This is the first of a series in which I will, however cursorily, consider the challenges – especially to the Western world – of life in the coming century. Part One: Are We There Yet? Where are our flying cars? The BFD. This may seem like a silly question. After all, didn’t the 21st century …
Continue reading How Shall We Live in the 21st Century? Pt 1
“Decolonisation” Has Nothing to Do With Justice and Everything to Do With Power. This sanitized vision of colonialism is no less unrealistic than the demented hatred of the left. A Devil's Curmudgeon. This is the third and final part of this series.Part One: The Myths of “Genocide” and “Stolen Land”.Part Two: Culture. In Orson Scott …
Continue reading The Myths of “Genocide” and “Stolen Land” Pt. 3: What Do They WANT?
Cultures Don't Only Change by Force - and Why Wouldn't They? A Catholic mission in Nauru in 1914. A Devil's Curmudgeon. In the first part of this series, I discussed the falsity of the pervasive narrative of “stolen land” and “genocide” that bedevils the West. As I argued, despite the lamentable fact that a great …
Continue reading The Myths of “Genocide” and “Stolen Land” Pt. 2: Culture
The Past Should Be Neither Lied About nor Judged by the Present. A sketch by Tahitian navigator and artist Tupaia, showing a British naval officer (believed to be Joseph Banks) and a Maori man exchanging gifts. A Devil's Curmudgeon. The self-hating narrative of the left in Australia, New Zealand and the Americas is omnipresent. The …
Continue reading The Myths of “Genocide” and “Stolen Land” Pt. 1
Ignorant vandalism has no place in civil society. Spot the Difference. L-R: Communists in Spain, Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution; Marxist vigilantes today. A Devil's Curmudgeon. Insight writer Chris Trotter caused quite a stir last week, when he wrote in defense of the sudden, violent craze for destroying statues. Particularly galling to many readers, …
To the first Europeans to arrive here, everything about Australia seemed upside-down and paradoxical. To many, Australian politics still seems the same. Our conservatives are "Liberals", and our "Labor" party are all wealthy professionals. Here's a rough guide to the upside-down politics of Australia ...Do read on ...
In the mid-1600s, Irish bishop James Ussher published his Annalium pars posterior, in which he famously calculated the date of Creation as 4004BC. Ussher’s work is often the target of ridicule today, especially from the New Atheists, mostly because of its association with Young Earth Creationism. But such sneering attitudes shockingly underestimate the scholarship and …
It’s a conventional wisdom of too many atheists, especially the group dubbed the “New Atheists” that there is no such thing as militant atheism, and that atheism is a peaceful ideology, in contrast to religions, which they characterise as bloodthirsty and violent. That atheism has historically been correlated with, let alone directly responsible for, some …
Going into bat for the legacy media which had had his own back for so long, Barack Obama praised them as “the curated media”. Likewise drunk on their own self-regard, the legacy media developed a mania for so-called “fact-checking”. Both Obama and his cheerleaders in the legacy media labour under the delusion that they are …
Continue reading How the Australian Government Created a Treasure Trove for Citizen Journalists
If you’ve ever been taught about the scientific method, you’ve almost been certainly told that it goes like this: Observation-hypothesis-experiment-theory. The only problem is: that is idealistic bullshit. Scientists hardly ever proceed from dispassionate observations to formulating and testing hypotheses, and, finally, constructing a testable theory. Invariably, hypotheses precede everything else. Just as often, observations …
