The Cost of Not Caring

I follow politics to a degree that is probably pathological. Some of my earliest memories are the elections of Kim Campbell and Jean Chretien. I’ve voted in every election, by-election, and referendum I’ve been eligible for. I follow five news sources...three Canadian, one from an allied country, and one from a rival country. I read books and blogs and reports and bills and initiatives.

When I was canvassing last year I was astonished by how many people told me they don’t follow politics. Some of it was probably just politeness, if they knew they disagreed with me. But the majority of them had no answers to my questions and had no questions of their own. The whole experience was utterly foreign to me.

When I got a radio license they told me I couldn’t talk about politics on the air. I had no idea what else there was to talk about. I have no idea how to talk about the weather without mentioning climate change, or talk about television without mentioning representation, or talk about traffic without mentioning public transit.

There is politics underlying everything if you pay attention to causes and effects. Until last year I didn’t realize just how little consideration people give to the consequences of their decisions, how little thought goes into even something as important as voting.

The main mistake the Democrats made in this election was nominating a stable candidate. It’s the mistake that Tom Mulcair made last year, promising slow incremental improvement and losing to the candidate who promised a clean sweep. In the Canadian election it turned out to be all empty promises and there has been little change in government policies with a year of the new administration. It’s impossible to say whether that will be the case in the US… as I said yesterday, since Trump has no track record beyond his campaign promises, we can’t know what he will do. The one thing we can be sure of is that when Congress votes to repeal Obamacare for the hundredth time, he won’t veto it the way Obama always had.

So he promised change, and people voted for change. They will be falling all over themselves to tell you that they didn’t vote because of bigotry, just a desire for change. I’m not sexist. I’m not homophobic. I’m not racist… why, some of my best friends are races. There are certainly people out there who are overtly bigoted, the ones who are at the moment painting swastikas on black churches, tearing hijabs off, assaulting women, and shooting protesters. I don’t know what proportion of Trump supporters are like this, but it can’t be all of them. Probably a majority have never considered such things.

The problem with this is that intentions are not magic. To quote a cheesy movie, “It’s not who you are inside, but what you do, that defines you.”

This week millions of moderate Americans, and center-right Americans, have voted for someone who promised to strip health care from 20 million people, because it was a change. They will say they have no bias against the sick but they have acted to hurt the sick because they just don’t care about the sick.

They have voted for a candidate who overtly discriminates against black people, who doesn’t want them to live in his building projects, who is on record stating he thinks they are inferior. The very definition of a white supremacist. They will say they are not racist, but through their actions they will cause untold devastation to racial minorities, because they just didn’t care. Not caring about racism is in itself racism.

They have voted for a molester… can you believe it? They have voted for a molester. Women have voted for a molester. We have to worry about the safety of children on the White House tour, and they will say it is because they wanted change. Whatever their intentions they have voted against women’s autonomy over their own bodies, and if their actions are sexist than we cannot say they aren’t sexist themselves, no matter what their excuse.

So many people this year just didn’t care. There is a cost of caring, a cost in time and stress, and they chose not to pay it. But sometimes the cost of not caring is greater, and unless you care enough to try to understand you will not know when that greater cost is due.

Things Fall Apart

This has not been a very good year all around. I mean, it’s been great for me, personally… better job, better pay, closer friends, et cetera. But it has been a disaster for the world. Climate change continues unchecked, the civil war in Syria is unabated, the flow of refugees out of Syria has triggered a rise in far-right nationalism throughout Europe, the great experiment of the EU is threatened with dissolution.

All these can be traced relatively simply from one to the next. It’s more difficult to make predictions, of course, but there’s a straightforward cause and effect progression.

It’s more difficult to unravel just what happened in the United States this week, and impossible to make reliable predictions for the future there. The election of a far-right demagogue with no political record leaves us relying only on his campaign promises for information. Said promises were made in a vacuum, without knowing how any of them could be accomplished, without knowing or caring what the powers of the presidency are, without knowing any facts of the present situation, and certainly without knowing that the potential consequences of them could be.

Well then, the deed is done. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. Americans awakened Wednesday morning to a great uncertainty. It might be a disaster, like the Brexit vote in the UK. It might be a catastrophe, like the election of the Golden Dawn in Greece. It might be an apocalypse, like the elections of fascists in the 1930s.

Frankly it could be worse than that… Mussolini never had nuclear weapons, killer robots, or anything approaching the modern surveillance apparatus.

