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Keywords: Conspiracy

  • RELIGION

    Duterte vs God

    • Erin Cook
    • 13 July 2018
    3 Comments

    To mark two years as president of the Philippines, Duterte has taken on his biggest sparring partner yet. God now joins the likes of Barack Obama and the UN as targets in Duterte's ranting. It would be laughable if he hadn't spent his presidency turning the country into Revelations, where even priests are being gunned down in the streets.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    There's no wrong way to be Chinese overseas

    • Tseen Khoo
    • 08 March 2018
    6 Comments

    Huang's article 'What Australia gets wrong about Chinese New Year' caused an uproar, with many comments about the Mandarinisation of Chinese culture. I had a moment of pleasure imagining telling my mother that, according to this writer, she's doing Chinese New Year wrong. My mother has an excellent range of Cantonese epithets.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The danger of dissent in Singapore

    • Sangeetha Thanapal
    • 27 February 2018
    9 Comments

    The world continues to laud Singapore as a model for governance, while ignoring the serious human rights violations that occur within it. The silence of countries like Australia and others in the region ensure that the Singapore state will continue intimidating its opponents into silence, or obscurity.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    In the 'climate wars' Tony Abbott is Hiroo Onoda

    • Greg Foyster
    • 12 October 2017
    11 Comments

    The conflict has finished, but a stubborn and deluded band of stragglers, led by their belligerent General, Tony Abbott, don't want to believe it. Abbott is behaving like the infamous Imperial Japanese officer Hiroo Onoda, who refused to accept his country's surrender in 1945 and spent a further 29 years fighting phantom enemies in a remote tropical jungle.

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  • MEDIA

    Balance vs fairness in giving airtime to conspiracy theorists

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 19 June 2017
    4 Comments

    The NBC has pushed ahead with its plans to air Megyn Kelly's interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones despite criticism from friends and family whose loved ones were killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which Jones claims was 'staged by actors' and 'never happened'. This contentious interview has sparked a conversation about which forums should allow dissenting viewpoints and whether dangerous ideas should be given public airtime in a news context.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Penetrating the cult of secrecy and abuse

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 15 March 2017
    1 Comment

    The power of Jones' film comes from bringing us the faces and voices of the victims in the present day; to hear in their words and see in their manner the ongoing trauma of those experiences. It is a timely and illuminating exploration of the impacts of child abuse, arriving during a period when many of our Australian institutions, religious and otherwise, have been facing the probing spotlight of a royal commission for behaviour that was at times equally as secretive, and traumatic.

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  • MEDIA

    Language is the first and last contest of the post-truth era

    • Fatima Measham
    • 19 January 2017
    11 Comments

    In the weeks before the US election, Salena Zito wrote of Donald Trump: 'The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.' Not being able to take consequential public statements as meant - that loosens threads that bind democracies. The work cut out for US journalists is in fact cut for all who live in this era. If language no longer organises reality in a way that meets basic agreement, not much holds us together.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Maintaining children's rights amid youth detention crises

    • Kate Galloway
    • 13 January 2017
    4 Comments

    The Minister has committed to improving youth detention facilities, the appointment of 100 more staff, and revision of Victoria's youth detention policy. But in doing so, she has sheeted home blame to the former government, and has accused lawyers for the children of pandering to ideology. The government's discourse continues the tough-on-crime narrative rather than acknowledging the causes and contexts of juvenile offending and the consequences of appalling facilities on the youth who are detained.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Watching the 'mixed bag' Senate cross bench at work

    • John Warhurst
    • 05 December 2016
    4 Comments

    To say the Senate cross bench is a mixed bag is an understatement. All that is really lacking is an extreme left senator unrestrained by Labor/Green discipline. Amid all the controversy I've grown comfortable with their place in the Senate and appreciative of their collective presence in an otherwise party dominated chamber. They each have their flaws, but they make a generally positive contribution to public discussion and to ultimate legislative outcomes. We are better off for their presence.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    US goes rogue on climate

    • Greg Foyster
    • 17 November 2016
    5 Comments

    Here we go again. Just a few days after the historic Paris Agreement on climate change entered force, another Republican climate denier has snatched the White House. Donald Trump isn't just a closet sceptic, paying lip-service to climate change while doing nothing about it. He's an out-and-proud conspiracy theorist. All signs point to the US returning to its role as international climate saboteur, and for much the same reasons: Republican paranoia over the economic rise of China.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The dangers of Trump and climate conspiracy theories

    • Fatima Measham
    • 29 September 2016
    6 Comments

    Trump predictably resorted to insinuation to mask his deficiencies. After the first presidential debate, he said: 'They gave me a defective mic. Did you notice that ... was that on purpose?' It is hilarious until you realise how it would be received by supporters. It captures something of contemporary politics, where the line between conspiracy theory and legitimate anti-establishment criticism is more smudged than ever. A deficit of trust is one thing; a detachment from truth is something else.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hope, not nihilism, is the antidote to bleak times

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 September 2016
    3 Comments

    In Mexico, a 12-year old boy walked onto the road to stare down an 11,000-strong anti-LGBTQ protest. In Italy, a small town has been revived by the arrival of refugees and migrants. In the US, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick has pulled the issue of police brutality into apolitical spaces, using symbolic gestures to draw out the history of racialised oppression. As Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine puts it, 'If you want to be right, be a pessimist, if you want to do right, be an optimist.'

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