This seems to be very much driven by social media. The controversy drives engagement, which tells the algorithm to serve the content up in more feeds, which drives the public discussion and fundraising.
I suspect, though, that this feedback loop will evolve. Remember when television advertising could drive huge behavioural change? We tend to get inoculated to stuff after a while. So time may soften the impact, but that doesn't help our current polarization.
We as citizens could start being more thoughtful in what we like and share on social media. Engagement drives views -- the content you engage with is more likely to gain a wider audience. Maybe we should all take that responsibility more seriously.
Moreover -- partisanship is a kind of tribalism that seems to measure success as getting all the policy goals *you* want done. That's not a great measure in a democracy where pursusion and compromise are built into the system. And where good ideas might come from anywhere. We're getting to a point where success is getting the policy goals YOU want enacted no matter what -- that 'your side' wins. That's not a reasonable goal ... Effective governance can't be about whether 'your' side wins.
As a close, I was just watching the latest Polievre video on the need for governments to use plain language. I am far from a PP fan, but it was a well-done, reasonable video that makes a pretty non-controversial point: that jargon makes it difficult for citizens to navigate government programs and hold governments accoutable. It was probably the most non-controversial thing I've seen him put out yet it's still getting negativity on Twitter. If we can't agree on things as basic as this, it's going to be hard to find constructive policy compromises on things that are legitimately challenging!
Any honest person knows that "our side" changes over time. I am perfectly well aware that any government, even one I really like, would, if left in office 15 or 20 years, become tired, dumb, and corrupt.
Good point: "Effective governance can't be about whether 'your' side wins."
This idea that "our side is better than the other side" has become very tiresome. Nobody wants more mud-slinging in the name of coming clean.
It is harder and harder to put confidence in our political system these days, for the reasons the author points out.
Until I see some clear evidence that our elected members are willing to get out from under the influence of big money or vested interests, I doubt they will quit the smoke and mirrors show of "stray voltage" - it's the perfect distraction no matter which side you're on.
That is priceless considering the travel mandates were put in by a non scientific board which was void of anything close to a scientist let alone any epidemiologists. My god the hypocrisy and unscientific dogma comes straight out of the Liberal Progressive globalists. They have zero respect for the working class and did everything possible to destroy small businesses and front line workers. You mean the laptop class sir is what you mean, the Liberals love them and the big globalist corporations. They had three wage increases and those big corporations made massive profits during the lockdowns. How well did those big globalist corporations treat their workers??? Lol. The Liberals have great respect for the government keyboard pushers as with the tech industries. The working class people consist of the people that work physically and contribute something tangible. The front line workers, the truck drivers, the farmers and the people who keep the economy moving and food on your table while the keyboarders stayed safe at home. It’s not the Conservatives who have disdain for the workers of this country. I mean the real workers of Canada, not the keyboard pushers who produce nothing but electronic paper being pushed from one department to the other. I mean the producers and the entrepreneurs that make a real contribution, feed, heat, and construct things. The Liberals despise the working class as they do small business. I mean how does this so called science work for the Liberals when Walmarts and Loblaws can stay open and that some how a large store filled with thousands of people is safer than a small business. Follow the science? You have got to be joking, right?
You are, in a number of ways, much more optimistic than am I. This is a reflection of character, but perhaps also because we use different sources order to become more informed.
The observation you make about the response to Poilievre’s video is reflective of a trend which seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. Experiments on cognitive dissonance have shown that once people are aligned with a particular group or position, most will support or reject an idea, not based upon what the idea is, but on where they think the idea is coming from. Another aspect of the phenomenon is that, once aligned with an ideology, only evidence which supports the ideology is legitimate, that which doesn’t support is either discounted or ignored.
You express some faith that people are going to realize the negative impacts of social media and discount them – I don’t see any evidence that that will happen on its own. The extent to which social media has been successfully used to influence is depicted quite well in “The Great Hack” (or reading about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook). A wealth of research has shown how social media exacerbates negative social and psychological effects - growth in tribalism is one of these. Your proposed solution that individuals be more discerning in what they share on social media has much merit, but Facebook’s algorithm puts a lot more stuff in front of me that supposedly will engage me (make me upset) than actual people do. Among other potential solutions, one is to limit feeds to what actual people choose to share with you – but that would hurt the Meta business model and be classified as some sort of a limit on freedom.
There have been recent surveys asking Americans whether they foresee a civil war in that country in the reasonably near future. Don’t know if you listen to podcasts, but if you do, you might be interested in Jordan Harbinger’s interview with Barbara F. Walter. https://www.jordanharbinger.com/barbara-f-walter-how-civil-wars-start-and-how-to-stop-them/ Although not directly related to what you have said, it may offer some insight into why political institutions are becoming more and more about “what YOU want enacted” and the potential consequences of that mentality.
My (totally not expert) opinion is that regulating social media algorithms is the best way to start addressing this. Take the power the platforms have to serve up users to whoever is willing to pay and empower users to decide with some level of detail what they want to see.
Right now, there are some limited options that you need to be a bit savvy to even know exist to manage your feeds, but even with that, I'm amazed on what turns up in my 'suggested videos' on YouTube and particularly amazed on the sort of clearly scammy ads that would never past muster on regulated channels (the secret invention that stops your smartphone from becoming obsolete was one that kept popping up in my feed for a while). It took multiple 'stop suggesting this' to get The Epoch Times out of my feeds, for example, which implies multiple paid placement.
As users, we should be able to fine tune what gets served to us AND have some transparency on why suggested content is being served to us. If you want to actively choose to see content, you should be able to. But, you should also have the power to stop being served up crap you didn't ask for just because it's profitable for the platforms.
If the Canadian government digital policy did three things: force platforms to transparently show users why there are suggesting content; give users the power to continually tune the algorithm to suit their wants/needs; and force platforms to make sponsored/promoted content look obviously different than regular feed content, I think that would go a long way to both addressing the imbalance that exists between platforms, their users and advertisers and would make what's happening a bit more intuitively obvious to all users.
Easier said then done, but right now that's not even on the menu for Canadian policy which I think is really disappointing. Google/Facebook/Twitter must have some excellent lobbyists!
Tony, I have read with interest your various comments over the past period of time. As one would expect - hope, even - I don't always agree with your perspective but I find them literate and well put. So, in that sense, a large bravo.
Now, as to this comment. I very largely agree with you.
You start by noting that much is driven by social media and I agree with that. You correctly note the "historical" influence of television advertising in politics. [Hah! to call only two to three decades ago "historical!"]
I would also add that (to me) a large part of the issue revolves around a feeling of what Emile Durkeim [I am really going back to my university days about a zillion years ago] called anomie which could be summarized as follows:
"Durkheim sees anomie as a state of social disintegration. Due to a far-reaching social change (here: industrialisation, introduction of the structural principle of division of labour), social differentiations are increasingly emerging (e.g. poor – rich, urban – rural, religious – secularised, etc.). The disappearance of old principles of structure and order weakens social cohesion. As a result, general social rules are no longer observed; the collective order dissolves and a state of anomie emerges."
[I apologize for my non-scholarly appropriation of a scholarly idea.]
I believe that the internet and, particularly, social media allows this social disintegration. To carry this point further, it seems to me that the current issues with social media, "false truths," the ability to hide behind pseudonyms, the ability to viciously label a different opinion without actually facing the person with a contrary opinion, etc. actually encourage this social disintegration. As always, before a new accepted paradigm (of whatever nature) is able to become fashionable, it will get worse, much worse before it gets better.
I agree: the currency of social media is engagement and the fastest current way to get engagement is with something outrageous (and likely something that elicits anger or fear). That's not good for civil discussion! And it rewards generalizations over nuance and tribalism over compromise.
