Apr 27, 2019 in Literature, Philosophy, Politics
Many, including me, have relied on Max Weber’s definition of a state as “the rule of men over men based on the means of legitimate, that is allegedly legitimate violence”. I thought that violence was synonymous with power and that the best we could hope for was a legitimate exercise of violence, one that was proportionate and used only as a last resort.
I have a blog post about state monopolies on violence because of Hannah Arendt. Her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was my re-introduction to moral philosophy. It, more than any other book, has informed this blog. To Arendt, thinking and judging are paramount. It is not so much, to her, that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is instead that the unexamined life exists in a state of mortal peril, separated only by circumstances from becoming one...
Apr 20, 2019 in Economics, Politics, Quick Fix
Degrowth is the political platform that holds our current economic growth as unsustainable and advocates for a radical reduction in our resource consumption. Critically, it rejects that this reduction can occur at the same time as our GDP continues to grow. Degrowth, per its backers, requires an actual contraction of the economy.
The Canadian New Democratic Party came perilously close to being taken over by advocates of degrowth during its last leadership race, which goes to show just how much leftist support the movement has gained since its debut in 2008.
I believe that degrowth is one of the least sensible policies being advocated for by elements of the modern left. This post collects my three main arguments against degrowth in a package that is easy to link to in other online discussions.
To my mind, advocates of degrowth fail to advocate a positive vision of transition to a...
Apr 6, 2019 in Model, Politics, Quick Fix
Richard Nixon would likely have gone down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents, if not for Watergate.
To my mind, his greatest successes were détente with China and the end of the convertibility of dollars into gold, but he also deserves kudos for ending the war in Vietnam, continuing the process of desegregation, establishing the EPA, and signing the anti-ballistic missile treaty.
Nixon was willing to try unconventional solutions and shake things up. He wasn’t satisfied with leaving things as they were. This is, in some sense, a violation of political norms.
When talking about political norms, it’s important to separate them into their two constituent parts.
First, there are the norms of policy. These are the standard terms of the debate. In some countries, they may look like a (semi-)durable centrist consensus. In others they may require accepting single-party rule as a given.
Second are the...
Mar 30, 2019 in Model, Politics
The fundamental problem of governance is the misalignment between means and ends. In all practically achievable government systems, the process of acquiring and maintaining power requires different skills than the exercise of power. The core criteria of any good system of government, therefore, must be selecting people by a metric that bears some resemblance to governing, or perhaps more importantly, having a metric that actively filters out people who are not suited to govern.
When the difference between means and ends becomes extreme, achieving power serves only to demonstrate unsuitability for holding it. Such systems are inevitably doomed to collapse.
Many people (I am thinking most notably of neo-reactionaries) put too much stock in the incentives or institutions of government systems. Neo-reactionaries look at the institutions of monarchies and claim they lead to stability, because monarchs have a large personal incentive to improve their kingdom and their lifetime tenure should...
Mar 27, 2019 in Politics, Quick Fix
Last week I said that I’d been avoiding writing about Brexit because it was neither my monkeys nor my circus. This week, I’ll be eating those words.
I’m a noted enthusiast of the Westminster system of government, yet this week (with Teresa May’s deal failing in parliament and parliament taking control of Brexit proceedings, to uncertain ends) seems to fly in the face of everything good I’ve said about it. That impression is false; the current impasse has been caused entirely by recent ill-conceived British tinkering, not any core problems with the system itself.
As far as I can tell, the current shambles arise from three departures from the core of the Westminster system.
First, we have parliament taking control of the business of parliament in order to hold a set of indicative votes. I don’t have the sort of deep knowledge of British history that is necessary...
Mar 23, 2019 in Model, Politics, Quick Fix
Brexit was always destined to be a shambles.
I haven’t written much about Brexit. It’s always been a bit of a case of “not my monkeys, not my circus”. And we’ve had plenty of circuses on this side of the Atlantic for me to write about.
That said, I do think Brexit is useful for illustrating the pitfalls of this sort of referendum, something I’ve taken to calling “The 50% Problem”.
Dec 9, 2018 in All About Me, Politics
“Hi, I’m Zach! I’m out here knocking on doors for Tenille Bonoguore, who is running to represent you in Ward 7. Do you have any questions for her, or concerns that you’d like her to know about…” is now a sentence I have said more than possibly any other.
Ontario had municipal elections on October 22nd. I looked at the bios of my local candidates, emailed all of them to find out more about their platforms, met with two of them, and ultimately decided that I wanted to help Tenille. Soon after that, I had been drafted to help manage canvassing efforts (although my colleague Tanya did more of that work than I did) and I was out knocking on doors again.
I knocked on countless doors and talked to an incredible variety of people. I don’t even know how many times I went out canvassing, but it was...
Oct 21, 2018 in Model, Politics, Science
A while back, I was linked to this Tweet:
|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣|
— Audra J. Wolfe, PhD (@ColdWarScience) July 12, 2018
Science
has always
been
Political
|＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿|
(\__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ#HistorianSignBunny
It had sparked a brisk and mostly unproductive debate. If you want to see people talking past each other, snide comments, and applause lights, check out the thread. One of the few productive exchanges centres on bridges.
Bridges are clearly a product of science (and its offspring, engineering) – only the simplest bridges can be built without scientific knowledge. Bridges also clearly have a political dimension. Not only are bridges normally the product of politics, they also are embedded in a broader political fabric. They change how a space can be used and change geography. They make certain actions – like...
Sep 29, 2018 in Economics, Politics
Vox has an interesting article on Elizabeth Warren’s newest economic reform proposal. Briefly, she wants to force corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue to apply for a charter of corporate citizenship.
This charter would make three far-reaching changes to how large companies do business. First, it would require businesses to consider customers, employees, and the community – instead of only its shareholders – when making decisions. Second, it would require that 40% of the seats on the board go to workers. Third, it would require 75% of shareholders and board members to authorize any corporate political activity.
(There’s also some minor corporate governance stuff around limiting the ability of CEOs to sell their stock which I think is an idea...
Aug 6, 2018 in Model, Politics
Did you know that half of all surgical complications are preventable? In the US alone, this means that surgeons cause between 50,00 and 200,000 preventable deaths each year.
Surgeons are, almost literally, getting away with murder.
