What is Happening With Face Book?: Part Two the Platform

In my last post I was heavily into speculation about the motivations behind the people engaged in the whole Face Book "whackadoodle" world---primarily with a focus on the local Yellow Vest page. In this post I hope I'll be on somewhat firmer ground because of the research I've been doing. 

The first thing that struck me when I looked at the Yellow Vest page was the number of people on the local page. According to the front page, it has 507 members---which seems like a lot. Funny thing, however, is that when I did a check of the Administrators and Moderators, I found that not a single one identified themselves as someone who lives in Guelph. This got me thinking about exactly how many ordinary members live here, so I started working through the list of members to see if I could identify their place of residence. 

This isn't an easy thing to do, as a lot of them haven't filled out much info about themselves that is available to the "non-friend" viewer. What I did was separate the members into three columns. The first was those that didn't say where they lived, or, who seemed to be obviously lying (for example, one fellow with a very English name said that he lived in St. Petersburg Russia and was born in Mongolia.) I was quite strict about this as a great many of them said they went to school in another province or even country, and, most of their friends were in another province or country too---yet I still put them in the "don't know" column. 

I did check the names of people through other social media systems such as "Linked In". Once in a while I'd find the same name at the same place of business---sometimes even with a photo of the obviously same person. If a location was mentioned in this other account, I'd use that address to assign them a place of residence.

Doing this methodology I worked through 72 names (ie: I went until I found someone who said she lived in Guelph) and came up with the following:

• 40 members who successfully hid where they lived
• 31 members who admitted that they live outside of Guelph or I found evidence that they did
• 1 person who said that they live in Guelph

I decided that it would be a waste of time to do this for the entire 507 members, so I'll extrapolate from the sample to suggest that this might mean that as as little as 1.4% of the group actually live in Guelph, or, 7 actual people. 

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Of course, this raises the obvious question "Why would someone go to the trouble of organizing all this nonsense on Face Book---even in towns where they don't actually live?" I did some research and found out some interesting things. 

First off, you can actually make money off Face Book groups. There are several ways of doing this, but mostly it comes down to advertising, asking for donations, or, selling people's information. 

• sell adverts on the top header of the page
• make the group "closed" and charge a fee to join
• ask for donations
• sell a product
• direct viewers to a web page with a form to fill out and then sell the data
• sell adverts that you then "pin" towards the top of the page for a given period of time
• direct viewers to a web page that then tries to sell you something or asks for a donation

Here's an example of a local Face Book page that sells adverts in it's header.

Big Face Book pages can be worth a fair amount of money. I asked on line and one fellow said that he knew a person who paid $10,000 for a site devoted to stupid jokes and that she was able to make a significant regular income off it through selling advertising. I don't think that the Yellow Vests are in that ball park, but I do think that there is something of a pay off for some of them.  

I'm not saying that the actual administrators of this group are trying to make money. I have no doubt at all that these folks actually believe in what they are doing. What I'm referring to are the people who generate the content that keeps getting promoted through the Face Book. Let me illustrate with a couple examples.

If you've been following this issue you might know that Alex Jones and InfoWars has been bounced off You Tube. What you might not know is that his program never left the Web. That's because it now gets posted on "banned.video" and "BitChute". These are two streaming video services that don't have anywhere the popularity of You Tube. So no casual viewer is going to get sent to them by an AI anymore, right? Yes and no. Because Face Book hasn't banned links to these streaming services, this means that the Face Book AI is now directing people to pages (like Guelph Yellow Vests), which are in turn directing people to banned.video and BitChute. And when people get to these streaming services, you can see that they are monetized. Again, it's true that Pay Pal has banned several of these groups off their service, but there are plenty of other ways that people can easily send money to these businesses---who are quite happy to create the media content that people can then share on Face Book groups like the Yellow Vests. 

(To be totally up front, I should point out that I monetize my blog using other people's groups whenever I announce that I've published another story. I build my readership, increase my Face Book followers, and, eventually pick up the odd subscriber this way.)

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Why should anyone be upset about this? After all, we live in a country with free speech, don't we? If this was just a question of speech, there would be no real problem. The problem is the behaviour of the people who take this speech to heart and then act on it. For both better and worse, we happen to live in a modern, complex society with a lot of technology that amplifies an individual's ability to do harm. Consider the examples of the modern semi-auto rifle and the face mask. 

Kyle Rittenhouse. Image original provenance unknown.
Taken from The Mercury News, used under Fair Dealing provision.

The above is a picture of a 17 year old boy who killed two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha Wisconsin. He doesn't look terribly fit and I doubt if he has had much experience fighting. If it was just a question of fisticuffs, he probably wouldn't be much of a threat to anyone but himself. But the gun in his hands makes that irrelevant. With it (and a modicum of training), he becomes a bad ass killing machine---as long as no one else has a similar weapon. 

Unfortunately, because of ideology it is now legal for children like Rittenhouse to walk down the street of a protest in Wisconsin with rifle slung over his shoulder. (Fortunately, this would still catch the eye of the police in Guelph and result in it being taken away ASAP.) Unfortunately, because of technology certain words and ideas have been spread over social media that encouraged him to be prepared to use violence against strangers. Primarily, I'm talking about the meme that humanity can be split into three distinct fractions: sheep, wolves, and, sheep dogs. 

To a certain extent, I tend to agree with this sentiment. There are a lot of people who just live personal lives and don't really put much thought into the problems that people create for others. There are also people who have zero concern for the well-being of others and want to take whatever they want from the first group. And, the job of police officers and the military---and maybe even "woke" citizens---is to protect the former from the latter. But there are several subtleties to the situation that need to be understood and I suspect that the people who promote this meme rarely do. 

First off, we need to understand exactly what people are talking about when they talk about the violence that "wolves" do to "sheep". If someone hits you over the head with a lead pipe and takes your wallet, well that's obvious. What if they wear a suit and tie, and, steal the money from your bank account? What if they sell you some shoddy merchandise? Or pollute your drinking water? These last few examples can harm a lot more people than the mugger. But should "vigilant armed citizens" be protecting the citizenry from them? 

Secondly, I think it's important to understand just how violent society really is. I've had lots and lots of arguments with people over this, but my understanding is that if you actually look at the statistics (instead of listening to commentators harping on about anecdotal evidence) society has become less and less violent throughout human history. This includes my lifetime. Take a look at the following graphs from the Pew research centre that cover the last 25 years. 

Click on the image for a clearer picture. Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.

This reduction in both violence and property crime would suggest to me that if there ever really was a reason for armed vigilantes, it no longer exists. But, I would argue, the facts aren't really what's important here. Instead, I'd say that for one reason or another some people are promoting the idea that America needs armed citizens to stand on guard and keep the antifa hordes at bay.  Moreover, I think that while the vast majority of the population can tell that this is total nonsense, there is a small percentage of the population who are so naive that they believe it. And when they act on that belief they become extremely dangerous.

Rittenhouse clearly wanted to be a police officer. So having been taught that he was a "sheep dog"---he naturally took his rifle and headed off to protect property from the Black Lives Matter "wolves". He was probably encouraged to do this because of stories on the Web that said that hordes of antifa "terrorists" were being bused into various protests in order to create mayhem. The technology embodied in the rifle and the rules that govern their use in modern day America mean that "sticks and stones may break our bones---but words can get us shot!" This dramatically complicates the situation regarding free speech on the Web, no matter what absolutists might say.

