Update: Welcome readers from Mark Steyn and Deborah Gyapong. This issue – can Western Civilisation be defended? – is aired a lot these days. A big part of the answer lies in one’s assessment of the value of that civilisation – and its intrinsic strength/resilience. If you think that something is […]
Here is a fine article by Richard Fernandez on the T-word. He takes up an article by Jeff Jacoby which points up the moral dilemmas in all this: Suppose the CIA had been denied permission to use brutal interrogation tactics, and Al Qaeda had consequently gone on to murder thousands […]
I hitherto have not ventured very often on to the noisy battlefield of Torture and its diplomatic and political and moral ramifications. Although this posting about the unnoticed and permanently pained victims of terrorist violence says most of what I feel on the issue. I have steered clear because everyone else appears […]
The United States’ policy towards Cuba has failed. So says US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And she should be in a good position to know, as her husband presided over this failing policy for eight years. Meanwhile equally ailing and failing Fidel Castro wants the USA to go even […]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Guardian writes about the Impotence of Might: There are few more startling illustrations of this impotence of might than the pirates, or the country they come from. A hundred years ago, any one of half a dozen imperial powers could have conquered Somalia in a matter […]
Why do positive things happen today? In good part because previous generations have acted ruthlessly to suppress the forces of destruction – to establish the principle that for good behaviour to spread, really bad behaviour must have really bad consequences. Hence for a long period piracy on the high seas was […]
Some Good Friday thoughts. Most people (including until yesterday myself included) do not know that it is only quite recently that the USA established full diplomatic relations with the Vatican, namely in 1984 under President Reagan. The issue was controversial in US domestic terms and even provoked litigation. Did establishment […]
President Obama has called for a world free of nuclear weapons. But he accepts that it might not happen in his lifetime. Why it is so difficult to scale back these systems once they are there? Basically, nuclear weapons are ghastly because they can not be used on any scale […]
Here is the mighty Richard Posner looking at some Big Picture economic issues. A good passage about ‘rational’ descision-making: If rationality means omniscience, then it is indeed an unsound premise for economic reasoning. If it means reasoning unaffected by emotion, then it misunderstands emotion. The word "emotional" has overtones of […]
Max Atkinson has picked up my comment as posted on his site about what makes a speech memorable and had a look at the famous speech by Sir Geoffrey Howe seen as a pivotal moment in the events which led to Mrs Thatcher’s resignation as Prime Minister. He asked if […]
