Science and politics

I've gotten pretty involved in Wikipedia over the last few months, which has led me to all manner of conclusions about it. I won't bother sharing most of these here, at least not right now. But as anybody who's spent much time there (and by "there", I mean places other than in the articles themselves, which often give the impression of a stable competence) knows that it's a hotbed of conflict. Much of this conflict can be described on one of several axes: the inclusionist-deletionist axis (should we have articles on individual Pokemon/municipal councillors/small corporations, etc.?), eventualist-immediatist axis (if somebody makes a questionable addition to the article, should we immediately revert it in the interests of the current quality of the article, or leave it there in the hopes that people will tinker with it until it's good, in the interests of the future quality of the article?), the protection of living persons-completeness of information axis (should the focus be on thorough reporting of notable living people, in the interests of completeness, or on the conservative reporting of notable living people, in the interests of decency?). There are dozens of these, and I'd strongly recommend that anybody whose life is short of drama and warfare go right down, register an account, and line up on one side or another.

One of the axes, though, is on tolerance of pseudoscience (should we portray natural selection as an open controversy within the scientific community, or as a scientific consensus that is under assault only by fringe scientific elements and non-scientists?), and this axis has recently got me thinking about science and politics. Normally, I associate anti-scientific viewpoints with the right-wing - young earth creationists, global warming deniers, etc.

(Disclaimer: I don't consider myself competent to have strong views on existence of anthropogenic global warming, but from what I've seen the portion of the scientific community that strongly believes in its existence appears to be both i. larger by orders of magnitude than portion of the scientific community that is skeptical, and ii. generally more persuasive. Regardless, I do consider myself competent to have strong views on whether action should be taken to combat the possibility of anthropogenic global warming, on the grounds that the reasonable possibility that carbon dioxide emissions are imperiling our way of life is quite enough justification to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.)

But one of the places I've spent some time at Wikipedia is on the homeopathy article. When I first showed up there, I was broadly unaware of what homeopathy was, besides that it was something that a lot of people seemed to consider an alternative to "conventional" medicine. Since I've learned more about it, I've concluded that it's batshit insane. In brief, its tenets are that substances that cause a given set of symptoms are useful for curing afflictions that cause the same symptoms, and that the more diluted these substances are the more potent they are as cures. Some homeopaths go so far as to suggest that these cures are at their most potent when they're so diluted that not a single molecule of the alleged cure remains (one explanation given is that water has a memory, so even if a substance is no longer present in the water, the water can "remember" when it was and behaves accordingly). It is the sort of thing that I cannot imagine any reasonable person believing for any reason other than religious ones, and I'm not aware of any religion that considers homeopathy a key tenet.

(Apparently in the late 1700s, homeopathy enjoyed a much greater success rate than conventional medicine, which sounds like a point in homeopathy's favour until you realize that the day's conventional medicine included things like bloodletting.)

And yet, by and large the people who believe in homeopathy, at least in the developed world, aren't young earth creationists and other conservative quacks, but hippies who, by and large, believe in evolutionary science and are adamant about fighting global warming.

So, um, yeah: what's up with that?

Random things one learns while researching Wikipedia articles...

The Calgary Sun did snapshot profiles of all the Calgary candidates in the last provincial election. They can be found here. I find the responses to "political heroes" interesting. First of all, it seems like pretty well every P.C. candidate named Churchill, which isn't all that surprising I guess. A little more surprising is that four candidates in Calgary were willing to come out and name Pierre Trudeau as their political hero. These bold four came from three different parties, none of which were the Liberals: they were two New Democrats, a Green, and a Wildrose Alliance candidate (who also cited Ralph Klein and Peter Lougheed as among his heroes).

Question to Liberals wanting to avoid an election...

"Some top Liberals have urged Dion to cut the incessant sabre rattling and frankly admit the party is in no position to fight an election this spring." - CTV.ca

So the reason that the Liberals are allegedly in no position to fight an election - and I do not, by the way, necessarily disagree with this allegation - is that Stéphane Dion is not a leader. How is this problem going to be solved or even mitigated by an admission by Dion that the official opposition is in no position to fight an election and is therefore prepared to allow the minority government to do whatever it wants?

