In my latest National Post column I say the U.S. has entered a new political era in which it would promote healing if one side could admit there are very good reasons for people to support Donald Trump, for instance their distaste for identity politics, and the other side could admit Trump is an awful person and a nasty President.
“Religion is a form of indoctrination, which requires a considerable amount of literacy. You cannot get religion into people minus literacy. And as literacy weakens, people lose their religious affiliations.”
Marshall McLuhan “Violence as a Quest for Identity” (1977) in Marshall McLuhan Understanding Me
“There is no limit to the amount of nonsense one can produce if you think too long alone.”
Jacob Viner, quoted by Bernard J. Shapiro, Principal, McGill University, to the Empire Club of Canada, Toronto, May 22, 1997, in Canadian Speeches Vol. XI, #4 (July/August 1997)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg’s Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinse Communist Party is Reshaping the World is a badly needed wakeup call, especially in Canada.
“[I]t is the mark of an educated man to look for precision to each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.”
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics quoted in Walter H. Beale A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric