Tag Archives: society

Freedom, censorship, and ignorance

This is an interesting time that we live in. I find myself in a position where I need to question my own values. I don’t do this lightly. I don’t pretend that my values have suddenly changed. It’s just that present circumstances put me at odds with my own beliefs around freedom of speech.

I am a strong believer in freedom of speech. I think that when a society sensors speech, they are on a dangerous path. I take this to an extreme. Except for slander, threats, and inciting violence, I think people have a right to say and believe what they want. I believe that taking away such freedom puts us on a perilous path where a select few get too much control, and can undermine our freedoms.

An example where I take this to the extreme would be agreeing with Noam Chomsky.

That has been my stance for a very long time. But the spread of misinformation on social media has me second guessing this. There is a fundamental difference between someone standing on a soap box in a town square, and a nut job with a massive audience spreading lies.

So now, even as an ardent defender of free speech, I find myself agreeing with YouTube’s decision to ban vaccine misinformation:

YouTube doesn’t allow content that poses a serious risk of egregious harm by spreading medical misinformation about currently administered vaccines that are approved and confirmed to be safe and effective by local health authorities and by the World Health Organization (WHO). This is limited to content that contradicts local health authorities’ or the WHO’s guidance on vaccine safety, efficacy, and ingredients.

Two, four, eight, or sixteen years ago when YouTube began, I would have screamed ‘Censorship!’ at the idea of a platform banning free speech. Even now it bothers me. But I think it is necessary. The first problem is that lies and misinformation are too easily shared, and spread too easily. The second problem is that the subject area is one where too many people do not have enough information to discern fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience. The third problem is that any authentic discussion about these topics is unevenly biased towards misinformation. This last point needs explanation.

If I wanted to argue with you that Zeus the Greek God produces lightning and thunder when he is angry, I think everyone today would say that I was stupid to think such a thing. However, if I was given an opportunity to debate a scientist on this in a public forum, what inadvertently happens is that my crazy idea now gets to have an equal amount of airtime with legitimate science. These two sides do not deserve equal airtime in a public, linkable, shareable format that appears to give my opinion an equal footing against scientific evidence.

Now when dealing with something as silly as believing in a thunder god is the topic, this isn’t a huge issue. But when it’s scientific sounding, persuading and fear mongering misinformation that can cause harm, that’s a totally different situation. When a single counter example, say for example a person having adverse effects from a vaccine, becomes a talking point, it’s hard to balance that in an argument with millions of people not having adverse effects and also drastically reducing their risk of a death the vaccine prevented. The one example, one data point, ends up being a scare tactic that works to convince some people hearing the argument that the millions of counter examples don’t matter. And when social media platforms feed similar, unbalanced but misleading information to people over and over again, and the social media algorithms share ‘similar’ next videos, or targeted misinformation, this actually gets dangerous. It threatens our ability to weigh fact from fiction, news from fake news, science from pseudoscience. It feeds and fosters ignorance.

I don’t know how else to fight this than to stop bad ideas from spreading by banning them?

This flies in the face of my beliefs about free speech, but I don’t know any alternative to prevent bad ideas from spreading faster than good ones. And so while I see censorship as inherently evil, it is a lesser evil to allowing ignorance to spread and go viral. And while it potentially opens a door to less freedom, and I have concerns about who makes the decision of what information should be banned, I’d rather see a ban like this attempted, than for us to continue to let really bad ideas spread.

I thought in this day and age common sense would prevail and there would be no need to censor most if not all free speech. However it seems that as a society, we just aren’t smart enough to discern truth from cleverly said fiction. So we need to stop the spread of bad ideas, even if that means less freedom to say anything we want.

TJ’s Story

Today we will wear our orange shirts. At Inquiry Hub, students will be wearing ones with a design by one of our students with indigenous heritage, Madison D.

On Orange Shirt Day 3 years ago, I shared this on Facebook:

Tomorrow will be the first Truth and Reconciliation Day holiday. We are moving forward, and people will remember.

