Category: Politics

On Tankies

On December 20, 2023

I’ve noticed in recent years an odd development, which is the rise of what are perjoratively called “tankies” among the online political discourse. Though it has negative connotations, I’ll try to use “tankie” in this essay in a neutral sense, because it works as a convenient label for a particular set of beliefs. These are people who not only defend a staunch version of Marxist Leninism, but also defend many countries that are ostensibly Marxist Leninist (at least in theory) and their often sordid and controversial histories, most notably China.

Now, I do think China is somewhat unfairly villainized in mainstream western media, but I’m also fairly critical of the Chinese government. Tankies seem to espouse a very all-or-nothing viewpoint that because America is the preeminent imperialist power in the world, that any force that opposes it is inherently a force for good. Thus, they cast China as a defender of socialism and bulwark against the evils of capitalism.

This, quite obviously I think, does not do justice to the complex reality of the situation. For one thing, America is more of a hegemony than an empire. For another, China has significantly embraced capitalism in recent decades. The tankies often contort themselves to try to explain away this latter contradiction, arguing that China is simply going through a phase of harnessing capitalism to build the forces of production and will someday switch back to communism, biding their time for when the moment is right.

It’s not clear that this is actually the case. Nationals who have actually lived in China tend to have a much more nuanced view of the capitalism that has taken hold in their country. On the one hand, the cutthroat competitiveness is discouraging. On the other hand, the economic growth has lifted millions out of poverty. To that extent, I begrudge that the CPC has done a decent job of improving livelihoods on a material level. But that’s different from saying they are the righteous defenders of socialism.

It’s also popular among tankie discourse to defend as mere “mistakes”, the terrible events of things like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. I do think they somewhat have a point here, that western discourse often paints these historical events as acts of pure malice and evil, when the truth is more complex. People like Mao, to me at least, seem like they were genuinely trying to implement the ideal of communism in their countries. The results of these efforts were, unfortunately, disasterous at times, no matter how well-meaning they might have been. Many millions died in famine and violence, and the CPC was in charge at the time, and were therefore responsible for the consequences. Minimizing these tragedies for the sake of ideology is crass and insensitive.

The idea that America is an evil empire that must be destroyed at all costs is also a rather simplistic view. America is a product of classical liberalism in the same way the Soviet Union and modern China were and are a product of the Marxist Leninist strain of socialism. They’re different worldviews that share a common ideal of equality, reason, and progress, but take very different methods in how to go about things. The people in the American government are often idealists who want to create a better world through the Pax Americana, to spread their understanding of democracy, and try to improve material conditions through the wealth generating effects of trade and capitalism. They generally see themselves as the “good guys”, just as tankies see themselves as such.

Similarly, though democracy is very much limited in China (they have local elections but the candidate selection is vetted by the party and so there’s not much real choice), I don’t doubt that many in the CPC and the government do believe they are working in the interests of their citizens, and possibly even the world. People don’t devote their time and energy to often altruistic and thankless endeavours like public service unless they genuinely believe they are making a positive difference.

That being said, this is not the same thing as saying they can do no wrong. Both the American and Chinese establishments are very capable of making short-sighted decisions that are harmful and dangerous to world peace and justice.

Tankies often argue that even though China and other “actually existing socialist countries” aren’t perfect, they should nevertheless toe the party line and refrain from criticizing their brethren. This often is described as “democratic centralism”, which is justified to them by the idea that socialism is constantly under attack from the forces of bourgeous imperialism, and must stand in solidarity and unity if it is to survive.

Personally, I disagree fundamentally with this idea. The truth matters to me. A system or ideology that can’t sustain itself through serious criticism both inside and outside the movement, is not a serious contender for the truth and for functional governance. The adversarial tone of calling your opponents names like “bourgeous imperialists” is also uncivil and a kind of ad hominem attack that shows a lack of rigor in their arguing and a very dark, cynical view of their opponents. If their ideology is right, they should attack arguments and ideas, and they should be able to face a steelman rather than a strawman.

While there is some merit to the concern that the concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few powerful corporations in the west may compromise liberal democracy, the idea that the best alternative is a socialist dictatorship, rather than say, a better democracy, is at best flawed. To me, both systems have issues that merit criticism. Neither side has a monopoly on either truth or righteousness, and I believe strongly that we should respect and give the benefit of the doubt to those who disagree with us. They are, after all, still human beings with legitimate and real concerns.

In that sense, I do sympathize with the tankie’s drive towards righteous indignation and desire to create a more just world. I just think their black and white viewpoint is mistaken.

Thoughts on China and Taiwan

by Josephius

On October 19, 2023

In Politics

I sometimes spend too much time on Twitter. Occasionally, I’m drawn into political debates. One such perennial argument is over the nature of the conflict between China and Taiwan. I thought, as the child of parents who came from Taiwan, and who’s wife is a loyal Chinese national, I would write down what I think about the whole situation.

My grandparents on my dad’s side come from China. They originally were from Changsha in Hunan province. They left when the Communists took over, eventually joining the Kuomintang or Nationalists in Taiwan. Legend has it that my grandfather smuggled gold for the bank he worked for from Shanghai to Taiwan. To my family on my dad’s side, Taiwan is the Republic of China, and they are Chinese.

My grandparent’s on my mom’s side grew up in Taiwan. They lived through the Japanese occupation, and my grandmother was fluent in both the local Taiwanese dialect and Japanese, but not Mandarin. To my family on my mom’s side, Taiwan is Taiwan, and they are Taiwanese.

The complexity of the situation is that the current government of Taiwan, the Republic of China, was founded by the losing side of the Chinese Civil War, a war that never technically ended, but merely became a frozen conflict. Unlike the Korean War, there isn’t even an armistice between the two factions. The war simply petered out over decades, and in theory is legally still a thing.

At the same time, Taiwan, despite this precarious situation, eventually became a liberal democracy and is a defacto sovereign state, with its own military and flag, albeit one that comes historically from the Republic of China that once governed the mainland. The people of Taiwan, despite being mostly Han Chinese in ethnicity, have lived apart from China proper for so many decades as to have developed a distinct culture and society, almost a distinct nationality even.

China and many Chinese nationals downplay this evolution. They still see Taiwan as unfinished business from the Civil War. There are clearly ties between China and Taiwan, such as the fact that most Taiwanese can speak Mandarin, thanks to decades of education by the Kuomintang to that effect. The museums of Taipei are also filled with priceless historical artifacts from the Chinese mainland, taken with the Kuomintang when they left, and effectively saved from the Cultural Revolution.

And yet, many people in Taiwan don’t see themselves as Chinese. Especially the younger generations have lived their entire lives apart from the mainland. In the process, the cultures have diverged subtly and meaningfully.

So, I understand both sides of this debate. Chinese nationalists see the historical antecedents, while many self-proclaimed Taiwanese see the defacto separation of cultures. I don’t want to say who is right in this, because in some sense they both have a claim to their concerns, and I find it annoying when foreigners, like Americans decide to interject their own assumptions into the fold.

While it’s true that Taiwan was never formally a part of the People’s Republic of China, mainland China was for 37 years the major part of the Republic of China. To ignore that Taiwan is still officially the Republic of China is to ignore reality. At the same time, to ignore that Taiwan is a defacto sovereign state, is also to ignore reality.

In an ideal world, whether people would join or separate from each other would be based on freedom of association and the right to self-determination. That would likely entail some kind of referendum on the question. But the reality is that most sovereign states other than the old Soviet Union, do not allow referenda on separation, or integration for that matter.

The reality is that most sovereign states are still built on the right of conquest. In a better world people could vote on whether to join another country or leave, but that’s not the world we seem to live in, yet. And so we have China trying to maintain what it sees as its territorial integrity, and we have Taiwan trying to exist as its own thing.

So, to me, the China and Taiwan situation is complex, and any attempt to simplify it is frequently either biased, or playing into the hands of propagandists or the agendas of national interest, whether Chinese or American. And at the end of the day, it is the people of Taiwan who are at risk of suffering for it.

Reflections on Working at Huawei

by Josephius

On October 13, 2023

In Life, Politics

Huawei has recently been in the news with the Mate 60 Pro being released with a 7nm chip. The western news media seems surprised that this was possible, but my experience working at Huawei was that the people working there were exceptionally talented, competent, technically saavy experts with a chip on their shoulder and the resources to make things happen.

