Happy Yule!

One of the nice things about being a literate person in the modern age is the ability to read old, old books. I like to do this because it acts as a window into a different world. This helps me put the present times into perspective and gives me the evidence I need to discard some of our modern world's deepest superstitions.

One of the books I am talking about are the Icelandic Sagas, which record the age of the old Norse. They were written down long after Iceland had embraced Christianity, but they retain enough of the "old ways'" flavour that I think I can get some inkling of pre-Christian Europe. One passage I loved to read was where family and friends had gathered for the Yule celebration. I suspect that most of us would recognize much that went on---people traveling to visit bringing gifts, a decorated tree brought into the house, a roaring fire, and, lots of food and drink.

So when people complain about wanting an "old-fashioned Christmas", I agree, whole-heartedly. I say "yes! I want to go back to celebrating Yule!"

In keeping with that tradition, I'm taking a three week vacation from this blog, my day job, and, I'm just going to relax, enjoy time with friends, and, eat and drink. It's been a hard year for me in many ways. As we enter the shortest day and longest night of the year (Dec 21st) I will reflect on the fact that winter will not last forever, nights will grow shorter, and, no matter how bad it seems there are always green shoots hidden beneath the snow. So enjoy your family and friends!

Norse Yule Celebration, Image: Reykjavik City Museum, c/o The Lincolnite
(Since I posted this, I noticed all the women are working and the men are having a good time.
Not much different from my childhood---but I can at least remember ploughing until midnight one Xmas eve.)

Propaganda in a Free Society

In my last post I took the time to work out an argument that supports the idea of "deplatforming" neo-Fascists. In this week's op-ed I'd like to build on that foundation to talk about some disturbing trends that I've recently noticed outside the loony bin and on the main stage of our political theatre. 

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On April 18th Canadaland published a leaked internal memo from the Toronto Sun that outlined how management wanted their reporters and journalists to cover the upcoming Ontario election. It makes for interesting reading. Here's part of the introduction:

Editorial Perspective:

• The past 14 years of progressive Liberal policies have undermined Ontario’s economy, electricity system and core public services and introduced unprecedented social division.
• Successive Liberal governments have been fiscally reckless, plagued by scandal, self-serving and demonstratively harmed the quality of life for millions of Ontarions.
• Our focus will focus on exposing the Liberal record during the campaign and advocating for change that addresses the critical need to responsibly address chronic and growing problems in health, education and economy.
• We are not better off than we were 15 years ago.

It goes on to outline a list of stories that management wanted their staff to write about. Consider the following, which are only a few chosen from a long list:

Issue: Hydro 

Story: The $9.2 billion fire sale of Hydro One was just one of many blunders that undermined the province’s electricity sector and drove up energy rates. We revisit the government’s failed green energy plan, articular ongoing and future costs, look back at the gas plant scandal and costs and detail how soon after the election rates will rise, and what the 25% rate cut will cost. We look at the high salaries and bonuses paid to hydro execs and dig into the Hydro One purchase of a U.S. coal plant and toxic sludge farm. Does anyone have a realistic plan for hydro?

Issue: Carbon tax 

Story: We compare Liberal cap-and-trade with Conservative and NDP plans for carbon pricing. We look at the impact carbon taxes will have on Ontario’s economy, from jobs to grocery and gasoline prices. We review failure of carbon taxes elsewhere, and problematic nature of implementing if the U.S. does not.

Issue: Minimum Wage 

Story: Ontario’s Financial Accountability Office estimated as many as 50,000 people could lose their jobs this year because of the wage hike. In January, 59,300 part-time workers lost their jobs. Declines have flattened out since then. We look at stats as they’re published during the campaign. Meanwhile, a 22.5 per cent cut in Ontario’s business tax from 4.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent won’t offset increased staffing costs and other incentives such as paid sick days and three weeks paid vacation for workers with five years on the job.We’re also increasingly seeing unintentional consequences, including part-time work for people with disabilities.

Issue: Green Energy

Story: Ontario’s Liberals have wasted billions on unnecessary wind and solar energy. We look at links between those who benefited and party. We also look at carbon taxes and impact on consumers. Cost of green energy? Corporate welfare? Promised Green jobs?

Please note, this is a strange form of journalism in that the managers are telling their writers and researchers what their conclusions should be before they go out to look at the facts. This isn't how news is written, instead this is propaganda. (This certainly isn't how I go about writing stories for the Back-Grounder. While it is true that I often have some vague idea about how I want to write a story, this usually goes out the window when I start doing research and learn how little I knew going in. For example, last week I thought I'd focus on climate change denial before I started researching and I ended up going with the problem of media concentration. That's how journalism is supposed to work---.)

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Paul Godfrey,
Conservative Politician and Media Tycoon
Image by Vibhu c/o Wikicommons

The Toronto Sun is owned by "the Postmedia Network". This is a very large newspaper chain that was accumulated by and is currently managed by Paul Godfrey (even though it is now owned by an American asset management firm called "Golden Tree Asset Management".) Godfrey doesn't come from a background in journalism---or even ordinary business. Instead he has been involved with various things such as: Conservative municipal politics (Alderman in North York 1964-73, then appointed to various higher offices such as North York Board of Control, Metropolitan Toronto Council, ending up his career as Chairman of Metropolitan Toronto in 1984), public administration (chair of Ontario Lottery and Gaming corporation 2009-2013), and, professional sports (president and CEO of Toronto Bluejays 2000-2008.) (The Wikipedia article linked to his name is really worth reading. The man has had his thumb in a lot of pies over the years.)

Just to give you an idea of how important he is to Canadian journalism, here's a list of Postmedia Network properties:

Newspapers

• National Post
• Calgary Herald
• Cornwall Standard Freeholder
• Edmonton Journal
• London Free Press
• Montreal Gazette
• Ottawa Citizen
• Regina Leader-Post
• The Star Phoenix (Saskatoon)
• The Vancouver Sun 
• Windsor Star
• Calgary Sun
• Edmonton Sun
• Ottawa Sun
• The Province (Vancouver)
• Toronto Sun
• Winnipeg Sun
• 24 Hours (Toronto, Vancouver)
• Airdrie Echo (tabloid)
• Barrie Examiner (broadsheet) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Belleville Intelligencer (broadsheet)
• Bow Valley Crag & Canyon (tabloid)
• Brantford Expositor (broadsheet)
• Bradford Times (tabloid) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Brockville Recorder and Times (broadsheet)
• Camrose Canadian (tabloid), closing 2018
• Chatham This Week (tabloid)
• Clinton News-Record (tabloid)
• Cochrane Times (Alberta) (tabloid)
• Cochrane Times-Post (tabloid)
• Collingwood Enterprise Bulletin sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Cornwall Standard Freeholder (broadsheet)
• Drayton Valley Western Review (tabloid)
• Edson Leader (tabloid)
• Elliot Lake Standard (tabloid)
• Fort McMurray Today (tabloid)
• Fort Saskatchewan Record (tabloid)
• Goderich Signal-Star (tabloid)
• Grande Prairie Daily Herald-Tribune (tabloid)
• Hanna Herald (tabloid)
• High River Times (tabloid)
• Hinton Parklander (tabloid)
• Kenora Daily Miner and News (broadsheet)
• Kincardine News (tabloid)
• Kingston Whig-Standard (broadsheet)
• Kingston This Week (tabloid)
• Lakeshore Advance (Grand Bend; tabloid)
• Lloydminster Meridian Booster (tabloid)
• Mid-North Monitor (Espanola; tabloid)
• Mayerthorpe Freelancer (tabloid)
• Nanton News (tabloid)
• Niagara Falls Review (broadsheet) sold to Torstar, 2017
• North Bay Nugget (broadsheet)
• Norwich Gazette, closing 2018
• Orillia Packet & Times (broadsheet) sold to Torstar and closed, 2017[17]
• Owen Sound Sun Times (broadsheet)
• Peace River Record-Gazette (broadsheet)
• Pembroke Daily Observer (broadsheet), ceasing print edition 2018
• Peterborough Examiner (broadsheet) sold to Torstar, 2017
• Pincher Creek Echo (tabloid)
• Sault Star (broadsheet)
• Simcoe Reformer (tabloid)
• St. Catharines Standard (broadsheet) sold to Torstar in 2017
• St. Thomas Times-Journal (tabloid)
• Strathmore Standard (tabloid), closing 2018
• Stratford Beacon Herald (broadsheet)
• Sudbury Star (broadsheet)
• Timmins Daily Press (broadsheet)
• Vulcan Advocate (tabloid)
• Whitecourt Star (tabloid)
• Woodstock Sentinel-Review (broadsheet)

