A notice to all those who commonly write on internet blogs: “Matthew Flannagan is an ignorant, stupid, illogical, irrational, backwards fundamentalist, moronic bigot, blah, blah, blah.” As of 3pm today please amend your insults to the following: “Dr Matthew Flannagan is an ignorant, stupid, illogical, irrational, backwards fundamentalist, moronic bigot, blah, blah, blah.” Matt will […]
Entries from December 17th, 2006
Reductio ad Bushium
December 16th, 2006 1 Comment
I read am amusing letter to the editor in the Otago Daily Times yesterday. The writer was discussing the coup in Fiji. Halfway through the letter he expressed outrage at the suggestion that democracy should be preserved. This, he noted, is what George W Bush believes *shock* *horror*. Here we have a reductio ad Bushium: […]
Tags: Bad Reasoning · George Bush
Sanctions and Siege Warfare
December 14th, 2006 6 Comments
I believe that a state has the right to wage war only to defend those living with in its boarders from attack. A state’s authority to use coercion to uphold justice is limited to its borders. Just as a state has no right to prosecute a person for committing a crime committed outside NZ or to make laws regulating peoples behaviour beyond its shores, it has no duty to defend people in other countries.
Tags: Fiji · Helen Clark · Role of the State · War Ethics
Democracy and Legitimacy
December 5th, 2006 Comments Off on Democracy and Legitimacy
The founding statement of liberal political theory, John Locke’s Two Treaties of Civil Government, opens with the following statement: Reader, thou hast here the beginning and end of a discourse concerning government; what fate has otherwise disposed of the papers that should have filled up the middle, and were more than all the rest, it […]
Tags: Declaration of Independence · Fiji · John Locke · Liberty · Role of the State · War Ethics
Airport Security – What a Joke!
December 3rd, 2006 1 Comment
Tomorrow I will be flying out of town and I was just now pondering the whole check in procedure and I remembered the last time I flew about a month ago…. I was standing inline at the airport security thingy waiting to get on the plane. Everyone steps up, puts their handluggage through the scanner […]
Tags: Airport Security
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Key a PC Socialist?
December 2nd, 2006 5 Comments
Murray certainly thinks so and I am inclined to agree from what I have heard so far from the man. Of course it could all be the way the media are reporting things but Key does appear to be pulling National more centrist and last time National were over there it was disastrous for them. […]
Tags: John Key · National Party