In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the repellent UN “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967” has a point that Canadian politicians must either walk the walk on their “decolonizing” talk or walk it back.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say fashion’s obsession with novelty and related denial of truth was bad enough when it involved clothes, food or music. When it’s body types, it’s managed to get even worse.
“A year earlier, during the third week of April 1940, Lewis had read Christopher Dawson's Beyond Politics. What struck Lewis about the book was the distinction Dawson drew between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of democracy. The idea of democracy as propounded by Rousseau and embodied in the French Revolution placed its emphasis on the ‘general will’ of the community over against the individual. The idea of freedom as expressed by the English placed its emphasis on the rights of the individual over against the will of the whole. Dawson traced modern English notions of freedom to the nonconformists of the 17th century, who sought religious liberty, and to the English aristocracy, which asserted its rights over against the Crown. Dawson concluded that without freedom, modern democracy and modern dictatorship are ‘twin children of the Revolution’ with their emphasis on the community or collective or state. Jack told [his brother] Warnie that he thought this view explained a great deal about the difference between the English and the European democracies. The French offered no exemption from military service for a conscientious objector, but the English did, even if reluctantly. This also explained the political alliance in the 17th and 18th centuries in England between the great nobility and the nonconformist merchant class. It was never the marriage of convenience as some supposed but a marriage of conviction. This view also explained to Jack why he and Warnie he felt so strongly about freedom but less so about democracy. These observations would not have risen to much more than a passing interest, except they became the thesis of C.S. Lewis’s first radio broadcast in May 1941.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“Stupidity – and I don’t mean ignorance – is a central issue of our time.”
Author William Gaddis, quoted by William F. Buckley, Jr. in National Review February 8, 1999
“It was not the use of science that bothered [C.S.] Lewis but its misuse. The danger lay not with the sciences but with the humanities, which had fallen to pieces after World War I and abandoned their function in preserving the concepts of right, wrong, true, false, and beautiful. Poetry no longer made sense, music no longer had melodies, novels no longer had plots, paintings no longer were pictures, and the vast public ceased to be interested in the arts.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“If you think wrong, you go wrong.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News September 12, 1914, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)
“the waters are always smoothest and even most polished when they pour over the precipice.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) [with particular reference to those topics on which polite society and the Establishment stifle debate]
“Al Gore prefers to say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition...’ As a rule, folks with a faith tradition tend not to call it such. At Friday prayers in Mecca, the A-list imams don’t say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition we believe in killing all the infidels.’”
Mark Steyn's “Happy Warrior” column in National Review Dec. 13, 2004