In my latest Loonie Politics column I advocate thinking about things you don’t want to think about, from Putin’s motives to Xi Jinping’s ideology to James Burnham’s warning about the “Suicide of the West”.
“It may be that a free society as we have known it carries in itself the forces of its own destruction, that once freedom has been achieved it is taken for granted and ceases to be valued, and that the free growth of ideas which is the essence of a free society will bring about the destruction of the foundations on which it depends.”
Friedrich Hayek “The Intellectuals and Socialism”
“.... and when the patient loves his illness, what pain he has to suffer when he is cured!”
Infanta, in Pierre Corneille The Cid II.5.
In my latest National Post column (filed before the invasion of Ukraine) I mock the government for encouraging us to switch providers to get lower prices and better service through the magic of competition, while subjecting vast swaths of the economy and our lives to its monopoly control
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion with one’s courage.”
Anaïs Nin, quoted in Epoch Times email newsletter November 22, 2021
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the disastrous failure of Ottawa protest convoy policing wasn’t the result of suddenly resigned chief Peter Sloly not doing what his political masters wanted but of his doing it all too well.
In my latest National Post column, while acknowledging the world-historic greatness of Justin Trudeau now that he has emergency powers, I ask whether our governments’ manifest incapacity to do even simple things including fixing health care derives from having long ago substituted make-believe for serious thought.
“Depend on it that if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail January 31, 2003