Magazines:

• Financial Post Business
• Living Windsor
• Swerve
• TVtimes

Websites:

• Canada.com
• celebrating.com
• connecting.com
• driving.ca
• househunting.ca
• remembering.ca
• shoplocal.ca
• SwarmJam.com
• Infomart.com
• in addition, Postmedia Network owns all websites associated with all properties listed on this page either wholly or in partnership.

(All of the info above comes from a Wikipedia article. I thought it would be 

valuable for readers to get an idea of the scale of Postmedia Network holdings.)

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What's happening here is a wealthy business man with ties to the Conservative Party is creating a Canadian equivalent of Fox News---a private propaganda outlet that relentlessly pushes a partisan viewpoint under the guise of "journalism".

It's important to understand how propaganda was created in older authoritarian nations like the Soviet Union. It wasn't particularly the case that each editor and reporter had an assigned KGB officer that they answered to. Instead, what happened was people who were interested as working as journalists realized "what side of the bread was buttered" and wrote stories accordingly. People who did this well and didn't let things like facts get in the way of the "party line" tended to get promoted. The foolishly idealistic, on the other hand, were quickly identified and they lost their jobs and never got hired again. No need for thumbscrews and beatings---the vast majority of people will simply do what they need to do in order to pay the mortgage and feed the family. Reporters are especially vulnerable to this sort of thing now because newspapers are in "free fall" and jobs are scarce as hen's teeth with gold fillings.

The other thing that we need to remember is that recent events have shown that even in a modern liberal society propaganda is tremendously successful. All through the scandals rocking the USA right, for example, popular support for Donald Trump has sat at a rock-solid 42% of the body politic. That's what happens when you have a significant fraction of the public who get all their news and information from corporate propaganda outlets like Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting.

The important takeaway from the above is that there is a problem with letting a small number of extremely wealthy and well-connected individuals control the media. Freedom of speech laws don't mean much if one side has a huge, enormously-amplified megaphone and the other side has nothing but the quiet voice of reason. That's why we need to build our own megaphones, and, lessen the ability of "big money" to say whatever they want---no matter how divorced from truth or objectivity.

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The pitch for support shouldn't actually be necessary in this week's op-ed. Do you want to let propaganda machines like Postmedia control what you learn about our society? Or do you want some sort of in-depth coverage that gives an objective, much more complete picture? The choice is up to you---you can support independent, responsible journalism, or, you can passively watch a small number of wealthy individuals amass a "free market" propaganda machine designed to control a large slug of voters. But that choice is easier than it has ever been. Just subscribe to the Guelph Back-Grounder through Patreon or put something in the Tip Jar. Other people have already done it---(thanks Charles for being so awesome!) What's stopping you?

You can also share the Guelph Back-Grounder through social media. Word of mouth is the only advertising I can afford.

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Another issue that is compounding the importance of this debate is the fact that the federal government is aware of the problems that newspapers are currently facing, which is why the Trudeau government has pledged money to help the news media. But the question is, who gets what and how is the money going to be allocated? Certainly, it sounds like Paul Godfrey thinks that he is going to be getting some of it. 

Paul Godfrey, the CEO of Postmedia, which publishes the National Post and daily broadsheets in many of Canada’s largest cities, said that tax credit “could be looked upon as a turning point in the plight of newspapers in Canada.”
“I tip my hat to the prime minister and the finance minister. They deserve a lot of credit,” said Godfrey. “Everyone in journalism should be doing a victory lap around their building right now.”

"$600M in federal funding for media 'a turning point in
the plight of newspapers in Canada’ "
Stuart Thomson, Nov 21st, 2018, The National Post

Of course, it wouldn't be a good idea if journalism actually disappeared. But equally, we don't want the government-of-the-day deciding on a case-by-case basis how this money is going to be divided up. If we don't do that, we will probably end up with an independent board deciding how to divide up the largess. But there will be a temptation to get a group of "establishment media types" together who will give most of the money to the existing media companies---like Postmedia. And if we do that, we run the risk of propping up some really horrible media practices, like managers deciding the editorial policy is to support the party of the guy who manages the paper.

Is this the only way we can deal with news in Canada? Maybe it would make more sense to decide the money needs to be divided up on the basis of how actually independent, objective, and, perhaps even local, the news media really is. I think that voters should make sure that Paul Godfreys and Postmedia don't end up using our tax money to tell us how to vote. What do you think?  

The Democratic Paradox

A few years ago a huge debate erupted on-line about whether or not people should physically fight against the re-emergence of fascism as a political ideal in society. The debate centred around an open white supremicist named Richard Spencer who was "sucker punched" while giving an interview on a sidewalk.

People argued back and forth on this issue using a variety of different starting points.

Some argued that freedom of speech should be an absolute with no exceptions, which means that no one should attack someone else simply because of what they say or advocated. This has more traction in the US than here, simply because Canada---like many countries---has hate speech laws that make it illegal for anyone to advocate certain ideas in public.

There are three separate hatred-related offences: section 318 (advocating genocide), section 319 (publicly inciting hatred likely to lead to a breach of the peace), and section 319 (wilfully promoting hatred).  

(Quoted from the Wikipedia article linked to above)

In contrast, the USA is a tradition of free speech absolutism, which means that they do not allow any infringement on freedom of speech---period. And, as a general rule most American citizens are also free speech absolutists, which I can attest to from conversations with my American wife and her friends. Most of them are somewhat appalled by our hate speech laws and see them as a tremendous assault on personal liberty.

Another dividing line in the discussion centres not on the ideal of free speech but rather on the tactical issue of whether or not it is good politics to punch out fascists. The argument is that while it might be legitimate on a moral basis to physically attack them, it will alienate any bystanders who might be sympathetic to your overall political agenda. It will also make the NAZIs more sympathetic to them because they will then use images of this attack over and over again to point out the hypocrisy of their opponents.

