For Trump, nation-building is essentially a form of ‘politically correct’ warfare, in which one tries to sort the good from the bad. The premise of nation-building – that other people were virtuous, ‘yearned for freedom’ and should be liberated from their oppressors, and turned into loyal American allies – is detached from its position on the political right, and re-attached to liberalism/progressivism, which is where it was located from Theodore Roosevelt to the fall of LBJ in 1968.

Towards midnight, the thousands crammed into the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia broke out the flags. Thousands of stars and stripes: hand-held paper ones; large cloth ones flowing in the hot night air. Chelsea Clinton came out in a red dress, to introduce her mother Hillary, who came out in a white pantsuit. At the end, Bill would join them in a blue suit. When Hillary's comprehensive but unexciting speech had finished, the entire crowd turned over handheld placards – red, white or blue – and the auditorium became a giant flag as red, white and blue balloons came down.

Colonial comparisons are odious, as are imperial ones. There’s something a little bizarre in sections of the Australian public flagellating themselves over national policy because, say, a small number of Germans are rushing to train stations to welcome refugees. Or because Germany’s government, for a variety of reasons, many of them realpolitik, has opened up a massive refugee intake, perhaps 800,000 over a number of years. Suddenly, our policy is ‘our great shame’ as shown up by Europeans. A simplistic narrative is taking over: they are urbane and civilised; we are rednecks and arseholes.

Paul Keating described his 1993 win as ‘the sweetest victory of all’. By that measure, Alexei Tsipras would be hovering on the edge of a diabetic coma. After six months of fraught and contested government, a referendum, a party split, and being written off in the polls, Syriza was returned to power with 35.5% of the vote – a 7% lead over the right-wing opposition New Democracy, and streets ahead of the former dominant centre-left party PASOK, somewhat recovered at 6%.

Some time ago, I made a mental note to write a piece about the election in Denmark – the one where the country had lurched to the left, repudiating the nativist Danish People’s Party, returning to the social democrats and socialists, and going beyond them to boost a new red-green alliance, and creating a four-party […]

Humans, the UK-US adaptation of a Swedish series about the complexities that arise when a super-realistic, super-responsive form of android becomes of use in the home, is premiering on Australian TV – insofar as that last clause describes a meaningful event any more. It produces, in this viewer, the same combination of interest and extreme irritation as does much sci-fi to those not addicted to the genre.

The Syriza government of Greece has submitted to the EU a draft agreement for economic management, as part of securing continued four-month funding to pay foreign debts coming due, and thus avoid a default.

What keeps you going? The idea that you have a kinship with earlier creatives, and, if you’ve got that novel in a drawer, that you might one day join their celebrated ranks? There’s a lot of people, wrestling with some echt-Williamsburg cutely miniaturist novel, who, if they were honest, have some image of themselves taking martinis on the terrace sometime with Gertrude Stein, Papa Hemingway, Jack Kerouac and Lena Dunham.

War movies always play fast and loose with the truth. So do science movies. The Imitation Game is a movie about science in war, so it was perhaps inevitable that it would be something of a travesty of both. Ostensibly, it’s the story of Alan Turing, the mathematical genius whose work on the ‘solvability’ of maths problems led him to propose the basic design of a machine that could work out whether a problem was solvable or not before it started working on it.

The Syriza victory has been won by years of hard campaigning across the country by people who never expected to be close to power, much less take it, and the night is theirs.

Good God, Interstellar is tedious. Even seen at a suburban multiplex, when you’re killing a couple of hours waiting for a Greyhound bus – about the best conditions in which to see any movie, the pure gift of relief from tedium – it doesn’t lift off.

When you write a book about the technologies of today that are building the future, and hear that a Marxist science-fiction writer is going to review it, one is liable to get a little nervous.

The latest war in Iraq – coming soon to Syria! – has had many unintended consequences, not least the utter disarray of the neocon project, at least as far as any intellectual or ideological consistency goes. Not least among these has been the changing fortunes of ‘multiculturalism’, which has found itself back in favour again on the right.

But it is on the Left that the most comprehensive split has emerged, based on two competing interpretations: one, that Scottish independence would mean the liberation of a country that has been under an imperial yoke, disguised as union, for three centuries (and under its dominance for a millennium); and the other, that the break-up of the UK would be a division of the working class of the Union, making it easier to defeat them with money and power.

The Chromebook is a taste of what that world would have been like, a counterfactual in a box.

