“One of the most popular supposed short cuts is imagining that we can make our decisions easier by bypassing value judgments and assigning numbers to everything. Call this the numerical fallacy, or the fallacy of false precision. I’m not saying that it’s never useful to count things.... if a lot of people are out of work, I want some idea of how many, and if prices are going up, I want some idea of how much. The problem is that we rely on numbers too much, too carelessly, for too many things, and we trust them far more than we should. Excessive trust in numbers is part of the technocratic ideology which supposes that government by experts is not political.... There just isn’t a way of generating measurements that isn’t based on value judgments. The only question is which value judgments it depends on, and how transparently or obscurely it depends on them.... Fortunately, there is an instrument for making judgments: The human mind. And there is a way to calibrate it: Experience, deliberation, debate, and the cultivation of practical wisdom. Sorry, but there aren’t any short cuts.”

J. Budziszewski “Underground Thomist” Dec. 27, 2021 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-technocratic-fallacy-of-false-precision].

In my latest Epoch Times column I defend the desire of normal people to protect pleasant neighbourhoods from social engineering cement.

“For all you good folks who think Islam is just Christianity in funny hats, or that Islam is the ‘Religion of Peace’, or that ‘we all worship the same God’ .../ ... nope. None of those are true in the slightest.”

Tweet from Willis Eschenbach 20/4/22 [https://twitter.com/WEschenbach/status/1516845836566626304] commenting on tweet about “Islamic Republic of Iran gives converts to Christianity five years prison for ‘deviant propaganda’ https://wp.me/p4hgqZ-14wY”

In my latest National Post column I take readers on a guided tour of the dismal wasteland that is Xi Jinping Thought.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the inquiry must avoid getting sidetracked into whether the convoy or the mandates were obnoxious and remain focused on whether invoking the Emergencies Act was justified because other forms of law enforcement were demonstrably non-existent, unavailable, or inadequate to the situation.

“So much must be said against the man of fashion. But, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that he is not alone in being frivolous: other classes of men share the reproach. Thus for instance, bishops are generally frivolous, moral teachers are generally frivolous. Philosophers and poets are often frivolous; politicians are always frivolous. For if frivolity signifies this lack of grasp of the fulness and the value of things, it must have a great many forms besides that of mere levity and pleasure-seeking. A great many people have a fixed idea that irreverence, for instance, consists chiefly in making jokes. But it is quite possible to be irreverent with a diction devoid of the slightest touch of indecorum, and with a soul unpolluted by a tinge of humour.... To say a thing with a touch of humour is not to say it in vain. To say a thing with a touch of satire or individual criticism is not to say it in vain. To say a thing even fantastically, like some fragment from the scripture of Elfand, is not to say it in vain. But to say a thing with a pompous and unmeaning gravity; to say a thing so that it shall be at once bigoted and vague; to say a thing so that it shall be indistinct at the same moment that it is literal; to say a thing so that the most decorous listener shall not at the end of it really know why in the name of all things you should have said it or he should have listened to it – this is veritably and in the weighty sense of those ancient Mosaic words to take that thing in vain. The Name is taken in vain many times more often by preachers than it is by secularists.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Frivolous Man” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # March-April 2022

In my latest Epoch Times column I challenge BoC governor “Tiff” Macklem to tell us what he thinks causes inflation, the thing it’s his #onejob to prevent and which is currently very unprevented in Canada.

“An obvious point about history is that if we take a sanctimonious view of such matters as Japanese internment, and insist that we’re so much better than people back (ugh) then, by depriving us of the ability to understand how other people made mistakes it deprives us of the ability to understand how we might.”

Another of mine, from September 5, 2002.