Macho Noise

Lately I've noticed that there seem to be a lot of loud motor vehicles blasting around downtown. I know that this issue has been raised before, but I thought I'd revisit it. When I did some poking around, I found out some things that "blew my mind".

The first thing that surprised is why the vehicles are loud. I'd always thought that people install a certain type of muffler because it improves the performance of the car or motorcycle. I asked around for some expert opinion and imagine my surprise when I found that that they do nothing of the sort---the whole point of the exercise is to make the machine louder.

The following YouTube video shows a couple morons spending an afternoon pulling the baffles out of the muffler on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. (I especially like the point at 7:36 where you get to see the huge amount of fiberglass that they pull out of the right tailpipe.)

It isn't just a question of ripping out the guts of a stock muffler. You can also buy motorcycle mufflers that have been designed to be loud. Here's a blog post that discusses this issue in some depth. The fast takeaway is that you can easily tell if a muffler isn't really designed to muffle the engine noise by one quick tell---it doesn't have a bulge in the pipe. Moreover, you can quickly tell if a stock muffler has been modified by looking into the tail pipe and seeing if the interior baffles have been removed. (Look at the beginning of the video to see them cutting them out with a Dremel tool.)

Here's a proper muffler, notice the bulge?
This and the next three images come from A Quieter O'ahu.Fair Use provision.

No bulge on this bike, nor on the next two.

This isn't just a problem with motorcycles. It turns out that there are muffler companies who sell "special" parts to make idiotic car noises. Consider this website by Thrush mufflers that invites potential customers to "Hear It! Sounds of Thrush". I especially like the "rattler"---it has a deep, throaty sound that is guaranteed to arouse a resonant, hate-filled, murderous intent towards both you and your car.

I sorta assumed that these mufflers would be something that you can only buy in a specialty shop and on-line for the "shade tree mechanic" crowd. But it turns out that in Guelph Speedy Auto Service, Canadian Tire, and, Partsource chains all carry Thrush products. I looked at their website and Speedy even has a special heading for loud mufflers.

PERFORMANCE MUFFLERS
As previously mentioned, a conventional muffler produces back pressure as the exhaust fumes are no longer taking the path of least resistance. This causes your engine to operate less efficiently. Performance mufflers, on the other hand, work hard at reducing the back-pressure by decreasing the resistance. Most performance mufflers do not reduce the sound as much as a regular muffler, but there is a happy balance between performance and sound.

The way it was explained to me, engine "performance" isn't the issue. You can only go so fast on the road, and the vast majority of autos can go far faster than either road conditions or the speed limit allow. That---and the fact that Thrush markets it's products through the noise they make---would suggest to me that the noise is the performance in question. 

It would appear that making your car louder than it needs to be is a major part of the economy. No wonder I hear so many loud yahoos!

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I thought about making this Editorial about enforcement. Dao knows that there are lots of angles to build on that issue. Police have traditionally complained that they cannot deal with complaints about loud vehicles because they would have to measure the sound with a special meter. That's really kinda nonsensical, because all they really have to do is check the vehicle to see if it has an non-legal muffler---ether because the baffles have been removed, or, they were never installed by the manufacturer.

Moreover, I quickly found out that the province already has laws on the books that allow the police to do this.

 (1.3)  No person shall install a muffler cut-out, straight exhaust, gutted muffler, hollywood muffler, by-pass or similar device on a motor vehicle or motor assisted bicycle.

Even if there was some sort of stupid legal decision that said that this law was invalid, it could easily be changed by the Ontario Legislature if someone wanted to control street noise. 

I suspect the real reason is that there are absolute limits to what the police can do. Everything they do costs time and money, both of which are in limited supply. And police have their hands full trying to minimize the number of people dying because of overdoses and dealing with people in crisis for mental health reasons. They have to decide priorities, and dealing with jerks who make the our city streets far louder than necessary is pretty low on the list. 

No police spokesperson will ever say this in public, however, because a great deal of the authority of police comes from them relying on the fiction that they have no personal discretion at all. "Sorry mam, I'm just doing my job. I can't pick and choose which laws to enforce!" If an officer said "yeah, I could turn a blind eye. In fact I usually do, but in this case for some reason I choose not to share with you---I'm going to enforce this particular law today specifically with regards to you, and, you alone". Can you imagine how that would look to a judge? Or the media?  

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Here we go again. My begging bowl is out-stretched. Who will toss a dollar into it every month? It's not that hard to do (thanks Nancy for being so awesome!) All you have to do is sign up through Patreon or PayPal.

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So what point am I going to make? 

I suppose the thing that really needs saying is "what the Hell is wrong with all these people who think that it's a good idea to create all this noise?" That's the real question. I'm trying to figure out just what exactly is going on in these people's heads.

South Park did an episode about the whole noisy motorcycle thing that had a lot of to say about the issue. Unfortunately it worked in a whole gay rights subplot (warning profoundly offensive language) that was in such appallingly bad taste that I refuse to post anything but this one clip where one of the characters admits to being "biker curious" and tries to explain the appeal.

I suspect that the "performance" that the people who use "performance mufflers" are doing is aimed at projecting the idea that they are, as Butters says, all about 

"rebellion against the system, a living image of independence, solid, defiant and supremely cool. The Biker is a living American icon of resilient individuality and freedom" 

Of course, this is nonsense. They are either social parasites who live off their willingness to be violent and run the risk of either dying a needless violent death or spending decades in prison---or are pathetic "wannabees" who feel somehow that they are stealing some of the "glory" of the criminal gangs. As for being "resilient individuals", I had this idea deflated when a friend of mine (who rode a bike too) pointed out that Harleys are so incredibly expensive that the vast majority of people who ride them are solid members of the middle class. "Defiant outlaws" indeed. 

I suspect that probably the best "deconstruction" of this sort of stupid, macho tribalism comes from the Who musical Quadrophenia. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it deals with a young man who is a member of a British "biker gang" flavour known as "the mods" who see themselves as being in tension with another flavour known as "the rockers".

For our young hero, the iconic image of the ultimate cool Mod is a fellow (played by Sting) who is "flash". The whole ridiculous fantasy falls crashing down, however, when it comes out that this hero supports his lifestyle by being a servile bellboy at a posh hotel where he spends his days getting ordered around by toffs.

The movie ends with the kid realizing that he's been wasting his life away pursuing a moronic worldview. At that point he runs his scooter off a cliff as an act of liberation from a pathetic, toxic self-definition. I can only hope that the dorks making such a racket in downtown Guelph will eventually make the same decision.

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This raises another issue, though. Stupid men making a racket with their rides is far from the most problematic thing in our society. (Hence the police indifference.) Lots of people have defined themselves in lots of dysfunction, self-defeating, and delusional ways. To a very large extant these are key to propping up the cloud-cuckoo culture that is currently destroying the planet. It might do us all a lot of good if we spent some time contemplating the intrinsic value of what we believe so we can purge at least a little of the idiocy out of our own pathetic little lives. 

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Too Many Airplanes

Greta Thunberg was recently in the news because she decided to travel by

Greta Thunberg is sailing instead of flying.
Photo by Jan Ainali, c/o the Wiki Commons.

sailboat instead of airliner to attend a environmental event in New York. The point she wanted to highlight is the impact of the air industry on climate change. As such, she was following in the footsteps of Mohandas Gandhi who also sought to mobilize public opinion through his own personal behaviour. (That is why he wore a loin cloth and was often seen sitting at a spinning wheel making thread. He was suggesting that Indians should support their local craft industries instead of British imports.)

She has been taking heat over this by "the usual suspects" who feel threatened by the idea that people are taking too many flights around the world and that maybe we need to rethink this behaviour.

I've always been somewhat skeptical about the idea that it is a good thing to have hordes of people flying all over the place. Generally I keep my thoughts to myself, however, because that is such an unpopular viewpoint in my social milieu and I don't want to always be the guy who "puts the turd in the punch bowl". But having said that, I thought I'd give this story another look. And, unfortunately, this is one of those ones where a little research has shown things to be far worse than I originally suspected.

I looked into a fact sheet put out by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and it turns out that there were a jaw-dropping 4.4 billion discrete trips by an individual on an airplane in 2018. (This was one of those times where I did a lot of double and triple checking for the number---because I originally couldn't believe that it was true.) This resulted in 95 billion (US, I assume) gallons of fuel being burned, which released 905 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. 

