Dave – blog@davemckay.ca

Spun Rock Wool

Where I grew up, our next door neighbours were Louise and Paul Buss. Paul was an immigrant and an engineer. He and his brother invented the process for making spun rock wool.

The Busses built Spun Rock Wools Ltd. in Thorold, manufacturing the insulation and selling it all around the world. Later the whole shebang was sold to Rockwool International. Spun rock wool is Roxul, which you may well have purchased if you were doing any renovations involving insulation.

And yet the Busses lived next door to the relatively impoverished McKays, in if anything a smaller house, although situated on the corner. This wealthy successful man who owned a factory and an international business, who had made valuable contributions to both technology and the economy, was just a neighbour to me. And there it is. Rich and poor, workers and factory owners, we all lived similar lives in the same neighbourhood in much the same housing.

Just a couple of doors down from me was built a conspicuously consumptive mini-McMansion covered in “security” lights and with a crowded driveway. In that house lives someone prosperous enough to be a model of consumerism. And what has that person done, for the world, for the economy? He owns a clothing line… That’s it. He has a brand, marketing and subcontractors.

And somewhere in that difference at either end of fifty years, I think I see what is wrong with our economy.

The fiction of left and right

It is a mistake, that plays into the hands of groups like the Republicans, the Ontario Conservative Party and the Conservative Party of Canada to pretend that we are seeing a polarization between the Left and the Right. We absolutely are not. If anything our entire social structure has been hauled to the “Right” by extremists on that flank.

Moderates, Liberals, New Democrats, and Democrats are not left-leaning but rather represent an intent to maintain and strengthen the institutions and policies that created robust widespread prosperity in the 20th century. In this respect these parties are the true conservatives, conserving the social development that hauled civilization out of the barbarism and iniquitous inequity of past centuries and created just and prosperous societies.

Right-wing propagandists want to characterize their “alternative” as legitimate by representing it as one end of a balanced spectrum. This kind of both-sidesism is necessary to legitimize what is more accurately an attack on civilization and democracy itself.

We all have to stop helping this along by pretending that there is a struggle between left and right-leaning ideologies. What we have is a crisis of radical extremism, which if our societies survive it, will look in the history books like a kind of widespread suicidal hysteria.

Pantone 16-1546

What is most impressive about the Pantone corporation is that it has managed somehow to keep itself in design despite the fact that Pantone ink products were largely made redundant more than 20 years ago. While high-end print jobs for corporate customers might still use a special ink like P16-1546, especially if it is the customer’s branding colour, most of the usefulness of these inks was left behind when four-colour printing became cheap.

Prior to that, you might have chosen two-colour printing (black and a special) to get a colour effect while being able to run your job on a less expensive two-colour press. I worked on such jobs. Those days are long gone.

Moreover for web work, Pantone has no relevance whatever. Selecting colours for CMYK printing or RGB digital using Pantone swatches is a conceit which causes real problems in output because to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individual Pantone number, no Pantone ink swatch colour is exactly reproducible in CMYK or RGB. That was always the point of using them.

Holidays

For me, Thanksgiving is about being thankful for sanitation. It is the most beneficial human achievement. It is taken for granted by everyone who has it, but is the single greatest contributing factor to human quality of life. So Thanksgiving is the day I reflect on being thankful for, primarily, clean water and sewers.

So, I thought what actual thing could other holidays be seconded to represent?

The February statutory holiday, which is, I think pre-appropriately, called “Family Day” but which we all know is for Valentines, shall henceforth be a day in honor of women’s reproductive health services. Not as important as potable water and a general absence of cholera, but a close second.

That is all.

A big fat horsey icon that does nothing.

If people are clearly irritated by a design change, that is you are in a thread started by someone who just wants to turn off some pointless bling a committee added to something in lieu of actual innovation, the solution can’t be that users should not be irritated. In this case a big horsey icon, started appearing smack in the middle of the screen.

So, I sez to im, I sez, “It is just bad interface design. They are prominent “horsey,” and yet largely functionless, unnecessary. It is not all that remarkable that they irritate people because, as is the trend in interface design, they are a bombastic visual element that performs no useful function. And as per a comment above somewhere, yes, you can get used to bad interface design. I would argue that as of late most interface design is pretty shitty. But “getting use to it” does not make it good, and could do a bit to explain some of the persistent, low-level irritation that many people continually experience.”

What do you have to do to get kicked out of the CPC Senate Caucus?

I am happy to see Senator Lynn Beyak “kicked out” of the CPC Senate caucus. I would not however go so far as to say that it represents any moral rectitude on the part of Andrew Scheer or the CPC. They did not rebuke her, indeed they were vocally supportive of Beyak, when she humiliated herself and all Canadians by suggesting, in the House, that residential schools were a net positive if some of the children who survived were Christianized. These racist letters that she posted to her parliamentary website were letters of support for exactly that stance.

So, what has changed? Well, Ontario is having an election this year, and there is an upcoming federal election in 2019. Conservatives will want something to point at to show they are not the racists they have been for years, even if they actively court that base.

