To maintain white men are more favoured than any other racial/gender group is to ignore that they are much less likely to receive the protection of the law, more inclined to take their own lives and, generally, much less socially successful than almost any other ethnic-social group

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What Greg Clarke, formerly head of the English Football Association, had to say about women in soccer, Indians in IT departments and gays in locker rooms can't be faulted on facts or tolerant sentiment, yet purity of heart couldn't save him being issued with a red card and banished from the game. Speak softly, friends, or pay the price

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Variously compared in his lifetime to Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Richelieu, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Chateaubriand and Clémenceau, he begged to differ, saying Tintin was a more apt doppelganger. Fifty years after his death, the man whose abrasive hauteur annoyed Churchill, aggravated Roosevelt and every president thereafter remains 'the greatest Frenchman'

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Modernism proclaimed itself ‘anti-civilisation’, characterised by a fanatical rejection of the core values, traditions and conventions that had sustained Western Civilisation for over a millennium. Depressing as that may be, take heart! As Kenneth Clark noted, civilisation has plumbed the abysmal depths before, pulled itself together and recovered

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In many Republican strongholds a curious thing happened on election day: while his party received the votes it expected, Donald Trump's tallies were way down. According to a bipartisan team of computer scientists and data analysts, there is only one explanation: the fix was in

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The electoral standoff that sees Donald Trump in court and Joe Biden jumping the gun to proclaim himself 'president-elect' is an invitation to soar into the stratosphere of speculation. Could this affair, like another contest 144 years ago, end up being decided on Capitol Hill? If so, Trump wins

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Is it mere ignorance that sees Australian journalists in the US providing only the most superficial coverage of the post-election contretemps between Trump's legal team and the various Democrat-run states where voting and counting, to put it mildly, was deeply suspect? We are poorly served by such reporters but, alas, it seems they are only kind there is

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Any ad campaign to promote the much prophesied 'decarbonised economy' will be a challenge indeed. Instead of the quick, convenient, comfortable and easy ways of modern life, the agency's brief would be to find positives in the slow, inconvenient and uncomfortable. Green lies are nothing new, of course, but this brief would defeat even the most gifted dissembler

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If, as widely alleged in leaks and reports, investigators have drawn admissions that SAS members committed war crimes in Afghanistan, the offenders need to be punished to the full extent of the law. But what of their superiors? As Australia endorses the 'Yamashita standard' holding superiors responsible for their subordinates' actions, equal justice demands the brass must also face a reckoning

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Will Longstaff’s painting of the memorial to the missing at Ypres, the legions of the dead marching in their grey batallions from unknown graves, proved a sensation when it toured the capitals. For those very many Australians who could not afford the voyage to mourn their kin on the distant soil where they fell, it offered a pilgrimage of the spirit

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