without courage, there cannot be truth,
and without truth there can be no other virtue
-Sir Walter Scott
Michael Walzer: The experts have apparently agreed that it wasn't values that lost us the last election. It was passion, and above all, it was the passion of fear. But maybe frightened people look for strong leaders, whose strength is revealed in their firm commitment to a set of values. Fear politics and value politics may turn out to be closely related. So what is wrong with the liberal-left? Do we really look weak, uncommitted, value-free-tacking to the wind, whichever way it blows? And is this just a matter of appearance, a failure of public relations; so that what we need is a little rhetorical uplift, cosmetic surgery, some improvement in our posture? Stand straighter! Talk tough! All God's Children Got Values
Eye on Politics & Law Lords: The Papal Legacy: The strategy of faking civil activity
As a young boy in the 1930s, my father attended public school in Snina, a town in eastern Czechoslovakia. Twice a week, a Catholic priest would come in to teach the catechism, during which the few children who were Jewish would wait outside. As they left the classroom, my father recalls, the priest invariably made some insulting remark about the Jewish people.
For Jews in the Europe of my father's youth, such Christian contempt was a fact of life. Its origins lay in the church's ancient claim that God had rejected the Jews when they rejected Jesus and that his covenant with Israel had been superseded by a new covenant with the Christian church. This ''teaching of contempt" fed an often virulent anti-Semitism, which created the climate for Europe's long history of persecuting Jews. Sixty-five years ago that history culminated in the Holocaust.
Perhaps the most beautiful achievement of political life in the late twentieth century was the international movement for democracy that brought down several dozen dictatorships of every possible description - authoritarian, communist, fascist, military. It happened on all continents, and it happened peacefully.
• The pope who turned anti-Semitism aside ; When Facts Collide With Beliefs . . . Papal Legacy: Questioning Capitalism [via Memeorandum The Pope and the Jews ; Labor's stacking crisis worsens ; Like the Mafia code of Omerta the 'made-men' who control the upper echelons of the Victorian ALP, who manipulate the membership base and who look after their cronies, are very careful to keep up appearances Corruption City ; Peter Brown, Orlando: Some issues, especially those that even tangentially involve race, become so one-sided there is no respectable opposition. But sometimes shifting political sands make it acceptable in polite company to oppose what was once a motherhood cause Is the Tide Turning on Dealing With Vote Fraud? ]
• · via Paula Rizzuto blog Enough: A Plan for Radical Reform of the ALP ; The careers of two state ministers are on the line after a damning submission to the corruption watchdog on their behaviour in the Orange Grove affair Carr's ministers savaged over Orange Grove affair ; The myths and truths World War II. By Adam Krzeminski - Europeans will go on living with competing memories and competing myths for a long time to come How there can be no single version of World War II
• · · An average of one passenger a day complains to Qantas about baggage interference but it took an outrageous mishandling stunt caught on film at Sydney Airport for the airline to concede it had any security problem at all The camel, croc and flying kangaroo: costume drama ends with sacking ; Security of luggage at airports Message from a pantomime camel ; Some people won't let a bad conspiracy theory go The Berger File
• · · · More than 100 patients released from mental units in NSW had committed suicide within 28 days of discharge and 36 were involved in murders over a five-year period Suicide rate high after mental unit discharge ; More drivers than ever before will lose their licences this year as a result of higher demerit points penalties introduced this week for low-level speeding offences Gone in a flash: your licence
• · · · · Hospital infection a $150m trauma case ; A story of hope Country health care a poor cousin; Trial by jury: recent developments
• · · · · · Timothy Garton Ash writes on The Orange Revolution ;William Galston on how liberals ignore and conservatives misunderstand America's guiding value: freedom; and on liberal pluralism and constitutional democracy. Taking Liberty ;
Introduction to the Special Issue: Confronting Memories: European "Bitter Experiences" and the Constitutionalization Process