October 2020 Volume LXIV, Number 10, No. 570
The Devil in the Details
Eichmann in Ballarat
Complexity, Your Modern Scoundrel’s First Refuge
George Orwell, a Man for Our Time
The Common Currency of Contempt
China and the Tyranny of Proximity
Contents
-
When the Devil asks for your soul, it’s probably best to think twice, especially if the terms are a bit vague. These days, instead of your soul, it might be your data, or your privacy, or even just your IP address he wants. In exchange, he (or Google, which is much the same thing) will give you access to all the knowledge in the world. Not a bad deal, all in allOctober 1, 2020
8 mins
-
The police who arrested Zoe Buhler in her kitchen didn’t shout, they didn’t threaten, they just unemotionally processed a very pregnant, upset and bewildered woman, showing neither hostility nor empathy. They were 'just following orders,' say apologists for Daniel Andrews' police enforcersOctober 5, 2020
8 mins
-
The critical race theory of Black Lives Matter is indeed a doctrine marked by 'complexity', as the New York Times would have us believe. If your panacea is constructed from a load of old falsehoods, you can hold it together only by the most complex Heath Robinson string-glue-and-sealing-wax logicOctober 12, 2020
9 mins
-
The time seems right for an Orwell revival. He was a man of the Left, and despite, perhaps because of, the current populist wave in parts of the West, the Left has responded with enormous cultural, political and financial power to assert their views in ways that would have won the admiration of Big BrotherOctober 15, 2020
26 mins
-
Does bad-temperedness matter, apart from reducing the quality of daily life? I think it may end up destroying democracy and, what is far worse, freedom with it. It is tolerance, willingness to listen and good cheer that need to be explained and extolled, not loathing, denigration and hatredOctober 16, 2020
8 mins
-
When did most Australians finally admit to themselves that inviting the PRC into our midst was 'opening up our country' not only to surprising levels of investment, cheap imports and an unprecedented demand for our wine, fruit and nuts, beef, wheat, barley, coal, gas, iron ore, educational institutions and the rest, but also to genuine peril?October 28, 2020
20 mins
-
Compared to earlier party-state totalitarianisms, China's is extraordinaryily centralised. There is no role for local party secretaries in designing the algorithms that WeChat uses to suppress free speech. All of the relevant strings can be pulled from Beinjing -- and they are, every second of every minute of every dayOctober 29, 2020
18 mins
-
The anti-COVID measures and edicts have turned the possible demise of thousands of enterprises into certainties -- pubs, butcher shops, newsagents, cinemas, grocery stores, they're all folding. All this has happened as the government announces, reverses and re-introduces more lockdowns, testing regimes and quarantinesOctober 8, 2020
11 mins
-
SIR: Christopher Akehurst quickly modifies the title of his article, […]September 29, 2020
7 mins
-
A Young Chinese Businessman A Chinese friend in his thirties, […]
September 29, 2020
11 mins
-
It was a clear and balmy night when the first […]
September 29, 2020
19 mins
-
The Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, having volunteered for active […]
September 29, 2020
17 mins
-
Whatever remnants of sovereignty still remain within the electoral class’s institutional framework—its parliaments, civil services and so on—political elites need to fundamentally re-evaluate their place and future as the 'blurred zone between consent and non-accountable control' grows ever largerOctober 19, 2020
10 mins
-
Curious and more than somewhat sceptical of two much-lauded maps purporting to chart some 300 colonial massacres, I selected thirty Western District events and set to work checking their sources. What I found was plagiarism, gross inaccuracy, slipshod scholarship and damning evidence of the researchers' incurious lazinessOctober 21, 2020
14 mins
-
The widespread notion of a pre-literate society as some sort of Eden amongst the eucalypts has been irrefutably dismantled by franker and more truthful anthropologists. Yet despite the wealth of evidence, the tendency to whitewash and obfuscate the barbaric aspects of Aboriginal society does more than persist, it grows strongerNovember 18, 2020
12 mins
-
The humanities are in crisis, as readers of Quadrant will […]
September 30, 2020
19 mins
-
The French political economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801–50) is not particularly […]
September 30, 2020
17 mins
-
Since the epoch-defining Pax Thatcher–Reagan, orthodox conservatism has entailed an […]
September 30, 2020
16 mins
-
We can’t say we were not warned: since 2017 Labor […]
September 30, 2020
16 mins
-
One of the many astute observations in Michael Shellenberger's refreshing 'Apocalypse Never' explains why the big oil and gas companies have made common cause with promoters of renewables. They 'know perfectly well that batteries can’t back up the grid. The places integrating large amounts of solar and wind … are relying more and more on natural gas plants'October 23, 2020
15 mins
-
As celebrity writers go, Anne Applebaum is of a distinctly […]
September 30, 2020
10 mins
-
While it is an engrossing detective tale, Bernadette Murphy's 'Van Gogh’s Ear: The True Story' also serves as a caution that we must never place too much faith in a meme until the back-story has been thoroughly examined. In this case, preconceptions and faux 'facts' are demolished one by one until little of what we thought we knew remains standingOctober 17, 2020
12 mins
-
The critics didn't fancy 1980's 'Somewhere in Time', but audiences did. Where the solons of the stalls lost their way was in failing to understand the movie's effect on ordinary people. Working in the rarefied world of 'serious' film and theatre criticism, they couldn't quite grasp why it would become a popular cinematic phenomenonOctober 31, 2020
19 mins
-
I pass like night, from land to land; I have […]
September 30, 2020
17 mins
-
Freedom for one group can mean the enslavement of another, which was as true in ancient Greece as it is today in America. Destroying statues of Robert E. Lee or the Bristol slaver Edward Colston may be momentarily gratifying, but it does not alter the past one bit and, in addition, carries the echoing sound of freedom betrayedJanuary 31, 2021
12 mins
-
A marketplace fable set in the Romano-Greco-Phoenician city of Tyre […]
September 30, 2020
19 mins
-
Duty called and I responded. This column was smuggled out […]
September 30, 2020
8 mins
-
Jet-lag All day your eyes conspire to close, no matter […]
September 30, 2020
2 mins
-
Reading up on Carl Linnaeus Life is mere taxonomy, I’m […]
September 30, 2020
2 mins
-
elizabeth’s day The galaxies assemble slowly in the greying winter […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
-
A dry leaf All that is left is a dry […]
September 30, 2020
2 mins
-
A B C you open always petal by petal myself […]
September 30, 2020
8 mins
-
Booval Tea Ladies During World War I, 35,000 returned soldiers, […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
-
“The Mouth of the Heart” (St Augustine) Reading the saint’s […]
September 30, 2020
2 mins
-
Pain’s Worth When I must I accept so now I […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
-
Poem to My Father for Christmas When you come I […]
September 30, 2020
3 mins
-
That kiss was mine That kiss was nice I had […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
-
Fraternity of Rock (Beehive Huts, Dingle Peninsula, Ireland) The huts […]
September 30, 2020
2 mins
-
Carnies The dark was coming on When we reached our […]
September 30, 2020
2 mins
-
Great Aunts Love at arm’s length—one step to the side, […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
-
work -> home she says the words but forgets […]
September 30, 2020
2 mins
-
In Passing They have washed it away, In a deluge, […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
-
Stellan he wears a ragged yellow mackintosh tattered jeans with […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
-
Thinking about Robert Harris the Poet Cold Spring crept over […]
September 30, 2020
1 mins
