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"Who is Mark Carney, Canada's new prime minister?"

I asked my friends and followers on Bluesky about Carney yesterday and the responses were generally positive.

Among the replies:

Excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free"

Book blurb:

First published in 1955, They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.” “These ten men were not men of distinction,” Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis.

An excerpt:

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn't make people close to their government to be told that this is a people's government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was 'expected to' participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one's energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time."

"Those," I said, "are the words of my friend the baker. 'One had no time to think. There was so much going on.'"

"Your friend the baker was right," said my colleague. "The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your 'little men,' your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

"How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—'Resist the beginnings' and 'Consider the end.' But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have. And everyone counts on that might.

"Your 'little men,' your Nazi friends, were not against National Socialism in principle. Men like me, who were, are the greater offenders, not because we knew better (that would be too much to say) but because we sensed better. Pastor Niemöller spoke for the thousands and thousands of men like me when he spoke (too modestly of himself) and said that, when the Nazis attacked the Communists, he was a little uneasy, but, after all, he was not a Communist, and so he did nothing; and then they attacked the Socialists, and he was a little uneasier, but, still, he was not a Socialist, and he did nothing; and then the schools, the press, the Jews, and so on, and he was always uneasier, but still he did nothing. And then they attacked the Church, and he was a Churchman, and he did something—but then it was too late."

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, 'everyone' is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, 'It's not so bad' or 'You're seeing things' or 'You're an alarmist.'

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can't prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don't know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

"But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That's the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in '43 had come immediately after the 'German Firm' stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in '33. But of course this isn't the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying 'Jewish swine,' collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

"You have gone almost all the way yourself. Life is a continuing process, a flow, not a succession of acts and events at all. It has flowed to a new level, carrying you with it, without any effort on your part. On this new level you live, you have been living more comfortably every day, with new morals, new principles. You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.

"Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.

"What then? You must then shoot yourself. A few did. Or 'adjust' your principles. Many tried, and some, I suppose, succeeded; not I, however. Or learn to live the rest of your life with your shame. This last is the nearest there is, under the circumstances, to heroism: shame. Many Germans became this poor kind of hero, many more, I think, than the world knows or cares to know."

I said nothing. I thought of nothing to say.

"I can tell you," my colleague went on, "of a man in Leipzig, a judge. He was not a Nazi, except nominally, but he certainly wasn't an anti-Nazi. He was just—a judge. In '42 or '43, early '43, I think it was, a Jew was tried before him in a case involving, but only incidentally, relations with an 'Aryan' woman. This was 'race injury,' something the Party was especially anxious to punish. In the case at bar, however, the judge had the power to convict the man of a 'nonracial' offense and send him to an ordinary prison for a very long term, thus saving him from Party 'processing' which would have meant concentration camp or, more probably, deportation and death. But the man was innocent of the 'nonracial' charge, in the judge's opinion, and so, as an honorable judge, he acquitted him. Of course, the Party seized the Jew as soon as he left the courtroom."

"And the judge?"

"Yes, the judge. He could not get the case off his conscience—a case, mind you, in which he had acquitted an innocent man. He thought that he should have convicted him and saved him from the Party, but how could he have convicted an innocent man? The thing preyed on him more and more, and he had to talk about it, first to his family, then to his friends, and then to acquaintances. (That's how I heard about it.) After the '44 Putsch they arrested him. After that, I don't know."

I said nothing.

"Once the war began," my colleague continued, "resistance, protest, criticism, complaint, all carried with them a multiplied likelihood of the greatest punishment. Mere lack of enthusiasm, or failure to show it in public, was 'defeatism.' You assumed that there were lists of those who would be 'dealt with' later, after the victory. Goebbels was very clever here, too. He continually promised a 'victory orgy' to 'take care of' those who thought that their 'treasonable attitude' had escaped notice. And he meant it; that was not just propaganda. And that was enough to put an end to all uncertainty.

