Literature
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Nothing Has Changed
Some thoughts on recent events Continue reading
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Tanstaafl
What do a libertarian society and its laws look like? Thoughts on Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Continue reading
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Antigone in Hamilton
The confrontation between New Zealand legal system and a family trying to bury a dead husband/father is eerily like Sophocles’ tragedy Continue reading
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The Mirror and the Light
Thoughts on finally finishing the last part of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy Continue reading
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How Power Corrupts IV
Thoughts on Bryan Caplan and David Henderson’s discussion of power’s corrupting effects Longtime readers may recall my posts trying to catalogue the various ways in which political “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I have written about power’s subtle but corrosive effects on those who wield it, even once they no longer do; about the Continue reading
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Bad Poetry
“A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.” So writes Hillary Mantel in Bring Up the Bodies. That’s true ― normally. But some statutes are in fact written to escape meaning rather than to capture it. They are usually bad statutes, and often bad poetry. What was first mooted as the Continue reading
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Hornblower and the Oath
I have just come across an excellent illustration of the complex ― I am tempted to say schizophrenic ― relationship between our constitutional law and the monarchy, which is at the heart of the litigation about the constitutionality of the reference to thee Queen in the Canadian citizenship oath. On the one hand, as Justice Continue reading
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How Power Corrupts II
In my last post, I used The Lord of the Rings to explore the meaning of Lord Acton’s dictum ― “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There is another novel, similar in many ways, though perhaps not superficially, to The Lord of the Rings, from which we might also learn something about Continue reading
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How Power Corrupts
Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Bas van der Vossen has a post asking what is it exactly that we mean when we say, with Lord Acton, that “[p]ower corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” As he shows, the meaning of Lord Acton’s dictum is not quite clear. Prof. van der Vossen suggests three possibilities ― Continue reading
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In Memoriam, Boris Strugatsky
Boris Strugatsky died on Monday in Saint-Petersburg, aged 79. The Guardian has an obituary which conveys something of his and his brother Arkady’s importance to Russian culture. The Strugatsky brothers are―are, since the books remain―among my favourite writers. I want to say something about them here. I have sometimes mentioned science-fiction on this blog, especially Continue reading
Double Aspect 