Latest news with #liberalism
ABC News
2 days ago
- Politics
- ABC News
As the planet warms and liberal democracy is attacked, does the government care?
This warning was published in 1762: "As soon as man can disobey with impunity, his disobedience becomes legitimate." It comes from The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau's words inspired the French Revolution, and the American revolutionary war, and influenced the political and moral philosophy we call liberalism, on which modern Australian political society is based. The message contained in that warning is extremely important. If we want to live in a world in which individual human and civil rights mean anything, certain groups in society must not be allowed to behave with impunity. Why? Because if some groups can behave with impunity, and everyone else is forced to stand back and watch, it has a deeply corrosive effect on human culture. If they can behave with impunity, they'll keep pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with (who's going to stop them?), and their outrageous behaviour will become the new low "standard" for others to follow. It's obvious what that downward spiral in morality and ethics means for everyone. Do we believe freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to protest, and the media's right to tell the truth, are essential for a free society? If we do, then we can't allow privileged groups to dismantle those things in their effort to protect their "prerogative" to behave with impunity. When we let anyone hack away at those pillars of liberalism — and make it increasingly dangerous for individuals to tell the truth, to speak up, and to protest the abuse of power — what will happen to our "free society"? It will see illiberalism flourish. In some ways, the battle to protect important elements of liberal society has already been lost. In the 21st century, the right to privacy, which is essential to an individual's ability to speak freely in their own home, has been destroyed. The internet, which held so much promise in the 1990s, has been turned against us. It's become a tool to crush political dissent and compile lists of suspect individuals and their personal networks. The weaponisation of our data and AI technology is driving a rapid evolution in dystopian predictive policing and warfare. Some private companies operating at the frontier of this technology, like Palantir, are profiting from these developments. And we need to understand everything is connected. Take the environment, the very thing that sustains life on this planet. In December last year, researchers at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom released a study that showed Australian police are world leaders at arresting climate and environment protesters. It found more than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involved arrests, more than three times the global average. It showed Australia's political leaders had joined the "rapid escalation" of global efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest in recent years, while sovereign states globally were failing to meet their emissions targets and international agreements. It complemented other reports (here and here) that illuminated the links between political donations and lobbying from fossil fuel companies, governments writing harsher laws and penalties for activists, policing agencies being used to enforce the new laws, and legal systems and courts bedding the laws down. Think about how that phenomenon is connected to the global economic system. Specifically, consider the role the "price mechanism" is supposed to play in industrialised society. At the moment, we're watching a nasty global battle over an attempt by scientists and environmentalists to have the true costs of fossil fuels properly reflected in the market prices of the products fossil fuel companies sell to the world. If the true environmental, climate, and planetary costs of fossil fuels were really reflected in their prices, the price of petrol, gas and coal would be many multitudes higher than today's suppressed "market" prices. So the global fossil fuel industry is using every lever it can — political influence, legal systems, police forces, private security services, national armies, extra-judicial harassment and intimidation — to stop the true cost of their products being reflected in the market prices of their products. And climate and environmental activists and scientists are using every lever they can — research, letters to politicians, the legal system, protests, civil disobedience, and blockades — to have the true climate and planetary costs of fossil fuels reflected in their prices. Do we have a right to an inhabitable planet? It's not difficult to see how the battle over the price mechanism is deeply connected to the struggle to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples globally (including land rights, the right to cultural preservation, and participation in decision-making processes). Everything is connected. Last week, the climate analyst Ketan Joshi wrote a fiery article in Crikey that touched on many of these issues. It's really worth reading. Mr Joshi said the Albanese government's recent controversial decision to allow Woodside's North West Shelf gas project to continue operating until 2070 was a major blow to the climate movement and signified something sinister. He argued Labor was not a climate denier, it was something "far worse". He said if anyone in 2025 could work to worsen fossil fuel reliance in full acceptance of the consequences, without any willingness to work to prevent them, they were "far scarier" than climate deniers. "There isn't a great name for this, but we can call it "tactical fatalism": the intentional, weaponised insistence that a worse future is the only future (from those who benefit the most from whatever makes it bad)," he wrote. "The climate movement is ill-equipped to deal with a threat that looks like this. The easy binary of deniers vs believers died last decade. Any fantasy we had of a global moral pact of good intentions is dead. "This decade we are realising how much damage and death can be caused openly, without any shame. Genocidal countries know it, and the fossil fuel industry knows it, too. "A half-decade of wars, invasions, energy crises and a really nasty pandemic haven't been easy on our movement, and the tactical fatalist predators are circling." How do these sad political developments fit with the principles of "liberalism," where the right to speak freely, to tell the truth, and protest are supposed to be sacrosanct? In The Social Contract, Rousseau said when privileged groups can act with impunity we exist in a world where might is right. "And as the strongest is always right, the only problem is how to become the strongest," he wrote. Is that really the world we want to live in? Is that what younger Australians voted for?
