Even being attacked can be educational and enlightening. In November 2020, eight official student groups published a public letter demanding that the McGill Administration rescind my Emeritus status. This was allegedly necessary in order to honor “the right of Muslims...
Prioritizing the fight for “social justice” or any other version of “justice” is a guarantee of unending warfare. Obsession with “justice” focuses on the past, on allegedly unjust deeds suffered by the party deeming itself a victim. That the past is long, and includes...
Canadians learned during the last years that they are completely and totally at the mercy of government officials and bureaucrats, no matter how ignorant or authoritarian they might be. These government figures demanded obedience of Canadians, or else. The “or else”...
Do you think that without electricity you can charge an electric car? The governor of California Gavin Newsom and the dozen states that follow California’s rules do, and so apparently does Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada. They have mandated electric cars by...
Artificial intelligence has come a long way. Unlike the rudimentary software of the past, modern-day programs such as ChatGPT are truly impressive. Whether you need a 1,000-word essay summarizing the history of Manitoba, a 500-word article extolling the virtues of...
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a recent rush visit to the Saskatchewan Research Council’s experimental rare earth refining facility in Saskatoon. He touted his government’s efforts to promote rare earth discovery, development, and extraction, along with the...
What do feminists want? Is feminism an inclusive movement striving for gender equality and justice for all, or is it a partisan movement seeking advantage and benefits for females at the expense of males? What exactly is feminism's attitude toward males? Is it...
On a winter river bank, a scorpion approaches a frog. “Mr. Frog, would you carry me across the river?” “Do you think I am crazy, Mr. Scorpion? You could sting me and kill me.” “But why would I sting you, when I would drown as a result?” “Hmmm. Maybe.” “Be reasonable,...
Western Universities have been major contributors to our civilization and others through scientific discovery and humanistic scholarship. Knowledge both old and new has been expanded, enriched, and diffused. Universities have also been an important channel of upward...
Facts that are inconvenient to the “woke” social justice narrative have to be explained away. The narrative is that we live in a class society in which whites, males, heterosexuals, Christians and Jews, and the rich all oppress people of color, females, LGBTQ++,...
It is common to observe projection in campus and party politics, and in human affairs generally. “Projection” is a well-understood psychological mechanism in which a person or collective accuses another of doing what the accuser himself or itself is doing....
There is a common cultural dynamic in which competition among members of a social or political movement for the prestige of ideological purity and group leadership leads to more and more extreme substantive positions. Examples are countless: Christianity, based on a...
What do feminists want? Is feminism an inclusive movement striving for gender equality and justice for all, or is it a partisan movement seeking advantage and benefits for females at the expense of males?
When I first took up my teaching post in 1968, a bright undergraduate said to me, “North American culture is the most corrupt in the world.” I was rather shocked to hear this, having just returned from a year of ethnographic research in the Middle East, where arguably...
Today, many people, in the U.S., Canada, and the rest of the West, have rejected liberal democracy in favor of “woke” identity politics and cultural Marxist “social justice.” Following the Marxist vision of society as a division of classes, with the oppressed victims...