johnfabian
4mo ago
Happy tariffs eve, to those who celebrate.
With by all accounts the tariffs against Mexico and Canada going into action tomorrow, actually for real maybe probably this time, let's have a slice of cake and blow some party horns. This is quite a significant change of political fortunes - symbolically at least, and one would presume economically too, depending on how quickly the reshufflings happen or if this actually goes through at all. Since the 1880s, and more definitely since the 1980s, the world and its various regional economic blocs have moved towards the free trade of goods and services between nations. It has not been uniform or without reverses, but the trend has been unmistakable.
Often I like to wonder how a given event might be thought of 100 or 1000 years from now - will some future textbook see this as the high water mark of globalism, some point in the line of history that is forever after viewed with special significance? As much as people have claimed Donald Trump has been hindered by the Deep State, they seem to be slow to react to him ripping up one of the signature features of American hegemony (something he himself has contributed to, given that it's his free trade deal that is essentially being dissolved).
At the very least this is all going to be fascinating - one of the ironclad, universally agreed-upon tenets of a social science being put to the test. Markets have not reacted well so far, but that's as much a feature of groupthink as it is reflective of material reality. It's a good time to be a prospective PhD in Economics. You're about to have more than you could have ever hoped to work with.
So, have a Happy New Era. If this is actually happening, which I'm sure a lot of people are still unsure about (certainly I am). See you on the other side.
A brief primer on the forthcoming Canadian federal election
I say brief in an attempt by myself to keep this short. The newly sworn-in Mark Carney has asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and call an election for April 28. This was as an anticipated reaction to the recent swings in polling so it's not exactly a surprise, but it's still short notice and parties are rushing to fill out their candidates and get their campaign in action.
The big story in all of this is the massive collapse in Conservative polling support, which is what prompted the election call as the Liberals hope to capitalize. The Liberals have been in power for ten years now, and were up until Justin Trudeau's resignation in December seemingly cooked. The Conservatives were on the verge of outright majority support in the polls, Liberal support was in the high teens, almost every ironclad safe Liberal seat was up for grabs, and it seemed possible - if not necessarily probable - that the Liberals might be reduced to a mere handful of seats nationwide. Now, as the election kicks off, polls suggest something between a comfortable Liberal minority to a majority government. What happened?
For general context: Canada has four major political parties, three national (progressive NDP, centrist Liberals, centre-right Conservatives) and one regional (Bloc Québecois). There are also two minor parties, the environmental Greens and libertarian/populist People's Party. Canadians are in general not partisan: it's very natural for support to shift between parties, and your average Canadian will have voted for 3 different federal parties by the time they hit middle age. What's unprecedented is the degree of the swing in support towards the Liberals, not that it never happens; in 2015 Justin Trudeau entered the 5 week election campaign thoroughly in third place but ended up winning a majority.
I think there's three major factors, and they are all individuals rather than larger undercurrents. The first is obviously Donald Trump. Never has one man done more for Canadian pride and unity. Canada of course is heavily intertwined economically and culturally with the United States, and the actions of the Man Down South has put everything in a bit of a frenzy. For once we are actually seeing meaningful progress towards dismantling inter-Canadian trade barriers, to building new nationwide infrastructure, and indulging in a bit of national pride which has been treated as rather disdainful the past decade. It also goes without saying that Trump's antics are repulsive to most Canadians, and you could not do worse as an advertisement for conservatism to Canadians. It does not help that there's a very fringe and annoying portion of MAGA Canadians, or that the federal Conservatives have done an agonizingly slow job of voicing meaningful denunciations to Trump's tariffs and annexation threats. (By comparison: Doug Ford whipped about quick and used the bully pulpit very effectively, and won his Progressive Conservatives another majority in Ontario).
Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, is the second factor. To put it simply: he is not an inspiring candidate to most Canadians. He has spent the past two decades in Parliament (he has never worked outside of politics; he became an MP more or less immediately after graduating university) as the attack dog, and he has kept up that spirit as party leader. He has incessantly and somewhat annoyingly been fixated on Justin Trudeau and the carbon tax for the past few years, ever eager to get in a dig. The problem: Justin Trudeau is gone, and so is the consumer carbon tax (Carney axed it on his first day as PM). Poilievre was never a popular individual, but up against an even less popular leader in Trudeau and his generally maleffective ministry Canadians would have grumblingly voted for him. Now suddenly he is very much the dog who caught the car. The things he has been harping about for years are gone, and he has not shifted his message an iota since the start of Trump's upheavals. The old tricks are simply not working anymore. I think if the previous Conservative leader Erin O'Toole were still leading things they would still have a comfortable lead. He was much more palatable to the average Canadian and far less vulnerable to the changing of the winds. Poilievre's combative nature has put them in a real bind because even if they win the most seats it's hard to imagine them forming government: the things I hear from insiders suggest people just hate working with him, and he's done his best to piss off all the other parties.
And that is particularly damaging because of the third factor, Mark Carney. He might be the most qualified individual to have ever become Canadian Prime Minister; he was appointed to lead the Bank of Canada during the Great Recession under the previous Conservative government, and was subsequently the first non-Briton to head the Bank of England. In a time where there are suddenly great questions about the economic future of the country, he is exactly the type of person voters look to. (Whether he will lead the country effectively remains to be seen.) I've often said that in times of turmoil even the most dysfunctional of democracies will pick boring bankers as leaders, but I was imagining this to be the case in 2029: I really did not see this polling turnaround coming. I think everyone misjudged Trump's capacity for havoc. Poilievre's partisan nature and lack of experience are very stark in comparison to Carney who at least so far is setting a more centrist sort of tone in his messaging and is soliciting notable from both the Conservatives and NDP to run for the Liberals in this election.
The only other thing to add is the real loser in all this might be the NDP. They had helped prop up the Liberals for the past few years and for the last two were generally polling ahead of them. But now the tent is collapsing and all their support is shifting to the Liberals instead. I very much dislike their leader Jagmeet Singh and will not be sad to see him go, but it looks likely that the NDP will lose official party status. It's a long long fall from where they were ten years ago, when they entered the 2015 campaign looking likely to form their first government.
My personal opinions are as follows: part of me wants to see the Liberals win a majority because it would be very funny, and I quite strongly dislike Poilievre and would find it simply embarrassing if a man like that were the leader of my country. We've been through ten years of Trudeau making a mockery of us and do not need any more nonsense. The other half of me finds it a bit galling that the Liberals might escape ten years of misrule and divisive politics without punishment. They are for better or for worse the natural ruling party of Canada (and the one I am most closely aligned with, ideologically) and that means they are the experts at shifting with the public, but it means they also can get arrogant and complacent and that begets all kinds of nonsense and corruption. So I guess I'm hoping for a small Liberal minority that chides the Liberals and forces them to do a better job.
johnfabian
5mo ago
From time to time I'm reminded of this quote from Orwell's essay "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and English Genius":
What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism, that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—does not work. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best. Hitler's conquest of Europe, however, was a physical debunking of capitalism. War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.
When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments. Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddle steamer of equal horse-power stern to stern and set their engines running. That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a planless one.
He wrote this in July 1940, in the midst of the Blitz. With the stunning battlefield defeats of the Allies in the west, and the division of the east between the Soviets and Germans, it certainly seemed that liberalism (and capitalism along with it) was Done For. One can not exactly blame Orwell for this sentiment, given that he was enduring bombing raids while writing it; it would seem rather axiomatic. Of course the next five years showed that liberal, capitalist countries were far superior at fighting total wars than their autocratic contemporaries, and when pushed to the brink were endlessly more evolutionarily fit.
I'm a liberal. I am unashamedly so, even if I am certainly ashamed of how liberal democracies have conducted themselves by and large these past few decades (post-1991, to put a point on it). I would not count liberalism out yet. It has survived through far worse periods. It managed after Carlsbad, after the failures of 1848, the nadir of World War II, the spread of communism during the Cold War. Each time it has eventually triumphed as the dominant political ideology. This isn't to say that it won't collapse on itself eventually, or that it has been found decidedly wanting in recent crises, but I think it is far too soon to count it out yet.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Certainly there were lots of people who at the time of the Holocaust saw it as a uniquely terrible crime, even as it was ongoing. For example in July 1944, Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden (concerning the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):
There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners’ camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.
johnfabian
3mo ago
There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not. The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.
