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Showing posts with the label Taylor (Charles)

On the “51st state”

Winter, for practical purposes, has ended.


Trump’s bizarre second term keeps lighting up the blogosphere. Will or won’t he annex Greenland and Canada? Is he serious? Who knows? Does he know if he’s serious?

What’s eye-opening, to me, is how seriously Canadians regard this bluster. But then Canadians have long feared annexation in one guise or another. There’s quite a literature on this. I never knew!

This book by George Grant is a notable example.

I’m tempted, now, to re-read Charles Taylor’s philosophy in light of the imperialist threat.

This list of Canada’s “most important” books (part one; part two) also is worth consulting. (Grant’s book is #41.) We may as well read what Canadians have to say, before we conquer them.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In the hullabaloo I’d forgotten that outstanding YouTube channel, Un mundo inmenso. Its latest video is about Bangladesh. Speak of a neglected nation! Did you know that one of every twenty people on Earth is Bangladeshi? That the country is cricket- and soccer-mad? That Argentina’s soccer team has more fans in Bangladesh than in Argentina? (Big deal, cosmologists would say: the size of the universe guarantees that Argentina’s fans are many times more numerous on other planets …)

A modest ambition

Side-project: a paper on “atomism” in political theory, though the heyday of that discussion was in the 1980s.

Turns out, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor was born exactly 50 years before I was, on November 5, 1931. His own “atomism” paper was first published in 1979. If, by 2029, I publish something of that caliber, or calibre, my ambition will be fulfilled.

(I have no ambition to write anything comparable to Sources of the Self.)