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I laugh every time I see advertisements for Musashi health supplements on the back of our local buses. A computer-game warrior, all menace and muscle, selling fantasy. The threatening salami chopper, fearless because thoughtless, living “as though already dead.” Musashi would have laughed as well. The use of his name borders on an insult. Still, I imagine he had a sense of humour.

A true hero is not someone who seeks danger. A hero is someone who could walk away, but doesn’t. Someone who risks his life for others.

The man who stopped the attacker at Bondi, Ahmed al Ahmed, is what a hero does. The word samurai means one who serves. In that moment, Ahmed—a Muslim saving Jewish lives—was a samurai. He acted as though already dead. Dead to himself.

He later said it was his soul that directed him. An affirmation of life over self. No hierarchy of people. Lives equal to his own. People equal to his people. That is service to something higher, whether you name it God or not.

Few of us will ever be tested like that, and we should be grateful. For most of us, there will be nothing spectacular. Yet the battle is daily.

I don’t remember whether it was Buddha or Confucius who said it—maybe neither—but it’s true: between the man who defeats an army of a thousand and the man who defeats himself, the latter is the greater conqueror. That is what the crucifixion story points to. Whether it’s factual doesn’t matter to me. The meaning does. The defeat of the self creates a void—space for something beyond ego to move through us.

Negation doesn’t tolerate this. The closer you get, the more vicious the resistance becomes. That’s where being a samurai matters. Remove the self, and you reduce your vulnerability. Each quiet victory strengthens you. And there are no medals. Inner battles rarely are visible.

The most brutal enemy is the sense that the effort is useless. Why be good when it costs you and gives nothing back? Fear of hell or prison doesn’t count. Fear doesn’t make you good.

Why do it anyway? I don’t have a clean answer. Once, belief in an afterlife made it easier. Now all I can say is notice how affirmation feels, and how negation feels.

I met a middle-aged Frenchman on a ferry in Thailand who joked about buying a boy as part of a hotel package. He laughed—until he suspected I might be the police. Later, when he saw me in Bangkok, he ran. He knew. There were no justifications. He had negated that boy’s humanity—and in doing so, his own. Shame chased him.

We can’t know with certainty whether God or Satan exist. But we know how choosing affirmation or negation feels.

Negation rarely begins with cruelty. It starts with despair. With the belief that the battle is already lost, that one is beyond repair. Some people come to prefer the abyss because it feels honest. They settle into it. Enjoy it. Until one day they realise they are trapped, and there is no way back.

That is when negation turns outward. That is when men like serial killer Denis Nilsen begin to destroy what they believe caused their fall.

The danger is not imperfection. The danger is believing that imperfection disqualifies you from serving anything good.

Often, the only reward for resisting negation is that others sense it in you. They don’t know why you feel safe—only that you do. I’ve had men approach me at truck stops, on bike rides, at campsites, at cliffs at sunset. A few are alive because someone listened.

To be a samurai is to serve—not because you are pure, but because you are available. Not perfect. Not holy. Open to being the conduit through which affirmation can act in the physical world.

I know this because the man who rescued me from the streets of Piccadilly Circus was deeply flawed himself. A boy-addicted punter.

And yet, in that moment, affirmation moved through him anyway.

No one should despair and choose negation. No one is exempt from being a servant of something better.

 

Delayed again. This time it’s trackwork between Sydney and Newcastle, where I’ll start the next ride. So now, God willing and trains running on time, departure will be on Monday.

Those who read Jeffery Robinson’s “Crimes against Humanity” might remember how he describes the Chilean secret police torturing children in front of their parents when the parents would not crack under torture themselves. Israel is applying the same strategy in Gaza: make life as painful as possible for the children of Gaza in the expectation that Palestinian parents will give in, pack up, and leave. The latest, given bombs, torture, starvation, and the blockade of life’s essentials, has not worked; Israel is banning aid agencies such as Doctors Without Borders. An organisation that is one of the most outstanding examples of human compassion and selflessness in coming to the aid of others. Israel bans it. Evil excludes love.