I think the equivalent trend for Republicans is something like racism. Most Republican politicians are not racist, certainly not in the good ol' boy kind of way. But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Time for another tv recommendation: Severance. In my opinion it's the first show in a while that quality-wise stands among the other greats of the "golden age of television"; or at least it has done so far. It has an interesting combination of dark comedy, satire, character work, and philosophical introspection with a heaping dose of mystery. If you're unaware what the show is about or have heard nothing about it, here's a teaser; I wouldn't seek out more for fear of spoilers.
It was a long, long gap between seasons 1 and 2 (the former aired near the end of 2022, the latter is airing now). But it's the first sort of "appointment viewing" for me and my friends in a while, and we've decided to get together as a group every other week or so and watch the new episodes. It's nice to experience these things with other people and it's the kind of show that very much benefits from group discussion/reflection.
There are people who still desperately cling onto the notion that crime is directly a result of poverty. It is very hard for them to explain how Baltimore (GDP per capita of ~$60k USD) has more murders annually than Italy ($35k).
Oh, Italy also has roughly a 100x larger population (60 million vs 600 thousand). But of course they are famously free of organized crime.
Maybe the real underlying cause is that murder rate is inversely proportional to pizza quality?
johnfabian
4mo ago
Germany's war on Poland provides no justification for England and France to ally with the Soviet Union in a catastrophic war aim of unconditional surrender on Germany.
This is the second time you've made this comment. I know you're not a complete fucking mongoloid, but obviously you think the rest of us are. So tell me again: how did the Soviet Union end up allying with the UK? Did Germany, say, do anything to the USSR that made them break their alliance?
johnfabian
10mo ago
It's good to be in London circa 1900 if you are wealthy. If you are poor you have to deal with all the effluent of all that progress. Terrible air quality, tenuous access to clean water, cramped, unsanitary living conditions, brutal work, endemic malnutrition. Persistent assaults on every facet of your health is your lot in life as an urban prole at the turn of the 20th century. (Though even 1900 is substantially better in these respects than say, 1860; or at least for London it is).
johnfabian
4mo ago
Sweden and Finland can call on ~14 battlefield-capable brigades between them. Poland has a few combat-ready divisions. Germany could probably scrape together a single active division, France the same.
Really only the former three would actually be able to put troops in the line next week. They are the ones who, bordering Russia, have been feeling the heat the longest and have actually done the work of preparing.
johnfabian
5mo ago
The thing that's really cool about being a radical wishing for a revolution, is that you don't know whether it's going to be your team or the other one that dumps you in a shallow grave.
johnfabian
3mo ago
It's a pretty big gamble to think you can get all of them when even one can kill 50+ million Americans.
johnfabian
9mo ago
I don't think the PLA Navy is ready yet. I don't think they'll be ready for a few years. But with the ongoing rearmament of Japan and Australia as well as a growing awareness in Taiwan and the USA, there may be a threshold where China decides that future gains in readiness are not worth waiting for given the potential of increased western capabilities to resist.
But in any case I highly doubt that this war would ever go nuclear. China simply does not have the nuclear stockpile to destroy the US; we're not in a MAD situation here so neither side has the incentive to strike first, or strike at all.
johnfabian
5mo ago
The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved under Mao was probably greater than the total number of deaths in World War II and the Holocaust from all causes, on all sides, civilian and military combined [source].
I would note that this is both a very high number (almost certainly an overestimate) for Mao's body count and similarly a rather large undercount of WWII's, which is pretty conventionally estimated at ~70-75 million.
I think it would be worth softening the language here.
johnfabian
6mo ago
Someone like MLK would fit much better as a Civ leader - he's much more obviously a political leader, and he fits a similar tradition in Civ games of giving prominent leaders of social movements a spot as Civ leaders (most notably Gandhi).
johnfabian
8mo ago
There were a spate of these kind of terror attacks in Europe in the mid-2010s. ISIS-inspired, invariably; some 2nd generation disaffected Arab rents a U-Haul and drives it into a crowd on some holiday. The first one was the Nice truck attack in 2016; there were a bunch of copycats and as a result pretty much every major public square in Europe now has bollards to prevent people from getting vehicles into them during busy times.
