In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask, with respect to Jordan Peterson and others, how cancellation of anyone who questions authority became the default option in our society.
In my latest Epoch Times column I outline what we should try to do to improve 2023 come what may.
“I took up my gun, my notebook, and my pencils, and went forth to the woods as gaily as if nothing had happened. I felt pleased that I might now make better drawings than before; and, ere a period not exceeding three years had elapsed, my portfolio was again filled.”
John James Audubon, the ornithologist, quoted in Samuel Smiles Self-Help (on how he had left 200 original drawings, the work of years, in a wooden box with a relative in Kentucky for a business trip to Philadelphia only to find on his return several months later that Norway rats had nested in the box and eaten them all. He did have several dark days before rebounding.) Smiles mentions that when Sir Isaac Newton’s papers were burned when his dog upset a lit taper on his desk Newton did not recover so well, but also the incident where Thomas Carlyle lent the first volume of his history of the French Revolution “to a literary neighbour to peruse”, namely John Stuart Mill, and the latter’s maid somehow put it into the fire, whereupon Carlyle rewrote it and it did indeed make his reputation.
“It must be remembered that, though concord is in itself better than discord, discord may indicate a better state of things than is indicated by concord. Calamity and peril often force men to combine. Prosperity and security often encourage them to separate.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay The History of England
“‘man will live forevermore because of Christmas day,’ as Harry Belafonte put it in those more confident times a mere 40 years ago…”
Mark Steyn in National Post December 24, 1999 [so 60 years ago now and the cultural and intellectual situation has not improved]
“Politicians are not going to get any smarter. Politicians are not going to get any nicer.”
Two entries in my ongoing work-in-progress “Robson’s Rules of History”, these two both dating to some point in the autumn of 1997. [I submit that thus far I have been proven sadly correct.]
“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 30, 1911, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
In my latest Epoch Times column I parse modern efforts to hide what we celebrate on Dec. 25 behind “Season” and “Winter” greetings, lights and other obvious clues.