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Similarly, the extreme mobility (ie: jets, trains, buses, cars) that we now take for granted as part of life mean that epidemics can spread really fast. This means that when a dangerous one comes along---like COVID-19---we need to all follow the advice of the health authorities. And it also means that it only takes a small fraction of the public acting foolishly to undo the precautions of the vast majority. And that will kill people just as surely as pumping slugs into them with an AR-15.

The important idea I'm trying to point out in this blog post is that what is happening isn't just a question of free speech, but one of marketing violence. And in this day-and-age we need to ask ourselves whether society has a right to limit the ability of citizens and businesses to market violence. For my part, I think it does. 

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A group with the name "Avaaz" recently published a detailed report about the role of Face Book in promoting disinformation about COVID-19 titled Facebook's Algorithm: A Major Threat to Public Health and it makes for fascinating reading.  

This study just looked at the role of Facebook in spreading false narratives about COVID-19. One of the key roles that it plays as a way of directing people towards websites that then went on to propagandize people into disregarding directives by official health agencies. Here's a list of the top ten, who were responsible for 1.5 billion views last year. 

1. Realfarmacy.com, 253,618,426 views
2. globalresearch.ca, 235,638,637
3. collective-evolution.com, 170,563,539
4. jedanews.com, 166,154,587
5. ripostelaique.com, 140,179,475
6. mercola.com, 133,536,826
7. lesmoutonsrebelles.com, 111,483,871
8. sonsoflibertymedia.com, 99,185,021
9. wakingtimes.com, 93,342,708
10. nowtheendbegins.com, 82,322,883

It's important to understand the impact of these sorts of websites on public discourse. According to the Avaaz study,

We then compared this with the views generated on Facebook for the websites of 10 leading health institutes in the UK, the United States, France, Italy, and Germany, as well as with the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), over the same period. We found that on Facebook, the content from the top 10 websites spreading health misinformation generated almost four times as many views as equivalent content from the top 10 websites of leading health institutions.

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At this point, it's interesting to ask the two questions "who is it that's spreading this misinformation?" and "why are they doing it?" Again, the Avaaz report attempts to answer.

The first answer to "who" is to ask if there is any obvious political orientation. 

The first thing to understand is that the majority of sites have no discernible political message at all (61%). So it's important to understand that most of this seems to be being posted for some other reason. But at the same time, it's important to realize that a sizable fraction is being posted by people who do seem to have a right-wing axe to grind (35.4%). That's still quite significant. Finally, it's important to "put to rest" the lazy idea that "they all do it". That's because only a tiny minority of these sites appear to have some sort of left wing agenda (3.6%). 

I've gone through and glanced at the top ten COVID-19 disinformation sites that the Avaaz report identifies, and it's not immediately clear where all of them get their money. Many of them do have products for sale and ways that you can donate money to them. I didn't see these things on some other sites, but there were calls to 
"sign up for a newsletter" on some of these. It's important to realize that these are "entry portals", though, and their job isn't to immediately get money into the hands of the people running them so much as to let people get "engaged" with the site on an on-going basis so they can make a financial pitch at some future time. 

Reading through the Avaaz report, however, it appears that most of these sites are designed to raise money more than anything else. I suspect that at least one person is making some money off all of them. But I don't think that they are anywhere near as lucrative as many other businesses---I don't think that they are being run by James Bond style super-villains. 

Moreover, I think it's just an accident of ideology that so many of them espouse right-wing politics. Right wing types just tend to be paradoxically more skeptical about experts and more gullible towards snake oil salesmen. Every business person knows that the "customer is always right". If the majority of the people who want to buy what you have to sell believe in a vast left wing conspiracy, then you will start acting like you believe it too. That's just good sales practice.

The problem is, however, that just like it doesn't take a lot of losers like Kyle Rittenhouse to create a violent mess on our streets, it doesn't take a lot of anti-maskers to spread a pandemic. It raises the question, therefore, about whether our society believes in a radical version of freedom of speech so much that it wants to continue to allow a small number of con artists to keep undermining the public education campaigns of our health authorities. Is the ill-gotten livelihood of a dozen or so sleazebags more important than the lives of all the people their misinformation campaign kills?   

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I recently received the following message on my personal Face Book feed:

Effective October 1, 2020, section 3.2 of our Terms of Service will be updated to include: “We also can remove or restrict access to your content, services or information if we determine that doing so is reasonably necessary to avoid or mitigate adverse legal or regulatory impacts to Facebook".

I don't really know, but I hope that it means that the company is stepping back from the sort of freedom of speech absolutism that Mark Zuckerberg (the CEO) was known for in the past.  

I've had a lot of arguments over the years about free speech. There are a lot of different elements at play here, but with regard to what I've been discussing here I want readers to walk away with the following points:

• if Face Book decides to turn off the taps of these fountains of disinformation we need to remember that what's happening isn't about individuals having the freedom to speak, but rather the freedom of a company to not publish stuff that they don't agree with
• this issue cannot be solved through the "back and forth" of honest debate. That's because this isn't about what the majority of people think. Instead the problem is that a very small minority of people who believe the nonsense can create havoc for the majority
• the media have always had 'gate keepers' who exert editorial control over the content of what they publish. People used to send in letters to the editor of newspapers. They had to be signed by the authors, who included their phone numbers, and, the papers called those numbers to ensure that what was being said actually came from the individual identified. If the editor thought that the letter contained lies or libel (or were just not worth reading) they didn't get published.   

We've been living through a short period of time where the technology got ahead of the regulations. And it is also a time when young people who are good at computer coding---but lack any real understanding of the complexities of the social issues they are dealing with---are making all the decisions. The time of "trial and error" is coming to an end, and I hope that the tech sector is realizing that the sort of easy libertarian solutions suggested in university coffee shops often don't work in the real world. 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

What is Happening With Face Book????????: part one, the people

Over the last few months I've been paying attention to the local "Yellow Vests" Face Book page. I see it as a window into a world that I know absolutely nothing about. 

In case you don't know, the yellow vests originated in France where they were opposed to unpopular fuel taxes plus the removal of a wealth tax that the Socialists had imposed on the very wealthy. In Canada, among other things, they seem to be mostly concerned about a grab bag of issues such as immigration, any attempt to limit industry to deal with climate change, and, more recently, attempts by the government to mandate public health measures such as wearing masks in public. 

I haven't seen any scientific research that would describe exactly who these people are and what makes them tick. Moreover, I don't know how a social scientist could study them because researchers are pretty much limited to using voluntary surveys to collect their data. This means any group that is concerned about secret government conspiracies and holds science in contempt is bound to not produce useful info if you ask them to tell you something about themselves in either a face-to-face interview or a list of boxes they are asked to check off. 

But baring any sort of academic study, I will hazard a hypothesis based on what I've been reading from a wide variety of sources. Take it for what it's worth, but I think that what we are seeing is an inarticulate response to massive social changes. In times past, this would simply be something "below the surface", but because of modern social media and populist political parties it has learned to "punch above it's weight" and become more influential than it should be able.

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First, I'll ask you to try to look at the world through the eyes of some of the people I knew when I was young. I don't think that many young people realize how appallingly nasty a lot of people were even a few decades ago. Let's me explain what I'm talking about with the following examples. 