My story with Huawei starts with a coincidence. Before I worked there, I briefly worked for a startup called Maluuba, which was bought by Microsoft in 2017. I worked there for four months in 2016, and on the day of my on-site interview with Maluuba, a group from Huawei was visiting the company. That was about the first time I heard the name. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Just another Chinese company with an interest in the AI tech that Maluuba was working on.

Fast-forward a year to 2017. I was again unemployed and looking for work. Around this time I posted a bunch on the Machine Learning Reddit about my projects, like the Music-RNN, as well as offering advice to other ML practitioners. At some point these posts attracted the attention of a recruiter at Huawei, who emailed me through LinkedIn and asked if I’d be interested in interviewing.

My first interview was with the head of the self-driving car team at the Markham, Ontario research campus. Despite having a cognitive science background in common, I flunked the interview when I failed to explain what the gates of an LSTM were. Back then I had a spotty understanding of those kinds of details, which I would make up for later.

I also asked the team leader, a former University of Toronto professor, why he was working at Huawei. He mentioned something about loyalty to his motherland. This would be one of my first indications that working at Huawei wasn’t with just any old tech company.

Later I got invited to a second interview with a different team. The team leader in this case was much more interested in my experience operating GPUs to train models as I did at Maluuba. Surprisingly there were no more tests or hoops to jump through, we had a cordial conversation and I was hired.

I was initially a research scientist on the NLP team of what was originally the Carrier Software team. I didn’t ask why a team that worked on AI stuff was named that, because at the time I was just really happy to have a job again. My first months at Huawei were on a contract with something called Quantum. Later, after proving myself, I was given a full-time permanent role.

Initially on the NLP team I did some cursory explorations, showing my boss things like how Char-RNN could be used in combination with FastText word vectors to train language models on Chinese novels like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Three Body Problem to generate text that resembled them. It was the equivalent of a machine learning parlor trick at the time, but it would foreshadow the later developments of Large Language Models.

Later we started working on something more serious. It was a Question Answering system that connected a Natural Language Understanding system to a Knowledge Graph. It ostensibly could answer questions like: “Does the iPhone 7 come in blue?” This project was probably the high point of my work at Huawei. It was right in my alley having done similar things at Maluuba, and the people on my team were mostly capable PhDs who were easy to get along with.

As an aside, at one point I remember also being asked to listen in a call between us and a team in Moscow that consisted of a professor and his grad student. They were competing with us to come up with an effective Natural Language Understanding system, and they made the mistake of relying on synthetic data to train their model. This resulted in a model that achieved 100% accuracy on their synthetic test data, but then proceeded to fail miserably against real world data, which is something I predicted might happen.

Anyways, we eventually put together the Question Answering system and sent it over to HQ in Shenzhen. After that I heard basically nothing about what they did, if anything, with it. An intern would later claim that my boss told her that they were using it, but I was not told this, and got no follow-up.

This brings me to the next odd thing about working at Huawei. As I learned at the orientation session when I transitioned to full-time permanent, there’s something roughly translated as “grayscale” in the operating practices of Huawei. In essence, you are only told what you need to know to do your work, and a lot of details are left ambiguous.

There’s also something called “horse-race culture” which involves different teams within the company competing with one other to do the same thing. It was something always found seemingly inefficient, although I supposed if you have the resources it can make sense to use market-like forces to drive things.

Anyways, after a while, my boss, who was of a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) background, was able to secure funding to add an HCI team to the department, which also involved disbanding the NLP team and splitting people between the HCI team and the Computer Vision team that was the other team in the department originally. I ended up on the CV team.

The department, by the way, had been renamed the Big Data Analysis Lab for a while, and then eventually became a part of Noah’s Ark Lab — Canada.

So, my initial work on the CV team involved Video Description, which was a kind of hybrid of NLP and CV work. That project eventually was shelved and I worked on an Audio Classifier until I had a falling out with my team leader that I won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice to say, my old boss, who was now director of the department, protected me to an extent from the wrath of my team leader, and switched me to working on the HCI team for a while. By then though, I felt disillusioned with working at Huawei, and so in late 2019, I quietly asked for a buyout package and left, like many others who disliked the team leader and his style of leadership.

