The Virtuous Authoritarians

This was first published at LinkedIn on 2nd July 2016. It's a long read, but I think it's worth the effort.

The left/right, progressive/conservative dichotomy is dead. The new political dichotomy is between authoritarians and libertarians and it’s the authoritarians that have the upper hand.

The authoritarians have established their position beginning at universities and spreading throughout much of the media by use of virtue signalling, conspicuous moralism and selective outrage. They believe themselves to be better equipped intellectually and morally to grapple with the issues of the day and by virtue of their intellectual and moral superiority, they have no compunction in forcing their decisions on lesser folk when those lesser folk won’t take them voluntarily.

Global Terrorism Index Report for 2016

The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) Report for 2016 has been released. It shows that 74% of all terror related deaths are attributable to Boko Haram, ISIL, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

All of the top ten worst attacks were committed by these groups along with Al-shabaab, Sinai Province of the Islamic State and the Ansar Al-din Front.

It got me wondering whether there is a common thread that links all of these groups? Some common belief or understanding. Couldn't find anything though. Anyone able to help?

http://economicsandpeace.org/…/Global-Terrorism-Index-2016.…

(Note: the word "Islam" appears only 6 times in the 100 page report, so it can't be that.)

This was originally published on my facebook timeline on 17 November 2016 so if you think you've seen it before, maybe you're right!

Hitchens, US Elections and Word Play

Christopher Hitchens in 2008 looking pensive and slightly aggressive at the same time.

Christopher Hitchens died in 2011 which annoyed me terribly although it probably annoyed him more. One of the annoying things for me was that I enjoyed his opinion on the various goings on in the world; even when I disagreed with him, he expressed his thoughts so clearly and with such humour that I couldn’t help but enjoy reading them. He was also my go-to source for commentary on US politics and middle east tensions; on both of these subjects the depth of his knowledge was formidable, giving him an understanding that was available to few others.

Indigenous Australians

Indigenous Australians live, on average, between 10 and 20 year shorter lives than non-indigenous Australians. Part of the problem with estimating the difference in life expectancy is that nobody’s too sure exactly what it is, but it’s around 10-20 years difference.

Sarkozy on Climate Change and Manufactured Controversy

A little while back, I wrote about what I called the virtuous authoritarians and their tendency to shut down debate by adopting a moralistic approach and thereby labelling anyone that disagrees with them as immoral and unworthy of being heard. I gave various examples of this approach ranging from the then recent Brexit campaign to bicycle helmet laws, gun laws and holocaust denial. One topic I did not touch on was climate change and global warming.

The Case of the Naughty Lawyers

One of my hobbies, albeit a hobby reserved for those times when I am of a particularly low mood and badly need cheering up, is to read decisions of various courts. Of particular interest is High Court decisions, but I am catholic in my tastes and have been known to read decisions of all sorts of courts and tribunals, both from Australia and overseas.

Five things I suffered through the 1970s

As a child growing up in the 1970s, I suffered a level of abuse that is difficult to conceive of in the modern age. I wonder sometimes how my parents avoided jail time for some of these heinous and wicked crimes. Listed below are five of the most evil things that they subjected me to.

Navel Gazing

Later today, my second book, Spider Dunstan’s Teeth will be released for sale, so in honour of its release, a little omphaloskepsis is in order. Specifically with regard to the blog. The blog’s been running for about seven years and although for much of that time it was inactive, some observations can be made.

I want to go to the toilet: Euphemisms and the euphemism treadmill

One of the wonderful things about language is the vast array of choices you are presented with to convey your message, all of them effectively meaning the same thing, but presenting that meaning in different ways. Even leaving aside intonation (try saying the phrase ‘I did not say he beat his wife’ and emphasising one word in the phrase, you can convey seven different messages with little effort) there are so many ways to convey subtly different messages just in your selection of words.

Wasting Time

One of the lovely things about the interwebs is stumbling across a website that is informative or interesting, but inherently useless. One of my favourites among these fascinating but pointless sites is listverse, a website that specialises in providing “Top Ten” lists of the most gruesome murders, hidden secrets of Egyptian Pharaohs, things you didn’t know about the fast food industry and so on.

The damn thing is a time sink, I just went over there to check some examples of lists and spent 20 minutes looking through “10 Mind-Blowing Things That Happened Last Month”. Number one on that list is that the town of Tisdale in Canada had to drop the town slogan that it had been using since 1958. The slogan, “Tisdale: the land of rape and honey” referred to the main products of the region, rapeseed being an older name for canola.