On the other side, people argue that if society doesn't vigorously oppose this ideology every time it becomes visible a process of "normalization" starts to take place. Ideas that were once "beyond the pale" become things that are now open to "legitimate discourse". And people who advocate them start to become important "news-makers" that can play reporters against one another for "access". (If you watch the YouTube clip I've put in above you might notice how Spencer is working very hard to "normalize" himself with the reporter doing the on-street interview. No "frothing at the mouth", just a regular guy trying to express his own, "legitimate" belief system.)

While this process often only goes so far in terms of making certain ideas acceptable to ordinary citizens, it can have a tremendous impact on the ability of organizations supporting these extreme views to reach out to that small fraction of the public who are predisposed to accept them. This is an important point to understand as these groups already understand that they will never constitute a majority point of view in society. Indeed, one of the memes that they bandy about is calling themselves "the three percenters". The reference is to the idea that only three percent of citizens supported the American revolution. If you advocate an authoritarian, armed revolution you don't need to have majority support---just enough armed thugs to force everyone else to accept it.

The philosopher Karl Popper (who lived and suffered through the rise of the NAZIs in Europe) wrote about this issue and called it "The Paradox of Tolerance". Instead of trying to explain the issue myself, I'll use the following cartoon which is widely copied on the Web.

Sorry, I couldn't find an original source for this---even though it has been copied over
and over again. The "Pictoline.com" caption is just a repository of images without attribution.

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Popper's "paradox of tolerance" is probably the best argument for anti-hate speech legislation. It suggests that experience shows that there have to be limits to tolerance in order for it to protect itself. If you accept this idea, then the next stage is to ask yourself what the concerned citizen should do if the state steadfastly refuses to pass and enforce anti-hate speech laws?

There are people who call themselves "Antifa" (ie: Anti-Fascist) who have been trying to shut-down and "deplatform" specific speakers. To understand what is going on, it is important to remember the specific context. There are a class of inflammatory speakers (such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Faith Goldy) who have built a business model around the following formula:  get a small student group to book you as a speaker at a university campus, say as much outrageous nonsense as possible in order to bait students opposed to said nonsense into trying to shut down the event, then plead "censorship" to the media. 

It's important to remember that they are exploiting a couple weaknesses "baked into" a specific place: university campuses. Universities usually have a policy of providing subsidized spaces to campus clubs that they can use to bring in speakers. This means that a small group of radicals on a campus can rent a venue that they could never get (either because of price or beliefs of the owners) if they were trying to book in someone like Yiannopoulos or Goldy through the private sector.

Secondly, universities tend to have an internal culture of free speech absolutism. This comes about because academics tend think in theoretical instead of practical terms, and, research is based on the free flow of ideas. This means that any administration that tried to ban right-wing shit-disturbers from the campus would have to deal with emotional opposition from inside the community. In contrast, businesses and churches that provide most of the venues off campus have totally different motivations---their responsibility is to protect their "brand", which would be tarnished if it became associated with alt-right provocateurs.

Finally, as a group, journalists (the people who report all of this to the general public) also tend to be free speech absolutists who have zero understanding of the sort of issues that Popper deals with in his paradox of tolerance.

Creating a media frenzy through having your public "lecture" disrupted will give you lots and lots of free publicity, which people like Yiannopoulos and Goldy then convert into support from the "three percent" crowd. This support can be mobilized in several ways:  financial (especially for "security" and "legal fees"), names on a list that can then be sold to various nefarious groups looking for the "three percenters", and, book sales. If you look at the clip below, it has all the elements described above. Please note that a "Republican club" booked Milo into a campus hall in Berkeley---an area of the country that is so known to be a hotbed of left-wing thinking that it is called "the people's republic of Berkeley". This venue choice means that the point wasn't to connect with the audience, it was to create a conflict on the streets.  Consider, if you will, how valuable the news clip below is to Yiannopoulos in his quest to connect with "the three percent".  You couldn't buy advertising this good even if you were a billionaire.

Does this mean that the antifa is wrong and that their battle to stop "normalizing" the alt-right is back-firing because it just creates more publicity for them? Not necessarily. It turns out that both Yiannopoulos and Goldy have been banned from using Patreon to raise money for their antics. If you want to know how important this is, consider another---admittedly far less crude---alt-right "star", Jordan Peterson. He has almost 8,500 subscribers on Patreon and rumour has it that he gets $80,000/month off it. In addition, if enough pressure is exerted on college campuses they may rethink the policies that are being exploited by provocateurs. Moreover, news editors might eventually get the message and stop allowing these jerks to "play them like a fiddle" for free publicity.

The secret to "deplatforming" seems to be three-fold:  convince college campuses to stop providing subsidized venues for fascist provocateurs, get the media to stop "normalizing" them in their coverage, and, cut off their access to money through crowd-funding sites like Patreon. This isn't the total answer to dealing with neo-fascism---there are a lot of other elements to our current crazy situation---but it does seem like a logical program to deal with one particular aspect.

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This raises an important point that we need to consider. What is it about "the three percent" crowd that allows it to create such chaos in society far beyond their numbers would indicate? I'd suggest that it's because they are highly motivated. This is why they are far more willing to pull out their credit cards and support their people on Patreon than "progressives". This is also something that needs to change. If you want to read news that actually informs instead of confuses, you have to be willing to pay for it. And this brings me to my usual "beg". Writing this blog is a lot of work. I have a day job (at least until I retire---which will be soon I hope), but if we want young people to have careers in journalism people have get into the habit of paying for content. So what's stopping you from signing up with Patreon? Even as little as a dollar a month will support the model if enough people pony up. A one-time payment in the tip jar is also appreciated.

In addition, don't forget to share posts on your social media! Word-of-mouth is the only way I get the word out about "the Back-Grounder".

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This is enough for one week's op-ed. I hope to go on and talk about the issues I've identified above and how they relate to climate change denial. I think that they are related.

Timor Mortis Conturbat Me

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks of 2001 I was asked to take part in a panel discussion about them at St. John's-Kilmarnock School in Breslau. This place is obviously designed to teach children of wealthy families so they can move forward to take their place as elite members of the community. As such, the people organizing the event were able to find a really broad mix of important people to talk about the subject. There was a protestant minister, a catholic priest, a cabinet minister, someone giving the Israeli perspective, several others I've forgotten---and even me to give the strange, "odd man out" viewpoint.

Sitting on that stage with a lot of people who represented "conventional wisdom", watching teenage students in the audience who were obviously quite conscious that they were being groomed to become future leaders; I was intrigued, then surprised, and, finally horrified by what the other members of the panel discussion were saying. They all harped on a single theme: how awful, horrible, unprecedented, and, totally unexpected the attacks had been. I remember the cabinet minister going on and on about how she was overcome with waves of violent emotion as she watched the attacks.

In effect, everyone else on that stage with me was doing their best to whip the audience into an emotional panic. 

From Fox television's "The Simpsons"

Used under the "Fair Use" copyright provision

Luckily, I had brought my well-worn translation of Dao De Jing, so I opened it up to chapter five and quoted from it: 

1. Heaven and earth are not humane (jen), 

They treat the ten thousand beings as straw dogs (ch'u kou).

