for those interested

It looks right when you turn it vertically, too.

But conceptually, I like the simplicity of the original rainbow. It’s a spectrum, all visible light, so it represents the natural diversity of life, and ergo there’s no reason to add anything to it because it already implicitly includes everything.

I always felt like it could look better, though, if we took more artistic liberty with colours. I don’t know how it was originally made, but at some point everybody settled on a version that looks like they just clicked the default colours and hit send without tweaking it at all.

I’m not an art student fluent in colour theory nonsense, but here, I tried to make a rainbow flag that looks better to me:

This is an example of a collective action problem. If the entire world was on board, then I say shut down all oil and gas, no new pipelines, nothing. I’m on board, because then we could actually accomplish this and literally save the planet. But currently, the world is fucking crazy and half the largest economies are governed by 70-year-old climate change deniers. Even if Canada reverted to medieval farming and had zero emissions, this place is fucked until that changes.

The realistic path to a green economy, and a future with less horrible foreign policy driven by oil dependence, is investing in that future, of course, but it’s most likely also expanding our domestic oil and gas sector in the meantime. The economic and political benefit is simply too much to ignore.

And the political reality, too: I wrote the above as though I’m an all-powerful government that can approach the issue rationally, but if you don’t manage the economy well enough, voters will reject you and vote in the same right-wing climate change deniers I mentioned, and they’re strip away environmental protections even harder, probably without even investing in the future. So then you lose either way.

This is the reasoning for why, even though I’ve said climate change is probably the single most important issue humanity faces, I’m in favour of the Canadian government expanding our oil and gas sector, reducing carbon taxes, or scaling back our goals for reducing emissions, to whatever degree they deem is appropriate as part of a broad economic agenda. The only thing we shouldn’t touch is whatever is required of us by any international agreement that other large industrial economies are also following.

Revisiting some of it as an adult, it’s much easier to articulate. The Simpsons is horrible and depressing. It’s a mirror world, a parody of ours, where everything and everybody sucks. It’s one of the most misanthropic articles of American culture.

It’s about Homer, who’s just some random idiot, who in the beginning is at least sort of a well-meaning person, but as the show goes on even that becomes questionable. His family is stupid and dysfunctional, which is probably largely his fault considering he’s a physically abusive alcoholic father. Despite their house being weirdly large, it’s intended to be low quality and the family constantly on the brink financially, despite Homer giving up on all his dreams to work a job he hates trying to maintain stability.

Speaking of which, his job sucks. He doesn’t like it, he’s not remotely competent at it. His boss mistreats everybody and is a criminal if not downright evil. The police are all stupid incompetents, the town is run by a horribly corrupt and cynical mayor who gets reëlected anyway because everyone in the town is stupid.

There’s a priest character who’s dry, petty, and burned out, basically just showing up and doing his job as a 9 to 5 without caring. The only person in the show with a positive disposition at all is their neighbour, Ned, whom Homer despises and whose positivity is just something to make fun of. as the writers destroy his life and take everything from him for laughs.

Homer spends his free time at a bar run by a depressed, suicidal incel who’s jealous of his wife, alongside his stupid alcoholic friends, one of whom has completely destroyed his life drinking and whom the show gives no relief or redemption (the punchline is “haha, this guy used to be happy and functional, but now he’s a miserable fat alcoholic!” and that’s it).

The children’s television is all mindless crap, orchestrated by Krusty, who’s a cynical, drug-addicted criminal who shamelessly does whatever gets him paid.

I also really dislike their portrayal of the elderly. Every older person in the show is portrayed horribly. It’s like they’re all dementia patients who sit around doing nothing and having no value to society whatsoever. It feels downright hateful, like everybody in the writing room had a bad relationship with their grandparents.

In each riding throughout the country, we vote in somebody to elect us in the House of Commons, serving as members of Parliament (MPs). The party with the most seats in the House becomes the governing party, meaning they control the Canadian Ministry, our executive branch. The leader of the governing party becomes Prime Minister (PM), meaning, among other things, that it’s up to them to appoint MPs to serve as ministers, hence the name Ministry. The collection of ministers is also called the Cabinet.

This is a very weird lawsuit because it’s not even an AI story. It’s literally just that back when they were making this movie 20 years ago, they looked at various women as inspiration for designing this animated character, and one of them was this girl, who somehow found out years later. Now she’s suing, calling this exploitation and theft, not only of her face but her biological identity and cultural heritage.

Is this really where we are? To be inspired by something while drawing your character is exploitation and theft?

They also appear to claim that if someone is inspired by your appearance, then draws a cartoon, then later has that cartoon do anything sexual, that’s actually the same as deepfake pornography.

Wow, did you guys know that when the Na’vi did that hair-connection thing in the first movie, you were watching child porn? Neither did I.

