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‘Effective Altruism’, tech bros, utilitarianism as ideology
More good is more good … It’s not like you did some good, so good doesn’t matter anymore. But how about money? Are you able to donate so much that money doesn’t matter anymore?
Sam Bankman-Fried
The three-week-long curfew that was recently enforced in Alice Springs is symptomatic of more than just the town’s ongoing problem with crime. In part, it has brought to light the complicated relationships and conflict that often characterise the town. Details in the media have been vague, but generally the curfew is understood to have been prompted by an episode of violence that erupted following a funeral. Reports describe a group of people, only some of whom were youths, descending on one of the town’s pubs in search of an individual they believed should be held to account.
Scott Robinson’s ‘Degrowth and the technocratic turn’ presents readers with several challenges. First, the title is curious given that Robinson’s strongest theme is charging degrowth advocates with a turn not to technology but to nature, to ecology—a charge more than once generalised to all environmentalists. He compounds all those who recognise the limits of nature and thus respect nature, writing that ‘ecological thinking de-naturalises the economy’ and ‘proposes to attune human societies with nature’.
Reradicalising degrowth via, among others, Arendt’s Human Condition, for a green politics of dept
…for now the history of mankind is only the continuation of the history of animals and plants…
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life
Humanity must resist its ceaseless, apocalyptic reconstitution
‘There is no way to get there without a breakthrough.’
The proposal to make a constitutional change affecting the nation’s relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—the Voice—was widely reported on mainstream Australian media. However, it went almost completely unreported on during hundreds of editions of the ABC’s midday Country Hour program and morning Regional Reports. During the three-week period before the Voice referendum and the week afterwards, the state editions of Country Hour and the local Regional Reports aired over 1,300 stories across regional Australia, from Broome to Ballarat and from Cairns to Esperance.
It can be hackneyed to describe a book as timely. However, reading The Palestine Laboratory in the wake of Israel’s horrific, genocidal assault on the people of Gaza beginning in October 2023 was particularly enlightening in as much as the book’s clear-sighted analysis roughly predicts the likelihood of a recently re-elected Netanyahu government seeking war as a pretext for escalating the Nakba—the displacement and immiseration of the Palestinians and their ongoing destruction as a people.
New Zealand’s defence and foreign affairs officials have presented the AUKUS military agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States as a ‘welcome … contribut[ion] to regional security’ in response to what is often described in PR-speak as China’s ‘increasing assertiveness’.
There was always a patina of heroism about the man: witness his life-beaten face, the heartthrob quality that irritated conservative pundits and commentators, showing him to be cocksure, stubborn, defiant. John Pilger was an insurgent journalist, the voice of the subaltern (Indigenous Australia, the working classes of industrialised states, movements of national resistance, the unmentionables), the demystifying solvent regarding absolute power and its nefarious uses.
The new National government’s law and order push will destroy gangs’ positive role as family and cultural institutions.