A lot of people used to be very open about their hatred of gays. To cite one extreme institutional example, in 1981 the police targeted the gays of Toronto  through "Operation Soap". This was a huge simultaneous raid on four bath houses under the old "bawdy house" law. This was a vague statute that allowed police to raid and arrest the owners and inhabitants of a building where acts of "indecency" were happening. Since gays were discriminated against in mainstream society, they had created their own subculture, part of which involved the bathhouses. In effect, the police were "creeped out" by gays, so they kicked the doors down of their private clubs, handcuffed them, threw them into jail, and, gave them a criminal record. If any of the people involved resisted, the officers could then beat and potentially kill them.

That's the way mainstream society treated gays back when I was at university. 

I can remember when Rod Stewart's song The Killing of Georgie came out and I heard a lot of vicious, nasty, homophobic things said about him. At the time I didn't think much about this (I was pretty naive and didn't even realize the song was about a gay person until I was older). But in retrospect I can only imagine what it must have been like to be a closeted gay who had to endure this blizzard of hate-filled nonsense. Take a look at Stewart's official video and try to understand how people who had grown in a society that was tremendously homophobic might have experienced it. I suspect a great many thought that this was the absolute end of the world as they knew it.

Now we are used to this sort of thing, but at the time this sort of conscious "gender bending" was absolutely terrifying to a great many folks. It still is for some people, who describe the growth of gay rights not as a move towards making society kinder and gentler, but rather as becoming "immoral".

I suspect that it's this general sense of fear and disgust that underlies the weird theory that people like Hilary Clinton and other top Democrats have created an enormous pedophile ring that kidnaps, sexually abuses, murders, and, drinks children's blood. (It's supposed to prolong a person's life. If you've never heard of this---read up on "pizzagate" and "QAnon".) If you are so strongly and emotionally repelled by the concept of gay rights, it is possible to create some sort of "fever dream" that suggests an evil, child-abusing cabal running society. 

I don't know about you, but I watch Netflix for old Star Trek series
and Turkish soap operas---.

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Another way in which society has become different in my lifetime is our racial makeup. When I was young, I never saw a black person until I was in my late teens. There was one Asian family in my village---they ran a Chinese restaurant. There was just one family of First Nations people and one of French Canadians that were at my local school. Racist jokes, use of the "N-bomb", anger against having to learn French at public school, stereotypes about First Nations, etc, sometimes came up in ordinary conversation among the adults. That wasn't very often, though. The fact is that we were pretty much an entirely white community. 

Fast forward to about fifteen years ago and my mom was showing some family Christmas photos to her neighbour---including my then partner from Bombay, my nephew's French wife of Algerian descent, my niece's black son, and, my brother's Mohawk wife and their two daughters. The comment "What the Hell is this? The United Nations?" was made. The photo reflected the fact that the racial composition of the country has changed, and my family was pretty much indifferent to the whole thing. But unfortunately, like my mom's next door neighbour, lots of people aren't very happy about the change. 

This isn't just about race, because race and culture are deeply intertwined. That was what the residential schools were all about---they weren't primarily opposed to people with a specific skin tone. Instead, they wanted to make all First Nations people into slightly darker carbon copies of their white neighbours. That's why they were forbidden to speak their own languages, why their hair was cut, etc. Many of the problems we identify as "racist" aren't per se about the fact of skin colour so much as the cultures that people follow that aren't considered "mainstream". 

This manifests itself among people as fear that immigrants are planning to take over the country and get rid of its "traditional values" and "culture". 

I enjoy eating different types of food. I enjoy learning about different cultures. I like to learn new things about world history. I also believe that there is much room for improvement in both my country and my civilization, and that we could benefit from following the example of others. But if you are someone who believes that the English Canada that you grew up in was pretty much the best that any society could ever be, then you are going to be really creeped-out by multiculturalism. 

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I have friends in business who get absolutely frothing mad about the way "heavy handed bureaucrats have made it impossible to make a living". This ranges from the way they have to fill out their taxes, to safety rules, to the minimum wage, to environmental regulations, and, more. I'm the last person to defend the way the Canadian bureaucracy works. But I do believe that I can see a reason why there is such a problem. 

The world is a lot more complex than when I was younger. There are a lot more people. Our technologies are a lot more powerful. And, we've learned that we can catastrophically damage the environment if we aren't really careful. We've also decided that injured workers aren't completely disposable, which means that we don't allow people to do all the crazy dangerous things that working people just used to take for granted. As a result, we've passed a lot of new rules and regulations to cut down on the carnage. 

Unfortunately, this increased regulation costs money. And we have periodically elected governments who want to cut taxes, which means that the civil servants who regulate a lot of our lives have to do so with budgets that are usually frozen if not in decline. What this tends to mean is that small businesses who cannot afford to hire lawyers to help them wade through the complex regulations tend to suffer a lot more than large corporations that can simply "swallow" the costs. 

If you are someone like me who thinks he can see a reason for all of this, it is still profoundly annoying to have to wade through mountains of paperwork and wait months (if not years) for something that in recent memory could be dealt with through a face-to-face conversation and an hour of time. But for a person who guides their life by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and sees business people as heroic figures, this can seem like a perfidious conspiracy against freedom itself. The difference between the two of us is that I can see how much of this is either necessary or the result of decisions by political parties who are supported by the people most annoyed by the glacial speed to which it has been reduced. 

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I grew up in a community that had a LOT of churches. Generally this didn't intrude too much on my life as even though we were nominally Baptist, my family wasn't terribly religious. (I'm told the one time a minister came to visit my dad crawled out the window of his study and hid in the barn until he left.) But we did have a Dutch Reform congregation in town that were anti-vaxxers. A child born the same year as me in the next farm behind us died of tetanus from a horse bite because he was never vaccinated against lock-jaw. In high school I had several friends who got polio---again, all members of that one congregation.

People in the community were pissed. "Why", we asked, "can the old-order Amish take their horse and buggies down to the clinic and get their vaccinations, yet these dweebs in their cars and modern lifestyle think that there was something 'ungodly' about it?" I still get annoyed, myself, when I think about it. 

In the middle of this current pandemic I find it really difficult to put myself in the shoes of the people who are fighting against our public health orders. But when I have the required patience and internal clarity, I can remind myself that the world can be a pretty scary place for people who have lost their sense of personal agency. 

Of course, the really big issue is that we really don't have much control over our lives. If we get born with some sort of disability, that defines much of our life. If our parents are poor or rich, white or black, intelligent or dumb, caring or dysfunctional, etc, has a huge impact. So does where we are born: Indian reserve or nice suburb? Canada or Afghanistan? When we come into this world has a huge impact too. (If you doubt this, consider how much more expensive buying a house is now versus thirty years ago.) 

Our health is much the same thing. We can exercise, eat right, etc, and WHAM! you get cancer, a heart attack, mental illness, or, hit by a bus. It's all a question of probabilities and random chance. Most human beings have a problem with this, they want to at least maintain the illusion of control over their life. But the fact of the matter is that human life can be relatively good or bad, often for reasons beyond our control. And it always ends in death---more than sometimes nasty, random, and/or, totally unexpected. 

Unfortunately, there are a lot of very important parts of our culture that are designed to fool people into thinking that if they just work hard enough they can achieve anything that they want. 

