In my latest National Post column I say the reason neither party can pull ahead in the American Presidential contest is that they’re both right about how awful their opponent is and dead wrong about how good their candidate is.
“Ambrose Bierce wrote of an inventor who built a moon rocket. When he fired it up, it bored straight down into the earth. A while later he crawled up out of the hole, and triumphantly announced, ‘My invention has proved correct in all its details; the defects are merely basic and fundamental!’ … whereupon the investors rushed forward to press money on him for the next attempt.”
Spider Robinson in Globe & Mail April 27, 1999
“The universal mark of ‘social reforms’ is the general attempt of the wealthy to get the needy well under their control.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 25, 1913, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say ideas like digging a huge tunnel under the 401 to relieve traffic congestion by cramming in more cars, or more government funding for mortgages when houses are unaffordable, obtusely misses the point that if you let in half a million people a year you will overstrain everything from infrastructure to the housing industry to social cohesion.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say that an ideology, aka paradigm or worldview, is essential to coherent thought. So instead of the “I know you are but what am I?” spectacle of people trading cries of “ideologue” we should try to debate the reasons why we disagree about which evidence matters and what it says. And your goal should not be to avoid ideologies but to choose a sensible one.
In my latest National Post column I say the DND report on patriarchy invading the cosmos , while hilarious, reflects an pernicious ideology that destroys all productive enterprises from space exploration to defence procurement, and has wrecked governance in Canada.
“I believe most of the great social reforms of our time will remain in history as Follies.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 3, 1919, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“... the whole way of life to which men are attached and the large ideas to which they own allegiance.”
Walt Rostow (in one of his books but my bibliographic note to self is incomprehensible)