“Martin Amis, who was harshly criticized in America Alone but gave it a positive review, said of the style: ‘Mark Steyn is an oddity: his thoughts and themes are sane and serious – but he writes like a maniac.’”
Wikipedia entry on Mark Steyn [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Steyn] at least as of Feb. 9, 2024
“Speaking fluently and clearly will be put at the heart of the national curriculum and given the same status as literacy and numeracy under a Labour government, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged. In an article for The Times the Labour leader says that the ‘almost exclusive’ focus on reading and writing at present is ‘short-sighted’ as he calls for oracy to be given priority at every level of a child’s education.”
The Times July 5, 2023 [the teaser referred to “oracy” and I went to scoff but stayed to listen]
In a talk to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta "Freedom Talk" in Red Deer, AB on July 7 I argue that a radical commitment to truth-telling, including refusing to remain silent in the face of lies, is crucial to personal and to political freedom.
“To close, I offer you the actor’s wish for a good performance, ‘Break a leg,’ coined in Shakespeare’s time when an actor’s third curtain call required them to bow so deep, they broke the line of their supporting leg.”
Dr. John Walker in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“What is the good of words if they aren’t important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn’t any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn’t there be a quarrel about a word? If you’re not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning by moving your ears?”
G.K. Chesterton “The Peacemaker” in The Ball and the Cross, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
In my latest National Post column I say historical amnesia seems to be Canada’s new national policy and slogan, driven by politicians who know they cannot withstand comparison with figures from the past.
“Why Japan Is Building Its Own Version of ChatGPT /Some Japanese researchers feel that AI systems trained on foreign languages cannot grasp the intricacies of Japanese language and culture”
Headline and deck on article in Scientific American September 15, 2023
In my latest National Post column I argue that the same libertarian-libertine qualities that made social media appealing across normal partisan lines, and addictive, are now making them hugely and rightly unpopular and we must make the platforms legally “publishers” to put a stop to the raging indecency.