Tag Archives: politics

How gullible are we?

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“… it is entirely possible that future generations will look back, from the vantage point of a more sophisticated theory, and wonder how we could have been so gullible.”

— Closing sentence of Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David J. Griffiths.

I came across this quote today and it made me wonder just how gullible we are as a species? Not just because we don’t understand quantum mechanics, not just because we don’t understand the gap between Newtonian Physics and Special Relativity, but for so many more simple and less profound reasons.

We fight over imaginary lines we call borders. We spend a considerable amount of our existence working for money… pieces of paper that only have value because we believe it has value, while our governments (we also make up silly rules for) print that money in mass volumes to keep our economies afloat.

We break into tribes based on heritage, relative strength, socioeconomics, and even skin colour. And we spend a tremendous amount of the global economy to create weapons to protect ourselves and also threaten ‘those who are not like us’.

We fight over false Gods. Why do I say false Gods? Because there are literally thousands of them, and even the largest, Christianity, doesn’t agree with who gets into heaven. So the vast majority of believers are believers in the wrong religion or wrong sect. Yet hate, discrimination, and wars are all byproducts of people of faith fighting people of different faiths, very often ‘in the name of their God’.

Human beings are playing the game of life with imaginary boundaries, imaginary political structures, imaginary currencies, and imaginary Gods. We are gullible. We are blinded by unimportant things, and in 100 years humankind will look upon us like we were as backwards as we perceive cultures and societies that did barbaric and stupid things 100’s of years ago.

Smart Voting

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For most of my adult life I have been someone who has pushed the idea that it is our civic duty to vote and have tried to stay non-partisan in that messaging. I’ve voted for three different parties in elections in the last 20 years and so I am not a cardholding member of any party, and can be influenced by policies and principles, be those the principles of the party or the candidate.

The reality that we are in right now in Canada has me choosing to vote ABC, ‘Anyone But Conservative’. But the key here is that I’m choosing the party in my riding that is most likely to beat the Conservatives.

My reasoning for this Smart Voting strategy is simple, the Conservative patry sits on one side of the political spectrum and the other two (or three if you count Green) parties all sit on the other side of the spectrum… competing for the non-conservative vote. The reality is that in the past this split has allowed the Conservatives to get into power.

With the turmoil and instability of US politics, and the wave of conservatism globally, I don’t see a Canadian conservative government under its leader as remotely good in any way for Canada. Polling suggests a Liberal win this year, which under the current leader, Carney, would be great…. As long as it is a majority government that can actually get things done. So this year I would want to vote Liberal (something I haven’t done in a while).

However, I’m going see where the polling is in my riding and vote ABC, because as important as a majority government may be at this time, preventing a Conservative government is more important to me.

It feels weird to be so open about my politics. I truly prefer to be a proponent of civic duty, encouraging people to take advantage of living within a free and open democracy, in a non-partisan way. However, I can’t stay silent when I think that one of our political parties will take us down a path that is undermining the very democratic freedoms and rights I believe in.

So it’s Smart Voting for me. I’ll vote to make sure that the Conservatives don’t get in.

As a side note, I’ve had some interesting conversations with a conservative voter. I don’t believe anything I’ve shared with him is going to change his mind. I’m disappointed, but also respectful of his opinion. Our conversations are civil and respectful, though a little animated. I wish more public political conversations could happen like this. Discourse is healthy, and necessary for a democracy to not just survive, but thrive.

What it means to be literate?

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Can you read? Can you do basic math? Is that enough?

The critical thinking required to make sense of the world today is ever increasing. We have a world leader using magical math to make a trade deficit calculation into a reciprocal tariff calculation, and claiming that this is, “Kind reciprocal, not full reciprocal.”

What? Help me make it make sense?

Meanwhile, I saw a video that someone created using AI. He uploaded a pdf article for two AI‘s to discuss, one of the AI’s was a version of himself, with his voice, and the other was a female at a desk. The only thing that suggested to me that the conversation was between two AI’s was some awkward hand gestures. Take those movements away, or make them a bit more natural/realistic and I would have no idea that I was watching an AI conversation.

Meanwhile, in Egypt, there are some wild claims about structures under the great pyramids, and while the evidence is unclear, I’ve seen many videos explaining these not-yet-proven structures. These claims include that they are a network of power sources connected to other structures around the world, and another theory claiming that aliens created them.

And speaking of aliens, wasn’t it just a few short months ago that we ‘discovered’ aliens living in our oceans? What ever happened to that story?

