Category: Politics & Society
Serious Games and the Global War on Terror
A brief history of wargaming from the little blue tokens of the Prussian Kriegsspiel to the GI Joe sprites of Marine Doom.
Prompted by a weak rebuttal of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs we look at the history of life insurance and the role played by 'actuarial science' in our understanding of human mortality.
Nothing has done more to highlight the moral vacuum that Australia's corporate media inhabit than their coverage of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.
In the second part of this essay we look at some of the ways that public denial and public hysteria around homosexuality has influenced the military history of Britain, Germany and Australia.
Given this litany of disastrous invasions and bloody occupations, why do politicians continue to insist that their armies will be welcomed with open arms?
Despite the long history of ‘humanitarian interventions’ the idea that nations have an obligation to defend the rights of those beyond their own borders has only recently begun to gain acceptance.
The fallacy of liberation played a major part in inciting conflicts during the Cold War but realism's hindsight makes it hard to appreciate the initial idealism that accompanied these conflicts.
Case studies in strategic optimism from the Greco-Turkish War to the end of the World War II.
A brief history of the fallacy of liberation from the wars of the French Revolution to the end of the long 19th century.
The public release of ChatGPT has permanently contaminated the Web. Welcome to the world of Average Garbage Forever.
Putin's disastrous invasion of Ukraine has revealed the indiscriminate nature of Russian propaganda.
The police were the first Georgians I met. Arriving in the capital, Tbilisi, at ten to midnight there were police officers waiting on the tarmac.
Back in 2015 Amazon unveiled a promotional campaign for their TV adaptation of Philip K. Dick's famous novel The Man in the High Castle.
I knew it was going to be bad. I'd read all the one and two star reviews and looked at the pictures of weird murals and overgrown gardens but I kept circling back to the listing every time I looked for accommodation on Kauai.
I knew that Hawaii was part of America but I still didn't expect it to be so American.
Studying Australian history often feels more like uncovering some sprawling conspiracy. Buried underneath all the accounts of white explorers, convicts, bushrangers, miners and diggers is a vast bedrock of black history. The more you dig the more connections you find but the full story always seems to remain hidden.
As a nation with a large reserve of uranium but no nuclear energy industry Australia is periodically subject to op-ed pieces designed to drum up support for a domestic nuclear power industry.
Photos by Asmaa Waguih and Joey Lawrence of Kurdish fighters provide a face for a revolution that is quietly taking place behind the front lines of the war with ISIS.
Our first day on the bikes took us up the west coast from Negombo to Puttallam. It was a busy stretch of road and we were still a few days away from getting comfortable with the traffic so progress was slow.