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Author Archives: skepticlawyer

Books with ideas

March 14, 2010 – 5:27 pm

Books with a heavy philosophical component don’t usually sell well, and publishers tend to avoid them for that reason, but when they do, they can sell very well indeed, and it can be very difficult to explain why. Over at Catallaxy, Sinclair has a thoughtful piece on Ayn Rand, whose books sell by the pallet load, [...]

Posted in Art, Books, Literature, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , | Comments (14)

The donations button has been fixed…

March 11, 2010 – 12:19 am

… Many thanks to the people who were kind enough to tell us it was busted, as we would never have found out otherwise. We’re not in the habit of checking. With any sort of luck it is now clever enough to spot whether you are in Australia or the UK (where most of our [...]

Posted in Blogging, Events, General | Comments (0)

The Long Barrier

March 9, 2010 – 5:43 pm

Someone listened to his cricket coach as a kid: 
A British soldier has described how he picked up a Taliban hand grenade which landed at his feet and threw it back towards the enemy.
Rifleman James McKie was on a tiny rooftop in Sangin. He and two of his platoon could hear the bullets fired by the [...]

Posted in Cricket, Defence, Terrorism | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

Such a jaunty little tune

March 5, 2010 – 5:10 am

Amanda Palmer sings and performs in the same tradition as the artists in Cabaret, with jaunty and up little tunes about death, destruction, weird sex and squick. Once part of The Dresden Dolls, she had a large hit with Coin Operated Boy and has since done various other things, including a musical attempt to revive the [...]

Posted in Feminism, Music | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

A Welcome to Lawyers’ Weekly readers

March 4, 2010 – 5:03 am

Some of the people who write this blog are actually organised. I, alas, am not one of them.
Unbeknown to me, this blog was prominently featured in this week’s issue of leading trade magazine Lawyers’ Weekly. The article discusses several sites across Ozblawgistan, including Stephen Warne’s professional negligence blog (you’ll notice he’s featured on LE’s blogroll) [...]

Posted in Blogging, Law, Media | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

‘For War is a Drug’

March 2, 2010 – 11:34 am

O wad some Power the gift tae gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us! 
It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 
An foolish notion.
From Robert Burns, To a Louse
The course Burns commends has, of late, become unfashionable. Instead of observing others unlike ourselves and reporting back, we have been enjoined to comment on things within our [...]

Posted in General, Middle east, Popular culture, Terrorism | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

In which SL gets her art deco fix

February 27, 2010 – 10:18 am

I have just arrived in Oxford (via a somewhat circuitous route) from New York. Everything was very late, I was astoundingly lucky to catch a cab (NY end) and astoundingly lucky to catch the last bus back to Oxford (after catching the last Heathrow Express). I came within a whisker of spending the night among [...]

Posted in Art | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

The Statue of Liberty is very green

February 23, 2010 – 9:34 am

It is likely impossible to say anything new about New York so I am not going to try. This post is a placeholder and an apology for not being around the blog very much, something likely to continue for the rest of this week while I see the sights.
Briefly, I attended a conference in Washington [...]

Posted in General, Immigration, Personal liberty | Tagged , , , , | Comments (8)

Hanson goes?

February 17, 2010 – 8:14 pm

I was unaware until this morning that I had been quoted at length over at LP on the Pauline Hanson issue: not about her leaving the country, but about Tony Abbott’s shenanigans when he set up ‘Australians for Honest Politics’, which to my mind is a black mark equivalent to his behaviour over RU 486. I [...]

Posted in England, Law, Politics, The Left | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (6)

Amnesty’s slow burn

February 15, 2010 – 6:30 am

This story has been something of a slow burn over here, but it’s starting to gain a bit of momentum now, to the stage where the implications are actually pretty awful:
A SENIOR official at Amnesty International has accused the charity of putting the human rights of Al-Qaeda terror suspects above those of their victims.
Gita Sahgal, [...]

Posted in England, Feminism, Free Speech, Human/Civil rights, Law, Middle east | Tagged , , , , | Comments (31)