Brampton, Ontario, situated in the sprawling outer suburbs of the Greater Toronto Area, is in many ways your typical Canadian city: rows and rows of middle-class houses with verdant lawns line quiet streets, with strip-mall parking lots and big-box stores …
Society without an Organizing Thesis
For the last 250 years, the United States, Great Britain, and most of the developed world have been guided by the principles of liberalism (John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, etc.) — that free markets, free people (freedom of speech, …
Society without an Organizing Thesis
For the last 250 years, the United States, Great Britain, and most of the developed world have been guided by the principles of liberalism (John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, etc.) — that free markets, free people (freedom of speech, …
Labour’s war on pleasure
Was England ever merry? We’re stagnant, divided, increasingly heavily taxed, and even our Prime Minister promises it’s going to get worse. Barely two months into a premiership in which he promised to “tread more lightly” upon the lives of Britons, …
The UN Invites Its Friends To Dinner
“We The Peoples of the United Nations determined…to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,”
~United Nations Charter Preamble (1945)
This is the third part in a series looking at the plans of the United Nations …
The First Amendment Cannot Stop Pavel Durov’s Arrest in America
The arrest of Pavel Durov in France last week offered yet another distressing sign for the dire state of free speech in the West.
As we’ve repeatedly seen in the United States, parties that once dedicated themselves to free expression …
We No Longer Ponder the Good Life
Last night I went out with friends and had a wonderful conversation about what constitutes the “Good Life.” This came on the heels of a marathon discussion, a few days earlier, with my three adult children and several of their …
It’s Disney Girl vs Oasis Man
Finding myself at a birthday party for much younger celebrants this weekend, I felt a wraith among the living. My life’s ambition to look like Michelle Pfeiffer had finally been realised — only it was the Stardust Pfeiffer, a 5,000-year-old …
Save the Voters, Replace the Schools
It’s a modern fetish that we’re brilliant while our ancestors were idiots. After all, they didn’t have iPhones, the Internet, or Kim Kardashian.
This is also academic consensus, for what it’s worth: called the Flynn effect, the idea is people …
The Seven Deadly Sins of Our World
I. When did the crisis begin?
Lots of writers in the Resistance try to figure out when the crisis began (the crisis being that global monopoly capitalism is trying to enslave the entire developed world via chronic illness).
Obviously the …
The Conservative Party needs a hero
When the six MPs vying to be Conservative leader were recently asked some quick-fire questions by party HQ, their interrogation was mostly limited to the light-hearted: “What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?” But …
Who Is Tim Walz?
In April of 2020, our portly, red-faced Aw, shucks governor, Tim Walz, was my hero.
He’d closed the public schools in our state on March 15th, but spoke—this former teacher and coach—with solemn grace. “I want to be very clear …
The Trajectory of Emergency Lands on Price Controls
The US’s serious bout of inflation – mirrored in many countries in the world – was set in motion in the first week of March 2020, like much of the rest of our ongoing emergency. This was a fortnight before …
Lessons from Poland: Elites and the Bonds We Forge
One of the great gifts of my life was wandering into a class on Contemporary Poland in college taught by a humane and deeply knowledgeable man named James T. Flynn. There, for the first time, I was forced to address …
The Republicans’ weird problem predates Vance
Politics has taken an unexpected turn. For decades, weirdness was associated with the Democrats. Excessively concerned with a culture war most Americans don’t care about while remaining captive to parochial subcultures — this used to be the purview of the …