Helen Razer
Writer and broadcaster @HelenRazer
Helen Razer is a writer whose work appears in The Saturday Paper, Daily Review, SBS Online and Frankie. She has previously worked as a columnist for The Age and The Australian.
Protests don't have to get media coverage to be successful -- if they help protesters feel like glorious revolutionaries, that's just fine.
You can try to give up talking about feminism for Lent. But then along comes Janet Albrechtsen with a morsel too juicy to resist for this Catholic ...
There are plenty of horrifying accounts of individual acts of violence on Manus Island. But we need to step back from them and see what is really at fault here: policy, not people.
Trolling is not about the trolls. It's the product of increasingly histrionic communication, where everything provokes outrage. And the reasons behind Charlotte Dawson's death are much more complicated.
Boycotting is the laziest form of protest, and won't hurt Transfield as much as it will harm artists.
Stop declaring the violence in Manus Island is "not in your name" or due to Australians' antipathy, because it's really not you. It's the government and the power structures we have put in place.
The tabloids tell us every scintillating detail about Schapelle. The broadsheets tell us the bogans who read the Murdoch press are idiots. They are both completely wrong.
We have become so inured to pain, violence, racism and abuse as infotainment that we can't find the compassion in our conscious minds to cry for the pain of others.
Sexuality doesn't exist; it's a Western construct. The human rights framework that we should all love who we love is a solution to a Western problem -- and not a very good one.
The claim that Aboriginal Australians have a "special relationship with the land" is, quite frankly, racist and extremely unhelpful. Let's make some real reparations -- cold, hard cash.