The sage is not humane (jen),

He treats the hundred families as straw dogs (ch' kou).

(Ellen Chen trans.)

I explained to the students that "heaven and earth" are the way the ancient Chinese described the laws and forces that govern the universe, "straw dogs" are cheap ritual offerings that are used once and discarded, and, that "the hundred families" are all the individuals in the human race. In effect, that the universe is totally unconcerned with the suffering of individuals, and, that wise people (ie: "the sage") understand this fact and act accordingly. 

I went on to talk about how they should think about this insight. First, I said that every single person in the room was going to die. (You could have heard a pin drop. I don't think that anyone had ever told any of these teens this obvious fact.) I also said that they shouldn't pay attention to the mere fact that 3,000 people died on 9/11 without putting that number into a context. I didn't have the numbers at hand, but I told them to remember that 3,000 deaths would have been considered a very slow day in WW2. (A conservative estimate places the deaths then at 55 million, over 5 years equals over 30,000/day.) I also might have pointed out that more people die from car crashes every year (37,500 in the USA---over 100/day and 2,000 under 16), but I don't remember for sure.

I then said that I was mentioning this fact because it was tremendously important to not get too emotional when something like this happens. That's because if you act out of fear or anger the possibility arises that you will support policies that would involve flailing around like a wounded bear that would make things much, much worse. I said that if people get emotionally freaked out, they could support policies that will result in the death of innocent people in far, far greater numbers as "collateral damage" of an aggressive foreign policy. (I seem to recall the cabinet minister turning and looking at me when I said that---but memory plays tricks.)

Looking back since then it's pretty obvious that my most dire predictions have come true. America flailed around like a wounded bear, and dragged a lot of its allies with them. (All praise to Jean Chretien for refusing to attack Iraq.) Many, many more people have died from "collateral damage" in the "war on terror" than on 9/11 (a "credible" estimate" of 461,000 in Iraq alone) but they weren't white, and, it was "accidental"---so who cares?

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I suspect most readers haven't a clue about what the title of this op-ed means. It's medieval Latin for "the fear of death disturbs me", primarily a reference to the following line in a church ritual: 

Peccantem me quotidie, et non poenitentem, timor mortis conturbat me. Quia in inferno nulla est redemptio, miserere mei, Deus, et salva me.

Sinning daily, and not repenting, the fear of death disturbs me. For there is no redemption in Hell, have mercy on me, o God, and save me.

I came across the line when I studied English literature during the first year of my undergrad degree. It was a line that was used repeatedly in medieval Scottish and English literature. In effect, it was a meme---much like the angry cat one that people trade around today. 

Does copyright apply to memes?
If so, fair use, from this website devoted to them.

Like any other meme, this one was used to spread a fragment of culture among people, namely, that we should think about death. This is similar to the quote from the Dao De Jing that I tossed out at St. John's-Kilmarnock. Our days are numbered and the universe is profoundly indifferent to our mortality. The important point that people used to remember, however, was that this meant that we should always try to live our lives knowing that the next thing you do could be the last thing that you can do. Moreover, that action could well be what we are remembered for and what defines our brief life on earth.

This was considered a very important idea through much of human history and was continued through the Renaissance with the use of another meme: the "memento mori" (ie:  "remember you will die".) What this often consisted of was the inclusion of a human skull in the pieces of art. 

"Young man with a skull", Frans Hals, 1626.
National Gallery, London.
Image c/o Wiki Commons

The memento mori even went further than art. Often educated people would have a skull on their desk, in their studio, or, workshop to remind themselves that they were going to die and that they should live each day as if it was their last.

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The emotion that I felt the most after that school assembly was sadness that the people who should have felt obligated to help these young teens control their fear and anger instead helped whip them up into a greater sense of emotional outrage. I'm afraid that this is what politics has come to in this day-and-age. Even if you don't think it's a good idea to push people to panic, I suspect many politicians believe that they have to at least pay lip service to people's "pain" in order to keep their votes. Unfortunately, there are lots of folks---we call them "populists"---who have no qualms at all about stoking people's anger and/or fear. 

As in so many things, the great author George Orwell was able to articulate this stream in politics. In his novel about totalitarianism, 1984, he described a tactic that the government used to keep the citizens whipped up into a frenzy: the "two minutes of hate".  It was specifically designed to make sure that people don't think but instead feel.

Just to give you a feel for what I'm talking about, take the time to look at these two video clips. The first is from a movie adaptation of Orwell's novel where the two minutes of hate are shown.

 

Next, here's the same clip that has been used to create a video "mashup"---in case the  obvious takeaway from this op-ed isn't clear enough.  ;-)

Emotions are important parts of being a human being. But they need to be tempered by reason. And politicians who genuinely care about the country shouldn't be playing to emotions in order to gain power. And voters should be extremely careful to recognize when they are being "played" by sleazy leaders who are trying manipulate them. One way of doing this that has worked for pretty much all of human history has been for people to remember their own mortality so they can think about how future generations will view their actions.

"The Dance of Death" from the National Gallery of Slovenia
image c/o Wiki Commons

The Curse That is Politics

Many, many years ago at work I was having a conversation---actually, I was listening to a monologue---with a fellow at work about how ludicrously over-paid and worthless the mayor was. At one point I could listen no more without commenting. "I happen to know that the mayor makes less money that we do." (This was actually true, all the people on Guelph Council used to make very little money.) In the space of a heart-beat, without even the time to draw breath, my co-worker announced "Well, then, that explains it! You get what you pay for." He then left the room "in triumph". This left me alone with another fellow who'd been listening without saying anything. "You do realize that that man's vote is every bit as important as yours, don't you?"

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I've run in elections several times. I've built a riding association from scratch. One of the political parties in Ontario has my fingerprints on various parts of it's constitution. I've also got to know some fairly successful elected officials over the years. And I wouldn't wish their lives on my worst enemies.

Why would I say this? Well if you run for office you have to convince a lot of people to vote for you on very flimsy reasons. It's a blunt fact of life that almost no one outside of your immediate family and close friends really knows much of anything about you. And, moreover, most folks know almost nothing about important public policy issues or your particular party's proposals. This means that you need to totally throw out the window any idea that you can run and win based on your personal character or the issues. Instead, what you generally are doing is engaging in a public relations war based on the shallowest of "memes".  (If you don't know what a "meme" is, stop reading my drivel and follow this link to the Wikipedia article and read it. It's probably the most important thing you can do to make sense of politics.)

And don't expect our news media to help out. Where there still is a print media, there are severe space and time limitations on what reporter can write. This limits them to being able to rush off to an assignment, take a picture, get some quotes, and, then hammer out a quick "he said, she said" story before rushing off to the next assignment.

And on-line publications are generally paid-for by advertising clicks. And to make real money, the story has to "become viral", which means that readers share the story with friends and family on social media, which gets other people to post it, and on, and on. (Come to think of it, this is a lot like those letters crazy aunt Bertha used to send saying: "Send this prayer to at least three other friends. If you break the chain horrible things will happen to you!") And to do that you simply cannot be writing about facts or ideas---you have to be punching emotions. Generally this takes two forms: sappy sentimentality (hence all the cute kitten posts) and ANGER. And if you want to get people angry, the last thing you will want to do is show nuance or grey. Absolutely everything has to be dumbed-down to the blackest of black and whitest of white.