Stephen Harper these resembles no Prime Minister so much as Joe Clark in that he's a minority Prime Minister who's decided to govern as if he had a majority. Like Clark, he faces a Liberal opposition that gives no appearance of being ready for an election In 1980, though, the Liberals adopted slightly different tactics.

Merger, you say?

Predictably, a lot of people who don't like the Tories - including some very intelligent people - are saying that the Liberals and NDP need to merge. Notwithstanding the fact that the parties hate each other much more than either hates the Tories, let's pretend that that happened. Further, let's pretend that every single person who voted for either of those parties voted instead for the new party, an assumption which is almost certainly ill-founded (with exhibit A being the Conservative Party of Canada, which still hasn't achieved the combined 2000 vote totals of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Parties). How would the legislature look today? Well, it would be a two party legislature, with the Tories having 62 seats and the Opposition having 21. Throw the Greens into the equation, and the Opposition also picks up Edmonton McClung and Calgary Elbow (although we're sort of reaching the point there that it might be fair to start wondering if we should add the Wildrose Alliance votes to the Tory counts, since we evidently think that political beliefs are a binary concept). None of the Opposition ridings in either scenario would be located outside the city limits of Edmonton, Calgary, or Lethbridge (even St. Albert, Liberal last time, went Tory by a margin of more than the combined NDP/Green vote this time around).

It takes a very special opposition party supporter to look at the results of this election and concludes that their biggest problem was a vote split.

Throne Speeches

I don't think it's sufficiently widely appreciated just how odd the spectacle we have just witnessed in Alberta - a speech from the throne being immediately followed by a dissolution of a legislature at the request of the very government that authored the throne speech - is, so I'm going to explain it. I'll try to be brief.

In a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, the government has certain legislative privileges. If the Westminster-style democracy in question happens to be a heavily partisan one, then a majority government has virtually unlimited legislative privileges, but that's a cultural issue rather than a structural one, so I'm leaving those privileges aside. What I'm talking about instead is the ability to control the legislative agenda (with a few exceptions) and a monopoly on introducing money bills.

Now, since the government wasn't elected by anybody - rather, it was appointed by somebody who also wasn't elected by anybody - this might seem a little dumb. Which it is, frankly, but not as dumb as you might initially think. Because, in exchange for those legislative privileges, the government needs to get the legislature to sign off, in the most general of all senses, on its agenda. Hence the speech from the throne. That's where the government says "As Her Majesty's government, here's what we plan on using our legislative privileges to do during the coming session." And then the legislators - who were elected - get to decide, via a vote on the speech (which is always a confidence motion) whether they're okay with that agenda, or at least okay enough with that agenda that they're comfortable leaving those legislative privileges in the hands of the current government.

It all makes a certain amount of sense - much more sense, I'd say, than most elements of Westminster-style parliamentary democracies.

Anyway, here in Alberta we just had a speech from the throne. Only instead of following the format I explained above, we got a situation in which the government says "Here's what we plan on using our legislative privileges to do during the coming session," and then, while the legislators were digesting that and deciding whether they were in support of the speech or not, the government was like "also, we're asking Her Majesty to dissolve y'all."

The government is laying out its plans for a non-existent session of the legislature. Weird.

Fun trivia question

Of the three so-called prairie provinces, which one has the strongest provincial Liberal party?

Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer died today. I don't want to give the impression that I admired him - he was a vicious anti-semite, among other things - but I was always sort of fascinated by the guy, despite the fact that, before I added the relevant Facebook application, I probably hadn't played a game of chess for non-instructional purposes in about a decade. I remember hearing on September 11 that Fischer had given an interview in praise of the attacks; it added to the surreal nature of that day more than most things could have.

Einarr Einarrson, apparently the chair of a "Fischer support group" in Iceland, is quoted as saying "He was not a man who wanted to seek medical attention. He didn't believe in Western medicine." Of course he didn't.

The world has lost an eccentric genius.