Play by the rules? How about the ones against using steroids? 
This comes from an entire page of "inspirational quotes".
Used under the "Fair Dealing" provision of the Copyright Act.

The problem with this idea, of course, is that it's errant nonsense. But unfortunately, we have huge swathes of the population that believe that this is literally true. It's what the whole Conservative movement in North America and our economic system is based upon. But it's also what a great many people increasingly reject.

Consider, if you will, the Black Lives Matter protests. How can you believe that if you just work hard you can achieve anything while at the same time understanding that if you meet the wrong police officer on the wrong day, you will just end up getting killed? How can you teach your children that if they work hard they can do anything---but that when they buy a candy bar in a corner store they should always ask for a bag because that way they can prove they didn't shoplift it if they get accused? (If memory serves, I remember hearing a local black person tell me that this was part of "the talk" that he gave one of his children.)

Underlying this delusional mythology is the great, grand daddy of delusional thinking: religious faith. 

A lot of people have been told that there is life after death, and that if they just believe in God strongly enough, they will end up in paradise. Some of them also believe that this faith will also provide them with happy, wealthy lives on this earth too. (This last bit is called "the prosperity gospel".) These are both ridiculously twisted misunderstandings of a point of view that could make some sense, yet they have---unfortunately---been heavily promoted in modern society. And as such, they help a large fraction of the population become totally unprepared to live their lives with any semblance of serenity or wisdom.

First, let's start off with the original idea.   

The problem with knowing that we all die, often in an extremely unpleasant way, is that if we fixate on it, it could cast a pall on every moment of our life. And who wants that? So paradoxically, if you really want to live a good life you need to, on some level, think that you are going to live forever. But if you actually believed that there would be a tendency to keep putting off today in favour of tomorrow---which would create a whole new set of problems. That means that at the same time you need to act as if today is the last day of your life. 

Run this paradox through popular religious culture (And don't forget that until very recently people would be treated very harshly for publicly being at odds with Christian orthodoxy) and you end up with the idea that when we die we go to paradise as long as we really, really, really believe in God. 

The issue for the people of my childhood who refused vaccinations was that their church hierarchy told their congregation that part of the "really, really, really believing in God" was not being vaccinated. 

Remember that "prosperity gospel" thing? Well, one of the pillars of capitalist society is the idea of the "invisible hand" which says that if people really believe in the free market all the individual choices that each consumer and business person makes will equal out and create the best of all possible worlds. Add this idea to the "faith thing" from a confused sort of pop spirituality, and you get the idea that if you really, really, really believe in the invisible hand it will make you rich and your country "Great!" or "Great Again!" 

The problem for people who believe in this nonsense is that it paints you into a corner. You aren't supposed to have any doubts or investigate any evidence that might undermine this worldview. Unfortunately, they really, really, really want to believe all this stuff but they can also see evidence to the contrary. So to prove how much they really, really, really believe they will make a big fuss about how completely wrong the evidence really is. (The psychologist Bob Altemeyer who spent his career studying conservative leaders and their supporters wrote that he's found out that a surprising percentage of the most vocal supporters of fundamentalist Christianity actually will admit that they don't really believe in God or life after death. They just say so to be part of the "group think".)

Along comes COVID-19. Whether or not we shut down society, ask everyone to wear masks, and, eventually tell everyone to get vaccinated all comes down to science. The virus couldn't care less about the spiritual values that you've built your life around---it just "is". And just like death, poverty, and, injustice it requires some sort of spiritual "work around" for the people who have never reconciled themselves to the fact that life isn't fair and that they are going to die. So they flail around looking for evidence either that the virus is a conspiracy or that it just isn't all that bad. And Face Book is quite happy to supply all the nonsense they are willing to consume.

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There's more to this story than just the way a minor segment of our society thinks. There's also the question of how they are being whipped into a frenzy by shysters, mega-corporations, and, questionable political organizations. But this is article is already long enough. I'll have to continue the story some other time. Until then---.

Moreover I say unto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Living in a World All Our Own

I had a conversation this morning with an old friend who talked about how much he enjoys not being on social media. I often hear this from my friends. I understand why they say this---I pretty much loathe what it does to me too. But part of me feels really annoyed when I hear this. I couldn't quite articulate what it makes me feel this way until today, but now I think I understand.

The ancient Greeks were very odd ducks compared to most of the other world civilizations. During what historians call "the Axial Age", most of the world's great religions and philosophies came into existence. This was when the monotheistic religions that we tend to call "Abrahamic" (first Judaism, then Christianity, and, later Islam) first came into existence with the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism (this connection is given lipservice in the Gospels when the "three Magi"---Zoroastrians---came to the manger bearing gifts). It was also when Buddhism and Hinduism arose in India, and, Daoism and Confucianism in China. (If you are a religious scholar, don't get your knickers in a knot---I know that this is a gross overstatement. But this blog is for public consumption, not your grad seminar!)

While all this was going on, the Greeks were experimenting with something

Socrates was a really annoying participant in the
ancient Greek version of social media. Public
domain image from the Louvre, c/o Wiki Commons.

completely different: philosophy and democracy. Philosophy is different from religion because it is based on critical thinking and direct experience instead of following a revealed authority. And democracy is not about finding and training the perfect ruler, but rather that of developing a culture where the general public manage their own affairs. And both these two different things were based on the idea of the "dialectic", or an argument within the public square.

This is an important point because the thing that I find that most people hate about social media is the arguing that goes on within it. That's understandable in a world where people are paid money to derail intelligent discussions by being "trolls". But unfortunately I find that a great many people learn the false lesson that there is no value at all in any form of dialectic. People like this not only won't argue, they won't even let anyone know what they really think. They just "disengage". Moreover, they often just walk away from any venue where the people they are with are not in fundamental agreement with them.

I can certainly understand if someone is so weak-minded that they cannot handle this sort of dissent. I can also understand getting burnt out and taking a vacation from social media idiocy. But what my friends are saying is very different. They are taking pride in disengaging from this conversation. They see it as an act of self-discipline that they no longer have a FaceBook, Twitter, or, Reddit account. They are looking down on me for my participation because they think that they are better than I am---since I obviously lack their superior self control.  

There is an apocryphal story to the effect that the ancient Athenians called people who weren't engaged in their social life "idiots", and that's why it is a pejorative term to this day. From what I've read, this isn't true.

Many political commentators have interpreted the word "idiot" as reflecting the Ancient Greeks' attitudes to civic participation and private life, combining the ancient meaning of 'private citizen' with the modern meaning 'fool' to conclude that the Greeks used the word to say that it is selfish and foolish not to participate in public life. But this is not how the Greeks used the word.

It is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation. Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying: "[we] regard... him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" (τόν τε μηδὲν τῶνδε μετέχοντα οὐκ ἀπράγμονα, ἀλλ᾽ ἀχρεῖον νομίζομεν). However, neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe non-participants, or in a derogatory sense; its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert. The derogatory sense came centuries later, and was unrelated to the political meaning.

From the Wikipedia entry on "Idiot" 

My sense of annoyance is that what I consider a vice (not being engaged with the society we live in), they consider a virtue. 