It’s becoming almost impossible to be informationally literate today. By the time you have time to seriously fact check something the story is already old, and there are new crazy claims that require your skeptical attention. What’s the source of this information? Where did they get their data from? What’s the bias of the news source? How is this data being manipulated? Who paid for the study? Is this a real quote? Is this video real, or CGI, or AI?

Who is fact checking the fact checkers? Meanwhile, here in Canada, a fact checker hired by one of our news stations was let go because trolls that don’t like their favourite political party being fact checked brought so much negative attention to her that the news station let her go.

What? Help me make it make sense?

The reality is that reading and writing and doing basic math is not enough to be functionally and informationally literate today. The critical thinking required to simply consume the information being thrown at us is overly demanding. I think the way forward for the short term is to find trusted sources and rely on them… and yet that’s the very thing that has seemed to get us into trouble. How many people get their news from just one or two biased sources? I’m literally now suggesting to find an echo chamber to sit in… hopefully you can find one that echoes facts, common sense, and some semblance of the truth.

Dire consequences

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The inability to process the consequences of your thoughts, words and action is a good definition for stupidity. The thing about stupidity is that even intelligent people can perform acts of stupidity. But repeatedly doing stupid things suggests a lack of intelligence.

I watched a video yesterday of people doing stupid things and getting hurt. One example was a guy standing on someone’s shoulders on a diving board and trying to dive, but slipping while pushing off and landing face first on the diving board. I don’t know if alcohol was part of the decision making, and I don’t know how smart that person might be, but this is a good display of stupidity with dire consequences.

If I said that there’s currently a display of stupidity on a global scale by a political administration, you would automatically know exactly which administration I’m talking about. The difference between the stupidity of the guy on the diving board versus this administration I mention is the scope of the consequences. The diving board guy was the sole sufferer of his stupidity.

I honestly feel like when I am listening to the words and watching the actions of this administration, I am watching a blooper reel of accidents. I’m watching a repeated display of stupidity with dire consequences, and yet the bloopers keep coming: Insulting and even threatening allies, slashing support programs, dissolving institutions, and making economic blunders, all of which are alienating not only global friends, but dividing their nation, and harming their citizens.

This blooper reel isn’t going to be fixed with stitches on a forehead, needed because of an impact with a diving board. The suffering for this stupidity won’t be felt by a single person. This is going to hurt a lot of people, and it’s going to take a long time to recover. The question is, when will the stupidity stop?

I don’t think the guy on the diving board is going to try to repeat that stunt. The question is if he’ll do something equally stupid again… it’s the repeated behaviour that truly moves someone from making a stupid choice to actually just being stupid.

Propaganda hyperbole

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I remember visiting Dandong, China and going to a museum about the Korean war. Our tour guide translated the name of the museum for us: “The Museum to Commemorate the War Against American Aggression”. To the Chinese, the loss of that war meant the US having access to North Korea, dangerously close to Chinese land and major ports.

In broken English there were translated signs describing pictures of American prisoners of war holding up peace signs, with a description that even the Americans knew the war was wrong. This was an excellent display of blatant propaganda. But it also made me think about what I knew about that war, and I realized my view would have been filled with American propaganda.

Our perspectives truly vary depending on where we live, and the media and information we are privy to. With that, I have to say that the US propaganda machine is currently spewing hyperbole as if it should be taken seriously.

This is US Vice President JD Vance sharing the American Administration perspective on Greenland, “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.”

And here is a perspective from outside the US: On TikTok, or saved here.

I’ve been avoiding news more than consuming it recently, but I can predict what Fox News versus MSNBC would have said about JD Vance’s Greenland speech. I just wish both broadcasts would spend a bit less time on myopic hyperbole about how they see their political leadership, and maybe, just maybe share some perspectives from other parts of the world.

Our global economy does not benefit from the rest of the (free) world perceiving the US as weak, or threatening, or laughable. No one is buying the current messaging, no one is blindly accepting the propaganda, no country is going to be bullied into thinking the US should have sovereignty over them.

The US either has to drop the propagandized dogma, or align it with their allies. Their current messaging isn’t just off brand, and offensive, it’s laughably embarrassing.

Appropriate Protest

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I’ve written that we should have ‘Intolerance for bad faith actors’. And I’ve also written about ‘Free speech in a free society’. In both cases civil decisions are being made, so that we can live in a civil society.

It’s time to draw some pretty clear lines:

Creating a subversive anti-ad campaign against Tesla is an absolutely brilliant way to protest.

Vandalizing cars and dealerships is an embarrassment to the civil society we should be living in.

