Blog – Page 16 – William Gairdner

Canada’s Great Political System

William Gairdner
February 19, 2017
Blog
0 Comments

My next few blogs will describe some of the things that make Canada great – and better than most other countries and cultures ( hope I do not get arrested for writing something so politically-incorrect!) *******************…

Romanticism & Multiculturalism: The Roots of Our Soft-Fascism

William Gairdner
February 16, 2017
Blog
0 Comments

Romanticism – the Root of Fascism Romanticism began by favouring emotion over cold reason and particular local identity and experience over universal experience. It was especially keen to repudiate the sort of French rationalism that was being imposed on most…

Canada’s Phony Refugee System

William Gairdner
February 9, 2017
Blog
0 Comments

There is currently much agitation in the USA over immigration and refugees. Canadians are prone to judge the American dust-up with a certain supercilious air, while knowing very little of the situation at their own doorstep. What follows is an…

How I Reversed My Vascular Disease

William Gairdner
January 30, 2017
Blog
0 Comments

Let me begin with what will strike anyone familiar with the matter of vascular disease as an heretical statement: I am fairly certain that my vascular disease is in the process of reversing, as the numbers at the end of…

Tom Wolfe and “The Kingdom of Speech”

William Gairdner
January 16, 2017
Blog
0 Comments

Yesterday, I read Tom Wolfe’s 185-page book, The Kingdom of Speech (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016). It’s a curious but apt title for such a book, implying, as becomes apparent by the end, that the human ability to…

Mill’s Limits on Liberty

William Gairdner
January 2, 2017
Blog
0 Comments

This is the last blog-installment taken, slightly revised, from chapter Eight, “The Road to Hyperdemocracy,” in The Trouble With Democracy (Stoddart, 2001, and BPS Books, 208).…

Mill’s “Good” – Only a Personal Good

William Gairdner
December 30, 2016
Blog
0 Comments

Only A Personal Good The central message sent by Mill to the modern democracies has been his insistence that we must be left free for “framing the plan of our life to suit our character” (1), and that “the only…

Mills Two Democracies

William Gairdner
December 28, 2016
Blog
0 Comments

The Two Democracies This war between the two democracies is still under way. It had been the failure and – to most intellectuals of the time – the tremendous disappointment of the theory and practice of Rousseau’s collectivist freedom that…

Mill’s Religion of the Self

William Gairdner
December 22, 2016
Blog
0 Comments

The New Religion Of The Self In an earlier chapter we discussed the two contrasting metaphors of the Mirror and the Lamp that stand for the vast cultural shift from the Classical/Christian to the Romantic ethos.[i] The metaphor of the…

Mill’s Sham Morality

William Gairdner
December 20, 2016
Blog
0 Comments

Sham Morality: Mill’s Two Fibs and The New Golden Rule His assault began with the bold announcement that the object of his essay was “to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with…