This is the night before the U.S. election. Unless you figure you can’t lose – or unless you figure you can’t win – you have to have two speeches ready for election night, a victory speech and a concession speech…. Read More ›
Everything You Wanted to Know About What’s Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask
CHARLIE HEBDO VS THE PROPHET
Rightly or wrongly we can decide when we’re more at our leisure; but in the meantime, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice can be taken as pretty much the canon on distributive justice, at least in our relatively affluent Western… Read More ›
HOW TO BE BOTH PRIVILEGED AND WOKE
For some time now I’ve been standing back and keeping bemused score on the latest salvos in the Great Cancel War, a war that’s been going on since even before we emerged from the cave. Sometimes it’s been about sedition,… Read More ›
EATING BREAKFAST TOGETHER
A considerable portion of our brains is dedicated to recognising faces at a distance because our most dangerous predators are others of our species. That friend-or-foe protocol atrophies when we become habituated to living in civil society. But put a… Read More ›
COMPELLED SPEECH
Cf. the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the idea driving the current culture wars is that language controls thought, and thought controls behaviour. So he who controls the words we speak controls the world. And, of course, he who controls the world controls… Read More ›
RACE RELATIONS IN CANADA
Okay, let’s settle this business once and for all. When Europeans came to this continent, and as their settlements crept west, they discovered the land was already occupied. Seeing this – and had they been as ‘woke’ as some of… Read More ›
THE N-WORD AND GENOCIDE
I’m jealous. I write over 200 blog entries trashing everything from Black Lives Matter to trans-activism to indigenous land claims to Israeli Apartheid to … And what do I get? Nothin’! Frances Widdowson, a tenured professor at Mount Royal University… Read More ›
WHITE FRAGILITY
White Fragility? Read it? Hell, I haven’t even blogged on it yet! Let’s fix that right now. I’m not sure what colour I am. I’m lighter than most brown people, but I’m darker than some blacks. But whatever colour I… Read More ›
THE REPARATIONS ARGUMENT
When receiving an award, be it for this or for that, it’s now considered churlish not to acknowledge that, “We stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.” Only at one’s peril should this be confused with “We… Read More ›
THE SCRUM
*This post was first published on May 11, 2020 English has one distinct advantage over Italian. The distinction between an assertive and interrogative is embedded in the construction of the sentence. In writing Italians have to rely on the question mark,… Read More ›
Paulosophical Vimplications 