Thought for the Day: to quote the Washington Post’s EJ Dionne, in the United States politics on the right has been driven less by issues than by a series of gestures Read the full article, here: EJ Dionne: The shutdown is the tea party’s last stand – The Washington Post.
With a government shutdown looming in the Benighted States, one exasperated citizen (ThinkThink2) posted this comment in the Washington Post: I am confident a large majority of the country would agree to shut down the US House of Representatives. Indefinitely. In fact, I am equally confident that they would insist it remain shuttered until global
This is a salutory article, picking up on the themes I flagged in my post this morning, about freedom of speech and the perils of Twitter. Does free speech mean we should allow hate speech – and who defines ‘hate speech’? Would you, or I, be comfortable with some of the ‘likes’ mentioned here –
Elizabeth Renzetti, a weekly columnist for The Globe and Mail, writes in the weekend edition about the Toronto firemen fired recently for their sexist tweets on Twitter. ‘What’s more offensive,’ she asks, ‘the tweeting or the firing?’ This blog is too well mannered, of course, to repeat the actual tweets here – lest you be
Consider this, a delicious excerpt from Evelyn Waugh, writing in 1931, via Paul Theroux’s 2011 anthology, ‘The Tao of Travel’: ‘But my ill-temper gradually cooled as the train, with periodic derailments (three, to be exact, between Mombassa and Nairobi) climbed up from the coast into the highlands. In the restaurant car that evening I sat
BBC News – Voyager probe ‘leaves Solar System’. Like the Vikings crossing the Atlantic, the Polynesians the vast Pacific, Cortez in Keats‘s sonnet, ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer‘ – is this not thrilling, wonderful, awe-inspiring?
