Politics and Human Rights Are Not Markets

07/10/2019

I haven’t posted much recently (except for the 1-year piece) because I spent a week visiting a close friend interstate. While it wasn’t my intention to be inactive and not write, it was good to take a break, and it let me have time to read and actually finish reading a book and get back into another university reading, Introduction to Political Communication by Brian McNair. After reading the chapter on political advertising, my stance only consolidates – political advertising should not exist.

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I Support Impeachment, But Not Like This

26/09/2019

Trump has been caught trying to get dirt on potential Democratic rival Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, through the Ukrainian government. This, for whatever reason, has thrown Pelosi into action – impeachment is now an acceptable move, unlike… when exactly was it not acceptable? Is this really the excuse they’re going to use to try and drag the cult leader of the Republican Party down?

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“Left”? What “Left”?

25/09/2019

Readers who have been on this site before may know I am not a fan of the ‘left vs right’ dynamic that is used to divide public opinion over irrelevant concerns, mostly because they are extremely subjective. Specifically, no one can tell whether it refers to social or economic policies, and many people who use the economic factors to label things often get it entirely wrong.

But let’s pretend the terms have meaning for a moment.

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On Discourse: Climate Change

24/09/2019

I recently joined a student led and run Facebook group for my university (it’s mostly a “shitposting” forum with some decent posts and gems hidden inside). This coincided with the climate strike last Friday, and so there was a lot of buzz about the protest in the city. While I am all for free speech and even enjoy a worthy shitpost (including those against the strikes), it was the occasional disinformation and vitriol that caught my eye.

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Israeli Election Offers Little Hope and Much Despair

23/09/2019

You ever just nearly set off an invasion because it looks like you’re going to lose a second election in 5 months and you have corruption charges looming? No? Just the current Prime Minister of Israel? Because that’s what he tried to do, and while a new invasion of Gaza was averted this week, the Israeli election has a lot at stake.

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Please, Won’t Somebody Think of the… Oil!

19//09/2019

Yep, Iran overstepped – they’ve crossed the line now. They might be giving very mild and negligible support to a rebel group in Yemen, the Houthis. Those Houthis claimed to be behind a strike on a Saudi oil refinery that resulted in zero bloodshed and some soaring profit margins for oil companies. Iran’s gotta fuckin’ go.

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Middle East on Edge

16/09/2019

Israel has an election coming up, after the shenanigans that occurred earlier this year, and as such have been increasing tensions in both Gaza and the West Bank. An attack on an oil supply in Saudi Arabia, allegedly carried out by the Houthis, has set the US on yet another rampage of rhetoric towards Iran. 18 years after 9/11, the US has done nothing but destroy any chances for peace that have arisen.

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Why I Detest the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ Labels

07/10/2018

Today’s turbulent media fosters one of the greatest divisionary tools of our age: that of ideological factionalism. This supposed ideological war between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ is nothing more than a distraction from actually dealing with the issues that we face. Look at any Facebook news post’s comment section or any political rally and you’re bound to see and hear sides being taken. While having an opinion on an issue and choosing a side is perfectly fine, there is a toxicity that has gradually built over time where ‘left’ and ‘right’ just can’t seem to find a common ground. There is no basis as to why they cannot.

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War and Civilisation

06/10/2018

At no point in modern history, or perhaps one could argue any point in recorded human history, has the world not had some state of conflict between one or more groups of people. To have knowledge of history is to know that humanity has an unnerving addiction to violence as a means and an end to and of their goals. It’s ironic that humanity is used synonymously with kindness when our species seems incapable of grasping what that even means in times of war.

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Venezuela is Primed for a Coup

04/10/2018

In February, I predicted to some of my friends that Venezuela and Iran were the next likely candidates to fall to US interventionism (a couple of months later I tentatively added Nicaragua to the list as a possibility). Since then, an assassination attempt against Maduro took place in August, and Trump’s handling of the Iran situation has only exacerbated the divide between the two countries. While the latter can be partially attributed to the Trump Administration’s incompetence, both of these events follow imperialist patterns used by the US since the 1800’s. Iran appears to be holding firm against US rhetoric, but cracks in Venezuela’s once popular government have been visible for some time.

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