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In this article I talk about the ancient Greek's participating in civically engaged arguments. The best example of this was Socrates---who ended up being executed after the Athenian state lost it's war with Sparta and its democracy was replaced by an oligarchy. He described himself as being like what we would call a "deer-fly" who's job is to bite the comfortable and force them out of their complacency. 

That's sort of what a journalist should do, IMHO. And that's at least part of why I write this blog. If you think that it serves a useful purpose, why not subscribe? Most folks pony up $5/month, but as little as $1/month is really helpful. (I support a couple YouTube channels by that much---so it isn't an insult.) It's not hard to do through PayPal or Patreon.  

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The fact of the matter is that people have a choice about how much they choose or do not choose to engage in the world around them. Moreover, they also get to choose who they engage with, and who they do not. This issue came home to me recently when I heard about Lisa Raitt's recent little "kerfuffle" on Twitter. 

For those of you who don't know, she posted a link to an article in the Financial Post (ie: the National Post) by Ross McKitrick (who happens to be an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph). This article suggested that the climate emergency hasn't resulted in more and worse extreme weather events, and, moreover there appears to be a world-wide conspiracy aimed at keeping this "fact" out of public discourse. McKitrick ends his piece with the following statement: 

The continual claim of such links is misinformation employed for political and rhetorical purposes. Powerful people get away with it because so few people know what the numbers show. Many scientists who know better remain silent. And the few who push back against the propaganda, such as Roger Pielke Jr., find themselves on the receiving end of abuse and career-threatening attacks, even though they have all the science in their corner. Something has gotten scary and extreme, but it isn’t the weather.

Ross McKitrick, U. of Guelph Economics prof, who purports to know a great deal about 

climate change. Public domain image by the U. of Guelph c/o the Wiki Commons.

I won't try to get into the "nitty gritty" of the science behind "heroic" economists pushing back against a conspiracy of climate scientists on the pages of the Post-Media flagship. Instead, I want to talk about a "Twitter Storm" that erupted when Raitt posted a link to the latest McKitrick eruption.

It appears that Raitt was absolutely inundated by people who attacked her for spreading misinformation. Interestingly enough, this resulted in an invitation by an actual climate scientist (ie: not an economist) to re-examine her opinion based on something like real evidence. Amazingly enough, Raitt seems to have changed her mind on the subject. But then she offered a quote that I found absolutely gob-smacking:

While Raitt said she can’t speak for Scheer, she believes “people are just getting their heads around this kind of stuff.” [My emphasis.]

What upsets me is the fact that Raitt is the deputy leader of the Conservative party---which has built it's brand around attempting to sabotage any real attempt to deal with the climate emergency---and, she doesn't seem to have bothered to put much thought into the subject up until now.

Conservative MP, Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Lisa Raitt.
Hasn't really thought very much about the Climate Emergency until last week.
Public Domain image from Wiki Commons by Tabercil.

At first glance this might sound surprising, as she has a Master's degree in chemistry from the University of Guelph. But she also has a law degree and has done extra training in the United Kingdom on international trade and commerce. This is a lot to have accomplished for someone who's only 51 years old. (Oh, and in addition, she has two sons---but there was a "stay-at-home" dad.) Plus, of course, all the political work that goes into rising to the deputy leadership position in the official opposition. And, being a child born out of wedlock who was raised by a dockworker's family, she probably didn't receive any "special favours" in her life either.

I suspect that like a lot of very successful people, Raitt has learned to be incredibly focused in where she puts her attention. Not only do I doubt if there are many nights where she kicks off her shoes and watches Neflix, I also suspect that she never reads anything unless it is specifically directed at the task in hand. Moreover, I also suspect that she rarely gets any time in face-to-face with lunatics like myself who have opinions totally outside of anything Conservative.

More's the pity.

I'm concerned that our society is being guided by more and more by people who's way of dealing with information overload and a general decline in civility in public discourse is to create their own little "walled gardens". Within these secluded enclaves they tend to thoughts that don't disrupt their view of the world and don't entertain visitors who talk too loud and stomp all over the primroses. Retirement can be more peaceful in these gardens. And a career can be carefully nurtured free from wasteful distractions. But society suffers when people cease rubbing up against the "other types" in the public square.

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Furthermore, I say to you---the climate emergency must be dealt with!

Leading by Example

Years ago I was doing some banking with some volunteers in the local Green Party riding association. Basically I had to cosign one volunteer Chief Financial Officer off the bank account and put another one on. This resulted in my standing on the sidewalk with a woman while we waited for another guy to show up. One of the woman's co-workers happened by and they had a bit of a conversation. He asked what she was doing and when she explained, he started up with the usual "yeah, this is all idealistic but no one actually walks the talk---people are all hypocrites" blather.

It was a bitterly cold winter's day. The roads were clear but a blizzard was coming in and there was a howling wind with snow flurries. In the midst of this guy's rant our fellow rolled up on his old Dutch bicycle. The cynic's mouth literally dropped and his eyes bugged out. He simply couldn't believe that someone was so concerned about climate change that he would ride a bicycle in that sort of weather. It rendered him actually speechless to see someone "lead by example".

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In the struggle for Indian independence there was a campaign titled "Swadeshi" that used "leading by example" to encourage Indians to think about how their day-to-day decisions impacted their country's economic independence from the British Empire.

Basically, the idea was that India's rural poor had been grotesquely exploited by an economic system that forced peasants to grow cotton, ship it to England, where it was turned into cloth, which was then shipped to India where it sold for less than that created by domestic production. This kept the peasants poor and stopped local Indian industry from developing as a competitor with Britain. 

The Congress Party of India sought to raise people's consciousness by encouraging people to buy cotton and spin thread which they then sold to artisanal weavers to make a special type of cloth known as "khadi", which they could buy and make their own clothes from.  Indeed, this was such an important campaign that people staged protests where they burnt English cloth to show that they would no longer buy or wear it. People bought their membership in the Congress Party with homespun thread. At one convention, Mohandas Gandhi (then President of the party) devoted a 40 minute talk to quietly sitting on a stage with a spinning wheel making thread for the weavers. 

Khadi is still sold in India.
This image from the Womenweave
organic co-op. Used under the "Fair Use" provision.

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When I first started working on this blog I wanted to make it an "open book" project. That is, I thought that I'd keep track of my hours and thereby tell readers how much time I put into researching and writing these missives. I quickly decided keeping track of my time would be a waste of effort. To a certain extent most of my life is now devoted to the project---I go to events and talk to people and that helps with stories. Even when I'm at home by myself I am often reading or listening to podcasts. Even when I'm not doing much of anything at all, at least part of me is always thinking about a story.

What I can do, however, is mention in this blue type whenever I spend some money for the blog. To that end, this week I sent $100 to the Linux Mint project because I upgraded the operating system on my computer. I did this because they had stopped sending security upgrades for the version I'd been using for about five years.

If you'd like to help me with these and other costs---plus give me some money to offset all those hours spent researching and obsessing---why not subscribe through Patreon or toss something in the Tip Jar? If nothing else, share the stories you like on social media.

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Gandhi was a real master of the concept of "leading by example". Unfortunately, a lot of this is lost on people who don't understand the issues he was dealing with. For example, he started out trying to be a "proper English gentleman" during his legal career. This involved wearing a suit and tie. But eventually, he stopped trying to "ape" the British and instead decided that he would live and look like an ordinary, poor Indian. This helped immensely in his attempt to connect with the Indian masses---who were alienated from the tiny Anglophile elite who tended to lead the independence movement.

