“It starts off like a Hungarian omelette: First, steal one egg.”
David Niven’s character Col. W.H. Grice in the 1980 movie The Sea Wolves.
“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 lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.”
Will Durant, quoted in Globe & Mail June 2, 1999
“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].
In my latest Epoch Times column I defend the desire of normal people to protect pleasant neighbourhoods from social engineering cement.
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
Dorothy Parker, quoted by Earl in the cartoon Pickles in Ottawa Citizen February 16, 2009