Don’t boo this week, Ontario. Vote.

Speaking of voting, consider this Economist dispatch about the “mind-bending electoral maths” of the forthcoming German election and tell me, again, why proportional representation is inherently superior to our own venerable system?

Speaking of dubious high-ground, Patrick West’s guest piece in the Spectator, which follows a political study reported by the Guardian, is the most interesting thing that I read all week:

Left-wing activists are less likely to understand or listen to people with conservative beliefs, compared to the rest of the population. They are more inclined to view them negatively, and to dismiss them as having ‘been misled’ in forming their opinions. This is the revelation on the front page of the Guardian today.

I think the key word here is activist—which I’ve come to see as having about as much tension with the word citizen as the words right and left have with each other.

The inaugural grand masters of science fiction each treated themselves to respective laws of the universe, and so it’s always nice to see anyone in a more, uh, serious field indulge in a set themselves. Paul Wells has dusted his four laws off in a recent post, just in time for the voting season. You know, someone should really compile a dictionary of various laws of Canadian political physics (as it were).

I’ve written in past about the moral poverty of invoking the “right side of history”—I positioned character as a better anchor, which I stand by, but drove by this more obvious, critical point from historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, from his recent Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast appearance:

…the thing about history is, it’s assumed an enormous power now. And the reason for that is that we don’t have religion anymore in our secular societies. And so where we look for authentic, legitimate, sacred power, where we look for sanctity, we don't look to God anymore. […] But we look to history. So when President Putin wants to invade Ukraine, he doesn’t mention God. He mentions history.

Speaking of podcasts and historians, Margaret MacMillian sure makes a sensible case for there being enough room to both appreciate one’s country while expecting more of it in future, on her a recent chat with the Hub podcast.