“I care not what may be the form of belief which the on-looker may hold – whether it be in unison or in antagonism with that faith preached by these men; but he is only a poor semblance of a man who can behold such a sight through the narrow glass of sectarian feeling, holding opinions foreign to his own.”

W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land [re the extraordinary devotion of the French (and thus by implication Catholic) missionaries to the western Indian tribes]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say for the Carney administration to resort to transparent budget trickery instead of reining in overspending is a disastrously self-defeating strategy even in PR terms.

“‘ALL ART is propaganda’, wrote George Orwell in 1940, ‘but not all propaganda is art.’”

Start of “Six books you didn’t know were propaganda/ Governments influence a surprising amount of literature. Some of it pretty good” in The Economist Nov. 3, 2023 [https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/11/03/six-books-you-didnt-know-were-propaganda with no byline]

“History belongs to an age of rationalism, to the 18th and particularly the nineteenth century. The latter century had shown great respect for its historians. The Guizots, Michelets, Rankes, Macaulays, and Actons were read and appreciated, especially by a bourgeoisie bent on expansion and integration. Our century has, by contrast, been an antihistorical age, in part because historians have failed to adapt to the sentiments of their century but even more so because this century has been one of dis-integration rather than integration. The psychologist has, as a result, been more in demand than the historian. And the artist has received more respect than either. It is noteworthy that among the mountains of writing built up on the subject of the Great War, a good many of the more satisfying attempts to deal with its meaning have come from the pens of poets, novelists, and even literary critics, and the professional historians have produced, by and large, specialized and limited accounts, most of which pale in evocative and explanatory power before those of the littérateurs. Historians have failed to find explanations to the war that correspond to the horrendous realities, to the actual experience of the war. The spate of official and unofficial histories that issued forth in the twenties was largely ignored by the public. By contrast, Remarque’s All Quiet [on the Western Front] became, virtually overnight, the best seller of all previous time.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the idea of putting warning labels on booze is as silly as putting them on lions, and worse.

“Her [Rome’s] language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the 18th century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest Epoch Times column I ask what we, the voters, would like them, the politicians, to do when they think we’re wrong on an issue, pander or debate, because we probably will get what we wish for.

“The period during which light was ‘sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle’ was a period of crisis – a period when something was wrong – and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.’ That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, ‘I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.’ That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific revolutions.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition