Festival of Dangerous Ideas. This festival was held in Sydney between 20-30 August this year. I usually report on my podcast listening, but I listened to Richard Flanagan’s address on ‘Heresies’ which is on YouTube instead. On his substack, Derek Thompson says that Everything is Television today, and the slippage between podcasts and You Tube is ubiquitous. There’s not much to see here except a man talking, so you may as well just listen to it. However you access it, here is a link to Richard Flanagan’s excellent lecture on the power of the Israeli lobby. Good on you.
Global Roaming And while I was at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas(metaphorically), I then listened to Nobel Prize winner and editor of Rappler Maria Ressa talking with Hamish Macdonald on How Big Tech is creating the next Donald Trump. She shares some amazing statistics: 74% of the world’s population now lives under some form of dictatorship, and in July 51% of internet traffic was not human. Of the ‘open internet’ only 25% remains open and not behind a paywall. And as far as people saying “I get my news from the internet”, of every hour of internet viewing, only 15 minutes takes you to an actual news website. She lays out an “authoritarian stack”: Peter Thiel bankrolling Donald Trump and JD Vance, Palantir winning a US $10 billion military contract, and Silicon Valley firms wiring themselves into state power. [I’m starting to be really uneasy about JD Vance]. As with the rest of the world, Australia is prostrating itself in front of Big Tech in order to get data centres, but do they provide sovereignty? [not if we’re just becoming a data processing factory for Big Tech say I].And should the ABC allow Anthropic to scrape its archives in order to make AI more Australian?- the ultimate Faustian bargain. [No bloody way, say I]
The War Game Series 1 The Grey Zone Episode 6 Iran- the hidden hand. This series was recorded in 2021, and up until then Iran had mainly used proxy forces as a form of warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States. In 2018 Trump tore up the nuclear agreement with Iran, preferring instead ‘maximum pressure’. During 2019 oil tankers were blown up in the Straits of Hormuz, probably by Iran, and there was skirmishing and seizures of tankers. [Did Trump learn nothing? Obviously] On 3 January 2020, the United States killed Iran’s top spy master, Major General Qasem Soleimani, in a drone strike in Iraq, thus undertaking similar Grey Zone tactics to what Iran was using.
The Rest is History The Fascist World Cup: Mussolini’s Football Dictatorship This episode was actually from their Extras series for Rest of History Club members. Sport was part of Mussolini’s projection of a New Italy. He built new gyms and sporting fields, and mass sporting events took over the existing Church and Communist sporting clubs. At the 1932 Olympics the Italian team wore black shirts, and gained international prestige for their performance in boxing, cycling and soccer (how lovely to hear the Irish guest historian Paul Rouse refer to it as ‘soccer’ instead of ‘football’! Just as Australia has its own football, so does Ireland). The Italian soccer team started headhunting players from South America, on the basis of their Italian heritage, which wasn’t common at that time.. In 1934 the second World Cup was held in Italy, and it was seen by Mussolini as a showcase for fascism. There was press propaganda, the opening of new stadia and the offering of tourist packages. Not many Italians saw the games, but they did hear them on the radio, where the broadcasts were in Italian, rather than in English. A game against Austria was won by Italy, although there are questions about the refereeing and certainly there were South American players on the team, but there was probably no conspiracy. They then won against the Czech team in the final. The Italian team then went on to win the Gold Medal in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, then the 1938 French World Cup. By this time, the soccer team had completely different players, which is testament to the depth of the Italian talent.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 