Posts in History
Wish I'd said that - September 10, 2020

“As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forest and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries…. Indeed, it seems not improbable that it was the engagement in this conversation (where talk is without a conclusion) that gave us our present appearance, man being descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.”

Michael Oakeshott “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind” in Rationalism in politics and other essays

From the barrel of a communist gun

In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s a revealing and very scary totalitarian detail that the “People’s Liberation Army” is a branch of the Communist Party rather than the Chinese government (with h/t to Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg’s Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World for this disquieting fact).