For those of you who read either the Age or Andrew Bolt, you will be aware of this article, which points out the following: More than a third of the winners of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, are now out of print. Of the 53 books that have been awarded the [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Australia, Books, England, Literature, science fiction
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Tagged Andrew Bolt, Antony Harwood, Michael Heyward, Miles Franklin Award, Text Publishing, The Hand that Signed the Paper, The Kindly Ones
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Law is a conservative profession. There is a reason why a large number of us still dress in clothes associated with the 18th century, and it isn’t because barristers’, advocates’ and judges’ kit flatters anyone, male or female, fat or thin. It’s because, in the law, when it ain’t broke, lawyers are disinclined to fix [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Academia, Education, Law
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Tagged club troppo, cognitive bias, confirmation bias, F. A. Hayek, framing, John Rawls, Jonathan Haidt, jurisprudence, Ken Parish, legal education, social intuition, veil of ignorance
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April 24, 2011 – 12:01 am
Enjoying the peace of absent window installers this Easter Weekend (back on Monday unfortunately due to the ‘negotiable’ religious holidays of the Roman Law tradition here in Scotland) I’ve been sparing a thought for what Easter means to me as a non-religious Christian of Quaker affiliation. After a childhood of Sunday School thanks to the [...]
By DeusExMacintosh
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Also posted in Britain, Personal, Philosophy, Politics, Privacy, Public Policy, Religion, Skeptics, Society, Welfare
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Tagged alarm-clock britain, Catholic Church, christianity, crucifixion, david cameron, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, disability living allowance, DLA, do unto others, DWP, Easter, empathy, golden rule, Iain Duncan Smith, incapacity benefit, isaiah berlin, Jesus of Nazareth, native american proverbs, Nick Clegg, protestantism, quakers, symbolism, the sermon on the mount, The Sun, walk two moons in a man's moccasins
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February 14, 2011 – 7:24 am
My year nine English class wrote me a joint letter once. It asked me to kill myself in order to improve everyone else’s educational experience (I was disinclined to acquiesce to their request). It was the culmination of a two-year program of uncontrolled bullying at a supposedly “good” Australian GPS school that included the more [...]
By DeusExMacintosh
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Also posted in Australia, Blogging, Britain, Free Speech, History, Law, Marriage, Personal, Personal liberty, Philosophy, Politics, Popular culture, Religion, Sexuality, Skeptics, Society
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Tagged apotemnophilia, assistance dogs, bullying, christianity, claim rights vs liberty rights, conscience, gay marriage, gay rights, hate mail, islam, Judaism, jurisprudence, LGBT, monotheism, quaker testimonies, quakers, reformation, religious society of friends, schools, thomas jefferson
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January 14, 2011 – 8:49 pm
In December the UK coalition government announced that as well as reducing the bill for Disability Living Allowance by 20%, they now intended to abolish the benefit meant to help pay for the additional costs of being disabled and replace it with a harsher ESA-style “Personal Independence Payment”. A foreshortened public consultation over Xmas and [...]
By DeusExMacintosh
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Also posted in Blogging, Britain, Economics, Internet, Law, Media, Personal, Politics, Public Policy, Society, Welfare
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Tagged #ombh, beveridge report, Department for Work and Pensions, disability, disability living allowance, employment support allowance, Iain Duncan Smith, infames, milton friedman, one month before heartbreak, personal independence payment, Roman law, the broken of britain, vituperatio
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November 25, 2010 – 7:44 am
[One of the things people of my generation have never experienced is what I came to call -- while writing Bring Laws & Gods -- 'reflexive patriotism.' That is, a patriotism where conquest is a good thing, soldiers are always noble and -- most important -- where regular people back both the government and the [...]
November 16, 2010 – 5:16 am
[It is a truth universally acknowledged that the writer of speculative fiction, confronted with the necessity of world-building, often interposes an intercultural visit, sundry scenes of schooling or an unusually well-informed tour guide... Alas, In Bring Laws & Gods I overdid it rather, and the great bulk of it has been excised for reasons of [...]
November 8, 2010 – 1:39 pm
Writers want to be read. We hope that you pick up our efforts in your local bookshop or while browsing the interwebs, read a few pages, like what you see and hand over your cash. My politics are right wing enough for me to admit happily to a desire to retain some of that cash [...]
October 17, 2010 – 10:54 pm
I don’t normally go around pimping other people’s stuff independent of our Saturday chit-chat threads, but this short essay on the difference between respecting beliefs you don’t share and giving those beliefs force of law is so good it deserves a wider audience. It had its genesis in this advisory from Te Papa (the National [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Law, Religion, Skeptics
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Tagged atheism, Bring Laws and Gods, cultural traditions, Maori, miracles, New Zealand, paganism, religious freedom, superstitions, tapu
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October 15, 2010 – 4:38 am
[SL: This follows on from here, and gives more backstory to Andreius Linnaeus, who is in the process of turning into the Roman version of a Chartist. It's a bit too British for the final version, which is why it's been excised, but it still works as narrative. Note: The first post on my forthcoming [...]
