2018.10.02
A good pun is in the oy of the beholder.
"'They need freedom, but they also need protection,' Skaife says of his ravens, as a soldier would speak of the British people."Interesting thought. Paternalistic as heck, obviously, and I think about what some of my more liberal friends would think of it. "Your freedom to swing your arm ends where my nose begins" is the fundamental challenge in free societies. There's always that contradiction that for freedom to work everyone has to submit to the overarching system of rules for it to not become a seething bed of endless injustic. Either intrinsically and voluntarily, because they recognize it as the superior way for a society to be, or becaause of some measure of enforcement - and either extreme is fraught with the potential for abuse.
(Kind of like how you can't have a society that is both purely free and a meritocracy, because of the natural instinct of humans to favor their own progeny.)
Hah, I was thinking "huh, this book sounds a bit like 'H is for Hawk'" and I realized the author of that book is Helen Macdonald, the author of that review.