There are a couple of other similar cases elsewhere; here in Toronto in 2018 an incel hired a van and killed a bunch of people with it.
Terror attacks very much seem to follow specific trends, and it seems to take certain people to think of novel ways to go about it. No one thought of using airliners as weapons until Al-Qaeda did it. Using a truck rental as a weapon wasn't a thing until that Nice attack. I'm not sure why this is, but it certainly seems like people who commit terrorist attacks want it to be recognizeable as such; or alternatively are just generally uncreative.
johnfabian
11mo ago
I previously sang the praises of Only Connect, my favourite game show. It is now back for series 20, with a brave youtube user evading the BBC censors for us. The first episodes of each new series are generally easier with it ramping up in difficulty towards the end.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Would Hezbollah have any moral concerns about killing Druze? Are they not viewed somewhat as Muslim apostates?
johnfabian
11mo ago
I think this is overstated. DeChambeau isn't really hated, his detractors think he's just more of an annoying kinda weird dude. Mickelson gets more ire, as do the LIV golfers who have generally failed to impress since the move. And of course your wording absolves Patrick Reed from consideration.
Also winning another major does big things for you. Both Koepka and DeChambeau seem fairly well-esteemed to me at the moment, just from idly browsing /r/golf.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Personally I mentally separate the West and BC. When people talk about "the West" they are not talking about Coquitlam.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I was talking to a friend yesterday about a book I had just read, How the Railways Will Fix the Future. She had recommended it to me because she knew I was a transit advocate, and besides that very much still my 5 year-old self with respect to thinking how cool trains are. It was a fairly quick read; the author (a former? railway engineer) does a good job of breaking down the technical aspects into easy to understand language, and the his engineering background allows him to make some interesting insights into transit that you don't get from your typical urbanism enthusiast.
Where the book utterly failed was in its persuasion. The author is so utterly trapped in his ideological bubble that he is either expecting no one who doesn't already agree with him to read it, or that no one actually disagrees with him (or if they do, are merely pretending to). Here's a tip for all you prospective authors: if you are trying to advocate for something, don't start by furiously denouncing the origins and history of what you want to advocate for. Spending the first 20 pages going over the problematic beginnings of railways as a tool of capitalism and facilitator of imperial conquest and colonization of indigenous peoples, funded by the capital created by the transatlantic slave trade, only to tepidly conclude that despite this legacy the idea can be rescued to create a more equitable future... what? Imagine going about your life like this. Is this man capable of saying he enjoys a good sandwich without first clarifying that he unambiguously denounces the legacy of bread as a staple ration for armies of conquest?
There were various other weak elements; it should go without saying around here that claiming the US needs to build more transit to help LGBTQ+ people of low incomes move states is an argument worthy of only a wanking motion, but beyond that shackling your arguments to such narrow slivers of the population when you're arguing for a universal good is just moronic. And he does the classic leftist tactic of insisting upon "democratizing" progresses by increasing public involvement and decentralizing decision-making, assuming of course that everyone shares his incredible niche politics. (The kicker is he had spent a good chunk of the previous segment going into the exploding costs of High Speed 2, maybe one of the better arguments ever against these notions) Just again and again the arguments came off as so staggeringly lacking self-awareness. But then again I looked up a few reviews for it and those were generally positive; essentially all coming from other left-leaning urbanist progressives who share very similar politics.
But it frustrates me endlessly as someone who actually wants to get these projects built is that ostensibly their biggest supporters are just so fucking bad at making the case for them. So somehow it ends up (at least in Ontario where I live) that it's only the conservatives who end up getting new infrastructure projects done.
johnfabian
8mo ago
I think it kind of smacks of desperation to take a politician changing her twitter profile as some kind of great paradigm shift. This reaction alone makes me think we have not yet reached "peak woke."
