In my latest Loonie Politics column I say if heads don’t roll over the latest revelations from the Mass Casualty Commission then we have pretty much given up on truth and decency.
“Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.”
Iris Murdoch, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail October 4, 2002
“If you don’t knit, bring a book.”
“Dorothy Parker’s advice” for surviving something terminally dull, quoted by John Ivison in National Post February 22, 2005
In a Loonie Politics piece I should have posted a couple of weeks ago I say it would be instructive to look back at old newspapers to see what did get covered, and how, as opposed to what turned out to matter and why.
“As to fighting, keep out of it if you can, by all means. When the time comes, if it ever should, that you have to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a challenge to fight, say ‘No’ if you can – only take care you make it clear to yourselves why you say ‘No.’ It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest. And if you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“The history of mankind is an immense sea of errors in which a few obscure truths may here and there be found.”
Cesare de Beccaria (a.k.a. Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio), quoted in Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
In my latest National Post column I explain how anyone who actually wants to have a sensible conversation on guns not a shouting match, or a virtue-signalling festival, could go about it.
“After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk fighting the wrong people and wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays