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Good guys?
Once, very many years ago, I had the temerity to argue a point of law with a public prosecutor. I say ‘temerity’, for one thing because he was a prominent public prosecutor whom I held in awe. More importantly, though, I knew nothing of law, and was arguing merely on the basis of what I…
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The kids
And now they are blowing up Germans! When western kids are frustrated, they tend to go on drugs or destroy themselves some other way. The past couple of weeks’ young killers in Germany seem to be of a different metal. Having somehow survived the ordeal of getting to Europe, partly by sea, trekking through woods,…
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And so it goes
Much has happened since the Middle Ages, not to mention since the Stone Age. Most of us now have TVs, for instance, and can witness what people are doing in other parts of the world. Many of us enjoy being on-line every moment of the day, except perhaps in the shower. We get healthier food…
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…and the winner is:
Speaking ill of the dead is in bad taste. I suspect that speaking ill of the winner of a competition is no better. So I have a problem. I may not speak ill of the winners of the US presidential primaries, may not speak ill of the Brexicists and may not even speak ill of…
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The test
I hear on the news that Edward Snowden is taking my country to court, or rather, he is asking the judiciary of my country to consider what his rights would be as a visitor to Norway. I find the question fair and timely. Much as I keep insisting that the rule of law is, by…
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Word of warning
I put to you – though of course you are entitled to disagree with me – that a successful democracy is contingent on an informed and responsible electorate. Mind you, democracies being what they are, the electorate rules (though parenthetically, of course, the market also has a slight say in the matter; in most matters,…
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Even in Israel
I would like to stress that only 57 percent of the respondents of an Israeli survey found that it was OK to shoot and kill an incapacitated Palestinian lying on the ground. The other 43 per cent found that it was not OK at all, and that the soldier who did the killing, the executing,…
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Yippee
I knew, of course, that this is done, and I knew, roughly, how; how some of the rich and powerful, as opposed to most of us, manage to pay little or no taxes. (Hear for instance BBC’s “file on 4”, “Dirty Money UK” of 11 October 2015). The problem is that more often than not,…
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Narrative
A word to look out for these days is narrative. Although it might be defined differently in dictionaries, the word narrative has come to mean: an analysis or explanations – in short, a storyline – from a party with whom you tend to disagree on most but not all points. In other words you will…
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Crime
A source of income for some, a means of revenge for others – for me and countless TV watchers, crime is just entertainment. Actually, I don’t watch all that much TV, not even crime, for various reasons, one of them being that what happens on the screen all seems a bit irrelevant. Not that I’m…