In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that Musk’s flameout as a deficit and waste cutter reveals just how hard it is to rein in overspending, especially because people give so little thought to why it really happens.
“It was not the slavers who would end up settling Africa, and subjugating it to foreign rule, but – by an irony familiar from Christian history – the emancipators.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Politics are now so corrupt that everything they touch is corrupted. We are long past the point of protecting our government from the degrading influences of trade or professionalism. If anything, we have to protect our trades and professions from the degrading influences of government.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness November 5, 1920, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024) [and I need hardly add that we did not and it has therefore gotten far worse in the intervening century]
“At a repast given in 63 [AD - he’s describing the increasingly high living as the Roman Republic fell apart] by a high priest, and attended incongruously by Vestal Virgins and Caesar, the hors d’oeuvres consisted of mussels, spondyles, fieldfares with asparagus, fattened fowls, oyster pastries, sea nettles, ribs of roe, purple shellfish, and songbirds. Then came the dinner – sows’ udders, boars head, fish, duck, teals, hares, fowl, pastries, and sweets.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and I was going along salivating pretty happily until we got to the udders]
“That history bore witness to a war between light and darkness, aeons old, and demanding from those on the side of good an unstinting watchfulness against evil, was a conviction that Tolkien shared with the Nazis. Admittedly, when articulating the mission of National Socialism, its leaders tended not to frame it in such terms. They preferred the language of Darwinism. ‘A cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation.’ So Hitler had defined National Socialism, a year before invading Poland and engulfing Europe in a second terrible civil war.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“This growth of arbitrary government in our country is a very real thing. The power of the Censor is a strong example of it, but not necessarily even the strongest. Judicial equity has become more and more a question of the judge and less and less a question of the statute. The very phrase ‘judge-made law’ either means nothing or it means personal despotism. If anyone said ‘King-made law’ we should start. The very importance of the legal mind is an instance; for lawyers necessarily thrive upon the absence of law.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted, without further attribution, in “News with Views” (“compiled by Mark Pilon”) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“The follower of Rousseau tended too much to say: ‘I am born in a state of innocence, and therefore I can be as guilty as I like.’ But the new skeptics, who also deny Original Sin, seem rather to be saying: ‘There is no Original Sin, because everybody can be born bad and behaves as badly as possible without it.’ The modern humanitarian believes in Total Depravity without any Fall to explain it.”
G.K. Chesterton in New York American March 25, 1933, quoted in “The Bad” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“Athanasius then continues, in Against the Gentiles, by stating his aim: ‘But since we do not have the works of these teachers to hand, we must expound for you in writing what we have learned from them – I mean the faith in Christ the Savior – that no one may regard the teaching of our doctrine (logos) as worthless, or suppose faith in Christ to be irrational (alogos). Such things the pagans misrepresent and scorn, greatly mocking us, though they have nothing other than the cross of Christ to cite in objection. It is particularly in this respect that one must pity their insensitivity, because in slandering the cross they do not see that its power has filled the whole world, and that through it the effects of the knowledge of God have been revealed to all. For if they had really applied their minds to his divinity, they would not have mocked at so great a thing, but would rather have recognized that he was the Savior of the universe and that the cross was not the ruin but the healing of creation. For if, after the cross, all idolatry has been overthrown, and all demonic activities put to flight by this sign, and Christ alone is worshipped, and through him the Father is known, and opponents are put to shame while he every day invisibly converts their souls – how then, one might reasonably ask them, is this matter still to be considered in human terms, and should one not rather confess that he who ascended the cross is the Word of God and the Savior of the universe?’ (Gent. 1)”
Translator’s (mostly windy and sawdusty) “Introduction” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation