As a few of you may be aware, the Australian Liberal Party under the command of Prime Minister John Howard was recently reelected in a public, totally transparent and legitimate election by the adults of Australia. Unlike in the US there is no controversy about the fact that his party's success was the will of the people, so while I disagree with their decision, the will of the people must be accepted. But the interesting thing about this recent election is that Mr Howard was returned to ...

I'm not going to bore anyone by going into political theories on polities and notions of the leviathan, but there are interesting dimensions to the war on terror that I haven't seen addressed in a while. The concept of the modern democratic state is simple. The people of the nation elect a government to represent them - to put it in metaphysical terms the government is the 1, 100 or 1000-man personification of millions of citizens. Their every action is the will of the people. Knowing...

So a few weeks back one of the world's foremost studies on attitudes to war, peace and apathy in Islam was released to the media (but not the public). I was waiting for Brad to post it up, as demographic surveys of Muslim countries are one of his regular topics. But he hasn’t yet, so I thought I’d mention it and throw it up to JU. Looking at the handful of figures that are out right now, I think everyone can probably find something to point to and say, “Wow, I’m ...