In Zen and other religions, it is known that when you negate your fellow human being, be it in thought, action, or speech, you throw the door wide open and roll out the red carpet for negation, call it evil if you prefer, to enter and take possession of yourself. That applies to nations as well, as history teaches us.

Tomorrow, Saturday 3rd. Train to Newcastle and then ride up the Hunter Valley to Dunedoo, where I’ll start the Central West Cycle Trail. The trail is a 400-kilometre loop. Altogether, trail and riding up and down the Hunter, this will be a 1000-kilometre ride. I’m going to take my time, no rush, and will post pictures and bullshit – technology working and sun shining.

Central West Cycle Trail website.

 

First day of the year.

No archive. No museum of half-right thoughts.
I cleared the walls because ideas aren’t medals. They’re tools.
When they’re bent, you don’t polish them — you melt them down.

We already know what’s at stake.
Life itself is on the line, not metaphorically, not someday.
And we already know what blocks us:
self-interest dressed up as realism,
division sold as identity.

This year has to be louder. Not noisier — clearer.
Demanding action, yes, but also embodying it.
Cut what emissions we can. Own our footprint without pretending it’s enough on its own.
And refuse the ancient distractions: race, religion, sexuality —
the recycled bullshit that turns neighbours into enemies
while the house burns.

Negation is the common thread.
Climate inaction negates the living world —
and we are not separate from it.
Hatred negates humanity, one person at a time.
A nod, a smile, an unremarkable kindness
is a small act of resistance.
It says: you exist, and so do I, and that matters.

I should already be on the road, bike loaded, days unfolding by pedal stroke.
But life interrupts. It always does.
Departure gets delayed, not cancelled.
In a few days I’ll roll out anyway.
The direction hasn’t changed.

No trophies. No certainty.
Just movement.
Just choosing, again, to stand where it counts.

I should be heading out on a bikepacking trip in a few days. Zen, the Australian bush,  and long-distance bicycle riding.

 

 

 

 

 

Years ago, I was camped in the hills west of Sydney — what you do when rent is a luxury, and the bush is free. Every afternoon, like clockwork, around five, the backpackers arrived looking for somewhere to bed down. A bonfire would be lit, because that’s what young people do. They sat in a loose circle, wrapped in fragrant smoke, wine bottles scattered like punctuation, talking about the world as if it were theirs to fix.

As an older man, you don’t enter the circle. You sit back on a tree stump and listen.

The first thing you notice is language. Everyone speaks excellent English; only the accents betray where they’re from. The second thing is gender — or rather, the near absence of it. The old signals are muted. There’s no obvious peacocking, no ritualised flirtation, though the young men still carry that ancient swagger that predates civilisation itself. Some things are older than progress.

What they talk about is the future: the planet, climate, politics, the feeling — unstated but shared — that they belong to something larger than any one country. A global youth culture, already formed, already assumed.

I’d seen hints of it before. A Western journalist in Iran, filming a death-metal band rehearsing in a soundproofed basement to avoid the morality police. Another report from Lebanon: the lead guitarist of a rock band, explaining that young people in the Middle East want in—not as imitators, but as participants. A thirteen-year-old Yemeni boy was asked what he and his friends wanted. He didn’t hesitate. “The same as you have,” he said. “Freedom and democracy.”

Sitting by that fire, included by default as the token old bloke, it was apparent this wasn’t an anecdote but a pattern. These young people were already world citizens. That fact alone will reshape diplomacy, leadership, and even how the planet is managed. We will see international statespersons emerge not as abstractions but as inevitabilities.

I can’t recall who said it — only that he was French — but he nailed it when asked the difference between patriotism and nationalism. “Patriotism,” he said, “is loving your country. Nationalism is hating everyone else.” The young French woman opposite me, downing her fifth glass of wine, certainly loved France. She didn’t hate Burundi.

The obstacles are predictable. Extremists, either too stupid or too invested to see that this was inevitable once technology collapsed distance. Living forever in sealed geographic compartments, by race, was never sustainable. I once said to an Aboriginal elder in the outback that the moment someone figured out how to sail upwind, sixty-four thousand years of isolation were over. As two grandfathers, we agreed that the only question that mattered was what we wanted for our grandchildren. And the answer was clear: Indigenous youth must take their place at the table — not as symbols, not as museum pieces, but as full participants in whatever comes next.