Gandhi, seated in the middle. The early elite, Anglophile.
Original image from Life magazine archive.
Public Domain image, copyright expired, c/o Wiki Commons.

A later Gandhi who was actively trying to court the vast majority of Indians.
Another public domain image. From the The New Indian Express website.

This process also extended to attempts to change the attitudes of Indians with regard to what Gandhi considered their own particular prejudices. For example, at the first Congress Party of India convention he attended he volunteered to be in charge of providing and cleaning the latrines. As an upper cast Hindu (Gandhi's father had been a prime minister in one of the "princely states"), it would have been seen by most people as absolutely bizarre for him to take on a task that should only be done by a Dalit (the horribly exploited class of "untouchables" created by India's caste system.) But this was just another case of his trying to build bridges between the different groups. The existing divisions between the different religions and castes of India had been exploited by the British for centuries. Gandhi not only saw a moral imperative in breaking down these barriers, he also saw that many people would not support independence if it meant that majority Indians would be free to horribly exploit their particular minority group.  

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The reason why I'm going on about this issue is because I think that it's time the environmental movement started to exploit the tactic of "leading by example". I say this because this is one of the few ways that it is possible to change the minds of the 30% or so of the population who are fighting absolutely tooth and nail against doing something to stop the human race from committing mass suicide.

There's a retired University of Manitoba psychology professor by the name of Bob Altemeyer who devoted his career to studying what motivates right wing people---both leaders and voters. The conclusion he came to was that these people are pretty much impervious to evidence and logic. But the one way that they do tend to change their worldview is through personal and vicarious experience. That is to say they build their worldview around people, not ideas.  

Let me illustrate with a couple examples. 

Altemeyer did some research on worldview changes among people who go to university. What he found was evidence that the old adage of "the fellow lost his faith when he went to college" is actually true. A lot of people do go through profound worldview changes. But what he found was that it wasn't because their course work enlightened them. Instead, it was because they were exposed to a lot of different people with different life experiences. It was the informal social interaction that destroyed their preconceptions about the world. 

Let me illustrate with one of these "worldview changes" that people have gone through in our lifetimes. At first the idea that gays could marry was opposed by a majority of Americans. But now a majority are in favour of it. What changed? Because of court rulings and a concerted campaign for gays to "get out of the closet", a lot of people who were opposed to gays in principle found out that some of the people in their lives who they really liked or respected were, in fact, gay. This forced them onto the horns of dilemma. They either had to drop kick these people out of their lives or change one of the basic building blocks of the way they viewed the world around them. In many cases, they chose the latter instead of the former. 

Chart from the Pew Forum webpage, presumably used with
their permission, as they have it set up to easily download.
Click on the image for a clearer image. 

This isn't a question of demographic shift (ie: "civilization progresses one funeral at a time"), because if you break the survey sample into different age cohorts you see the same change in attitudes.

Pew Forum et al. As you can see, lots of people---regardless of age---changed their minds about gay marriage at
roughly the same time. Altemeyer says this didn't happen because of evidence or logic.
Instead it was learning that uncle Fred was gay and Aunt Muriel is a lesbian.

(If you are interested in learning more about Altemeyer's work, he published a free to download Ebook that on the subject. If you are interested in learning more on the subject covered in this post, you might want to read my first book Walking the Talk. At the top right side of this site there is an advert for it with links to where you can buy it either as an Ebook or paperback. The paperback is also on sale at the Bookshelf downtown. And the public and university libraries each also has a copy.) 

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One of the first things that I saw after Steve Dyck announced that he was running for the local Green Party of Canada nomination was a snide remark about the fact that he was currently in Central America. The idea was that if he really believed in climate change as an issue, he wouldn't have blasted off a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere for a frivolous winter vacation. This isn't a "one off". The web is awash with memes talking about the disconnect between what leading environmentalists say about the environment and how they live their lives. Here's a small sample that I'm sharing with you under the "fair use" provision of the copyright law. 

From the "Bookworm Room" 

From "The Top 12 Celebrity Climate Hypocrites"

From "Leading Malaysian Neocon"

From garyvarvel.com.

     

I could post a lot more of these. The point I'm trying to make is that there are a lot of folks out there who think that if you really do think that climate change is an existential threat, then you should live your life in a way that looks like you really believe it. I think that they have a point. 

If an environmentalist says that the world is reaching a crisis point over carbon dioxide, then they shouldn't be jetting around the world to go to on vacations, conventions, to visit family, etc. This isn't to say that your particular trip is going to tip the balance, but learning to do without this is something that shows that you really mean what you say. Otherwise, it looks like you want other people to give up their "goodies" while you keep yours. And that stinks. Even worse, it is sabotaging the environmental movement when we need to bring as many people "on board" as we possibly can. 

This isn't to say that many environmentalists haven't already made big changes in the way that they live their lives. But some high-profile environmentalists still seem to live excessively "large lives". But the point is that there needs to be a conscious campaign to harness the symbolic value inherent in "living the like you already live in the world you want to inhabit". Gandhi knew how to do that, I don't see why modern environmentalists cannot do the same thing. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Liz Sandals, Part Two

Liz Sandals, Guelph's MPP
from 2003 to 2018
Image from Ontario Legislature Website

In the previous part of my interview with Liz Sandals we had been talking about the problem that the "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) phenomenon was causing in the creation of affordable housing for Guelph. We continued by moving on to the sex ed curriculum that was a "hot button" in the last election.

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Hulet:  Well it seems to me that the problem comes down to 70% of people in Guelph own their own homes. And two things make people very conservative: their home and their children. If anything looks like it might affect either one of those things,  they instantly go into fear mode.

Yeah. Yeah. 

Hulet: As education minister I'm sure you've seen that with regard to children.

Sex ed actually started off as an off-shoot of the "safe schools" work when I was Minister of Education. So that's been my file all the way through by reporting to Kathleen first as her PA and then as the Premier. That's been my file all along. 

One of the things that I found really interesting was the perception that older people are automatically going to be against this. But I've had all sorts of seniors come up to me and say "It's about time someone actually did this right". And my suspicion was that probably they knew somebody. The teen that had gotten pregnant. Or the friend who was gay and always got bullied, or whatever it was.  They had some life experience of someone who had suffered because someone hadn't gotten the right education. 

So it was very interesting that the opposition was very much specific pockets. When we did the polling, when we first introduced it, it was one of the most popular things that we ever did. It was just that the opposition was extremely vocal. 

Hulet: So it was that "how deep is the support---or the opposition?" thing.

Yeah. When you did polling that was random---if we've learned one thing, it's that if you do random polling, it really isn't anymore. For example, if you do phone polling you're over-sampling seniors. But it was still one of the most popular things that we'd ever done!  

So the perceptions about how the population split on that one---. The perceptions weren't the truth. But a lot of the opposition wasn't about sex ed, per ce. It was about homophobia. Seeing the emails that came in on that---because a lot of that was directed on me---and what was directed at me wasn't nearly as vile as what was directed at Kathleen. It got to the point where my constituent staff and the Ministry staff wouldn't show me the stuff that we were getting anymore. 

Hulet: Well, I can attest that at my family events that things were said and all I could think was "What the Hell do you do about this?"