This isn't a static number, either. It turns out that there was a 7.4 % increase in Revenue Passenger Kilometres (RPK) in 2018 over the year before. (This is a more useful term than just the number of fliers, because this adds in an idea of the length of the trip as well as the bare number.) This number has been going up by leaps and bounds---an average of 7% for each of the last six years. Just to put things in perspective, if we convert this 7% growth rate to a "doubling" number---using "the rule of 70"---we come up with a doubling of the air industry in only 10 years. Presumably that would mean that at the current rate of expansion air travel could result in 190 billion gallons of fuel burned and 1.8 billion tonnes of CO2 release in the year 2029. (I think Greta might be onto something here---.)

Statistics Canada has some numbers about what our nation is doing. Here's a graph of air travelers by year.

Another interesting factoid says that Canadians logged in 192.8 billion passenger kilometres in 2016, which was an astounding 9.5% increase from 2015. (If this seems odd given the above bar graph, remember that "passenger kilometres" measures the distance traveled. If the same number of people travel longer distances, the problem just got worse.)

Let's put this into a perspective. The IATA says that in 2016 the entire world logged in 3.8 billion trips, and---from the above Statistics Canada graph---Canadians logged in something like 80 million. In 2016 the world population was something like 7.4 billion and Canada's was 35 million. So Canada's share of trips by plane was 2.1% of the trips, even though we only had 0.47% of the world's population. Yet another example of Canada punching above it's weight on the world's stage!!!!

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If you think that this blog is a valuable resource for you to read, why not subscribe? It's really easy to do. And when I say that I'm fine with people only paying a buck or two per month I really mean it. I only have one person who subscribes that much---everyone else puts in five or ten a month. That's appreciated, but if a lot of people would just send in a buck a month that could build a significant subscription base. Both Patreon and Paypal are set up to let people do that---so why not try it?

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I mentioned above that I'm not very popular with people when I talk about this

Mark Twain, photo by A.F. Bradley.
Public Domain c/o Wiki Commons.

sort of thing. I think that that's because it is an article of faith among baby boomers that "travel broadens".

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

Mark Twain

The problem with this quote is that it is total nonsense. The actual physical movement of a human being from place to place has zero influence on their mind. I first figured this out by talking to sailors. You might think that traveling around the world on a ship would help people learn about other cultures. In fact, for many of them just go to the nearest bar and stay there until it's time to ship off again. And how many people's idea of travel boils down to not much more than laying on a beach reading mystery novels and sucking down drinks with tiny paper umbrellas? Of course, there are exceptions. But those come from the individual, not the mere act of burning jet fuel and hurtling from one country to another at high speed.

A passing acquaintance with history will tell you that it's always been thus. Yes, there are folks who've had their minds broadened while traveling. But that says more about them than their months spend in a ship or on horseback. If this wasn't the case, what explains the hordes of "Colonel Blimps" who managed the colonial empires of the world? Or the missionaries who devoted their lives to spreading the blight of Western sexual hangups to "primitive peoples"? Shouldn't all these folks have had their "minds blown" by living in a totally different culture for extended periods of time? If "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" where the Hell did all that Western "cultural imperialism" come from?

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How about we come up with a new and better quote for someone to use in this context?

The world has too many people travelling around trying to find a good place to visit---and not enough staying put to build a good place to live.

Frank De Jong, former leader of the Green Party of Ontario

Frank De Jong, with his favorite transportation device.
Photo by Shaun Merritt, c/o Wiki Commons.

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One last point.

When I mention the impact of any personal behaviour on the macro level, I am not suggesting that anyone who actually does this thing is evil. Nor am I saying that there is no solution unless everyone spontaneously changes their behaviour. No social issue every changes because people all individually stop choosing to do some particular act. Slavery, using ozone destroying chemicals, discrimination against gays, etc, all needed to be dealt with through government regulation.

But there is a relationship between what people personally choose to do, and what the government will eventually end up regulating. If almost everyone flies around the world on a regular basis---for business, family matters, tourism---politicians are going to avoid creating any sort of policy that will cut down on a voter's ability to do so. That means that at least some people have to be willing to start a debate about whether or not something is a good idea. And at least a visible minority of people have to be willing to change their minds about this sort of thing. If they don't, no politician with any hope of getting elected will ever be willing to take it on.

