In my latest Epoch Times column I ponder uneasily what George Washington, or indeed Sir John A. Macdonald or the Duke of Wellington, would make of modern politics.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we should get back to the values that made Canada great starting by celebrating them with gratitude on July 1.
“Eddie Izzard likes pink. Pink coats, pink jackets – they’re all over the website promoting his failed bid to stand as a Labour candidate at the next general election. Labour’s colour is traditionally red but pink is for girls, and Izzard has been campaigning in what he coyly calls ‘girl mode’ for months now. Alas, all his efforts came to nothing at the weekend when he was soundly beaten by a local councillor who also happens to be a woman…. while people are ready to applaud an actor and comedian who challenges gender stereotypes, they may not be so keen on a man making demands that defy the evidence of their senses. Izzard’s claim to be trans highlights the problem at the heart of self-identification, which is that it requires so little of the individual – but so much of everyone else. Izzard is a man who likes to wear women’s clothes, favouring garments that are a parody of what actual women choose to wear.... The setback to Izzard’s attempt to become a Labour MP is a heartening sign of a return to sanity. After all, being a woman involves a great deal more than wearing pink.”
Joan Smith on Unherd December 5, 2022
“Indeed, one of the real lessons of history, is that nobody ever learns them. In every age and era, too many people believe that the experiences of others can’t apply to them. Their age and place is unique and therefore exempt from experience. Two other lessons of history are these: Nothing lasts forever, and very few people notice or care that their society is in trouble until it is too late.”
John Thompson in Mackenzie Newsletter April 1998 #32
“Why would a journal [The Lancet] committed to scientific rigor & medical ethics totally ignore the good reasons people have for stigmatizing untreated mental illness?/ Find out at my Substack!”
Tweet from Michael Shellenberger October 11, 2022 [https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1579914325405622272] pointing to his piece “Dark Side of Destigmatization/ No human being should be stigmatized. But untreated mental illness and addiction are dangerous and destructive, and should be.”
In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the irony of people who spent decades destigmatizing everything and saying we should all do whatever we feel like now complaining that nowadays we all just do whatever we feel like.
“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.”
Emailed to me and attributed to George Carlin, as it is in a number of places online (though one site attributed it to someone else), but none of them provide any detail as to when or where he supposedly said it. If anyone can do so, or knows it’s not really Carlin, please let me know.
“We have been driven into a widespread system of arbitrary and tyrannical control over our economic life not because ‘economic laws are not working the way they used to,’ not because the classical medicine cannot, if properly applied, halt inflation, but because the public at large has been led to expect standards of performance that as economists we do not know how to achieve.”
Milton Friedman’s 1971 address to American Economic Association quoted in Leonard Silk The Economists