Video Games and the Hobbit

Yeah, deep choices for today’s writing. What can I say, it’s a slow news day today. And perhaps more importantly, I spent the whole day working, without time to read anything, and I got through it by listening to Howard Shore’s Hobbit soundtracks.

A few weeks back I read this article on violence in video games, how violence is pretty much the only way to get ahead most games these days. You can find racing games and puzzle games if you look hard enough, but the days of Tetris ruling the market are long gone.

I was reminded of the game made out of Return of the King. The fight scenes from the book and movie were translated well, but whenever there was a plot point that didn’t involve a fight scene in the original, somehow it became a fight scene in the adaptation. Instead of Sam sneaking through the Spider’s lair and up the tower, there’s a big fight. Instead of Frodo being escorted to Osgiliath, there’s a fight. Instead of Aragorn running through the canyons, there’s a fight. Instead of Gandalf just walking up to Isengard, there’s a fight.

In contrast, if any games have been made of the Hobbit films, they could just be copied shot-for-shot, because those films are already video games. Every fight that happened in the background in the books has of course been placed front and centre. Many peaceful scenes - the trip to Rivendell, meeting Beorn, the escape from Mirkwood - have become big fight scenes. Action interludes that do nothing to advance the plot and can be safely skipped, like a commercial break.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this revelation. Except to conclude that I’d really like to see a version of the Hobbit films that cut the time down about three hours. And I think I ought to look for more video games that involve jumping or stacking blocks.

Tar Sands, Tar Sands, Fires in the Tar Sands

I was just voluntold for a recurring newsletter writing thing, so I figured this would be a particularly bad day to not write anything. I checked the news, and it turns out, we’re all out of news. Show’s over, folks!

Well, like I said, this would not be a good day to skip. So I went looking elsewhere. BBC World, Al Jazeera English, the Globe and Mail, et cetera. Then I checked the Grauniad, which I used to read regularly until I started running short of time. Perhaps it’s time to add that back in the rotation?

The first page I scrolled to was, naturally, “The Americas”. Why read about scandals in France when I can read about scandals in Brazil?

As luck would have it, there’s amazingly good representation for Canada on the front page. Of the 35 articles covering this entire hemisphere, 11 are about Canada. Compare that to 4 about the US and 5 about Brazil. But that’s where the good news comes to a crashing halt. As it turns out, when Canada makes the international news, it’s not flattering.

Here’s the rundown: MacKay, Ottawa gunman, MacKay, Doctor dies, alleged Nazi war criminal dies, Tar Sands, Tar Sands, Tar Sands, Tar Sands, Wildfires in the Tar Sands, Michael Sam.

That’s a little different focus than we usually get here. But it’s an interesting perspective. And some of it at least is good news. So as we enter the weekend take a few moments to celebrate MacKay quitting, Nazis dying, and Michael Sam getting a CFL job, and be sure to pretend all the horrible things haven’t been happening at all.

5 Anti-Feminist Myths that Will Not Die

I’m feeling a little too lazy to write a proper blog post tonight, but luckily I went on a little facebook rant that I can elaborate a little on.

But first, some background. Last September, Christina Hoff Sommers wrote an article for Time called “5 Feminist Myths that Will Not Die”. It crossed my Facebook feed this morning and I couldn’t resist posting a few comments.

“Much of what we hear about the plight of American women is false. Some faux facts have been repeated so often they are almost beyond the reach of critical analysis. Though they are baseless, these canards have become the foundation of Congressional debates, the inspiration for new legislation and the focus of college programs. Here are five of the most popular myths that should be rejected by all who are genuinely committed to improving the circumstances of women:”

So right off the bat, we know that this article is all about debunking myths about women… not stereotypes about women, but rather myths put forward by those who claimed to support improving women’s circumstances but aren’t “genuinely committed”.

“MYTH 1: Women are half the world’s population, working two-thirds of the world’s working hours, receiving 10% of the world’s income, owning less than 1% of the world’s property.”

I don’t know how common this is, I’d only ever encountered this in the context of a debunking. In particular, I saw an article last year pointing out that the figures were close enough 50 years ago, but didn’t allow for any progress made in the intervening decades. I recall adding up the wealth owned by all the female Walton heirs… it didn’t equal 1% of the world’s wealth, but it was enough that I am happy dismissing this as a myth. But really, has anyone been using this seriously, or is it just a straw man?

