Category Archives: Quotidian

Democracy and freedom of speech

By Andrew L. Urban Democracy is a complex system of governing, unavoidably full of compromises and contradictions. Amongst other things it guarantees freedom of expression and freedom of the press. One can feed into the other. The media can report … Continue reading

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The greatest moral challenge of our time … is not climate change

By Andrew L. Urban The uncomfortable truth is that Al Gore got it wrong. His urgent call for action on global warming (now it’s called climate change) was turbo-charged with the political slogan that tackling it was the greatest moral … Continue reading

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Orwell, newspeak and democracy today

In George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘newspeak’ was one of the key tools of the totalitarian State, used to diminish the range of words, hence thoughts, by the citizens. A propagandist language, it is characterised by euphemism, circumlocution and … Continue reading

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