Australia claims to have one of the best healthcare systems in the world, a claim which, judging purely by life expectancy, seems to be true. All the same, I think we should be more like Bangladesh. I don’t mean this in a global sense, I know far too little about Bangladesh to make sweeping generalisations…
No matter what China’s recent naval drills in the Tasman Sea were meant to provoke, the result has mainly been a lot of often vacuous discussion as to whether or not Australia should feel provoked. There has been a huge diversity in the coverage, from rather sensible-sounding reflections on adopting some kind of diplomatic stoicism,…
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” -Haruki Murakami Nearly every government, from tiny Tuvalu, all the way up to India, has a public sphere. That is, a community of some kind, “made up of private people gathered together as a public…
On the 24th of February last year, Russia relaunched its invasion of Ukraine (which originally started on the 20th of February 2014), and apart from a parody of Putin’s irredentist essay, I haven’t done much to make fun of Putin. So let’s look at some of the worst-aged quotes to recently turn a year old….
William Le Lacheur is a national hero in Costa Rica, where his exploits are legendary. He helped the newly independent nation establish direct trade links with Europe, helping establish its economy. He also took young Costa Rican boys to London to get an education, brought Protestantism to Costa Rica, and helped them defeat an American…
The French system of allocation of power is pretty strange: despite the very first article of its constitution stipulating that “Its organisation is decentralised.”, France is one of the least decentralised countries in the democratic world, even for a unitary state. The current political establishment was set up in the middle of the Algerian War…
-A modest proposal furthering Putin’s ideas to their logical consequences: Strasbourg and Kehl are one people, who have time and again been greedily ripped apart by the powers that be. These people have been separated by far-off emperors and politicians trying to hold back Greater Strasbourg. The most recent separation, in 1953, was certainly the…
Everybody’s talking about the current French elections, but as far as I can see, no one is talking about the effect these elections could have on the Andorran monarchy. The President of France, whomever it is, automatically becomes a coprince of Andorra; a landlocked microstate in the Pyrenees, situated between Spain and France. The coprince…
I’ve already talked about why democracy works, and its flaws, but I’ve hardly addressed the potential to improve democracy further. In this article I’ll be doing just that! Citizen Journalism: As I talked about in the previous article, the press is extremely important in upholding democracy. While the internet’s contributions to this are often overlooked…
À la lumière de l’invasion de l’Ukraine par Poutine, certains d’entre vous se demandent peut-être ce que vous pouvez faire pour aider l’Ukraine en ce moment crucial. Il est facile de se sentir impuissant lorsque ce conflit se passe si loin de vous, mais vous pouvez aider. Voici quelques façons d’y parvenir : – Faire un…
In light of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, some of you might be wondering what you can do to help Ukraine in this vital moment. It’s easy to feel helpless when this conflict is happening so far away, but you can help. Here are some ways to do just that: -Donate: You can do what our…
El 7 de septiembre del año pasado entró en vigor la nueva “Ley Bitcoin” de El Salvador. Esta ley convierte al Bitcoin en moneda de curso legal en El Salvador, junto con el dólar estadounidense. Esta controvertida ley fue presentada a la asamblea legislativa por el presidente Nayib Bukele, líder populista de El Salvador. El…