Why do we let them? Engineers who see their designs catastrophically fail often lose their engineering license, even when they’re found not guilty in criminal proceedings. If surgeons were treated like engineers, many of them wouldn’t be operating anymore.
Indeed, the death rate in surgery is almost unique among regulated professions. One person has died in a commercial aviation accident in the US in the last nine years. Structural engineering related accidents killed at most 251 people in the US in 20161 and only approximately 4% of residential structure failures in the US occur due to deficiencies in design2.
...Jul 11, 2018 in Economics, Politics, Quick Fix
Last week I explained how poor decisions by central bankers (specifically failing to spur inflation) can make recessions much worse and lead to slower wage growth during recovery.
(Briefly: inflation during recessions reduces the real cost of payroll, cutting business expenses and making firing people unnecessary. During a recovery, it makes hiring new workers cheaper and so leads to more being hired. Because central bankers failed to create inflation during and after the great recession, many businesses are scared of raising salaries. They believe (correctly) that this will increase their payroll expenses to the point where they’ll have to lay many people off if another recession strikes. Until memories of the last recession fade or central bankers clean up their act, we shouldn’t expect wages to rise.)
Now I’d like to expand on an offhand comment I made about the minimum wage last week and explore how it can affect recovery,...
Jun 25, 2018 in Economics, Politics
There are many problems that face modern, developed economies. Unfortunately, no one agrees with what to do in response to them. Even economists are split, with libertarians championing deregulation, while liberals call for increased government spending to reduce inequality.
Or at least, that’s the conventional wisdom. The Captured Economy, by Dr. Brink Lindsey (libertarian) and Dr. Steven M. Teles (liberal) doesn’t have much time for conventional wisdom.
It’s a book about the perils of regulation, sure. But it’s a book that criticizes regulation that redistributes money upwards. This isn’t the sort of regulation that big pharma or big finance wants to cut. It’s the regulation they pay politicians to enact.
And if you believe Lindsey and Teles, upwardly redistributing regulation is strangling our economy and feeding inequality.
They’re talking, of course, about rent-seeking.
Now, if you don’t read economic literature, you probably have an idea of what “rent-seeking” might...
Jun 18, 2018 in Economics, History, Politics
Friends, lend me your ears.
I write today about a speech that was once considered the greatest political speech in American history. Even today, after Reagan, Obama, Eisenhower, and King, it is counted among the very best. And yet this speech has passed from the history we have learned. Its speaker failed in his ambitions and the cause he championed is so archaic that most people wouldn’t even understand it.
I speak of Congressman Will J Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech.
William Jennings Bryan was a congressman from Nebraska, a lawyer, a three-time Democratic candidate for president (1896, 1900, 1908), the 41st Secretary of State, and oddly enough, the lawyer for the prosecution at the Scopes Monkey Trial. He was also a “silver Democrat”, one of the insurgents who rose to challenge Democratic President Grover Cleveland and the Democratic party establishment over their support for gold over a bimetallic (gold...
Jun 11, 2018 in All About Me, Politics
“Hi I’m Zach. I’m out here canvasing for Catherine Fife, Andrea Horwath, and the NDP. I was wondering if Catherine could count on your support this election…” is now a sentence I’ve said hundreds of times.
Ontario had a provincial election on June 7th. I wasn’t fond of the Progressive Conservative (PC) Party’s leader, one Doug Ford, so I did what I could. I joined the PC party to vote for his much more qualified rival, Christine Elliot. When that failed, I volunteered for Waterloo’s NDP Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP), Catherine Fife.
As a volunteer, I knocked on more than a thousand doors and talked to more than two hundred people. I went out canvassing eight times. According to Google Maps and its creepy tracking, I walked about 24 kilometers while doing this (and have still-sore feet to prove it).
Before I started canvassing, I knew...
Jun 3, 2018 in All About Me, Politics
I like to keep track of my life over time. I’m an obsessive journaler (and, as this blog can attest, a fairly regular blogger). At the end of every day, I track my mood, my sleep, my productivity, my social life, and how well I did in spaced repetition exercises. Last May, I decided to track one more thing about myself and start a tradition of publishing my Political Compass results yearly.
I’m a bit late this year (I kept the title because I started the post in May) because there’s actual politics happening; I’ve been volunteering for my local MPP’s re-election campaign. Of explanations for being late with a politics related blog post, that might be the best one I ever give.
Last year, I scored -3.25 on the economic axis and -6.56 on the authority axis.
Canadian results come from The Political Compass’s...
May 30, 2018 in Literature, Politics
It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic over the age of forty must be prepared to write a book talking about how everything is going to hell these days. Despite literally no time in history featuring fewer people dying of malaria, dying in childbirth, dying of vaccine preventable illnesses, etc., it is very much in vogue to criticise the foibles of modern life. Heck, Ross Douthat makes a full-time job out of it over at the New York Times.
Enlightenment 2.0 is Canadian academic Joseph Heath’s contribution to the genre. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because I’ve referenced him a bunch of times on this blog. I’m very much a fan of his book Filthy Lucre and his shared blog, induecourse.ca. Because of this, I decided to give his book (and only his book) decrying the modern age a try.
...Apr 1, 2018 in Falsifiable, Physics, Politics
Under the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT), all nuclear tests except for those underground are banned. Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), only the permanent members of the UN Security Council are legally allowed to possess nuclear weapons. Given the public outcry over fallout that led to the PTBT and the worries over widespread nuclear proliferation that led to the NPT, it’s clear that we require something beyond pinky promises to verify that countries are meeting the terms of these treaties.
But how do we do so? How can you tell when a country tests an atomic bomb? How can you tell who did it? And how can one differentiate a bomb on the surface from a bomb in the atmosphere from a bomb in space from a bomb underwater from a bomb underground?
I’m going to focus on two efforts to monitor nuclear weapons: the national security apparatus...
Mar 18, 2018 in Economics, Politics
I watch a lot of political debates with my friends. A couple of them have turned to me after watching heated arguments about public debt and (because I have a well-known habit of reading monetary policy blogs) asked me who is right. I hear questions like:
Is it true that public debt represents an unfair burden on our hypothetical grandchildren? Is all this talk about fiscal discipline and balanced budgets pointless? Is it really bad when public debt gets over 100% of a country’s GDP? How can the threat of defaulting on loans lead to inflation and ruin?