“MYTH 2: Between 100,000 and 300,000 girls are pressed into sexual slavery each year in the United States.”

This is another one that I hadn’t heard of before, though Sommers cites a few celebrities who have mentioned it. She points out that the number is based on a misreading of a study that stated 100,000-300,000 were at risk, not that they were actually being pressed into sexual slavery. Follow-up with the author of that study led to a much lower figure of “a few hundred” who were actually pressed into sexual slavery.

Sommers makes a very good point here… except that the revised figure is grotesquely understating the true number. I suspect the definition is too narrow, and probably only counts children in forced prostitution. If you add forced marriages to the definition… well, there are probably “a few hundred” children pressed into forced marriages in the little town of Creston, British Columbia, population 5000. That’s an extreme example, it would be unreasonable to extrapolate to the national population, but it’s far from the only town like that.

I suppose it’s possible those marriages don’t include sex. I don’t think that’s very likely, though.

“MYTH 3: In the United States, 22%–35% of women who visit hospital emergency rooms do so because of domestic violence.”

OK, I’ll grant that this one might just be complete hogwash. But is this a myth that won’t die, or is it just something that gets passed around as encyclopedia authors plagiarize each other? At least unlike the first myth she doesn’t claim that it’s been used to justify new laws or anything.

This reminds me of the 10% of the brain myth, or the amount of iron in spinach myth… things that started with typos and spread due to lazy fact checking. Except that, well, I’d never heard of it before so I doubt it’s spread all that much.

I guess this qualifies as the Argument from Personal Incredulity. But still, I’m a little incredulous.

“MYTH 4: One in five in college women will be sexually assaulted.”

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. This is a thing I’ve actually heard of… not only that, but it’s been circulating since Sommers wrote her article, and I’ve seen it pop up just this last week. Actually this is probably why the article is coming up again.

And it turns out that, rather than being a myth that won’t die, it’s actually a perfectly legitimate finding that has been replicated. Just not to Sommers’ satisfaction. The studies apparently suffer from a sampling problem… Sommers claims that women who have been sexually assaulted are more likely to participate in the study than those who have not been. Well, it’s just as easy to make the counter-claim, that women who have been sexually assaulted want to avoid answering questionnaires about the experience. Underreporting of rape is a serious problem as well, after all.

Sommers goes on to claim that the definition of sexual assault is too broad, including unwanted touching, attempted forced kissing, and drugged sex. Well, guess what? Those are all sexual assault. They might not all be rape, though the last clearly is, but they are all sexual assault. That’s why the statistic isn’t given as 20% chance of rape.

I think this little rant is already too long to get into a detailed definition of rape, but can we stop pretending it only means scary black men with guns hiding in the bushes at night? The majority of rape falls into the category of “drugged sex”. Probably the vast majority.

“MYTH 5: Women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work.”

Oh hey, I heard it’s up to 79% now. Progress! That’s what Sommers is complaining about, right? That the myth hasn’t been updated with the latest census data?

As it turns out, no. This one has been debated to death, but Sommers drags out the usual arguments against it. Women choose lower-paying careers, and women leave work to raise children.

Well, guess what? Those don’t explain the whole pay gap. Women make less than men in the same field, with the same amount of training and experience. The only cure for this has been unions, which reduce the gap to a few percent.

Some of the best-paying careers systematically exclude women, whether those women would like to choose that career or not. Fields that are male-dominated but become female-dominated get devalued as a result, as happened with teaching in the 19th century. Fields that are female-dominated but become male-dominated become better paying as a result, as happened with computer programming in the 1960s and 1970s. Fields that are female dominated in some places and male-dominated in other places, like medicine, are devalued in those places where they are female-dominated.

So, full disclosure, I was biased against this article from the start. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of Christina Hoff Sommers, but I have been warned about her. She’s an ex-academic who left to join a far-right think tank. She’s an outspoken anti-feminist, which I always thought was a little hypocritical coming from a woman. Surely anti-feminists would consider it unseemly for women to be outspoken? She’s also a supporter of the misogynistic harassment campaigns that have been plaguing the internet.

