Oh, Oh, Canada!

William D. Gairdner

Description

For more than two decades, William D. Gairdner has been a major voice from the conservative resistance, primarily through his bestselling books The Trouble with Canada . . . Still, The War Against the Family, and The Trouble with Democracy.

Now, in this new book, his passionate, probing, and provocative intellect is hard at work, ranging over hot button issues of the day in the spheres of culture, the family, politics, and science. His quick-hit, entertaining, and rousing chapters include "Late Night Thoughts on Equality," "Baby Seals and Babies," "Mourning Marriage," and "Six Types of Freedom." Here's what the famous conservative thinker William F. Buckley Jr. said about Gairdner's original publication of The Trouble with Canada: "His mobilizing passion wonderfully animates an analytical precision that should be the reason for a national -- binational -- celebration."

Sujets

• Passion (emotion)
• Analytic
• Politics
• Entertainment
• Conservatism
• Family
• Passion
• Science
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: BPS Books
• Date de parution: 04 mai 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781927483114
• Langue: English

Extrait

OH, OH CANADA!

Also by William D. Gairdner

The Critical Wager The Trouble with Canada The War Against the Family Constitutional Crackup On Higher Ground The Trouble with Democracy Canada’s Founding Debates(co-editor)

OH, OH CANADA!

Copyright © 2008 by William D. Gairdner

All rights reserOed. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieOal system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by BPS Books Toronto, Canada www.bpsbooks.com A diOision of Bastian Publishing SerOices Ltd.

ISBN 978-0-9784402-9-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-927483-11-4 (ePub) ISBN 978-1-927483-10-7 (ePDF)

Cataloguing in Publication Data aOailable from Library and ArchiOes Canada

CoOer design: Greg DeOitt Design Text design and typesetting: Greg DeOitt Design

Dedicated with love and affection to the wonderful grandchildren I have already — Jackson, Ethan, Walker, Austin, and Mason — and to all those yet to come

CONTENTS

Preface I — Culture Late Night Thoughts on Equality Sticks and Stones Dying for Values Chomsky and Nativism Anthropology and Ethics Canada’s Slave Trade Homeless? Or Family-less? A Hero Gone Can There Be Morality on the Moon?

II — Religion and the “Values” Problem On Atheism A Machine-gun Conversion Opus Dei and “No Pain, No Gain” Baby Seals and Babies

III — Sex, Women, and Family Women and Money Grieving Nichola There Can Be No Sex in Homosexual AIDS and Mortality Rates Brain Sex Women and Equality Mourning Marriage Restoring the Pro-family State

IV — Politics and Law Six Types of Freedom In Defence of Capital Punishment An Elected Senate? Be Careful! Despotism and the French Revolution Swedish and Canadian Socialism Socialism: The Ultimate Conservatism Quebec a Nation? Never! Choosing Your Belonging Rae’s Rambling Rhetoric From History to Harper to “Nation” The Charter at Twenty-Five The Ruse of Political Apologies The Death of Cicero The Natural Law in a Nutshell

Part V — Science Biking on the Brain Physics and Mystics

Global Warming in a Nutshell

PREFACE

When I was a young boy, a wise old man told me there were two ways to answer a serious question. “You can give a first-order answer,” he said, “which is what most people do, in the hope that they will not have to work any harder. Or, you can decide to do the work, and find a second-order answer.” “What is the difference?” I asked, and he answered by pointing to a radio sitting on the desk beside him, one of those older types with a cover, a dial, and a few rotating buttons. “If I asked you how this radio works,” he said, “you could give what most people would say is a perfectly good and perfectly true answer by showing how to turn it on, like this.” He reached for the first dial and turned it on. Then he twiddled another dial and found a pleasant music station. Smiling, he said, “You see? That’s how the radio works. On-off, volume control, station-finder, and so on. Most people who see me do this will never ask how a radio works again, and will never want to know anything more about it. My answer is good and true, but for the really curious person is not very satisfying. It tells how the radiooperatesbut does not say how it reallyworks.” At this point he lifted the cover off the radio and showed me something I had never seen before: a little jungle of glowing vacuum tubes and a tangle of coloured wires and all sorts of other gizmos soldered together that had always been hidden from view just because I had never bothered to take a radio apart myself. Then he gave me what he called a second-order answer to the question. I must admit, I was enthralled, because what he told me seemed like magic. He explained about radio waves, and how they were invented, and when, and by whom, and how they travel through the air at various frequencies and even pass through our bodies, and how they hit the radio antenna — here it is, right here, he showed me — and how this and that tube (which had to be a vacuum, I can’t remember why) would convert the radio wave into the sounds of the beautiful music I was hearing at that very moment. I remember asking him, “But how, but howreally?” And I knew at that very moment that he had hooked me. I have never thought about a radio — or much else — in quite the same way since. Now this little story is just my way of saying that although he is long gone now, this lovely old man is still with me, like a voice encouraging me to take the cover off whatever subject I am writing about in order to give readers a satisfying, second-order experience. That is all I have tried to do in every essay in this book. It is my fond hope that after reading them my readers will join the resistance by never accepting less.