I find Steve Horwitz, along with George Selgin (prominent advocate of free banking and supporter of a productivity norm [pdf] for monetary policy), the most accessible of contemporary Austrian school economists as they are both clear writers who seek to engage with those who are not of their school and are refreshingly free of the nastiness [...]
By Lorenzo
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Also posted in Economics, Entrepreneurs, History
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Tagged Austrian business cycle, Austrian school, capital, David Glasner, deflation, Friedrich Hayek, George Selgin, Inflation, John Maynard Keynes, labour markets, monetary policy, Scott Sumner, Steve Horwitz, Tyler Cowen
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The other day, Lorenzo alerted me to this post on the Volokh Conspiracy on why academic lawyers failed to foresee that the US Supreme Court would be very negative towards Obama’s healthcare legislation. In the post, Adler argues that it is surprising that anyone expected academic lawyers to have any insight whatsoever into the views [...]
I’m blogging about Easter again, sorry. This time spurred by an online conversation between friends about the appropriateness or not of being wished “Happy Easter” on Good Friday. Classicists of the world, wrack off – yes I DO know the entire event was probably lifted from pre-existing pagan rites of spring, but for the purposes [...]
By DeusExMacintosh
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Also posted in Art, Australia, Blogging, Britain, Events, Fark!, General, History, Media, Personal, Politics, Popular culture, Religion, Skeptics, Society, Terrorism
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Tagged 9/11, christianity, Easter, ground zero, islam, Jesus, Jonathan Jones, Judaism, magnum, New York, photography, september 11th, the guardian, the meaning of 9/11's most controversial photo, The Passion, Thomas Hoepker, twin towers
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I have just read Suzanne Collins’ series The Hunger Games. ‘Read’ is probably not the right word: ‘devoured’ is more like it. Once I’d started, I had to finish. As I’ve said before I think good writing has a “hook” which makes you want to read on, but also makes you think about people or [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Books, Literature, Personal liberty
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Tagged better angels, dystopia, empathy, fiction, inner demons, Katniss Everdeen, novels, Peeta Mellark, psychology, reality TV, steven pinker, Suzanne Collins, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Hunger Games, violence
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February 17, 2012 – 3:02 pm
We just got a notice from my daughter’s state school yesterday inviting us to choose which religious education class we’d like to enrol her in. There were a multitude of choices: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Ba’hai, Buddhist and Hindu (an accurate reflection the nature of her school, I think). Finally, there was the choice to ‘opt [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Human/Civil rights, Law, Parenthood, Personal, Religion, Skeptics, Society
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Tagged atheism, Ba'hai, Buddhism, Children, christianity, conscientious objection, discrimination, Education, equal opportunity act, faith, FIRIS, Hinduism, humanism, islam, Jesus, Judaism, parenthood, primary school, religion education, religious, Russell Blackford, school, secularism
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February 9, 2012 – 7:40 am
On 2 February 2012, I attended the launch of Russell Blackford’s new book, Freedom of Religion and the Secular State. I’ve finished the book so I thought I’d write a brief review as well as some comments on the visible move to secularism in one of my areas of study, trusts law. Blackford’s central thesis [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Academia, Australia, Blogging, Free Speech, History, Human/Civil rights, Law, Personal liberty, Politics, Public Policy, Religion, Skeptics, Society
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Tagged Boo Hoos, burqa, Free Speech, freedom of religion, Freedom of Religion & The Secular State, History, John Locke, Law, Religion, Russell Blackford, secularism, society, trust law, Trusts
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October 21, 2011 – 1:23 pm
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on [...]
August 11, 2011 – 8:01 pm
[SL: there was a time, not so long ago, when conservatives and libertarians could afford to be smug about the intellectual miasma in which left-liberals and progressives had lost themselves. It is unfortunate--and does us little credit--that when a decent number of left-liberals reacted in horror to the colonisation of their political tradition by postmodernism [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Economics, Guest Post, Law, Politics, Science, Skeptics, Terrorism, The Left, The Right
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Tagged Adam Smith, American Revolution, common law, conservatism, Edmund Burke, French Revolution, Inflation, Modernism, monetary policy, Norman Geras, postmodernism, Samuel Johnson, Scopes Trial, slavery, Tories, torture, US Civil War, Western Civilisation, Whigs, William Jennings Bryan
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Excusitis, n (med): the condition whereby one is rendered incapable of seeing the faults in one’s political position, particularly with respect to that position’s capacity to facilitate the perpetration of violence. When I was a green young lawyer, I was introduced to the ‘No True Scotsman’ logical fallacy. It’s an old concept (the argument is [...]
By skepticlawyer
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Also posted in Law, Media, Politics, Religion, scotland, Skeptics
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Tagged Antony Flew, begging the question, Brendan O'Neill, Charles Moore, conservatism, equivocation, Excusitis, House of Commons media committee, Jamila Hussain, margaret thatcher, Neil MacCormick, news corp, Nick Cohen, No True Scotsman, populism, PZ Myers, Rupert Murdoch, Sharia, The Daily Telegraph
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Via Jim Belshaw, I have become aware that the Federal government is trying to convince people that it is doing a good job because it has passed more legislation than the previous incumbent government. Jim pointed me to a post by Noric Dilanchian, in which Dilanchian notes that most people think more law is a [...]
By Legal Eagle
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Also posted in Australia, Law, Media, Public Policy, Society
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Tagged Adam Smith, american disabilities act, Anthony Albanese, Australian internet filter, freakonomics, internet filter, joseph raz, legislation, Levitt and Dubner, mixtures, pale criminality, Racial Discrimination Act, self interest, social consensus, The Limits of Law
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