My sense is this doesn't lead to good things, but the advantage of freedom and democracy is that experiential learning eventually has an opportunity to work. Eventually (I hope) people will notice the world of social media is a cartoon version of reality and treat it with a healthy degree of skepticism. Or a smart entrepreneur will come along and realize they opportunity for systems that inject some measure of trust and accountability into the platform. Call me a skeptical optimist!
Good article - Trudeau has clearly inspired Pollievre to use the same tactics. I have Trudeau Derangement Syndrome - I admit it - just hearing his voice makes me physically cringe. However I think the 'small fringe minority' attack on the convoy protesters has backfired on him. I know many moderates who have commented on how offensive it was - particularly as more information about the vaccines comes out. His doubling down on vaccine mandates for travel is also turning off large segments of the otherwise politically indifferent class. Of course the two things are related as he clearly has a stubborn streak about never backing down on a bad decision.
I too cannot bear to look at, or God forbid, have to listen to Junior's breathy nasal woke addled inanities.
Here are a few tips which I have found useful in guarding against exposure to The Father of the Nation:
Never turn on the computer with the sound on. Forget to do that and the first video you click on will invariably feature Junior parroting one of the talking points prepared by Katie and Gerry.
Always assume that any video you click on will have a pop-up of Junior making some inane announcement. Protect yourself by having a vial of gravol at hand and some trusty Air Canada airsickness bags.
And above all, and I speak from sad experience here, never, ever check out the news wearing a new suit!
Let's remember that 10% (and increasing, thanks Western U and U of T) or more of the population are still:
- excluded from many post secondary schools and residences
- excluded from many jobs, recreational programs, summer camps and private schools
- subject to 2 week house arrest every time they travel outside of Canada
all because they did not take a medical treatment which, whether at the time it was useful or not, is now universally agreed to be useless. Does anyone at all think that a person who took two vaccine doses in Spring 2021 is materially less likely now to contract or transmit Covid than a person who chose not to? Of course not.
And yet most of the political and media class (including, as far as we can tell from their writing, Matt and Jen) either continues to support this discrimination or simply doesn't care enough to even say "this is wrong".
Of course many people are angry. They ought to be. Everyone ought to be.
The mandates were never justified IMO. However I think the fact that these mandates are being extended when they are totally irrational is really worrying. They are clearly violations of the charter - the government is supposed to do a continuous rebalancing assessment. In the case of the Federal mandate this clearly never happened as has come out in court - and no one seems to give a shit. The rule of law is kind of important and we clearly can’t rely on the sclerotic Canadian court system to defend on our rights in any timeframe that matters. The media failed on Covid completely - in fact our entire society may fail due to the bias and incompetence of the media. Look at Europe heading into a cold, hungry, dark winter. All because their media has been cheerleading about global warming and renewable energy for 20 years instead of questioning the glaring holes in those narratives.
The fact that so many people clearly couldn't care less about flagrant and obviously irrational discrimination against a large fraction of the population is certainly infuriating. As Ad Nausica says, many people on the pro-mandate side simply don't view the vax free as citizens deserving of the same rights and treatment as anyone else.
This pretty much defines extreme polarization: not so much that people angrily disagree with each other, as that many people quite openly don't think of the marginalized group as really "people" at all.
With “rights” comes responsibility. When there is a proven tool available to prevent serious illness I believe there is a responsibility to the community to avail oneself of it. When a person refuses to believe the science, it’s hard not to interpret that as a FU to the community at large. Doctors I know are infuriated. I know I am.
Obviously, the virus has changed and many of the mandates no longer make sense. But they did at the time the virus was more deadly.
However, on a personal note, two frail people I know made it through the worst of the pandemic, only to lose their lives when rules were relaxed. Two people dead, when it wouldn’t have been their time to go if people in their circle hadn’t have gotten sloppy.
I am a buff of history and through books and help from my mother’s deep interest in the same, brings to mind many correlations of Nazi Germany before the mass extermination of the intolerable began. So for many to suggest that what we are seeing today does not bring with it the same intolerance of that era in history is flabbergasting. The mass extermination of the Jewish people did not start with gas chambers, it took time to prepare the German people to that amount of loathing to be able to ignore the reality of what was the greatest evil of all time. It started by the division of those who were believed to be intolerable and the spreaders of disease. It became a medical issue and about cleanliness and went to labeling (visibly) those to be avoided and dismissed as the cause of disease. It started with this and went to the indoctrination of the youth (brown shirt’s) to the ideology put forth by the regime who became an arm of the Nazi party’s control over the population. The state took over the raising of children who reported those parents who dare descent against the regime and turned them over as enemies of the State. The children were used against the parents similar to what information is being spread through out the education system here, teaching children to be intolerant of Conservative voices and deeming them an enemy of the State by our tolerant Government in office today. The burning of the books and the control over the language was also used in Nazi Germany before the extermination of millions of those considered intolerable. Many actions of this Progressive Government is similar to those used by the Nazi regime and they are able to do so because of the peoples lack of knowledge on the history of that time and the beginnings of an evil so vile that produced camps of death and ended in the Nuremberg Code. The very thing that the same progressives and medical professionals (experts) in this country have purposely ignored. So those who denounce Ms Leslyn Lewis are doing so because they lack the knowledge of history that was behind and part of the greatest injustice perpetrated on a population in history. Knowledge of history brings with it the know all to stop the repetition of the mass extermination of those deemed uncleanly and intolerable by those with power.
Dis ease is something that progressives push on the working class of this country. Dis ease is what happens when those With power purposely create an atmosphere of division and hatred. Dis ease is what happens when those in power believe they know better what people want than the people themselves. Dis ease is created by those who continually propagate and keep the political disregard of their fellow Canadian’s on high and hold distain and contempt for those who stand up against tyranny. Dis ease is created by those who would support such actions from those in power and deem them virtuous instead of the complete tyrants and dictators they are. That is what causes dis ease and distrust. So sir, if the shoe fits, feel free to wear it.
Canada seems to be the only wealthy country putting their own citizens under house arrest. And even if it wasn't, is that your standard for Canada? "Not the worst place in the western hemisphere"?
Sounds like something our Liberal government might strive for.
At the time I received my vaccines, there was a good possibility that covid 19 would have been fatal to a person my age.
As time passed, the virus became weaker.
In spite of being vaccinated, I still contracted the omicron strain - but it was not near as dangerous as the original strain.
I do, however, agree that the government has mismanaged as well as exploited the crisis to suit its political agenda.
At this point in time it is clear that covid does not present the degree of mortal threat to Canadians that it once did and that the restrictions in place can be eased without major hazard.
The Arrive Canada program is simply a waste of time and resources.
I am more disgusted than angered by our Liberal government for its chronic inability to bring social stability to our country.
Like voters who elected Trump, I am simply fed up with both the political establishments in Canada that have put forward ineffective leaders that are simply not in touch with the political realities of our nation and are not qualified to manage its basic needs.
I was surprised that Trump was voted into office and I was no fan.
America’s challenges notwithstanding, I do believe Poilievre could easily surpass Trudeau in terms of ability, principle and common sense.
Mik, I am also "of an age" plus I have those "underlying health conditions." Luckily, M. Covid stayed away from my house (well, as near as I can tell!).
I got shot as quickly as I could and am now four time shot and happy that I am. What I really, really didn't like was that some folks who chose, for their own reasons, whether in my mind sensible or otherwise, were discriminated against. And what really, totally, absolutely pissed me off was that last winter, in order to see my grandson play hockey I was required by my provincial government to disclose my medical status - a very personal thing and a violation of my rights. At that time it was well known and even admitted by the health authorities that even those fully vaccinated could pass on the disease so there was simply no reason to have those stupid rules. And I say that as someone who could get in to the hockey rink if I chose to disclose my medical status.
