In my latest National Post column I say “This government doesn’t do hard” could become our new national motto as a vast cast of characters across the executive, legislative and judicial branches avoids thinking about difficult choices from COVID to national security and the budget.
“Revenge really does feel good… The [then just-published] Swiss brain-imaging study reveals how we draw satisfaction from teaching strangers a lesson when they have behaved badly... As the journal Science puts it, the study reveals what goes on in Dirty Harry’s head when ‘he succinctly informs a norm violator that he anticipates deriving satisfaction from inflicting altruistic punishment.’”
Ottawa Citizen August 27, 2004
“What comes first in intention comes last in execution.”
St. Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Pierre Trudeau in Thomas Axworthy and Pierre Trudeau, eds., Towards a Just Society
“His workers liked to say that he always arrived at meetings in a freshly rumpled suit.”
Luke Sharpe in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #7 (re Leo Burnet, a great adman responsible for all sorts of icons including Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant, and the Pillsbury Doughboy)
“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”
E.B. Schumacher Small is Beautiful
“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”
Aristotle Ethics
In my latest National Post column, I say the Prime Minister’s real problem in fighting to keep Enbridge 5 open is that he actually believes fossil fuels are worse than useless.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise Biden’s willingness to stand up to Russia and China, but condemn his belief that it requires adopting much of their big-government philosophy.