When will the chronicling of the US president’s sordid decline give way to the more optimistic narrative that embodies citizen expectations for a post election corruption and insider trading commission, and war crimes prosecutions board?
Trump is an abysmal president and walking, talking catastrophe of a person, but if he takes his evident displeasure with Australia to the degree of cancelling the awful AUKUS deal, I’ll be the first to thank him.
Has nobody around him thought to suggest to the former PM that his comment strongly suggests he is “Trump, with no brains”? #auspol
MAGA took the fading but still fearsome US empire, and made it simply fatuous.
The thinking might be that no sane person on the planet would want to spend a second longer in his odious presence than is strictly necessary. So it might increase the chances of a quick settlement.
The concept of ‘civilisation’ emerged in the 18th century – and it has been cursed from the very start. 👉 theconversation.com/what-ac...
Here is me in The Conversation: theconversation.com/what-actuall...
The American President’s threat to kill a civilisation make us all barbarians now, equally at the mercy of a madman’s nightmare of civilisation.
For my entire adult life I’ve lived under an American imperium.
As non-Americans, we were invited to marvel at America’s limitless power.
In 2026 we finally discover that the only limitless thing America owns is humiliation.
Without doubt the most sordid end to an empire.
The US has shown itself once again to be a force for illegality and systematic corruption globally; a facilitator of genocide and perpetrator of war crimes, led by a demented moron who is served by a junta of spineless sycophants intent on self aggrandisement. Australia needs a better kind of ally.
Trump says he will bomb Iran "back to the stone age". Another President already said that in 2006. Nothing better captures the impoverishment of this moment than a plagiarised boast by a corrupt but empowered moron whose only genius is to ruin - buildings, businesses, economies, countries, lives.
Governments should tax companies adopting AI proportionally, according to how and where they use AI to replace human workers, to help pay for the social and environmental costs of using AI.
Jurgen Habermas was part of my university education too. I was never that much interested in his ideas, and gravitated toward Foucault. Now that he has gone, I feel that we should much rather live in the world Habermas thought possible than the one we do inhabit.
www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/ma...
B possesses an object of value.
A steals said object from B.
A places said object in a museum.
Descendants of A may view said object for free.
Descendants of B may view said object for a fee.
That is extortion, and most of the world’s leading cultural institutions are perpetrators of it.
If it is true that we are not responsible for the evils of the past, then we should immediately stop honouring the values we routinely locate in that past, such as Christianity & western civilization. If we honour the past we have a responsibility to address its wrongs. Abstaining won’t get it done.
Australia abstained.
I honestly can’t see that there is an ethical or even pedagogical reason why academics like me should be pressured to include LLMs in our teaching, nor tolerate their use by our students. Much worse by far though, are those colleagues who employ LLMs to fabricate their own scholarship.
It’s bitterly ironic that a Premier who cancelled a speaker at Writer’s Week on the spurious grounds that her words may have some implication of violence (thereby causing the whole event to implode), is the same Premier who welcomed the Bone-Saw International Golf cavalcade to the state.
Losing wars is rarely fatal to empires. What is fatal is looking ridiculous, to friends, dependents, and enemies alike.
There’s not much to be said for empires, and even less of their endings. But at least Rome had the self respect to be conquered by barbarians. America’s end is a spectacle of self-humiliation to appease the demented whim of a pedophile President whose only genius is to inspire deserved revulsion.
It’s easy to despise the corporations and CEOs who have been gifted their impunity. Far harder to hold to account the myriad of decision-makers who have worked so assiduously for 40 years to guarantee our current economic servitude.
“Here individuals are interested not only in their own affairs but in the affairs of the state… it’s a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a person who takes no interest in politics is someone who minds their own business; we say that they have no business here at all…”. Pericles via Thucydides.
Probably a few of those too.
A little known fact about Griffith University is that unlike all other Australian universities, it has resident dinosaurs.
I can see a case for it but only where consent is freely given. I absolutely agree that colonially sourced remains should not be displayed, and repatriated wherever possible.
Whatever we choose to call it, the science of amassing human remains sourced from abused, murdered, enslaved, or colonised bodies takes us back to Europe’s era of Enlightenment. This history necessitates a reappraisal of the supposed ‘age of reason’. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Where or whenever this ‘collecting’ started, it involved very specific crimes including theft, murder, massacre, and enslavement - the inevitable concomitants of empire and colonisation. It’s why @lindaaburnett.bsky.social and I refer to it as head hunting. yalebooks.yale.edu/2025/11/20/h...
Turnbull showed Australia’s importance in the 1800s in sourcing ‘specimens’ of human evolution (Science, Museums and Collecting, 2017), but Heaney (Empires of the Dead, 2023) tells us that this quest originated in colonial South America in the 1600s and 1700s…
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but Fabian (The Skull Collectors, 2010) drew our attention to the importance of collecting crania in Victorian science, while Redman, (Bonerooms, 2016) focussed on the role of museums as centres of collection…
There is a long and bitter history here, that does not seem to be well-known despite a very substantial (and growing) historical scholarship. A short thread on scientific head hunting…
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
Thanks for this important work. Many would not know of the now very substantial (and still unfolding) historical scholarship that explains precisely why this ‘collecting’ took place, and exactly what kinds of crime it involved - theft, murder, enslavement, colonisation, empire.