In any event, that Covid stupidity is both water under the bridge and quite indicative of the failures of the current federal government, which I loathe, with so much disgust that it is not possible to quantify. My own provincial government is not a huge amount higher in my regard, but at least I don't loathe them.
You didn't like Trump and I can't say that I did but I was fascinated by him, the way that you look at a car wreck on the side of the road. A relative in Ireland (of all places) emailed me on voting day in 2016 to the effect that, "at least we won't have to hear about that loudmouth Trump anymore..." I responded that I thought Trump would do much better than expected (who knew about a win?) because of the great number of people who felt that their "betters" - actually, their worsers - simply didn't think they, the people, were worthwhile (i.e. "the deplorables" - thank you Hilary!)
I think that many of the same issues that were in the US in 2016 have, as always, worked their way into Canada in our own Canadian way and I further think that our political establishments really haven't done their jobs. [Hello, "gatekeepers."]
Whether Poilievre is the real deal or a pale imitation, I expect that we will see. I live in Alberta and we here have our own issues with politicians not living up to their promises - or to their supposed promise, for that matter.
It’s not just about ‘transmission’, that’s a red herring. Vaccines prevent serious illness in nearly all except the fragile. The social cost now, as then, is that the ICUs still have many people, mostly unvaccinated, sucking scarce medical resources from everybody else. And we know how backed up the medical system is already - due to the unvaccinated previously flooding the hospitals. The unvaxxed wore out the medical staff. Nurses and aids have quit in droves.
Firstly, people young enough to be employed or at school simply never ended up in ICUs in material numbers, vaccinated or not - so how is discrimination against them justified?
Secondly, the idea that having been vaccinated 18 months ago confers more protection against serious disease now than, say, losing 10 pounds or not riding a motorcycle or climbing mountains, is itself absurd. We don't discriminate against those people - why pick on the vax free?
The fact that people can say the kind of deeply uninformed, irrational and discriminatory thing you did in public without being widely mocked is itself a problem.
Deeply uninformed? Hardly. With three physicians in my life I know a great deal about what is actually going on, in the real world. And they rant, plenty.
I am not going to defend the continuation of mandates in most institutions. The virus has changed. Long covid, however, is a thing the young should be concerned about.
As for your second point, everyone I know including young people, is doing their bit, and is up to date with the appropriate number of vaccinations. Not one and done 18 months ago. The other conditions you mention are not contagious and don’t require 5 people to flip them over every few hours to prevent them from drowning in their own snot, should they end up in ICU. Not analogous at all. Far more resources required for a largely preventable illness and the entire of the community is at risk.
Truly, it boils down to “me me me and my rights” without a nod to responsibility versus a more community minded view. And that isn’t new. It’s a culture clash. Nor is quarantine. Exposure to scarlet fever in the thirties got you locked down for a week or two. Polio is going to be on a come back tour with the former kind of mindset.
I notice you didn’t address the huge cost to the community of deferred health procedures and the massive amount of resources required to care for the wilfully unvaxxed, and the burn out of health professionals.
Your oscillation between claiming that mandates can be justified based on transmission and claiming that they can be justified based on risk of covid to the vaxxed individual alone is typical of the illogic of mandate supporters. You advance one claim, it is knocked down, you advance the other, it is knocked down in turn, and you return to the first.
You earlier said "transmission is a red herring", and now you say "contagious" and "risk to the whole community". Make up your mind.
The incoherent arguments and lack of basic reasoning by Covidians should have been the best indicators to normal people that the so called "experts" didn't know what they were talking about: logic is for everyone.
"But it also catalyzes political polarization. It constantly ratchets up the temperature inside the reactor that is our political system. Because every time you compare something to the Holocaust, you are invariably calling someone somewhere a Nazi, whether you use the word or not."
They say, "Others, including Scott "Saney McSanerson" Aitchison, have already stepped in on this one so we don't feel the need to add much beyond: wtf? We at The Line have been skeptical of vaccine mandates, too but, Jesus. Of course, of course drawing any kind of comparison to the atrocities of the Holocaust to a still-voluntary vaccine mandate demonstrates a wild lack of historical perspective."
Even the great "no-bullshiters" Matt and Jenny fall into these illogical, cognitive biases. They, like Aitchison, either intentionally or via subconscious bias confuse "type" and "degree". Saying something violates a principle -- the Nuremberg Code -- in no way suggests that vaccine mandates are comparable IN DEGREE to Nazi atrocities. And yet, Aitchison, The Line, and others just end up helping people like Lewis because anybody who actually thinks critically can see that those objecting to what she said have zero valid content in their objection. Bodily autonomy isn't just in the Nuremberg Code, it is a well-defended concept throughout the liberal world for decades, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with a long history of legal precedence: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art7.html
They even make it worse with the self-paradoxical phrase, "a still-voluntary vaccine mandate". I would have hoped Matt and Jenny would have had enough language education at least to recognize that the word "mandatory" is the adjective form of "mandate": https://www.wordnik.com/words/mandatory
To work for the government, you needed to be vaccinated. To contract with the government, all private employees needed to be vaccinated. To travel by train or plane, you need to be vaccinated. To be let in the country you needed to be vaccinated. [Edit: The federal government did suspended -- but not end -- some of these mandates on June 14, 2022. But, many workplaces still require them as a result, and this is after the damage was done. These mandates were never "voluntary", they harmed people, and they violated the principles behind bodily autonomy.]
By contrast, the term "voluntary" means "without coercion", "done or undertaken of one's own free will", or "without legal obligation or consideration".
On a scale of 1 to bullshit, I think The Line editors rate a, "Were you drunk when you wrote that?"
So I agree with you Mitch. But, I think you are diagnosing the symptoms. Political divisiveness, even within parties or moderates, is a symptom. I don't think Scott, Matt, or Jenny intentionally tried to make themselves look that foolish, or to create divisiveness.
The issue is more psychological. We all have the same ape sub-structure in our brains that drives us to "us vs them" tribalism and to fling poo at each other (whether literal ape poo that chimpanzees throw, or the metaphorical kind that humans throw that we blame on bulls). It doesn't need to be extremist tribes like the "woke" left vs "MAGA" right. It can occur by individual topic, like sports and politics.
In this case, many people including The Line editors have picked a side on vaccine mandates and cannot see past the opacity of their solid faith in that belief to even consider they could be wrong or that objectors can have a legitimate case -- or even a better one. Like, for instance, when the WHO repeatedly came out against such mandates as did bioethics groups, and bioethics councils set out policy 15 years ago against such mandates, of which one of the reasons is exactly the distrust and divisiveness that results from them: https://adnausica.substack.com/p/who-keeps-on-trucking
Gee, you'd think we'd learn to listen to the science and expertise on how these things play out. But alas, once you set your mind that these mandates are the correct things to do, our tribalist minds become great at ignoring and dismissing the legitimacy of points like Lewis', calling dissenters names, using non sequitur and self-humiliating statements (like The Line editors), ratcheting up the divisiveness, and believing you are taking the high ground.
Perhaps I'm just pessimistic here, but we're not talking about some radical elements or even uneducated masses. When our political leaders and journalists -- and journalists who claim to reject bullshit -- cannot think critically about these things clearly, then what hope is there for reasoned discourse?
