Showing 1 - 10 of 11
Despite Brexit turmoil, I'm proud to be a Brit
News, John Lloyd, Published on 21/01/2019
» This is a fine time to be British. Indeed, to be proud to be British.
Expect 2019 to test global stability
News, John Lloyd, Published on 03/01/2019
» The resignation of US Defence Secretary James Mattis stands not only as a radical disassociation from the actions of the president he served, but as a foreboding for the future, a warning for 2019 -- and beyond. And, for all the assurances the world is getting better, such as Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, there are huge geopolitical challenges to face and master to make that optimism real.
Politics of confrontation heats up
News, John Lloyd, Published on 15/10/2018
» The next president of Brazil, Latin America's giant, is all but certain to be former army captain Jair Bolsonaro -- who was relatively unknown, even in his own country, just a few months ago, but who now has a large public profile all round the world. At 63, he has spent years in public life, leaving a mark -- but not a large one -- as a man of the far right, ready with insults for women who oppose him, disgusted by homosexuality, approving of the military dictatorship that killed and tortured leftists between 1964 and 1985.
How to save the modern Catholic Church from itself
News, John Lloyd, Published on 03/09/2018
» When the pope is given a cool, even combative, welcome in the Republic of Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church is in trouble. The country had been -- from its founding as the Irish Free State in the early 1920s after a violent break with the United Kingdom -- deeply influenced by Catholic teaching in the framing of its laws and the management of its institutions. It is now solidly secular -- and it has a list of hard questions to put to the Church.
Imagining a post-Putin Russia
News, John Lloyd, Published on 27/08/2018
» It's not the week to say it, but Donald Trump has a point. It isn't original and what it proposes will be hard to do, yet when he says that "getting along with Russia is a good thing", as he did before his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki last month, he isn't wrong.
Can Jones and Johnson be the face of 'new politics'?
News, John Lloyd, Published on 13/08/2018
» Two men of influence -- the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and politician Boris Johnson -- now face media bans and ridicule for what they saw as speaking their minds. Both, though quite different in background, manner and actions, are pioneers in the new politics.
Tribalism and the politics of World Cup football fever
News, John Lloyd, Published on 02/07/2018
» Would fans lay down their lives for football? Bill Shankly, the legendary football player and Liverpool manager, once famously said he was "disappointed" with the idea that the sport was a matter of life and death. "I can assure you," he said, "it is much, much more important than that."
The outsized power of Hungary's Premier Orban
News, John Lloyd, Published on 18/06/2018
» Closing a major university is a big deal. Created, staffed and maintained at large, usually public, expense, universities serve both a utilitarian and an idealistic purpose: to provide the highly-educated workforce modern economies require, and to uphold and further civilised values through the understanding of the world the various academic disciplines claim to provide.
Why populists increasingly become more popular
News, John Lloyd, Published on 12/03/2018
» Those who feel left behind by the enrichment of the minority and the stagnation of the many are choosing to be represented by political forces that cannot give them what they need, and will likely make their lives worse.
In illiberal societies, a wider #MeToo movement
News, John Lloyd, Published on 13/02/2018
» In China, women calling themselves the "silence breakers" have demanded investigations into allegations of sexual harassment. In doing so, they pit themselves against a macho culture, a Communist Party deeply allergic to independent citizens' initiatives, and an exaggerated and assiduously cultivated respect for hierarchies, themselves male-dominated.