In 1759 General James Wolfe launched a daring British offensive up the St. Lawrence River to attack the robustly fortified city of Quebec, the heart of French colonialism in North America. General Wolfe would later die at the battle (depicted…
When we see the world through the lens of how things currently are, it is almost impossible to imagine things differently without in some way imparting some of the existing dynamics into the imagined future. Ask a random person on…
The ultimate aim of the employment system is not to create a self. This is a long-forgotten aim in some distant, lost century. The aim now is to package the self, to create the illusion of a self in such…
Imagine an eighty-year-old man who has been working his entire life and has forgotten what his childhood felt like. He has, like Citizen Kane, achieved the heights of commercial success but with the consequent sacrifice of boyish mannerisms, mischief and…
There are seven sin in modern thinking that have emerged in recent years. To my mind, these holes are as damaging to society as the logical fallacies of old (and still include some of them) as they taunt us with irrational thought…
The NSW Bail laws are undergoing fundamental reform, spurred on by knee-jerk public reaction to bail decisions. 1) The presumption of innocence has been removed as an independent clause and has been moved to a new preamble of the…
Universities in their original conception were idealised in the Renaissance as places that could produce ‘intellectuals’. An intellectual was a person of inquiring mind who, through rational judgment and prodigious independent study, battled with an intellect they could not suppress, to…
It’s 2004 and Boston Legal defence lawyer Alan Shore rises to his feet to deliver a blistering defence of personal misconduct, immorality and criminal negligence. He tells the court that ‘every first year law student is taught: don’t ever, everequate legal ethics with morality. They’re almost always mutually exclusive.’
It’s two months before America enters World War I, and Woodrow Wilson stands before the Senate to deliver a speech to the American people. His recent appeals to the Allies and Entente for peace have failed, and yet here he stands again. His 14 points, yet to be written, are forming in the back of his mind as he makes his way to the podium for one last, desperate plea. It’s a simple message, “only a peace between equals can last.” Only a peace where all nations are seen as “equal”, with no difference between big or small, powerful or weak, will peace exist worldwide, Wilson insists. The “common good” of humanity must be placed above the “individual strength” of nations, or the world will degenerate into new and ever worse World Wars.
When Australia first entered the Iraq war in 2003, Prime Minister John Howard gave a cursory nod to representative government. Calling all Federal MP’s back into session, Howard gave them each a chance to vote for “war or peace”. The…