I think it will take our society to burn itself out on tribalist discourse first, for the success of intellectual discussion and disagreement in the marketplace of public viewership, and for the celebration of, and respect for, dissenting views as critical to social progress, before we start to see the dissipation of this type of bullshit, even from the "no bullshit"-ers. That will take time. Maybe 5 more years? Certainly in Canada it will require Trudeau to be gone, and that's at least 2025.
Edit: I will re-tract and apologize for an implication. I lumped The Line editors here in the ideological support of vaccine mandates, which is beyond their positions. They even say in the line I quoted, "We at The Line have been skeptical of vaccine mandates, too". They are not one-sided on the mandates. But, their clear mixing up of type and degree, dismissiveness of Lewis' valid point, and the oxymoronic "voluntary mandate" reference do not appear to be intentional trolling for the sake of divisiveness, but rather honestly, yet nonsensical, held beliefs based on cognitive biases. Or, perhaps, mind-altering substances.
This is why Rupa Subramanya is such a star. She took a public position, and then later looked carefully at the evidence and changed her mind.
But she didn't just change it quietly or minimally. She reconsidered everything, followed logic through to the end, and now stands up and takes heat from both sides. That is journalistic integrity.
Many other journalists know the mandates and other discrimination are complete bunk, but are pretty much keeping their heads down.
However, the federal government's own science team analysis, even at the time Trudeau was implementing the mandates post-election, said there wasn't sufficient evidence that the vaccines reduced transmission risk, per the NACI ACS of Oct 22, 2021: https://adnausica.substack.com/p/the-vaccines-work-thats-a-problem
The case certainly wasn't there during the campaign, nor the election, nor following the election. It was never there scientifically, and certainly not from either a bioethics perspective (E.g., Nuffield Council on Bioethics, WHO bioethics refs) or as an effective way to get the public to vaccinate in the first place, per the WHO and Nuffield documents.
Rupa was just wrong from the start on mandates, but at least checked on it as Omicron came along and reached that conclusion.
Absolutely she was wrong from the start to support it. The Provincetown weekend, the HMS Queen Elizabeth incident, and the Israeli covid case data showed that there was no science behind the mandates; and hundreds of years of ethics and philosophy showed that they were immoral anyway.
But I think a close reading of her article shows that she now acknowledges that her opinion was largely wrong - lots of conditionals in her paragraph on what she thought then, and an acknowledgement that her views were driven by fear and changed when she spent time at the convoy, with people who weren't fearful.
I found that going to Ottawa during the convoy was, for me, a transformative and healing spiritual experience (surely the only time anyone has ever said that about a trip to Ottawa), helping me see that there was good in my fellow Canadians, and helping me conquer my anger at how my family and I and so many others had been treated. Obviously it was a healing experience for Rupa as well, helping her conquer her fear.
I can forgive those who were cruel due to fear. What I can't forgive is the people who support the remaining mandates now, not out of fear, or even active hatred, but out of simple indifference.
While millions of people were forced to take a shot they didn't want, on pain of loss of job or education, or exclusion from society.
I would say your "hundreds were inconvenienced for three weeks" is about right.
And the fact that peaceful assembly and due process rights were suspended across the country to privilege the elite hundreds over the harmed millions is a major reason why people are angry.
Nice! I don’t consider myself an unengaged voter but I believe it works on people like me as well. Just appreciate the term “stray voltage”, new to me but I like it and will use it. In the long run however I do think it’s a toxic addition to a system already viewed by many with cynicism. I currently have a hard time believing any politicians have the best interests of the citizenship in general at heart
"I would argue that if you understand the Trudeau government as an Obama cover band (the quality of which is entirely up to the reader), its governing philosophy makes a lot more sense."
I think this is a fantastic analogy that highlights why I find watching the ascent of Poilievre almost comical - Trudeau and his team are fighting the last war and don't know how to fight him.
I don't really want him to win - but oh, is he going to do it. In slow motion, watching an absolute annihilation of a loss is kind of funny.
Unfortunately the really hard work in politics is changing the structure of government rather than throwing money at a particular segment. It is also the most likely action to get a government criticized for errors and the least likely to get it credited for successes. What is most visible is often the least important.
I’m not surprised at the links between Obama and the Liberals. With what little time they have left after engaging in leadership adoration ceremonies and translating everything into French, political advisers find it easier to hire US consultants than actually develop a more moderate Canadian strategy. And ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that PACs could spend unlimited funds on political campaigns as long as no individual individual or party was promoted/supported, negative ads have predominated. So for instance I could legally run an ad saying the Conservative leader is the AntiChrist, but not one saying that Trudeau speaks good English. Even though this US ruling has no legal effect on Canada that I know of, it’s certainly easier and quicker to ape US practice than actually come up with something new.
This is so smart. We don't allow big political donors in Canada (good thing!), so parties have made raising money a weekly thing requiring weekly 'shocks' to convince citizens to part with their money. They help finance political events which are partisan to thank donors and keep them involved. The system feeds itself and less time is spent trying to reach consensus.
Fascinating column. I wonder if traditional non voters were always angry and you see it now b/c it is tied to politics or whether anger was whipped up?
Well said. Though 'firing the central banker' was used by Chretien too, eh, well before this era of political stray voltage? By going around the legacy media, turning the tables on his opposition, I wonder how much Poilievre is circumventing this game.
Interesting article. First up from ‘Pops’ is an excellent example of why ‘stray voltage’ works. It’s a bit like Pavlovian’s dogs. In this case, the very name ‘Trudeau’ apparently elicits physical responses.
There will come a time when those slavering to take revenge, or whatever their point is, on those who they can never be will face consequences, as I hope the chap in the underwear and his female sidekick, who threatened the Deputy Prime Minister, will, in short order. I’m thoroughly sick of this small cadre of Canadians (maybe) who think they are more important than anyone else.
See this approach in grotesque proportions in the current UPC leadership race. Barry Cooper's damn the Constitution campaign for Danielle Smith is shock politics in extreme. They know it's wrong but are doing it anyway to fill warchests and divide loyalties.
What's missing is the fact that public figures will cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war when the inevitable happens. A loser in a stained wife beater screams obscenites and the PM threatens to bring the state's security establishment down upon the heads of those that disagree with his values. Let's fsce it, Trudeau and company have been called worse in Albeta.
The politician as victim routine that came after was nauseating.
Fantastic article and while social media bears some of the blame it only reflects the underlying anxiety people feel, as Stephen Punwasi (highly recommend following him on twitter) put it
Increasingly Canadians are telling me they can't get ahead. It doesn't matter how hard they try, it just doesn't work. A household can make double the median income and still not be able to afford housing in 🇨🇦's major cities. This isn't just a Millennial issue.
I missed that you are actually implying there is something wrong with firing the governor of the Bank of Canada. The Bank had one primary mission: controlling inflation. They failed catastrophically.
Why on earth wouldn't we fire the governor? Because he tried hard and it's not fair to fire him? Seriously? Boo hoo.
When regular people are treated unfairly by the government, that's a problem. When an organization fails, removing the leader is just accountability.
This seems to be very much driven by social media. The controversy drives engagement, which tells the algorithm to serve the content up in more feeds, which drives the public discussion and fundraising.
I suspect, though, that this feedback loop will evolve. Remember when television advertising could drive huge behavioural change? We tend to get inoculated to stuff after a while. So time may soften the impact, but that doesn't help our current polarization.
We as citizens could start being more thoughtful in what we like and share on social media. Engagement drives views -- the content you engage with is more likely to gain a wider audience. Maybe we should all take that responsibility more seriously.
