On the N-word

     Something that one often hears white people complain about is the apparent double standard over who can use the N-word. (I'm not going to spell that word out here, but to make sure that everyone knows what word I'm talking about, I'll say that it derives from "negro", the Spanish/Portuguese word for "black", and involves a lazy vowel shift from a long 'e' to a short 'i', and dropping the final vowel, leaving a lazy 'r' as the final syllable.") 

    The double standard they complain of is that Black people are allowed to use it, but white people aren't. And superficially, you can see why they'd think this was a double standard, and a racist one at that. After all, if the only discriminant on who can do something (whether it be using a word or a water fountain) is the colour of their skin, then gosh darnit that's RACIST! But maybe there's a better way to understand this.  

    Let's look at pronouns, particularly first and second person. These are words which literally change their meaning, depending on who is speaking. When I use the word "I", it actually denotes a different individual from when you use the word. It's the exact same word, but the meaning is different. And if I type the sentence "I am the author of A Blog Of Tom", the sentence is true when I say it but (probably) false when you utter it, unless either you're me or you happen to write your own blog which just happens to have the same title as this one. 

     No one has trouble with this concept, once they master English or any of the hundreds of other languages that have relative pronouns, or indeed words like "here" and "there" or "now" and "then" or "tomorrow" and "yesterday". These words mean different things depending on where or when they are used or who is using them. 

    Well, that's kind of how it is with the N-word. Think of it as a special kind of pronoun. When a Black person uses it, it can have a meaning roughly like "one of us", whereas when a non-Black person uses it, it cannot help but mean "one of them". Of course, unlike basic pronouns, this one has a whole lot of other connotations loaded into it. As "one of us", it is inclusive, hinting at shared understanding and experience; as "one of them" it is inherently exclusive, and implies a sense of disrespect, contempt if not outright hatred. 

    So the answer to the question about who can use the N-word is really this: anyone can. It's like I taught my son when he was very little about profanity: I don't care what words you use, so long as you use them appropriately and correctly. As a white person, I could use the N-word if I wanted to, if the meaning I was trying to express was "those contemptible people". But I don't feel that way, so it would be a lie for me to use the word. And if I tried to use it to express the sense "one of us", no one would read it that way, because as a white person I don't get to use the pronoun "us" to talk about a group I don't belong to.

Here and There

     I've seen this kind of post come across my feed fairly frequently, usually from friends I don't consider at all racist. Here's the most recent specimen, with the text below for the benefit of the search engines:

Welcome

You came here from there because

you didn't like there, and now you

want to change here to be like there.

We are not racist, phobic or anti

whatever-you-are, we simply like

here the way it is and most of us

actually came here because it is

not like there, wherever there was.

You are welcome here, but please

stop trying to make here like there.

If you want here to be like there you

should not have left there to come

here, and you are invited to leave

here and go back there at your

earliest convenience.

 

     So why do I object to this meme? Well, first of course there's the "We are not racist" line, which is kind of a red flag in itself, but that's kind of how this stuff works. You start out with what sounds like a perfectly reasonable position, but there's just enough ambiguity in the terms used that you find yourself agreeing wholeheartedly to one vague interpretation and subtly, perhaps even unconsciously, opening up to the more sinister implications. 

     Here's the benign reading: We don't want peaceful, tolerant, law-abiding, free and prosperous "here" to become violent, intolerant, lawless, war-torn and impoverished "there". And sure, nobody wants that. NOBODY wants that, including most especially the immigrants who choose to come to Canada (and the refugees who have less of a choice). After all, those who choose to come here pretty much unanimously choose Canada because we have a reputation for being peaceful, tolerant and all that other stuff.

     But notice how this plants an idea in your head: that immigrants do want to change "here" to be more like "there". Since no one who comes to live here actually wants us to become the kind of oppressive tyranny/anarchy that we associate with "there", what kinds of changes do they want?

     And here's where it gets offensive, because the kinds of changes to "here" that immigrants do make in their neighbourhoods are things like opening stores and restaurants that cater to their own cultural preferences in music, clothing, food and so on. They put up signage and converse in public in languages we don't understand. They practice strange religions and have strange customs. 

     Oh sure. This is all about culture, though, so it's not racist. We just want to protect our culture; we don't care if someone's skin colour isn't right, so long as they just assimilate in every other meaningful way. Ha ha. How ridiculous, how racist it would be to expect them to change their skin! No, of course, we don't want that! We're just being reasonable here.

     This is a use of "reasonable" that I've talked about before.  Here it's used to downplay the severity of a demand: a less extreme demand is more reasonable than a more extreme one. But that doesn't mean the demand is reasonable in the sense of being the result of reason.

     There is no reason in that sense about cultural preferences. Sure, we can argue about the relative benefits of various cultural practices, and even conclude that some should be avoided or even banned, but we already have a mechanism for that within the common law tradition. And that, ultimately, is what really makes "here" better than "there": our law gives us the freedom to embrace our own cultural preferences, to dress as we like, to speak the languages we prefer, and so on. Demanding that people conform to our cultural preferences is not reasonable in that sense because it is incoherent with the fundamental value of freedom that allows us to indulge our own cultural preferences. What makes Canada a good place to live is not that we have donuts and hockey, but that we can have whatever food or sport we want.

     And those who would demand that immigrants adopt our superficial cultural practices at the expense of that basic freedom? They're the ones who are making "here" more like "there".

A Defunding Thought

     The other day in the shower, I suddenly had what seemed like a crazy idea, but I can't quite dismiss it from my head.

     When someone runs afoul of the criminal law, their first point of contact with the system is almost always the police, and this is necessarily an adversarial, conflict-ridden situation. Why do we do it this way? Obviously if the police are at the scene while a violent conflict is underway and they break up the fight, they're in a position to apprehend the suspect and hold them pending a bail hearing, but as a general procedure, do we actually need to send police to arrest someone as the first step of a criminal case?

     What if, upon investigators deciding to charge someone, before issuing a warrant they were to forward a notice to a defence lawyer, who can approach the accused in a non-threatening context, inform them of their rights and obligations, and make arrangements to respond to the charges?

      * * *

     "Excuse me, Mr. Doe?"

     "Who are you? A cop?"

     "Not at all. I'm a lawyer. Actually, I'm your lawyer for now, unless you already have or decide to hire a different one."

     "Don't need one, and I'm not gonna pay you."

     "You're not expected to pay me. This is one of the things that whole 'defund the police' business is paying for. My job is to advise you of your legal rights and obligations, and to help you through the process. And the first step in that is to inform you that a prosecutor has elected to charge you in connection with an assault alleged to have happened last Friday night outside Roe's Pub."

     "That bastard. He started it."

     "We can talk about the facts and your defense later in my office. Right now, I need you to know that there will be legal proceedings against you, and you are ordered by the court to attend on this date. You should know that if you don't show up, they'll charge you with failure to appear as well. I will be there in any event, and do my best to defend you, but I will not lie for you. And you should know that if you are convicted, the police will be coming for you."

     "They'll have to find me first."

     "Well, I found you."

     "Yeah, but I wasn't hiding."

     "You want to go into hiding for the rest of your life? Look, right now you're merely an accused, presumed innocent until proven guilty. If you don't help me defend you, it's very likely you will be proven guilty, especially if you are guilty of simply failing to show up when commanded to do so. And once you've been convicted, you will be officially a fugitive, and actual arrest warrants will be issued. Moreover, depending on the seriousness of the crime, they may implement other enforcement measures: forfeiting your Basic Income, seizing property. They'll be going to great lengths to make it more costly for you to break the law than to obey it."

     "Hmmm."

     "I know. It's a big decision. As your lawyer, I can only advise you as to what your legal options are, and legally you have no choice but to appear. I can ask the court to reschedule your appearance if this date is impossible for you, but they won't allow it if they think you're just avoiding it."

     "Okay. I'll be there."

     "Great! Now, is there a good time for you in the next week for us to talk about the case?"

     * * *

     Obviously this approach wouldn't be practical in all cases. There are going to be times when someone is apprehended in the middle of a violent crime and needs to be subdued and isolated to protect others. And this model doesn't fully address what I think are serious problems with the basic idea of incarceral justice in the first place. And there are a host of practical complications and considerations that I haven't thought of here (and a bunch of others I've deliberately not included in my example narrative). But it seems to me that the current approach of leading off with coercive force by the police, is a really bad default position to take.

All Mammals Breathe Air!

A: "Cats breathe air."
B: "ALL mammals breathe air!"

     B's statement is true, but unhelpful. It is best understood as a snarky way of saying, "I already know that." The snark is understandable if we assume that A's intention is to inform B of something new, because it's kind of insulting to be presumed not to already know that cats breathe air. Everyone knows that!
     Yes, everyone knows that. And everyone knows that everyone knows that, so it's equally insulting to presume that A doesn't already know that B knows cats breathe air.  So when someone tells you that cats breathe air, they're probably not informing you, but reminding you, calling your attention to one particular piece of common knowledge because it is immediately relevant to the situation at hand. It's one thing to know, in the abstract, that all mammals are air-breathers, but if you've forgotten to punch some holes in that cardboard box before packing Mr. Fluffy into it for a trip to the vet, it's not clear that you've fully grasped the implications of that knowledge.
     Or maybe B is misreading A's statement to mean that only cats breathe air. This is even worse; B is not just assuming that A condescendingly underestimates B's grasp of common knowledge, but that A is shockingly wrong about the common knowledge itself. One would have to be quite perversely deluded indeed to believe that dogs and deer and humans and horses don't need to breathe air, and yet B is presuming that A is just that stupid.

     In both cases, B is essentially attacking a straw man, creating a weak effigy of A's statement to attack rather than making a good faith effort to understand what A actually means. By making the argument about a perceived insult to B's intelligence, B is trying to avoid engaging with the initial statement, which is irrefutably true and actually reinforced by restating the general claim about all mammals. But not all mammals are about to be transported to the vet in a sealed cardboard box; the fact that cats, and this cat in particular, need air is the point that B is obtusely sidestepping, with potentially disastrous consequences for Mr. Fluffy.


   

Why the Conspirators in Paranoid Conspiracy Theories Are So Stupid

     First of all, not all conspiracy theories are stupid. There are actual conspiracies in the world, and therefor there can be legitimate theories about those conspiracies. What I'm talking about here are what we used to call paranoid conspiracy theories, and the reason I'm emphasizing the word "paranoid" is because the paranoid theorist really does think they're out to get him. More specifically, they think that all the evidence against their theory is deliberately concocted as a part of the conspiracy's coverup, an attempt to lead the theorist (and everyone else) astray. To the non-paranoid, a random fact is just a random fact, to be assessed and interpreted impersonally, but the paranoid sees it all as either proof of the conspiracy against them or part of the conspiracy against them.

     So that's the kind of conspiracy theory I'm talking about, the ones that involve vast powerful organizations coordinating some kind of plot that they are able somehow to conceal from everyone but our clever conspiracy theorist, who has somehow seen through the illusions to crack the case. And it's these theories that I claim are pretty much always involve a conspiracy that is remarkably stupid, or at the very least commits some remarkably stupid mistake in execution. Here are just a few examples:

The moon landings were faked to show up the Soviets!
     It's often been pointed out how ridiculously difficult it would be to successfully carry out a faked moon landing. There were about a hundred thousand people involved in the project, and keeping a secret among that many people is just preposterously difficult. But if you really did have the technical and organizational capacity to pull off this kind of massive undertaking, isn't it just a little weird that you'd make the kind of dumb mistakes that some guy can pick out from his couch? Wouldn't you think a professional moon-hoaxing organization would think to include fake stars in the background or to make a flag that didn't ripple in the windless lunar vacuum? Nope. They get tripped up by amateur mistakes that our sharp-eyed conspiracy theorist with no particular training just happens to be smart enough to notice as unusual.

9/11 was an inside job, a controlled demolition to mobilize public support to invade Iraq!
     This conspiracy would be pretty stupid on several levels, not least of which is that if you want to engineer an invasion of Iraq, you don't have to blow up any buildings; all you have to do is make up some story about WMDs. Telling one simple lie is way cheaper and easier than orchestrating a hugely destructive hoax. But hey, let's say that some nefarious conspiracy staged it for some other reason, like to collect on insurance. That conspiracy would still have to be fantastically stupid to make the kinds of mistakes that the conspiracy theorists point to as their evidence of the conspiracy. If some amateur can notice that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel beams, then presumably the conspirators would also have considered this and chosen something more plausible -- unless, of course, the amateur is just wrong in thinking that steel beams need to be liquified before they'll fail. (A stick of butter right out of the fridge can support considerably more weight than one at room temperature, though both remain solid.)

Big Pharma is concealing the cure to cancer, because it's more profitable to sell treatments than cures!
     There are thousands and thousands of very smart people all over the world working to find cures for cancer, and most of them have loved ones who have died or will die of cancer. Can you imagine just how astoundingly powerful a conspiracy would have to be to get all of these people to cooperate with a coverup? Now, if you had that kind of power and influence, why on earth would you need to even pretend you were selling cancer treatments in the first place, since you could almost certainly do much better for yourself by using that power more directly. It's like Dr. Evil demanding One MILLION dollars; you've got this super futuristic orbital base and a global empire of henchmen, and you're using it to chase a mere million dollars?

Sandy Hook was faked to stir up support for gun control!
     Right. This dreadfully evil cabal intent upon taking away your guns so they can impose martial law and do away with all liberty, hires a bunch of "crisis actors" and coordinates a fake shooting only to be discovered by a sharp-eyed patriot who recognizes the same crisis actors being used for something else. But somehow the cabal isn't quite smart enough to realize they could achieve the same goal with less risk of being caught if they just, you know, manipulated some loser into shooting up a school for real. Or maybe they wouldn't do that because they're not actually so evil after all. Or something.

     I could go on, because there's a whole lot of goofy conspiracy theories out there, but there should be a pretty clear pattern by now: superhumanly competent and powerful and organized conspiracies doing incredibly sophisticated things, but also making really obviously stupid mistakes. The point here isn't that smart people don't make stupid mistakes sometimes, but usually the mistakes they make take some kind of digging to identify, and only really seem stupid in retrospect. Industrial disasters get investigated in great detail by experts who usually have to work very hard to uncover some sequence of subtle but critical failures that all combined to produce a Chernobyl or a Hindenburg. It's usually not some one dumb screwup.

     So why is it that these conspiracies always seem to be simultaneously superhuman in capacity, and embarrassingly stupid at the same time?

     It's because ultimately, the thing that makes a conspiracy theory take root is that it strokes the ego of the conspiracy theorist; it makes them feel smarter than everyone else. The theorist is the one person, or one of the privileged few, smart enough to have seen through the lies of the conspirators, which have fooled everyone else. And so there is a hard limit on how smart the conspirators can be: they must be just not quite as clever as the conspiracy theorist who has unmasked them.
     Notably, the actual organizational details of what the conspirators are actually doing are always glossed over or treated in the abstract. The 9/11 Truther doesn't provide an org chart of who acquired the explosives and who installed them and how they were concealed and how the planes were coordinated; they just say it was done. So they don't really need to conceive of all of the details of the plan, and in this respect there's always a Dunning-Kruger level of incompetence. The theorist has absolutely no idea just how much would be involved in trying to fake a moon landing or conceal a cancer cure, and has no idea even of how little they know about the problems involved. These things are literally easier said than done, and all the theorist has to do is say them.
     Similarly, the clues noticed by the theorist that let them unravel the whole conspiracy are always just simple enough to be detected by the theorist's own expertise/talent, which by the conceits of the theory are necessarily superior to everyone else's. So the Apollo skeptic assumes they know enough about the moon and cameras and optics to be able to accurately predict whether stars should be visible, and that the supposed experts staging the faked moon landings wouldn't know this stuff better. The 9/11 Truther assumes they know enough about demolition to spot the mistakes made by the conspiracy's demolition experts. And so on.
   
     And that's why it's so hard to defeat conspiracy theories with facts and logic, because they're ultimately not about facts and logic. They're about feeling superior, special, enlightened.

Some Scary Thoughts About Viruses

     There was no vaccine for chickenpox when I was a kid in the 1970's, and it was considered inevitable and indeed preferable to catch it as a kid, since it tends to be more serious to catch it as an adult. I remember it as both a novelty and an inconvenience; sure, I itched a bit, but no big deal, and I knew it would go away soon enough. Most people my age have a chickenpox scar or two, but it was really no big deal.
     And that's to be expected in a virus that's been circulating in the human population since forever. There's a principle in evolutionary biology: parasites tend to evolve towards becoming symbiotes over time. That's because parasites eventually need to spread their offspring to new hosts, and if you kill off your host too quickly, you may find it harder to find new hosts to infect (unless you evolve some kind of complex life cycle that involves infecting the animal that eats your current host.) Chickenpox doesn't significantly impact the survivability of the average human child who catches it, so it has plenty of opportunity to infect lots of other human children.
     But humans have immune systems, and quickly fight off chickenpox within a week or so, and in the process learn to recognize the zoster virus so you're typically immune to it for the rest of your life. And this is a bit of a problem for zoster, because if it spreads rapidly through a small group of hunter-gatherers, and then everyone is immune, the virus has no new hosts to infect.
     Zoster has a clever solution, which I learned about last year. See, you don't actually get rid of the virus entirely. Some of them find their way into the nervous system and hide out there for a few decades, and then make their way back down to the skin and appear as a new disease: shingles. This means that the virus has a whole new crop of young people to infect, who were born after the last outbreak ended. And so the virus persists well into the future.

     The virus that causes Covid-19, named SARS-cov-2, had been circulating among some population of bats for a long time, but it only entered the human population about five months ago. That means we have no idea whatsoever what its long term effects are. Most people only suffer a minor cold-like infection and get over it -- we think. Many people have had it and recovered -- we think. But we just don't know what's going to happen one or ten or thirty years after exposure. The initial infection with HIV is very much like coming down with the flu, and clears up after a week or so and is forgotten, but then can take ten years or more before it damages the immune system enough to develop into AIDS. For all we know, people who've "recovered" from Covid-19 might suddenly start dropping dead of mysterious blood clots, six months after getting the all clear. There have, after all, been reports of higher rates of strokes and heart attacks, and strange blood concentrations in the toes of young people; the virus does seem to be having some kind of effect besides just causing respiratory problems.

     For that matter, maybe they develop superhuman endurance and a ravenous hunger for human brains, and this is the start of the zombie apocalypse for real.

     Now, I don't think that's likely at all. I'm not a biologist or a physician or an epidemiologist, but I suspect that we probably won't see too much in the way of unexpected long-term effects from the virus. But the point is that we just don't know right now.
     If we assume that Covid-19 is just a really, really bad cold that kills 1-2% of the people who catch it, then you can sort of make the argument that once we've had enough people get sick and recover, the health care system can handle anyone who gets infected later when we ease all the mask wearing and social distancing rules. We haven't reached the point where that's a good idea yet, but you can make the argument.
     But I argue that since we do not know what else this virus may do in the long run, we should therefore be a little more cautious about opening everything up than we would be if we knew this was just a very bad cold. Spreading out the infections over a longer time is better than having them all at once, even if everyone is eventually infected, but it's still better yet never to be infected at all, especially with such a new and poorly-understood virus. So I urge patience. Let's beat this thing.

Exit Strategy: Take the Money and Run

     The oil industry has been a big deal here in Alberta for decades; our two NHL teams are the Oilers and the Flames, and while the latter started out as the Atlanta Flames (named for the burning of Atlanta during the Civil War), they kept the nickname when they moved to Calgary because it was evocative of the flare stacks you see at oil refineries. And our provincial government has long been increasingly friendly to oil interests, to the point where it's fair to say they govern for their exclusive benefit.
     For example, for many years the provincial Conservative Party had set the royalty rates on oil and gas at below the market value recommended by independent economists. They also were very lax about enforcing rules on setting aside money to clean up abandoned oil wells, so it's been a common practice for wells to be operated by small throwaway corporations who conveniently go bankrupt before having to properly rehabilitate spent well sites. Alberta has thousands of orphan wells, with an estimated cleanup cost in the tens of billions, according to this CBC story.

    The corruption and entitlement of the Conservative Dynasty reached a peak in 2015, when there was just enough anger among the electorate (and division among conservative factions) to allow the New Democratic Party to form a government. They had a steep learning curve, but they were doing a pretty good job starting to repair the damage. But the old Progressive Conservative party and the Wild Rose Party merged to form the United Conservative Party and, with a very well-funded campaign vilifying the NDP, managed to retake a majority in the provincial legislature.

    I had thought, at the time, that their long term game plan would stay the same: pander to the oil companies for as long as they can, and if worse comes to worst and their opponents get elected, blame all of the long-term damage from their own policies on the four years of their opponents trying to fix that damage, and get re-elected to continue oil service.
    But lately that has shifted in a very sinister way. The very first thing the UCP did when they won the provincial election last year was announce a major business tax cut, ostensibly to help create jobs.  (It did not have that effect. Husky Oil, one of the bigger beneficiaries of the reduced taxes, announced layoffs shortly afterwards.) And the UCP has been making truly devastating cuts to education and health care (yes, even health care, in the middle of a pandemic). And just last week, a government pension fund lost $4 billion on an unusually risky investment.

    I don't think this is business as usual. I think what's happening is that the oil companies are recognizing that oil isn't coming back. Investment in and demand for sustainable alternative sources of energy continues to grow, while fossil fuels are becoming at the very least unfashionable. And the pandemic is, among other things, getting people talking about how blue the skies are and how maybe we don't need to fly or drive everywhere quite so much. This will pass, and -$35 a barrel oil futures are almost certainly an anomaly, but the future just doesn't look all that rosy for the oil industry, and they know it.
     So what would you do, if you realized that your long term prospects for extracting wealth from the ground were effectively at an end? The sensible-self-interested strategy would be to liquidate all the assets you could from your oil-production business and get the hell out. Abandon your spent wells and leave someone else to pay for cleaning them up, but on a much bigger scale.

     How big a scale? How about a whole province? For decades, it was worthwhile to keep Alberta functioning as an advanced oil-extraction support system. They needed smart engineers and geologists and technicians, and so it was worth it to spend money on education, and on a robust health care system to support the work force. But now, with the future of oil in doubt, investing in all these other things doesn't really benefit the oil interests. That's why the UCP is making such drastic cuts to everything, while dumping as much money into "supporting" the oil industry as possible. But those subsidies aren't going to attract new investment in developing Alberta's oil resources. It's part of the process of draining as much value out of the asset as possible while they still can, that asset being the provincial government itself. It's time for them to take the money and run.

     It's not that Premier Jason Kenny and his cabinet are unaware that their policies will leave Alberta in a desperate mess when their term is over and they face another election. It's that they don't care. They may still have enough financial backing from the oil industry to hang on for another election, but even if they don't, they know they're in the endgame already. If they lose the next election, then the mess they've made will be someone else's problem. That was the plan all along.