And what does all this mean for Ontario? Is Doug Ford right about the deficit?
This is my attempt to sort this all out in a public and durable form. Now when I’ve taken a political debate drinking game too far, I’ll still be able to point people towards the answers to...
Mar 4, 2018 in Model, Politics, Quick Fix
Tanya Granic Allen is the most idealistic candidate I’ve ever seen take the stage in a Canadian political debate. This presents some awkward challenges for the candidates facing her, especially Mulroney and Elliot.
First, there’s the simple fact of her idealism. I think Granic Allen genuinely believes everything she says. For her, knowing what’s right and what’s wrong is simple. There isn’t a whole lot of grey. She even (bless her) probably believes that this will be an advantage come election time. People overwhelming don’t like the equivocation of politicians, so Granic Allen must assume her unequivocal moral stances will be a welcome change
For many people, it must be. Even for those who find it grating, it seems almost vulgar to attack her. It’s clear that she isn’t in this for herself and doesn’t really care about personal power. Whether she could maintain that innocence in the face of...
Feb 10, 2018 in Economics, Politics, Quick Fix
I don’t understand why people choose to go bankrupt living the most expensive cities, but I’m increasingly viewing this as a market failure and collective action problem to be fixed with intervention, not a failure of individual judgement.
There are many cities, like Brantford, Waterloo, or even Ottawa, where everything works properly. Rent isn’t really more expensive than suburban or rural areas. There’s public transit, which means you don’t necessarily need a car, if you choose where you live with enough care. There are plenty of jobs. Stuff happens.
But cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and San Francisco confuse the hell out of me. The cost of living is through the roof, but wages don’t even come close to following (the difference in salary between Toronto and Waterloo for someone with my qualifications is $5,000, which in no way would cover the...
Jan 23, 2018 in Economics, Politics
When you worry about rising inequality, what are you thinking about?
I now know of two competing models for inequality, each of which has vastly different implications for political economy.
In the first, called consumptive inequality, inequality is embodied in differential consumption. Under this model, there is a huge gap between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (net worth: $60 billion), with his private islands, his yacht, etc. and myself, with my cheap rented apartment, ten-year-old bike, and modest savings. In fact, under this model, there’s even a huge gap between Larry Ellison with all of his luxury goods and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (net worth: $90.6 billion), with his relatively cheap house and restrained tastes.
Jan 14, 2018 in History, Literature, Politics
Hannah Arendt’s massive study of totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is (at the time of writing), the fourth most popular political theory book on Amazon (after two editions of The Prince, Plato’s Republic, and a Rebecca Solnit book). It’s also a densely written tome, not unsuitable for defending oneself from wild animals. Many of its paragraphs could productively be turned into whole books of their own.
I’m not done it yet. But a review and summary of the whole thing would be far too large for a single blog post. Therefore, I’m going to review its three main sections as I finish them. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem set my mind afire and spurred my very first essay on political theory, so I’m very excited to be reviewing the section on antisemitism today.
(Reminder: unless I’m specifically...
Jan 6, 2018 in Economics, Falsifiable, Politics
Since the minimum wage increase took effect on January 1st, Tim Hortons has been in the news. Many local franchisees have been clawing back benefits, removing paid breaks, or otherwise taking measures to reduce the costs associated with an increased minimum wage.
TVO just put out a piece about this ongoing saga by the Christian socialist Michael Coren. It loudly declares that “Tim Hortons doesn’t deserve your sympathy”. Unfortunately, Mr. Coren is incorrect. Everyone involved here (Tim Hortons the corporation, Tim Hortons franchisees, and Tim Hortons workers) is caught between a rock and a hard place. They all deserve your sympathy.
It is a truism that a minimum wage increase must result in either declining profits, cuts to...
Dec 3, 2017 in Model, Politics
Since June 21st of this year, Mohammed bin Salman (often known by his initials, MBS) has been the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. This required what was assuredly not a palace coup, because changes of government or succession are never coups, merely “similar to coups”, “coup-like”, “coup-esque”, or “coupLite™” 1. As crown prince, MBS has championed a loosening of religious restrictions on women and entertainment, a decrease in reliance on oil for state revenues, and a harder line with Qatar and Iran.
Media coverage has been, uh, split. Here’s an editorial in The Washington Post comparing MBS to Putin, while an editorial in The New York Times fawningly declares “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last”2. Given that there’s so much difference in opinion on MBS, I thought it might be useful to...
Nov 12, 2017 in Model, Politics
Last week, I used the Graph Model of Conflict Resolution to find a set of stable equilibria in the present conflict between North Korea and the USA. They were:
But how much can we trust these results? How much to they depend on my subjective ranking of the belligerent’s preferences? How much do they depend on the stability metrics I used?
To get a sense of this, I’m going to add another stability metric into the mix, come up with three new preference vectors, and look at how the original results change when we consider a North Korean invasion to...
Nov 5, 2017 in Model, Politics
Why do things happen the way they do?
Every day, there are conflicts between decision makers. These occur on the international scale (think the Cuban Missile Crisis), the provincial level (Ontario’s sex-ed curriculum anyone?) and the local level (Toronto’s bike lane kerfuffle). Conflict is inevitable. Understanding it, regrettably, is not.
The final results of many conflicts can look baffling from the outside. Why did the Soviet Union retreat in the Cuban missile crisis? Why do some laws pass and others die on the table?
The most powerful tool I have for understanding the ebb and flow of conflict is the Graph Model of Conflict Resolution (GMCR). I had the immense pleasure of learning about it under the tutelage of Professor Keith Hipel, one of its creators. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share it with you.
GMCR is done...
Nov 2, 2017 in Politics
The following is the annotated speakers notes for a talk I gave on nuclear weapons today. I’d like to claim that it was a transcript, but after practicing from these notes for almost a week, I ended up giving the talk mostly ex tempore. Like I always do.
Note: The uncredited photos were created by the US government and therefore have no copyright attached. All other images are either original (and therefore covered by the same license as the rest of the blog) or are credited and subject to the original license (normally CC-BY of some sort).
Hi I’m Zach.
This will be a backwards explanation of nuclear weapons; I don’t have time to cover it all so instead of covering the boring stuff like how fission works, I’m going to talk about the strategic...
Oct 16, 2017 in Politics
“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita… ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’” – J Robert Oppenheimer, on the reaction to the successful test of the first atomic bomb.
Sep 3, 2017 in Politics
I’ve been ranting to random people all week about how much I love the Westminster System of parliamentary government (most notably used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK) and figured it was about time to write my rant down for broader consumption.
Here’s three reasons why the Westminster System is so much better than the abominable hodgepodge Americans call a government and all the other dysfunctional presidential republics the world over.
And more importantly, the head of state is a figurehead.
The president is an odd dual-role, both head of government (and therefore responsible for running the executive branch and implementing the policies of the government) and head of state (the face of the nation at home and abroad; the person who is supposed to serve as a symbol of national...
Aug 27, 2017 in Economics, Politics
It used to be a common progressive grumbling point that the social safety net subsidized the low wages of McDonald’s and Walmart (and many less famous and less oft grumbled about enterprises). The logic went that employees at those companies just weren’t paid enough; they wouldn’t be able to survive – a necessary prerequisite to showing up at work – without government assistance. The obvious fix for this would be forcing these companies to pay their employees more – raising the minimum wage.
In my last piece on the minimum wage, I said the existing evidence pointed towards minimum wage hikes having few negative consequences. Recent evidence from Seattle suggests this may not be the case (although there are dueling studies, further complicated by accusations of academic misconduct against the scientists who found the hike had no effect). If my...
Aug 6, 2017 in Model, Politics, Quick Fix
Previously, I talked about akrasia as one motive for socially conservative legislation. I think the akrasia model is useful when explaining certain classes of seemingly hypocritical behaviour, but it’s far from the only reason for social conservatives to push for legislation that liberals oppose. At least some legislation comes from a desire to force socially conservative values on everyone1.
Liberals are terrible at understanding the values underlying conservative legislation. When an anti-abortion single issue voter took a reproductive rights seminar at Yale, he was surprised to hear that many of his classmates believed that anti-abortion laws were aimed entirely at controlling women’s sexuality, rather than stopping the (to his eyes) moral crime of abortion2.
This is an easy mistake to make. It’s true...
Jul 30, 2017 in Model, Politics
If you hang out with people obsessed with self-improvement, one term that you’ll hear a lot is akrasia. A dictionary will tell you that akrasia means “The state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgement through weakness of will.”
Someone who struggles with it will have more visceral stories. “It’s like someone else is controlling me, leaving me powerless to stop watching Netflix” is one I’ve often heard. Or “I know that scrolling through Facebook for five hours is against my goals, but I just can’t help myself”.
I use commitment contracts (I agree to pay a friend a certain amount of money if I don’t do a certain things) or Beeminder (a service that charges me money if I fail to meet my goals) to manage my akrasia. Many of my friends do the same thing. Having to face...
Jul 27, 2017 in Economics, Model, Politics
Breaking news: a retired mechanic spent one afternoon and $550 building a staircase. This is news because the City of Toronto said it would cost $65,000 for them to do it. They’ve since walked back that estimate, claiming it won’t be that expensive (instead, the final cost looks to be a mere $10,000).
Part of this is materials and labour. The city will probably go for something a bit more permeant than wood – probably concrete or metal – and will probably have higher labour costs (the mechanic hired a random guy off the street to help out, which is probably against city procurement policy). But a decent part (perhaps even the majority) of the increased costs will be driven by regulation.
First there’s the obvious compliance activities: site assessment, community consultation, engineering approval, insurance approval. Each of these will take the...
Jul 23, 2017 in Literature, Politics
My latest non-fiction read was Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign. In addition to making me consider a career in political consultancy, it gave me a welcome insight into some of the fascinating choices the Clinton campaign made during the election.
I really do believe this book was going to rip on the campaign no matter the outcome. Had Clinton won, the thesis would have been “the race was closer than it needed to be”, not “Clinton’s campaign was brilliant”.
Despite that, I should give the classic disclaimer: I could be wrong about the authors; it’s entirely possible that...
Jul 19, 2017 in Economics, Model, Politics
There are two sides to every story. Zoning and maximum occupancy regulations are exclusionary and drive up the price of housing. They are also necessary to prevent exploitative landlords from leaving their tenants in squalor. Catastrophic health insurance plans leave patients uncovered for many of the services they might need. They’re also often the only plans that are rational for younger people to buy.
Where you come down on either of these – or any similar cases where there’s a clear trade-off between maximum access and minimum standards – is probably heavily dependent on your situation. If you’re an American millennial without an employer-provided or parental health care plan, you’re probably quite incensed about the lack of catastrophic health care insurance. For healthy young adults, those plans were an excellent deal.
Similarly, workaholics in the Bay Area sometimes want to...
Jul 3, 2017 in Model, Politics
There is perennial debate in Canada about whether we should allow a “two-tiered” healthcare system. The debate is a bit confusing – by many measures we already have a two-tiered system, with private clinics and private insurance – but ultimately hinges on the ability of doctors to mix fees. Currently it is illegal for a doctor to charge anything on top of the provincially mandated fee structure. If the province is willing to pay $3,000 for a procedure, you cannot charge $5,000 and ask your patients (or their insurance) to make up the difference.
Supporters of a mixed system argue that it will alleviate wait times for everyone. Detractors argue that it will create a cumbersome, unfair system and paradoxically increase wait times. It’s enough to convince me that I don’t know what the fuck a two-tier healthcare system would have as its first order effects.
But I...
Jun 3, 2017 in Economics, Politics
ETA (October 2018): Preliminary studies from Seattle make me much more pessimistic about the effects of the Ontario minimum wage hike. I’d also like to highlight the potential for problems when linking a minimum wage to inflation.
There’s something missing from the discussion about the $15/hour minimum wage in Ontario, something basically every news organization has failed to pick up on. I’d have missed it too, except that a chance connection to a recent blog post I’d read sent me down the right rabbit hole. I’ve climbed out on the back of a mound of government statistics and I really want to share what I’ve found.
Reading through the coverage of the proposed $15/hour minimum wage, I was reminded that the Ontario minimum wage is currently indexed to inflation. Before #FightFor15 really took...
Jun 3, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Quick Fix
I predict that within five years of the implementation of the new $15/hour Ontario minimum wage, we’ll see an increase in the labour participation rates of women and a decrease in the labour participation rates of people with disabilities or developmental delays.
May 31, 2017 in All About Me, Politics
Like many others who are a bit, um, obsessive when it comes to politics, I’ve long been a fan of the Political Compass. Most people are familiar with the differences between left wing redistributive and right wing capitalist politics. The observation underlying the Political Compass is that these aren’t the only salient axes of political disagreement.
In addition to the standard left-right economic disagreement, the Political Compass looks at the disagreements between libertarians and authoritarians. This second axis deals with the amount of social restrictions (or, from the other point of view, mandated social cohesiveness) a government imposes on its citizens.
The Political Compass breaks political parties (and the political views of individuals) into four quadrants: the authoritarian left (think centralized communism, e.g. Mao, Stalin), the authoritarian right (think socially conservative capitalism, e.g. Reagan, Thatcher), the libertarian right (think socially permissive capitalism e.g. Macron, Gary Johnson), and the libertarian...
May 30, 2017 in Model, Politics, Quick Fix
I’d like to expand on one of the points I raised yesterday about Canadian social conservatives and the sorts of things they can expect from Andrew Scheer, because I think the Canadian approach to “family values” conservatism is desperately under-theorized.
Yesterday I claimed that the main way that Harper pushed so-called family values was through economic incentives to have a 1950s-style nuclear family. Both income splitting and the Universal Child Care Benefit were designed to make it more feasible to have a single income family.
This is a radically different tack than taken by American family values candidates, who primarily exercise their beliefs by banning sex education, fighting against gay marriage and adoption, and restricting access to abortion1. The American approach attempts to close off all alternatives but a heterosexual, monogamous, child-producing marriage. The Canadian approach is to bribe people into this (and to...
May 28, 2017 in Politics
Yesterday generic conservative Andrew Scheer was crowned leader of the Conservative Party of Canada in a nail-biting 14 ballot process. His margin of victory over the libertarian Maxime Bernier was less than 2%.
Reuters managed to get pretty much everything about this story subtly wrong, from the number of votes political observers expected – by the final week, most of us remembered that there were so many low support candidates that it would probably go to the very final ballot – to Scheer’s position in the party. Reuters has Scheer pegged as a social conservative, whereas people watching the race were much more likely to describe him as the compromise candidate.
The Conservative Leadership race was one of the high points of my engagement in Canadian politics. I haven’t been this engaged since the 2011 election (I was out of country for the 2015 election which limited my involvement...
May 20, 2017 in Literature, Politics
I just finished Professor Arlie Hochschild’s latest book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”, a book some people are trumpeting as the one that explains Trump.
That wasn’t exactly how I read the book. I think Trump’s win is well explained by some combination of the “fundamentals” and the Comey Letter just before the election. I’m also wary of falling into the trap of drawing conclusions about America because Trump won. The result of the election could have been changed by dozens of random events. I’m following Scott Alexander’s advice and not basing my narratives off of which potential events happened to actually happen.
Besides, Trump is barely even in this book. He only appears in any substantive way in the last chapter and Prof. Hochschild doesn’t devote much ink to him. If you’re using this book to explain Trump, you’re...
May 13, 2017 in Biology, Politics
If you don’t live in Southern Ontario or don’t hang out in the skeptic blogosphere, you will probably have never heard the stories I’m going to tell today. There are two of, both about young Ontarian girls. One story has a happier ending than the other.
First is Makayla Sault. She died two years ago, from complications of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She was 11. Had she completed a full course of chemotherapy, there is a 75% chance that she would be alive today.
She did not complete a full course of chemotherapy.
Instead, after 12-weeks of therapy, she and her parents decided to seek so-called “holistic” treatment at the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, as well as traditional indigenous treatments. . This decision killed her. With chemotherapy, she had a good chance of surviving. Without it…
There is no traditional wisdom that offers anything against cancer. There is no...
May 7, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Quick Fix
A friend asked me what I thought about the candidates in the leadership race for the Conservative Party of Canada. I found I had more to say than was strictly reasonable to post in a Facebook comment. I posted it anyway – because I’m sometimes unreasonable – but I found I also wanted to record my thoughts in a more organized manner that’s easier to link to.
Right now, I think there are a few meaningful ways to split up the candidates. You can split them up based on what block of the party they represent.
The way I see it, you have:
It might be possible to collapse these categories a bit; unobjectionable compromise candidates and Harper clones don’t have that much difference between them, for example. But I think I’m clustering based on salient differences in what the candidates are choosing to highlight, even when their policy positions or voting records are very similar.
Apr 26, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Quick Fix
Back in February, I predicted that the slew of scandals Trudeau was facing wouldn’t decrease his approval ratings. To put numbers on this, I gave my confidence intervals for Trudeau’s approval ratings in April.
Thanks to the “Leader Meter”, it’s easy for me to check up on how Trudeau is doing. As of right now, the most recent poll has him at 48% approval (this is conveniently the first poll since April 1st, making it useful for the purposes of checking my prediction), while Éric Grenier’s model has him at 50.6% approval.
Both of these are within all three probability intervals I offered. In addition, Trudeau was polling higher in March than he was in February, further evidence that the scandals in February (and the abandonment of electoral reform) haven’t hurt his popularity.
I continue to believe that the erosion of political norms around scandals during Steven Harper’s time in office has played a large role in Trudeau’s enduring popularity.
Apr 6, 2017 in Economics, Model, Politics, Quick Fix
Neil McDonald’s new column points out that Trump’s low-income supporters voted against their own economic self-interest. This presents a fine opportunity for Mr. McDonald to lecture those voters about how bad Trump’s policies will be for them, as if they couldn’t have figured it out themselves.
I say: some of Trump’s supporters voted against their own self-interest? So what? Hillary Clinton’s well-off supporters, from Sam Altman, to many of my friends in the Bay Area did as well.
Back in Canada, I have even more examples of people who voted against their self-interest. They include myself, Mr. McDonald (in all likelihood), a bevy of well off technologists and programmers, and a bunch of highly educated students who expect to start high-paying jobs before the next election.
Just like Trump’s lower-income voters, we knew what we were getting into. We understood that we were voting for higher taxes for people...
Mar 12, 2017 in History, Literature, Politics
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is the second book I’ve read about World War II and culpability. I apparently just can’t resist the urge to write essays after books like this, so here we go again. Since so much of what I got out of this book was spurred by the history it presented, I’m going to try and intersperse my thoughts with a condensed summary of it.