We need people like Greta Thornberg---who now has the public eye---to publicize this important issue. Unfortunately, a lot of the people I know who are leading the fight against climate change are also products of the "boomer generation" and accept as a rock-hard, totally not-to-be-debated, article of faith that "travel broadens the mind" and they adamantly refuse to even contemplate the idea that there should be some reduction in the amount of jet travel. Frankly, I'm appalled at the number of Greens, "climate activists", "progressive politicians", etc, who think nothing of flying all over the place to go on personal vacations or to conferences with marginal importance. This isn't because I think that they are "evil", or that they in particular are going to personally destroy the planet---but because the optics are horrible and it dramatically undermines their moral authority when it comes to advocating for policies aimed at lessening humanity's carbon footprint. And that weakens their ability to influence government policy.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Does News Need to be Topical?

I've built the brand of the Guelph-Back-Grounder around the idea that it is never meant to be "topical". By this I mean that I am specifically trying to not respond to the "news of the day". This is heresy to reporters, who's job it is to go out and get the story before the other guy. But I'm not that sort of beast, instead I'm a long form journalist. The difference boils down to the relative importance of getting the news out on time, versus making sure that the story is complete.

Both types of news gathering are important and ideally they help one another. Long form journalists rely upon reporters to dig up facts and publish them quickly so the former can then use this information to point them in the direction of other sources. And reporters (at least sometimes) should be reading long form journalism so they can understand the bigger picture when they are trying to understand the individual facts they are collecting.

One of the important differences between the two is the fact that reporting tends to have an extremely short shelf-life. This shouldn't be because the "facts" keep changing (although this sometimes happens because editors feel that they have to publish things before being able to do adequate research), but just because time marches on and what is news today is forgotten tomorrow. In fact, this was such a truism of newspaper reporting that I've had more than one friend "in the biz" tell me that no matter how good a story was she'd written, it all boiled down to not being much more than liner for a birdcage. An ancient television show even build its opening theme around this trope.

This isn't entirely true, as I have learned while grinding through spools of microfilm of old copies of various newspapers. Those articles (at least the ones that have survived the vagaries of time) are important windows into the historical issues that have long been forgotten. But in one point my reporter friends were right. They aren't easily accessible to the general public.

Long form journalism in the modern age is different. It costs very little to keep old articles on-line. And search engines make it easy to retrieve stories on any given subject. This means that anyone who writes in-depth stories about subjects that are of continuing interest can hope that people will continue to read a good article long, long past it has been published. (And long past the point where newsprint has been recycled and the most a glossy magazine can hope for is a twilight existence in a doctor's waiting room.)

I keep track of the hits on this blog and I can see that people are actually using the Guelph-Back-Grounder as an information source. That is to say, my readership is growing at a significant curve and a lot of that increase is driven by people reading past articles. This is exactly what I set out to do. I want to be something of a "news encyclopedia" for the community. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to be as focused on local stories as I'd originally hoped. That's because I need to get something out every week in order to build a loyal readership---and it's far too much effort to research a "deep dig" article every week. (Or at least far too much effort for an old man who, while retired, still has all the aches and pains associated with a life of hard physical labour.) I have been heartened by quite a few readers who have said that they like these editorials just as much as the other stories, though.

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I got started on this subject because I originally was interested in writing some comments about the Jeffrey Epstein case. But once I sat in front of the computer, I realized that I was about to break the rule I set down when I started the blog. Then I thought about the Lavalin issue and the ethics watchdog report that recently came out. I could write a story because I've been researching Parliamentary reform and there is an aspect of that that has direct bearing on the expulsion of Jody Wilson-Raybould from the Liberal caucus. But I decided that would be wasting a future deep dig on what I suspect will turn out to be a minor story.

But it did get me thinking about the tyranny of topicality and how it can damage the way people learn about the world around them. It's often said that "the average person has the attention span of a gnat". I don't agree. First, it simply is a fact that there is a market for long form journalism, or else it simply wouldn't be "a thing". Some journalists have developed extremely successful "franchises" based on long form journalism. The best example is VOX Media.

For those of you who haven't heard of this institution, VOX is something of a "media empire" that is based on getting into the "nitty gritty" of stories instead of just the latest headlines. It has a website with lots of stories like The day Philadelphia bombed its own people, Fracking may be doing more climate damage than we thought, and, The algorithms that detect hate speech online are biased against black people. It also has a series of very popular podcasts such as The Ezra Klein Show and The Weeds which are specifically meant to deal with complex issues in depth over a fairly long period of time (both shows routinely extend over an hour in length). There is also a YouTube channel, (here's an example of one of their shorter videos---I think that they are better than amusing cat videos.)