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Since I've just made my usual rant about how awful the mainstream media is, I think I'll make my also usual pitch for support through Patreon or the tip jar. It's a thing that people do if they think that my blog posts serve some useful purpose. I've been sick with the flu for a week so I've foolishly decided to try to write a humorous rant (probably because of the fever.) James Howard Kunstler has been doing these for years under the banner of "Clusterfuck Nation" and they work pretty well for him. I doubt if this post is anywhere near as good. But I'm generally my own worst critic, so I'm tossing this out as an experiment that will probably never be attempted again. Get back to me if you like it. 

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This leaves going door to door, which is essential to an election campaign. But the fact of the matter is that candidates and campaign workers simply do not have the time to be able to spend more than a trivial amount of time talking to voters. This is far less than is necessary for anyone to make an honest appraisal of the candidate's character or the party's platform. So to be a politician you have to master the skill of showing that you are deeply empathetic while cutting the conversation to the shortest time possible. This means that if you have any sense of self-consciousness you end up feeling like a bit of a phony while appearing like one to anyone who is dumb enough to think that you might have the time to actually listen to what they think. Now that's a prescription to make you feel good about yourself!

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If by any wild trick of fate you actually get elected, you then become the last gasp and hope for people that are desperate for help. They will demand and beg for aid with social assistance, parking squabbles, immigration papers, termite spraying, and anything else they can think of. This will run the risk of totally overwhelming your office and grinding your staff into exhaustion and despair.

May the Dark Lord of the North help you if your party wins power. And abandon all hope if you end up in a position of real responsibility---like becoming Mayor or a Cabinet member. That's because if you do, you will end up feeling like an antelope that has been caught by an entire pack of hyenas. One group of people will grab you by one leg and beg you to do one thing. Another will grab another leg and demand you do the exact opposite. Yet another will grab your right arm and demand that you drop everything else and focus on something entirely different. And another will grab your left, and demand that something else be done. No matter what you try, you will never be able to please everyone and these people will generally curse you as a totally vile sell-out.

If you doubt this last point, consider the case of our present Prime Minister. The man has tried to pull the four corners of the universe together to build the case for preventing climate change. And yet, he finds himself facing a revolt from provinces who believe it is better to avoid paying taxes than to prevent a civilization-destroying environmental catastrophe. Foolishly, he attempted to make a Faustian bargain by at the same time supporting a pipeline to help Alberta, and Kinder Morgan kicked him in the groin by deciding to pull out of an "obviously profitable" Trans Mountain pipeline. To appease the Alberta voter, he then went the further step of actually buying the project so that it would still be built. But having done all of that, he is still being vilified to the point where people are selling "merch" suggesting he be lynched.

A brilliant political statement,
by a company that I refuse to promote with a URL
Image used under the fair use provision

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And underlying all of this is the basic fact that far too many ordinary voters have the minds of spoiled children. If you doubt this idea, consider the following graphic.

From the Calgary Herald, art by Dave Elston,
in his book: You Might Be From Alberta If...
Fair use, free advertising, don't complain.

We all know about the bumper sticker. What makes the cartoon funny is the caption that says that it is "reusable". I'm not sure, but I think that Alberta has managed to piss away two oil booms after the first time this bumper sticker entered my consciousness. And yet, they've still managed to avoid saving any money in a heritage fund or diversifying their economy. And they did this at the same time as they lectured the rest of the country about how it needed to "get it's economic house in order" and blamed central Canada (and both Trudeaus) for all their problems short of dandruff and crab grass. In contrast, Norway only had one oil boom and it was able to save more money than God and is now rapidly setting their society up to run on nothing more than sunlight and fresh air. (Can we please trade Alberta for Norway?)

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Frankly, I don't know why anyone would enter politics. I can only speculate, but I think that there are basically two reasons. Some folks enter into it because they are something close to Saints, Bodhisattvas, Sages, Realized Men, or, whatever your religious tradition calls tremendously groovy people who are willing to suffer mightily to help others. The other folks are people with deep, deep holes in their psyche that demand that they amass power no matter how many people they crush in the process. My general experience has been that the former vastly out-number the latter but recent political developments may cause me to rethink that assessment. Ultimately it comes down to the gullibility of the average voter. If things swing back to a more sensible equilibrium my faith in politicians and the system may go back to normal. If not, I may have to start rethinking my understanding of how the universe works. 

Why does Guelph have a Community Energy Initiative?

I've been working away at researching my next series of articles on the Guelph Community Energy Initiative. Here's the first one. It answers the question "Why should Guelph---or any city for that matter---have a Community Energy Initiative?"

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The first thing to realize is that a local energy plan isn't about how the energy is created. So don't fixate on things like wind turbines and solar panels. Instead, it's focused on how efficiently the energy is used. This is an absolutely key point to remember because efficiency is directly linked to productivity, which is an economic concept that is key to a prosperous community. 

What is "Productivity"?

If two workers are producing a specific product---like a blender---we generally think of the worker who is producing two an hour as being more productive than the one who is only creating one. And, if each blender sells for the same price and is equally profitable, then the factory owner can make more profit and (at least potentially) pay his workers more money than the owner who's workers only make one. Or at least that's how the theory of productivity works.

The first thing to remember is that productivity is not a measure of how hard a person works, but rather how much she produces. That's because we live in a results economy, not an effort economy. People sometimes forget this distinction and talk as if productivity is a measurement of laziness versus work ethic. Instead, productivity usually comes down to capital investment decisions by management. The factories that produce more than one blender an hour do so by installing robots rather than having managers yell at their employees to work harder.

This gets to the second thing that people need to remember. Productivity is not just a question of how many things get done per person, it's more generally a question of how much comes out after putting how much into it. That's where the robots come into play. Up until now, the cost of labour has always been so much higher than the cost of replacing it with machines that our society has gotten into the habit of always assuming that machines are always more productive than people, and, that the only way to become more productive is to get rid of workers. This process is called "automation" and it is why wages rose sharply in the decades after the Second World War and also why in the last few years fewer and fewer people get to have steady, full-time employment.

Some folks use short-cuts when they think about problems (ie: they are mentally lazy) instead of learning the complete facts of the matter. And in the case of productivity there are a great many ways one can think about productivity depending on how deeply you dive into the issue. For example, the people who think of productivity in terms of the laziness or work ethic of employees have reduced the issue to a simple equation:

(Gross Income) - (Cost of Labour) = Productivity

Other folks do understand the importance of capital investment in productivity, but forget about the cost of energy. For them, productivity boils down to this equation:  

(Gross Income) - [(Cost of machines) + (Cost of Labour)] = Productivity

But machines aren't free to buy or run. They also use energy, and for some of them the energy used is a major fraction of the cost of producing something like a blender. These people think of productivity using this formula:

(income) - [(energy) + (machines) + (labour)] = productivity

There is yet another important element to consider. Businesses also exist in a social and environmental context. They have neighbours, their workers have lives outside of work, and, so on. The government has to consider the impact of the business's activities on the greater society and calculate the costs to society-as-a-whole in order to understand how useful it is. For example, if a company making blenders dumps poisonous sludge into a river and this destroys a very profitable fishing industry, the increased wages and profits created by the factory may be completely negated by the lost wages and profits from the fishery that is destroyed. This is what economists call an "externality". If a business is forced by the government to deal with potential externalities (eg: cleaning the toxic sludge up instead of just dumping it in the river), this again adds costs, which lowers productivity.

