“We cannot be content with the vague modern phrase that every sentiment must be tolerated so long as it is sincere. Sincerity is a palliation of partly evil things: but it is an aggravation of entirely evil things. That a man is a sincere Mormon makes him better; but that he is a sincere Satanist makes him worse. There are theories so vile, there are beliefs so abominable that one can only endure their existence by denying their sincerity. Sincerity in these cases has no moral value. It amounts to no more than saying that a cannibal sincerely enjoys boiled missionary, or that Mrs. Brownrigg sincerely tried to hurt her apprentices. Those who talk of ‘tolerating all opinions’ are very provincial bigots who are only familiar with one opinion. There are opinions which are in the literal and legal sense intolerable. Otherwise we are saying that two blacks make a white; that one who has acted wickedly is excused if he has thought wickedly too.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted by Mark Pilon in “News With Views” (without further attribution) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“The scenes uncovered by the allied armies in 1945 were not the inevitable outgrowth of the events that took place in early 1933, but they were a probable outcome. National Socialism was yet another offspring of the hybrid that has been the modernist impulse: irrationalism crossed with technicism. Nazism was not just a political movement; it was a cultural eruption. It was not imposed by a few; it developed among many. National Socialism was the apotheosis of a secular idealism that, propelled by a dire sense of existential crisis, lost all trace of humility and modesty – indeed, of reality. Borders and limits became meaningless. In the end this idealism completed a circle, turned upon itself, and became anthropophagous. What began as idealism ended as nihilism. What began as celebration ended as scourge. What began as life ended as death. Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement, as, in the words of Thomas Mann, an ‘explosion of antiquarianism,’ intent on turning Germany into a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, the general thrust of the movement, despite archaisms, was futuristic. Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future, toward a ‘brave new world.’ Of course it used to full advantage residual conservative and utopian longings, paid its respects to those these romantic visions, and picked its ideological trappings from the German past, but its goals were, by its own lights, distinctly progressive.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

In my latest Loonie Politics column I describe Mark Carney’s chronic jetting about blabbing to his fellow Davos Man sophisticates instead of sitting at his desk making hard choices as proof that he really believes words are deeds, especially fancy abstract ones. And as brazenly hypocritical on the dreaded “carbon pollution”.

“A million kids want to clean up the earth. A million parents want them to start with their rooms.”

Emailed by a friend without attribution

“The period during which light was ‘sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle’ was a period of crisis – a period when something was wrong – and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.’ That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, ‘I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.’ That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific revolutions.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you’re right but not enough about the subject to know you’re wrong.”

Classic self-annihilating relativism from Neil deGrasse Tyson at the start of an ad for his masterclass that I’ve seen umpteen times on YouTube including specifically on January 24, 2025 on one of our own CDN videos.

In my latest National Post column I say the routinely grandiose rhetoric emanating from Prime Minister Mark Carney is a warning sign about the routinely grandiose way he thinks.

In my latest Epoch Times column I suggest in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination that we all ask ourselves whether our own interventions in public debate are designed to lead people back to the light or drive them further into the darkness.