This is actually the first time I’ve read some of her writing directly. But I’m not impressed. She takes one or two questionable facts and attempts to overturn entire fields of study with them. She takes “not proven” verdicts and calls them complete exoneration. She glosses over thousands of rapes and enslavements as if they don’t exist. just because nobody can tell her that “thousands” is “precisely 3,811”. She dismisses drugged rape as if it was just another Tuesday, and groping or forced kissing as if it was expected and deserved on any given subway ride.

Hopefully I never have to read this sort of dreck again.

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Wait, didn't I say I felt too lazy to write a proper blog post? I guess an improper blog post was just what the doctor ordered.

Bill C-51 Analysed

So this is fascinating. A legal analysis of the C-51 Anti-Terrorism bill I’ve been complaining about for months. Commissioned by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and done by the Centre for Law and Democracy.

Full disclosure: I haven’t heard of those groups. But the author is a lawyer, which is the important thing here. I was hoping someone qualified would take a look at this.

All the initial reports were saying that the bill was overbroad and maddeningly vague, written so that it could apply just as easily to the Trans-Mountain or Idle No More protestors as to violence. It was amended in April, to narrow it a bit. But I hadn’t seen anything saying just how broad the amended bill was.

It looks like the answer is still “pretty broad”. The lawyer, Toby Mendel, didn’t speculate about who might be targeted by the bill. But whoever it targets, there are still lots of problems with it.

This bill will introduce new restrictions on free of speech. It will allow the government to seize and suppress “terrorist propaganda”. It could easily apply to news reports. This is over and above the restrictions on incitement to violence, which we have had all along.

The standard for calling material “terrorist propaganda” is administrative action taken on “reasonable grounds”. Not judicial action taken when proved beyond reasonable doubt, as I would hope for. It’s all up to the minister, apparently.

This bill also introduces a no-fly list, and includes the ridiculous idea that nobody can appeal for 90 days. Why the delay? If their inclusion holds up in court, they lose the appeal, it lasts longer than 90 days. The only possible reason to include this provision is if you expect to lose on appeal but want to punish people anyway.

The lawyer mentioned that this could be used arbitrarily against peaceful protestors and the government’s political rivals, but said that this is “unlikely in a Canadian context”. Why not set it up so that it can’t be used arbitrarily? Why rely on the unlikelihood of breaching unwritten rules of etiquette?

The whole thing just stinks of a power grab, relying on people’s fear and the other parties’ goodwill to entrench their own authority.

Party Lines

Party discipline is strictly enforced in Canada, as it is in most other Westminster-style parliaments. It isn’t enforced legally… in fact, for a long time parties were irrelevant as far as the law was concerned, and I think the first mention of them was concerning the appointment of a Prime Minister from the largest party.

This is the natural consequence of having the executive branch being dependent on the support of the legislative branch. Once the very existence of a government is in question, keeping those legislators in line becomes a much higher priority. Those ministers and backbenchers who don’t stick with the party line are removed from the party, and sit as independents. They are still in Parliament… but they lose a lot of the influence, lose the chance to sit on committees, and lose all the support they need to get reelected.

What this creates is a situation where most of the time you don’t really need to know anything about the local candidate. Not even their name, sometimes. You can safely vote just based on the colour of their tie.

There are two exceptions to this. First, the elected member can change parties. If ejected from a party they can join another, or if they are dissatisfied they can go looking for another. There are no legal barriers to this… remember, the party is just a voluntary association on their part, even though it’s usually the most important consideration for the electorate.

The second situation is when a member chooses to vote against their party. Such a situation has just arisen, in the Senate, but the circumstances prove just how effective party discipline really is in this country.

Liberal senator Mobina Jaffer has come out against Bill C-51, the Conservative’s anti-terrorism bill. The Liberal party as a whole supports the bill. Perhaps when they found out they weren’t the opposition anymore, they decided to be the support? Whatever their reasoning, they’re for C-51.

Mobina Jaffer can’t face retaliation for this, because as it happens all the Liberal senators were kicked out of the party last year. Not based on their votes, but rather because the Liberal party is against the appointed Senate and wants elected senators instead.

