Tom Hyland

Lapsed journalist, but tries to keep the faith. Melbourne.

[Bernard Keane @BernardKeane]

and the humiliating grovelling to potential sources of far right cash has begun in earnest...

[Aaron Smith @aaronsmith]

Raf Epstein has assessed Karl's recent work as, and I quote, 'bullshit'.

And it's the most accurate take so far.

[Ronni🧂Salt-WhoWroteGunnawahYeahThatOne @RonniSalt]

Just so we're all aware, old mate Karl and his hidden financial backer's plan is exactly this

This 👇🏽

Karl is deliberately pushing the envelope to get himself taken off air with Nine

It's boringly predictable

And he'll keep doing it until Nine have no choice, and he wins

.

[Frank Bongiorno @fbongiornoanu]

Me on Hanson at the Press Club. Once a Liberal, on Inside Story https://t.co/H2cvmoNFoJ

[Sushi Das @SushiDas1]

Social media outrage is now an entire industry weaponised by people who know how to game the attention economy. Ed Coper’s new book, Angertainment, explains how it works. Catch him at the the Wheeler Centre on 24 June. 6.30pm. Go to https://t.co/9jruXQPXwz for tickets.

[Ronni🧂Salt-WhoWroteGunnawahYeahThatOne @RonniSalt]

So, let's recap, shall we?

This week the @PressClubAust managed to:

* cancel at the last minute, the questions and subsequent presence of renowned journalist Margo Kingston, who’d travelled over 2 days to Canberra to ask her question of Pauline Hanson – and yes, they were questions initially requested and organised by the Press Club itself 9 days ago.

* cancel the press gallery membership of long-term journalist, Greg Jericho, allegedly because he works for the @TheAusInstitute. Although Greg has been employed by the Aust Institute for 4 years, his membership cancellation only came yesterday after he publicly called out the Canberra press gallery - which is of course a highly fortuitous coincidence and not at all connected to his criticism.

* somehow allowed a person or persons unknown to enter the Press Club premises and put up a 3 metre wide electronic banner, without anybody in the Press Club noticing them doing it. How several people enter a private club carrying something that large, then proceed to wire it up on an open stage and nobody at the premises noticed in any way, is yet another display of the NPC’s staggering incompetence.

* release an unnecessarily detailed, high-school level statement about said banner incident, a statement that reeks of defensiveness and hysteria, while also prejudicially naming an alleged culprit and arguably sinking to the bottom of the barrel in terms of the journalistic standards it supposedly represents. Read it below and remind yourself that people who work with words for a living wrote that.

* allowed the speaker, Pauline Hanson, to defame one of their own - a journalist from the Guardian who dared to ask a hard-hitting question - by calling her "trash". This was only weeks after calling the same journalist a "nasty bitch". Mirroring, Trump’s “Quiet piggy” incident, the journalist's alleged colleagues all sat mute, as did the moderator, Tom Connell from Sky News during the abuse. No rebuke, no blow-back, no support for their fellow journalist, standing alone under Hanson's hissing vitriol. Just pusillanimous silence.

The National Press Club outdid their already dubious reputation this week, spraying themselves in a spectacular shower of self-inflicted shit – wall to wall, dripping effluent.

Australians currently suffer some of the most timid, captured political journalism in the western world, and if the actions of the #NPC this week are the metric, then we can all see why.

What a national and international embarrassment of an organisation meant to serve as a vital democratic institution and a cultural conscience – and one that has offered us neither.

.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

History will remember him as the man who ended the same war 39 times.

[John Kennedy @JKennedy1947]

Socceroos:

- 18 players w direct immigrant or refugee heritage
- Over 15 different ethnic backgrounds
- 4 players born in/raised in refugee camps
- 3 players born outside Aus

If you support One Nation, then don’t support the Socceroos. Just be a racist, not a racist hypocrite.

[stranger @strangerous10]

Raf Epstein calls out blatant favouritism media gives Pauline Hanson
“She could never say ‘show me the good Jews”
“She says that about Muslims”
“If she said that about Jews there’d be a discussion on this couch whether or not she should be prosecuted under hate laws”💥🎯 #auspol

[Geoff Kitney @4mambo]

When Greg Hywood took over at Fairfax and committed to breaking the journalistic culture (seen as left wing and progressive - in the bad sense) he started a project which has now pretty much achieved its objectives.

[Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz ,داني سيترينوفيتش @citrinowicz]

The Collapse of Deterrence Against Iran?

Paradoxically, one of the most serious consequences of this campaign may be the erosion of deterrence vis-à-vis Iran, specifically, the loss of the implicit sword hanging over Tehran as it considers whether to move toward nuclear weapons capability.

For years, one of the main factors restraining the Iranian leadership under Khamenei from openly advancing toward a bomb was the fear that doing so could trigger a large-scale military campaign aimed not merely at damaging Iran’s capabilities, but at threatening the regime itself.