Aside from the prologue, which takes place just after Hirohito’s (arguably) extra-constitutional surrender, the book follows Hirohito’s life chronologically. Hirohito’s childhood was hardly idyllic. He spent most of it being educated. Meiji Era Japan drew heavily from Prussia and in Hirohito’s education, I saw an attempt to mold him into a Japanese Frederick the Great.
I think Dr. Bix is right to spend as much time on Hirohito’s childhood as he does. Lois McMaster Bujold once criticized authors who write...
Feb 22, 2017 in Model, Politics
In light of the leaks about Michael Flynn, just about everyone, from America’s allies to its intelligence officers, seems to be reconsidering how much intelligence they share with Donald Trump’s White House. I can’t think of anything more damaging to President Trump’s ability to govern than various domestic and allied agencies (semi-)publicly mulling whether or not to share information with him.
It’s not that I think this will cause irreparable damage to his public image. At this point, you can be swayed by other people’s opinion of Trump or you can’t. Trump’s base doesn’t care what a bunch of intelligence geeks in suits think about him. They just want to see jobs come back.
It’s just that Trump is already beginning to experience one of the most significant failure modes of single-person rule: isolation.
One of the little talked about virtues of democracy is how its decentralizing tendency makes...
Feb 20, 2017 in Data Science, Politics
The other day, I posed a question to my friends on Facebook:
Do you think countries with higher taxes see more charitable donations or fewer charitable donations? What sort of correlation would you expect between the two (weak positive? weak negative? strong positive? strong negative?). I just crunched some numbers and I'll post them later. First I want to give people a chance to guess and test their calibration.
I was doing research for a future blog post on libertarianism and wanted to check one of the fundamental assumptions that many libertarians make: in the absence of a government, private charity would provide many of the same social services that are currently provided by the government.
Feb 14, 2017 in Ethics, Politics, Quick Fix
When Ken over at Popehat gets into a full-on rant about people who don’t understand rights, I’m often sympathetic. It was Ken who made me understand that people who don’t understand rights are a threat to everyone. When many people are misinformed about their rights, those rights become easier to take away.
When Scott at Slate Star Codex talks about good social norms, I’m very keen to listen. Scott helped me understand that social groups are worth cultivating and that it’s a good idea to think about how your group norms will change your experience of interacting with people.
So, when Tessa linked me to a Slate Star Codex post where Scott disagreed with Ken, I had some thinking to do.
The Slate Star Codex post is a response to a piece Ken put up after the furor around Justine Sacco’s...
Feb 12, 2017 in Politics, Science
In an effort to make my nuclear weapons post series a one stop resource for anyone interested in getting up to speed on nuclear weapons, I’ve decided to add supplementary materials filling any gaps that are pointed out to me. This supplementary post is on laser enrichment.
Enrichment is one of the more difficult steps in the building of certain nuclear weapons. Currently, enrichment is accomplished through banks of hundreds or thousands of centrifuges, feeding their products forward towards higher and higher enrichment percentages.
Significant centrifuge plants are relatively big (the Natanz plant in Iran covers 100,000m2, for example) and require a large and consistent supply of energy, which often makes it possible spot them in satellite imagery. The centrifuges themselves require a recognizable combination of components, which are carefully monitored. If a nation were to suddenly buy up components implicated in centrifuge design, it would clearly signal...
Feb 7, 2017 in Model, Politics
There is an interesting post by Professor Bryan Caplan spinning limited government as an insurance policy against wild swings in political climate. You should go read the whole thing, but I’ll summarize for the lazy.
Professor Caplan makes his case using a thought experiment with an angel. This angel talks to you during Obama’s inauguration and offers you a bargain. The terms are simple If you accept, neither Obama nor Trump will be able to get much done. You trade away Obamacare and in exchange you don’t get Trump’s immigration policies. Professor Caplan frames this as a form of political insurance, a guarantee of mediocracy instead of potentially wild swings.
Professor Caplan points out that this insurance (which might be sounding pretty tempting to you right about now) is actually similar to the concept of limited government, something we already know how to achieve.
Feb 6, 2017 in Model, Politics
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rang in 2017 with an ethics scandal. Electoral reform and President Trump might have pushed it out of the news, but it still bears talking about.
Maybe it’s just that my memory is fuzzy before 2004, but I feel like there was a point in Canadian politics when scandals weren’t a run of the mill occurrence. It seems like we’ve been treated to a non-stop parade of them since the sponsorship scandal. There was the In-and-Out scandal, that time Maxime Bernier left classified documents with his Hell’s Angels girlfriend, that horrible mess with Afghan detainees, the Robocalls (and associated criminal charges!), the F-35s, the senate, and now the Aga Khan.
There’s also been a host of minor scandals that didn’t even make it into this list, like the $50 million of G8 money spent to make Tony Clement’s...
Jan 31, 2017 in History, Model, Politics
Yonatan Zunger has an article in Medium claiming that the immigration executive order from last Friday is the “trial balloon” for a planned Trump coup. I don’t think this is quite correct. While I no longer have much confidence that America will still be a democracy in 50 years, I don’t think Trump will be its first dictator.
I do think the first five points in Dr. Zunger’s analysis are fairly sound. I’m not sure if they are true, but they’re certainly plausible. It is true, for example, that it is unusual to file papers for re-election so quickly. Barack Obama didn’t file his re-election form until 2011. Whether this means that Trump will use campaign donations to enrich his family remains to be seen, but the necessary public disclosures of campaign expenses make this falsifiable. Give it a year and we’ll know.
Unfortunately, the 6th point is much...
Jan 29, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
Nuclear weapons represent an existential risk. I’ll let 80,000 Hours speak for me for a minute:
A survey of academics at the Global Catastrophic Risk Conference by Oxford University estimated a 1% chance of human extinction from nuclear wars over the 21st Century. … Luke Oman estimates the probability “for the global human population of zero resulting from the 150 Tg of black carbon scenario in our 2007 paper [delving into the effects of a single nuclear exchange] would be in the range of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000.” This being said, we think this estimate is too low, as it doesn’t account for the potential for weaknesses in their model or the risk of a societal collapse causing a permanent reduction in humanity’s ability to reach its potential (which is nonetheless an existential risk even if people remain).