Yeah. Yeah! So much of the information that was going around was sheer nonsense. It was people who were deliberately misinforming other people in order to crank them up. 

Kathleen Wynne photo
c/o Australian Ministry of Trade
Public Domain, c/o Wiki Commons

Hulet: This gets into the "Ontario Proud" thing. There was just recently a Toronto Star article saying that there was a bit more to this than met the eye. And Jesse Brown at Canadaland did a piece saying that when he interviewed the people behind "Ontario Proud" they had been disingenuous about their funding---which now seems to have come mostly from a small number of wealthy developers.

I can't really speak about "Ontario Proud" but I can certainly say that social media was clearly what was driving the "We hate Kathleen" thing. There's no doubt that that was driven by---and I first saw it on sex ed---and that was pure, unadulterated homophobia and misogyny. But it wasn't just on the sex ed. What you could see happening was you would get a cluster of correspondence all of which would repeat one or two phrases. You could tell "Oh yeah, you're on that chain" because here are the talking points. 

I would never have seen the original, what was out on social media, or email groups, or whatever---but I would know what was in it. That's because I'd get a bunch of stuff with a cluster of talking points, and then three months later I'd get another bunch of stuff with a different set of talking points that would come back through the echo chamber. There's no doubt that social media has a huge part to play in stirring up this "I hate Kathleen" stuff. And, if at the door you asked "why?", then they often couldn't say why.  

Part of that was if the real reason was homophobia and misogyny they weren't going to tell me---the MPP, standing at their door. They aren't going to tell that they hate her because she's a lesbian. So they have to pull something out of the air:  "Hydro". Because that's what they've heard the most about. But there was a total mismatch between "do you approve of the policies?"---full day kindergarden, childcare, pharmacare for the young, free university tuition for low income youth,---. If you went through the list: "do you like that?" "oh yes", "do you like that?" "oh yes", "do you like that we closed the coal plants?" "oh yes", "cap and trade?" "don't really understand it, but we should do something about climate change", etc. People at the doors liked our policies---except selling "Hydro", and that's because they didn't understand that "Hydro One" wasn't "Ontario Hydro".      

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Just to give people an understanding of what "Ontario Proud" is, look at the following video. As the Podcast by Jesse Brown says in the headline: "This Facebook group gets more engagement than the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail combined."

Originally, Ontario Proud said that they were funded by small contributions by ordinary citizens. But in a December 11th report by the CBC, it turns out that a small number of companies with links to the development industry donated most ($459,000) of the half million dollar budge that the social media company used to fuel their message---including $50,000 from Nashville Developments (a developer based in Vaughan), and, another $50,000 from Merit Ontario (a group that represents non-union construction companies.) I'm not going to get much into the content, but the fact that the ex-Premier is portrayed by a man in a dress who smokes cigars might just be construed as slightly homophobic. As for the electricity policy, you might want to read a previous article I published on that subject to suggest an alternative point of view. If you do, you might be surprised to find out that there are really good reasons why some people's electricity bills are more expensive than others.

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As for the point that Sandals makes about the distinction between "Ontario Hydro" and "Hydro One", "Ontario Hydro" doesn't exist anymore. In 1998 it was split up into five different companies: "Ontario Power Generation", "Hydro One", the "Independent Electricity System Operator", the "Electrical Safety Authority", and, the "Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation". It's really important to keep these six different corporations (Ontario Hydro plus the five other entities it was broken into) separate in your mind. "Ontario Power Generation" is a crown corporation that is still owned by Ontario and it is in charge of major power generation stations---think nuclear power and Niagara Falls. The "Independent Electrical System Operator" is a different crown corporation that manages the electricity market in Ontario. It is what allows giant nuclear power stations and people with a few solar panels to be able to trade freely on a very dynamic electricity spot market. The "Electrical Safety Authority" is a corporation that sends out that guy who inspects your home wiring to ensure it won't burn the house down. The "Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation" manages the finances of all the different elements of previous obligations taken on by the old "Ontario Hydro", and, new obligations of it's successor organizations (where appropriate.) And "Hydro One"---the only privately-owned company---is in charge of all the power lines and transformer stations that connect all the places that generate electricity with the people who use it.

"Hydro One" was sold off because the government of the day decided that the general public didn't want their taxes increased to pay for all the deferred investment (in things like transit) that previous governments had simply "kicked down the road" for future generations to deal with. Ontario retained enough shares to believe that they still had power over the agency, although the opposition parties complained bitterly that this simply wasn't true. (Since Doug Ford was able to replace the CEO when he wanted, and a regulatory board in the USA has decided that Ontario still controls Hydro One, it would seem that the Liberals have been proved right. But what do I know? The Conservatives have a man in a dress smoking a cigar that says otherwise---.)  

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Later on in the conversation, I raised the issue of how well the government is able to communicate with the public.

Hulet:  When I was researching the stories I did on solid waste I was amazed at how much quite progressive legislation had already been passed by the government.  Even though I generally think of myself as being quite well informed about these sorts of issues, I had no idea about most of this. Why do so few people know about much of what gets done by government? Is it just that complex stuff just doesn't make it into the conversation?

Complex stuff doesn't make it. The other thing is the mainstream media---in addition to what I've said about social media---the mainstream media is part of the communication problem. Because there's no place where people actually get good descriptions of what's going on anymore. Newspapers that have lots of long, thoughtful, well-researched journalism on this topic or that topic---most people don't access it, and, it doesn't happen much. When I was young everyone turned on the tv to watch the CBC 11:00 news. So there was a common understanding from a neutral provider---maybe you tuned into CTV and they're more rightwing---so there was a bit left of centre and a bit right of centre. 
But there was a centre and everyone was working from the same facts. And then you could have the debate about the facts. But there's no central repository of where people go to get facts, because people go to the outlet that produces the facts that they like. 

So there isn't even a common understanding of what the facts are anymore. There's very little in terms of places you can go to get a detail understanding of anything even vaguely complicated. For example, cap-and-trade. So anytime I was doing an announcement in Guelph related to cap-and-trade money I would take the time to explain how cap-and-trade works. I would explain that there's a carbon reduction fund and all the money that comes from polluters buying carbon credits has to got here, and has to go into greenhouse gas reductions, and you can go see about the climate change action plan on line if you really care and it will tell you all the ways the money can be spent.  

When I did this you could see the media go "Oh crap. There she goes again. Another cap-and-trade speech." I doubt if any of the media ever tried to explain it the first time, but it was certainly usually "Oh, there she goes again!" But when I walked back into the audience, their response was "Oh. I didn't know any of that! I'm so glad you explained it." But when your audience is only 20 or 30 people---. You had to be in the audience during one of those announcements to get one of the detailed explanations. 

The same thing with the tuition. Well, I did tuition workshops all over the province. I would explain "this is how it works, this is what the math looks like, if you are of this income and you do this you get this much of your tuition paid". I'd walk through with parents, counselors, social workers, etc---this was eight months into the process---and again it was "I didn't know that". You feel like you are doing it, and doing it, and doing it, but no one in the mainstream media ever talks about it. In any depth---other than the headline. And if you work in the mainstream media you get rewarded for posting the short version on the Internet before the next guy does. So the shortest headline, and the guy that tweeted first, is what gets rewarded. It isn't, "Did you come back and write a thoughtful article and actually explain what's going on?" Or explain the implementation as its going---say this month, the next month, and the month after?               