What troubled me that night was who wasn’t there. Around that fire, there wasn’t a single young person of colour. There’s a danger that some groups will be welcomed first as curiosities —even pampered pets—tolerated, displayed—only to be quietly left behind once the party moves on.

The resistance to this emerging civilisation comes from fear: fear of losing control, fear of diluted identity, fear of the future itself. It comes dressed as the far right, as religious extremism, as nationalist revival. Putin’s Russia. Xi’s China. Modi’s India. Trump’s America. Different costumes, same impulse: to freeze history and pretend entropy can be negotiated with.

But sitting there in the Australian bush, listening to young people who already belonged to one another, I knew the truth. This movement isn’t political in the usual sense. It’s closer to an evolutionary step. You don’t vote against it. You don’t stop it. You either adapt — or you fossilise.

 

Everything begins in the void.
Not emptiness, not nothingness—but tension.
The pull between yes and no, between what insists on being and what withdraws, erases, denies.

Reality is not built from substances so much as forces. Affirmation—this exists, this matters. Negation—this should not, this must end. They are not enemies. They are partners in a long, unfinished dance. Nothing emerges without both. Stars burn because gravity resists them. Life persists because death presses close. Meaning exists because it can fail.

Human beings are not exempt from this structure. We are not observers standing outside it. We are one of its expressions.

That’s the first mistake modern culture makes: treating human behaviour as a collection of private moral choices, disconnected from the systems that produce them. As if desire, cruelty, tenderness, or collapse originate in isolated souls rather than circulating through a species like weather.

Humanity functions less like a crowd of individuals and more like a superorganism—distributed, adaptive, unstable. Ant colonies understand this better than we do. No ant imagines itself sovereign. Meaning exists at the level of the whole. Humans, by contrast, invented hyper-individualism and then acted surprised when the organism began to fracture.

Our crises—ecological, political, sexual, moral—are not failures of character. They are symptoms of a system drifting into imbalance. Too much negation. Too little integration.

Sexuality sits directly on this fault line.

We insist on treating it as a private quirk—an orientation, a preference, a taste—because that makes it manageable, marketable, punishable. But sexuality is not an individual anomaly. It is a species-level system. It redistributes intimacy. It forges bonds. It relieves pressure. It reduces aggression. It produces creativity. It reorganises social energy in ways reproduction alone cannot explain.

That homosexuality persists across cultures and eras is not an error in the code. It is the code expressing redundancy, resilience, variation. Species that survive long enough learn to diversify their forms of attachment. Alloparenting, mentoring, non-reproductive bonds—these are not deviations from nature. They are nature hedging its bets.

Desire, like everything else, can affirm or negate.

At its best, it connects. It humanises. It says: you exist to me.
At its worst, it collapses into domination, exploitation, erasure. It becomes a mechanism of negation—using bodies to avoid recognition.

When systems compress human need—through economic precarity, social isolation, ideological rigidity—sexuality warps. It doesn’t disappear. It distorts. What cannot be lived openly returns sideways, coded, underground, sometimes violent.

This is where moral panic enters. Societies react to distorted outputs by blaming individuals. They tighten taboos. They amplify shame. They mistake symptoms for causes.

Taboo itself is not evil. It is a primitive regulatory algorithm—an early attempt to manage risk in a fragile organism. But when taboos harden into ideology, when silence replaces feedback, the system loses its capacity to correct itself. Shame becomes weaponised. Negation masquerades as virtue.

We are living through such a cycle now.

Climate collapse. War returning to the centre. Fertility crises alongside population panic. Institutions hollowed out. Shared language dissolving into slogans. It resembles the old myths for a reason. Babel was never about towers. It was about the collapse of coordination—the moment a species can no longer speak to itself.

Sexuality is one of the pressure points where this breakdown becomes visible because it sits so close to vulnerability, power, and recognition. The powerful act out distorted forms of desire not because they are uniquely depraved, but because power amplifies system failures. It removes friction. It reveals what was already there.

What looks like individual pathology is often a system under strain.