If you’re interested in reducing the existential risk...
Jan 28, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
Having covered the practicalities of nuclear physics, nuclear weapon design, and nuclear weapon effects, we may now turn our attention to the strategies that have grown out of these physical realities.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of nuclear weapons – tactical and strategic. This post has been focused primarily on strategic nuclear weapons, high yield weapons capable of destroying cities and hardened targets. Tactical nuclear weapons have smaller yields, allowing them to be hypothetically used on a battlefield that contains friendlies.
The line between the two gets somewhat blurred with the highest yield tactical weapons. Is a 5kt bomb tactical or strategic? No one really has a clear answer. These already crystal clear waters get muddied further when you add in “dial-a-yield” weapons, which can yield anywhere from <1kt to ~100kt. On the low end, they’re definitely tactical. But at the high end,...
Jan 27, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
All the nukes in the world are useless unless you have a way to get them to their targets. Aside from outlandish and potentially suicidal methods like suitcase nukes or nuclear artillery, there are three main ways of doing this: bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs).
The only nuclear weapons ever used in anger were delivered by B-29 bombers, the Enola Gay and the Bockscar. Because the Allies had attained near total air-superiority over Japan at the time of the bombings, it was possible for these bombers to go in without any real escort. They were accompanied only by weather reconnaissance and observation planes.
In a modern nuclear exchange, total air superiority would probably be required for a country to be able to openly deliver a bomb. If a nuclear bombing is attempted with anything less than total superiority, the attacker can...
Jan 27, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
To understand the effects of nuclear weapons, you first need to understand how those effects scale with weapon yield.
Modern bombs are much smaller than the Tsar Bomba. The standard US nuclear warhead, the W88, is a “mere” 475kt, a yield that is 100x less than that of the Tsar Bomba. On the other hand, the W88 weighs in at 360kg, 75x lighter.
This may seem like a poor trade, but it’s actually a very good one, due to the fundamental properties of explosive scaling. Scaling factors are very important to weapons. They determine the stable equilibriums that designs fall into. For example: we have tanks instead of mechs because strength scaling and mass scaling together make tall vehicles very vulnerable to weapons.
Scaling factors for all nuclear weapon effects (the fireball, the shock wave, and electromagnetic radiation) are different, but we can use the scaling factor...
Jan 26, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
The last section required that you take it on faith that nuclear weapons are hard to design. Now it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty details of weapon design and understand why that is.
Nuclear explosions require a critical mass of the right unstable isotope. But there’s no safe way to store an assembled critical mass. As soon as you get to the critical mass, the chain reaction starts and an explosion will occur without drastic countermeasures.
All nuclear weapon design ultimately starts with this problem of assembling a critical mass in situ (and only ever in situ).
The first atomic bombs used one of two methods: gun assembly or implosion. These methods are still used to this day in fission weapons or in the fission first stage of multiple stage weapons.
Jan 25, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
There are currently nine countries with acknowledged or suspected nuclear arsenals. Five of them are signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the main international treaty aimed at minimizing the number of nuclear armed states. Ideally, no country or group would have nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world; the NPT is maybe the next best thing.
The NPT acknowledges the right of the permeant UN Security Council members (UK, USA, France, China, and Russia) to possess nuclear weapons even as it bans anyone else from getting (or trying to get) them. The remainder of the nuclear armed states (Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea) haven’t signed on to NPT or signed and later withdrew from it. South Sudan also isn’t a signatory of the NPT – I think they just haven’t gotten around to it – but no one is particularly worried about that (for reasons that...
Jan 24, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
For this to all make sense, we should start with a brief review of atomic theory.
All matter is made up of atoms. Atoms have an outer shell of negatively charged electrons (more accurate descriptions exist, but I’m not going to delve into them; throughout this section I’m going to use simplified models wherever they’ll do the topic justice) and an inner core containing uncharged neutrons and positively charged protons.
The number of protons in an atom determines which element the atom is. All atoms with two protons are helium, all atoms with six protons are carbon, and so on. Much of the time, elements will have the same number of electrons as they have protons, so that the charges cancel each other out. Forms of elements with differing numbers of electrons are called ions. Ionization is a very common phenomenon. You observe it whenever you see lightning or dissolve...
Jan 23, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics, Science
With President Trump in possession of the nuclear launch codes, I have a feeling that many people who’ve neglected nuclear weapons as an important cause area may begin to sit up and take notice. This is a good thing. There currently exist basically no checks and balances on a US President’s ability to go to nuclear war. Harold Hering was cashiered from the Air Force in 1973 after asking (on the subject of nuclear weapons launch) “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?”. Nothing has changed since then.
This post series is meant as a non-exhaustive primer on the (declassified) physical and strategic realities of nuclear weapons. It’s supposed to get you up to the point where you can begin asking the right questions in a relatively short time period. If you want more information, I’ve included relevant...
Jan 21, 2017 in Politics
Note: A previous version of this post referred to Kellie Leitch as “Ms. Leitch” instead of “Dr. Leitch”. I don’t know how I forgot she was a doctor, but I’m deeply sorry that I did.
Nick Kouvalis (campaign manager for Canada’s cheap knock off demagogue, Kellie Leitch) bragged in Macleans1 about how he’s deliberately spreading “fake news” on Twitter to help him identify liberals who are joining the Conservative party to vote against Kellie Leitch.
“We call it Operation Flytrap,” Kouvalis says. “We did it knowing that people who aren’t real Conservatives can’t help themselves, so they post something negative about me, or Kellie. Some of them use real names. We find out who they are, and check them against the membership list. I’m going to challenge as many as I can.”
But there are further layers of dishonesty going on here....
Jan 21, 2017 in Politics, Quick Fix
Jan 8, 2017 in Ethics, Philosophy, Politics
Remember Horseshoe Theory? It’s the observation that in many ways, the extremist wings of political movements resemble each other more than centrists or their more moderate brethren. We see this in anti-Semitism, for example. In any given week this year, you’re about as likely to see anti-Semitism come from Stormfront… or the British Labour Party.
I’ve been thinking about horseshoe theory in light of another issue: the police. Let me explain.