"Once the war began, the government could do anything 'necessary' to win it; so it was with the 'final solution of the Jewish problem,' which the Nazis always talked about but never dared undertake, not even the Nazis, until war and its 'necessities' gave them the knowledge that they could get away with it. The people abroad who thought that war against Hitler would help the Jews were wrong. And the people in Germany who, once the war had begun, still thought of complaining, protesting, resisting, were betting on Germany's losing the war. It was a long bet. Not many made it."

"On These Questions, Smarter People Do Worse"

This is a very smart video from Veritaseum, finding a very in-channel way to speak to politics and the divide that exists between the parties.

The study itself is something I think is interesting, but I think the title and take away from the original author may be overly reductive (noting: I am basing this on the video, and not watching the original TEDx talk, or reading the underlying paper.)

Basically, from the videos, the thing I think that gets overlooked is that people with higher numeracy struggle with (based on the clips shown) is that even though it is a fictional scenario, those with higher numeracy are likely to also have additional questions which are very important when parsing these sorts of results. The premise being none of those additional factors matter, just decide based on this.

But that isn't how brains work, especially when presenting them something that they have beliefs or concerns over.

Even on the initial presentation of the skin cream numbers, I immediately had follow up questions to know more about the methodology and relative group sizes, etc. Once I understood the intent was to make a decision based just on the four numbers, I got the correct answer.

But when they showed the gun control example, then it becomes also about things like one of the people said in the video about the types of crimes, and other 'gotchas' which are regularly used in these sort of studies which are real and do get cited by the news.

Ultimately the title of the video is correct, regardless of the reason why they get it wrong, it boils down to being wrong.

Eco's 14 Points of Fascism

Umberto Eco was an Italian philosopher, novelist, an historian (among other things.) It's good to remember his 14 points that define fascism. Eco received the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic before dying in 2016. He named the following 14 points in his essay 'Ur-Fascism.'

To be clear - I do not believe all conservative politics is inherently fascistic. But the problem the Republicans are dealing with is the thing where if they are at a rally and it features fascist points, it is a fascist rally.

And as a definition, 'syncretistic' means referring to syncretism, which, in turn means, "Reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief, as in philosophy or religion, especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous."

1. The cult of tradition. "One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements."
2. The rejection of modernism. "The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism."
3. The cult of action for action's sake. "Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."
4. Disagreement is treason. "The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge."
5. Fear of difference. "The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition."
6. Appeal to social frustration. "One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups."
7. The obsession with a plot. "Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged."
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. "By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak."
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. "For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle."
10. Contempt for the weak. "Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology."
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. "In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death."
12. Machismo and weaponry. "Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality."
13. Selective populism. "There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People."
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. "All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning."

Defining my personal political platform

I don't know if/when I'll publish it. But I've had something I wanted to do for a while. It was to take a list of political platform questions and begin writing down my thoughts on them, as well as my ideas. Not to say I expected any revelations out of it, but it's one thing to have a political platform in your head and another to commit to to text and actually figure out what you have to say on each issue.

I ended up doing this on my flight to LA yesterday. Before take off I got a list of topics from ChatGPT by asking for it to give me a bulleted list of the topics which are often found on political platforms. No positions, no statements. Just the buckets of topics.

It was actually a really interesting thing. I had answers or thoughts on most of them, and others I had to figure out how to say what I believe.

What I wrote is still quite bare bones and nowhere near where I want to share it. But I found it really interesting to work on and is something I plan to write more on in the future.

And for those curious, here is the list it gave me.

• Economy and Jobs
• Healthcare
• Education
• Infrastructure
• Taxation
• Environment and Climate Change
• Energy
• National Security
• Immigration
• Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement
• Social Welfare and Safety Nets
• Civil Rights and Equality
• Foreign Policy
• Defense and Military
• Technology and Innovation
• Agriculture and Rural Development
• Trade and International Relations
• Housing and Urban Development
• Government Accountability and Transparency
• Veterans Affairs
• Drug Policy
• Gun Control and Second Amendment Rights
• Abortion and Reproductive Rights
• LGBTQ+ Rights

I added one item, which was "Government Functions" to capture things like how I felt about shutting down the government, term limits, age limits, etc.

