Displaying items by tag: politics

Welcome to East Berlin - I mean Melbourne.

Cancel culture is all around.  It crushes rational debate and destroys freedom of thought and speech.  The latest victim is the eminent British historian David Starkey, caught up cruelly in the Black Lives Matter debate.  His cancellation raises important questions for how those who value freedom fight against leftist revolutionary thought and practice.

The re-emergence of Mark Latham has been one of the most interesting developments in recent Australian politics.  Latham's common sense centrism and his push-back against the ruling elites has struck a chord with voters of all stripes.  Populism, perhaps, but also, maybe, a much needed reality check in these troubled and inauthentic times.

The modern culture wars have their genesis in a most unfortunate marriage of convenience between two intellectual and political movements.  The proponents of economic liberty and the cultural marxists who emerged in the 1960s found common cause in radical individualism, in the 1980s.  And we have all suffered since.

The Covid crisis has thrown up many conundrums, and ideological positions.  The politicisation of death is distressing, so called "Covid death porn".  But there are other dimensions to this, not least the other, less reported Covid porn epidemic.  Returning to real science is critical, as is moral and political perspective.

The Covid scare has taken even further the tendency for politicians, ideologues and interest groups of all stripes to politicise death.  Already seen during tragedies and natural disasters, political actors rush to embrace crises, and they now even sometimes make them up.  Death counts are now a part of daily political life, and the new currency of political debate.  This is an unseemly development.

We are asked to forgive our enemies, as core business of Christian life.  How do we best forgive, in a culture of non forgiveness?  Who and what should we forgive?

As debates rage over the origins and impacts of COVID 19 and whether draconian government policy response here and overseas have been appropriate and effective, now there is a proposed tracking app that the Government is introducing.  Bill Muehlenberg asks - What could go wrong with a Government App?

Has the world finally, conclusively gone mad?  What on earth has happened to “perspective”?  Why have we the people allowed the Deep State to just get a whole lot deeper, and broader?  Now the State controls the elderly, churches, clubs, small businesses, large businesses, community groups.  In short, it totally controls us all. 

When the dissing of a stalwart figure of good governance and sensible policy like the late Roger Scruton can lead to his reputation being shredded, and have that shredding rubber stamped by a “Conservative” Government and its standard bearing ministers committed to, above all else, “public relations”, we need to stop and think about what drives our modern governments.