“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.”
Will Durant, quoted in Globe & Mail June 2, 1999
“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].
“I guess the classic loser buck-me-up which John Diefenbaker used on every losing occasion is a quote from Sir Andrew Barton, an Elizabethan soldier: ‘…I am wounded but I am not slaine, I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile and then I’ll rise and fight againe.’ And he did.”
End of Val Sears column on the pain of political defeat in Ottawa Sun June 29, 2004
“I am inclined to think tradition has more of the sobriety of truth.”
G.K. Chesterton in America July 23, 1927, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022) [I know I’ve been leaning heavily on GKC in recent items, but when someone says so many prescient things it’s a sign worth noting]
In my latest National Post column I take readers on a guided tour of the dismal wasteland that is Xi Jinping Thought.
“Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”
Titus Livius (aka “Livy”) The Early History of Rome
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.