Posts in Government
Words Worth Noting - May 14, 2025

“Under a massive and increasing national debt, the economy has stagnated. Taxes have gone up and productivity is stagnant. Resource industries are throttled. There will be more Canadians but poorer. Not referred to in any of these books is the Orwellian censorship legislation recently brought in. Or the taking of the legacy media into wardship with multiple subsidies. All this results from the man nominally in charge being an airhead with no conception of, or interest in, his responsibilities. From all we knew of him from the day of his birth, there was no reason to expect any better of him, but millions were taken in, and media who looked on politics as a game, or even entertainment, encouraged them.”

John Pepall in Dorchester Review #29 (Vol. 14 #3 Autumn 2024)

Words Worth Noting - May 13, 2025

“It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense.”

W.I. Miller Humiliation, in header quotation in Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999 Vol. 7 # 6

Words Worth Noting - May 8, 2025

“That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these were never self-evident truths. The Nazis, certainly, knew as much – which is why, in today’s demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they – because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses – rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise. Liberals may not believe in hell; but they still believe in evil.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

Words Worth Noting - May 7, 2025

“When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016 an immediate reaction in the media, among Democrats and discomforted Republicans, and many besides, was that he should not be ‘normalized’. That such an ignorant, intemperate, corrupt buffoon was President was an enormity that was to the country’s shame and must be resisted. When Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in November 2015 there was no such reaction in Canada. That a callow young man who had led a meandering life, who had never shown any interest in government, who was evidently both conceited and silly, should be Prime Minister simply because he had been famous since shortly after his conception, was nice looking, and was the son of a man who had been a bad Prime Minister for fifteen years over 30 years before, should sweep the country in the 2015 election was shameful. No one seems to have noticed.”

John Pepall in Dorchester Review #29 (Vol. 14 #3 Autumn 2024)