The part they don’t explain (not that it’s well hidden—they just hope you don’t think about it) is that what this shows is a strong and consistent preference for the Liberals over the Conservatives, because the vast majority of people who vote for our smaller parties (the NDP, Green, and Bloc) would vote LPC if it were a vote just between those two parties. (The purple one, the PPC, is the only other right-wing party.) The Bloc isn’t always more left than right, so it depends, and I’m not saying we can count all third-part voters as would-be Liberal votes. But if Canada held a big referendum that was simply Liberal Party versus Conservative Party, the result would, by all indication, be a Liberal landslide. And this has been the cast for decades now. The Conservative Party only stands any chance at all because they consolidated the right vote, and our system still rewards being the largest plurality.

This is the hard problem of the Conservative Party of Canada: when you get down to it, they just aren’t a good reflection of Canada. They don’t represent Canadians. They just don’t, the same way the NDP or PPC don’t. The majority of Canadians, the average in Canada, want something to the left of the Conservatives. And you’re not going to solve that with memes. You can’t just sit there waiting for the Liberals to screw up and then say ‘eh? how about us?’ and expect to gain any long-term support from that. It gives you a boost every now and then, but the underlying issue is that people fundamentally don’t like what you stand for. To change this, you have to change the party. That’s why so many people have been saying the Conservatives should move on from Poilievre: not because he isn’t popular with Conservative voters (he is), but because he’s somebody who’s dug in to his own way of being, he doesn’t like to change course, he never changes his mind about anything, he says so himself.

Why is this so? Why can’t a country both hold debt and hold investments at the same time? I have no idea. And unfortunately, none of the people making this retort made any effort to explain or elaborate. I’ve heard people talk about wanting a sovereign wealth fund in Canada before, and people wanting one in the U.S. as well (which it supposedly committed to doing earlier this year). And I don’t remember anyone saying a requirement to have a sovereign wealth fund was we had to solve our debt and become a net surplus nation first. That seems like something everybody “decided” in response to Carney’s announcement. And to be sure, a government holding certain funds it manages in this way is not that uncommon, not even a totally new thing for Canada, and certainly not limited to surplus nations. The opposition’s talking point is made up, shallow, contrived, meant only to offer the appearance of a rebuttal for people who will pay attention to the news for no more than a few seconds.

The only real question was where the money to spend on making the investment was going to come from. And obviously for Canada, since we don’t have a bunch of government-owned oil companies to draw revenue from (like Saudi Arabia, say), the principal is going to be either taxation, borrowing, or both — the same way we pay for literally everything. If the government expands healthcare, or builds a pipeline, or increases our military spending, that’s all paid for with taxes or borrowing. And the government gave us its answer: they planned on borrowing money for seed funds, because Canada is considered a very safe debtor internationally, so we can borrow at very low rates. Then part of what we’re going to do with that money is invest broadly in our own national infrastructure and energy economy, since we’re also planning on expanding in those areas. So it will be a strategic tool for the country and only grow more effective over time. The one component of it that sounded unusual — which isn’t to say bad, necessarily, but unusual — is their plan to let anybody invest in the fund, meaning if you throw your money in, you’ll get a share of the returns for that money, like any other investment.

After the government announced it was going to be seeded with borrowed money, the opposition talking point became comparing it with a credit card. The whole plan was compared with a person being in credit card debt, and then taking out even more credit card debt to invest in the stock market. The opposition leader, Mr. Poilievre, called it the credit card budget, and said Liberals are just putting “more bills on the national credit card.” What makes this appealing rhetoric is that normal people view credit card debt as bad, but the reason credit card debt is bad is that it’s given to you at such high rates. It’s not inherently bad to hold any debt at all. It’s possible to hold too much of it, and for it to become a problem, but within some limit debt is good. It lets you spend future money before you could access it otherwise. That’s why people borrow money. It’s why every successful person has debt, it’s why every big company has debt, it’s why most countries have debt. The idea that debt is bad because credit card debt is bad is a supreme act of oversimplification.

First, the Nazis never used the term ‘Nazi’. There was no Nazi Party or Nazi Germany, officially. They called the party the Nationalsozialistische such and such. It was common in German at the time to abbreviate things by taking the first syllables of things and adding an ‘i’, thus a social democrat might be called a sozi (in German, it was ‘sozialdemokrat’). An advocate of Nationalsocialism might then be called a nati, but they used ‘Nazi’ because it looked more like ‘sozi’, already a more established term, and because ‘Nazi’, by happy coincidence, had another meaning: a folk name for a clumsy moron. It was short for Ignatz, a German given name that doesn’t have a common English equivalent, though if you’ve seen The Princess Bridge you should remember a character named Inigo (the “you killed my father, prepare to die” guy), which is its Spanish form. It became a stereotypical name in some parts of Germany for a peasant and was therefore made fun of through jokes and plays. An American equivalent might be calling somebody ‘Jimbob’ or some other stereotypical ‘redneck’ name. Imagine if there was a new fascist political party in the U.S. and their abbreviation was the JMBOB Party or something, so we all started calling their followers Jimbobs, because that sort of works and is also funny.