Interestingly, the Conservatives and NDP also support an elected Senate. Or at least, they did. The Conservatives changed their position to supporting an appointed Senate just as soon as they formed the government and were faced with the chance to make the appointments.

The NDP hasn’t had that chance, so I won’t speculate on whether they would drop their principles as well. But kudos to the Liberals on making the honourable choice to boot out their senators… after enough Conservative senators had been appointed to cost them their majority anyway.

Anyway, enough cynical jabs. Mobina Jaffer is against C-51. Good for her. It doesn’t matter that much, though I will be really impressed if 52 or so Conservative senators join her. I’m not holding my breath.

And as for elected members crossing the floor… well, I think it ought to automatically trigger a byelection. Let them find out if their constituents support the choice. It requires making the party system official… but let’s get real here. The parties have been in charge for longer than Canada has existed. Making it official won’t change that.

Throw It In and Run for Cover

The Conservatives have announced a carbon emissions goal, 30% drop by 2030. It’s not enough to hold climate change to a reasonable level, but it’s a start. It’s also nigh-impossible.

I think this is a good sign. Not for the climate, no. But at least it’s a good sign for the election. What longer political tradition is there than announcing a big project, not making any headway, and leaving it for your political opponents to take the heat for cancelling it? I think this is a sign that the Conservatives are expecting to lose.

But the climate will be no better off here.

Fuzzy Vampires at the Open Mic

I just did some volunteer training for the NDP today, and they brought up an interesting problem that I’ve run into way too many times... people people who will just talk your ear off forever and ever. They warned about the vampires, who suck away all your time.

Brevity is wit.

I tend to be pretty impatient when it comes to long drawn out speech. I find that at every event with a Q&A there will be a few people who just monopolize the microphone, giving a statement rather than asking a question. I think I wrote about that just a couple days ago.

It’s easy to shut these people down when you disagree with them… but sometimes you agree. Those are the fuzzy vampires, who you get along with but who still suck away all your time.

Of course you can find it in other settings as well. I’ve had a lot of patients where, when I ask them a simple and direct question, they’ll give me a ten minute essay that doesn’t actually lead anywhere.

What the instructors today had to say was that for some of these people, it’s the first time anyone’s ever asked them their opinion… for one, it had been the first time anyone had ever knocked on his door. Funny, I thought that’s what the internet was for, but I guess some people don’t have it.

The lesson, though, was that sometimes you just have to go away, no matter how much you agree with them, or how much you want to argue with them. Life’s too short.

And as for the open mic? You need to be willing to shut them down, because they aren’t just wasting your time, they’re wasting a hundred people’s time. At the event earlier this week I suggested using the Oscar music to play them off… but you can always just cut the power.

I used Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” picture for that post. But just because you have freedom of speech doesn’t take away other people’s freedom to not listen.

Too Tired to Write, part 3 of N

So I just had a very very very long day. As evidence, I present the current time: 01:53. It’s already tomorrow and has been for nearly two hours.

On a day like this I would normally not bother to write a blog post, but as it turns out this I kind of had my shit together today and wound up accomplishing absolutely everything I set out to do. Except write the blog post.

So unlike most very long days, if I can just string together a few syllables for the blog I can call this a Perfect Day.

And I guess that was it.

Goodnight.

Coin Toss

Just a little addition to yesterday’s post, regarding voter apathy. There was just an election in PEI that came down to two votes. And on the recount, it was a tie! Which means it came down to a coin toss.

The loser of the coin toss is considering taking it to court. But although the results weren’t final until the recount, I think the results are final now, which means that the newly elected member will sit in legislature during any court case or appeals. Kind of a fait accompli.

Now granted, this was in PEI. The most overrepresented province in the country, where there are three times as many representatives for the population as you’ll find in BC or Alberta. That election might have had only a few thousand votes cast. But still. A tie.

There are probably a lot of people in PEI who regret not voting today. And hopefully the story spreads widely enough that people throughout the country are more likely to vote.