LBCI
6 days ago
- Business
- LBCI
South Korea's new President Lee vows to revive democracy from 'near demise'
South Korea's new liberal President, Lee Jae-myung, pledged on Wednesday to rebuild the country from what he described as the near destruction caused by a failed attempt at martial law and revive a struggling economy facing global protectionism. Lee's decisive victory in Tuesday's snap election is poised to usher in a sea change in Asia's fourth-largest economy, following backlash against a botched attempt at military rule that brought down Yoon Suk Yeol just three years into his troubled presidency. Reuters
Washington Post
29-05-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Poland holds a presidential runoff election, which Trump has sought to influence
WARSAW, Poland — Poland's presidential election has come down to a stark ideological choice: a liberal pro-European mayor versus a staunch nationalist conservative. They are polling so close that the outcome is impossible to predict in the run-off round on Sunday. It's not just a domestic affair. President Donald Trump has thrown his weight behind the nationalist candidate, Karol Nawrocki, and dangled the prospect of closer military ties if Poles choose him over liberal Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski.
Washington Post
22-05-2025
- General
- Washington Post
The end of writing and reading will be the end of freedom
Nicole Krauss is a novelist and a 2025 Guggenheim fellow. For the past year I've lived away from my home in America, in Rome, among the achievements and the ruins of 3,000 years. It's made me deeply aware of the long arc of history, which saw the rise and fall of almost everything: democracies and dictators, gods and humans, war and peace, that which was feared, and that which was loved and cherished. And though the countless crossroads people arrived at in history, arguing about which way to go, may have since faded into the indelible road chosen, I'm also acutely aware that we now stand at another. That the direction we choose will determine not only our children's future, but the future of what it will mean to be human — and the conditions under which human life will unfold. Whether the still-relatively young values of liberalism will survive, whether reading and writing will continue to be the underpinnings of culture, whether the constructs and algorithms of AI will replace the freedoms of selfhood, whether we will dominate and destroy nature, or salvage and protect it: We now stand before these questions. Stand and, I hope, pause. For in the stillness of that pause, the lessons of history sometimes speak to us. Lately, I've found such a lesson in the history of my own people. In the 5th century B.C., when the Jews in exile in Babylon were allowed to return to Jerusalem, they were called upon to rebuild themselves, their city and their lives in their homeland. In exile, without a land or a Temple, the Jews wrote and transcribed the Torah. The opportunity to return to reconstruct their home and rebuild the Temple raised a vital question: What kind of people are we going to be? The synoptic Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are two accounts of that return and its essential question. Ezra, a priest, laments the moral and spiritual decline of the newly reestablished community, and calls for religious reforms and priestly leadership. But it is in Nehemiah that we read of something truly extraordinary: the first record of the Torah being read in public. Ezra brought the scroll out and read from it 'facing the square before the Water Gate, from the first light until midday, to the men and the women and those who could understand; the ears of all the people were given to the scroll of the Torah. … They read from [it], translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading.' It is impossible to exaggerate how momentous this moment was. At perhaps the greatest juncture the Jews have ever faced, the Temple was replaced by Torah. Sacrifice was replaced by reading, teaching and study. And Judaism was made independent of place and became portable, ensuring its survival to this day. Dayenu, as we say. But there is even more to those astounding lines in Nehemiah than the choice of Torah over Temple. What we find is a radical step toward democratization: toward the democratic ideals that generations of later Jews would not only embrace but die without, and also die to create — and whose present endangerment many are now protesting in the streets and squares of their cities and countries. In those few lines of Nehemiah, we find a rejection of a hierarchical system based on hereditary power in the hands of the few, toward the town square, where all men and women are offered the chance to participate, to listen, learn and understand the teachings for themselves. It might be argued that from that day on, all that is required to live as a Jew are words. No more, and no less. I am a writer in a long line of writers, among my people and all people who have been writing these last few thousand years. And I write, just as I read, because I believe that in the realm of literature we are, each of us, free. Free to imagine, to invent, to change our minds, to travel through time, across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to do what I don't believe can be done in any other realm, medium, or dimension: to step into the mind of another. Feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy. As such, literature is fundamentally democratic but for one major caveat: To access its freedoms, we must be taught to read, value and engage with literature. At the crossroads where we now stand, among the many other things at stake, is the future of reading, writing and literature, and all of the expansive freedom it has afforded us. In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside of a cellphone, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachment to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being. This month, hundreds of thousands of students are graduating across the United States, from colleges and universities where it is the lifework of countless professors to ensure they have access to the freedom that comes with becoming a reader, being able to write for oneself, and partake in a culture of literature and ideas. Which, to me, is deeply heartening. And I do believe that history is long, and that where there is destruction, there is also the potential for tikkun, for repair. For thousands of years, we have been finding words for ourselves, we have been writing our own story, and in the process have done something far more radical than expressed ourselves: We have invented ourselves. We have asked the essential question: Who are we, and what kind of people do we want to be? And it is, I believe, only as readers and writers, only as people educated in the bonding of language and meaning, that we have any hope of rising to the occasion of an answer.
The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
'They want to feel like men': Why are gen Z men turning to rightwing politics?
Young men and women are pulling apart ideologically – in the US, UK, South Korea, France, Germany and elsewhere, young women now take far more liberal positions on immigration and racial justice than young men, while older age groups remain evenly matched. At the same time, as Reform UK polls neck and neck with Labour, a new group of voters referred to as 'radical young men' make up one of Reform's largest voting blocks, mirroring the Trump campaign's focus on the 'manosphere' during the US election. The Guardian's Damien Gayle goes in search of these young men to ask why they are turning to the right
