In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise Mikhail Gorbachev for the fundamental decency that led him to permit the peaceful dissolution of Soviet Communism. But I insist that he was no statesman, and no thinker, and that credit for ending the Cold War properly belongs with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their supporters.
“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
“I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration [than myths in very early history] of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”
Titus Livius (“Livy”) The Early History of Rome
In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw on the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton to unravel the attitudes of populist and their opponents to accountability.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the main difficulty with ditching various terrible cabinet ministers is who’s going to replace them… and why.
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.
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that the painfully visible vulnerability of our electric grid is due to politicians and bureaucrats who increasingly think we should be grateful that they let us pay high prices for lousy infrastructure and other public services.