But there is another factor to consider. Lynn Beyak is a stupid white woman. The stupid and white are important, not only because her privilege has befuddled her critical thinking, but because her being white is the only reason someone so stupid could have achieved such high office. In the last CPC leadership race candidates were running on xenophobic ignorance and hate, so don’t tell me that these ideas are unique to Senator Beyak, they are common tropes both within the party and its racist base. Nope, Lynn is not especially racist for her party, but she is also a woman. And at this point in time a party that is also misogynistic has looked around for a public relations scapegoat and thrown HER under the bus.

Do women have rights. It’s a simple question and the answer must be yes.

People who want blastocysts, embryos, and fetuses to have ‘rights’ create an unreasonable dilemma.

Either women have rights, or you can require them to carry a child.
Either women can choose to terminate a pregnancy or they do not have a right to security of their person. There is no way around this.

No matter how deeply you feel about the life of an unborn child there is no practical way for it to have rights that supersede or restrict those of the mother.

No matter how distressing you find this reality there is no moral choice that assigns rights to a pregnancy where that would deprive the host of her rights as an independent human being, which blastocysts, embryos and fetuses are not.

No matter how impractical a method of birth control abortion is, disenfranchising pregnant women, and therefore by extension, sooner or later most women, is a repugnant option.

This is why it is intolerable for a political party to advance members who take an anti-abortion stance or who advocate any measure that would tend to limit women’s access to reproductive health services. It is simply not acceptable that any person in a position of authority could stand behind a policy that inevitably and so negatively diminishes women’s hard-won legal personhood and still moderate gains in equality.

But the distress and hand-wringing is entirely unnecessary. Ask, “Do women have rights.” It’s a simple question, with a simple answer that must be, “yes.”

Socialist

Every so often, someone buys a shitty backpack, catches a ride to the end of some logging road, heads off into the “wilderness” with high hopes, and ends up leaving their broken corpse somewhere inaccessible for future generations to find.

No one can survive alone outside the community of people. Our species has been specializing in interdependence for hundreds of thousands of years. To survive and prosper each one of us needs the fellowship and cooperation of our community.

This allows individuals to specialize in, for instance, plumbing. You can become an excellent plumber because you can rely on bakers to bake, firefighters to extinguish fire, dentists to cause you periodic discomfort and etc. That way they can also become excellent specialists because they can rely on you to be great at plumbing for them.

And everyone cooperates. They may superficially resent or disparage this, but everyone needs help in order to move house, to hold a ladder, to let them do a lane change.

This is what society is made of. Everything about everyone’s survival and prosperity is based in social cooperation and mutual support.

Survivalist libertarian nut-job vloggers do not ride a bicycle strapped to a generator for 10 hours to make the electricity to charge their cellphone to record their latest every-one-for-themselves podcast. Not any more than they maintain a unique personal GPS satellite system so they can find their car after.

Almost every aspect of everyone’s life is intricately entwined with the efforts and good will of the members of their society. Where this breaks down, death follows.

Which is why it makes me so angry to listen to ranters deride socialism, for socialism in its fundamentals is just this cooperation and specialization of everyone, for everyone, that no one is apart from unless they are face down in a ravine waiting to die.

No matter what humans do within society we are all socialists. Humans are social animals. It is our one true strength and the source of all our adaptation. If you cannot understand this you are either eligible for the gold medal in self delusion or are alone, cold, wet and unlikely to make it til morning.

YouTube Advertising

Like most people my age, I grew up watching lots and lots of TV, with 4 minutes of commercials every 15. As soon as cable came along anyone who could afford it left those commercials behind. When commercials followed viewers to cable they found other ways to watch content without.

Commercials are almost universally insulting, stupid and irritating. Once you have stopped watching them, you are going to have a strong WTF reaction when you are waylaid by some inane barking bullshit trying to get you to buy junk you do not need.

I stopped watching television, after about 40 years of being used to it, because if I have to watch commercials, I have other things to do.

Honestly, no matter how grim another task is, for instance cleaning the toilet, it is more interesting than almost any commercial.

So, YouTube has found a way around AdBlock Plus. It is interrupting videos to show me commercials for new-agey supplements, woo for geriatric dogs, cereal etal. And I cannot be asked to sit through that shit.

I have given up video, to which I had been long indoctrinated, before to avoid the indignity of advertising. If this keeps up, I sure can find other things to do than sit through some flaky charlatan barking about cleanses and herbal supplements.

Is YouTube committing suicide? I guess we will see.

Freedom from Religious Persecution

Today I saw a person praying openly and at considerable length, and I was reminded of what freedom of religion is.

I was reminded because prescribed ritual behaviour makes me quite uncomfortable. However religious freedom, freedom from religious persecution actually, means that my discomfort was my problem, not his.

Centuries of monotheists persecuting people of different faiths necessitated that secular societies advanced the principal that you should not attack anyone just because they do not conform to your views on religion.

So while I sat their and the praying continued I was not only aware of my irrelevant discomfort, but of the climate in the room as people whispered and pointed and checked to see if, in an historic context, there was something intolerant they needed to do about the “other.”

I remember IRA bombings in the news. I am belatedly aware that there are conservative senators in Canada who think the cultural genocide of my country’s first nations was not so bad if some of the victims were successfully indoctrinated to Christianity.

So, what is my point? I am not very certain. I am dismayed by the surge in public religiosity particularly among white Christian evangelicals in North America, which I can only put down to a failure in education. However what I am certain of is that the whiff of intolerance I experienced today is not a healthy response to anyone’s faith.