This is not an abstract insight for me. It is lived data.

I didn’t study this from books alone. I watched it unfold in rooms where men arrived carrying longing, fear, bravado, despair. Some wanted connection. Some wanted escape. Some were acting out fractures they didn’t have language for. Affirmation sliding, sometimes imperceptibly, into negation.

The lesson was not that desire is dangerous. The lesson was that unmet desire becomes dangerous when systems deny its reality.

And this is where the personal intersects with the philosophical.

When you’ve met negation face to face—when you’ve seen how it inhabits people, hollows them out, dresses despair up as clarity—you begin to recognise it early. In yourself. In others. Especially in the young, standing at the edge of their own initiation into a world that no longer offers rites of passage, only markets and warnings.

That moment of recognition is not erotic. It is existential.
It is the quiet thought: I know this terrain. I survived it. You might too.

Older cultures understood this. They placed elders at thresholds. They did not pretend the forces weren’t real. They taught how to walk with them without being consumed.

What we’ve lost is not innocence but affirmation.

Negation is seductive because it feels honest. It says the world is broken—and it is. It says meaning is fragile—and it is. But it lies about the conclusion. It insists that because things fail, nothing is worth tending.

Affirmation is harder. It doesn’t deny suffering. It absorbs it. It says yes anyway—not loudly, not sentimentally, but stubbornly, through presence.

This is not optimism. It is ontological resistance.

Love, in this sense, is not romance. It is the refusal to reduce another being to their worst moment, their damage, or their utility. It is the act that reconstitutes meaning where negation has taken up residence.

Negation dazzles. Affirmation builds.

That is the imbalance we are living through. Not too much desire. Too little integration. Not moral collapse, but systemic disarray.

Human behaviour is system behaviour.
And the system is out of balance.

The question, then, is not how to eliminate desire, or punish it, or sanitise it. The question is whether we can restore conditions where affirmation has enough space to do its work—where connection does not have to masquerade as transgression, and recognition does not arrive too late.

That is not a moral project.
It is a survival one.

 

It is difficult to deny that the far right is on the rise. Explanations abound—cultural anxiety, social media, populism—everything, in fact, except the cause. That cause is history. We have been here before, and the last time it took a world war to rid ourselves of the beast. Its head has regrown not because of a lack of legislation or progressive speech, but because the conditions that give it life are once again being ignored.

Germany was punished most severely after losing a war it did not start. The monuments, the minutes of silence, the dawn services serve a secondary purpose: they obscure Allied responsibility for how the First World War began and how its aftermath was handled. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles was designed to cripple Germany economically, making recovery and stability almost impossible. The Kaiser was removed, creating a political vacuum into which both the far right and the far left rushed. Meanwhile, ordinary Germans watched their savings evaporate. A wheelbarrow of banknotes might buy a loaf of bread.

Into this desperation stepped the National Socialists. They promised to tear up Versailles, restore dignity, and—crucially—assured the population there would be no more war. They would make Germany great again. How this would be achieved was a question people were too hungry, too humiliated, and too exhausted to ask.

Extremes rise when real problems go unaddressed. This is why social security exists—not primarily to protect the recipient, but to protect society from desperation. In interwar Germany, desperation was allowed to fester, and responsibility for that lies squarely with the victorious powers.

Much the same pattern is visible today across Western democracies. Successive governments have failed to confront the social consequences of runaway house prices, stagnant wages, and migration policies that may be well-intentioned but poorly managed. Communities destabilise not from diversity itself, but from rapid change without material support. At the same time, governments appear more attentive to the demands of loud, militant constituencies than to the quiet anxieties of the worker, the unemployed parent, the household with five dependents staring at an empty table at day’s end.

That person does not see the contemporary left as a solution, but as part of the problem. What remains is the far right, which is always ready to offer an explanation—simple, emotional, and wrong—by pointing to those it claims are responsible.

I am reminded of The Tin Drum, set in the years leading up to the Second World War. Its protagonist, three-year-old Oskar, refuses to grow up after witnessing the moral collapse of the adult world. In one scene he reflects that there was once a naïve people who believed in Santa, and then one day discovered that Santa was the gas man. The line lands because it captures the moment illusion gives way to horror—when denial becomes complicity.

