I’m not sure that academia attracts heresy. Rather I suspect it’s tenure that generates it. In fact since we’re all, by definition, catholic, without the threat of hell – or in our case unemployment – we’d probably all think unclean… Read More ›
Social and Political Philosophy
COUNTING THE COST
Front-line workers – in healthcare, in law enforcement, and so on – have every right to refuse to be vaccinated. Their employers – hospitals, police departments, and so on – have every right not to let them on the job-site… Read More ›
WHY I MUST BE A WHITE SUPREMACIST
I think I must be a white supremacist. Not because I think all lives matter, contrary to what the Black Lives Matter movement thinks I ought not to think. Rather it’s because mattering requires a ‘for whom?’, and I’m highly… Read More ›
TRISTAN DA CUNHA
In this brave new world of reversing the onus, you’re a racist just in case someone says you are. After all, how can you prove you’re not a racist? In fact to protest your innocence is to confirm your guilt. … Read More ›
SOME PUZZLES ABOUT SEXUAL ‘INTERFERENCE’
I’d hardly be the first to observe that when a small child falls and scrapes her knee, nine times out of ten she looks to her parent before deciding that it hurts. If the parent doesn’t signal alarm, the child… Read More ›
HUMOUR
There’s an important difference between twisted and sick. Dead baby jokes are twisted, but telling them at a SIDS funeral is sick. It might relieve the tension in the room, but I’d hold off unless you really know your crowd…. Read More ›
SNOW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER
A few years ago, the University of Lethbridge went from thirteen-week semesters to twelve. And then this fall, between Virtue Signalling Day (September 30) and cancelling classes today to perform a completely gratuitous Covid reset, we’re down to eleven. If… Read More ›
PARTISAN BLEATING AND UNSEEMLINESS
When you’re at war, it’s perfectly understandable that you’ll mourn your own losses, both military and civilian, you’ll rejoice in the losses of the enemy’s combatants, and you’ll pretty much ignore his ‘collateral’ losses, which before and since have been a… Read More ›
ON THIS TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY
All other things being equal – in this case being equally just anybody – some of us will be saints, some of us will be assholes, but most of us will be neither. For example, the likelihood of an American… Read More ›
THE REPUBLIC OF GILEAD
In the Morgentaler Decision (1988), the Supreme Court of Canada very wisely did an end-run around the metaphysical status of the foetus and chose instead to decriminalize abortion on the grounds that variability in access violated the constitution’s equal protection… Read More ›