Fair Vote

Tonight I went to a presentation from Fair Vote Canada on proportional representation. It featured a talk from Professor Wayne Broughton, followed by a Q&A with representatives from three local political parties. Norah Bowman, Kelowna / Lake Country Candidate from the NDP; Wes Forgione, Outreach Director from the Liberals; and Robert Mellalieu, Financial Agent for the Greens.

No representative from the Conservatives. But that’s not really a shock.

So, I voted for the STV when it was proposed in 2005 and 2009. But I didn’t really think it was explained well, and I was mostly just voting against the current First Past the Post (FPTP) system rather than for a particular alternative. So I knew going in that I had half-baked and uninformed opinions, and I hoped I might learn a little.

The basic problem with the present system is that it gives enormous power to parties that have only marginal pluralities rather than majorities. Only a handful governments in Canadian history have had majority support, the last was 30 years ago. It’s much more common for a party to eke out a plurality of 40% to 45%, which FPTP translates into a majority of Parliament.

The most egregious examples of this are the 2005 Liberals, 2011 Conservatives, and 2015 Alberta NDP, which got their majorities with less than 40% of the popular vote.

Another problem, albeit less common, is that when the seats aren’t well distributed it can sometimes enable a party to form a majority of seats when it lacks even a plurality of votes… when one of their opponents has more popular support. At the provincial level this happened in BC in 1996, in Quebec in 1998, and in New Brunswick in 2006.

Wayne described several different systems of proportional representation, with examples of countries where they are used. Single Transferable Vote, the system from the BC referendum, seemed needlessly complex, enough so that I can’t really describe it here. So perhaps that deserved to fail. It’s sole advantage seems to be that it could keep the current districts.

Mixed-member proportional looked a fair bit more favourable. This is where there are fewer, larger districts, with multiple representatives from each. For example, a district with 5 representatives. A party with a slim majority in that district might get 3 seats, with 2 going to their rival. Or perhaps a party with the plurality would get 2 seats, and each of their rivals might get 1 seat. It’s a system that gets increasingly proportional as district size increases, offset by the decrease in local representation… so a balance has to be found somehow.

Once the lecture was done the party representatives came out for an extended Q&A session. It will probably not shock you to hear that I liked the NDP and Green reps the most. The Green and Liberal reps had the disadvantage of not being the candidate, but the Green rep held things up OK well the Liberal rep wasn’t willing to commit to anything on his candidate’s behalf. He made it through the whole Q&A without saying anything substantive at all.

There were a few standout questions. At the start someone asked why the STV referendum failed… it turns out that the bar was too high. It needed 60% support, and only got 58%. I’d known that already… but I hadn’t realized that the 60% threshold was chosen by the sitting government, specifically to be an unattainable goal. Knowing that it’s amazing how close it came.

Someone asked about the timeline for the change. All parties were planning to address the issue if victorious in this year’s election. None could commit to succeeding, of course.

Several people asked about issues of voter apathy… all representatives offered some platitudes about increasing youth engagement and political awareness, Norah offered some specifics about having student clubs and the like. All seemed to distrust the Australian model of mandatory voting, except for the Liberal rep who didn’t seem to have ever heard of such a thing.

The Q&A was derailed several times by people trying to deliver polemics rather than asking questions. Luckily the microphones were positioned so that they had to at least try to face the speakers. A few spent their whole talks addressing the audience, and we couldn’t really hear them.

I’ve never seen these sorts of non-questioning questioners dealt with effectively, but I think maybe the award show model could work. Start playing them off at 10 second, if they hit 20 seconds send someone up to wrestle the microphone out of their hands.

All in all, a decent evening. Very informative. Didn’t really change my mind at all about anything. Hopefully that means that, rather than just being set in my ways, I actually had better opinions going in than I gave myself credit for.

Conspiracies

The new episode of LUEE just came out, and they're talking about Moon Landing conspiracy theories. It owes a pretty big debt to the Mythbusters episode, which they acknowledge a few times. But it's well worth listening to even if you've already seen the Mythbusters cover it.

Besides the usual suspects, they address a conspiracy theory I hadn't heard of before... the "That's No Moon" theory, from David Icke, he of the reptilian overlords fame.

And there's a fascinating discussion at the start covering conspiracy theories more generally. In particular, why some people believe them despite the lack of evidence. They did a great job of covering all the bases... confirmation bias, the feeling of superiority, that sort of thing.

