“Come join the party”
Slogan that came to me regarding the need to be cheerful in policy polemics and struggles during a conversation June 25, 2025.
“Leisure is not in any way identical with liberty. My dog has any amount of leisure. In fact, he has nothing else. But for all that he has no liberty.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 14, 1923, in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000)
“[W]e are learning to do a great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be to learn not to do them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in “News With Views” “compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) [the specific context is using CRISPR to bring back extinct animals].
“It was the glory of Roman law that it protected the individual against the state.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [although he describes frankly the considerable degree of legal and constitutional chaos that existed, including Hadrian trying to draw it all into a Perpetual Edict only the Emperor could change]
“We are not very credulous about statistics. It was in some ways unfortunate when men found they could tell lies in Arabic numerals as well as in Roman letters.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly May 12, 1928, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I identify a variety of self-defeating mental habits on display over the current Middle Eastern war that prevent decadent civilizations from prevailing in long conflicts.
“Donald J. Savoie has spent decades studying the inner workings of Canada’s federal bureaucracy. He’s watched Ottawa grow more centralized and more crowded with what he calls ‘poets,’ policy thinkers and advisers, while the ‘plumbers,’ the front-line workers delivering services to Canadians, have not been prioritized.”
Introduction to interview with Savoie in National Post July 26, 2025
“Her [biographer Catherine Tsalikis’s] admiration for [Chrystia] Freeland’s ambition is obvious. She paints her political views as centrist pragmatism. I would define them as aspirational progressivism. A desire for power exists; she wants to be ‘in the room where the decisions are made,’ but we don’t know why. Freeland’s ‘values’ are a confection of tasteful platitudes that signify status. One might call hers the Audi of ideologies: multiculturalism, globalization, and woke capital, all in the slipstream of careerism. Her insatiable appetite for status is the defining feature and likely her Achilles heel.”
Brad McKenzie reviewing Tsalikis’s Chrystia: From Peace River to Parliament Hill in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)