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Search Results: piracy

  • ECONOMICS

    Rising from the ashes of bad media business

    • David James
    • 19 October 2015
    7 Comments

    For those who believe, as G. K. Chesterton quipped, that the popular press is 'a conspiracy of a very few millionaires', the decline of mainstream media may not seem such a great loss. But the thinning of journalistic ranks is not good for democracy. In the world of business, old habits usually do not die at all — it is rather the businesses themselves that experience terminal decline. What journalism that does emerge from the ashes of the existing mainstream media businesses will be very different.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Blood and the Bard

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 01 October 2015
    4 Comments

    Lady Macbeth is left somewhere in the realm of caricature, her 'Out damned spot' soliloquy oddly decontextualised and the circumstances of her death diminished and confused. That said, the conflation of the Macbeths' conspiracy to commit regicide with an act of discreet marital sex is a potent image of their moral codependency. This faithful adaptation by Australian director Justin Kurzel is grimmer even than Polanski's 1971 version, which it is set to displace as the standard-bearer adaptation.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Education needed to overcome media superficiality

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 09 September 2015
    1 Comment

    Last week's image of Aylan Kurdi was emblematic of a range of current social crises: religious and ethnic conflict, discrimination and inequality, terrorism, the plight of migrants and refugees. Western Sydney University Humanities lecturer James Arvanitakis sees education as the key to grappling with them beyond the knee-jerk response to the disturbing images.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Cold War blinkers threaten MH17 truth

    • Tony Kevin
    • 20 July 2015
    9 Comments

    A Russian investigative committee continues to claim that MH17 was most likely to have been downed by an air-to-air missile that was not Russian-made. For their part, Western commentators became increasingly impatient and scornful of Russian ‘conspiracy theories’ on who downed MH17. Whether the identity of who actually shot down MH17 becomes known in the fullness of time could depend upon the extent to which our political leaders can resist using MH17 to prosecute their Cold War enmities.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Stepping on to mandatory data retention's slippery slope

    • Fatima Measham
    • 25 March 2015
    6 Comments

    Mandatory data retention was a bad idea when it was originally floated during a Gillard Government inquiry. It is a worse idea now, and is set to become law for political reasons, not because it has been properly scrutinised. There are important questions that we should be asking, and we should not let ourselves be put off from doing this if we don’t know the difference between data and metadata (there is none).

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A plague of killer robots

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 April 2014
    6 Comments

    Killer robots — drones in an advanced stage of development — are now a daytime reality. They will be autonomous in their operation, able to identify targets, track them down, work out the best way to destroy them, and learn from their failures, all without the need for human direction. These qualities raise serious ethical questions. Obama's use of just war theory to defend such drones was misguided at best, pernicious at worst.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The people power of Game of Thrones pirates

    • Michael Mullins
    • 14 April 2014
    3 Comments

    Last week's Game of Thrones series four premiere revealed Melbourne as the pirate capital of the world. The downloaders make a 'people power' claim to moral legitimacy because they think pay TV provider Foxtel's business model undermines the access they believe they are entitled to. Stories are not a cultural form of terra nullius, and human nature will not allow them to be wholly appropriated by business interests.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott pays a heavy price to stop the boats

    • Tony Kevin
    • 28 January 2014
    34 Comments

    It is now weeks since any asylum seekers arrived in Australia, and under the Abbott Government there have been no reported deaths at sea involving Australian border protection interception action or failure to act. This is a striking improvement on the high death rate under the Rudd and Gillard governments. Tony Abbott has kept his pre-election promise to stop the boats, but at what huge cost!

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Al Shabaab's grisly PR pitch

    • Evan Ellis
    • 27 September 2013
    3 Comments

    Last week most Australians had not heard of al Shabaab. But after a grisly four-day 'performance', complete with social media strategy, this has changed. The Nairobi shopping mall massacre was made for media consumption. Kenya might be tempted to simply seek revenge, but a measured, discriminate response that prioritised the safety of all Kenyans would allow the government to draw a line between the 'bad men' and themselves.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Israel's emotional pull on Australian Jews

    • Philip Mendes
    • 26 February 2013
    12 Comments

    Some Jewish Australians bring from their childhoods in tranquil Australia a special degree of idealism and innocence to their involvement in homeland conflicts. It may be this, rather than spy-catcher conspiracy theories, which best explains what happened to Ben Zygier and other young Australians who have died in conflicts in the Middle East.

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  • RELIGION

    Islam in denial over burqas

    • Muhammad Izhar ul Haq
    • 07 June 2011
    16 Comments

    Everything Western nations do is analysed by the Muslim world in the light of 'conspiracy theories'. Fanatics present the French burqa ban as a reflection of anti Islamic sentiment. In fact millions of Muslim women in France and elsewhere do not cover their faces.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The real people of Afghanistan

    • Jan Forrester
    • 28 June 2010
    6 Comments

    I am struck by lurid online comment on whether Aussie troops should go or stay in Afghanistan, a miasma of old-left vs new-right trench exchanges, armchair military strategists and conspiracy theorists. As in the national game of Buzkashi, Afghanistan is a goat carcass fought over by a gaggle of teams.

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