But there's one obvious reason for believing in conspiracies that they didn't mention. Perhaps of was too obvious to mention.

Sometimes the conspiracy theories are right.

Oh, not reptiloids, and not the moon landing hoax. Nearly all conspiracy theories are untrue. But there are also a few things that were conspiracy theories until they turned out to be true.

Take this list, for example: 10 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True. It crossed my Facebook feed this morning... that's convenient. A little too convenient, perhaps...

I can't personally verify that all of those really did turn out to be true, of course. And for some of the well established ones, like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, I don't know if there were rumours circulating before the facts became public.

The last one though, the mass surveillance, that hits home. Because back in the early 2000s I really did think that those people talking about emails and phone calls being intercepted were just conspiracy theorists. It turned out to be true... not just a little bit true, but more than anyone had imagined.

And there are others not mentioned in this article, that have come out in court cases or declassified documents. Like Reagan arming the Contras, or Nixon sabotaging the Paris Peace Accords, or Stalin spying in embassies. Or so many others... things that are never considered conspiracy theories anymore because they are just a part of history, as obvious in hindsight as anything done openly.

There's a risk of coming off endorsing the conspiracy theorists here... "They Laughed at Galileo, but he was proved right in the end!" But I think it's important to remember that behind all the wacky conspiracy theories you can sometimes find some reasonable conspiracy hypotheses.

And the wacky theories can feed off of reality. There would probably be a lot fewer 9-11 truthers if a staged Casus Belli wasn't one of the oldest tricks in the book.

The Thrill Is Gone

Happy Victoria Day! Be happy because it’s a day off. Be happy because it’s now summer… except here, where it’s raining, which doesn’t count.

But whatever you do, don’t be happy because of Victoria.

I’m not a big fan of monarchy. In fact, I think I’ve been a member of Citizens for a Canadian Republic for over half my life by now.

There are a lot of perfectly good reasons to distrust monarchy. Some are universal, some are limited to the present system. For example, there is the “they aren’t really Canadian” argument. But I think I’d be opposed to a local monarchy just as much. And there’s disliking one particular monarch or heir, but I can’t think of anyone I’d like all that much.

More generally there’s the basic principle of not entrusting anyone with political power unless there are ways to get rid of them. With elected officials, you can vote the bums out, at least eventually. Even those positions that aren’t term-limited have to face the music eventually. With monarchies the traditional way to remove a disliked ruler is by decapitation, but I don’t think that would work very well these days. Plus I’m generally against the death penalty anyway.

The counterargument to that last point is that our monarchs don’t have any real power anyway… but all you need to do is look at Charles’s declassified correspondences to disprove that. Actually, you don’t even need to read them. The simple fact of having classified communication channels to high levels of government is proof enough. A truly powerless monarch would be treated by the government in exactly the same way as the King of Pop or B.B. King (RIP).

I think the only monarchy I’d accept is one where I’m the king… and as long as there’s at least one other person with the same opinion that makes it poor system.

Coming Out of the Woodwork

The Tsarnaev sentence has come down, and it’s death. I wrote about this back in April… I find it very disappointing, but not surprising. It appears that since then the opinions of Massachusetts have not turned in favour of capital punishment.

I’m not surprised by the verdict, but I have been surprised by the some of the reactions. It has been a very polarizing verdict. People I otherwise respect are cheering the verdict, and generally for terrible reasons.

There seems to be a trend of people who dislike with capital punishment in general, but want it in this specific case. What they should realize is that every case will look like this if it’s known in enough detail. Everyone personally affected will have that emotional reaction to a case.

This is where you need to examine your reasons for being for or against capital punishment. If you are against capital punishment because of one specific case you know of where it was a bad idea, that’s not a very good reason to oppose the general case. If you are for capital punishment because of one specific case where it was a good idea, that not a very good reason to support the general case.

There are other reasons that can work better, though. Things like whether you trust or distrust the government with that sort of power… and if the answer is trust, whether you trust or distrust the next government with that sort of power.

Things like whether you think the police and prosecutors are acting in good faith… and whether you would support the death penalty for prosecutors who got it wrong.