In any case, that probably isn’t too relevant to the news about Huawei. The news seems surprised that Huawei was able to get where it is. But I can offer an example of the mindset of people there. Once, when I was on lunch break, an older gentleman sat down across from me at the table and started talking to me about things. We got on the subject of HiSilicon and the chips. He told me that the first generation of chips were, to put it succinctly, crap. And so were the second generation, and the third. But each generation they got slightly better, and they kept at it until the latest generation was in state-of-the-art phones.

Working at Huawei in general requires a certain mindset. There’s controversy with this company, and even though they pay exceptionally well, you also have to be willing to look the other way about the whole situation, to be willing to work at a place with a mixed reputation. Surprisingly perhaps, most of the people working there took pride in it. They either saw themselves as fighting a good fight for an underdog against something like the American imperialist complex, or they were exceedingly grateful to be able to do such cool work on such cool things. I was the latter. It was one of my few chances to do cool things with AI, and I took it.

The other thing is that Chinese nationals are very proud of Huawei. When I mentioned working at Huawei to westerners, I was almost apologetic. When I mentioned working at Huawei to Chinese nationals, they were usually very impressed. To them, Huawei is a champion of industry that shows that China can compete on the world stage. They generally don’t believe that a lot of the more controversial concerns, like the Uyghur situation, are even happening, or at least that they’ve been exaggerated by western propaganda.

Now I’ve hinted at some strange things with Huawei. I’ll admit that there were a few incidents that circumstantially made me wonder if there were connections between Huawei and the Chinese government or military. Probably the westerners in the audience are rolling their eyes at my naivety, that of course Huawei is an arm of the People’s Republic, and that I shouldn’t have worked at a company that apparently hacked and stole their way to success. But the reality is that my entire time at the company, I never saw anything that suggested backdoors or other obvious smoking guns. A lowly research scientist wouldn’t have been given a chance to find out about such things even if they were true.

I do know that at one point my boss asked how feasible a project to use NLP to automatically censor questionable mentions of Taiwan in social media would be, ostensibly to replace the crude keyword filters then in use with something able to tell the difference between an innocuous mention and a more questionable argument. I was immediately opposed to the ethics of the idea, and he dropped it right away.

I also know that some people on the HCI team were working on a project where they had diagrams of the silhouettes of a fighter jet pasted on the wall. I got the impression at the time they were working on gesture recognition controls for aircraft, but I’m actually not sure what they were doing.

Other than that, my time at Huawei seemed like that of a fairly normal tech company, one that was on the leading edge of a number of technologies and made up of quite capable and talented researchers.

So, when I hear about Huawei in western news, I tend to be jarred by the adversarial tone. The people working at Huawei are not mysterious villains. They are normal people trying to make a living. They have families and stories and make compromises with reality to hold a decent job. The geopolitics of Huawei tend to ignore all that though.

In the end, I don’t regret working there. It is highly unlikely anything I worked on was used for evil (or good for that matter). Most of my projects were exploratory and probably didn’t lead to notable products anyway. But I had a chance to do very cool research work, and so I look back on that time fondly still, albeit tinged with uncertainty about whether as a loyal Canadian citizen, I should have been there at all given the geopolitics.

Ultimately, the grand games of world history are likely to be beyond the wits of the average worker. I can only know that I had no other job offers on the table when I took the Huawei one, and it seems like it was the high point of my career so far. Nevertheless, I have mixed feelings, and I guess that can’t be helped.

On The Morality Of Work

by Josephius

On May 17, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy, Politics

If you accept the idea that there is no ethical consumption or production under capitalism, a serious question arises: Should you work?

What does it mean to work? Generally, the average person is a wage earner. They sell their labour to an employer in order to afford food to survive. To work thus means to engage with the system, to be a part of society and contribute something that someone somewhere wants done in exchange for the means of survival.

Implicit in this is the reality that there is a fundamental, basic cost to living. Someone, somewhere, is farming the food that you eat, and in a very roundabout way, you are, by participating in the economy, returning the favour. This is ignoring the whole issue of capitalism’s merits. At the end of the day, the economy is a system that feeds and clothes and provides shelter, how ever imperfectly and unfairly. Even if it is not necessarily the most just and perfect system, it nevertheless does provide for most people the amenities that allow a good life.

