There’s a story I was a bit obsessed with as a child. I was that weird, nerdy kid that was massively into UFOs, ghosts, the paranormal etc. I read everything I could find and bored anyone who was within earshot. But this one story in particular stood out. It happened in my home city, in…
Teaching Ethics: What’s the Harm?
In their (not infrequent) darker moments, academics have been known to observe wryly that students’ grandparents seem to die at a much higher frequency near exams, requiring the students to have time off for the funeral. The ‘Dead Grandmother Problem’ has even been the subject of (tongue-in-cheek) academic research demonstrating that based on extension requests,…
Free Speech or Public Harm?
One thing you have to give Steve Bannon: he knows how to get people yelling at each other. The former Trump chief strategist and Breitbart editor may be greatly reduced on paper, but he continues to exert a disturbing influence on global affairs – and start fights just by turning up, and sometimes not even…
‘What is necessary is to rectify names’: Ramsay’s Game is sheer indoctrination
In 1994, an impish Northern Irishman stood in front of a room full of smelly, doubtful-looking sixteen-year-old boys, and declared “By the end of this term, I will make you love Keats.” Incredibly, it worked. After weeks of luxuriating in every syllable of “Ode to a Nightingale,” pulling apart every line of “To Autumn,” we…
Meet the Infrels: A Thought Experiment
Think about people who have no friends. Imagine that there are many reasons why they have no friends. Some might be very shy or simply lacking in social skills. Some might live in places or move in circles where they just don’t get to meet potential friends. Some might simply be unpleasant to the point…
John Clarke: an unsurpassed craftsman of the Australasian voice
There are some writers whose voice, by sheer accident of timing in your life, reach far deeper into your brain than the specifics of what they wrote. For me, it was the satirist and actor John Clarke, who died suddenly on Sunday while hiking in the Grampians, aged 68. I never met Clarke. But he…
The Vice President Dines: A Philosophical Dialogue
[In a swanky Washington DC restaurant, L’Metaphysique, VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE is enjoying an intimate dinner with his wife and constant companion KAREN PENCE] MIKE PENCE So I said, “Well, Don, if they’ve got the video, and it’s really that bad, why don’t you just” – Karen? Karen, what’s wrong? Is the steak a…
Is it OK to punch Nazis?
Hey, remember 2016? When all those beloved celebrities kept dying and we couldn’t wait for the year to be over? We’re now less than a month into 2017 and a week into Donald Trump’s presidency, and the internet finds itself seriously conflicted over whether it’s ok to punch Nazis. Nostalgic yet? The dapper Backpfeifengesicht of…
Senator, You’re No Socrates
So, we all knew Malcolm Roberts, former project leader of the climate denialist Galileo Movement turned One Nation politician, would make an ‘interesting’ first speech to the Senate. If you’ve been following Senator Roberts’ career, most of what he said was more or less predictable. The UN (“unelected swill” – take a bow, PJK), the…
The ‘no’ campaign on marriage equality owes us better arguments
With the re-election of the Turnbull government, the likelihood that marriage equality in Australia will be the subject of a harmful, expensive, and non-binding plebiscite becomes ever more likely. That may also mean the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns will receive public funding to put their cases. If we’re going to go ahead with this,…