The world got a good laugh the other week when the World Economic Forum announced that its annual Davos meeting would focus on inequality. As photos of Bono hanging with Hapsburgs trickled out, accompanied by the gushing features of financial journalists treated to five-star junkets at the gabfest – which has all but retreated to its mountain redoubt these days, largely because of the besiegement it got in Melbourne in 2000 – even its supporters couldn’t keep a straight face.

God, did the Hundred Years’ War feel like this? Are we going off to fight the curriculum wars again? Everything about this engagement feels so incurably second-rate. With the installation of the Abbott government, the old one-two has been instituted – something is floated in the Oz, and then a Lib stands up in parliament and says ‘we must look into this’ and then six articles come forward. Or vice versa. Sometimes there’s a third loop through the IPA.

‘We have to stop learning French and start learning Mandarin’. Which politician said that? The answer is: all of them, in the last ten or fifteen years.

Years ago, the Age was wont to put out a parody edition at the time of the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Last fortnight, I thought they’d returned to the habit, with six articles – six! – on the recently passed Lou Reed (and a double page spread on hot new restaurant Chin Chin).

In Adelaide for business, changing hotels, waiting in the lobby, thinking about my impending divorce, replaying some months in my head wondering if it could have been otherwise. Remorse and regret. The cab pulls up, I load the bags in.

Currently, there's three pitches sitting in my email inbox from people I read and respect – they know who they are – for various forms of crowdsourced funding for their projects. The amounts asked are small, but I have no doubt the requests will expand exponentially over the next few years until everyone I know is asking everyone else I know for money, maybe myself included.

Established by Churchill and Labour minister Hugh Dalton in 1940, the SOE was designed to encourage and facilitate espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in Nazi-controlled Europe and to aid local resistance movements.

The ‘revelations’ that the NSA has been monitoring all US phone traffic for some time, and that most major internet giants have been participating in the PRISM programme, allowing the US to harvest explicit data have surprised and angered many people. It is prompting a renewed focus on the new levels of surveillance, such as those that helped disrupt the Occupy movement in New York.

Helen Razer’s broadside against ‘the Left’s’ obsession with symbolic politic – dumb articles on newsreaders, rainbow-painted street crossings – got a strong vote of support when it appeared on Crikey last week. It was difficult not to join in.

More recently, billionaire financial services broadcaster, Michael Bloomberg simply bought the mayoralty of New York with a massive outspend of his opponent, while Vegas property developer and ultra-zionist Shelton Adelson pumped tens of millions into the one-man crusade of Newt Gingrich (in return, Gingrich’s speeches would veer alarmingly from the structural economic problems of the US to a demand that the country’s Israeli embassy be moved to Jerusalem).

At time of writing there’s still no further information on either the Boston marathon bombing, or the Texas fertiliser plant explosion (yet another C and W song title in waiting) and it would be foolish to build a firm case on ‘what-ifs’.

There’s nothing rational about the death of someone being the moment for discussing a whole era – indeed it can be absolutely distorting (obscuring in this case, the degree to which Thatcher was the front-person for a phalanx of interconnected ideological-interest forces). But there’s no way out of it. The whole culture is replaying thirty years worth of battles over ten days.

In the foyer of the Congress Center Hamburg, free bottles of Club-Mate, the high-caffeine herbal cola favoured by hackers, were being distributed from bikes, the riders threading their way between table upon table of black-clad guys and gals hunched over laptops: tacktacktacktack, furious fingers on shallow keyboards against a constant chatter of techno music.

First published in Crikey. The Andrew Bolt judgment (Boltgate? Gatebolt) has had and will have a lot of keystrokes devoted to it over the next while, but most of them will be from either the liberal-left, the cultural left, or the Right. The liberal-left will be well represented by David Marr’s SMH piece last week; […]

‘Are you interested in being involved with a courageous project to reform every political system on earth – and through that reform move the world to a more humane state?’ Sometime in December 2006, a former Melbourne University maths student, still hanging around the common room, posted the question to the students’ society network. His rather alarming message explained that the organisers proposed to launch their campaign in two months but were being overwhelmed by a media cascade with more than 51 000 (!) page hits on Google and stories in the Washington Post and so on.

Amidst the chancers, hacks and Groupers who comprise the Rudd cabinet, Attorney-General Robert McClelland scarcely seems to belong to the darker side. The owlish, earnest McClelland was born to wear a V-neck sweater under a suit and so it was painful watching him, with his manifest desire to do good, sell his proposed reforms to anti-terror laws inherited from the Howard government.