The latest example of an attempt to deal with externalities is the decision by the Liberals to put a price on carbon in order to get the market to consider the consequences of climate change in its investment decisions. In the short run, the importance of externalities can be hidden if the government simply refuses to think about them. (This appears to be the brilliant economic development strategy supported by the Conservatives.) But over the long haul society either suffers real consequences (fishermen lose their jobs, the cost of fish increases), and/or regulations are eventually introduced.

This leads to the following formula. (It might be that there are yet other elements to add, but that would be another article.)

(income) - [(externalities) + (energy) + (machines) + (labour)] = productivity

Readers need to understand the tremendous opportunity implied by the last equation. If Guelph can find a way to increase productivity by cutting the non-labour productivity costs (ie: machines, energy, and, externalities), this will give businesses the freedom to raise wages for Guelph workers without cutting the number of people it employs. And if Guelph citizens are making more money, they will spend it locally and increase the "spin off" benefits for everyone else who lives here. Moreover, if Guelph has a coordinated plan to encourage increased efficiency throughout the city, businesses that can see the advantages to such a strategy will want to build new facilities here.

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Locally Sourced is Better

A second point that needs to be understood is that spending money on energy tends to be a way that wealth leaks out of Guelph. To understand this point, consider what happens when you buy vegetables from a large corporation---say Walmart---versus what happens when shop directly from a local farmer. A certain amount of the money you spend at Walmart will stay in your community in the form of local wages, but if you buy Californian lettuce, most of the money goes back to the farm there and the truck that shipped it to Ontario. Moreover, all the profit ends up going to Arkansas (ie: the Walmart headquarters.) In contrast, if you buy cabbage at the market from the farmer who grew it, a lot more of the money goes into the local economy. Even inputs that come from out of town (eg: the fertilizer and gasoline) came through a local distributor, who gets to pocket some money before it disappears. This means that when you buy anything locally it tends to have a bigger impact on the well-being of the community than if it is purchased out-of-town.

I couldn't find any analysis or data that specifically dealt with energy, but economists have done some work on the macro-economic effect of buying local on the economy. Consider the following two sets of pie-charts that compare the relative economic benefits of locally-owned retail stores and restaurants that come from a report prepared by the American Independent Business Alliance.

Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.
Click on image for a bigger version

Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.
Click on image for a bigger version.

As you can see, where you shop has a big impact on the economic well-being of your community. Exactly the same processes are at work whether you are buying potatoes, a hamburger, or, energy for your home or business. If you buy electricity from a local guy with solar panels, the money he makes might very well be spent at the business you own. Similarly, if a local business saves so much money on making itself more efficient that it can give its employees a dollar/hour raise---that money may also end up in your pocket. 

At this point the obvious question is "Where does our energy currently come from?" Ontario uses almost no coal. And our electricity is mostly created in-province using nuclear and hydro-electric plants. So when we are talking about money-leakage based on energy, we are mostly referring to natural gas and petroleum. As you can see from the chart below, a significant fraction of our natural gas comes from Western Canada (WCSB means "Western Canada Sedimentary Basin".) ("Bcfd" means "Billion cubic feet/day", which should give you some idea of the amount of energy---and money---we are talking about.) 

Sources of natural gas in Ontario.
Navigant 2015 report commissioned by province of Ontario.
Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.

As you can also see, the percentage of natural gas we are purchasing from Western Canada is in significant decline because of competition with the USA. Why this is happening is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say the money that goes out of Ontario is certainly not bouncing around in Guelph helping you pay off your mortgage. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a similar groovy graphic for oil in Ontario, but here's a quote from an article from the National Observer:

Ontario sources the majority of its oil domestically, and all its imported oil comes from the United States. Ontario brought in an average of 50,000 cubic metres of oil per day of domestic oil between January 2012 and July 2017, compared to an average of 5,000 cubic metres per day of imported crude, mostly from North Dakota, Indiana and Texas.    (from "Guess Where Quebec Gets Its Oil", by Carl Meyer, Nov 13, 2018)

Obviously Western Canada is a better source than Texas, but still the money is leaking from our city. 

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What About Carbon Taxes?

Money will also increasingly "leak" out of Guelph as a result of externalities too. The federal government has doubled-down on its commitment to put a price on carbon, even as the Conservatives have decided to make sabotaging the future health of the planet their core economic development plank. Even if we only take climate change seriously once the ice caps have melted and climate change denier's bodies are swinging from lamp posts, we will eventually have to switch to a no-carbon economy. And no matter what happens, any city that has built it's economy around using energy more efficiently is going to do better than one who built their "game plan" around "Après moi, le déluge!" (or "after me, the flood").

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Why Get the City Involved?

If you look at a municipality---like Guelph---and try to think about it like a business the first question to ask is "what does it produce?" I'd suggest that the primary product of a municipality is "coordination". City staff and Council decide a myriad of different issues for both businesses and citizens: which roads to fix this year, how many bus routes we need, when and how often garbage gets picked up, whether we build recreation centres or libraries, how many police, etc. If ordinary people or even large businesses tried to figure these things out for themselves, the city would be an exercise in complete chaos.

To understand this point, look at the following photo. This shows two parts of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The upper half with the high-rises and the trees is the part that has gone through the same sort of zoning process that Guelph routinely uses to build housing. (Although unlike Guelph, there seems to not be as much pressure from NIMBYs to prevent high density housing.) In the bottom half there is a "favela", or "shanty-town".  The difference is that a favela is "self-organizing" without any municipal government planning. The difference is stark reminder of how important the role of organizing can be in human life. People routinely complain about "government bureaucracy", but the fact of the matter is that life with clearly defined rules and chains of command is much better than the total free-for-all that exists in a favela. (I know that I have grossly over-simplified a complex subject, but that isn't what this article is about.)

See the difference between planned and unplanned parts of a city?
Image by Alicia Nijdam, c/o Wikicommons

A community energy plan is nothing more than an attempt to expand the mandate of the city to go beyond the current limits of coordination, and move into another sphere---energy. And the reason it would do so is for exactly the same reason it currently plans things like road construction, zoning, public transit, garbage pick-up, etc:  because by doing so it can create new efficiencies that will benefit everyone.

This is also a way that a Community Energy Plan can help the people of Guelph. If coordination is the product that cities sell, then by adding in energy efficiency to the mix they are making the city more attractive to businesses that are looking for a place to expand. To understand this point, consider the case of the Toyota plant that was built in Woodstock Ontario (where I spent some of my teenage years.) Toyota was offered significant financial incentives to locate in the Southern USA but instead it chose to move to Ontario. The reason why is because Ontario offered a greater level of coordination than places like Alabama and Mississippi.

