by Nigel Scotchmer | Sep 28, 2023 | Essays
ISSN 2817-7363 A Tonic for the Age The Ironist is an open forum to encourage discussion and reflection upon the written word and the world around us to promote critical analysis. Irony, “the recognition of incongruities” (Cleanth Brooks), is a tool that permits...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Sep 27, 2023 | Essays
It is a supreme irony that the Ontario public school system, at least in its Peel District school board, should fall victim to wokeist activists of the ‘cancel culture’ persuasion, militants unrepresentative of Canadian majority opinion. Recent news reports of a...
by Peter Scotchmer | Sep 27, 2023 | Essays
Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack, (John Murray, 2021) Kenneth Baker, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word, (Unicorn, 2016) The aim of those vandals who burn books in an open forum is arguably to...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Sep 17, 2023 | Essays
If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, it makes Jill pretty boring, too. If truth be told, those workaholics Mr. and Mrs. Jack are tedious company, as well. So obsessed has our society become with work, usually paid work, that its antithesis, play, has become...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Sep 15, 2023 | Essays
The Russian writer, dissident, and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1917-2008) was an outspoken critic of communism in what was then called the Soviet Union, and was imprisoned in the Siberian gulag for eight years for critical comments he...
by Nigel Scotchmer | Sep 9, 2023 | Essays
On First Looking into Perry’s Podcast Much have I travell’d on the internet, And many goodly vids and jpegs seen; Round many reels & tik toks have I been Which bards in fealty to Osiris hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d...