Most issues boil down to a simple number of questions: what’s the problem? what’s at stake for the various sides arguing about it? is any given outcome likely to be seen by all concerned as both fair (enough) and sustainable? And above all: who decides? Many key international disputes (Israel/Palestine, […]
Democratist is someone who follows the goings-on across the former Soviet Union in some depth. Here he takes up William Hague’s recent speech on UK foreign policy, and makes an interesting point about how the UK invests in foreign policy outcomes in that complicated region: OSCE election observation is about the best […]
In my eccentric Left phase as a student I got very depressed by a popular book by a young David Horowitz, a prominent American Leftist who railed at great length (460 pages) against the iniquities of Amerika and its unforgiving anti-communist foreign policy machinations. Not only was the USA surrounding the […]
Fascinating interview with Clay Shirky at the Guardian website, where all sorts of issues dealing with the impact of the Internet (especially on old-style media outlets such as newspapers and TV) are covered elegantly. Examples: When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; […]
We all agree that government spending in many Western countries is too high – stupidly high. We are cranking up debts to pay for current consumption at a rate which suggests to the markets that we have lost our minds. The markets look to charge us higher interest rates, as […]
Sorry not to have been more active recently, folks. But I have had to travel to Stuttgart, Geneva, Warsaw/Cracow and now Brussels all in the past ten days, while keeping an eye on our attempts to sell Crawford Towers. My latest manoeuvres involved leading a course on Ethical Dilemmas in […]
A day with my nose press’d hard against the perspiring computer screen writing scenarios for a new course which I lead later this month, all about Ethical Dilemmas in Diplomacy. As far as I know this is a pioneer course, the first of its kind to be taught to professional […]
Maybe it all gets just too complicated. Too many things go wrong at the same time. The capacity of the world’s leaders and institutions to respond in a coherent and authoritative way on several huge problems at the same time ebbs away. This opens the way for calculated lunges by different regional […]
When I was growing up, Israel was a favourite in some progressive quarters – an open-minded and successful society in a national-socialist Middle East, with trendily progressive kibbutzim where gap year students could go and hang out in the sunshine. Israel had been created in 1948 with the best possible level of international credibility […]
Brain Barder responds to my posting about Being, Not Producing – and poses some Questions: Don’t you find something just a tiny bit disturbing about the prevailing ethos of all our main political parties according to which those who for whatever reason can’t or won’t hold down a job must be […]