Like most denizens of the internet, I’ve been exposed to libertarians of various persuasions. One common complaint I’ve seen among these libertarians is a belief that the state has an illegitimate monopoly on violence. This is most frequently bundled with calls to abolish the police in specific and government in general. Now I see calls to abolish the police coming from the left.
I disagree strongly with calls to abolish the police. It’s not that...
Jan 1, 2017 in Falsifiable, Politics
In the vein of Slate Star Codex, I’d like to publicly post my predictions for 2017. I’ve tried to tie these predictions to empirically verifiable outcomes as much as possible, so that there’s no room for interpretation or wiggling. I’ve also included my confidence in my predictions (all predictions are formulated so confidence is at least 50%) so that I can check my calibration as well as my accuracy. If you can think of a better formulation of any of these that maintains the meaning, please let me know before January 7th. I will not edit this post at all after then, even to correct typos.
Dec 8, 2016 in Politics
This is the final post in my public safety green paper consultation project. This time around, I’ll be focusing on just the questions dealing with secret and classified evidence.
This section is a mixed bag. I think lawyers with security clearances are a great idea (although I have nagging worries about access to them; for all its potential for abuse, at least the special advocate program is free), but I’m deeply creeped out by the concept of classified evidence. It feels fundamentally at odds with a free and democratic society.
I recognize that I’m coming from a place of feeling safe. Terrorism doesn’t feel like much of a threat to me. I care far more about democratic values than the small chance of dying a really horrible death. I even care more about democratic values than the small chance of my loved ones dying horrible deaths. But I understand that other people make that...
Dec 6, 2016 in Politics
This is a special edition of my public safety green paper consultation project. This time around, I’ll be focusing on just the questions dealing with digital investigations, encryption, etc. It’s all one section on the consultation website.
In contrast to many of the other sections, where I felt that the questions were leading in a positive direction, I’m deeply worried with where the government wants to go with digital investigative powers. I feel like there’s a fundamental disconnect between how the government thinks online security and encryption works and how they actually works. I hope that others who understand the value of encryption can join with me in voicing our fears to the government.
Dec 6, 2016 in Politics
The Canadian government is currently reviewing the national security framework and is soliciting public comment. I’ve decided to post my comments publicly, in the hopes of spurring discussion and providing model comments for others to riff off of.
If you care about limiting government spy powers and government accountability, I urge you to read the Green Papers and comment yourself.
In Part 3, I cover Procedures for Listing Terrorist Entities and Terrorist Financing.
I noticed that the listing process doesn’t officially include an arms embargo, which seems to be required under UNSC Resolution 2253. I assume that the legislation listed as stemming from UNSC Resolution 2253 included an arms embargo, but it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to automatically forbid Canadian companies and citizens from selling any arms or military equipment to any entity listed through the...
Dec 4, 2016 in Politics
The Canadian government is currently reviewing the national security framework and is soliciting public comment. I’ve decided to post my comments publicly, in the hopes of spurring discussion and providing model comments for others to riff off of.
If you care about limiting government spy powers and government accountability, I urge you to read the Green Papers and comment yourself.
In Part 2, I cover Information Sharing, The Passenger Protect Program, and Criminal Code Terrorism Measures.
One person’s lawful protest is another person’s riot. Whether protestors are given sympathetic treatment or labelled as an unruly mob often depends on...
Dec 4, 2016 in Politics
The Canadian government is currently reviewing the national security framework and is soliciting public comment. I’ve decided to post my comments publicly, in the hopes of spurring discussion and providing model comments for others to riff off of.
If you care about limiting government spy powers and government accountability, I urge you to read the Green Papers and comment yourself.
In Part 1, I cover Accountability, Prevention, and Threat Reduction.
Yes. The recent revelations about metadata collection show that oversight bodies need to be strengthened. In addition, it may be very useful for review bodies to be allowed (and required) to do some amount of independent investigation, without having to wait for a complaint to be made. Preventative audits of our national security services would help increase Canadian’s faith...
Nov 23, 2016 in Advice, Ethics, Politics
A couple months ago, I wrote of Kellie Leitch:
I remain genuinely unsure what Kellie Leitch’s goal is. I went into this blog convinced she was another hypocrite who was only using queer Canadians when it suited her racists agenda. And yet, she voted yea to Bill 279 (to treat gender identity as a protected class) despite almost every single one of her cabinet colleagues opposing it. She does appear to have a principled and reasonably long standing support for queer rights. She voted the party line on whipped bills (as does basically every MP in Canada), but when she’s allowed to vote her conscience, we see that it is rather different than many of the other Conservatives. She may be a political opportunist who can sense which way the wind blows. Or she may be trying to change the conservatives from within.
I spent weeks wondering: is Dr. Leitch just a political opportunist, or is she driven by real (albeit misguided) principles?
Sep 3, 2016 in Falsifiable, Politics
Note: A previous version of this post referred to Kellie Leitch as “Ms. Leitch” instead of “Dr. Leitch”. I don’t know how I forgot she was a doctor, but I’m deeply sorry that I did.
Kellie Leitch recently put out a survey that asked potential Conservative voters “should the Canadian Government screen potential immigrants for anti-Canadian values as part of its normal screening process for refugees and landed immigrants.” This has proved controversial, to say the least. It’s been described as a dog-whistle and has prompted other candidates to ask her to leave the race.
Dr. Leitch later clarified that she meant immigrants should be screened for: “intolerance towards other religions, cultures and sexual orientations, violent and/or misogynist behaviour and/or a lack of acceptance of our Canadian tradition of personal and economic freedoms”.
I have a lot of conflicted feelings about this. First, I’ve heard Canadian progressives wish...
Aug 16, 2016 in Falsifiable, Politics
This post is a response to a recent Slate article.
A quick summary: the coup attempt in Turkey, terrorist attacks in France, Brexit in the UK, and rise of Trump in the US are all connected and can be viewed as the four horsemen of the end of liberal democracy. As the last defenders of liberal democracy struggle with the spectre of illiberal democracy (the will of the people unadulterated by any pesky rights for minorities) they throw up roadblocks in the form of undemocratic liberalism (rights for minorities without any of that pesky voting). Defenders of liberalism need to restore the core promise of democracy – that it will lead to ever increasing wealth if we’re to keep the “fact” that no wealthy, consolidated democracy has ever fallen true.
I didn’t buy the theory. I think some of this came from me having factual disagreements with it – Chile...
