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Category Archives: The Left

Trenton! Trenton! Jesus Christ, Trenton!

April 8, 2012 – 11:30 pm

With the awful inevitability of a dog chasing deer into oncoming traffic in Richmond Park, I present to you Trenton Oldfield (Hell’s bells, the names even rhyme), Australia’s shame. Yesterday, Trenton Oldfield did this at the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race: First, Sir Matthew Pinsent, the former Olympic rower, thought he saw debris in the water. Then, [...]

By skepticlawyer | Also posted in Academia, Australia, Britain, England, Events, Fark!, Funnies, Popular culture, Sport | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (35)

Your merit good is not meritorious, therefore it has been cancelled

April 4, 2012 – 7:32 pm

Instead of doing, you know, actual work last night (how do I hate thee HMRC, let me count the ways), I spent quite a bit of the evening reading articles and responding to the news that new Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has cancelled (I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but never mind) the [...]

By skepticlawyer | Also posted in Academia, Australia, Books, Economics, Education, Law, Literature, Politics, Popular culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (43)

The Labor Schism

February 26, 2012 – 8:33 am

Since my post on Rudd’s announcement that he was resigning as Foreign Minister, Australian politics has now become a bear pit, at least on the Labor side. No sooner did Rudd resign than the Labor MPs started aligning themselves as pro-Gillard or pro-Rudd (Gillard appears to have the numbers). A number of Ministers in the [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Australia, Politics, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (44)

Australia Day shenannigans

January 27, 2012 – 10:01 am

I have to say that I am pretty unimpressed with the actions of the activists who forced Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to flee the Lobby Restaurant yesterday, where she was attending an Australia Day function to celebrate emergency services. For non-Australian readers, yesterday was Australia Day, a public holiday which falls on the anniversary [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Australia, Free Speech, History, Politics, Racism, Society, The Right | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (73)

Retrospective legislation against the rule of law

November 3, 2011 – 11:25 am

Retrospective legislation and the rule of law F A Hayek neatly summarises the rule of law as follows: Stripped of all technicalities [the rule of law] means the government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Australia, Immigration, Law, Politics, Public Policy, Society, Taxation, The Right, Welfare | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (43)

Minority government on the edge?

August 19, 2011 – 8:57 am

If I’d been asked to predict how Julia Gillard’s minority government might be pushed to the precipice, I would not have said that it would be over the issue of brothels, of all things. My prediction would have been that one of the independents or the Greens decided not to support a particular proposition on [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Australia, Politics, Public Policy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (71)

Postmodern Conservatism – guest post by Lorenzo

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 | Also posted in Economics, Guest Post, Law, Philosophy, Politics, Science, Skeptics, Terrorism, The Right | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (100)

The Two Cultures Redux

August 9, 2011 – 2:59 am

On May 7, 1959, British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered an influential Rede Lecture at Cambridge University. His lecture concerned the intellectual division between the sciences and the humanities, and contained the following famous passage: I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, ‘Have you noticed how the word ’intellectual’ is used nowadays. There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn’t include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me? It [...]

By skepticlawyer | Also posted in Feminism, Law, Religion, Science, Skeptics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (21)

Putting your money where your mouth is

July 13, 2011 – 8:18 am

For those who live overseas, the Australian Prime Minister has recently unveiled a plan to introduce a carbon tax, after brokering an acceptable deal with independent and Green MPs. In this post, I want to look at a possibly interesting shift in opinion about the need for direct action on climate change, upon which the [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Australia, Environment, Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (114)

Entitlement, greed and luxuries

June 20, 2011 – 8:33 pm

David J alerted me to an article which says that Australian kids are taking luxuries for granted: Yesterday’s luxuries have become today’s necessities, giving children a bad case of “affluenza”, parenting experts say. Increasing wealth, cheap toys, gadgets and time-poor parents have produced a generation of children who often can’t tell the difference between need [...]

By Legal Eagle | Also posted in Australia, Children, Economics, Motherhood, Parenthood, Personal, Personal liberty, Politics, Public Policy, Society | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (88)