In my latest National Post column I say the reason neither party can pull ahead in the American Presidential contest is that they’re both right about how awful their opponent is and dead wrong about how good their candidate is.
“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”
John Stuart Mill, quoted in Anthony Robbins, Unlimited Power
“A year earlier, during the third week of April 1940, Lewis had read Christopher Dawson's Beyond Politics. What struck Lewis about the book was the distinction Dawson drew between the ideal of freedom and the ideal of democracy. The idea of democracy as propounded by Rousseau and embodied in the French Revolution placed its emphasis on the ‘general will’ of the community over against the individual. The idea of freedom as expressed by the English placed its emphasis on the rights of the individual over against the will of the whole. Dawson traced modern English notions of freedom to the nonconformists of the 17th century, who sought religious liberty, and to the English aristocracy, which asserted its rights over against the Crown. Dawson concluded that without freedom, modern democracy and modern dictatorship are ‘twin children of the Revolution’ with their emphasis on the community or collective or state. Jack told [his brother] Warnie that he thought this view explained a great deal about the difference between the English and the European democracies. The French offered no exemption from military service for a conscientious objector, but the English did, even if reluctantly. This also explained the political alliance in the 17th and 18th centuries in England between the great nobility and the nonconformist merchant class. It was never the marriage of convenience as some supposed but a marriage of conviction. This view also explained to Jack why he and Warnie he felt so strongly about freedom but less so about democracy. These observations would not have risen to much more than a passing interest, except they became the thesis of C.S. Lewis’s first radio broadcast in May 1941.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“Stupidity – and I don’t mean ignorance – is a central issue of our time.”
Author William Gaddis, quoted by William F. Buckley, Jr. in National Review February 8, 1999
“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, widely cited online and apparently authentic (see for instance https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/napoleon-bonaparte-quotes).
In my latest Loonie Politics column I argue that our politicians are dangerously helpless in the face of explicit support for antisemitic terrorism not from active malevolence but because it’s a form of evil their woke “paradigm” or worldview can’t process… yet.
In my latest Epoch Times column I deplore politicians’ self-destructive fixation on what they claim they’re going to do instead of how they think they might be able to do it.
“It is impossible for someone like me who is not totally immersed in these questions to judge to what extent Aboriginal people sincerely wish to perpetuate in large measure, though with modern benefits, the lives of their ancestors. I doubt if the alternatives were clearly laid out, a majority of Indigenous people would choose to live nomadic lives tribally and eating fish and game. But whether it is a tactical masquerade to maximize compensation and reparations or a sincere commitment, native Canadians at the very least have a right not to be treated as if they were immigrants from a foreign and much different country. It hardly needs emphasis that they and their ancestral civilization antedated the arrival of the now overwhelming majority of Canadians of overseas ancestry, and as a now well recognized natural right, they’re entitled to preserve as much as they wish of their traditional civilization, as long as it does not violate fundamental principles of Canadian life.”
Conrad Black in National Post April 6, 2024