Go on, surprise me!

Let me first set the stage for  this post: I am trying the standing desk again (so far so good), I am in the grip of a boomerang cold (I got rid of it for a day and a  half and now it’s back) and my patience is almost entirely depleted. Between waiting for the self-publishing website to clear my ebook for sale in itunes/Amazon/everywhere else, waiting for the election to finally happen, and spending three consecutive days housebound with the little dud, I am an irritable curmudgeon. And so, I come here to talk about politics. Now that you know what you’re walking into, let’s get going.

For my handful of international readers, I’ll give a little background, and I will attempt to be non-partisan about it. Here in Canada, there are 5 federal parties. There may technically be even more, but I don’t have the willpower to include every tiny sub-group. There are 2 major parties (Conservatives and Liberals), 1 medium party,( New Democratic Party) 1 party that only represents 1 province (Bloc Quebecois), and 1 tiny party (Green). For the last 5 years, we have been tolerating a Conservative minority government. They have been able to retain power not because of astute leadership or demonstrated policy acumen, but because the alternatives were less savory. The Liberal party spent most of that time finding the worst possible leader and putting him up for an election which he promptly lost. He was a meek and pale fellow who could only speak one of Canada’s 2 official languages well, and it wasn’t the one most of Canada speaks. The NDP has a charismatic  leader, but no one took the party seriously as a potential ruling party. The bloc are only interested in defending the interests of Quebec, which makes it a little hard to get a vote anywhere else. Plus, they would like Quebec to leave Canada and become its own country. And  our little group of Green party candidates can’t scrape together enough votes in the places they need to. So, in the face  of all of this unimpressive choice, the country let an economist with delusions of grandeur run the place.

The Canadian people went to the polls twice to tell the Conservatives ‘listen, we don’t really like you, but the other guys aren’t any better, so you can be the placeholder Prime Minister. But you have to work with everyone else’. For the last 2 years, however, the Conservatives have been trying to game  the rules of government to find  ways around the opposition parties. It’s been a string of small but significant slights against our parliamentary traditions, designed to both increase the Prime Minister’s centralized power, and  to try to goad the opposition into forcing an election. After 2 elections in 5 years, the conservatives were counting on voter disgust and apathy at the prospect of a 3rd election (the one we’re in right now) to give them the majority they are drooling over. They claim that they ‘didn’t want this election’ but they’ve been spending taxpayer money to run campaign ads on television for months before the election call happened. Plus, there are a bunch of conservative scandal chickens that are coming home to roost soon, and the Cons need a majority to make those chickens go away.

A funny thing is happening right now, though. The party no one really took very seriously, the NDP, is suddenly polling very high. Very, VERY high. We’re in the last 3 days of the campaign, and they are knocking  on the Conservative’s door. It’s unlikely that they’ll win the election outright, but anything could happen. No one saw this wave of popularity coming, but in hindsight it makes sense.

Imagine the current PM Harper as your neighbourhood jerk. His dogs run around and poop on everyone’s lawn, but no one has had definite proof that it was his dogs, and he refuses to accept that he’s to blame. The Liberal leader is the grumpy old man who finally has proof and he corners the jerk at the neighbourhood barbeque. Grumpy keeps yelling and yelling about the poop, and the jerk just glares back and insults the grumpy old man. Total buzzkill. But over at  the bar, there’s your cheery neighbour who throws all the pool parties. He’s handing out margaritas and having a laugh about the other two guys fighting in the corner. Next thing you know, the bar is packed with people having a good time. They don’t care about the poop anyway, they just wanted to hang out with their  friends. By the time the jerk and the grump realize no ones watching, the good time guy is already kissing their wives and getting cheered for it.

Maybe that explained it, maybe it  made  it worse, who knows. It amused me, and  that’s enough. I will laugh my balls off with delight if somehow the NDP win on Monday. Speaking of amusing, I find it hillarious that a guy who barely managed to stay in power during this dearth of leadership options is delusional enough to fill his  office with portraits of  himself, instead of the traditional portraits of past Prime Ministers. It’s like bragging that you beat the stinky kid with the weird face lumps for the title of ‘least nauseating boy’ at summer camp.

Yay! I’m Standing!

