Posts in Values
Words Worth Noting - March 19, 2025

“There has been, as every informed Canadians knows, an avalanche of ludicrous judicial decisions, and the Supreme Court of Canada, because of inappropriate appointments to it from successive prime ministers, has become an almost constant source of absurd judgments. In one case a few years ago, the high court determined that the Charter’s right of assembly guaranteed the right of employees of the government of Saskatchewan performing essential work to strike. The upper courts have allowed judges to make an incoherent smorgasbord of our laws, with a shrinking number of reliable precedents and highly idiosyncratic lower court interpretations that pay no attention to the normal meaning of the language or intention of the legislators. This means that when the courts have finished, the legislators haven’t been legislating at all-just putting forth thoughts for the delectation of the bench. But even more sinister, the courts as a whole have followed the legislators into complete abdication in allowing the administrative state to function as it wishes without any apparent reference whatever to the text of law. In the case of Jordan Peterson, his freedom of expression counts for nothing in the face of churlish and self-righteous students or even a few frequenters of the Internet.”

Conrad Black in National Post August 17, 2024

The far vague media

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the press should try to understand the rise of populism instead of reflexively smearing parties like the AfD as “far-right” without any attention to their program, the meaning of that insult, or the nature of their appeal, as if the job of the media were to censor rather than explain.

Words Worth Noting - February 27, 2025

“We are incessantly told that past periods were very bad; and I cheerfully agree that they must have been most horribly bad, if they were really worse than the period we are asked to praise.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly January 18, 1930 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

Words Worth Noting - February 19, 2025

“A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense has really become very uncommon. Straightforward ideas appear strange and unfamiliar, and any thought that does not follow the conventional curve or twist, is supposed to be a sort of joke.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly November 2, 1933 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)