Moreover -- partisanship is a kind of tribalism that seems to measure success as getting all the policy goals *you* want done. That's not a great measure in a democracy where pursusion and compromise are built into the system. And where good ideas might come from anywhere. We're getting to a point where success is getting the policy goals YOU want enacted no matter what -- that 'your side' wins. That's not a reasonable goal ... Effective governance can't be about whether 'your' side wins.
As a close, I was just watching the latest Polievre video on the need for governments to use plain language. I am far from a PP fan, but it was a well-done, reasonable video that makes a pretty non-controversial point: that jargon makes it difficult for citizens to navigate government programs and hold governments accoutable. It was probably the most non-controversial thing I've seen him put out yet it's still getting negativity on Twitter. If we can't agree on things as basic as this, it's going to be hard to find constructive policy compromises on things that are legitimately challenging!
Any honest person knows that "our side" changes over time. I am perfectly well aware that any government, even one I really like, would, if left in office 15 or 20 years, become tired, dumb, and corrupt.
Good point: "Effective governance can't be about whether 'your' side wins."
This idea that "our side is better than the other side" has become very tiresome. Nobody wants more mud-slinging in the name of coming clean.
It is harder and harder to put confidence in our political system these days, for the reasons the author points out.
Until I see some clear evidence that our elected members are willing to get out from under the influence of big money or vested interests, I doubt they will quit the smoke and mirrors show of "stray voltage" - it's the perfect distraction no matter which side you're on.
That is priceless considering the travel mandates were put in by a non scientific board which was void of anything close to a scientist let alone any epidemiologists. My god the hypocrisy and unscientific dogma comes straight out of the Liberal Progressive globalists. They have zero respect for the working class and did everything possible to destroy small businesses and front line workers. You mean the laptop class sir is what you mean, the Liberals love them and the big globalist corporations. They had three wage increases and those big corporations made massive profits during the lockdowns. How well did those big globalist corporations treat their workers??? Lol. The Liberals have great respect for the government keyboard pushers as with the tech industries. The working class people consist of the people that work physically and contribute something tangible. The front line workers, the truck drivers, the farmers and the people who keep the economy moving and food on your table while the keyboarders stayed safe at home. It’s not the Conservatives who have disdain for the workers of this country. I mean the real workers of Canada, not the keyboard pushers who produce nothing but electronic paper being pushed from one department to the other. I mean the producers and the entrepreneurs that make a real contribution, feed, heat, and construct things. The Liberals despise the working class as they do small business. I mean how does this so called science work for the Liberals when Walmarts and Loblaws can stay open and that some how a large store filled with thousands of people is safer than a small business. Follow the science? You have got to be joking, right?
You are, in a number of ways, much more optimistic than am I. This is a reflection of character, but perhaps also because we use different sources order to become more informed.
The observation you make about the response to Poilievre’s video is reflective of a trend which seems to be becoming more and more prevalent. Experiments on cognitive dissonance have shown that once people are aligned with a particular group or position, most will support or reject an idea, not based upon what the idea is, but on where they think the idea is coming from. Another aspect of the phenomenon is that, once aligned with an ideology, only evidence which supports the ideology is legitimate, that which doesn’t support is either discounted or ignored.
You express some faith that people are going to realize the negative impacts of social media and discount them – I don’t see any evidence that that will happen on its own. The extent to which social media has been successfully used to influence is depicted quite well in “The Great Hack” (or reading about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook). A wealth of research has shown how social media exacerbates negative social and psychological effects - growth in tribalism is one of these. Your proposed solution that individuals be more discerning in what they share on social media has much merit, but Facebook’s algorithm puts a lot more stuff in front of me that supposedly will engage me (make me upset) than actual people do. Among other potential solutions, one is to limit feeds to what actual people choose to share with you – but that would hurt the Meta business model and be classified as some sort of a limit on freedom.
There have been recent surveys asking Americans whether they foresee a civil war in that country in the reasonably near future. Don’t know if you listen to podcasts, but if you do, you might be interested in Jordan Harbinger’s interview with Barbara F. Walter. https://www.jordanharbinger.com/barbara-f-walter-how-civil-wars-start-and-how-to-stop-them/ Although not directly related to what you have said, it may offer some insight into why political institutions are becoming more and more about “what YOU want enacted” and the potential consequences of that mentality.
My (totally not expert) opinion is that regulating social media algorithms is the best way to start addressing this. Take the power the platforms have to serve up users to whoever is willing to pay and empower users to decide with some level of detail what they want to see.
Right now, there are some limited options that you need to be a bit savvy to even know exist to manage your feeds, but even with that, I'm amazed on what turns up in my 'suggested videos' on YouTube and particularly amazed on the sort of clearly scammy ads that would never past muster on regulated channels (the secret invention that stops your smartphone from becoming obsolete was one that kept popping up in my feed for a while). It took multiple 'stop suggesting this' to get The Epoch Times out of my feeds, for example, which implies multiple paid placement.
As users, we should be able to fine tune what gets served to us AND have some transparency on why suggested content is being served to us. If you want to actively choose to see content, you should be able to. But, you should also have the power to stop being served up crap you didn't ask for just because it's profitable for the platforms.
If the Canadian government digital policy did three things: force platforms to transparently show users why there are suggesting content; give users the power to continually tune the algorithm to suit their wants/needs; and force platforms to make sponsored/promoted content look obviously different than regular feed content, I think that would go a long way to both addressing the imbalance that exists between platforms, their users and advertisers and would make what's happening a bit more intuitively obvious to all users.
Easier said then done, but right now that's not even on the menu for Canadian policy which I think is really disappointing. Google/Facebook/Twitter must have some excellent lobbyists!
Tony, I have read with interest your various comments over the past period of time. As one would expect - hope, even - I don't always agree with your perspective but I find them literate and well put. So, in that sense, a large bravo.
Now, as to this comment. I very largely agree with you.
You start by noting that much is driven by social media and I agree with that. You correctly note the "historical" influence of television advertising in politics. [Hah! to call only two to three decades ago "historical!"]
I would also add that (to me) a large part of the issue revolves around a feeling of what Emile Durkeim [I am really going back to my university days about a zillion years ago] called anomie which could be summarized as follows:
"Durkheim sees anomie as a state of social disintegration. Due to a far-reaching social change (here: industrialisation, introduction of the structural principle of division of labour), social differentiations are increasingly emerging (e.g. poor – rich, urban – rural, religious – secularised, etc.). The disappearance of old principles of structure and order weakens social cohesion. As a result, general social rules are no longer observed; the collective order dissolves and a state of anomie emerges."
[I apologize for my non-scholarly appropriation of a scholarly idea.]
I believe that the internet and, particularly, social media allows this social disintegration. To carry this point further, it seems to me that the current issues with social media, "false truths," the ability to hide behind pseudonyms, the ability to viciously label a different opinion without actually facing the person with a contrary opinion, etc. actually encourage this social disintegration. As always, before a new accepted paradigm (of whatever nature) is able to become fashionable, it will get worse, much worse before it gets better.
How depressing!
Thanks for the compliment!
I agree: the currency of social media is engagement and the fastest current way to get engagement is with something outrageous (and likely something that elicits anger or fear). That's not good for civil discussion! And it rewards generalizations over nuance and tribalism over compromise.
My sense is this doesn't lead to good things, but the advantage of freedom and democracy is that experiential learning eventually has an opportunity to work. Eventually (I hope) people will notice the world of social media is a cartoon version of reality and treat it with a healthy degree of skepticism. Or a smart entrepreneur will come along and realize they opportunity for systems that inject some measure of trust and accountability into the platform. Call me a skeptical optimist!