And of course, it would be remiss not to say that it could be more of the same. Trump has promised bombing campaigns, mass deportations, oil pipelines, stripping health funding, violently crushing protests, and turning back refugees. These are of course all things the US has engaged in for decades. Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

That’s the best case scenario. It’s a best case scenario that will result in millions of deaths around the world, hundreds of thousands in the US. It’s reset the most optimistic global warming predictions from 2° to 3°.

I now have no idea whether we will get the best case world on fire or the worst case nuclear winter. You don’t know either. The Washington press corps has no idea, the Speaker of the House has no idea, the Vice President has no idea.

Ultimately I suspect the Trump has no idea either. The man doesn’t seem to be real big on forethought and advance planning. There are conspiracy theories that his whole public persona was a cynical invention to get elected, but he has changed little over the past two years, even over the past decades. If Trump presses the button it will be at the spur of the moment.

If we don’t know what Trump will do we have still less knowledge of what people might do to stop him. I’ll try to cover that in a future post.

Pulling Up the Ladder

I've been watching two different arguments raging on the internet for the past week, on the issues of safe spaces in schools and the minimum wage. The arguments I've seen have been on two different places, Twitter and Facebook. They have involved two very different groups of people, academics and journalists on the one hand, and the assorted people I actually know on the other. And yet somehow the arguments wind up sounding eerily similar.

Both issues have been brewing for years but have been brought to greater public attention recently. Two universities in the US, Yale and the University of Missouri, have have protests concerning racism on campus. In Missouri the protesters were able to oust the university president. The protests have gotten a lot of blowback, though, from people who think students these days are being coddled too much. Students never used to need protection from racism, they say. Kids need to face that challenge to learn how to deal with the real world.

The minimum wage issue has become heated due to nationwide strikes of food service workers, who are trying to get the minimum wage increased to $15. They've had some local success, in Seattle, and have gotten Bernie Sanders to sign on. And on Facebook I've seen dozens of paramedics post this, which just gets more infuriating every time I see it:

Now, there's a basic factual misunderstanding here, because American paramedics make about half as much money as Canadians. We aren't in any danger of bumping into the minimum wage here. Confounding the issue, although the normal minimum wage is similar when you correct for the exchange rate, the US has a much lower minimum wage for tipped workers, which includes many food service workers are tipped. They only get about a quarter of the Canadian minimum wage.

But beyond the number issue, when I read these posts I get a real sense of anger from them, the same as in the school racism situation: “I never had it that easy, why should they?”

It all reminds me of this joke:

There's a phenomenon where people who benefit from something try to deny that opportunity to others. It's easiest to see when politicians try to cut the social safety net and it is inevitably found that they themselves only got to their position because of that help. This is called "pulling up the ladder behind you". These safe space and minimum wage fights could be related... not trying to make things worse for others, but trying to keep them from getting better.

Part of making the world a better place is that the people who come after you will inevitably have it easier than you did. And conversely, if they don't have it easier, than the world now is no better than it was decades ago.

That's what you should really be angry about.

Niqabs Again

There was a Supreme Court ruling on September 15 overturning the law banning niqabs at citizenship ceremonies. I’ve been procrastinating on this for a while, and… wait, what’s that? I already wrote about niqabs? And it’s all still relevant?

Well, that makes it easy.

So my stance for the last few years has been that I want to be on the side that isn’t telling women what they have to wear. I’m still pretty happy with this stance. As luck would have it, it turns out that Tom Mulcair seems to agree with me:

"No one has the right to tell a woman what she must — or must not — wear."

It’s nice to know that I’m in good company. Or rather, that Mulcair is in good company, because I already knew that I was right.

As with all other forms of religious accommodation, I think this should be applied across the board. That if people can cover their faces for religious reasons, they should be able to cover their faces because they are cold, or they have bad zits that day, or without bothering to give a reason at all.

If I wasn’t a citizen already, I’d show up wearing a ski mask and one of those Mulcair Beard face covering things. Just to see if I could get away with it.

It’s possible to imagine a situation where some rights could only be extended to a few people. Like in National Parks… a few people leaving the trails does negligible damage, but a hundred thousand people leaving the trails is catastrophic, so those areas are limited to parks staff. It makes sense in contexts like that. The best example of this with religious accommodations is for holidays. It’s relatively easy to give people time off for their religious holidays if they are in a minority religion, but gets increasingly difficult as that religion gets more adherents.