Donald Trump, now there's a guy
who gets good press coverage!
Photo by Gage Skidmore
c/o Wiki Commons

Boring, bland Bill Davis.
Premier of Ontario for 14 years.
Photo by Hans Blohm,
c/o Wiki Commons 

Now Bill Davis---everybody said of him "bland works"---I don't think Bill Davis would get elected in today's media market. Because they're looking for something more interesting. They want to talk about Doug Ford, or Donald Trump, because that's what sells media. 

Hulet: There was that quote from CBS chairman Lesli Moonves about giving Trump so much free airtime "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS" .

Yeah. Yeah! 

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Here's a graph from an analytics firm, "MediaQuant", that was quoted by a New York Times article published in March of 2016. It deals with a specific period in the election cycle, but it gives an idea of the grotesque disparity in coverage that the corporate media gave to Donald Trump's campaign. This illustrates their support of Trump that Sandals mentions above.

Image from New York Times, used under the "Fair Use" provision of the Copyright Act

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Looking at the above graph and seeing the "Ontario Proud" rap video you see the stark alternatives that people face if they refuse to pay for their news. You can have propaganda machines or advertising-based media constantly sinking lower and lower in a desire for more "clicks". If you want the sort of in-depth coverage that Sandals says that most journalists won't give you, you are going to have to support indie media like "the Guelph-Back-Grounder". Fortunately, it's easy. All you have to do is go to the Patreon Page and sign up, or, toss something in the "tip jar". (Thanks Andrew for being so awesome and increasing your subscription!) You don't have to pay a lot, indeed some of the folks I personally support only get a dollar a month or a dollar a post from me. It doesn't seem like much, but if only 5% of Guelph residents gave a dollar a month for real news, this news blog would be making over $5,000/month.

So what's stopping you? 

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At this point our conversation veered off into a sort of generalized question about why it is that people vote for populists like the Doug Ford Conservatives.

We know that there are all sorts of people that voted for Ford, and given that we know that they liked that catalogue of things, but they had no idea that they were voting for getting rid of things that they liked. If you'd asked them "Would you vote for getting rid of pharmacare for children and youth?" they would have said "No. I'm not voting for that." But that's what he turned around and did within a month of being elected. 

And this is where we go back to the "short form". Then people are voting against something. So they're voting against Kathleen. But they haven't really thought about what the consequence of that is because it wasn't as if they wanted to undo everything she'd done. It was "We're just voting against Kathleen." 

Hulet: I wonder how much of that was just voting against "the world".

I think that's a lot of it. I'm mad, so I have to show that I'm mad.   

Hulet: I'm an "early adopter", but even I get sick of the rapid pace of change in our lives. I just get worn down. I think that there's a lot of people who are just mad about that part of the world.

There's also this change in civil discourse. I first ran for the school board about 30 years ago. So in one way or another I've been doing elections and politics for over 30 years. People will say things to you now that they would not have said to you ten or fifteen years ago. 

Hulet: Nasty things?

Yeah. Yeah. Just the nastiness of the conversation. The way in which people are "invited" to be angry, and then the way that they express their anger has gotten worse and worse. 

Hulet: When I was doing my research on the Carnegie Library being torn down I was struck by how polite the letters to the editor were at that time.

It's not universally true, but it's generally true that if people have written something long hand or something that they've done on a word processor then they've edited it, and shaped it, and sent off the final version; that comes out way more civilized than if they've sent something out on email. 

Hulet:  Fair enough.

People will put the craziest stuff in emails. 

Hulet: I will admit that I'm one of those people who have just hammered stuff out and sent it off when I was upset about something. This has caused a certain amount of embarrassment on my part---. Do you think it's just that change in technology? Or do you think people feel a little more empowered to just vent? Or maybe they are angrier? Or that they just feel more frustrated about the way the world is going? I think this a core issue---that anger is driving this populism. I think that this needs to be something that any politician has to wrestle with.

I agree with what you're saying. People feel angry and they feel entitled to be angry, and they are angry because people are feeding them things that are often untrue, and that makes them even angrier. I see the stuff that they've been fed in what would bound back at me---and it was patently untrue. People are deliberately feeding them things that make them angry. It isn't that if they were sitting on an island by themselves that they would be as angry. They're angry because they are living in an echo chamber and what keeps getting echoed is more anger. 

I honestly don't know how we counteract that. If we had the answer, we would obviously just do it.  

Just to get back to Bill Davis. I've gotten to know him a bit because of both having been Education Minsters. I like him. But I don't know how well he would play today as he did then. Because there's a constant need to "fill the space", the "media space"---be it social media or conventional media---with stuff that's loud and noisy and controversial. If what you are reporting is good news or responsible progress on a responsible project---it's not news.  

Hulet: From that point of view Donald Trump is great, he makes good copy.

And ironically CNN spends as much time on him as FOX, and in spending time on him, they're feeding him.   

Hulet: I'm glad politicians are thinking about this stuff, even if I don't read any news stories about them doing so.

One of the frustrations when you are in government is "How do you communicate to people what you are doing?" My experience being in government is that when you are able to communicate with real people---"this is why we are doing this"---when you have a conversation where you can actually explain "this is why it is this way instead of that way"---"yeah, I hear you. We could do that better, but this is 'baked-in' for this or that reason"---. People's response is "Oh. That's very helpful, thank you." 

You can have that human discourse, but how do you replicate that when what's bouncing around in the real space that people are living in is a whole lot of anger and a whole lot of five second clips? 

Hulet: We really do have to rethink the media. The funding model of supporting the most outrageous stories is dangerous. It's damaging to society.

I have obviously not figured out what we do about this. Going back to the Trudeau quote [In the previous article: "The art of leadership is staying exactly seven inches ahead of popular opinion"], there's another part to the problem. People don't think very far ahead. That's really what he's talking about. And there's a difficulty if you get too far ahead of the voters. But the problems that we need to address are long-term. So if you're talking climate change---that's not something you can fix in a three or four year mandate. If you're talking public transit, that's not something you can fix in a three or four year mandate. If you're talking about affordable housing in Guelph, that's not something you can fix in a three or four year mandate. If you're talking about public education, that's a twenty year journey to get a kid through post-secondary.  

All of these things that you need to do take a long time. 

Hulet: And it always seems easier to sabotage an existing program than it is to build a new one.

Exactly. 

If what the public reacts to---in terms of electoral support---is short-term anger, and short-term goodies. Like, "Are you going to give me a tax break?", then how do you fix any of the real problems---that arguably is what government is supposed to do because it's the stuff that you and I can't do as individuals. Increasingly what government needs to do are long-term projects. 

Maybe they always have been long term projects. You can look at the CPR crossing Canada. That was certainly a long-term project. 

Hulet: And there was a lot of political controversy about that too---.

Yes. Yes there was---.   

 &&&&

The thing about real conversations about substantive issues is that they never really come to an end. What does end is the time we can spend on them. And that's how my conversation with Ms. Sandals ended, with a glance at a clock and a hurried "I'd better be on my way." But I was very happy to have had the time to talk to a person that I hadn't really known that much about, but now I am very happy was my representative at Queen's Park for fifteen years.