Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Politics and Society

Trump 2.0

Given the likelihood that the 2024 US election will be a repeat of 2020, Joe Biden vs Donald Trump, and Trump has a realistic chance of winning, I've been catching up on Trump 1.0 via the venerable Bob Woodward.  He wrote three Trump books.  Fear  was published in 2017 and dealt with Trump's transition to power and the first nine months of his presidency.  Rage was published in 2020 and dealt with most of the Trump presidency, from its early days to the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests.  The final book, Peril , cowritten with Woodward's younger Washington Post colleague Bob Costa, deals with the 2020 election, its aftermath and the early months of Biden's tenure. Bod Woodward is a strangely appropriate person to be documenting the Trump and Biden years.  He became famous alongside Carl Bernstein in the early 1970s for exposing the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, back in the days when committing a criminal offence was enough to end so

The Nine Lives of Grace Tame

( Content warning: this post discusses child sexual abuse and sexual assault.) I have to say I don't generally pay a lot of attention to the Australian of the Year award.  Often the person who receives it is someone I've never heard of, and as often as not I am none the wiser at the end of their term.  Theoretically they get to use their status to promote the work and issues which got them there in the first place.  The 2023 recipient is Taryn Brumfitt , the leader of the Body Image Movement which tries to counter the negative messages women and girls get through their lives about their bodies and build a more positive culture around our physical selves.  It sounds like a good thing, but I had to look that up just now for this article.  I was more familiar with her predecessor Dylan Alcott but I heard a lot less of him in 2022 when he was using his platform to promote disability inclusion than than I did in previous years when he was winning tennis tournaments.   I had also ne

Chasing the Scream

I've written before about the crazy world of drug policy and the arms race between dealers and police that marks our futile efforts to outlaw various substances.  We are caught in an endless loop of first order change , doing more of the same and hoping for a different result.  The victims, it has always seemed to me, are the poor people at the bottom of the heap - people with addictions, trauma and other issues in their lives who end up jailed or homeless as casualties of a pointless war.  So I was excited to learn about the existence of Johann Hari's Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. A friend told me about Hari's most recent book, Stolen Focus , which looks at the prevalence of digital technologies and the way they are robbing us of our ability to concentrate and be present in the moment.  I really enjoyed it, if that is the right word for a great book about a terrible thing, but it was this earlier book that really made me take notice.  Publi

Active Hope

In my musings about late 60s activism in the USA and here in Australia, I noticed a contrast between the hippie movement's emphasis on spirituality and deep renewal, and the Australian political activists' focus on causes and actions.  So just like that (Shazam!) I've come across something that beautifully bridges the divide.   Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We're in without Going Crazy  is a book by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, published in 2012.  It is based on a group process pioneered by Macy and others in the 1970s known as the Work That Reconnects , which has since spread around the world and is still active and widely used.  I believe Macy, now in her 90s, is still active in this work.  Her bio describes her as 'a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology'. Johnstone is a British doctor and psychologist who first met Macy at a Work That Reconnects workshop in 1989 and is now the main facilitator of this process in the UK.   The

Disobey!

Prompted by Extinction Rebellion and some of my friends who are involved in direct action protests on climate, war and other things I've been thinking a fair bit about civil disobedience.  This is what timid people like me do when faced with the option of being confrontational - we go away and think about it.  I'm planning to share various things with you over the next little while but here, by way of starters, are some reflections on Frederic Gros' little book Disobey: The Philosophy of Resistance. Frederic Gros is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, also in Paris.  This book is based on a series of lectures he delivered to his students, published in French in 2017 and in this English translation in 2020.  The subtitle is a little ambiguous - the cover says 'The Philosophy of Resistance', the title page 'A Guide to Ethical Resistance'.  I would go with the cover - this is a work of philosophy, not a

Drugs, Guns and Lies

 A few years ago I read and reviewed Neil Woods' Good Cop, Bad War, the story of his work as an undercover police officer in the UK infiltrating illicit drug networks.  Woods tells the story of his 14 years as an undercover operator, beginning in the early 1990s.  It's a hair-raising tale of subterfuge and danger written with a clear purpose.  Woods was the chairperson of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an association of former and current police and customs officers campaigning for drug law reform, and he wanted to use his own experience to highlight the futility of the 'War on Drugs'. I recently came across a Queensland equivalent to this story, Drugs, Guns and Lies: My Life as an Undercover Cop, by Keith Banks, published in 2020.  Banks was a Queensland police officer from 1975 to 1995, entering the academy as an innocent, naïve 16 year old intent on helping the good guys by taking out the bad guys, and leaving in 1995 with a more realistic idea of who exactly