Making history

We are living through one of the biggest social experiments in history. We are getting thousands of data points all over the world that show us what the Delta variant is doing…

In Florida:


And in India:

In comparison to Iceland and the UK:

The difference in deaths is directly related to the number of people in less and more vaccinated areas.

And in Mississippi and Louisiana:


Want to guess what the death rate will look like in these highly unvaccinated areas?

Where does the social experiment come in? India didn’t have ready access to vaccines, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana all did. Meanwhile, the Florida Governor has an order against mask mandates in schools. Over the coming months we get to see large scale data sets on how decisions like this affect the lives and deaths of people in different places. We get to see what happens when people put themselves before their communities, and what fear can do to undermine society.

Decades from now there will be case studies in textbooks that will discuss the differences in preventable deaths. There will be questions about how to prevent this in a future pandemic. There will be models to show how devastating this kind of response would be if the same pandemic response happened with a virus that is 3, 10, or 20 times more contagious and/or deadly.

The Delta variant, which is affecting younger people more indiscriminately than the original variant, is quickly becoming the great un-equalizer. It is quickly revealing how a good response to the pandemic fairs so much better than a bad response. The sad part is that it’s doing this with hospitalization and deaths.

Equally as sad is that many younger kids and immune compromised people that do not have a choice to get a vaccine will suffer because of people who are able to take an available vaccine and choose not to. The unvaccinated, that are so by choice, are creating a giant social experiment where they are playing with people’s lives, and the data that’s coming out is proving this.

The worse part is that they are basing this choice on fear and misinformation. And as a PSA, the vaccine makes us safer, not safe.

Wear a mask. Practice social distancing. Stay safe.

A comic is worth a 1,000 words

Sometimes I see a comic strip and I think it makes a truly powerful statement. Mohammad Haj Youssef shared a post on Facebook that had a whole series of these comics with a comment, “This is the world we live in.”

Here are the images. Because sometimes images speak for themselves, I’m going to share the images without commentary. Some speak to me more than others, bit they are all powerful in their own way.

Fictional vigilante

I’m currently listening to ‘Nameless‘ by Dean Koontz. It it, a nameless clairvoyant with scientifically induced amnesia, and a didactic memory for everything after his memory was wiped, is a vigilante. He is the executor of bad people who have killed others for greed and/or pleasure. He is hired by a tech-savvy team that use cybercrime to confirm that the people they hunt are indeed bad people. Then Nameless exacts justice, often in befitting ways.

I’m not an ‘eye-for-an-eye’ kind of person, I have spent a lot of time as an educator helping students come to peaceful resolutions of issues in positive ways. But something about this book appeals to me. I think some people are beyond reproach. I think there are people in this world that are very bad, and they know it, and they prey on the weakness and kindness of others.

Recently we have had gang wars in Vancouver spilling out in the streets. An innocent person died in a drive by ‘hit’ of a known gang member. And a gang member was targeted and killed at the airport, leading to a car chase with guns being fired later. These gang members have had a complete disregard for innocent people in the wake of their war.

Now I’m not saying it’s vigilante time, but rather, I’m wondering what should be done when these known criminals disregard public safety and endanger peaceful citizens? It’s a case where they are playing by completely different rules than law-abiding citizens, and causing significant harm to the community. Even if they are caught, it is often only after they have done further harm to innocent people.

I think some people are intentionally evil. They choose to do bad things, then get caught up in a world where others around them disregard the value of the life of others. There are also evil people who get pleasure out of hurting others, including children, in violent and disturbing ways.

Listening to this book, I feel no remorse for the killers that are getting their just dues. I don’t think that they should be arrested and put on trial instead. Perhaps I should. But this fictional book is making me question what we should do with people who skirt the law and do truly evil things? It’s interesting that the characters in this book can pull out of me a character trait I didn’t know I had. I have never seen myself as approving of a vigilante, but I find this book enjoyable… I see justice in a serial child molester, or a doctor that preys on the elderly, or a killer who stalks campers in remote areas, meeting their demise after learning that they have been found out.

I think there are some truly evil people in the world, and they don’t always deserve to live after what they have done to others. That said, I’m not convinced that vigilante justice is something I’d like to see played out in the real world on a regular basis… I’ll just go back to my book and enjoy it there.