Good article - Trudeau has clearly inspired Pollievre to use the same tactics. I have Trudeau Derangement Syndrome - I admit it - just hearing his voice makes me physically cringe. However I think the 'small fringe minority' attack on the convoy protesters has backfired on him. I know many moderates who have commented on how offensive it was - particularly as more information about the vaccines comes out. His doubling down on vaccine mandates for travel is also turning off large segments of the otherwise politically indifferent class. Of course the two things are related as he clearly has a stubborn streak about never backing down on a bad decision.
"just hearing his voice makes me physically cringe", same here, lol. I wish Canadian could treat this seriously and tell this guy to move on!
I too cannot bear to look at, or God forbid, have to listen to Junior's breathy nasal woke addled inanities.
Here are a few tips which I have found useful in guarding against exposure to The Father of the Nation:
Never turn on the computer with the sound on. Forget to do that and the first video you click on will invariably feature Junior parroting one of the talking points prepared by Katie and Gerry.
Always assume that any video you click on will have a pop-up of Junior making some inane announcement. Protect yourself by having a vial of gravol at hand and some trusty Air Canada airsickness bags.
And above all, and I speak from sad experience here, never, ever check out the news wearing a new suit!
I hope these tips help!
His doubling down on vaccine mandates
It's odd that's there's been almost zero blow back to provincial conservative protections who went way way further than Trudeau ever did.
Let's remember that 10% (and increasing, thanks Western U and U of T) or more of the population are still:
- excluded from many post secondary schools and residences
- excluded from many jobs, recreational programs, summer camps and private schools
- subject to 2 week house arrest every time they travel outside of Canada
all because they did not take a medical treatment which, whether at the time it was useful or not, is now universally agreed to be useless. Does anyone at all think that a person who took two vaccine doses in Spring 2021 is materially less likely now to contract or transmit Covid than a person who chose not to? Of course not.
And yet most of the political and media class (including, as far as we can tell from their writing, Matt and Jen) either continues to support this discrimination or simply doesn't care enough to even say "this is wrong".
Of course many people are angry. They ought to be. Everyone ought to be.
The mandates were never justified IMO. However I think the fact that these mandates are being extended when they are totally irrational is really worrying. They are clearly violations of the charter - the government is supposed to do a continuous rebalancing assessment. In the case of the Federal mandate this clearly never happened as has come out in court - and no one seems to give a shit. The rule of law is kind of important and we clearly can’t rely on the sclerotic Canadian court system to defend on our rights in any timeframe that matters. The media failed on Covid completely - in fact our entire society may fail due to the bias and incompetence of the media. Look at Europe heading into a cold, hungry, dark winter. All because their media has been cheerleading about global warming and renewable energy for 20 years instead of questioning the glaring holes in those narratives.
The fact that so many people clearly couldn't care less about flagrant and obviously irrational discrimination against a large fraction of the population is certainly infuriating. As Ad Nausica says, many people on the pro-mandate side simply don't view the vax free as citizens deserving of the same rights and treatment as anyone else.
This pretty much defines extreme polarization: not so much that people angrily disagree with each other, as that many people quite openly don't think of the marginalized group as really "people" at all.
With “rights” comes responsibility. When there is a proven tool available to prevent serious illness I believe there is a responsibility to the community to avail oneself of it. When a person refuses to believe the science, it’s hard not to interpret that as a FU to the community at large. Doctors I know are infuriated. I know I am.
Obviously, the virus has changed and many of the mandates no longer make sense. But they did at the time the virus was more deadly.
However, on a personal note, two frail people I know made it through the worst of the pandemic, only to lose their lives when rules were relaxed. Two people dead, when it wouldn’t have been their time to go if people in their circle hadn’t have gotten sloppy.
I am a buff of history and through books and help from my mother’s deep interest in the same, brings to mind many correlations of Nazi Germany before the mass extermination of the intolerable began. So for many to suggest that what we are seeing today does not bring with it the same intolerance of that era in history is flabbergasting. The mass extermination of the Jewish people did not start with gas chambers, it took time to prepare the German people to that amount of loathing to be able to ignore the reality of what was the greatest evil of all time. It started by the division of those who were believed to be intolerable and the spreaders of disease. It became a medical issue and about cleanliness and went to labeling (visibly) those to be avoided and dismissed as the cause of disease. It started with this and went to the indoctrination of the youth (brown shirt’s) to the ideology put forth by the regime who became an arm of the Nazi party’s control over the population. The state took over the raising of children who reported those parents who dare descent against the regime and turned them over as enemies of the State. The children were used against the parents similar to what information is being spread through out the education system here, teaching children to be intolerant of Conservative voices and deeming them an enemy of the State by our tolerant Government in office today. The burning of the books and the control over the language was also used in Nazi Germany before the extermination of millions of those considered intolerable. Many actions of this Progressive Government is similar to those used by the Nazi regime and they are able to do so because of the peoples lack of knowledge on the history of that time and the beginnings of an evil so vile that produced camps of death and ended in the Nuremberg Code. The very thing that the same progressives and medical professionals (experts) in this country have purposely ignored. So those who denounce Ms Leslyn Lewis are doing so because they lack the knowledge of history that was behind and part of the greatest injustice perpetrated on a population in history. Knowledge of history brings with it the know all to stop the repetition of the mass extermination of those deemed uncleanly and intolerable by those with power.
Dis ease is something that progressives push on the working class of this country. Dis ease is what happens when those With power purposely create an atmosphere of division and hatred. Dis ease is what happens when those in power believe they know better what people want than the people themselves. Dis ease is created by those who continually propagate and keep the political disregard of their fellow Canadian’s on high and hold distain and contempt for those who stand up against tyranny. Dis ease is created by those who would support such actions from those in power and deem them virtuous instead of the complete tyrants and dictators they are. That is what causes dis ease and distrust. So sir, if the shoe fits, feel free to wear it.
Canada seems to be the only wealthy country putting their own citizens under house arrest. And even if it wasn't, is that your standard for Canada? "Not the worst place in the western hemisphere"?
Sounds like something our Liberal government might strive for.
At the time I received my vaccines, there was a good possibility that covid 19 would have been fatal to a person my age.
As time passed, the virus became weaker.
In spite of being vaccinated, I still contracted the omicron strain - but it was not near as dangerous as the original strain.
I do, however, agree that the government has mismanaged as well as exploited the crisis to suit its political agenda.
At this point in time it is clear that covid does not present the degree of mortal threat to Canadians that it once did and that the restrictions in place can be eased without major hazard.
The Arrive Canada program is simply a waste of time and resources.
I am more disgusted than angered by our Liberal government for its chronic inability to bring social stability to our country.
Like voters who elected Trump, I am simply fed up with both the political establishments in Canada that have put forward ineffective leaders that are simply not in touch with the political realities of our nation and are not qualified to manage its basic needs.
I was surprised that Trump was voted into office and I was no fan.
America’s challenges notwithstanding, I do believe Poilievre could easily surpass Trudeau in terms of ability, principle and common sense.
Mik, I am also "of an age" plus I have those "underlying health conditions." Luckily, M. Covid stayed away from my house (well, as near as I can tell!).
I got shot as quickly as I could and am now four time shot and happy that I am. What I really, really didn't like was that some folks who chose, for their own reasons, whether in my mind sensible or otherwise, were discriminated against. And what really, totally, absolutely pissed me off was that last winter, in order to see my grandson play hockey I was required by my provincial government to disclose my medical status - a very personal thing and a violation of my rights. At that time it was well known and even admitted by the health authorities that even those fully vaccinated could pass on the disease so there was simply no reason to have those stupid rules. And I say that as someone who could get in to the hockey rink if I chose to disclose my medical status.