Whether you think it does or doesn’t act as a deterrent. And how much evidence that conclusion is based on, and what you would do if new evidence came to light.

And if that doesn’t work… well,  I guess at least it’s good for pruning the dead wood out of the social media accounts, in much the same way as Baltimore and Ferguson have been.

Thinking Too Much

I could have spent today writing a blog post… researching, compiling sources, trying to come up with some sort of original thought… but it was too sunny. The UV Index was 4, the Fire Hazard Index was High, and the Ennio Morricone Index was “Il Deserto”.

Plus, thinking is getting a little too dangerous these days. Apparently it can cause cancer! I'm keeping that link handy for every day like this. Today I decided to reduce that risk, and spent the day outside. There’s no way to get cancer from outside, right?

High Expectations and Vote Splitting

In 2013 there was an election in British Columbia. The BC NDP got 39.7% of the vote, resulting in a very unexpected crushing defeat.

In 2015 there was an election in Alberta. The Alberta NDP got 40.6% of the vote, resulting in a very unexpected resounding victory.

The narrative that has emerged from the Alberta election is that of a province taking a hard turn to the left, turning its back on the past 80 years of conservative rule. There is a little truth to this… the Alberta NDP didn’t get nearly as many votes the last time around, coming in at 9.8%. So their popular support has grown tremendously.

But that’s not the whole story. It’s worth considering why the 40.6% brought victory when 39.7% fell so far short in BC. The truth is, more Albertans voted conservative, 52%. They just didn’t do it in an effective way. 27.8% voted for the Progressive Conservatives, and 24.2% voted for Wildrose - the Regressive Conservatives. Because of the terrible gerrymandering, Wildrose walked away with twice as many seats as the PCs, but neither was enough to make a big impact on their own.

There’s a lesson here, about strategy, and about complacency. Alberta was safe for the conservatives, so they didn’t need to coalesce around either party. It was not safe for the left, so the NDP and the Greens made moves to avoid splitting the vote.

The Alberta victory is very similar to the Federal situation in the 1990s. The Progressive Conservatives had a crushing defeat, in large part due to the regressive conservatives (variously called Reform, Canadian Alliance, and CRAP) splitting the right-wing vote.

It will be months before I can guess what is likely to happen in the Federal election this fall. It’s tougher than usual because the party positions are not so neatly binary… the Liberals are there in the middle and it’s hard to tell which way they’ll fall. It will be interesting to see whether the Liberals do a better job of splitting the left wing vote or splitting the right wing vote.

As for Alberta, well, it will be far more than a few months before I can guess how that will shake out. Perhaps the right-wing unites in time for the next election. Perhaps the process drags out for several. For now though, Albertans might be willing to give the NDP a chance.

Seymour Hersh and the Bin Laden Raid

Four days ago Seymour Hersh published an article an article questioning the official story on the Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. Here’s the story. And a rebuttal, from government officials. And a deconstruction of the rebuttal and a defense of the original story.

I can’t really comment on the substance of Hersh’s allegations, because there’s absolutely no evidence to support or refute them. Actually, the intriguing thing about the Bin Laden raid is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the official story either, which makes it a very convenient target for both investigative journalism and conspiracy theories, whichever this turns out to be.

I do find it funny that the rebuttal includes the statement “If you believe Sy, you would have to believe this massive conspiracy that President Obama, Robert Gates, Leon Panetta, and Mike Morell were all lying to you.” It’s brings me no end of amusement to think that this official, a former CIA spokesman, is befuddled by the very concept of lying coming from politicians and spies. Isn’t that what they’re for?

There is one section of Hersh’s account that I’d like to examine more, though. The official story is that the CIA was watching Bin Laden’s courier, got suspicious, and used a fake vaccine program to confirm their suspicions. Hersh’s story is that the CIA was approached by a high-level ISI official and confirmed the report using undisclosed means. The vaccine doctor was given up as a scapegoat because he was already an ISI prisoner for other reasons, and it wouldn’t affect him much.

So my question is why give up the doctor at all? Whether it was releasing a true detail or inventing a false detail, it wasn’t at all necessary. And it has had catastrophic consequences. Vaccination teams have been torn apart by angry mobs. Polio is back, leaving hundreds of children dead or injured. Would it have been so hard to simply not release that detail? Easy enough to simply say there was a DNA test postmortem instead of premortem.

