Over recent years [read: under the previous Labour government] we have been increasingly concerned at ill thought out, badly drafted legislation that removes power from the judiciary and confers it on other bodies within society that are not subject to the rules of evidence and due process. The anti-smacking bill is an obvious example. The […]
Entries Tagged as 'Liberty'
Guthrie Cards as an Inchoate Genetic Database
December 4th, 2008 7 Comments
I just stumbled across this from Kiwipolemicist; it seems that if you were born in New Zealand from 1969 onwards, chances are that the New Zealand government is holding a sample of your blood. Some 2.1 million blood samples taken from newborns via the ‘heel-prick’ test are still on file today stored on “Guthrie cards.” […]
Tags: Liberty · Rights and Freedoms
Kiwisaver or why I am not a centrist
July 9th, 2007 1 Comment
A little while ago a friend and I were discussing New Zealand politics with an American associate. My friend spoke of how he was an economic centrist and I informed him I was not. The topic got to kiwisaver, a policy with which he agreed. I thought his comments were interesting. Basically he cited anecdotal […]
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
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.
