Chesterton alert

GK Chesterton is best known today for his "Father Brown" mysteries, but his essays (which can be found on Project Gutenberg or audio files in Librivox) are still being quoted.

From Insight Scoop /CWR blog about the US 2016 election: GKC writing about the UK's 1924 election:

"The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes," wrote Chesterton, who then stated:
The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

then we have Dricoll at Instapundit quoting GKC:

FALLACIES DO NOT CEASE TO BE FALLACIES BECAUSE THEY BECOME FASHIONS, as G.K. Chesterton said

Instapundit always has the latest about the college idiots, who seem ignorant of basic things like economics (Driscoll's links are about the minimum wage leading to fewer jobs) or "protesters" who now are using Hxtory instead of history...presumably this is a mimic of feminist idiots who used "herstory" for "history", but of course, the word has nothing to do with the word "his": but presumably the protesters are ignorant of where the word came (ancient Greek)...

from Greek historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record, narrative,"

of course the Greek word derives from the word for wise man, so I guess they have a point. But then maybe they should change the non pc word and substitute moros  or more properly ηλίθια γυναίκα

Someone has too much time on their hands.

Or as GKC wrote:

“Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left — sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.” ― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

well, given the state of NSA surveillence, the novel the Man who was Thursday, where most of the the dangerous radicals turn out to be detectives who infiltrated the radicals...heh, sounds like it was written about today's protests (or the protests of the 1960's).

as for the elections:

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the wellbeing of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves. G. K. Chesterton Toronto, 1930

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