Category Archives: AI - Blog 2013 - Page 3
Image of the month: Hestar
Image of the month: Saving the Saviour of the Lamb
Sunday, February 3, 2013 — How you measure a person’s worth.
Sunday, January 6, 2013 — Thoughts Generated by Icelandic Shnapps
The following is inspired by my visit to Iceland, but will draw on other experiences as well. I still have a bottle of Icelandic Schnapps (“with the goodness of lichen”), which nobody else I know here in Toronto is willing to drink. I will take a small nip of it every time I finish a paragraph.
I visited Iceland because I had long been fascinated by its peculiar history. Its medieval status as a non-aristocratic republic, with unique electoral and judicial features, far different from the urban republics of Italy, commends it to any historian of democracy. Various features of modern Iceland are equally interesting. Consequently, I had been reading about Icelandic history and culture for decades before I set foot in the place. One of the reasons I was attracted to studying the history and society of Iceland was its lesson that a country with a population as small as 300,000, blessed with few natural resources or strategic advantages, can provide its citizens with pretty much anything they would need in the modern world. While it cannot offer its citizens aircraft carriers or linear accelerators, it can easily provide most of the things that people in this century consider necessary for a good life. Most of these blessings are patently traceable to its commitment to, and experience with, effective democratic institutions. This lesson is a very important one for people in small nations, especially post-colonial ones, who yearn for both economic development and the establishment of solid democratic institutions. Iceland spent many centuries as a colony, and many centuries in poverty. It’s complete independence arrived only in the mid-twentieth century. It’s achievements since then have, on the whole, been very impressive. Read more »