Sunday, January 21, 2024

The Rise of Authoritarianism

 

Twilight of Democracy - The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

by Anne Applebaum



Some quotes:

About Putin - In a 2017 interview with Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, he (Trump) expressed his admiration for Putin, the Russian dictator, using a classic form of "whataboutism."  "But he's a killer," said O'Reilly.  "There are a lot of killers.  You think our country's so innocent?" Trump replied.  This way of speaking - "Putin is a killer but so are we all" - mirrors Putin's own propaganda.  It's an argument for moral equivalence....  It gives people the excuse to support corrupt and violent leaders.

About Laura ingraham - "The America of the present is a dark, nightmarish place where God speaks only to a tiny number of people; where idealism is dead; where civil war and violence are approaching; where democratically elected politicians are no better than foreign dictators and mass murderers; where the "elite" is wallowing in decadence, disarray and death."  "Any price should be paid, any crime should be forgiven, any outrage should be ignored if that's what it takes to get the real America, the old America, back."

From Wikipedia, a description of the author and the book.


"The Pulitzer Prize-winning author, professor, and historian offers an expert guide to understanding the appeal of the strongman as a leader and an explanation for why authoritarianism is back with a menacing twenty-first century twist.

Across the world today, from the Americas to Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege while populism and nationalism are on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum offers an unexpected explanation: that there is a deep and inherent appeal to authoritarianism, to strongmen, and, especially, to one-party rule--that is, to political systems that benefit true believers, or loyal soldiers, or simply the friends and distant cousins of the Leader, to the exclusion of everyone else.

People, she argues, are not just ideological; they are also practical, pragmatic, opportunistic. They worry about their families, their houses, their careers. Some political systems offer them possibilities, and others don't. In particular, the modern authoritarian parties that have arisen within democracies today offer the possibility of success to people who do not thrive in the meritocratic, democratic, or free-market competition that determines access to wealth and power.

Drawing on reporting in Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil; using historical examples including Stalinist central Europe and Nazi Germany; and investigating related phenomena: the modern conspiracy theory, nostalgia for a golden past, political polarization, and meritocracy and its discontents, Anne Applebaum brilliantly illuminates the seduction of totalitarian thinking and the eternal appeal of the one-party state."

There's plenty to think about in this book.

Friday, January 12, 2024

Will EVs Break the Grid?

 

Regardless of the fact that total numbers of EVs on the roads now is small and the near-impossibility that their total percentage will rise to overwhelming levels in anything less than a decade or two, it's still routine to see some climate change denier and EV alarmist insisting that "all these EVs will crash the grid", or some such poppycock.


This nonsense was raised in recent posts on (where else) Facebook, when someone posted a warning from Nelson Hydro asking that people try to restrict power use during the upcoming cold snap.  Never mind the request had to do with the cost of Nelson Hydro purchasing power from FortisBC, a few online experts immediately started worrying about how EVs were going to cause armageddon on our power grid.

Rather than spend more valuable time explaining this myself, I'm attaching a link to an article from Consumer Reports (not, so far as I'm aware, an agent of any government), that lays out why they do not feel there is any need for concern.

Can the Grid Handle EVs? Yes!

Even better, EVs could very well be used to stabilize the grid during peak hours.  More on that in a later post.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Fact Checker Nazis

 

I generally find most of the various Fact Checker sites pretty informative, but one recent situation left me wondering if one "Fact Checker" outfit was using not-very-intelligent AI to flag posts or if they were just using people with no social awareness and possibly no sense of humour.

It went like this.  I saw, and posted, this meme, along with the caption "Welcome to Texas - Home of the American Taliban".


Most people I know will recognize the literary reference to The Handmaid's Tale.  If you don't get it, best to stop reading this now, get a copy of Margaret Atwood's book and learn about it.

In any case, within hours, the Fact Checker vigilanties had flagged the meme as "False", stating that the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders had, in fact, NOT changed uniforms.  Well, Duh... was my response.

Full rationalization here....

Definition of a meme:  an amusing or interesting item, often humorous, not necessarily factual.  

As for Texas (soon to be followed by Florida, according to some)....Do a Google search for "Texas the American Taliban".  I did, and immediately (thanks Google) received dozens of articles saying exactly the same thing.  A selection:

With Texas' Abortion Ban, Who are We to Judge the Taliban?

Texas Abortion Ban Prompts Taliban Comparisons

And in the pages of Salon, Texas Lawmaker Mocked for Odd Comparison.

Even Amazon had an appropriately designed mug.

I only wish the pseudo-boffins at Fact Check were even half as vigilant about flagging false information about the supposed dangers of vaccines, how COVID is no worse than the flu, that climate change is a hoax....  Flagging those posts would perhaps give them something useful to do.


Tuesday, December 05, 2023

Counting the Lies - Just for the Record

 

One of the more notable features of Donald Trump's presidency were the egregious lies that he told, and repeated, again and again.


The Washington Post kept track.

For the record, here it is:

In 4 years, President Trump made 30,573 False or Misleading Claims.

I guess we can call them "Alternate Facts"....

Book Review - Climate Wars

 

Climate Wars

By Gwynne Dyer

Gwynne Dyer is a long-time analyst of the geopolitical world.  Here he turns his attention to what some have described as human-kind's existential crisis, climate change.

Mr Dyer writes of a time in the near future as climate change ushers in world conditions that challenge our very survival.  

The book was written in 2009, which makes reading it now all the more timely.  We've had 14 years to solve this problem.  How have we done?


Presidential Review

 

As with most parts of history, a complete perspective on the Donald Trump presidency will take years to fully develop.  In fact, if polls are to be believed, and if enough Americans remain sufficiently deluded to vote for Trump again, this part of history might not be over yet.

However, the Pew Research Center published a study based on their research during Trump's presidency.  It was published at the end of January 2021, and it only recently came to my attention.  

How America Changed During the Donald Trump Presidency

It's a pretty reasonable accounting, based on survey data conducted by Pew, and covers such topics as 

  • Partisan divides
  • Dearth of shared facts and information
  • Concerns over Democracy
  • Racial Inequality
  • The Public Health and Economic Crisis
Worth a serious read.  To varying extents, these issues have appeared elsewhere.  Useful to compare with the American experience.  My partisan opinion goes more in this direction when summarizing Trump's time in office:






Monday, November 13, 2023

Perspectives on Forest Fires

 

For some unknown reason, I was absent-mindedly wandering through an old edition (July 13th, 2023) of The Valley Voice a few days ago, and came across another "Voice from the Valley", written by one of the local sages.  Should you wish to see what attracted my attention, you can see it here, on page 4, where it's called "Wildfires".

So far as I can tell, the writer seems to be upset that forest fires have been renamed "wildfires", a term he believes is only used to scare us all.  And, of course, scaring all of us is part of the "climate change agenda", presumably being pushed by radical environmentalists, the WEF, Bill Gates, the UN, the WHO and possibly even the NHL.  I jest, of course, but the number of vocal conspiracy-minded individuals seems to have mushroomed recently.  I think COVID-19 pushed some people over the edge.  But I digress.

I just finished reading Fire Weather - The Making a Beast.


A good bit of this story describes the May 2016 fire that destroyed a few thousand homes in Fort McMurray and forced the evacuation of close to 90,000 people.  Total cost has been estimated at close to $10 billion.  In addition to destroying 2400 homes and other buildings, the fire burned 1.5 million acres and wasn't declared completely out until early August the following year.

One thing that struck me (among a list of many) were descriptions of houses being completely consumed by fire in around 5 minutes, start to finish.  The speed and ferocity of this fire's advance was startling to everyone there to witness it (mostly professional firefighters).  As the author points out, this is the way fires behave now, more like a wild beast than what we were used to.