That isn’t to imply that I have been unable to stand upright until this moment. The title is misleading. The difference is that I am testing the concept of a standing desk, and I am blogging at it right now. With my sad sack folding banquet table desk and patio chair combination, I really couldn’t have a less ergonomic setup, so I did what the internet told me to and set up a standing desk. Okay, so I have been considering it for a while, though not very seriously, so the recent articles I read about standing versus sitting and the toll that my sedentary life  is taking on me just pushed me into action. Hopefully I don’t end up with a sore back and feet, but my normal routine gives me a sore back and numb tongue (neck muscle pressing slightly on a nerve, not a stroke. Thanks for worrying) so there’s nothing to lose.

On to other things. I was tangentially involved in a twitter-based political conflict today. You didn’t know I was on twitter? Well I didn’t tell you, but now you know. My username is @spankules. It’s pronounced like Hercules, but with spanking, which is totally misleading since I don’t involve myself in any spanking at any time, whether for correction or amusement. Anyway. A chum of mine was questioning a campaign worker about something, and asking him to give an exact number. The worker refused and things got testy.  In response to a short-tempered tweet, my chum asked the fellow if he would want his son to behave the same way in a similar situation. The worker went into a rage, mistakenly thinking his family and his parenting skills were being questioned. It’s the first time that I’ve seen a collision between someone’s political efforts and their personal life.

Doing a little research into the angry man, I found some helpful information, most importantly the fact that he has a 7 month old baby at home. I remember the lack of emotional control and rationality I had at that phase in my little dude’s life, so I suspect baby stress fueled his anger. Plus, a stressed dad is always worried about defending his  family, and he might  start to see threats where there aren’t any.I know I still feel like I’ve let the team down if someone speaks rudely to my wife  or child when I’m not around (I’m looking at you, angry rude man at No Frills!), so I can understand where the campaign worker was coming from.

It also doesn’t help that the worker is aligned with a party that has put a lot of effort into being uncommunicative and aloof. People are so desperate to get answers from the party that they get pretty…enthusiastic when somebody actually responds. And since the unlucky few party members who are still willing to be open and communicative are forced to defend their party’s fabrications and unethical actions, they probably feel like their on the bottom of  a dog pile. There’s nothing worse than being a good guy with an unscrupulous autocratic boss. But for this specific twitter conflict, everybody calmed down and apologized, so no harm done.

I am not a Computer Scientist

Also, I am not an expert in the subject of Artificial Intelligence, but I won’t let my ignorance stop me. There is one element of the human intellect that will probably get missed by the people working on AI. This facet of human decision-making is, despite all appearances, vital to the function of our big big brains. I call this element ‘the self-destruct compulsion’. It’s not a catchy name, but I just made it up and I’m tired from the gym, so you do better if you’re so smart.

This is more than taking a risk on a course of action that has a very low chance of success. No, this is the urge that every human being has to occasionally make the worst choice possible on purpose, just to see what happens. To paraphrase Alfred from The Dark Knight, sometimes we just want to watch the world burn.

If you’re a parent, you have seen your child engage this part of their logic. They look you straight in the eyes, with a fixed glare of determination, and they haul off and punch you (or pinch or kick or whatever the most verboten action is at the time). They know it’s a bad choice, they know it’s against the rules, but they do it anyway. It’s an exploration of boundaries, but it’s also a way to test how you recover from a terrible choice.

On a bigger scale, I suspect this urge sometime rises to the surface during election time. the tea party in America is a prime example of people voting for disaster. They want to see how bad it can really get, when you reject fact and logic and just barrel ahead with your hands off of the wheel. I’m worried that the election here is going in the same direction. The guy who is currently winning (according to the polls) is really running on an anti-government platform, because he seems to hate the political process more than anyone. Strangely, he’s capitalizing on the anti-politician sentiment by re-enforcing the stereotype of ‘all politicians are crooked’. It’s a shame, because there are so many good and honest people running for office, and I hate to see them painted with the same hateful brush. (Can a brush be hateful?)

So this compulsion to occasionally be your own worst enemy is a big part of our learning process. Learning to recover from catastrophe is a vital skill for evolutionary survival, so we make sure to keep practicing by making our own messes to clean up. Hopefully we can, as a species, stay one step ahead of our ability to make a mess, so we don’t create a disaster that is unrecoverable. And we won’t see a fully realized artificial intelligence until they add a subroutine that actively works against the good of the whole. I am a nerd.