December 2020 Volume LXIV, Number 12, No. 572
America’s Forlorn Hope of a Quiet Life
A Kafkaesque Scenario
The Medicalisation of Life
The Ever-Downward Coarse
1619 and All That
Warring Tribes and Fake Virtue: The 2020 US Election
Contents
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The nastier post-election sentiment on the jubilant Left is that the Trump movement must be demobilised by others if it won’t demobilise itself. Good luck with that, Democrats. That legion of Deplorables isn't going to embrace compliant docility after the 'stolen election'December 9, 2020
11 mins
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Within the ideological imperatives that prevail today, any one of us could become George Pell. We could be accused by strangers of reprehensible behaviour, and then find the weight of the nation’s structures of law, government and public opinion piled on top of usDecember 1, 2020
8 mins
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Sir: David Martin Jones (September 2020) writes splendidly of “the […]November 27, 2020
7 mins
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In the Soviet Union, adopting proletarian ways was a survival mechanism, whereas in Oxford it was a fashion, and a pretty dishonest one -- Marie Antoinette playing the shepherdess. Alas, affectation becomes habit over time, as the relentless march of declining cultural aspiration attests
December 22, 2020
8 mins
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If the US Constitution and the devil’s bargains behind it were the legacy of slavery, as the New York Times asserts, the Bill of Rights and fundamental freedoms that form the core of American self-understanding are a bequest of another stripe, an inheritance that decisively affirmed and asserted its dominance in 1895December 24, 2020
8 mins
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Big Media unilaterally decided that Joe Biden won the 2020 US election fair and square, decreeing without investigation that the contest was no more rigged than any other and that the time had come for unity. That a nation of two bitter and mutually contemptuous tribes can find common ground is nothing short of absurdNovember 30, 2020
23 mins
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Political theorist Ernest Renan defined a nation as 'a soul, a spiritual principle' rooted in a 'rich legacy of memories' and, most of all, 'a desire to live together'. By those yardsticks, how France is to survive with such an alienated and frequently hostile minority is very much unresolvedDecember 17, 2020
9 mins
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The French president wants a Muslim-led training body he believes will bring forth “a form of Islam in our country that is compatible with Enlightenment values”. Meanwhile, entirely unmoved by the Prime Minister's optimism, Muslim bus drivers continue denying admission to women they deem immodestly dressedDecember 13, 2020
25 mins
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It began with China's gift of the Wuhan virus and encompasses seven pressing realities needing to be understood and addressed, both individually and as a whole. If we can define those issues, the needed strategy, remedies and goals, it might just be that we can dodge disaster before the dam breaksDecember 11, 2020
20 mins
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As the BLM movement's absurdities go global, an Australian Prime Minister retreats from a truthful yet apparently 'insensitive' statement that the institution of slavery had no place in our history. Meanwhile an Aboriginal scholar wonders what perverse pleasure a white woman derives from kneeling before herDecember 26, 2020
14 mins
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It is no surprise to discover that among the two social groups that have experienced the steepest declines in literacy -- the working and lower-middle classes -- research finds that entertainment is increasingly more valued than education. The consequence: a political and legal class free to act with virtually no scrutinyDecember 28, 2020
7 mins
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Part One: The Authoritarian Personality Turns 70. Authoritarianism has a […]
November 27, 2020
21 mins
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Christ distinguished between the two sets of obligations, spiritual and civic, by separating the obligations of faith from those of politics. Pope Francis, on the other hand, has plenty to say about Caesar, it's just that his views and pronouncements are those of The GuardianDecember 10, 2020
16 mins
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In late 2019 the McGowan Labor government in Western Australia […]
November 28, 2020
27 mins
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The judicial errors that have foiled a good man's quest to clear his name are many and significant, and the failure to address them has broader and continuing implications for the fairness of Australia’s justice system. In the light of new evidence and the overturning of guilty verdicts against George Pell, these miscarriages urgently need to be examinedJanuary 3, 2021
24 mins
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While Australia and its exporters have suffered much at the hands of a bullying and spiteful Beijing, we are far from alone in enduring the dragon's breath. That relapse into arbitrary and opportunistic power-plays makes some fundamental rethinking unavoidableDecember 14, 2020
25 mins
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Fading interest in Europe—for Putin, the G7 is so yesterday—marks a return of that ineffable sense of Russian superiority, equalled in history only in England by the English, and partly against the run of play, in France by the French. But superiority complexes belie inferiority complexes, as Russian literary careers sometimes showDecember 31, 2020
47 mins
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French journalist Albert Londres' remarkable 'The Wandering Jew Has Arrived' suggests histories of the Holocaust should consider far more deeply the influence of Eastern Europe's pogroms' on both the future victims and those volunteers who aided with such enthusiasm the later Nazi work of exterminationDecember 19, 2020
12 mins
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Despite the many and obvious failings in Peter Gardner's account of conflict and massacre on the Gippsland frontier, a legion of dittographers in academia and the media have slavishly repeated and amplified this apocrypha without exposing its errors and falsehoods, or questioning its underlying assertions and lack of evidenceDecember 30, 2020
35 mins
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Punching at pomposity and fraud was his favourite activity and he looked on his 1993 Quadrant essay on the many and profound shortcomings of Manning Clark's 'History of Australia' as perhaps his best product, not least for the odium it attracted from the academic establishment's gossipy little club of infuriated insidersDecember 16, 2020
7 mins
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In August 1945 the British government agreed to give refuge to 300 child survivors of the German death camps. The dramatised account of their stories and those of the men and women who helped them rebuild lives that had known nothing but torment is a compelling testament to both the worst and best of the human heartDecember 12, 2020
16 mins
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The Norwegian’s dark and bleak pictures of individuals, couples or families lost in windswept and threatening landscapes, with their sidearms or rifles at the ready, offer a sharp reminder of realities to come or not far away. It is no surprise that he shared a podium on one memorable occasion with Sir Roger ScrutonDecember 20, 2020
15 mins
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There are times when Ruth can feel it—a flickering in […]
November 28, 2020
16 mins
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The assumption that a job will be completed more rapidly if a greater number of people are assigned to it seems logically sound. The truth, though, is that unless the task is digging ditches, loading bricks or rounding up stray Uyghurs for slave labour and organ harvesting, it doesn’t work that wayDecember 27, 2020
8 mins
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October Snow Savitaipale, Finland It falls on the still green […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
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La Perouse to Little Bay after the fire Past the […]
November 28, 2020
2 mins
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Still Life with Aphids Behind the bean lattice, in the […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
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Imagining America in a Lockdown It is difficult to imagine […]
November 28, 2020
2 mins
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My Plea of Not Guilty I am the ambassador […]
November 28, 2020
3 mins
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The Doll Hospital I took my daughter to the Doll […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
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Occasionally Incomparable “We meet members of Thomson’s circle which, in […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
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Allie Riding Mr Gentle My daughter on the black horse […]
November 28, 2020
6 mins
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Dozmary Pool A grey bowl of chilled gruel guarding its […]
November 28, 2020
2 mins
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The Flower Girls of Fiji The flower girls of […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
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Condong a sugar mill, a congregate jumble of buildings like […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
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Obituary The anthropoid measure of a coffin’s space clasps her […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
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Claribel You’re a map of myths and mysteries cast in […]
November 28, 2020
2 mins
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Uncouth Bacilli as George Bernard Shaw called them. Arguing for […]
November 28, 2020
1 mins