Holding a protest at a rally, and speaking out against someone you disagree with is the foundation of an open and free society. Shouting and throwing things at a speaker is immature and inappropriate behavior. Even if the person is spewing hate… in which case they should be dealt with legally, not with vigilante violence.

We need a society that allows disagreement. We need to be civil about how we protest. Because there is no civil society where violence and damaging property works one-way… only the way upset people think it should. Societies that tolerate inappropriate protest are inviting responses that are less and less civil. And nobody wins.

Morality police

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I have regularly created AI images to go with my blog posts since June, 2022. I try not to spend too much time creating them because I’d rather be writing blog posts than image prompts. But sometimes I try to create images and they just don’t convey what I want them to, or they come across as a bit too much in the uncanny valley, feeling unnatural. That happened with my post image 4 days ago, and I used the image anyway, because I was pressed for time.

(Look carefully at this image and you’ll see a lot wrong with it.)

I made 5 or 6 attempts to adjust my prompt, but still kept getting bad results, so I made do with the only one that resembled what I wanted.

And then for the past couple days I had a different challenge. I don’t know if it’s because of using the version of Bing’s Copilot that is associated with my school account, but my attempts to create images were blocked.

And:

However, Grok 3, a much less restricted AI, had no problem creating these images for me:

And:

I’m a little bothered by the idea that I am being limited by an AI in using these image prompts. The first one is social commentary, the second one, while a ‘hot topic’, certainly isn’t worthy of being restricted.

It begs the question, who are the morality police deciding what we can and cannot use AI to draw? the reality is that there are tools out there that have no filters and can create any image you want, no matter how tasteless or inappropriate they are, and I’m not sure that’s ideal… but neither is being prevented from making images like the ones I requested. What is it about these images requests that make them inappropriate?

I get that this is a small issue in comparison to what’s happening in the US right now. The morality police are in full force there with one group, the Christian far right, using the influence they have in the White House to impose their morality on others. This is a far greater concern than restrictions to image prompts in AI… but these are both concerns on the same continuum.

Who decides? Why do they get to decide? What are the justifications for their decisions?

It seems to me that the moral decisions being made recently have not been made by the right people asking the right questions… and it concerns me greatly that people are imposing their morals on others in ways that limit our choices and our freedoms.

Who gets to be the morality police? And why?

McBean and the Propaganda Machine

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I used to think that Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches was about discrimination. Either you have a star on your belly or you don’t… and the book was about learning a lesson that superficial traits really don’t matter.

I’ve come to realize that I was wrong.

The book is about being grifted. It’s not about the Sneetches, it’s about Sylvester McMonkey McBean putting Sneetches through a propaganda cycle, which in turn leads them through the machine, again and again and again until they are broke and disillusioned.

I also realize that we are all Sneetches right now.

I am a Canuck

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Identity

I am a Canadian, and yet I am an immigrant to this great nation. I grew up in a multicultural family, and moved to Canada, to Toronto, one of the most multicultural cities in the world. My first friends in Canada were Greek, our neighbours were Armenian, my friends in high school were a Scottish heritage Canadian, a German, a Jew with roots in India, a Shiite Muslim from Africa, and a Sunni Muslim born in Canada. If America is known as the melting pot, Canada is the stew.

Canadian pride is a pride in being able to celebrate your own and each other’s heritage. It is about being sorry for the things we got wrong in history, and actually thinking about and working on reconciliation.

Being Canadian means paying over 40% of my paycheque to taxes and benefits, complaining about it, while simultaneously wanting to see more taxes go to healthcare and education. It means we care about our neighbour’s wellbeing, and quite frankly care for our southern neighbor’s wellbeing too.

Our ‘Neighbors’ to the South

I learned the American anthem and the Canadian anthem at the same time, at hockey games.

I watched what the nation to our south watched on TV. As a result of watching American early morning cartoons, I learned from Schoolhouse Rock ‘How a Bill Becomes a Law’ in the US long before I knew anything about Canada’s legal system. I knew the rules to American football before I knew anything about the Canadian version. I was as likely to watch American news as Canadian news because the show I watched before the news was on an American channel.

I know so much more about the US than most Americans will ever knew about Canada. Not because of my interest but because of my exposure: American cartoons, sports, television, movies, and newscasts all told me about the great nation that took care of us and the entire free world.

Changing Tides

We didn’t always agree, but we have always been friends.