I look forward to finding out more about this in the future. Hersh has a habit of writing things that turn out to be true once they are declassified decades later. With any luck I’m still alive when the truth of this tale gets out.

Recovery Day

I was just offered some work for tomorrow, which means I ought to get to sleep soon, which in turn means I’d better write today’s blog post really quick. The trouble is, I don’t have a topic yet. I’d been kind of putting that off. Usually if I haven’t done something worth putting up a picture of, I’ll at least have read something worth commenting on… today that didn’t happen either.

This probably counts as a day where I merely existed rather than lived. Oh well. There’s always tomorrow.

Confidential

It’s 1AM, which means today’s blog post (or yesterday’s) will necessarily be much shorter than Monday’s. Good thing I keep a stash of news articles that I can shout about without requiring much in the way of original thought…

“Diamond royalties a closely guarded subject in Ontario”. The royalties DeBeers pays to the government of Ontario for its Victor mine are confidential. They accidently released the figures for 2014. The grand total was $226. DeBeers was apparently shocked that any royalty was charged at all.

The corresponding royalties for Lucara’s diamond mine in Botswana? $26.6 million. Six orders of magnitude higher.

The Victor mine is next to Attawapiskat, which as you may recall is destitute and doesn’t get a share of resource revenue… not that a share of $226 would go very far.

OK, that’s about all the outrageous things I can come up with from this story.

Goodnight.

Zero Tolerance

I missed this news story a few months ago… I guess I can’t read anything. The Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, told the UN General Assembly that Canada would have zero tolerance for any attempts to delegitimize Israel, including the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement.

Full disclosure: I have nothing to do with the BDS movement, but I’m tempted to sign on now out of spite.

Luckily it didn’t escape the attention of CBC columnist Neil Macdonald, who has been asking what exactly zero tolerance means in this case, what sort of actions the government is planning to take against this movement. On May 7 he got a reply from Josee Sirois, a spokesperson for the Public Safety department. The reply didn’t list specific actions, but did quote the Criminal Code sections on hate crimes and hate speech.

Full disclosure: I dislike Neal Macdonald but don’t remember why. I probably disagreed with him about something petty… this is why I need to cite sources on my enemies list. I’m tempted to sign on as a fan now. Out of spite.

So, the sections of the Criminal Code relating to hate crimes don’t apply here, since they only deal with motive once a crime has been committed. For example, vandalizing a mosque would probably be considered a hate crime, but only because vandalizing any building is already illegal.

The sections on hate speech, though, that’s a little more concerning. They make it illegal to incite genocide, incite hatred, and willfully promote hatred.

I doubt the spokesperson meant to imply that advocating boycotts is inciting genocide. But what about the other sections? Willfully promoting hatred? That’s awfully vague. I mean, I’ve promoted hate before, and I’ll do it again.

Go ahead and hate this guy. It’ll be fun, I promise.

At least this one spokesperson thought that these sections were somehow relevant to the question of what zero tolerance actually means. The department as a whole has walked it back… stating that the laws have been on the books for years and haven’t changed in any relevant way.

Laws not changing isn’t all that reassuring, given how easy it is to vary the interpretation of those laws, and the level of enforcement. But let’s accept that for now.

So then, has anything changed, despite the denial? The article where the department walked it back referred to the new cyberbullying law from December, which among other things modified the hate speech law to add national origin as a protected class, in with things like race, gender, and religion.

But perhaps there’s another change in the law that could be relevant. Five days ago, one day before that email from the spokesperson, Parliament passed the new anti-terrorism law, Bill C-51. One of the many changes it made was including as terrorism any actions threatening economic or financial well being.

Which brings us back to my easy dismissal of those hate crimes laws. They don’t apply in this case, because they only come into play when doing something that’s already a crime. But what if boycotts can be considered a crime? When the new provisions were discussed, I only really predicted them being used against pipeline protesters, or First Nations blocking highways, which would be bad enough. Once you make it a crime to do anything threatening economic interests… well, it has me a little worried.