And by "coordination", I mean two things:  a good public education system, and, single-payer

Paul Krugman writing
about Woodstock Ontario???
Prolineserver, c/o Wikicommons 

healthcare. In the Southern US the public education system is in free-fall and anyone who can puts their children into a private school. Similarly, there is no single-payer healthcare system, and health coverage costs a lot more for everything---plus the employer is supposed to foot the bill, not the government. Toyota wasn't interested in putting functionally illiterate workers in charge of machines that cost millions of dollars. Nor were they willing to pay the highest hospital bills in the world when those workers got sick. (Paul Krugman wrote an op-ed about this for the New York Times.) If Toyota was willing to come to Woodstock because of the good schools and public healthcare, the argument is that companies would similarly come to Guelph if it can help them save money on energy costs.

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Well, time to put out the begging bowl. As you might imagine, writing articles about things like the Community Energy Initiative take a lot of work. I'm not an expert, but I have to dig deep and try to make myself into one every time I foolishly decide to take on a new subject. I don't just "jump into" this stuff, I have to start out by finding local experts, interviewing them, working my recordings into notes, and then using those notes to find information in other sources to quote in my final blog. (Did I mention that I do all this while also working at the full-time job?)

This is fundamentally different from what a professional reporter does. Their job is to entertain instead of inform, which means that their editors choose stories based on their shock or "cutesy" value. They are also under extreme financial constraints, so they usually have to run around and get quick sound bites and hammer out several short stories a day. What's the result? An  ill-informed electorate, many of whom seem to live in a state of permanent outrage against people that have never done them any harm at all. How much would you pay for a news outlet that actually informs people about the world around them? How about one that isn't behind a pay wall, so you can not only pay a modest fee to keep it up and running, but which is also delivered free to anyone who wants to read it?

Well, that's what "The Guelph Back-Grounder" is, and you can be part of the solution by either making a regular contribution through Patreon or by tossing something in the Tip Jar once in a while. Other people have already done it (thanks Patricia for being so Awesome!), why haven't you? 

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So How Much Money are We Talking About?

And what exactly are the projected energy savings that come from an Community Energy Plan? If you go back to the original Community Energy 2007 report written for the city by Garforth International, IIc , you will see the following figures for Guelph (note, they do not count inter-city transportation---just what happens here):

• homes and buildings use 30% of all energy, and 50% of all electricity
• in 2004 6,030 gigawatts of energy were used, or, 52.45 megawatts per person
• transport fuels in the city represent 30% of total energy and 45% of greenhouse gas emissions
• in 2005 total water use was 19.2 billion liters, or 52.579 million liters per day
• water use per household/day averages at 230-250 liters---the rest is used by industry

Let's get an "order of magnitude" number here. The cost of energy fluctuates wildly on the spot market, and large consumers get different prices than individual home owners. Moreover, there is a huge difference between the cost of a kilowatt hour of natural gas, gasoline, electricity. ("Kilowatt hour" is a measure of all types of energy, even though people generally only use it to describe electricity.)  Just to give you an idea of the comparisons, one cubic metre of natural gas has 8.8 kilowatt hours (kwh) of energy. I looked up the current price for natural gas in Guelph, which is about $0.21/cubic meter.  If we divide that by 8.8, we should get the price for natural gas per kwh of something like 2 cents. The amount of energy in a liter of gasoline is 9.1 kilowatt hours. A quick check on line says that the price of gasoline in Guelph is something like $1.02 per liter. Divide them out and the price per kilowatt hour of gasoline is 11 cents. Looking at my latest hydro bill, I'm paying 6.5 cents per kilowatt hour.

Let's put this on a bullet chart:

• natural gas: 8.8 kwh per cubic meter, 21 cents/cubic meter, or, 2 cents per kwh
• gasoline: 9.1 kwh per liter, $1.02 per liter, or, 11 cents per kwh
• electricity: 6.5 cents per kwh 

I think that the above makes sense. Resistance electric heating (baseboard heaters) is more expensive than natural gas and electric vehicles run cheaper than gasoline powered.

I'm not about to try to calculate how much Guelph spends on energy a year because that would require more research than I'm prepared to do on a story, and also because I'd lose most of my readers anyway. But let's just break down how much 6,030 gigawatts of energy would cost using each of those numbers above. I can calculate that by multiplying the cost by 6.03 billion ("kilo" means "thousand" and "giga" means "billion"---so the "kilo" in "kwh" cancels out three decimal points):

• natural gas:  at $.02 kwh equals $0.121 billion or $121 million
• gasoline: at $0.11 kwh equals $0.66 billion or $663 million
• electricity: at $0.065 kwh equal $0.39 billion or $392 million

At this point I need to remind readers again that the prices I am using above are not what are actually paid. There are volume discounts and wild fluctuations in the spot market. But having said that, it's important to have some sort of number in front of us so we can understand if the amount of money is bigger than a toaster or smaller than a moose. Having said that, there's a considerable range of cost here, from a minimum of $121 million/year for natural gas versus $663 million/year for gasoline. 

The Garforth International report goes on to say cities that actively pursue city-wide energy efficiency programs often achieve 50% savings (from page 14 of the executive summary.) That means that the potential for freed-up money in Guelph could fit into a range of $60.5 million/year to $332 million/year. How does that compare to the Guelph economy-as-a-whole? Well, I couldn't easily find a Gross Domestic Product number for Guelph, but Statistics Canada does have a Gross Domestic Product per capita number for Guelph:  $48,410. (Only because Guelph has the 10th highest number in Canada---which is really amazing. We appear to be doing something right.) In 2006 the city's population was 115,000, so presumably the GDP was $5.57 billion.

So how does a saving of between $60.5 and $332 million fit into an city economy of $5.57 billion?  Just dividing out for a percentage, we get a range of 1% to 6%.  That might not seem like a lot, but it is a significant increase in economic activity. (Just consider how much freaking-out would happen if the mortgage rate went up that amount!) And, it is important to realize that this is in addition to the other effects that I mentioned above:  the decreased leakage of wealth out of the city (both to buying energy and carbon pricing) and the increased attraction for outside investors to move facilities to Guelph so they could take advantage of city-wide energy saving programs. 

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That's enough for now. (I originally wanted to do a short introduction to the subject.  But as you can see, like every other "deep dig" I write, it has ballooned.) As always, comments are welcome and please share on social media. 

We Can No Longer Afford Ideology

Yesterday I was interviewing a respected local politician and I asked her a totally idiotic---and yet, I think profound---question:  "Are the Conservatives  evil? Or are they stupid? It seems that they are either one or the other."

It's an idiotic question because it's hopelessly simplistic and forced her to quickly come up with a reasonable-sounding response. She managed to come back with something that not only kept her from offering me a too-honest "gotcha" quote, but also kept her from sounding disingenuous. The fact that she did so without also making me look like an idiot just showed her profound mastery as a politician.