History does not repeat itself mechanically, but it rhymes. When desperation is ignored, when dignity is treated as expendable, the far right does not need to be invited in. It arrives on its own.

Yesterday I was poking around the Internet, and as I suspected, I’m upsetting some people. As cowards do, they go for your reputation. They hide and would never face you in open battle because they know they would lose. Nearly twenty years ago, I had a story, a big one, and was naive enough to believe I could publish what is in the public interest to know, and that interest would compensate for how I uncovered a sewer and those wallowing in it. Anyways, reflections on independent, undercover, investigative journalism.

 

Truth doesn’t arrive by invitation. It doesn’t respond to FOI requests, doesn’t submit itself to process, and doesn’t wait patiently for editorial approval. Criminal worlds don’t archive their own indictments. They don’t keep minutes. They don’t self-document. They test, they whisper, they watch to see who can stay long enough without flinching.

You learn this the hard way. You also learn something else: when you return with information the mainstream media didn’t get, didn’t want, or didn’t dare pursue, the resistance rarely comes from those exposed. It comes from the institutions whose authority rests on being the ones who know first.

There is a quiet rule in modern journalism: information is acceptable only if it preserves the hierarchy that delivers it. Truth is welcome so long as it arrives through the correct door, stamped, sourced, and legible to the lawyers. If it doesn’t, if it comes back on your clothes, smelling of proximity and time, it is treated as suspect — regardless of how accurate it is.

This is why the great uncomfortable cases never quite settle. William Thomas Stead buying a child to prove that children could be bought. A Danish journalist embedding himself for years inside a pedophile network, not skimming the edges but inhabiting the logic, the language, the self-justifications. These weren’t just exposés of abuse. They were exposures of method. They demonstrated that some truths do not reveal themselves to distance or decorum. They require endurance, ambiguity, and moral risk.

And that is what Europe and then the West recoiled from.

The Danish case, in particular, ended a certain kind of innocence in Western journalism. Not because the reporting failed, but because it succeeded too completely. It showed, beyond argument, that proximity yields knowledge — and that knowledge cannot be neatly separated from the means by which it is obtained. Courts and editors were forced to confront a question they preferred not to ask: what happens when a journalist does what institutions cannot, or will not, do themselves?

The response was not philosophical. It was structural. Newsrooms tightened rules. Editors demanded exit strategies before entry. Lawyers entered pitch meetings. Undercover work was not outlawed, but it was shortened, supervised, and sanitised. Public interest stopped functioning as moral exemption. In effect, the West decided it would rather risk ignorance than tolerate uncontrolled knowledge.

This shift coincided neatly with the rise of FOI culture and data journalism. Documents are clean. Databases can be audited. Records can be verified, litigated, archived. But entire criminal worlds operate precisely where records do not exist. Abuse networks do not keep files. Corruption does not invoice itself honestly. The deeper you go, the less paper there is.

FOI is a powerful tool — against governments that fear audit, against institutions that leave trails. It is useless against silence, against trust-based criminal intimacy, against cultures that communicate in implication rather than text. You don’t submit a request to enter those spaces. You are admitted, or you are not.

And when you are admitted, the cost is permanent. You don’t unsee it. You don’t age out of it. There is no resolution, no clean ending, no moment where the knowledge politely stands down. It follows you forward in time, because knowledge accumulates. Ignorance expires; knowledge does not.

So you end up in a strange position. Mistrusted by those you exposed. Resented by those who claim to expose. Too compromised for the clean rooms, too honest for the press release. Accused, inevitably, of complicity — usually by people who never went near the fire and are deeply concerned about the smell of smoke.

What the Danish case finally clarified was that journalists who go where documentation does not exist will not be protected — not by courts, not by employers, not by the profession’s own mythology. Once that became clear, only institutions with extraordinary backing, or individuals willing to absorb lasting damage, continued the work. The rest learned to look away politely.

This is the quiet bargain modern journalism has made with itself: we will report what can be proven without contamination, and leave the rest to law enforcement. Each side pretends this boundary is natural, rather than convenient.

