In my latest National Post column I say the outrageous way the Chinese government speaks about the outrageous things it does is a red flag about the outrageous way it thinks.
“it is not probable that a man who is careless in small matters is careful in large ones; quite the contrary, a man who cannot even copy a sentence of Keynes’s correctly is not likely to be a reliable reporter of complicated or badly expressed ideas.”
George Stigler "On Scientific Writing” in The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays [in support of a proposal that someone undertake a large-scale random verification of statements of empirical fact and of quotations from other writers in published economic articles]
“He shall die a flea’s death.”
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”
P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002
“Narcissism: when one grows too old to believe in one’s uniqueness, one falls in love with one’s complexity.”
John Fowles in Daniel Martin Chapter 2 according to en.wikiquote.org [a friend had cited a slightly different version from memory at a dinner].
“‘If he is dead to-day,’ he [Phocion to a tumultuous Athenian crowd following a rumour that Alexander the Great had died] said, ‘he will be so to-morrow and the day after to-morrow equally. So that there is no need to take counsel hastily or before it is safe.’”
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives II
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the government’s inability to produce a COVID vaccine is just one sign of a plague of public sector ineptitude driven by ignorance of economics, utopian expectations and mental softness on our part as well as theirs that is far more dangerous than the coronavirus.
“But despite the current, almost mystical belief in communication-as-problem-solving – talk doesn’t always help.”
Lillian Breslow Rubin Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family