Jane Parker @parkando

She was 57 years old. White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject. She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home. The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene. Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it. The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her. Most people would have gone quiet. Mary Beard went further in. She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation. And she found it had always been there. In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men. She goes. Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately. Not as ancient history. As a pattern. In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts. In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches. Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country. The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life. Mary Beard had found something important. In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening. Her argument was precise and devastating. The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years. The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like. She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it. The threats continued. But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked. They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them. The room had been designed without them in mind. That is not a personal failing. That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision. And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it. Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men. He was wrong then. He is still wrong now. And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it. via The Inspireist #FeministFriday #HERstory

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work. His name was Lev Vygotsky. He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died. He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about. Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud. The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly. Vygotsky said the exact opposite. He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it. He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life. The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower. For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew. The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it. The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for. Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it. The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset. They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way." The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked. Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it. What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use. People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought. You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room. And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way. The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own. Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

Now that Gaza lies in ruins—shattered, like a beloved face after a long brutality—Israel moves with a terrible confidence to the next act: The act of leaving every soul there not merely wounded, but permanently disabled. Injured, sick, hungry, homeless, without work, without hope. This is not war’s collateral damage. This is design. As my friend Gideon Levy writes—and he knows, he knows—this is the prelude to expulsion. Think of it: a society without teachers, without doctors, without social workers, without engineers, without clerks. That is not a society. That is a holding pen. A slow erasure. And when nothing functions—no school, no hospital, no office, no heart—then it becomes ‘easy,’ they tell themselves, to scatter the people to the four corners of the earth. Like seeds from a broken pod, except no soil will take them. We must name this. Not with rage alone, though rage is honest. But with the cold, clear tears of recognition: they are making life impossible so that departure becomes the only ‘choice.’ And the world watches, adjusts its spectacles, and calls for restraint. Restraint! There is no restraint in a slow drowning.

#BREAKiNG. Unbelievable & despicable. Albanese Gov trying to ram thru a new law to block almost all people from #Iran with valid visas to Australia, from entering. While signing us up for an illegal war to apparently liberate the very same people they are shutting the door on!

Turkish photographer Uğur Gallenkuş portrays two different worlds within a single image.

Here's a primer for Justice Virginia Bell in her Royal Commission deliberations, brilliantly encapsulated by a Harvard law professor in 2 mins 🙏

Ben Eidelson @beidelson

4 months ago

Why anti-Zionism can't properly be treated as antisemitism for purposes of federal civil rights law, in ~ 2 minutes (Full hearing: youtu.be/uJ_k0v_jmZ8?t=…)

195 1K 4K 290K 2K

How's the double standard? It just isn't on. Just. Is. Not. On. It's 2026.

Witch Hunt against Francesca Albanese continues Hillel C. Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch (a Geneva-based NGO that monitors the United Nations and is broadly aligned with pro-Israel advocacy), posted a short video online that was edited from a longer speech by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. Neuer and UN Watch say the organization has a history of attacking Albanese and other UN figures who have criticized Israel, and that this video incident is another example of distorting statements to influence public opinion against her. Hillel Neuer is a repulsive liar, who will not succeed taking Albanese down. #IstandwithFrancescaAlbanese

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Goosebumps! People often ask, is Shakespeare still relevant? Here is a great example, from the Steven Colbert Show, in which Sir Ian McKellen delivers an extraordinary speech. Shakespeare’s words are timeless, urgent and important. #Shakespeare #ianmckellen #stevencolbert

Delivering the Curtin Uni Human Rights lecture -I discussed the Importance of geomapping -how risk is concentrated in certain communities & families and why this is critical to Closing The Gap. Geomapping shows the heaviest burden of suicide, violence, child removals occurs in the most densely populated Aboriginal regions. Strikingly, these are also the same regions that have historically had the most human rights restrictions. This is not coincidence. When human rights are restricted, risk escalates. No-one thrives under subjugation. Vitally, geomapping allows us to predict risk before it escalates and enables us to intervene early—directing resources to the exact places where the gap is widest. Sadly this approach is not understood as part of Government policy or funding. Learn more about this and how to address this risk in my national workshops-they are selling quickly! indigenouspsychservices.com.au/shop/

“Please get the truth out about our son.”

Statement of the parents of Alex Pretti, Minneapolis

“Freedom is not free. We have to work at it. Nurture it. Protect it. Even sacrifice for it.”

