Dr Robin Douglas Profile picture
Apr 29 21 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
The Wisdom of Jolyon Maugham KC

A thread of quotations from Jollers' new book.
The law "is the sluice gate through which the river of humanity flows".
"The hand of a good lawyer holds the mightiest pen. Its stroke can enlist the power of the State."
"Knowing you are wearing blinkers is better than not knowing."
"The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not."
"My natural tribe are the winners."
"Our constitution and our legal system are the victory dance of power. To engage with them is to bless or curse them, to join the dance."
[Some of this stuff reads like a badly translated Confucian classic]
"Why turn off cruise control on the endless highway of life?"
"Those months will always remain written on my face."
"Giving a speech on receiving the Praeses Elit in Dublin, a prize awarded to those who have advanced the discourse in their line of work and are a source of inspiration to young people, I reflected on Gandalf standing on the bridge at Khazad-dûm in The Lord of the Rings."
"It is hard to feel optimistic at present - but things change in cycles. Or, as the conservative folk singer, Bob Roberts, put it in a film of the same name: 'The times they are a changing back'."
If we had a written constitution: "We would then have democracy as process, not event. Each day would be Valentine's Day."
The law "can't compensate you for a forever-vacant left side of the bed. Or that your newborn son will never get the inside track on how to wee standing up."
"To ask for a cohering intellectual architecture is to conceive of the law as a purpose-built town, a Welwyn Garden City if you like, rather than the London that it is"
Jollers reflects on historical divorce law: "Penetrative sex was grounds for divorce but you could blow your neighbour to your heart's content (assuming the heart to be the appropriate organ)."
"The prime minister didn't just stand and watch Hancock's smash-and-grab raid on our constitution - he drove the getaway car and fenced the proceeds"
"But public anger at lawbreaking is not a currency with a fixed value. Presence makes the heart go wander."
PRESENCE. MAKES. THE. HEART. GO. WANDER. Image
"I remember being so self-conscious about how I walked that I struggled to make it across the playground at school. And worrying about having had puffy nipples."
Somehow, the idea that Jollers found the task of walking a bit too challenging seems entirely believable.

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More from @Robin_C_Douglas

Apr 28
If you are a republican, like me, why would you care about the Coronation?

If you are not religious, or not a Christian, why would you care about a church ceremony?

This is my attempt to answer these questions.

#Coronation #Coronation2023
I'm not sure that I've quite convinced myself, but maybe others will be convinced.

(If any journalists want me to write or talk about this, DM me. I wrote a dissertation on this stuff a long time ago.)
I'm going to be making 3 points in this thread.
Read 20 tweets
Apr 27
Cranks like this are the far right's best friends.

You might just as well write a cheque to Trump or DeSantis. Image
Btw that thread contains GIFs, which serves to underline the well-known fact that only the worst people on the internet illustrate their tweets with comical GIFs to show how witty and whimsical they are. It's only one step up from writing all in lower case.
I'm not sure the underlying point is worth responding to, but in the UK the idea of "great books" came from John Lubbock, Lord Avebury, a Liberal politician who came up with the idea in the context of promoting working people's education. It was a progressive, democratising move.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 29, 2022
A thread on esotericism and political extremism.

Inspired by the latest online occultist drama.

/1
There has been a bit of this recently.

Gordon White is as good a place as any to start.

/2
White is an Australian esotericist who emerged from the Chaos Magick world.

He is charismatic, highly intelligent and sometimes genuinely insightful.

He is also a conspiracy theorist of the most extreme and paranoid variety.

/3
Read 30 tweets
Feb 27, 2022
"Maybe just for once - just for once - Americans aren't going to make this current event about US racial politics."

"Oh hang on, what's this?"
"The Treaty of Brest Litovsk is whiteness"
"St Alexander Nevsky did not sufficiently center BIPOC marginalized voices."
Read 4 tweets
Sep 12, 2021
@EdwardQuine Ok. This has come up largely in two contexts - the Article 9 right to freedom of religion in the European Convention of Human Rights (which is applied in the UK through the Human Rights Act), and the Equality Act 2010.
@EdwardQuine Both of those instruments protect religion as well as belief more generally - which is another hole in Dawkins' argument, because secular philosophical systems are also protected (and can become matters of deep commitment and identity, as Dick's own record demonstrates).
@EdwardQuine So, what is protected? What distinguishes a protected religious (or philosophical) belief from a personal whim?
Read 12 tweets
Dec 30, 2020
I missed this.

President Donald Trump issued a proclamation yesterday on the death of St Thomas Becket.

Of course he did.

whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…
The President acutely notes that St Thomas was a "lion of religious liberty" even before the first amendment was added to the American Constitution.
"turbulent priest" is the traditional rendition of this phrase, but rather amusingly the proclamation uses the version ("meddlesome") from the film "Becket".
Read 4 tweets

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