Bruce Schneier hosts "Reimagining Democracy" in a two day workshop

Bruce Schneier is, in my opinion, one of the biggest names when it comes to security analysis online. He apparently held a two-day event to imagine creating a new country:

The idea is to start from scratch, to pretend we’re forming a new country and don’t have any precedent to deal with. And that we don’t have any unique interests to perturb our thinking. The modern representative democracy was the best form of government mid-eighteenth century politicians technology could invent. The twenty-first century is a very different place technically, scientifically, and philosophically. What could democracy look like if it were reinvented today? Would it even be democracy—what comes after democracy?

I've had a very similar idea for years, though I came at it from the game design angle, thinking of finding a system or evolution of current structures where game designers aim to align incentives for people and government despite different political and philosophical positions.

Schneier published a very long set of notes out of the event on the linked page. Here are a few notable excerpts as I read through them.

On the failure of languages in modern society as a barrier to modern democratic systems:

Zoe Hitzig: Experts corrupt the language we use to describe our social goals.

Josh Fairfield: Law is the sharpened end of the language we use to talk about the world we want to live in together…. Language evolves between us when we are speaking to another human as a function of context. we’re not developing language in the way we have been

Nils Gilman: Even if fungus cannot speak, we still need ways to include their voice—we need experts who are equipped, like the Lorax, to speak for the trees. Not necessarily scientific experts, could be indigenous—pluralize idea of expertise.

In regards to the waning fundamental discursive and epistemic boundaries:

What does modern governance mean if “we have never been modern”?

I really like this question. Many view today's government as modern, despite it being a stone's throw (if that far) from what was designed 250 years ago.

They then move into the area which more closely mirrors my thinking for setting up a group like this:

Any system can be gamed and hacked; how can we bring both anticipatory and retrospective/historical thinking to designing robust and resilient governance systems?

• Bruce Schneier on hacking: A hack is something a system permits that’s unintended by the designers. Subversions of rules that change the system. What happens when AI starts doing that kind of thing? Idea that AIs can become a creative force to find loopholes and exploit them.
• Lessons of history (Ada Palmer—We should always ask, what will happen when this system inevitably becomes encrusted with corruption, polarization, demagoguery, and threats from the outside?)
• Lessons of science fiction (Jo Walton walked us through several democratic imaginaries from science fiction of the past seventy-five years).
• Judith Donath: Lots of technologies were invented to deceive people. What kind of a society do we want to have? What is our relationship with truth and honesty?
• Disinformation is not a technology problem (though obviously made worse by it) but actually the default state of humanity. How do we build systems with the knowledge that the production of facts is fragile and rare?

Next, money.

Resisting financialization and the deleterious effects of optimizing for economics

• Let’s not pretend we live in a world that has arisen from a rational pursuit of relevant facts. Money and power pervade everything. Many “governing”/state systems are actually about protecting property.
• Sorcha Brophy: Our economic system shapes what’s possible. Students have trouble imagining beyond the perverse incentives of capitalism.

100% on this. It is hard to imagine things and systems different from our capitalist/consumerist reality for many folks.

Ethan Zuckerman: These [business] models are only fifteen years old. We’re pretty new in the surveillance hypercapitalism sphere. Governance feels locked in stone because these platforms are huge. We are thirty years into Thatcher and Reaganism. If we could get back to public investment, we could see change very quickly.

I would like to think Ethan is correct. Maybe we'll get to find out one day.

The notes are hard to follow, definitely missing context.

Later on in a section about the implementation of governance, though this next note feels relatively unrelated:

Ada: I spend a lot of time convincing my students that things used to be worse. Despair is how we lose.

And that was all day 1 stuff, next we move to day 2.

Feasibility vs. what the future calls for (where are we vs. where we want to be); CAN we directly seek abolition of (national) borders, (epistemic) boundaries, and (surveillance) business models? How does the conversation change if we are necessarily adapting from current conditions?

