Society

Josef Fritzl’s unspeakable crimes against his daughter not only sicken us, says Rod Liddle. They sharpen our confusion about day-to-day parenting in the modern world You may, by now, be losing track of Austrian nutters who lock women in basements. The latest is Josef Fritzl, who kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned in a dungeon for more than 20 years and fathered a total of seven children with her. The last nutter you read about, meanwhile, was Wolfgang Priklopil, who abducted a young woman, Natascha Kampusch, and kept her beneath a manhole cover in his garage for eight years. Both crimes are, of course, beyond appalling: it takes a lot to

Shamelessly plundering the idea from Norm, it’s time for an exciting new development here at Debatable Land HQ: Polling! Yes, indeed… And given that this is a Presidential election year in the United States, what better way to begin than by conducting a Presidential poll? We are familiar with polls in which historians rank US Presidents in order of greatness in which the same names – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and so on – always finish at the top. So let’s attempt something a little different. The Debatable Land polling organisation wants you to nominate your choices for the Most Over-Rated and Most Under-Rated Presidents in American history. The rules are

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the pundit seeking heft to support his argument must eventually turn to George Orwell. This is, for sure, often a wise decision since much the most remarkable aspect of Orwell’s writing is how much of it remains vivid and even valid today. But not all of it since Eric Blair was as capable of talking through his hat as the next intellectual. Thus John Quiggin, writing about the Olympic torch’s travels across Australia, cites Orwell’s view that: Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce

Mike Crowley highlights Hillary Clinton’s changing style: April, 1993: “We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility   and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable   questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how   we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”  April, 2008: [E]very speech she gave in Indiana on Friday and Saturday had the same topic sentence. “My campaign is about jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs,” she said, always to thunderous applause.