Aren't lots of high-profile people leaving twitter anyways? It might be more of a prelude to her jumping ship off the platform than anything else.
johnfabian
8mo ago
It’s hard not to view this as just the latest in a long string of people lighting their credibility on fire for a tiny chance of stopping bad orange man. It seems to run contrary to every other piece of evidence: polls, registration, early voting, “vibes.”
A Trump blowout still seems like the most likely scenario to me. There is just too much going in Trump’s favor relative to the very close 2020 election.
We've only got a few days to wait so we'll see. But how willing are you to consider that rather than your ideological opponents willfully blinding themselves, it is perhaps you?
I've got no horse in this race; I suppose I would prefer Harris wins but it would certainly be funnier if Trump does. Seems like this pollster has a sterling track record. I'm not sure why your initial response would be blanket denial.
johnfabian
8mo ago
I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo and enjoying it a lot. It feels very much like a sort of shlocky Hollywood action movie dressed up as literature, but like in a good way. A man is wronged by his friends, imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit, escapes, becomes rich and plots his elaborate revenge on his enemies? I can just imagine Dumas whispering "hell yeah" to himself constantly while writing this.
Cyclist culture wars: reporting from the front lines
It's been a bad year for cyclists in Toronto. Five people have died so far this year, and a few dozen injured. Vibes in general are bad. There is a general feeling that drivers are getting more aggressive - construction has been very bad this summer and congestion is worse than ever. To add to that spaces meant for cyclists are now increasingly taken up by international students doing food deliver on e-bikes with very limited fidelity to traffic rules; very frequent to see e-bikes ridden on sidewalks or the wrong way down cycle lanes. Our new progressive mayor has been significantly less active on the cycling front then people had hoped - there was actually great progress made during the previous conservative mayor John Tory, especially during COVID - but only 100 km of new lanes are being added by 2027. And these are generally not the kind of physically-separated infrastructure cyclists prefer, but "painted" lanes that can still be quite dangerous.
Last month a woman was killed while cycling in one of these lanes when she was forced to merge out of it because a construction company had illegally put a dumpster in the middle of it; this sparked a widespread fury among Toronto cyclists. I remember the day after the accident biking to a friend's party and during the 20 minute ride overhearing three different groups of cyclists talking about it. It also launched a kind of guerrilla campaign reporting illegal blockages of bike lanes (example here). There is a sense of frustration that we are putting our lives at risk every time we go out. Personally I have become much more cautious and will take more time in order to keep to routes with better infrastructure. As the late Rob Ford said we are "swimming with the sharks" when we're out there and there is very low trust in the capabilities of drivers.
I'm writing this post now because last night NHL star Johnny Gaudreau and his brother were killed by a drunk driver while cycling in New Jersey. They were supposed to be groomsmen in their sister's wedding today. Johnny left behind two babies and a widowed wife. There's a lot of shock and anger in response, and frustration that many news agencies have characterized this as a "biking accident"; it appears the drunk driver attempted to pass them on the shoulder and instead rear-ended them, killing both instantly.
Bicycle lanes are the lowest of the low hanging fruit for many cities. They are cheap, simple, ways to reduce traffic congestion, promote healthy and active living, and protect the lives of cyclists. It is so incredibly frustrating how much of an uphill battle it is to get them built. I think there's this enduring perception from people who exclusively drive that bike lanes are something for hobbyists rather than a way for people to get where they need to go. Every attempt to get new lanes built is met with a torrent of backlash. I try to do my part by showing up in support at community meetings and the level of vitriol always astonishes me. Yes there are bad cyclists, it cannot be denied. But they are not in charge of two-ton death machines. Bad drivers never are perceived as a systemic issue. Recently a pregnant mother with two young kids was killed by a driver near me; no one gave thought to redesigning the road, or restricting licenses for the elderly, or treating it as anything other than an unavoidable tragedy.
I tell my friends that the first priority as a cyclist is to survive. Every now and then you get people who yell at you for no reason, or throw bottles at you, or almost turn into you, or door you, or whatever. Don't engage because it's not worth it. It's like bringing a butter knife to a gun fight. You have to make your efforts at the political level.
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