In any event, that Covid stupidity is both water under the bridge and quite indicative of the failures of the current federal government, which I loathe, with so much disgust that it is not possible to quantify. My own provincial government is not a huge amount higher in my regard, but at least I don't loathe them.
You didn't like Trump and I can't say that I did but I was fascinated by him, the way that you look at a car wreck on the side of the road. A relative in Ireland (of all places) emailed me on voting day in 2016 to the effect that, "at least we won't have to hear about that loudmouth Trump anymore..." I responded that I thought Trump would do much better than expected (who knew about a win?) because of the great number of people who felt that their "betters" - actually, their worsers - simply didn't think they, the people, were worthwhile (i.e. "the deplorables" - thank you Hilary!)
I think that many of the same issues that were in the US in 2016 have, as always, worked their way into Canada in our own Canadian way and I further think that our political establishments really haven't done their jobs. [Hello, "gatekeepers."]
Whether Poilievre is the real deal or a pale imitation, I expect that we will see. I live in Alberta and we here have our own issues with politicians not living up to their promises - or to their supposed promise, for that matter.
A very discouraging time in so many ways.
We agree - let’s hope that a significant number of others do.
It’s not just about ‘transmission’, that’s a red herring. Vaccines prevent serious illness in nearly all except the fragile. The social cost now, as then, is that the ICUs still have many people, mostly unvaccinated, sucking scarce medical resources from everybody else. And we know how backed up the medical system is already - due to the unvaccinated previously flooding the hospitals. The unvaxxed wore out the medical staff. Nurses and aids have quit in droves.
Ridiculous.
Firstly, people young enough to be employed or at school simply never ended up in ICUs in material numbers, vaccinated or not - so how is discrimination against them justified?
Secondly, the idea that having been vaccinated 18 months ago confers more protection against serious disease now than, say, losing 10 pounds or not riding a motorcycle or climbing mountains, is itself absurd. We don't discriminate against those people - why pick on the vax free?
The fact that people can say the kind of deeply uninformed, irrational and discriminatory thing you did in public without being widely mocked is itself a problem.
Deeply uninformed? Hardly. With three physicians in my life I know a great deal about what is actually going on, in the real world. And they rant, plenty.
I am not going to defend the continuation of mandates in most institutions. The virus has changed. Long covid, however, is a thing the young should be concerned about.
As for your second point, everyone I know including young people, is doing their bit, and is up to date with the appropriate number of vaccinations. Not one and done 18 months ago. The other conditions you mention are not contagious and don’t require 5 people to flip them over every few hours to prevent them from drowning in their own snot, should they end up in ICU. Not analogous at all. Far more resources required for a largely preventable illness and the entire of the community is at risk.
Truly, it boils down to “me me me and my rights” without a nod to responsibility versus a more community minded view. And that isn’t new. It’s a culture clash. Nor is quarantine. Exposure to scarlet fever in the thirties got you locked down for a week or two. Polio is going to be on a come back tour with the former kind of mindset.
I notice you didn’t address the huge cost to the community of deferred health procedures and the massive amount of resources required to care for the wilfully unvaxxed, and the burn out of health professionals.
Your oscillation between claiming that mandates can be justified based on transmission and claiming that they can be justified based on risk of covid to the vaxxed individual alone is typical of the illogic of mandate supporters. You advance one claim, it is knocked down, you advance the other, it is knocked down in turn, and you return to the first.
You earlier said "transmission is a red herring", and now you say "contagious" and "risk to the whole community". Make up your mind.
The incoherent arguments and lack of basic reasoning by Covidians should have been the best indicators to normal people that the so called "experts" didn't know what they were talking about: logic is for everyone.
The medical system was failing prior to covid.
The virus simply accelerated its disintegration.
Firing unvaccinated health care workers made it worse. And this is a very interesting idea too: https://gerodoc.substack.com/p/moral-injury-an-internal-alarm-system
Significantly. 2-5% staff losses from being fired or just getting fed up and retiring is pretty material.
"But it also catalyzes political polarization. It constantly ratchets up the temperature inside the reactor that is our political system. Because every time you compare something to the Holocaust, you are invariably calling someone somewhere a Nazi, whether you use the word or not."
Mitch, you didn't need to link to the CBC and Scott Aitchison. Even the editors here at the, ah, "no bullshit" The Line do this: https://theline.substack.com/p/dispatch-from-the-front-line-conservatives
They say, "Others, including Scott "Saney McSanerson" Aitchison, have already stepped in on this one so we don't feel the need to add much beyond: wtf? We at The Line have been skeptical of vaccine mandates, too but, Jesus. Of course, of course drawing any kind of comparison to the atrocities of the Holocaust to a still-voluntary vaccine mandate demonstrates a wild lack of historical perspective."
Even the great "no-bullshiters" Matt and Jenny fall into these illogical, cognitive biases. They, like Aitchison, either intentionally or via subconscious bias confuse "type" and "degree". Saying something violates a principle -- the Nuremberg Code -- in no way suggests that vaccine mandates are comparable IN DEGREE to Nazi atrocities. And yet, Aitchison, The Line, and others just end up helping people like Lewis because anybody who actually thinks critically can see that those objecting to what she said have zero valid content in their objection. Bodily autonomy isn't just in the Nuremberg Code, it is a well-defended concept throughout the liberal world for decades, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms with a long history of legal precedence: https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art7.html
They even make it worse with the self-paradoxical phrase, "a still-voluntary vaccine mandate". I would have hoped Matt and Jenny would have had enough language education at least to recognize that the word "mandatory" is the adjective form of "mandate": https://www.wordnik.com/words/mandatory
To work for the government, you needed to be vaccinated. To contract with the government, all private employees needed to be vaccinated. To travel by train or plane, you need to be vaccinated. To be let in the country you needed to be vaccinated. [Edit: The federal government did suspended -- but not end -- some of these mandates on June 14, 2022. But, many workplaces still require them as a result, and this is after the damage was done. These mandates were never "voluntary", they harmed people, and they violated the principles behind bodily autonomy.]
By contrast, the term "voluntary" means "without coercion", "done or undertaken of one's own free will", or "without legal obligation or consideration".
On a scale of 1 to bullshit, I think The Line editors rate a, "Were you drunk when you wrote that?"
So I agree with you Mitch. But, I think you are diagnosing the symptoms. Political divisiveness, even within parties or moderates, is a symptom. I don't think Scott, Matt, or Jenny intentionally tried to make themselves look that foolish, or to create divisiveness.
The issue is more psychological. We all have the same ape sub-structure in our brains that drives us to "us vs them" tribalism and to fling poo at each other (whether literal ape poo that chimpanzees throw, or the metaphorical kind that humans throw that we blame on bulls). It doesn't need to be extremist tribes like the "woke" left vs "MAGA" right. It can occur by individual topic, like sports and politics.
In this case, many people including The Line editors have picked a side on vaccine mandates and cannot see past the opacity of their solid faith in that belief to even consider they could be wrong or that objectors can have a legitimate case -- or even a better one. Like, for instance, when the WHO repeatedly came out against such mandates as did bioethics groups, and bioethics councils set out policy 15 years ago against such mandates, of which one of the reasons is exactly the distrust and divisiveness that results from them: https://adnausica.substack.com/p/who-keeps-on-trucking
Gee, you'd think we'd learn to listen to the science and expertise on how these things play out. But alas, once you set your mind that these mandates are the correct things to do, our tribalist minds become great at ignoring and dismissing the legitimacy of points like Lewis', calling dissenters names, using non sequitur and self-humiliating statements (like The Line editors), ratcheting up the divisiveness, and believing you are taking the high ground.