Masked in an Unmasked World

When we lived in China from 2009-2011, we would see people wearing masks when we were out in the community. They weren’t used by most people, but there were enough people that wore them that they became something you were quite accustomed to seeing. Certain places you would see them more frequently, two of these being on public transportation, and in large underground malls, common in the city of Dalian.

Also, you would see street vendors who made your food wearing them as well, or the staff at the back of restaurants or food stalls. It was a common courtesy for food handlers to wear a mask.

Basically, you’d see masks occasionally worn in public, and worn more frequently in crowded indoor spaces, and by people who served food. That makes a lot of sense. Another place we would see them is worn by students who had colds. Parents would still send them to school, but with a mask… and that’s far better than what happens here with young students sniffling and wiping their snot on their sleeves.

As the population slowly becomes double vaccinated and the Coronavirus numbers come down, I wonder what mask use will look like here in Canada? How common will mask-wearing be as we start to unmask?

My guess is that Asian cultures that are used to having masks around for over a decade since SARS and H1N1 will wear masks far more frequently than other cultures… simply because it is good etiquette to wear them in crowded public places. But will this be something that is looked upon as a gesture of safety and respect for others, or will this make them a target for racism?

Who else will we see wearing masks regularly? The immunocompromised, germaphobes, food handlers? Will there be many random people wearing masks because they feel comfortable doing so, or because they don’t feel 100% well and don’t want to spread anything? Or will mask-wearing be an anomaly in a sea of unmasked people, going about their business like Covid-19 never happened?

I think the acceptance of after-pandemic mask wearing will depend more on the continued spread of variants, and that the longer Covid-19 lingers, the more accepted mask-wearing in public after vaccinations will be. My hope is that as people unmask, they also become accepting of seeing people prefer to keep masks on in public. Living in China and seeing masks frequently, I never thought of it as weird. I never judged someone for wearing one, and as an avid fan of street food, it comforted me to see a street vendor who wore a mask as he or she prepared my food.

We will be mostly unmasked soon. Let’s make sure that we are considerate to those who continue to wear masks, since they are being considerate of us.

We are getting there

I’m surprised how many people are still choosing not to get vaccinated. Here’s a short video that says a lot:

I think the part that people miss is that at this point it’s a civic duty. Never in our lifetime have we been called to ban together for a common good in the same way, and yet so many people choose to cherry-pick data and find reasons to be fearful. They have their reasons, their justifications, their ‘freedom’.

But we are getting there. First we’ll get everyone who wants a vaccine their vaccine. Then we’ll get them their second dose. Then we’ll see how many millions of people are safe because if it, like the measles and chicken pox vaccines that came before. Then a few of the reluctant will realize that the shot will give them more liberty to travel and to see elderly people they care for, and to receive hugs without masks.

It won’t happen as fast as I would like, but we are moving in the right direction.

Scams and spam

It’s unreal how much spam comes our way. Recorded phone calls and emails that get by our spam filters, trying to get our attention or steal information or money.

Occasionally, I enjoy watching videos of people wasting the time of a scammer. They let them control a virtual and empty computer after 30 minutes of delays, or even fool the scammers and take over their computers. I like the idea of distant scammers doing bad things to good people being punished in some way. Especially since these scammers tend to take advantage of the elderly and vulnerable.

But that’s minimal entertainment compared to the damage they do; the hurt they cause. It seems to me that they undermine trust in a way that is harmful to society. They cause us to act from a standpoint of distrust as a default. They make the world more sceptical.

Email is broken. I get too much of it, and the relevance to my priorities is low. I don’t answer calls unless the number is in my phone or I’m expecting a call. But that doesn’t mean a spam call isn’t still a distraction, a thief of my attention and time. I’m not sure how, but this needs fixing. If not, I only see it getting worse.

Ordering online is too easy

Sometimes it is just too easy to order things online. The draw to impulse buy something is strong. The incentive to buy in bulk, or more items than you need is exaggerated by a pricing scheme that invites buying excess. I needed golf tees to use to put my paper archery targets onto my target block. 25 tees would last a long time, 50 would last well over 2 years, but I got 75 because it was a great deal. It didn’t cost much more to get the extra 25 tees… but that little bit more was still money that I didn’t need to spend.