In contrast, sometimes the compromises made for the religious accommodation can make it something that can be made available for everyone. Like with the Kirpan case. The government argued - and I disagree with this, but will accept the premise for the sake of argument - that it wasn’t safe to have knives in school. Sikh boys are required to carry ceremonial knives. So the compromise was that they can now carry dull knives, securely strapped into the holsters. Well, once you’ve made those changes, it’s no longer unsafe to let everyone do that. At least, not unless you plan to ban metal rulers and sturdy pens as well.

But neither of these applies in this case. Citizenship will not be harmed if a majority covers their faces, or even if everyone does so. That is because the work of becoming a citizen is all done in advance of the oath. The citizenship ceremony is meaningless in itself. In fact, if I were setting it up, I’d make it like a graduation ceremony: Those who can’t or won’t attend will get their citizenship card in the mail.

Politics in the Internet Age: The Totals So Far

I wrote last month about candidates being worth to withdraw due to internet comments, and today I wondered just how much it’s been happening. I couldn’t find this list anywhere on the internet, so I had to actually research it. Legitimate journalism! So here are all the withdrawn candidates I could find, including both social media gaffes and otherwise.

May 12 - Chris Lloyd - Conservative - Just running as an art project

June 20 - Ray Fox - Liberal - Facebook - Racism, sexism

August 7 - Buddy Ford - Conservative - Pot charges

August 7 - Augustin Ali Kotoko - Conservative - Actually an NDP supporter

August 10 - Morgan Wheeldon - NDP - Facebook - Israel

August 18 - Ala Buzreba - Liberal - Twitter - Lots of profane stuff

August 21 - Gilles Guibord - Conservative - Comments Sections - Racism, Sexism

September 7 - Tim Dutaud - Conservative - Youtube - Crank Calls, Ableism

September 7 - Jerry Bance - Conservative - CBC News - Pissed in a Mug

September 10 - Joy Davies - Liberal - Facebook - Marijuana

September 15 - Blair Dale - Conservative - Racism, Sexism

September 16 - Chris Austin - Liberal - Jian Ghomeshi comments

September 22 - Louis Robicaud - Conservative - Unknown

September 24 - Stefan Jonasson - NDP - Israel Comments

The score right now: Conservatives 8, Liberal 4, NDP 2. I think the list is comprehensive up to September 16… it’s mostly based on this list, with three additions from early in the campaign and two additions from this week. There might have been more this week, I’m not sure.

The nominations will be finalized on September 28. I wonder what will happen after that? It seems likely that anything unearthed by opposition researchers has been hoarded, so that candidates can be targeted when they no longer have the chance to withdraw. It will be interesting to see what people have come up with… I wonder if there are any candidates left without embarrassing things somewhere in their pasts?

Certainly most of the candidates won’t have criminal charges, won’t have made national TV pissing in a mug, and won’t secretly be members of some other party. Unlike Ala Buzreba, most of them will have gone through adolescence long before the ubiquity of social media. And yet, I suspect we have only seen a fraction of the mud that will get slung around after next Monday.

The Inevitable Kim Davis Post

I just realized while going over my financial records that I’ve worked 120 hours in the last 12 days… so maybe I shouldn’t feel too guilty about letting the blog lapse a little. There really aren’t any consequences for doing so… except now and then a missed opportunity to say “I told you so”.

One of the bigger pieces of political news last week was a county clerk in Kentucky, Kim Davis, who is refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Her office is an elected one, so she can’t simply be dismissed for failing to do her job… she has to resign or be impeached. Impeachment is very unlikely given the current state of the Kentucky state legislature.

After weeks of impasse a solution was found… a court order was given requiring her to issue the licenses, and when she breached it she was jailed for contempt of court. Reportedly this was chosen over a fine because her supporters would have paid any fine she incurred, leaving it ineffective as a punishment.

I have no doubt that would be the case, there seems to be an unlimited pool of money in the US for reactionary conservatives who commit all sorts of crimes, high or petty, everything from gunning down children in the streets to refusing to sell flowers to a wedding. There’s little doubt a fine would have been meaningless to her, unless it was the sort of grossly unreasonably fine that would bankrupt small countries.