Perhaps I'm just pessimistic here, but we're not talking about some radical elements or even uneducated masses. When our political leaders and journalists -- and journalists who claim to reject bullshit -- cannot think critically about these things clearly, then what hope is there for reasoned discourse?
I think it will take our society to burn itself out on tribalist discourse first, for the success of intellectual discussion and disagreement in the marketplace of public viewership, and for the celebration of, and respect for, dissenting views as critical to social progress, before we start to see the dissipation of this type of bullshit, even from the "no bullshit"-ers. That will take time. Maybe 5 more years? Certainly in Canada it will require Trudeau to be gone, and that's at least 2025.
Edit: I will re-tract and apologize for an implication. I lumped The Line editors here in the ideological support of vaccine mandates, which is beyond their positions. They even say in the line I quoted, "We at The Line have been skeptical of vaccine mandates, too". They are not one-sided on the mandates. But, their clear mixing up of type and degree, dismissiveness of Lewis' valid point, and the oxymoronic "voluntary mandate" reference do not appear to be intentional trolling for the sake of divisiveness, but rather honestly, yet nonsensical, held beliefs based on cognitive biases. Or, perhaps, mind-altering substances.
This is why Rupa Subramanya is such a star. She took a public position, and then later looked carefully at the evidence and changed her mind.
But she didn't just change it quietly or minimally. She reconsidered everything, followed logic through to the end, and now stands up and takes heat from both sides. That is journalistic integrity.
Many other journalists know the mandates and other discrimination are complete bunk, but are pretty much keeping their heads down.
Agreed. I do not that Rupa claims her change is position is because the facts changed with respect to transmission: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rupa-subramanya-how-ottawa-exploited-our-fear-to-limit-our-liberties
However, the federal government's own science team analysis, even at the time Trudeau was implementing the mandates post-election, said there wasn't sufficient evidence that the vaccines reduced transmission risk, per the NACI ACS of Oct 22, 2021: https://adnausica.substack.com/p/the-vaccines-work-thats-a-problem
The case certainly wasn't there during the campaign, nor the election, nor following the election. It was never there scientifically, and certainly not from either a bioethics perspective (E.g., Nuffield Council on Bioethics, WHO bioethics refs) or as an effective way to get the public to vaccinate in the first place, per the WHO and Nuffield documents.
Rupa was just wrong from the start on mandates, but at least checked on it as Omicron came along and reached that conclusion.
Absolutely she was wrong from the start to support it. The Provincetown weekend, the HMS Queen Elizabeth incident, and the Israeli covid case data showed that there was no science behind the mandates; and hundreds of years of ethics and philosophy showed that they were immoral anyway.
But I think a close reading of her article shows that she now acknowledges that her opinion was largely wrong - lots of conditionals in her paragraph on what she thought then, and an acknowledgement that her views were driven by fear and changed when she spent time at the convoy, with people who weren't fearful.
I found that going to Ottawa during the convoy was, for me, a transformative and healing spiritual experience (surely the only time anyone has ever said that about a trip to Ottawa), helping me see that there was good in my fellow Canadians, and helping me conquer my anger at how my family and I and so many others had been treated. Obviously it was a healing experience for Rupa as well, helping her conquer her fear.
I can forgive those who were cruel due to fear. What I can't forgive is the people who support the remaining mandates now, not out of fear, or even active hatred, but out of simple indifference.
While millions of people were forced to take a shot they didn't want, on pain of loss of job or education, or exclusion from society.
I would say your "hundreds were inconvenienced for three weeks" is about right.
And the fact that peaceful assembly and due process rights were suspended across the country to privilege the elite hundreds over the harmed millions is a major reason why people are angry.
Nice! I don’t consider myself an unengaged voter but I believe it works on people like me as well. Just appreciate the term “stray voltage”, new to me but I like it and will use it. In the long run however I do think it’s a toxic addition to a system already viewed by many with cynicism. I currently have a hard time believing any politicians have the best interests of the citizenship in general at heart
"I would argue that if you understand the Trudeau government as an Obama cover band (the quality of which is entirely up to the reader), its governing philosophy makes a lot more sense."
I think this is a fantastic analogy that highlights why I find watching the ascent of Poilievre almost comical - Trudeau and his team are fighting the last war and don't know how to fight him.
I don't really want him to win - but oh, is he going to do it. In slow motion, watching an absolute annihilation of a loss is kind of funny.
Unfortunately the really hard work in politics is changing the structure of government rather than throwing money at a particular segment. It is also the most likely action to get a government criticized for errors and the least likely to get it credited for successes. What is most visible is often the least important.
I’m not surprised at the links between Obama and the Liberals. With what little time they have left after engaging in leadership adoration ceremonies and translating everything into French, political advisers find it easier to hire US consultants than actually develop a more moderate Canadian strategy. And ever since the US Supreme Court ruled in the Citizens United case that PACs could spend unlimited funds on political campaigns as long as no individual individual or party was promoted/supported, negative ads have predominated. So for instance I could legally run an ad saying the Conservative leader is the AntiChrist, but not one saying that Trudeau speaks good English. Even though this US ruling has no legal effect on Canada that I know of, it’s certainly easier and quicker to ape US practice than actually come up with something new.
This is so smart. We don't allow big political donors in Canada (good thing!), so parties have made raising money a weekly thing requiring weekly 'shocks' to convince citizens to part with their money. They help finance political events which are partisan to thank donors and keep them involved. The system feeds itself and less time is spent trying to reach consensus.
Fascinating column. I wonder if traditional non voters were always angry and you see it now b/c it is tied to politics or whether anger was whipped up?
Great article, now how do the masses react to something they know is happening to get their reaction ?
Well said. Though 'firing the central banker' was used by Chretien too, eh, well before this era of political stray voltage? By going around the legacy media, turning the tables on his opposition, I wonder how much Poilievre is circumventing this game.
Interesting article. First up from ‘Pops’ is an excellent example of why ‘stray voltage’ works. It’s a bit like Pavlovian’s dogs. In this case, the very name ‘Trudeau’ apparently elicits physical responses.
There will come a time when those slavering to take revenge, or whatever their point is, on those who they can never be will face consequences, as I hope the chap in the underwear and his female sidekick, who threatened the Deputy Prime Minister, will, in short order. I’m thoroughly sick of this small cadre of Canadians (maybe) who think they are more important than anyone else.
You guys are being used and it’s not pretty.
Succinct and on point.
See this approach in grotesque proportions in the current UPC leadership race. Barry Cooper's damn the Constitution campaign for Danielle Smith is shock politics in extreme. They know it's wrong but are doing it anyway to fill warchests and divide loyalties.
What's missing is the fact that public figures will cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war when the inevitable happens. A loser in a stained wife beater screams obscenites and the PM threatens to bring the state's security establishment down upon the heads of those that disagree with his values. Let's fsce it, Trudeau and company have been called worse in Albeta.
The politician as victim routine that came after was nauseating.
Fantastic article and while social media bears some of the blame it only reflects the underlying anxiety people feel, as Stephen Punwasi (highly recommend following him on twitter) put it
Increasingly Canadians are telling me they can't get ahead. It doesn't matter how hard they try, it just doesn't work. A household can make double the median income and still not be able to afford housing in 🇨🇦's major cities. This isn't just a Millennial issue.
More here
https://unrollthread.com/t/1564820796941508609/
I missed that you are actually implying there is something wrong with firing the governor of the Bank of Canada. The Bank had one primary mission: controlling inflation. They failed catastrophically.
Why on earth wouldn't we fire the governor? Because he tried hard and it's not fair to fire him? Seriously? Boo hoo.
When regular people are treated unfairly by the government, that's a problem. When an organization fails, removing the leader is just accountability.