I don’t golf, and never visit golfing stores, so I don’t know how much I saved, buying from Amazon rather than from a place that has to pay high fees for retail space? I don’t think about the fact that a store like that is good to have in the community, and worth supporting. I also like the idea of not going to a store that I don’t need to right now. Not walking by people in isles, people who seem less interested in social distancing than they do in getting to the items that they are shopping for.

The appeal to just online shop rather than going to retail stores is strong. When the pandemic ends, I suspect online ordering habits won’t. I wonder what this will do to our local economies? If we will end up with less choices, and more ‘big box’ stores that have the draw of meeting many needs, because niche needs are easier to get online? I wonder if there will be a pricing reset for retail space?

I also wonder how much extra junk we are all buying, because more is better, and bulk items are cheaper? We live in a consumer product driven world and online shopping is an easy way to accumulate a lot of stuff we really don’t need.

Having hard conversations

Last night I joined a conversation on Clubhouse that was really challenging.

Because I am writing this before 6am, and don’t plan on writing for a couple hours, I’m going to leave the topic out of my thoughts below.

The conversation was hot and a participant (who was in my opinion immature) created a bit of a mess. I wasn’t planning on speaking but thought I could give some insight to the challenging topic this young man brought up. I said what I wanted to, then I made a tangent point to another argument. This tangent, to be blunt, was uninformed (read as ‘ignorant’ if you like), and it was further misunderstood in a way to undermine everything I said before this error. My fault. My communication was poor.

Then a second crap-storm broke out. I sat silently while other people argued for and against a point I never intended to make. About 15 minutes later the moderator created a space, invited me, back into the conversation.

I was careful to apologize, tried to explain what I was really trying to say. Then again acknowledged that what I said was wrong. I didn’t want my explanation of intent to be perceived as an excuse, so I was happy to end with a second apology.

But others still wanted to talk about the point that was contentious, even though there was a window of opportunity to move on, and the discussion became a convoluted argument. More people misspoke and the conversation was filled with people triggered by the previous speaker. Then some of them got upset with the moderators who where trying their best to keep the conversation polite and respectful.

Hard conversations are hard to have… or they wouldn’t be hard! But we need to learn to have them. We need to understand that learning conversations might involve not just disagreement, but hurt. We need to be willing to set aside egos, and not take things personally, when there isn’t intent to hurt. We need to make conversation spaces places where we can misspeak, where we can apologize, where we can disagree, even in places where topics make us feel uncomfortable.

We need conversations to be safe, and understand that topics won’t always feel safe. This is tricky. This is something some people won’t agree with. But if the conversation can’t go to uncomfortable places, to places that feel uncomfortable, then the learning is hindered. The ability to make mistakes and learn from them disappears. The conversation becomes a ‘safe space‘ but it is no longer a rich learning space. Hurt is no longer something that can be healed, instead it is interpreted as hate. Perspectives become polarized, rather than recognizing how ideas are on a spectrum:

“We want to live, thrive, and love in a pluralistic society. We just need to recognize that in such a society we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.”

Hurtful words are not always hurtful or hateful acts. Opposing views are not always personal attacks. And opposing views are not ever changed by attacking the person who holds those views. If we let the words, said in error, said in misunderstanding, and even said in ignorance, hurt us, we can not do the work to reach, or help others learn. We do not leave the room for insight or apology. We do not create any space for an opposing view to change.

Instead, we create a space where we can only feel wronged, where there are feelings of injury, and words are said in anger. Conversation gets lost, words get weaponized, and opportunities for learning diminish. If we can’t have conversations about difficult topics, because they don’t feel safe, then what is the alternative? Ignorance? Violence?

Words can hurt. If we hold on to the hurt, if we only see hate, words don’t ever get to heal. While we prevent the potential for hurt by avoiding challenging and charged conversations, we also never get to a place where minds can change… where conversations are hard, but where authentic learning can happen… where dialogue can bring people together, rather than keep people with opposing and different views apart.