Phrase

• Barry Humphries breathed life into Australia’s “slanguage” – but it was often an imagined life.
• Humphries took linguistic invention to extremes – plucking words and phrases out of obscurity, but also pushing or exceeding acceptability.

“Slangy philosophers” in Australian history

• During a great period of Australian myth-making (1890-1925), newspapers and magazines such as the Argus, Australian Tit-Bits and the Bulletin enabled the public to write letters or stories and debate one another.
• Readers aggressively debated Australian word etymologies - and the degree to which these words were or were not Australian.
• For instance, a Bulletin writer by the name of “Blue Duck” dismissed the emerging Australian slang, writing, “Much Australian slang is simply cockney flash, introduced every mailboat by stewards”.
• Many aspects of the Australian lexicon first emerge in Britain, or in the imaginations of our middle-class citizens or artists.

Humphries and the lexicon of New Nationalism

• Barry Humphries’s Bazza McKenzie character emerged during Australia’s New Nationalism in the 1960s/1970s.
• In linguistic terms, this was an era of growing colloquiality in Australian English.
• Humphries noted that
  words like cobber and bonzer still intrude as a sop to Pommy readers, though such words are seldom, if ever, used in present-day Australia.

Bazza, taboo and the Australian lexicon

• Of course, Humphries – especially through Bazza McKenzie – didn’t just breath fresh life into old Australian words, but coined many of his own.
• Slang generally flourishes wherever things go bump in the night, and Humphries had in his sights Victorian taboos around body parts and bodily effluvia.
• He was also a master of the frankenphrase – pulling together bits and pieces of the Australian lexicon, and reinventing them.

Beer-swilling Bazza and our slang from ‘Down Under’

• The verses were very much inspired by a character he had called Barry McKenzie, who was a beer-swilling Australian who travelled to England, a very larger-than-life character.
• He’s a master of comedy and he had a lot of expressions that we grew up listening to and emulating.
• To survive, slang expressions require what Ben Zimmer once described as a “perfect lexicographical storm”.

• As public attention focuses on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ close personal and financial relationship with a politically active conservative billionaire, the scrutiny is overlooking a key role Thomas has played for nearly three decades on the nation’s highest court.
• Thomas’ predecessor on the court, Thurgood Marshall, was a civil rights lawyer before becoming a justice.
• In his concurrence with the majority decision in that case, Thomas declared his opposition to Marshall’s principle, lamenting that the court had not done more to pare back its prior work.

A shield for those in need

• At the root of Marshall’s jurisprudence was a hope that while law could be a powerful tool of oppression, it might also be a shield.
• While his Payne dissent criticized the court for reversing itself, Marshall was no stranger to calling for reconsideration of established law.
• The distinction between Marshall and Thomas is not really about whether the court should reverse past decisions but simply which ones.

Power as a key factor

• While last summer’s abortion decision is an obvious example, Thomas has led the court’s assault on precedent in other areas as well.
• Similarly, recent decisions have followed Thomas’ lead in weakening the vitality of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which fortifies the separation between church and state.
• Those in need of constitutional protection in Thomas’ view are more likely to be property owners, corporations making campaign contributions or gun owners.

On affirmative action

• Perhaps no topic better captures the distinction between the two men’s views than affirmative action, which the court is considering in a pair of cases from Harvard and the University of North Carolina to be decided this term.
• He has railed against affirmative action, saying it brands Black people in prominent positions with a “stigma” about “whether their skin color played a part in their advancement.” Indeed, Thomas claims his position requiring colorblindness is a better path toward full Black citizenship.
• But this summer, the court may finally embrace a different vision on affirmative action, coming again to a position Thomas has been advocating for decades.

• Part of such notions’ appeal may be the argument that they’re not just exciting, or profitable, but would benefit humanity as a whole.
• But what do these phrases really mean – and how does Musk’s record stack up?

The greatest good

• In simple terms, utilitarianism holds that the right action is whichever maximizes net happiness.
• Like any moral philosophy, there is a dizzying array of varieties, but utilitarians generally share a couple of important principles.
• This is often summed up by the expression “each to count for one, and none for more than one.” Finally, utilitarianism ranks potential choices based on their outcomes, usually prioritizing whichever choice would lead to the greatest value – in other words, the greatest pleasure, the least amount of pain or the most preferences fulfilled.

Utilitarianism 2.0?

• Utilitarianism shares a number of features with effective altruism.
• In addition, both utilitarianism and effective altruism are agnostic about how to achieve their goals: what matters is achieving the greatest value, not necessarily how we get there.

Long-term view

• Longtermists, including many people involved in effective altruism, believe that those obligations matter just as much as our obligations to people living today.
• In this view, issues that pose an existential risk to humanity, such as a giant asteroid striking earth, are particularly important to solve, because they threaten everyone who could ever live.
• Longtermists aim to guide humanity past these threats to ensure that future people can exist and live good lives, even in a billion years’ time.

Measuring Musk

• Musk has claimed that MacAskill’s effective altruism “is a close match for my philosophy.” But how close is it really?
• It’s hard to grade someone on their particular moral commitments, but the record seems choppy.
• To start, the original motivation for the effective altruism movement was to help the global poor as much as possible.
• Musk did not, the public record suggests, donate to the World Food Program, but he did soon give a similar amount to his own foundation – a move some critics dismissed as a tax dodge, since a core principle of effective altruism is giving only to organizations whose cost-effective impact has been rigorously studied.

Futuristic solutions

• In fact, he has suggested that negative media coverage of autonomous driving is tantamount to killing people by dissuading them from using self-driving cars.
• In this view, Tesla seems to be an innovative means to a utilitarian end.
• His Boring Company’s attempts to build tunnels under Los Angeles, meanwhile, have been criticized as expensive and ineffecient.
• Answering this question requires thinking about three core questions: Are their initiatives trying to do the most good for everyone?

• You access your passkey by signing in to your device using a personal identification number (PIN), swipe pattern or biometrics like fingerprint or face recognition.
• You don’t need to remember passwords for every account and don’t need to use two-factor authentication.
• As a result, passkeys are likely to soon overtake passwords and password managers in the cybersecurity battlefield.
• However, it will take time for websites to add support for passkeys, so passwords aren’t going to go extinct overnight.