“There is also, just for the record, the cold comfort of knowing that all empires crumble when hubris and militarism alienate even their closest allies, distant wars entangle them in bloody conflicts, and popular leaders are exposed as self-serving frauds. I’m not saying this is especially good news, just that it is history’s lesson.”
Mark Kingwell in National Post March 19, 2003
“When a politician says the debate is over, you can be sure of two things: the debate is raging, and he’s losing it.”
“George Will, political commentator” as “Quote of the Week” “Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #499” from Watts Up With That 11/4/22 [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/04/11/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-499/] with “H/t Ron Clutz]”
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the arrogance behind the Prime Minister’s sneering refusal to admit he’s the one who stayed in that $6k/night London hotel suite is a major problem in Canadian public affairs.
“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
Jonathan Swift, as “Quote of the Week” in Watt’s Up With That “Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #488” January 24, 2022
In this mid-October Loonie Politics column (which I apparently forgot to post at the time, sorry) I argue that the huge list of caucus critics unveiled by Pierre Poilievre is absurd in an ominous way, reflecting and contributing to the absorption of the legislature by the executive.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I insist that the mainstream media didn’t do Canadians or themselves any favours during the truckers’ convoy crisis by failing to alert us that no adults were in charge of the government response.
“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