From Tehran’s perspective, however, Iran has now endured precisely such a confrontation and survived it.

More importantly, the conflict exposed the significant limitations facing both Israel and the United States in any future campaign against Iran: the reluctance to commit ground forces, constraints on available munitions, and Israel’s deep operational and strategic dependence on the United States.

At the same time, Iran may have concluded that its ability to threaten or disrupt the Strait of Hormuz, thereby inflicting severe damage on the global economy, gives it a level of coercive leverage that the West is ultimately unwilling to challenge decisively.

It is important to acknowledge that Iran withstood an unprecedented military assault in terms of the scale of firepower directed against it, yet the regime remained intact and did not capitulate. That reality may lead Tehran to conclude that the deterrent credibility of both Israel and the United States has been fundamentally weakened.

This perception could become even stronger after the U.S. elections and under future American administrations, many of which may be even less willing to enter into direct confrontation with Iran. From Tehran’s perspective, Iran’s resilience during the conflict may have shattered the aura of overwhelming Israeli-American deterrence.

Paradoxically, deterrence may have been more effective when it remained ambiguous and untested. Once military power was actually employed, it may have demonstrated the limits, rather than the strength, of Western coercive capacity against Iran.

This is a deeply consequential development. One indication is that Iran reportedly adopted tougher positions in post-war negotiations than it held before the conflict began. The loss of the deterrence card could ultimately convince the Iranian leadership that this is precisely the moment to move toward nuclear weapons capability, believing that neither Israel nor the United States possesses either the will or the ability to stop it.

The core problem is that neither Israel nor the United States was prepared, or perhaps even capable, of going all the way in a confrontation with Iran. Instead, they appeared to rely on external variables, whether Kurdish unrest, internal regime instability, or hopes for political fragmentation inside Iran by supporting Ahmadinejad, as substitute mechanisms that could spare them the enormous manpower requirements and the prospect of a campaign stretching over months or even years.

Once those assumptions collapsed, what remained was essentially an air campaign. While tactically impressive, its achievements may ultimately pale in comparison to the strategic damage caused by exposing the actual limits of Israeli and American power in Iranian eyes.

From Tehran’s perspective, the war may have revealed not overwhelming Western dominance, but rather the boundaries of what Israel and the United States are truly willing and able to do militarily against Iran.

That, in itself, may become one of the most damaging long-term consequences of the entire campaign. This should force both Israel and the United States back to the drawing board. They will need to reassess how deterrence against Iran can be rebuilt under the current circumstances.

That will not be easy. Restoring deterrence after it has been tested , and, in Tehran’s eyes, exposed as limited, is far more difficult than maintaining an ambiguous threat that has never been put to the test. Most importantly, the conflict likely helped Iran better understand its adversaries through direct friction and real-world confrontatio.

#IranWar‌
#iran

[Tom Hyland @TomHyland2]

@MarkBaker20 Well it had the lines: “This masthead can reveal…”

[Tom Hyland @TomHyland2]

Story in The Age about Avalon airport evacuation reveals how people walk: « David, who is travelling to Brisbane, said people had walked out of the airport on foot. »

[Nick Bryant @NickBryantNY]

The myths of US democracy, as the Supreme Court mounts its latest attack on voting rights. My latest Substack post at History Never Ended. All content is free.

https://t.co/3kPUsmwNI9

[Nick Bryant @NickBryantNY]

Move over James Bond. Britain can deploy a more effective agent of the state. The man with the golden mace. My latest on that Royal visit, and that subversive speech to Congress. Historical anomalies abound…..

https://t.co/yYIFLXYCzR

[Nick Bryant @NickBryantNY]

Trump is finding it harder to conjure an alternative reality. The illusionist is no longer so spelling-binding. One of his most devastating political superpowers, to bend the truth in his favour, is failing him. “Fake inflation” is how he describes the spike in gas prices.

[Michael Shoebridge @MichaelS_SAA]

"Behind the hoopla, the Australian Government is leaving our military badly under-equipped in the drone era. Less over-hyped celebrations & more achievement is what Australians want from the Government when it's spending our money on our security." https://t.co/Jh2AJs1oU6

[Grant Wyeth @grantwyeth]

Although the Liberal Party's "Australian Values Migration Plan" is driven by panic and cheap politics, there is something more substantial that the Australian government should consider – a civic orientation programme.

https://t.co/AUhIz7mEqV

[Danny Postel @DannyPostel]

Drop whatever you're doing and read this @newlinesmag article by the political scientist Hussein Banai, which is the single most incisive — and chilling — piece of analysis I believe has been published, anywhere, on this subject of ultimate urgency.

https://t.co/S5pR8ESBYL

[David Crowe @CroweDM]

Bomb power stations? Mick Ryan on the Putin parallel.

https://t.co/xdFYDfdgDO