French Politics Going Up a Gear?

BBC : 'The trial of former French president Jacques Chirac is going to take place in the same courtroom where Queen Marie Antoinette was sentenced to death'.

Sensing new, exciting times across the Channel, Beeb?

Darwin and Wallace: Fear and Awe

"Darwin was afraid of what he discovered; Wallace was not', said interestingly the conservationist Tim Flannery (on Andrew Marr's brillinant Monday programme on BBC4).

'His spiritualism was a flaw of his character', he addes foolishly.

Divine help

I used to believe that with divine help which is available to you through genuine pleading and honest effort on your part - you can achieve peace, understanding and love between yourself and yours and your neighbours. Now I've come to believe that the latter is impossible and the former is still necessary - not to achieve perfect love, but to avoid a total schism, conflit and murder. And you're lucky if you manage to.

Egalitarianism - Freedom - Christianity

Juergen Habermas said in an interview given in the late 1980s:

"For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk."

Hitler's Pope?

From Wikipedia:

"Five years after the publication of Hitler's Pope, Cornwell wrote: "I would now argue, in the light of the debates and evidence following Hitler's Pope, that Pius XII had so little scope of action that it is impossible to judge the motives for his silence during the war, while Rome was under the heel of Mussolini and later occupied by Germany."

The Judgement Method

I use the judgement method to develop my ideas. I quickly make a judgement after learning something about an issue - and express it. That expressed opinion, very often a strong one, gives me a stimulus further to investigate and relfex on the issue. This approach is riddled with risk, but it makes topics, views, philosophies involved personal and exciting.

The PR folly

Simon Jenkins has just summed up well the proportional representation: first you vote, then you learn who you voted for, and finally you get the manifesto.