So our local sage might believe that forest fires have been renamed just to scare us, but my observation, having read Vaillant's book, would be that our forest fires (aka: wildfires) ARE something to be VERY worried about, even scared, and maybe that's what it will take to prod us into the changes necessary to avoid worse in the future.

I wonder what the residents of West Kelowna thought as last summer's "wildfires" swept down form the hills and raged through their neighbourhoods.  Did they think "wildfire" was just a scare tactic?

Our local sage goes on to rail against the hated Carbon Tax, insisting that it's ineffective, a cash grab by government, unnecessary....you get the picture.

(For those who might have forgotten, the Carbon Tax wasn't brought in to "save the planet".  It was brought in partly to act as an incentive - financial - for people to make different energy choices.  It was also brought in as a tax on pollution, since fossil fuel burning has been polluting the atmosphere for free for decades.  In fact, the taxpayer supports billions in $$ of subsidies to the fossil fuel industry each year, just so they can keep doing what they've always done).


Danielle, of course, is still looking for arsonists.

Our local sage mentions a number of things that aren't quite the way he describes them.  For instance, Germany dismantling a wind farm to make way for more coal mining.  What he neglects to mention is that the wind farm in question had been in use since 2001, the turbines are much smaller and less efficient than current models and despite plans to phase out coal-fired power generation by 2030, there are still concerns with adequate power supply, especially in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.  This isn't happening because renewables aren't working or because climate change isn't real, as our sage tries to infer.  Two stories here in the interests of promoting more informed discussion - more easily available on the Google Machine.



Of course, this is what governments often do.  Here in Canada, despite all the nice-sounding talk, REAL action to address climate change has been tepid, at best.  

I hear talk that the next Federal Election will be a Climate Change Election.  I'm beginning to believe that will mark a turning point.  Either we will DO something or we will kick the can down the road another few years, by which time it will be even more difficult (and expensive)  to change our current trajectory.

As for Fire Weather?  Find the book and read it.  It will be well worth your time.  And if it doesn't make you afraid of your next forest fire experience, I will be very surprised.

[Update:  In an exchange on that anti-social platform run by Meta, one commenter responded to my post by name calling - socialist, communist - and pointing the finger of blame everywhere except at the very activities that contributed to making the Fort McMurray fire what it was - CO2 emissions from the oil and gas industry which are directly linked to a warmer climate which, as expected, is making forests hotter and dryer than usual, especially for that time of year.  Mr A.B. Woodpile (clearly not his real name - I often find these people don't have the guts to do anything other than hide behind fake identities) apparently doesn't realize that taxpayers paying billions in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and paying for abandoned well cleanup, messes left behind by oil and gas companies, is a classic example of socialism.

Mr Woodpile also claimed that the then-Premier, Rachel Notley, refused industry help in creating fire breaks so it was HER fault that the fire entered Ft McMurray.  The facts are that over 500 hectares of fire breaks WERE constructed in an attempt to stop the fire.  They didn't work.  The fire also jumped the Athabasca River, and thus gained access to the city, at a point where the river was close to half a kilometer wide.  This is the nature of more and more of our fires these days.  And we know why.

As an aside, during last summer's fires in the Okanagan, the West Kelowna fire jumped Okanagan Lake.  In Ft McMurray, spot fires were starting kilometers ahead of where the fire front actually was.

One other thing I discovered while looking for information related to the Ft McMurray fire.  Apparently Russia offered some of its huge fire-fighting airplanes which they use there.  The Federal government turned them down.  Why?  This was a massive fire with smoke plumes reaching up into the stratosphere.  So, very limited visibility, combined with pilots unfamiliar with the terrain.  It's a known fact that aerial accidents are the main causes of death during fire fighting operations.  It was deemed unsafe to add massive planes with unfamiliar pilots whose English language skills would likely not be that great, to an already dangerous situation in difficult terrain and conditions.

I understand that Mr Woodpile is bitter and angry, but his anger is misplaced and poorly informed.  As Jim Prentice said some years ago, look in the mirror for the source of your perceived problems.]