Return to normal postponed
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Charlie Angus, the long-time NDP MP for Timmins (also legendary punk-rock musician and great writer), warns fellow parliamentarians on his Substack that the same old political games will not be useful against the real and imminent danger that Trump represents.
Canada must undergo a massive rethink of our politics, economy, and international relations to meet the challenge in this new and darker world. To forge a new and independent path means breaking out of our partisan boxes and building a new national consensus. There is simply no other way because no one leader or party has the playbook.
He opens his piece with the story of a woman who was in the second tower on 9/11. Her colleagues assured her it was a freak accident and insisted on continuing to work like it was any other Tuesday. She disagreed and left the building. They all died and she survived.
Are we in this serious a moment? Angus appears to think so. I’m not sure I fully agree. Serious, yes. But not this stark, life-and-death serious.
Already there are serious cracks showing in the Republican Party – mostly coming from voters who suddenly realize Trump isn’t exactly for them or for people like them, unlike what he promised. Everyone’s in favour of cutting waste until it hits their job or that of someone they know. Nobody thinks of themselves as a swamp in need of draining.
The strength and inherent goodness of the American people is what gives me hope that this circus won’t last. The legendary spinelessness of most elected Republicans is the great counterweight. If they decide to back Trump and send their voters packing, the misery will last longer but then the wave of popular discontent will be more severe.
But to Charlie’s point, for progressives and centrists (and grown-up conservatives) on both sides of the border, it’s high time to switch to a political discourse that is serious and real, and that addresses issues that matter to normal people. And while I have a soft spot for idealists like this long-time NDPer, there is a need for parties and partisanship in electoral politics, if for no other reason than to give the vast majority of people who live full lives without obsessing about every twist and turn like (ahem) some people we know, a political Rosetta Stone to quickly decode conflicting messages coming from every which way and to cut through the noise and to the substance of issues.
Essentially what we need politicians to do is to talk to voters about real issues as though voters were sentient and intelligent beings, not just dupes to be hoodwinked. And we can stop with the boxing thing now, thanks very much.
Are kids really this regressive?
Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic (paywalled), discusses this depressing worldwide trend of young people becoming not just conservative in their politics but frankly anti-feminist not to say altogether toxic.
“Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift.
In Canada, the popularity of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in the polls for much of the last 18 months includes a lot of young people, as Philippe Cross wrote last fall for the Fraser Institute, struggling to contain his glee. And fair enough; if you’ve devoted your life to making conservative issues popular and you suddenly see them becoming popular with young people, it has to feel pretty good.
One thing older small-l liberal folks fail to understand, generally speaking, is that the system doesn’t work for young people. Not at all. Twenty-somethings have spent the bulk of their lives doing exactly what they were told to do to be successful, only to end up with massive student debt and the dream of middle-class existence unattainable even to those who earn good money in secure jobs.
The math is very harsh; even if you imagine a 27-year-old with a masters’ degree earning $110,000 a year, how long do you think it would take them to put together a down payment on a $750,000 home? Half their income goes to taxes, then rent (another $25K a year, easy), that leaves them $30,000 a year for car, food, clothing, utilities, internet, and the odd night out. Even if they’re very aggressive in their saving strategy, it’s hard to see how they could pile up more than $10,000 a year. A 25% down payment on that home is $187,500. At $10,000 a year – or $20,000 if there’s two of them and they both earn the same – you’re still looking at 10 years if not more. And that’s just for the down payment. Now imagine those same young people earn a more realistic $75,000 in a professional entry-level job. Or $49,000 as a nurse. And housing prices that keep going up…
In Canada the only federal party that’s been speaking directly to these young people about precisely that problem is the Conservatives. Poilievre promises to shake things up so that people keep more of their money. That’s popular these days.
Justin Trudeau was no longer able to reach those young people — or anyone else, really. He was being tuned out. So far, polling numbers show Mark Carney (the presumptive next Liberal leader) would have as much support as Poilievre nationally, and that’s before most people have actually heard him speak. It’ll be interesting to see what numbers show about young people and their voting intentions by the time the next federal election is called, which I predict will be before March 12.
And incidentally, the French debate tonight (February 24) will be supremely important. If Quebecers decide to back one candidate in significant numbers, that person will be prime minister and may even get a majority, given the current climate.
This explains why the Carney camp won’t want to wait. The new leader will need a fresh mandate, given all the bullshit coming from Donald Trump. Clear direction from the electorate will speak volumes when dealing with the president. But also because Carney would be stupid to give Poilievre time to find a gear that’s not Canada-is-broken-because-Trudeau. And if there’s one thing Mark Carney ain’t, it’s stupid.
So, to answer my own question, no. I don’t think kids are this regressive. But they do want change and they deserve it. Otherwise it’s just a minority of young men who are attracted to the masculinist discourse, which is nothing new. What’s different today is they don’t mind advertising who they are, which is useful information for the rest of us.
In other news, the news is still human
Two articles about journalism and AI caught my attention lately. In the first one, reports show BBC News tried four tools by giving them access to its own news stories and asking them to help write articles using prompts that included said BBC news stories as source. The results were… underwhelming:
Over half (51%) of the AI answers had contained “significant issues of some form,” 19% of answers “introduced factual errors — incorrect factual statements, numbers, and dates,” and “13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered from the original source or not present in the article cited.”
Examples include saying Gisèle Pelicot uncovered her husband’s sex crimes against her because of her own memory loss, or claiming “in December 2024 that Ismail Haniyeh, who was assassinated in Iran in July 2024, was part of Hamas leadership.”
The other article details AI use at the New York Times.
The paper encouraged editorial staff to use these AI tools to generate SEO headlines, summaries, and audience promos; suggest edits; brainstorm questions and ideas and ask questions about reporters’ own documents; engage in research; and analyze the Times’ own documents and images.
In my work I’ve experimented with AI tools, including the generative kind, for instance to come up with a first draft of a speech. You throw in a couple of ideas and see what the tool spits out. It’s generally pretty shit, no two ways about it. But it can be useful when you’ve been procrastinating unduly and have zero motivation to write something you’re only doing because someone is paying you to. It’s a lot easier and faster to take AI’s crappy first draft and turn it into scintillating (and accurate) prose than it is motivating yourself to write about something you don’t wanna.
You have to check it though. Like, check everything. But with that caveat, it’s useful. Also incredibly time-saving are transcription tools that turn audio or video content into text. It’s pretty accurate, too. I’m old enough to remember the horrors of Dragon’s “NaturallySpeaking” speech recognition software. Today’s tools are light-years ahead of that. They also take a French conversation and spit out an English transcript (at the moment they’re not writing in French, alas), as well as a very handy summary of the conversations including key takeaways.
It’s useful, but not inherently trustworthy. Sort of like humans that way.