As the world watches Iran, its worthwhile reminding you of an event thats always convieniently "left out" and ignored, when it comes to Western calls for "Freedom and Democracy" in Iran. It just so happens those very same countries, now calling for "Liberty" in Iran, were instrumental in crushing Iranian Democracy in the early 1950's In 1953, the United States and Britain orchestrated the covert overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in a secret operation that would reshape the Middle East and fuel decades of anti-Western resentment and conflict. Mosaddegh, an Iranian nationalist leader who rose to power in 1951, had nationalized Iran's oil industry (very bad idea) seizing control from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which was majority owned by the British government (later became BP) This move to put Irans national assets to work for Iranians "threatened British economic interests" and prompted an immediate embargo on Iranian oil, this British action led to the crippling of the economy and created serious societal instability that the West of coursec exploited. The coup, codenamed "Operation Ajax" by the CIA and "Operation Boot" by MI6, was driven by fears that Mosaddegh's policies could inspire similar nationalisation elsewhere and potentially align Iran with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. US President Dwight D Eisenhower approved the plan after British Prime Minister Winston Churchill appealed directly to him for "help", with the CIA allocating one million dollars for the effort. Leading the operation on the ground was Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a CIA officer (and grandson of Theodore Roosevelt) who coordinated the dirty work from Tehran. The plot unfolded in stages. First, propaganda campaigns in Iranian media, funded by the CIA, portrayed Mosaddegh as corrupt and incompetent, while bribing journalists, clerics, and politicians to turn against him, (sounds familiar right?) In August 1953, an initial attempt failed when remarkably popular Mosaddegh's supporters arrested the coup plotters, but Roosevelt persisted, even resorting to organizing paid mobs to stage riots in Tehran ( sounds familiar again right?) They were "instructed" to pose as communists to insure justification for western intervention. Military units loyal to the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had fled the country briefly, then moved in, bombing Mosaddegh's residence and arresting him on August 19. Mosaddegh was then tried in a military court, convicted of treason, and spent three years in prison before house arrest until his death in 1967. The Shah was "reinstated" with expanded powers, ruling as an autocrat backed by US aid until the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew him. The CIA's own declassified documents revealed all of the above in detail in 2013, admitting the coup was undemocratic and contributed to long term instability, including the rise of anti US forces in Iran. Of course this entirly illegal intervention set a precedent for US led regime changes, from Guatemala in 1954 to Chile in 1973, often justified as being to defend from communism but in truth rooted in protecting grubby corporate and strategic interests. Iran's vastly valuable oil remained under Western influence until the Islamic revolution which deposed the Shah, a revolution whose government are today fighting for survival on the same streets Mossadegh was dragged through. So, as you watch the events unfold in Tehran, you now know its not the first time Western powers have called for the heads of an Iranian government. When next you hear talk of "Freedom and Democracy" in Iran, maybe now you'll recall the fate of Iran's democratic government in 1953 at the hands of the same agencies" now undoubtedly on the streets of Tehran once again. Thank for reading, I hope it sheds some light on lesser known history. Maybe consider subscribing. Chay.

Son of holocaust survivor & Human rights activist Kenneth Roth has slammed Antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s report as “completely counterproductive” & says she uses a definition of antisemitism that’s “used over & over as an excuse to suppress legitimate criticism of Israel”💥

Michelle Berkon, JAO’48: 'Until I was six, I lived in South Bondi and went to Emanuel Kindergarten. This was my community. This is a huge sadness for me—most of the adults I grew up with had the blue tattoo on their arms and had lost children, parents, siblings and spouses in the Holocaust. This should be my community. Instead, many Jews like me have walked away because the descendants of these survivors have become, frankly, vile, racist, supremacist and ignorant people, which is heartbreaking.' 'With Muslim and Arabic people—again, I am not wishing to swap places or to compare suffering—these people are enduring genocide—but at least their own community embraces them. Whereas for us, the only community we have now is each other. Many do not have their extended families. Some do not even have their own nuclear families. They have lost their entire social circle. They have lost an enormous amount by standing up against genocide.' 'At Bondi, there were people yelling, “We hope Hamas rapes you to death and cuts off your head.” One of the worst, which I’ve heard several times, but it never loses its impact, is: “It’s a pity any of your family survived the Holocaust.” When a Jew can say that to another Jew, you know there is something astonishingly wrong, something profoundly twisted has happened. That is a level of depravity that is very hard to fathom.' 'These measures are deeply reactionary and anti‑democratic. Jillian Segal [the Albanese government’s special antisemitism envoy], who presents herself as defending Jewish safety, has a history of leadership roles in Zionist organisations. Her husband is a major donor to the far‑right group Advance Australia, which should tell you something about her priorities.' 'By hiding behind ‘Jewish safety’ to impose repressive laws, the government is using Jewish people as human shields and endangering us, because we will bear the resentment of the wider community.”' 'Minns’ new laws are about criminalising dissent—especially anti‑war and pro-environment, pro‑Palestine dissent—they’re not about protecting Jewish life. By invoking Jewish safety to shield imperial and corporate interests, the government fuels resentment against Jews while enabling future war crimes.' wsws.org/en/articles/20…

@LeiblerMark Australians can both mourn the Jews murdered in Bondi & protest the atrocity of Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza Anyone who can't accept that that's the natural human reaction to both atrocities has got a problem with empathy, compassion, humanity & morality

Weight makes a difference ᵃᶦ

A year has passed since the detention of my father, In this white coat, he walked alone amidst death, destruction, and in front of tanks—not because he was fearless, but because his oath and his humanity were greater than any fear. He refused to abandon the children and the wounded at Hospital , and for that, he was detained. This image is a testament to the courage of the man who was the last line of defense for life, and it is the very same scene that ended with his unjust arrest. A full year of injustice has passed. Today, we ask for nothing but his freedom. Please share his story to keep his voice alive.

One of the greatest lecture in the world.