My own piece of the Internet
 
Tag: <span>racism</span>

#illRideWithYou

During the Sydney Cafe siege on 15 December I watched Twitter melt down into a morass of self-congratulatory compassion over the #illridewithyou hashtag. In an incredibly short time there were 120,000 tweets from Australians bravely standing up to anti-muslim behaviour by offering to ride with Muslim’s on public transport. News.com.au described it as a twitter movement which would “restore your faith in humanity”. Buzzfeed thought that it was “one of the few positive things to come out of the horrific events in Sydney.” The Sydney Morning Herald was a little more measured, seeing it as a bulwark against the “climate of fear and …

Franz Kafka’s In The Penal Colony, Manus Island, and Australia’s second wave of racism and xenophobia

“The matter stands like this. Here in the penal colony I have been appointed judge. In spite of my youth. For I stood at the side of our Old Commandant in all matters of punishment, and I also know the most about the apparatus. The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt. Other courts could not follow this principle, for they are made up of many heads and, in addition, have even higher courts above them. But that is not the case here, or at least it was not that way with …