Netflix created a partnership with VOX to produce a series of documentaries on a variety of subjects, which is titled Explained. (I highly recommend the episode titled Weed, which explains in great detail many of the issues raised by cannabis legalization.) 

Secondly, if you look at people's behaviour you can tell that if someone is really interested in a subject, lots of people can be very focused towards it. To cite one example, I remember hearing Ralph Nader once opine that if the average sports enthusiast invested a fraction of the attention towards politics that they do to following their favourite team, there would be a revolution in American society. Even if someone can't recite baseball statistics back to the 19th century, there is generally something that he can and will focus on. We live in a world of shade-tree mechanics, master gardeners, quilters, home brewers, model train builders, and so on. All of these pursuits seem horribly tedious to anyone who hasn't "caught the bug"---yet we all know someone who devotes enormous amounts of their spare time to them. It's obvious to me that these folks have more than "the attention span of a gnat". If they don't want to pay much attention to the news, it's because it doesn't interest them---not that they are genetically incapable of focusing on it.

Some of these folks probably don't care about the news and there's nothing anyone can do to get them excited. But I suspect that at least a percentage of them just don't like the trivial way the mainstream media follows stories. It becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy when an editor constantly tells his reporters to "dumb down" the news. Eventually people who would be interested in something else get bored and look elsewhere. Many of the folks who do stick just expect that the vast majority of what they are watching is nonsense that they should only take with a grain of salt, so they only engage with it in a half-hearted way. That leaves the fraction of people who truly are incapable of "paying attention" as being the only folks who get listened to when it's time to design the latest main-stream media model. I suspect that this is at least part of why we've seen such a decline in real investigative news in favour of blowhards yelling at each other and quick "he-said, she-said" stories totally devoid of any context. (Of course the general decline in revenue for news is another part of this, but again, lack of loyalty to real news on the part of management is probably also another cause of declining support for news organizations.) 

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This whole editorial is something of an explanation of why I think this blog is important, so I'm not going to insert the standard blue-type plea for subscriptions. (But if you do want to subscribe through Patreon or PayPal feel free.) But I will leave you with this last idea. VOX has succeeded because it specifically deals with issues of interest to a huge market---the USA and the greater international audience. Insofar as a news site focuses on local stories (like my deep digs) I am not going to get readers outside of Guelph. That means that I am trying to dance with cement blocks tied to my feet, which suggests that the "smart money" is against what I'm trying to do here. So any support that "proves the business model" right now is going to pay big dividends down the road for creating a vibrant local news ecosystem. If you want to read news about where you live, the motto isn't "build it and they will come", but rather "support it and it will survive".

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Cheap Vacation Post

I went away last week to visit friends out of town for a few days. As a result, I didn't have time to come up with weekend editorial. But in my sleazy need to build a base of readers, I need to get out something, so I decided I'd put in a link to one of my posts for my old blog, Diary of a Daoist Hermit.

Contrary to what you might think, I did write the odd post with bearing on political and social matters. Here's one on the "Tragedy of the Commons", from April in 2011:

http://urbanecohermit.blogspot.com/2011/04/tragedy-of-commons.html

Next week, I'll be back to the regular grind---. 

The Stupid and the Gullible

Last week I watched the Netflix documentary The Great Hack. It was OK, but something of a disappointment. I thought so because I believed it focused too much on one character, Brittany Kaiser.

Brittany Kaiser. Image c/o Twitter. 

She was a former director for Cambridge Analytica who choose to become a whistle blower after becoming horrified by the company's influence on the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. 

I get why a documentary maker would do this, as she is something of a compelling figure. She had been a human rights campaigner early in life, but became involved in right-wing causes when her parents lost all their money in the 2008 stock market crash and she needed money fast to help them out. (Or at least that is what is alluded to the documentary.) As such, she is a complex, somewhat sympathetic figure that you can build a narrative around. 

But if I'd done the film I would have focused on another figure, one that is only mentioned in passing during the Netflix film: Carole Cadwall. 

Carole Cadwall. Image captured from a YouTube video.
Provided to Wiki Commons by Molly MEP.

She is the reporter who works for the Observer and broke the story of FaceBook and Cambridge Analytica's influence on the Brexit referendum. She outlines what she learned on a 15 minute TED talk that is worth watching.

