John Robson
John Robson is a documentary film-maker, columnist with the National Post, commentator-at-large for News Talk Radio 580 CFRA in Ottawa and an Invited Professor at the University of Ottawa. He holds a PhD in American history from the University of Texas at Austin. You can see his work at www.johnrobson.ca
Bio last updated November 24th, 2021.
Articles by John Robson
A Harrowing Heartwarming Tale
By John Robson
March 3, 2020
Having sat on the edge of his seat during the movie 1917, John Robson writes the film depicts a war story with likeable characters and requisite tension.
But all that prelude was necessary because the first way the film 1917 could have failed was, like the film Passchendaele, to be a trite anti-war movie The film could also have failed by being a tritely conventional buddy movie
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Pretenders to the Devil’s Throne
John Robson
August 28, 2019
John Robson argues the vanity of Ottawa’s recent Satanic mass wasn’t just that it mocked Catholicism. It’s that the assembled Devil worshipers didn’t sincerely believe there’s a Devil.
And at any rate Rebecca Atkinson in Convivium described the scene with human charity: “A crowd of an estimated 200 people spilled onto the sidewalks of a downtown street in Ottawa’s Byward Market to counter Canada’s allegedly first satanic black mass occurring inside a bar on the opposite side ...
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Heading Off The Robots
John Robson
April 16, 2019
Ottawa journalist John Robson warns that once machines become intelligent enough to tell human beings precisely what we’re good for, we might not like answer.
By now, the good computers are not just so much better than the best humans that there’s nothing interesting about playing, they increasingly approach chess strategy in ways we don’t understand (BTW I don’t claim to be much good at chess, but if you don’t know what the Panov-Botvinnik Attack is, tru...
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Redeeming a Doofus Sweater
John Robson
December 21, 2018
Our reviewer, John Robson, caps his acid pen after discovering that a musical version of “The Hockey Sweater” scores where Roch Carrier’s original short story whiffed worse than the Leafs trying to make the playoffs.
What? No redemption? No character development? Everybody hates everybody? Boo! I couldn’t imagine how anyone could turn this into a musical you’d want to watch even if you like musicals, or indeed into a musical at all since it’s barely three pages long For starters, Roch’s mother is much more three...
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Only Ourselves To Thank
John Robson
February 2, 2017
Canada has been transformed in the 50 years since Canada’s 1967 Centennial. For some, the change shows we are now what history always meant us to be. But contrary voices have been to argue that we have, in fact, been cut off from our national origins, and natural development, by calculated ideological schemes.
Yet he immediately claims that Canada’s transformation into a place that’s actually cool and worth inhabiting was not the result of “political decisions, parliamentary votes, court rulings and Royal Commissions…” Rather, “the explosions of official novelty that were launched in and around 1967 weren...
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A Gift that Cannot be Given
John Robson
December 20, 2016
Music that appears effortless, music where the struggle is achingly felt in every note, simple music, bafflingly complex music, sad songs, haunting songs, joyful songs, marches, all leave me mute with admiration and wonder as well as in compliance with that court order, precisely because I know it i...
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Let Free Markets Distribute
John Robson
June 1, 2013
G.K. Chesterton was right about almost everything, John Robson argues, except economics, which he got horribly, horribly wrong.
Second, those psychos who do pursue money or market share with mentally unsound determination fail because people who are good at business don't get rich by cutting the throats of their rivals, associates and customers He felt that by concentrating property in a few hands, capitalism took it out of ...