In my latest National Post column I say the Liberals’ plan to censor social media is an unpalatable blend of arrogance and cluelessness.
“I have a worldview, of a sort, and a wider concern. But politics begins at home. The immediate business, and the one that one might hope to understand, is not to reform the world or save mankind, but to make decisions relative to Australia’s immediate needs.”
“Politics” in “A Plot Unmasked” in Leonie Kramer, ed., James McAuley: Poetry, essays and personal commentary
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the dismissal then minimization of allegations against former CDS Jonathan Vance are all too typical of a political class that does not understand accountability… or security.
In my latest National Post column I say the key question about Canada’s federal budget isn’t political but intellectual: Is this massive spending and borrowing spree based on sound assumptions about how the world works or not?
In my latest Epoch Times column I say political party conventions reveal more than they mean to.
“the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.”
Fyodor Dostyevsky, quoted by Owen Lippert in Fraser Forum July 2000
On March 27 in a Christian Heritage Party webinar talk “Magna Lockdown: Canadian Liberty in a Medical Crisis” I argued that liberty isn’t a frivolous luxury or vague abstract ideal but a vital practical tool for creating and maintaining good government in crises as well as quiet times.
“If a rule of the form ‘he who takes the benefit must pay the cost’ is at stake, then solving the problem means spotting cheats. People do this well. The mind is not following abstract reason; it is enforcing a social contract.... Given this view of man – a natural trader, ever concerned with social debts and an uncertain future – it is little wonder that human minds are interested in detecting cheats, not pursuing pure logic, and in sampling frequencies rather than making risky one-off guesses.”
The Economist July 4, 1992 [an article on so-called "Wason tests" some of which people solve far better than others though they are logically equivalent]