• Eli: Let’s imagine in 2050, we have flourishing multicultural multipolar democracies—“I can’t tell a story of how we get there with incremental small reforms.”
• On the one hand, we have valuing nonhuman intelligence, considering the lens of the future, learning from history, planning for future generations’ enjoyment and thriving.
• On another hand, we have toxic individualism and commitment to economic and property-based conceptions of what government is for.
• The above might be a false binary, but the point that we’ve jumped in seems past the point where you ask a basic question about what society is for, or at least what government is for.

Later on in a section labeled "Participation vs. Expertise":

Claudia: We’re not talking about direct democracy, we’re talking about a different form of representative democracy. Not getting rid of expertise, but creating the right epistemic conditions to be able to make forward progress.

And in the final note of the first segment of notes is this reference to the late Aaron Swartz and how he represented a different mentality for Silicon Valley:

Henry: Aaron Swartz as a linkage between Rob and Tim[’s debate about Silicon Valley style optimization]—a different path that could have been taken by Silicon Valley—piecemeal democratic engineering—no grand plans, but figure stuff out on the fly, iterate iterate iterate. Would love to see coming out of this, a project of piecemeal democratic engineering.

---

The notes continue quite a bit further. I haven't finished reviewing them. Definitely some interesting insights from this group, but it also had a fair bit of philosophizing and, it feels like, circular conversations. But yeah, glad to see these sort of things happening and curious to see more.

"Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledges to make India a developed country in 25 years"

Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged to raise millions out of poverty and turn India into a developed country in the next quarter-century as he marked 75 years since independence from British rule.

"The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world"

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

I had read this stat at some point in the past but did not come across a larger discussion on it and thus it faded from my memory. Fascinating to see that you need far less than a majority to get large change to take hold.

"A Journey To an Afghan Region Where the Taliban’s Grip Hasn’t Taken Hold"

With the US out of Afghanistan it's easy to forget about the region. I've really enjoyed the articles der Spiegel has been putting out, and this interesting look at a very rural part of Aghanistan and what life is like there was interesting to see and hear about.

Shinzo Abe Assassinated

Push to move King County elections to even-numbered years likely headed to voters in November

This headline left me confused as to why the use of even-years would matter. Is it a quirk of human behavior or something? Phases of the moon? Dodging most Cicada events? El Nino?

No. The article finally points out the logical reason for this change in the fifth paragraph.

Over the past 20 years, King County voter turnout in even years — when presidential, gubernatorial and congressional elections are held — has averaged 77%. Voter turnout in odd-numbered years has averaged 47%.

Opinion | Joe Biden's Approach: Speak Softly, and Carry a Big Agenda (by Ezra Klein)

It wasn't a week ago I was on Twitter angry that we haven't gotten stimulus relief checks delivered yet. This opinion piece was a good reminder that there is more going on than just those checks. Biden and his team are pushing hard in a number of ways that would, each individually, potentially be presidency defining.

Ezra highlighted this first paragraph on Twitter, where I found the link to the article, but it's actually the second paragraph that I found most insightful and something to keep in mind regarding my own biases. It's something that people have to remember amid the craziness of Texas opening up fully for the pandemic - it wasn't the individuals in that state who made that decision, it was the governor and his leadership. Will many agree? Absolutely. But not everyone. And not even all Republicans.

A few pieces of political science research are shaping my thinking here. In 2012, Stephen Nicholson, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, published an interesting paper called "Polarizing Cues." In it, Nicholson asked people their opinions of proposed housing and immigration policies, sometimes telling them that Barack Obama supported the policy and at other times telling them that George W. Bush or John McCain supported the policy. What he found was that opinions didn't much change when people heard that a political leader from their own party supported a bill. But opinions changed dramatically when you told them a political leader from the other side supported a bill — it led to sharp swings against the legislation, no matter the underlying policy content.

When I called Nicholson to ask him about the paper, he gave an insightful explanation for the results. Humans tend to see diversity in the groups we belong to, and sameness in the groups we mistrust, he said.

A great visualization of why it's a big deal that we have Vice President Harris

Alexey Navalny detained on return to Moscow five months after being poisoned