Rex Krueger
Published 21 Aug 2025
August 22, 2025
You built a tool chest. Now, make it YOURS.
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Resolved – This country’s youth will not fight to defend this country
On Tuesday, John Robson discussed the results of a recent Angus Reid survey that, among other things, indicated that Canadians are at least as anti-military as they’ve been since the first Trudeau government:
Canadian soldiers set a perimeter position after disembarking a U.S. Navy landing craft during a simulated amphibious landing, 24 April 2009.
U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer Seth Johnson via Wikimedia Commons.
The National Post reports an Angus Reid survey finding that a significant majority of us favour compulsory voluntary service by the youth of today. Which might sound like a bracingly traditional Jordan Peterson clean-your-room, stand-up-straight, shoulders-back attitude until you read the fine print, which would risk making Peterson ill if he weren’t already. Because it turns out we want to conscript them to work in health care so we get stuff we didn’t pay for, not to defend the country because if ye break faith and so on.
According to the survey, 74 per cent of respondents want young people to have to give a year of their lives to bolstering our failing, structurally unsound socialized medical system. Respondents were also in favour of mandatory service in support of the environment (73 per cent), “youth services” (72 per cent), whatever it might be, and “civil protection” (70 per cent). But when it comes to (ugh) national defence, just 43 per cent supported it, with 44 per cent opposed.
Spending on comfort while barbarians undermine the city walls lacks prudence as well as dignity. As I observed in a long-ago graduate-school debate about American national security, it didn’t matter how wonderfully progressive the Dutch social welfare system was in 1940 when the Nazis came calling. And we too seem to have our priorities backward.
If I might confuse the government by discussing principles of political economy, there are good reasons why national defence is considered a binding duty on those able to contribute to it. First is the “free rider” problem that everyone benefits from successful protection of the community, especially, at least in a narrow and hedonistic sense, if you send some other chump to die for your freedom while you recline comfortably at home.
Second is the moral consideration that, as John Stuart Mill famously if uncharacteristically put it, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse”. Which comes from, yes, his “Principles of Political Economy”.
Mill was no warmonger. As he immediately continued, “When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people”.
But not all wars are like Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, let alone Hamas’s attack on Israel. As the anything-but-bellicose Mill added, “A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice — is often the means of their regeneration”.
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History’s Oldest Dessert – 4,000 Year Old Mersu
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 18 Mar 2025Short pastry filled with pistachios and dates
City/Region: Mari, Mesopotamia
Time Period: c. 1800 B.C.E.In the ancient ruined Mesopotamian city of Mari, a clay tablet receipt from 4,000 years ago was found that mentioned dates and pistachios for making mersu for the king. We don’t know exactly what mersu was or if there were other ingredients in it, but I think there was more to it than just dates and pistachios. The king employed eight specialists who made mersu, so my guess is that it was at least as complicated as this pastry, possibly much more so.
The flavor combination in this interpretation is wonderful. The pastry is a little crumbly, and the filling is chewy, rich, and quite sweet, with the added texture of the nuts.
I made my pastry dough unsweetened and I really liked the contrast between the unsweetened dough and the very sweet filling, but you can add some date syrup or honey to your dough if you’d like.
1 gur of dates
And 10 sila of pistachios
For making mersu
Meal of the king
— Receipt from Mari, c. 1800 BCE
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QotD: “White fragility”
White fragility is the sort of powerful notion that, once articulated, becomes easily recognizable and widely applicable … But stare at it a little longer and one realizes how slippery it is, too. As defined by [White Fragility author Robin] DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable; any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point. Any dissent from “White Fragility” is itself white fragility. From such circular logic do thought leaders and bestsellers arise. This book exists for white readers. “I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,” DiAngelo explains. “I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective”. It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. “White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,” DiAngelo writes, a system “we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves”. … Progressive whites, those who consider themselves attuned to racial justice, are not exempt from DiAngelo’s analysis. If anything, they are more susceptible to it. “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color,” she writes. “[T]o the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived …” … It is a bleak view, one in which all political and moral beliefs are reduced to posturing and hypocrisy.
Carlos Lozada, “White fragility is real. But ‘White Fragility’ is flawed,” Washington Post, quoted by Ann Althouse, 2020-06-19.
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