A couple of weeks back, I went to hear Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, two right-wing nationalist speakers who recently finished a tour of Australia and New Zealand, speak at Sydney’s International Convention Centre. My attendance was part study, part curiosity about their audience and influence.

The logic here makes it seem that Warmbier deserved what he got – fifteen years of hard labour and torture for breaking the laws of a foreign country by stealing a poster. But it is not justice for one ignorant American to visit a totalitarian state and finally experience the suffering that so many others experience.

So while we may see the violence at Don Dale as an awful aberration, it is actually part of a system of inherent violence conducted by the state. Rather than solving crime, the prison system perpetuates it, creating a permanent ‘criminal class’.

In recent weeks, the debate over the Safe Schools Coalition anti-bullying program has intensified, taking what is in many ways a bizarre turn. One of the more interesting elements of this has been the debate it has created about the role gender and sexual politics can and should play within Marxism. Here enters Guy Rundle.

Of course neoliberalism is deeply problematic – but so is reducing all of the world’s current problems to this one ideology. Neoliberalism hit its heights in the 1980s, but nowadays is nowhere near as prevalent. Focusing all our energy on this one school of thought means we are misdiagnosing the problem, and, in turn, giving power back to the very people who developed the system in the first place.

Whether advocating for ‘evidence-based policy’, demanding people ‘respect the science’, or denouncing those who ‘don’t understand the facts’, we on the Left have placed our faith in experts as a way to build our movement.

This weekend, thousands of people will take to the streets in the next round of ‘Bust the Budget’ rallies. The events will coincide with the sitting of the new Senate and organisers want to use the moment to turn up the heat on the Abbott government.

A short time ago, Maiy Azize wrote a piece for Overland on Reclaim the Night and the history of women-only spaces. Azize reflected on the value of these spaces, stating that feminists need to revisit the question of whether men should be invited in to them.

‘Equality is inevitable.’ This has been the catch-cry of marriage equality campaigners for years now. A call to conservatives to ‘get on the right side of history’ and finally accept that we’re all born equal. Look across progressive movements and you can see similar messaging. Demands for equality are everywhere.

It seems like the progressive love affair with WikiLeaks may be coming to an end. On Sunday it was revealed that WikiLeaks had preferenced the fascist Australia First and the Shooters and Fishers parties ahead of the Greens in the NSW Senate, as well as the National Party ahead of Greens Senator Scott Ludlam in WA. The deals could see the Shooters get elected in three weeks time, and may cost Ludlam – one of WikiLeaks’ most vocal supporters – his seat.

I travelled to Turkey in late June to attend Global Power Shift, hosted by 350.org. It was about a month after the start of a nation-wide protest movement sparked by the proposed demolition of Gezi Park in Istanbul and I was intrigued to see what was going on. I went in with no idea about Turkish politics and little understanding of the movement. But through talking to activists and seeing it in action, I learnt a lot.

I learn more about privilege from what I get wrong about misogyny than from what I get right about racism – Teju Cole