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…
