It is one of William Faulkner’s most quoted lines. “The past is never dead,” he wrote in his novel Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” In fact, it’s being rewritten all the time for contemporary contexts. But when college students try to erase whole parts of the historical record, as many seem to want to do these days, it’s time to point out the lessons history has to offer about the consequences of such behavior—and how easily zealous righteousness is transformed into tyranny.
The voices of civil libertarians, as well as community and legal activists, were strangely silent last month despite the announcement by Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne that she wants to institutionalize racial profiling by the government itself.
Yes, that’s right. Racial profiling will apparently be a good thing, not a bad thing, when done by the Wynne government.
The opening of the Paris conference on climate change will be the occasion for the customary lamentations about the imminent demise of life on Earth if we do not pull up our socks as a species and reduce carbon emission levels, and thus avoid the toasting of the world. The adduced scientific evidence does not justify any such state of alarm. Every sane and informed person in the world is concerned about pollution and demands vigilance about any clear trends of climate change and any convincing evidence that human behaviour influences the climate.
Aristotle's Bench Press 