The important take-aways from this video are that a huge number of people were identified and categorized according to a psychological profile that allowed a specific type of political advert that appealed to their particular concerns to be sent to them---and them alone. The people paying for these ads broke the campaign finances rules. And there was no publicly available repository of adverts that would allow anyone to know what other people were seeing on their Facebook feeds. (The images below were all released due to Parliamentary orders leveled against Facebook, who fought hard to not let them see the light of day.)

It's important to understand that different types of ads were aimed at different types of people. First, consider the following one. It was aimed at sports enthusiasts who have a tendency to vote in fewer numbers than the general public and aren't generally interested in politics.

This ad was for a 50 million pound prize people would win if they could guess the score on every soccer game in the European Championship that year. (The odds were ridiculously high against anyone being able to do that, but the person who came closest would get a 50,000 pound consolation prize.) In order to get a free entry, a person had to fill out a form about what they thought about Brexit. This created a large database of British voters who were probably not very sophisticated politically and were "persuadable" to support leaving the EU.

Using this list and others provided by Facebook, the Leave campaign then sorted out the small fraction of "persuadable voters" according to what their computer programs identified as their key concerns.

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Another weekend and another editorial to hammer out. It's true that I think that writing this blog is an important and useful thing to do. (Someone told me that yesterday.) But it's also work---just like when other people shuffle paper in an office, sell some appliance, install a machine, build a new house, etc. And as such, I only think it's fair that people pay for the work. I don't need much to make it worthwhile. A buck or two a month really is fine---although more is appreciated. It's easy to do using Patreon and PayPal.

One thing I promise is that I will never put this blog behind a paywall. I believe in the idea of information being "free" in the sense of it being available to everyone---even if I don't think that it should be "free" in the sense of no one paying for the work involved.

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One of the key memes that they hammered away at was the idea that 350 million pounds leaves Great Britain for the EU every week. First off, that is the gross amount of money that Britain is charged on paper. As a matter of fact, there are both discounts under various programs that lower that amount plus money that comes back from Brussels into the UK. The net result for 2018 was 8.9 billion pounds, which comes to 171 million pounds a week---less than half the number pushed by the Brexit camp. Anyway, the dubious number was pushed relentlessly and used to argue that the money saved could fix the National Health Service, amongst other things. This was the message sent to anyone identified as being "persuadable" and concerned about the state of the British single payer system.

Other people were concerned about businesses having greater freedom to "do their own thing".

Another issue that was identified as being important to "persuadables" was immigration. One item being pushed was that of Turkey being admitted to the EU---something that was once on the table but is now completely gone now that Turkey has started slipping further and further into authoritarian government. But the Leave campaign never let the truth get in the way of a good meme, so they hammered away at this.

One way to do this was to contrast the average wage in Turkey to that of Britain and suggest that an influx of Turks would crush people's wages.

Having established the "alternative fact" that Turkey was joining the EU, then the Brexit camp then went on to claim that the EU had paid it one billion pounds to help it join. What they failed to mention was that these funds were earmarked to encourage Turkish society to move closer to European standards of democracy and human rights---which would presumably mean fewer people would want to leave their country and come to Europe. Since the country has been moving backwards on these issues, the money has actually been moved towards a more general "Balkans" strategy, and Turkey has been taken off the list of recipients. 

Yet another card to play against Turkey is to point out the fact that it borders unstable nations like Iraq and Syria. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions that if Turkey joins the EU, hordes of Islamic terrorists will arrive in Liverpool to blow up city hall.

It would be wrong, however, to say that the only people targeted were people with a bias against Muslims. The Brexit misinformation campaign targeted people all across the spectrum of political beliefs.

Some ads were aimed at people who were concerned about recent flooding in the UK---which presumably could be stretched to suggest that Britain would be better able to deal with the climate emergency outside of Europe.

Another unlikely Leave advert dealt with whaling. While I couldn't find any evidence that the EU supports whaling, it is true that Norway has a significant whaling industry. And even though it is not part of the EU (partially so it can control it's own fishing policy---which I imagine includes whaling), it does have a treaty that means it is very much the next-best-thing to a member. While it might seem odd to Canadians---who have often had to deal with EU outrage against sealing---but to some anti-whaling advocates, Brussels is seen as an apologist for killing whales.

It also gets tarred with the idea that it supports bull-fighting, simply because Spain is part of the EU.

