Self-described "crap cutter" dishes it out to Corporate Knights

David Warren who, within memory, was the editor of a precious -- and ultimately failed -- little magazine called The Idler, has fetched up as curmudgeon-in-chief at the Ottawa Citizen where he dispenses a three-time-a-week column of opinion, ostensibly about international affairs.

We were struck by the weird detour he took recently in order to dish out insults to the magazine Corporate Knights, which he describes thus:

Among all the gaudy, glossy, grisly, ugly trash I must pull from my mailbox every day, to get at my bills and court summonses, perhaps the most irritating is a giveaway magazine-format piece of junk of undetermined periodicity, entitled Corporate Knights: The Canadian Magazine for Responsible Business.

His column goes on to slam purveyors of various kinds of "green" public policy and accuses Corporate Knights and all its fellow travellers of contributing to the "idiotization" of the public.

It is the inevitable result of the bureaucratization of our public life. As the Nanny State expands, it sucks all the clean air out of civil discourse, and replaces it with the stench of "settled science" and institutional priorities, enumerated by persons who in turn have no idea what they are talking about, because the nonsense they are spouting is never challenged.

This is a terrible, and potentially fatal, environmental problem, for sleepwalking hardly ever ends well. It is why my own number one priority is to find new ways to cut through all the crap.

Well, that's all right then...David Warren is on the case. Once he straightens us out, he may go back to apologizing for the war in Iraq.