Had I staked out a claim at the time I would have recommended a fine anyway. I’m not what you could call a “Carceral Liberal”, I don’t like prison generally. I don’t recommend it for any cases except where the criminal is a danger to the public. But it’s especially bad in this case. It fires up that wingnut welfare machine, guaranteeing that when she’s released (which has already happened) Kim Davis walks away with wealth and fame and no lasting consequences.

A far better approach, I think, would have been an escalating fine. Start it out small… a few day’s pay for her first day not working, perhaps. Then double it for the second day. Double it again for the third day. If the wingnut welfare comes, let it come! I’m sure Kentucky can find a use for vast hoards of ill-gotten treasure.

The only downside I can see is the delay. Jailing Davis, however temporarily, allowed weddings to proceed unobstructed for the last week. If she refuses again, and is jailed again, they will presumably continue again this week. My escalating fine scenario would have resulted in a delay… not much of one, geometric progression being pretty fast, but some. This might have had lasting consequences, such as happened when the when a US soldier with breast cancer died while her prospective marriage was being appealed. But in such cases I think all those fines could be used to transport people to the next county over.

Anyway, she’s out now, and apparently none the worse for wear. She now has throngs of followers. The Republican presidential candidates are falling over themselves to praise her. She has vowed to continue defying the court order, so she’ll probably go back to jail sometime this week. And nobody will be safer or better off for it, leaving only the cold comfort of the schadenfreude.

I do wish I’d staked out this position in advance. But by waiting, I did manage to avoid a couple pitfalls… there was a tweet from someone pretending to be Kim Davis, comparing her to Rosa Parks. Lots of excellent rebuttals of that, but since Davis never actually said that they were all a little misplaced.

And the slut shaming… oy, the slut shaming. Libby Anne, who I’m not sure I’ve ever disagreed with about anything, dealt with that nicely. Pretty much all I can say about it is this: Come on now, we should be better than that.

The Enemy of the Good

Hey, remember that time when I used to have a blog? That was fun, right?

So I’ve been a little too busy to write lately. Not in a “working” sense of busy, but… every since the smoke rolled into the Okanagan I haven’t been able to run. So I’ve been walking instead… usually two-three hours every day. That’s lots of time to listen to podcasts, not a lot of time to write.

As a consequence I now have a big backlog of things I want to write about, so today will be sort of a theme and variations. Today’s theme is the nirvana fallacy. This fallacy is best explained by aphorisms. “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” “Give them the third best to go with, the second best is too late, the best never comes.” “Striving to better, we oft mar what’s well.”

I regularly read a web forum that has a tendency to pick fights in pursuit of ideological purity. It’s a fairly small forum… such groups are inevitably small, because they exclude people that would be close allies but for one little flaw. It can be infuriating to watch groups of good people split or self-destruct. I personally don’t comment there much, because sometimes it seems like anything I post is likely to offend someone somehow… and it’s so much easier to not post there than to be continually apologising. It’s still worth reading, but it would be dangerous to take it too seriously.

I think this is closely related to the tendency of political parties to go to the extremes. Take the current Republican primaries in the US, for example. Jeb Bush isn’t a pure conservative, because he is seen as weak on immigration. Rand Paul is seen as weak on social issues, Ben Carson is too weak on abortion… so each candidate is pushing all the others farther and farther to the right.

You see the same on the left, of course, all the time, though the party nominations are obscure enough that it tends to play out in general elections. So the Liberals and Greens are attacking the NDP for not being left enough, the NDP is attacking the Liberals and Greens for not being left enough… oddly, the Liberals and Greens are tending to not attack each other, probably because the NDP is the front runner right now.

I’m not by any means immune to this tendency, just because I know about it. That’s not how cognitive biases work. In politics, Thomas Mulcair was actually my very last choice for the NDP leadership, I think 10th on my ballot. His selection was very much a deliberate choice by the party to go with mainstream electability over ideological purity. This is what makes the attacks on him for having a background with Quebec provincial liberals and negotiating with the Federal conservatives about joining so funny… those were well known at the time, and part of why he was chosen.

This fallacy doesn’t just play out on grand political scales, of course. It’s everywhere. I probably could have easily written six new additions to my ongoing “Too Tired to Write” series, each with maybe one or two jokes cribbed from my facebook posts, and that would have been better than writing nothing at all. But that wouldn’t be perfect, so it didn’t happen.

Maybe I ought to try doing that tomorrow. Just because I might not have time to write an in-depth analysis of an important topic doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do anything at all.