The cost of that bargain is hard to measure, because what disappears is not stories, but possibilities. Truths that require years rather than cycles. Trust rather than access. Facts that only surface after you’ve been tested and found willing to stay.

History doesn’t remember who followed procedure. It remembers who returned with realities everyone else insisted could not be proven — until they were.

Below is Edward Murrow’s report on Buchenwald. This is proximity, powerful, factual journalism. And yet,  eighty years later, it happens again, and we are called criminals for raising our voices against it.

 

Update on the proposed hate speech laws here in New South Wales.

It looks as though the government has dropped insisting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as hate speech. Because it isn’t, a point I made a few posts ago, and I’m confident many others did as well. So, they have come up with another one, “Globalise the Intifada.” In the two years I’ve been going to pro-Palestinian demos, I have never once heard anyone calling for “Globalise the Intifada.” It’s something made up to get the law passed. Intifada in Arabic means “resistance,” so translated, it becomes “Global Resistance.” Resistance can be demonstrations, boycotts, trade sanctions, or things more likely to upset the Israelis than a 6-year-old hurling little stones at a tank. They know how to handle stone-throwing children: brutal arrest, no legal representation, trial in a military rather than a juvenile court, open-ended detention purposely designed to be hell on Earth.

The so-called ‘hate speech’ legislation passed the State’s Lower House last night and will most certainly pass the Upper House later today, becoming law. Three organisations claim the laws are unconstitutional and are mounting a constitutional challenge. Those mounting the challenge include Palestinian Action Group Sydney, the Council of Australian Jewry, and Jews Against the Occupation. Let’s hope it succeeds.

 

There are calls here in Australia to expand hate-speech legislation to include the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which risks collapsing an already fragile distinction between speech that incites harm and speech that contests history. However confronting the slogan may be to some, it is not, in itself, hate speech. It is a political claim about sovereignty — one rooted in a particular reading of history — and democracies should be extremely cautious about criminalising such claims.

Australian hate-speech law is rightly concerned with language that targets people for who they are and incites hostility, discrimination, or violence against them. The phrase “Palestine will be free” does none of these things on its face reading. It names no ethnic or religious group, calls for no violence, and prescribes no method by which freedom is to be achieved. What it asserts is that the population of Palestine ought to exercise sovereignty over the land in which they live. One may dispute that claim; one may find it politically naïve, historically selective, or strategically reckless. But disagreement does not convert political speech into hate speech.

Much of the argument for banning the phrase rests on inferred intent rather than expressed meaning. It is said that some people use it to imply the elimination of Israel or the expulsion of Jews. That may be true in particular contexts, but intent is not transferable by slogan. Australian law has never operated on the principle that ambiguous or contested language becomes criminal because it can be read in the worst possible way. If it did, a great deal of protest language — including speech challenging Australian sovereignty itself — would be vulnerable to prohibition.

There is also an ethical dimension that should not be ignored. Palestinian political expression has long been treated as uniquely suspect, as though asserting self-determination is acceptable for some peoples but inherently threatening when articulated by others. That asymmetry has historical roots. From the Sykes–Picot Agreement through the Mandate period and the UN partition plan, decisions about Palestine were routinely made without the consent of its Arab majority. To now criminalise the language through which Palestinians and their supporters articulate a claim to freedom risks repeating that pattern: managing the people while foreclosing their voice.

Importantly, to permit the phrase is not to endorse it. Democracies do not function by protecting only speech that aligns with official policy or settled outcomes. We allow — and rightly so — robust critique of Australia’s own history, sovereignty, and borders. We allow assertions that the existing order rests on injustice. To deny that same discursive space to Palestinians is not neutrality; it is a choice to elevate one historical settlement beyond challenge.

Hate-speech law should remain focused on preventing real harm: incitement to violence, dehumanisation, and threats to public safety. Expanding it to police historical interpretations and sovereignty claims would set a dangerous precedent. Political conflicts are not resolved by banning words. They are resolved — if at all — by allowing competing narratives to be heard, tested, and argued in the open.

Uncomfortable speech is the price of a plural democracy. The alternative is something far more corrosive.