Penn Raine: Controlling the narrative

Apparently, the CFOs of Meta and Google have figured that there is better business to be had by allowing their users to freely express opinions on their politicians’ IQs and whether or not a woman can be a woman with a pair of XY chromosomes, otherwise they would have turned up to the meeting with President Macron and one of our ex-PMs – you remember, the one who was kind. Their failure to front at the talking heads lineup for the Christchurch Call to limit on-line ‘extremism’, whatever that means, may suggest to optimists among us that the corporate appetite for woke vanity projects is diminishing. 

Brian Easton: How Much Influence Do Governments Have?

The more informed an economist is, the more they keep their head down during elections.

Elections are not a time to talk about economics in a serious way. Sure, politicians talk about the economy and what they will do to it, with promises soon forgotten when they take power. Elections are timely reminders of how shallow and poor quality our public discussion on the economy is. (You won’t be able to infer how I voted from this column. Economic issues were not a major determinant.)

Chris Trotter: Restoring The Narrative: The Political Logic Behind The Campaign Against Disinformation.

Perhaps Jim Morrison's hostility toward Establishment America was born out of his father’s role in the notorious Tonkin Gulf Incident. Not many people know that The Doors’ lead-singer’s father, George S. Morrison, was an admiral in the United States Navy. Even fewer realise that he was one of those commanding the US naval force patrolling off the North Vietnamese coast in 1964. The very same naval force that was “attacked” by non-existent North Vietnamese gunboats in an “incident” that never happened, but which served as the pretext for Congress’ “Tonkin Gulf Resolution”. The very same resolution that gave President Lyndon Johnson the authority to escalate American involvement in South Vietnam to the level of full-scale war.