“Any man with a large mind ought to be able to write about anything.”
G.K. Chesterton in “What Is Right With The World” quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. Because there’s no difference between that and thinking. One of the things that blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. ‘Well, why are you writing?’ ‘Well, you need the grade.’ It’s like, no! You need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake – and those could be battles for good things. If you can think, speak, and write, you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way. So that’s why you learn to write. And if you can formulate your arguments coherently, and make a presentation, if you can speak to people, if you can lay out a proposal. People give you money; they give you opportunities; you have influence. That’s what you’re at university for. Be articulate. Because that’s the most dangerous thing, you can possibly be.”
Jordan Peterson “Mondays of Meaning” email December 6, 2021
“Of other Nobel Prize winners who make many grandiloquent statements on things they know nothing about, Stigler said that they ‘issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.’”
Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?
In my latest National Post column I contrast various Ontario school boards’ grudging admission that some misguided students might celebrate the Queen with their mandatory embrace of every progressive occasion or pseudo-occasion.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the youth of tomorrow’s future back to the dismal reality of today’s schooling with an assignment to write an essay on what they’d really do if they were in charge, and why it would be so different from what they promised and expected to do.
In my latest National Post column I say we can’t rationally decide whether we want “strong” mayors for our cities until we decide what mayors are for, and what they are.
“Few are presumptuous enough to dispute with a chemist or mathematician upon points connected with the studies of labour of his life. But almost any man who can read and write feels at liberty to form and maintain opinions of his own upon trade and money …. The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history and the most flagrant contempt for the conditions of economic investigation. It is much as if astrology were being pursued side by side with astronomy or alchemy with chemistry.”
Gen. Francis A. Walker, a professor at Yale and later president of M.I.T., quoted by Milton Friedman in CATO Policy Report Vol. XXI No. 2; another source on which my notes are culpably incomplete calls him “probably the most famous American economist of the nineteenth century” and director of two national censuses, which latter claim Wikipedia confirms, adding that he was wounded at Chancellorsville, fought in other battles, became a POW, was made a brevet brigadier general at age 24, and went on to a series of other achievements that make one wonder what one has done with one’s own life.
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.