Author: solomonfaust

I’m sitting in the Labour in Vain hotel sipping a pint of dark ale. The resident tom cat is under my table and Joni Mitchell is singing about paradise long paved. Outside, the election rattles past.

The whole thing’s looking pretty tired: ragged journalists scurry behind it, lobbyists and strategists drag it along. Candidates keep falling out and crunching under the wheels. On top of the election is Antony Green with a pocket calculator and Kerry Anne Kennerly with garland of skulls.

Two power hungry men with nothing to say stage a fist fight for the shrivelling crowd. Coloured flags fray in the wind: yellow, blue, red, green and brown. Captain GetUp! gives me the finger, mimes something about far-left bias. Almost no-one watches on.

An unprecedented number of far-right extremists are running for the Senate. Since some of them are  camouflaged behind reasonable sounding names, I’ve chucked together a quick guide to voting in the Senate.

Although you don’t have to, I think it’s most strategic to number every box above the line, like you would in the lower house.

The parties are in the order of the Victorian Senate ballot, with the number of my preference underneath. They’re colour coded as:

good
okay
bad
really bad
really really really bad.

I’m sure there haven’t been enough people telling you how you should vote, so bon appétit. Continue reading “Senate Guide 2019” →

This essay about automation was written and published for Melbourne Knowledge Week 2017.

THE DISRPUTED

“Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.”

– Genesis 17:26, KJV

The weavers are coming to break the machines. They charge through streets that smell of kerosene and dung as the planets – still undimmed by smog – circle above the English midlands. The weavers carry lit torches and sledgehammers and cry the name of their leader, King Ludd.

Ludd is a legend and an in-joke, a hero who doesn’t exist. A couple of the bearded weavers wears dresses and call themselves “Ludd’s Wives”. When the Luddites reach the mill they storm the door and swarm the floor to break the things that took their jobs. The guards have fled and the looms do not fight back.

The mechanised loom is an exciting advance for England’s economy and for humanity as a whole, but for the artisans it usurps it is a violent innovation. The Luddites fight for oldest reason: so their kids can eat. Tendons pull, elbows pivot, human cogs and levers break their iron competition. Cheers and splinters fill the mill. A dog howls in the distance.

Thick thread tumbles from a broken frame. It unspools through history, weaves through the red coats of the soldiers marching up from London and coalesces into ropes that loop around the throats of the weavers, then tighten as they fall. Ludd’s wives dangle in the breeze.

Continue reading “The Disrupted” →

‘What does the martyrdom of Christians in the Roman Empire between the reign of the Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus and Emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus have to do with a defamation action commenced in Australia in 2017?’

– Justice Michael Wigney on Mark Latham’s ‘extraordinary’ 76-page defence of his claim that journalist Osman Faruqi’s joke tweets were ‘anti-white racism’ that would incite terrorism.

I, Marcus Williamus Externus Lathamus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my infinite enemies as ‘A Racist’, or ‘Bonecrusher’ or ‘What the Hell Mark, Are You Okay?’ or at best as ‘The Increasingly Erratic Former Leader of the Labor Party’ am now about to write this strange history of my post-political life; starting from when I was treacherously deposed by colleagues to this fateful point some thirteen years later, when, at the age of fifty-seven, I find myself persecuted by the Islamo-Femo-Eco-Homo-ABC-Communist New World Order.

Continue reading “I, Latham” →