“Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul...”
“Thomas Paine” quoted as 2nd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].
“Where there are no men, be thou a man.”
“Rabbi Hillel” quoted as 1st of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].
Nietzsche was “[c]ondemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both. Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilization. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Hi John,/ Is your email deliverability in good health?”
Start of email from Mailchimp Oct. 1, 2025 [prompting my retort "better than your syntax"]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that the dominant feature of federal policy nowadays isn’t Carney’s ill-concealed radical leftism, it’s unconcealed but widely overlooked massive incompetence. Almost nothing’s actually working, good or bad, and the soothing spin just makes it worse.
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
Lincoln's First Inaugural, quoted in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonized and enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, had so successfully persuaded peoples around the globe that it possessed a universal import. When, a month before his inauguration as president, Mandela traveled to the Transvaal, there to celebrate Easter in the holy city of Moria, it was as a Savior who had died for the whole world that he saluted Christ. ‘Easter is a festival of human solidarity, because it celebrates the fulfillment of the Good News! The Good News born by our risen Messiah who chose not one race, who chose not one country, who chose not one language, who chose not one tribe, who chose all of humankind!’ Ironically, however, even as Mandela was hailing Easter as a festival for all the world, elites in the old strongholds of Christendom were growing ever more nervous of using such language.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“In a world where everything is so inter related that one feels helpless to know where or how grab hold and act, defeat sets in; for years there have been people who found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on ‘doing their own thing.’ Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.... As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be – it is necessary to begin where the world is if we're going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”
“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals