Monday Morning Links

Miscellaneous material to start your week.

- Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor write about the rise of end-times fascism - and its connection to the long-standing project among the wealthiest few to survive environmental and social destruction from gated communities. Sam Freedman discusses the authoritarisn bent of self-professed "libertarians" who want the vast majority of people to be stripped of any agency to maximize their freedom to exploit the general public. Noah Berlatsky writes that the Trump regime's constant lying and gaslighting serves as an end in itself by making it difficult to combat abuses with facts. And Greg Sargent talks to Leah Litman about the public threat of politically-motivated prosecutions of elected officials who represent their constituents rather than allowing themselves to be used as tools of an autocrat. 

- Paul Krugman examines how Donald Trump's perpetually-shifting tariffs could hardly have been designed to avoid accomplishing any of their theoretical goals - particularly in light of Hafiz Rashid's report that nobody's actually collecting them. And Jessica Wildfire discusses the difference between progressive development based on ingenuinty and hard work, and the capitalist idea of "success" based on variance and leverage. 

- Angella MacEwen offers a warning about the dangers of "polite austerity" as Mark Carney's plans for cuts in real social funding for receive little attention. And Luca Caruso-Moro reports on new Statistics Canada data showing that investors cleaned up in 2024 while wages dropped. 

- Adam King writes about the need for the Canadian left to rebuild electoral power. Armine Yalnizyan writes that the "Canada is not for sale" movement needs to reckon with the important institutions which are already under the control of foreign capital. And Max Fawcett points out that any Con posturing about standing up to the Trump regime is utterly implausible when their plans involve being tied even more tightly to the U.S. 

- Finally, Will Adams offers a peek at the concentrated racism and hatred at the core of the Cons' public events. Olivia Bowden examines how the younger manosphere has become the one significant addition to the Cons' electoral coalition. And Deirdre Mitchell-Maclean points out that the separatists being encouraged by Danielle Smith and the UCP are just as much a threat to Alberta as they are to Canada.

On guardrails

There seems to be a general (and rightful) consensus that Elon Musk's demand to eliminate all regulations as a baseline position is high on the list of his unauthorized plans, based solely on libertarian fervour and wilful ignorance, which stand to create catastrophic risks for the American public. 

But if we recognize that compulsive deregulation is one of the most obvious and dangerous symptoms of antisocial corporatist disease, shouldn't we also recognize that it's worth defending our governments' ability to enact protections in the public interest - rather than using Trump's administration as an excuse to subject ourselves to the same type of presumption that all regulations should be invalid in Canada? 

Update: See more from Chris Roberts and Stuart Trew, as well as Dougald Lamont. 

[Edit: fixed wording.]

Friday Morning Links

Assorted content to end your week.

- Ed Yong laments the U.S.' particularly dangerous spin through the pandemic cycle of panic and neglect as it is eliminating all federal funding even as the most dangerous COVID-19 wave yet begins to crest, while Phil Tank calls out Scott Moe's cherry-picked appeal to public opinion as overriding any sense of responsibility to keep people safe and healthy. And Maija Kappler discusses how the Omicron BA.2 variant is taking over as the dominant strain in Canada, while Chris Herhalt and CTV News report on its rise in Ontario and Alberta respectively. 

- Joel Dryden writes about the fallout from the #FluTruxKlan's heavily-armed assault on the Coutts, AB border crossing. And Jessica McDiarmid and Mark Fawcett investigate how much of the Facebook content claiming to reflect grassroots local concerns from a right-wing perspective is in fact the product of Conservative-affiliated political operatives, while Geoff Dembicki reports on the role of Canada Proud in particular in systematically disseminating climate misinformation. 

- Meanwhile, Thom Hartmann writes about the role of the libertarian message injected into the political mainstream by Ronald Reagan in enriching the already-wealthy while making life ever more precarious for everybody else. And Patrick Radden Keefe discusses how Vladimir Putin's oligarch cronies have found welcoming servants in London (and elsewhere) when throwing around the money extracted from their home country.  

- Finally, Victoria Gibson reports on new research showing that the Libs' model for privately-developed housing development is allowing private rental landlords to access federal funding while still charging above-market rents. 

On glibertarianism

One of the more obvious points of convergence in political thought over the past 70-80 years is the greater appreciation of systemic complexity - the recognition that different decisions by many types of actors may collide in unpredictable ways, with the results potentially far outweighing the perceived impact of any single action and reaching people who may have had no idea their interests were affected.

That recognition in turn gives rise to two broad public policy responses: to seek to have a government equipped to identify the risks posed by factors which no other party has the means or will to address, or to give up and leave ourselves at the mercy of forces which interact in ways which we don't even try to anticipate.

Suffice it to say that Andrew Coyne's response to the Lac-Mégantic rail explosion is staking out some rather extreme territory in the latter camp.

Here's Coyne trying to isolate the specific circumstances of the explosion in order to treat the issue as one which doesn't call for an immediate response:

Consider what a singular convergence of events was required to bring it about. A highly flammable cargo; an unattended train; parked on a hill; on the main track, not a siding; above a town; far enough from town to build up great speed; and, as a final piece, that fatal bend in the track as it entered town. If any one of those is not present, no disaster and no deaths. But even if all are, you still need two more: the failure (so it seems) of the air brakes; and the failure (so it is alleged) to lock the hand brakes.

Now, may be true that Coyne's list of factors is indeed extremely unusual. But I'm fairly sure the right answer to "how many towns could see the same type of disaster?" is "we don't know, and should probably find out" - not "one - and since it's already been blown to smithereens, let's not worry our pretty little heads about it."

And indeed, a closer look at those same factors reveals some rather important decisions not to consider possible public safety issues:

Consider what a singular convergence of events was required to bring it about. A highly flammable cargo whose transportation has never been subject to a specific regulatory evaluation; an unattended train which is permitted by regulation; parked on a hill which should presumably be known to the rail operator and regulators alike; on the main track, not a siding which should presumably be known to the rail operator and regulators alike; above a town which should presumably be known to the rail operator and regulators alike; far enough from town to build up great speed which should presumably be known to the rail operator and regulators alike; and, as a final piece, that fatal bend in the track as it entered town which had been pointed out by concerned residents. If any one of those is not present, no disaster and no deaths. But even if all are, you still need two more: the failure (so it seems) of the air brakes; and the failure (so it is alleged) to lock the hand brakes.

Again, this brings us back to the core question of how to deal with complexity. Should we simply ignore risks in the name of minimizing our own costs, presuming that somebody else (and in this case, a private operator devoted to shipping the most product for the least cost) will bother to identify what needs to be done in order to avoid public tragedies? Because the evidence from Lac-Mégantic (and an ongoing series of spills, derailments, explosions and other disasters) doesn't exactly support the "let somebody else do it" argument.

Moreover, it seems equally obvious that other "convergences of events" might come about elsewhere. And that's precisely why we need a regulatory structure equipped to evaluate the distinct threats facing all sorts of communities and ensure that they're being avoided to the extent possible - rather than one based on allowing private operators to self-report on standardized checklists as the primary precondition for carrying out dangerous activities.

But sadly, we have a government more interested in slashing public services than making them work - which is an issue we should be discussing regardless of whether a particular regulatory tweak would have been necessary or sufficient on its own within the complex array of factors which might have stopped the Lac-Mégantic tragedy. And yes, the aftermath of a preventable disaster is probably the best possible time to highlight the fact that we should be making some effort to prevent disasters.

Speaking of which, I haven't even reached the most galling part of Coyne's take:

There are things we could do, without a doubt, that would preclude another Lac-Mégantic altogether. We could make the cars out of titanium, or reroute the lines around towns, or take out the bends. But are the costs, potentially high, worth the risk: vanishingly small? We could ban carrying oil by train, but other methods, as I’ve mentioned, have their own risks — and what of the vast number of other hazardous materials that also travel by rail?

Put in its most charitable light, one might read this passage as referring solely to probabilities - to the exclusion of any talk about the cost imposed on innocent parties should the possibility materialize. But surely any rational calculation of risk includes some consideration of both. (Paging Dan Gardner on this one.)

And I'm far from willing to consider this...

...to be a vanishingly small cost incurred in the fulfillment of the apparent highest possible good of ripping carbon from the ground and burning it.

Thursday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your afternoon reading.

- Andrew Potter comments on Samara's most recent findings about federal politicians in Canada:

Samara’s findings underscore the profound amateurism that permeates our national politics. When the vast majority of members of Parliament, upon leaving office, feel obliged to insist that well, they never really wanted to be a politician in the first place, that only reinforces the broad cynicism that many people feel toward public life. After all, if our members of Parliament don’t take their jobs all that seriously, why should anyone else?

To amplify that point a bit, it raises the question of who is ultimately responsible for the health of Canada’s democracy. Institutions are not buildings, they are sets of norms and procedures designed to achieve certain goals, and being “institutionalized” simply means that you accept those norms and are committed to keeping them healthy. Parliament’s central function is to enable representative self-government, which in our system involves working within and through institutional structures that are centuries old.

But the cult of the outsider that Samara has discovered among departing parliamentarians suggests that a large number of MPs see themselves as just too cool for school. One of the most belaboured themes of Canadian public discourse is that our political system is dysfunctional. If that is true, maybe it is because they people we send to Ottawa didn’t bother thinking about why they were going there in the first place.

Meanwhile, it's also worth noting that much of the breakdown in institutional norms in Ottawa (with the Cons in particular exercising constant central control in pushing the envelope for their own purposes at every opportunity regardless of what custom, logic or human decency might dictate) would figure to be exacerbated by a set of MPs who themselves don't see any particular value in the system that's being unwound.

- Speaking of which, the Cons' legislation which was supposed to reduce partisanship in federal hiring turns out only to have made matters worse.

- Aaron Wherry nicely skewers a few of his fellow journalists for trying to conjure up in-fighting within the NDP. My money's on this becoming the next example.

- Doug Saunders is right to note that Belgium's test case in a country functioning without an effective government should give pause to the. But let's note that while recognizing the flaws in libertarian rhetoric, he seems far too willing to accept their trope that the only purpose of a governing coalition would be to engage in austerity and public benefit cuts.

- Finally, the NDP leadership rules have been unveiled here (PDF). Naturally, I'll have more to discuss about those in a future post.