The Great War
Published on 15 Nov 2018G.J. Meyer: A World Undone
Martin Gilbert: The First World War
Peter Hart: The Great War
David Zabecki: The German Spring Offensives
Alexander Watson: Ring of Steel
Robin Neillands: Western Front Generals
November 16, 2018
The Victors & The Vanquished I THE GREAT WAR Epilogue
Comments Off on The Victors & The Vanquished I THE GREAT WAR Epilogue
The political wrangles ahead over the federal carbon tax
Andrew Coyne — for once not beating the drum for electoral reform — discusses the challenge facing the federal government in the wake of provincial resistance to their carbon tax plans:
But the real test, of course, is yet to come. The provinces cannot stop the tax on their own. The court challenges are likely to fail. Provinces that refuse to implement carbon pricing will simply find the federal “backstop” tax imposed in its place. It is the election that will decide the issue, not duelling governments. Or so Conservatives hope.
Certainly there are abundant grounds to doubt the political wisdom of the Liberal plan. A tax, or anything that resembles it, would be a hard enough sell on its own. But a tax in aid of a vast international plan to save the earth from a scourge that remains imperceptible to most voters, to which Canada has contributed little and against which Canada can have little impact, while countries whose actions would be decisive remain inert? Good luck.
What seems clear is that voters’ support for carbon pricing is shallow and tentative. The Conservative strategist who chortled to the National Post that the Liberals are asking Canadians “to vote with their hearts, not their wallets” — an impossibility, he meant — was correctly cynical. Just because people want to save the planet doesn’t mean they want to pay for it.
The best way to read the public’s mood is in the positions of the political parties, who are in their various ways each trying to assure them that it won’t cost them a dime. The Liberal version of this is to promise to rebate the extra cost of the federal tax to consumers — indeed, they pledge, 70 per cent of households will make a profit on the exchange.
The Conservatives have been less forthcoming, but it would appear their plan is to hide the cost, substituting regulations, whose effects are largely invisible to consumers, for the all-too-visible tax at the pump. Here, too, I suspect they may have a better (i.e. more cynical) read on popular opinion. The public often prefer to have the costs of government hidden from them, even if they know they are paying them — even if they know they are paying more this way, as indeed they are in this case. Do what you want to us, they seem to say, just don’t rub our faces in it.
So I would be skeptical about polls showing majority support for the federal plan: 54 per cent, according to Angus Reid, while Abacus finds 75 per cent would either support or at least accept it (versus 24 per cent opposed). These were taken shortly after the announcement of the federal rebates. Yet it is far from evident the rebates will still register with people a year from now. Indeed, the Conservatives barely paused to acknowledge them as inadequate before going on to pretend they had never been mentioned.
Comments Off on The political wrangles ahead over the federal carbon tax
The Origin of Quantum Mechanics (feat. Neil Turok)
minutephysics
Published on Oct 14, 2012Check out the Massey Lectures with Neil Turok: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-201…
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics: http://pitp.caMinute Physics provides an energetic and entertaining view of old and new problems in physics — all in a minute!
Music by Nathaniel Schroeder: http://www.soundcloud.com/drschroeder
Thanks to Nima Doroud and Bruno LeFloch for contributions and to Perimeter Institute for support.
http://www.perimeterinstitute.caProduced in association with the 2012 Massey Lecture Series http://dft.ba/-massey Created by Henry Reich
H/T to Aeon:
The physics revolution that started with the flicker of a lightbulb
The discovery of quantum mechanics at the start of the 20th century shook the very foundations of physics, forcing scientists and philosophers to reexamine everything from particles upward. But as this short animation from MinutePhysics explains, the quantum revolution was jumpstarted by a rather unremarkable question. As the German government asked the theoretical physicist Max Planck: how can lightbulbs be made more efficient? To help solve the problem, Planck tried to account for the changing colour of light based on temperature, which he eventually realised couldn’t be explained by classical Newtonian physics. Working backwards from his data in ‘an act of despair’, Planck found that light wasn’t emitted continuously, but rather in discrete packets that he referred to as ‘quanta’. And the rest is the illusory arrow of time that we call history.
Comments Off on The Origin of Quantum Mechanics (feat. Neil Turok)
QotD: Defining hate speech
Then, of course, there is the question of where hate-speech ends and legitimate commentary starts. It is generally easy to recognise the vilest abuse that is intended only to inflame and not to argue, just as it is easy to recognise pure pornography (I use the word ‘pure’ in its chemical, not its moral sense, of course). But often matters are much more complex than this.
For example, I recently saw the following statistic in a serious article on the internet: that Nigerian immigrants to Switzerland are seven times as likely to be convicted for a crime as Swiss citizens. Surely no one who wrote such a thing could think that it was calculated to create warm feelings in the hearts of the Swiss towards Nigerian immigrants, except those very few of Fabian mentality, who see in serial killers a cry for help (from the killers, of course, not from their victims).
The statistic – let us assume – is true. But then let us ask whether it has been corrected for the different sex and age structures of the two populations, that of the Nigerian immigrants and that of the Swiss population.
If it has not (and the article does not say), it is easily conceivable that a better, or at least different, statistic would be that Nigerian immigrants are only twice or three times as likely to be convicted for a crime as Swiss citizens. And if this were in fact the case, would the man who published the article be guilty of hate-speech, or merely of intellectual error? Is the test of hate-speech to be whether something does in fact bring a group into hatred, ridicule and contempt, or whether it is intended to do so?
It is easy to multiply examples. In this country, young Moslem men far out-fill their quota in prison, while young Hindu and Sikh far underperform where criminal conviction is concerned. Is this an interesting and important sociological fact, or an incitement to hatred, ridicule and contempt, or perhaps both?
A further problem is that of judging how sensitive people actually are or should be to perceived slights and insults. Just as the expression of hatred can be self-reinforcing, so can the sensitivity to slight and injury. The more you are protected from it, the more of it you perceive, until you end up being a psychological egg-shell. The demand for protection becomes self-reinforcing, until a state is reached in which nobody says what he means, and everybody infers what is not meant. Temperatures, or tempers, are raised, not lowered. The disgracefully pusillanimous (and incompetent) Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence demonstrated the risks we run: it suggested that a racial incident should be defined as an incident which any witness to it believed to be racial, without there being any need for objective evidence that it was. Where a British judge can be so pusillanimously unattached to the rule of law, we can be sure that one day hate-speech will be defined as any speech that anyone finds hateful.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Hating the Truth”, Salisbury Review, 2011-06.
Comments Off on QotD: Defining hate speech
