Life, The Universe and Everything

Tag: Politics World

  • Twitter, the July Days and the Arab Spring

    Crowds in revolutions are fascinating for the historian as we try to unpick and explain to our students how the “Paris Mob” operated so the tweets from the revolutions of the “Arab Spring” are not only a wonderful document of a struggle for democracy, but also a case study in revolution.

  • Imagining a better future..

      Quoting O’Bama is a cheap trick this week, but it is a good headline to address the issue of the plethora of campaigns for reform that have spring up as a result of our current economic woes. Most focus on constitutional reform, or on fixing our banking laws, in the hope that we can…

  • “Ecrasez l’infâme”

    Geert Wilders is dangerously ill-informed about the developement of liberal democracy in the West, and while I winced at his description of Islam as a ‘retarded culture’ on Sky News yesterday, I’m also appalled  at his cavalier assertion that “”Our cultures, based on humanism, Judaism and Christianity, are far better than the Islamic culture.” This…

  • Crying WHOlf?

    Raising the Pandemic Alert level to 5 shows how crude the WHO system of pandemic threat levels is – one more notch and we’re all dead? Surely not. News media all over the world are obviously featuring the story, but many people will find a Level 5 alert on a 6 point scale unduly alarmist…

  • Swop Finance Ministers and we’ll fight again!

    Well, faith and begoraah but isn’t it great to be Irish today? The government actually made a decision (quick – when was the last time an Irish cabinet made a decision?) to guarantee all savings in Irish banks and now cash is flowing from the UK into Dublin; to such an extent that Alasdair Darling…

  • Lisbon, Egalitie, Fraternitie?

    The EU and its allies are now losing 50% of the votes in the UN Human Rights Commission to opponents of basic human rights led by an “Axis of Sovereignty”; a group of states who value the rights of the state over the rights of the people.  Ratifying the Lisbon Treaty wouldn’t have automatically stopped…

  • Its a Statement, not a Resolution…

    ….but it is nice to see the UN Security Council agreeing something about Zimbabwe, even if it will make no difference to Mugabe and his political machine. Yesterdays Statement from the Security Council does say some interesting things about legitimacy and democracy, but nothing in the media tackles the interesting question of who in ZANU-PF…

  • Charlie Wilson’s War

    Charlie Wilsons War is a book which should get onto quite a few academic reading lists as an interesting case study in several areas – it sheds light on the workings of US government and politics, on how some clandestine agencies work, at least some of the time, and is one of the most interesting…

  • Israel 0, Libya 1 on a long ball

    Libya slipped a nice bit of diplomacy past the posts in the most recent UN resolution on Iran’s nuclear program by getting a half sentence inserted about creating a regional nuclear free zone – that, of course, would require Israel to give up her nuclear weapons. Of course nothing will happen about it anytime soon,…

  • Shoot me now please..I agree with John Bolton

    I had a bad moment yesterday morning when I found myself agreeing with things John Bolton and other neo-cons said in a New York Times report. However, there were only a couple of points I agreed with – that elections in Pakistan may produce instability, that sanctions won’t work against Iran and that the Bush…

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