Why I asked the question in the first place was not because I wanted to score points, but because it was a way of getting to something that journalists usually are afraid of asking about when dealing with important people. That is, "Why exactly do people do the things that they do?" And that is the import of my question, because it is a way of introducing more subtle and serious issues. I was thinking in particular about the decision of both the provincial and federal Tories to build their brand around sabotaging any attempt to prevent runaway climate change. And in that context, the question "are they evil?" really boils down to "are they aware of the existential threat to human civilization and yet consciously choose to oppose legislation to prevent runaway climate change simply because they think it will help them win the next election?" Similarly, the question "are they stupid?" is a shorthand for "are they so blinded by their ideology that they simply cannot comprehend how dangerous climate change is to humanity?"

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It's usually considered "rude" or "unfair" to question the motives of anyone when they say or do something. Indeed, I've been accused of being a "troll" in on-line discussions because I sometimes do this. The idea is that you have to simply accept that someone is saying something with the best of intentions and only deal with what they say instead of why you think that they may be saying it. The problem is that many people suffer from a profound lack of understanding about what the implications of their actions will be. To an outside observer what might seem like a profoundly cynical power play might simply be a case of someone being oblivious to the effects that the course of action they support will have on other people.

I first considered this idea when I heard a fellow at work talking about being in a developing nation and seeing a man with no legs rolling around on a creeper and begging for money. My co-worker said he was with a couple other tourists and he was amazed to see that they were actually afraid of this guy, even though he offered zero physical threat because of his disability. I opined that perhaps they were terrified by the implications that this man raised about the nature of life. This is the idea that "there but for the grace of God goeth I", and this can be a scary thing to contemplate. My co-worker looked at me with amazement, thought for a while, and said "I think you may have something there. I'd never thought of that." The point is that what had seemed obvious to me was something that had never occurred to this other guy.

Too stupid to know he's stupid?
Public Domain, US gov photo
c/o Wikicommons

Since the rise of Donald Trump people have become more aware of something called the "Dunning-Kruger effect". That is a syndrome where people are so ignorant of a subject that they don't know that they know nothing about it, but instead believe that they are experts. It's sort of the corollary of Aristotle's observation that "the more I know, the less I think I know". The implication is that if you know nothing at all, maybe you think that you know everything. There's also a related effect where someone knows a subject so well that they expect that everyone else does too. If it is blindingly obvious to her that a certain thing is going to result from following a specific action, she will believe that anyone advocating for it is really seeking that (to her) inevitable result. And if the other person says "no, not at all", he is actively hiding his true intentions. Well, no. Lots of time people are just oblivious to the consequences of what they are advocating.

This is where the "too stupid to understand" idea arises. I'm not talking about people suffering from some sort of brain damage. Instead, I'm talking about people who have had their heads so stuffed with nonsense that there isn't any room left for evidence or logic to alter their opinions. 

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Time for the begging bowl. If you like these articles---and I suppose you do if you are reading this---consider subscribing to them through Patreon or toss something in the Tip Jar. Maybe, you could buy a book. All these options exist on the upper right hand of the screen. (Switch to the desktop option if you read these on your cell phone.)  Writing these things take a lot of time and energy and I have bills to pay and family obligations just like anyone else. Part of the problem that I'm identifying in this article is that if people expect to get their news for free, people write wild, sensationalist articles in order to get clicks and shares to increase ad revenue. If you want to "damp this down" and get more logical, fact-based stuff (ie:  less ideological), people are going to have to get back into the habit of paying for it. Lots of folks used to pay for newspapers---why not blogs?

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A few years back I was at a dinner party and one of the guests was a fellow I'd never met before. He was a profoundly odd person. Among other things, he said that "everyone in the USA has healthcare". (My wife, Misha, is an American---one who has never had health insurance except when she was in the Armed Forces.) I was taken aback. I tried to get an idea of what he meant, and said that I knew for a fact that this was simply not true. But he just blustered and got angry if anyone disagreed with him. Eventually, I just left rather than spend any time in the room with this disagreeable person. (I wasn't the only one. An elderly woman who remembered England before the National Health Service similarly couldn't stand this "nonsense" either, so she left too.)

While it was hard to figure out exactly what this guy was thinking (simply because he refused to engage in the "back-and-forth" of conversation that allows one to tease out this sort of information), I did learn that he owned a local company and he was profoundly pissed off about the amount of money he had to pay in taxes. In fact, it seemed like he had worked himself into an almost permanent frenzy over the subject.

Moreover, my hosts told me afterwards that they had made a mistake inviting the three of us to dinner at the same time. They'd forgotten that they had invited this person earlier. The fact of the matter was that my two friends were also self-described "right wing", but they tended to keep quiet around me and the elderly relative, because they knew that we didn't share their opinions.

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I might be odd (in fact I've been told I am by several people), but I tend to think that we should subject our cherished ideas to some sort of "fact checking" once in a while. The idea that someone would tell me to my face that I was wrong, and that my wife does have health insurance when I know that this isn't true---and that in some sense this is a question of "opinion" instead of "facts"---just seems weird. 

Of course, there are nuances to most conflicts. It might be the case that the fellow I met at the dinner had conflated the idea that no one can get turned away from an emergency department in an American hospital with the existence of "medical insurance". But if you do end up at a hospital, you will end up with a bill afterwards and people can and often do lose their entire life's savings over this sort of thing. And as a result, people often think long and hard about whether they want to go in for a "check up" after a minor accident. Indeed, Misha had a friend who got into a "fender bender" on his motor scooter, got a significant bump on the head, but avoided going to Emergency because of this concern. He died of an aneurysm the next day. People who have no health insurance never go for check-ups either. Which means that if I lived in the USA I would never have had my high blood pressure identified and would probably be well on the way to kidney failure right now.

The important point, however, was that we never had this discussion because this guy was so angry and belligerent that he would not allow me to find some sort of "common ground" that we could build a conversation on. He just made angry, universal statements. Indeed, if my friends had been better organized, I would never have even met him because the two of us would have been kept carefully separated into our own, independent "filter bubbles". 

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This isn't a new thing. In fact pretty much since the revolutions (British, American, and, French) that changed European politics from being about intrigue between courtiers to being about the worldviews of an entire nation, people have been creating grotesquely over-simplified ways of looking at the world. Political scientists and revolutionaries alike call these "ideologies".

The thing about ideologies is that they aren't fully-formed, well thought out, and, evidence-based. Instead, they are a type of tribal identity that one declares allegiance to. Before I figured this out, I would often be surprised by people who complained about things like "the liberal bias" of universities and who expressed a desire to see space created there to allow "a conservative point of view". Why---I would ask---can't we just judge each issue on its own merits and see where the facts lead us? The problem I couldn't see was that in the hierarchy of understanding that these people hold, "conservatism" is more important than facts or logic. At the dinner party, the anti-tax business guy simply ignored my statement that my wife didn't have health insurance because it didn't agree with something more important, namely his ideological opinion that all taxes are a form of theft.

Ideological conflict has been around since the 17th century's battles over the divine right of kings. But until now the "stakes of the game" haven't been all that large. It just involved whether or not thousands and hundreds of thousands of people would suffer horribly because of minor irritants like slavery and horrific poverty. Now, the fate of human civilization is on the chopping block. What is more important, whether a company in Guelph has to pay more taxes or the ice caps melt and Bangladesh gets drowned? It seems clear to both the federal and provincial conservatives that taxes are much more important. But that's absurd. Our world is too complex and our technology far too powerful to continue this childish game of ideological thinking.