Today tariffs will be implemented by a misguided American leader who thinks national isolationist policies will work in a global economy. He will punish his citizens and ours as we retaliate appropriately as an independent nation. The burden of this economic fight will be a wave of high prices and lost jobs sweeping across both nations. People living on or near the poverty line will be drowning in debt. Small business will sink. We are in for some rough seas, and the consequential ripples will be felt for years to come.

A Proud Nation

Insults, like calling Canada the 51st state, do not hurt Canadians, they strengthen us. Bullying us with tariffs does not make us cower but stand up taller. Attacking us does not divide us but emboldens us. We don’t usually focus on nationalism because our identity is about celebrating our differences, but when attacked our resolve is unified. We will find other global neighbours who we will work with. We might not start a fight but we aren’t afraid to finish it.

We are proudly Canadian, we will fight, we will not yield. We will support each other, while simultaneously supporting others in need. And we will prevail, stronger than ever before.

In Rome’s Shadow

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I asked Grok3, an AI LLM, what the similarities are between the fall of Rome and what we are seeing happen in the US. This was the response:

Here are six bullet points that draw direct comparisons between the fall of the Roman Empire and the potential fall of the U.S.

1. Leadership Betrayal and Enemy Deals

  • Rome: A general shaking hands with eastern thugs (like Parthia or Scythians) betrayed allies for personal gain, weakening Rome’s unity and trust.
  • U.S.: Trump siding with Russia—berating Zelenskyy on February 28, 2025, and pushing for a peace deal—sells out Ukraine, a key ally, mirroring Rome’s disloyalty and boosting a rival power.

2. Allies Breaking Away

  • Rome: The west (like Gaul) broke free from Rome’s control, rejecting its rule as it weakened.
  • U.S.: The EU steps up to support Ukraine and isolate the U.S. politically and economically after Trump’s actions, acting like provinces ditching a faltering empire.

3. Economic Collapse from Trade Mistakes

  • Rome: Markets crashed and trade stopped as Rome’s taxes and neglect dried up its wealth, leaving farms barren.
  • U.S.: Trump’s tariffs choke trade—hurting markets and raising costs—mirroring Rome’s economic self-sabotage, pushing the U.S. toward isolation and decline.

4. Internal Division and Chaos

  • Rome: Leaders fought each other, splitting the city into thieves versus thieves, paralyzing Rome’s ability to act.
  • U.S.: Political infighting—Congress and Trump’s administration clashing over Russia, Ukraine, and tariffs—echoes Rome’s bickering, stalling any unified response to the crisis.

5. Rivals Gaining Ground

  • Rome: The east (Parthia) grinned as Rome faltered, ready to exploit its shrinking power and borders.
  • U.S.: Russia laughs at America’s diplomatic mess and weakened stance, gaining leverage as the U.S. loses global clout, just like Rome’s enemies circled its decay.

6. Loss of Belief and Influence

  • Rome: Temples rotted and people stopped believing in Rome’s greatness, letting its moral core crumble.
  • U.S.: America’s reputation tanks after the Zelenskyy fiasco, with allies doubting its leadership and soft power fading, akin to Rome’s lost glory.

___

I find the choice of words fascinating: (emphasis mine)

“mirroring Rome’s economic self-sabotage, pushing the U.S. toward isolation and decline”

“America’s reputation tanks after the Zelenskyy fiasco”

I know there are some things that are not comparable. I know that the US still holds economic, political, and military power that the Roman Empire probably lacked when it fell. And I actually want to see the US survive and even thrive, because I think that democracy and world peace are likely both casualties of a fallen US ‘empire’… But the US needs leadership that understands the geopolitical threats it is facing. And that is severely lacking right now.

When the President of the United States calls the Prime Minister of Canada a Governor of the 51st state; When he blames the victims of an invasion for the war they are in; When he literally shares a narcissistic video of a war torn region, renaming the area with his name, and says that the people of Palestine won’t mind being relocated… it doesn’t show diplomacy, it shows ignorance. It would be hyperbole if it wasn’t his own words and deeds.

But the biggest threat to the US lies within. With a growing number of people who are financially worse off than they were even a few months ago; the undermining of government positions that ensure the government runs smoothly; and the dismantling of healthcare and education… with cuts that will have lasting and costly implications… the potential for social unrest is alarming.

The protests will start. The unrest will be violent. The response will escalate the violence.

The worse part of this will be the lack of civility. Peaceful protest is part of democracy. Violent unrest and insurrection are weapons of tyranny. We aren’t going to see democracy and western principles prevail through force and violence. Instead we will just see a once vibrant nation that promised its people a dream and left it in the shadows of ruin.