Category: Chris Leapock Blog

After this week’s unfortunate incident, by which I mean the election of He Whose Hands Must Not Be Mentioned, I’ve had enough of American politics. The war in Eastern Ukraine hasn’t been in the news much in the past couple years. It’s turned into a frozen conflict—a stalemate between two rebel enclaves and a Ukraine…

British voters yesterday chose a print of a late-nineteenth-century oil painting to lead their country for the foreseeable future. The picture shows a white family at a table drinking tea. A portrait of Queen Victoria hangs on the wall. Golden-tinged sunlight streams in from a window, through which a carefully-tended garden is visible. The picture…

The Roman senator Cato the Elder was not a very nice man. When he was young he fought in the Second Punic War against Carthage. The war devastated Italy, and Rome was nearly defeated. But it finally prevailed and imposed a peace treaty on the Carthaginians that basically came down to “All your empire are…

Last night, in a battle fought across the country, the young wizard Harry Potter delivered a resounding defeat to the Dark Lord Voldemort. Potter was widely considered too young and inexperienced to be a serious threat to He Who Now Can Be Named Freely…

Last on my list of interviews was Thomas Mulcair, the leader of the New Democrats. It took a while to get hold of him, because when I called his campaign office a recording said the line had been disconnected. Eventually I tracked down his campaign manager, who turned out to be crashing on a buddy’s…

After my unsatisfying interview with the Prime Minister, I met with Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party. That didn’t go much better. To start with, he wanted to meet me on a beach in Cuba. When I got there he was lying on his side in the sand, wearing nothing but a red Speedo,…

So it’s been a long time since I posted anything here, despite the obvious fact that there is a national election going on and everyone is in a tizzy. I’ve been busy, mostly working on a new book, which is turning out to be six billion times more complicated than I’d thought. Writing is, like,…

The Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective just published a critical reply by me to a paper on relativism. The original paper (by Howard Sankey, in Social Epistemology) tries to refute relativism. That’s generally a good thing, but Sankey’s ar…

It’s election time in Alberta – the premier heard the call on this blog, or maybe one of the four million other blogs in Alberta that are more widely read, and deigned to ask voters for a mandate. Much to his surprise, the voters counteroffered with a trip to the glue factory. Yes, it looks…

Today is the centenary of the beginning of the Armenian genocide, when as many as 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the Ottoman government. Using the word “genocide” here is a bit controversial, and by “controversial” I mean that it pisses offTurkish nationalists. The Hürriyet Daily News ran a columnarguing that the Turkish nationalist perspective…