I guess I should link to my Post column from Tuesday, even though I wasn't totally happy with it; I started it late, intended to devote a great deal of it to the revived NHL Fighting Question, and lost heart somewhat because I have very little to say that is new, per se, and was somewhat intimidated by Chris Selley's column taking the meta angle on the debate (while at the same time fearing that I might provoke myself into a violation of his orderliness rules).
Selley rightly asks why we should polemicize, and descend so easily to ad hominem, in the absence of genuinely compelling evidence concerning what effect the abolition of fighting would have on the regular-season game. Of course, this raises the political question whether social experimentation is wise where its consequences are unforeseeable, and conservatives and (modern) liberals are defined by canned answers to that question. The conservative says "The consequences are always unforeseeable, and where the existing order or way of life is a contingent achievement built on the wisdom of many generations, experimentation is inherently more likely to inflict more harm than benefit." The liberal says "Progress is impossible without experimentation: defending the status quo means, precisely, defending the results of past experiments, so why should we feel hesitant to perform them in our time?" And both are quite right.
The reason I'm not a liberal, in this sense of the word, is not that the liberal premise is wrong. The reason is that experimentation cannot be justified on the liberal premise if we are not willing to abandon failed experiments, and liberals never do abandon them. Even where the failure is quite palpable, as with cookie-cutter no-fault divorce or monopolistic public schools, their only answer is to shriek "SO YOU WANT TO GO BACK TO THE BAD OLD DAYS, DO YOU?" This is the clue that they are not really liberals, but utopians smitten with the romance of revolution.
The parallel conservative failing is, of course, to defend the indefensible. I do not mind much when conservatives do this—but you will notice if you observe me closely that it does raise my hackles when they defend order by the liberal means of introducing preposterous novelties, such as "creation science" in the classroom, or the notion that any therapeutic abortion is ipso facto murder. To me, this makes them worst of all: dangerous utopians without the flimsy excuse of good intentions.
Anyway, there's not too much left about fighting in that column. And, really, the most important point I made was the one about the CFM's dubious grocery list of "shovel-ready" projects. What's the earliest that ground could possibly be broken on the LRT NAIT extension—about the year 2012? We could have cold fusion and personal jetpacks by then, you horseshitters.