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.