How do we interpret these results? Well, the dark red on the far left is the Communist Party of Germany, the KDP. The brown on the far right is the Nazi Party, the NSDAP (formally, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party). The other parties were of diverse opinions, but most of them found unity in a simple platform: democracy is good, and extremist groups (Communists and Nazis) who want to dismantle democracy are bad.

From the German republic’s founding in 1918 until the elections in 1932 (the elections immediately after this one), there was a coalition government formed by numerous parties, always including at least the Social Democratic Party and the Centre Party, as well as other smaller parties. (The German National People’s Party, the main right-wing party before the Nazis came along, was the largest other party not part of the coalition.)

It wasn’t until the election after this one that everything changed. The Great Depression severely affected Germany, more so than any country outside the U.S. and the UK. The parliament was in a period of disagreement and gridlock. Meanwhile, the Nazi propaganda machine was now working in full force, pushing the narrative that the Germany government, especially the the Jews, had sold out the German people through the Treaty of Versailles, and that’s the real reason everything was going so badly. The goal was hatred and blame for the current establishment, and to inspire belief in an unseen conspiracy of traitors that needed to be rooted out.

There was also a very real fear of Communism coming to Germany. Germans knew about the Russian Revolution, they knew the Soviet Union was meddling in their politics, and the German Communist leader was even an admirer of Stalin, the Russian dictator, and wanted to bring that style of rule to Germany. The Nazis positioned theirselves as the only force that could put a stop to this and stand up to the Red menace. This was a major factor in driving moderates to their side, choosing them as the lesser of two evils in a battle to come.

The area of life where you hear about rational ignorance most is voting in elections for public office. To research two different politicians and decide which of them is better is time-consuming and more importantly doesn’t benefit you much. It’s easier to either not vote or just vote for the person who gave you the best first impression without bothering to read anything. There is truth to this, though it’s often presented absent the fact there is benefit, socially and psychologically, for voting, and for feeling as though you’ve done the right thing by voting well. It’s not truly a pointless activity. But some of us learn far more than is necessary or practical because we find it interesting and it becomes a hobby or passion. This is the case for me and if you’re reading this there’s a good chance it is for you as well. For most people in your society this is not the case. They don’t find politics interesting and ergo there is a limit to the depths of what they’re willing to learn.

For those people, what I believe is best is for them to embrace their ignorance about policy questions. What should our budget look like, what people should be appointed to what cabinet positions, what kind of policy should the environmental minister pursue, what should our housing policy be, how should our foreign relations be managed, how should our healthcare system be restructured? These are complicated questions. They don’t have simple answers. There are people who dedicate their careers to coming up with the correct answers, and you’re not them, so chances are you have no idea what the best way forward is in these areas. And that’s not a problem, provided we understand this and act accordingly.

I was speaking with somebody the other day who said they didn’t care that much about whether a politician seemed like a good person or told the truth or how well they conducted theirselves in general because in their mind a politician is just a means to an end, where that end is policy they agree with. They simply vote for the policy they want, regardless of the personal qualities of the politician who’s going to deliver it. To me, this feels like something you would only say if you knew the conduct of your preferred politicians wasn’t good. If your party was made up of good, admirable, honest people and the opposition party was made up of crooks and liars, it’s hard to believe you would shrug and say personal conduct doesn’t matter. It feels more like how somebody copes with playing a game and losing by acting like they didn’t care about winning anyway. But even if that weren’t the case, and this person truly, honestly, from the bottom of their heart doesn’t care about politicians’ conduct so long as the policy is good, even in the event their party is the one acting better, I simply couldn’t disagree more.

When things go wrong, when problems arise, when an office or taskforce needs to function and get its job done, it’s very important that you have good, competent people in those positions to make smart decisions, who are going to choose to do the right thing. Leaders need to be competent, but they also need to have good character, and that’s where I tend to end up focusing most when evaluating different politicians. And crucially for my broader point, judgment of character is more accessible to the average person than judgment of the efficacy of policy proposals. When you go in to vote, you should be asking yourself who in the race is the person of good wit, of good character, and who is a reflection of your values or attitudes about what problems in society ought to be addressed. So, let’s say you’re at a party convention and one person is an inexperienced moron: of course, we cross that name out. Then say a person has a criminal history and lies to us about various things: we cross those names out, too. Then it’s a matter of choosing the person who’s trying to represent you, values wise. Then put your trust in leadership and leave the “how?” to them. They’re the ones who specialize in making laws, in running committees and departments, who will consult with relevant experts to determine effective policy in areas you care about, and so on.