There were ads targeting European support for Greece in it's debt crisis. This is an interesting divide, as it really comes down to whether or not you consider yourself a citizen of Europe or Great Britain. If the former, then any support for Greece is something like a "transfer payment" of the sort Canada makes between "have" and "have not" provinces and territories. If the latter, then it just seems like money given away in foreign aid.

The Leave campaign also implied that there was something about the EU that was bad for the working man. For example, they posted the following graph showing youth unemployment for selected nations in Europe. As near as I can tell they've cherry picked numbers for Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, and, Great Britain.

Of course, what they left out were EU countries that were doing better than the UK, like Germany (7.2%), Austria (9.9%), Denmark (10.9%), Holland (10.8%), and, the Czech Republic (14.9%.) It's also important to compare these numbers with countries similar to the UK outside of the EU, like Canada (10.7%), the USA (8.1%), Australia (12.0%), and, New Zealand (12.2%). I won't go into it, but it's also important to understand that social programs and wage levels are important to consider when comparing unemployment rates across national boundaries. You can have low unemployment rates which are the result of very poor social programs forcing people to take horribly-paid, crappy jobs just to keep from starving. (I suspect that explains the relatively low US number.)

There is also an advert that would suggest that the EU is against labour unions. As a Canadian who always thought we had a much lower percentage of unionized workers than the EU average (28%), I find it bizarre that anyone would argue that leaving the EU is good for worker's rights, but there it is.

Here's a graph from Forbes magazine that compares rates of union membership in 2017. You can judge whether or not the EU is anti-union. (Frankly, I'm kinda surprised to see that Canada has a higher percentage of union members than both the UK and Germany.) I suspect that it's so close to the EU average because of the recent admission of Eastern European countries, which do not have the same level of membership as the older, Western nations. Poland, for example, doesn't even keep track of union membership, but researchers have estimated that as of 2012 it was at about 12%.

Image from Forbes magazine. Used under the Fair Use copyright provision.

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The important thing to remember about the above advertisements (there are lots more, but I tried to give readers an exhaustive sample) is relatively few people would have seen any of them. That's because they were crafted to specific, small percentages of the voting public---based on the profile that had been created using sophisticated computer software.

The people who did see them were folks that were deemed vulnerable to persuasion using this sort of propaganda. It's like a fellow with a big list walked down the street with a piece of chalk and put a big "X" in front of every house where someone was deemed "gullible" or "vulnerable" so someone else could knock on the door to sell them a vacuum cleaner, hot water tank rental contract, or, the "good news" of the Jehovah Witnesses.

This only made sense as a strategy because of a very special circumstance, namely the very close level of entrenched, already-existing support for both sides of the referendum was fairly close. See the following aggregation of public opinion polling during the time frame. 

Graph c/o Wikipedia article and the Wiki Commons.
Image created by T.seppelt.

As you can see from this graph, there was only a maximum of 10% separating the "yes" and "no" options all through the campaign. The end result was a win of only 51.9% versus 48.1%, with a 72.2% turnout. It was a very close race. (Much the same thing could be said about the Trump/Clinton election where Cambridge Analytica/Facebook were doing much the same thing.) My suspicion is that this sort of manipulation only works if there is such a small gap between the two factions in the population and a small change in voting intent can make a big difference in the outcome. 

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How many people in any given society are gullible? Stupid? Racist? (I'm not sure that that actually deserves it's own category. Isn't a racist by definition a mixture of both?) This isn't a trivial issue, and we are going to have to figure out just how much power we can put into the hands of silly people without having our society fly totally to pieces. It does appears that enough exist to create epidemics with easily eradicated diseases like measles. It might also be the case that Great Britain is going to trash it's economy because the new Prime Minister (Boris Johnson) is willing to crash out of Europe using the so-called "hard Brexit". (In that case only time will tell. It might be that the Brexiter's are right and the country will be able to "muddle it's way through" without an economic disaster.)

Democratic societies have always been prone of demagoguery. (The ancient Spartans used to comment on the wanton speed with which the Athenian assembly was willing to get itself into wars. This turned out to be their undoing when the demagogue Alcibiades convinced them to send their fleet on a disastrous expedition to Sicily.) The problem now is that modern technology has created a machinery of demagogic control and is now selling it to the highest bidder. New laws will have to be created to deal with "new normal". In the interim, I hope we can limit the damage.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!