Thus, in an abstract sense, work is fair. It is fair that the time spent by people to provide food and clothing and shelter is paid back by your spending your time to earn a living, regardless of whatever form that takes. On a basic level, it’s at least minimally fair that you exchange your time and energy for other people’s time and energy. Capitalism may not be fair, but the basic idea of social production is right.

So, if you are able to, please work. Work because in an ideal society, work is your contribution to some common good. It is you adding to the overall utility by doing something that seems needed by someone enough that they’ll pay you for it. Even if in practice, the reality of the system is less than ideal, the fact is that on a basic level, work needs to be done by someone somewhere for people to live.

While you work, try to do so as morally as possible, by choosing insofar as it is possible the professions that are productive and useful to society, and making decisions that reflect your values rather than that of the bottom line. If you must participate in capitalism to survive, then at least try to be humane about it.

In Defence of Defiance Against The World’s Ills

by Josephius

On May 16, 2023

In Motivational, Philosophy, Politics

“If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” – Jesus

In 1972, the famous Utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer published an essay titled: “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” that argued that we have a moral duty to help those in poverty far across the world. In doing so, he echoed a sentiment that Jesus shared almost two millennia prior, yet which most people who call themselves Christians today seem relatively unconcerned with.

From a deeply moral perspective, we live in a world that is fundamentally flawed and unjust. The painful truth is that the vast majority of humans on this Earth live according to a kind of survivorship bias, where the systems and beliefs that perpetuate are not right, but what enables them to survive long enough to procreate and instill a next generation where things continue to exist.

For most people, life is hard enough that questioning whether the way things are is right is something of a privilege that they cannot afford. For others, this questioning requires a kind of soul searching that they shy away from because it would make them uncomfortable to even consider. It’s natural to imagine yourself the hero in your own story. To question this assumption is not easy.

But the reality is that most all of us are in some sense complicit in the most senseless of crimes against humanity. When we participate in an economy to ensure we have food to eat, we are tacitly choosing to give permission to a system of relations that is fundamentally indifferent to the suffering of many. We compete with fellow human beings for jobs and benefit from their misery when we take one of only a limited number of spots in the workforce. We chose to allow those with disproportionate power to decide who gets to live a happier life. And those in power act to further increase their share of power, because to do anything else would lead to being outcompeted and their organization rendered extinct by the perverse incentives that dominate the system.

Given all this, what can one even begin to do about it? Most of us are not born into a position where they have the power to change the world. Our options are limited. To be moral, we would need to defy the very nature of existence. What can we do? If we sell everything we have and give to the poor, that still won’t change the nature of the world, even if it’s the most we could conceivably do.

What does it mean to defy destiny? What does it look like to try to achieve something that seems impossible?

What exists in opposition to this evil? What is good? What is right? What does it look like to live a pure and just life in a world filled with indifference and malice? What does it mean to take responsibility for one’s actions and the consequences of those actions?

Ultimately, it is not in our power to single-handledly change the world, but there are steps we can take to give voice to our values, to live according to what we believe to be right. This means making small choices about how we behave towards others. It means showing kindness and consideration in a world that demands cutthroat competition. It means taking actions that bring light into the world.

Even if we, by ourselves, cannot bring revolution, we can at least act according to the ideals we espouse. This can be as small as donating a modest amount to a charity in a far off land that corrects a small amount of injustice by giving the poorest among us a bednet that protects them from malaria. If approximately ~~$4800~~ $6500 worth of such things can save a life, and minimum wage can earn you $32,000 a year, if you modestly donate 10% of that to this charity, you can save about ~~three lives~~ one life every two years. If you work for 40 years, you can save ~~about 60~~ almost 20 lives this way. Those lives matter. They will be etched into eternity, like all lives worth living. (Edit: Corrected some numbers.)

Admittedly, to do this requires participating in the system. You could also choose not to participate. But to do so would abandon your responsibilities for the sake of a kind of moral purity. In the end, you can do more good by living an ethical life, to lead by example and showing that there are ways of living where you strive to move beyond selfish competition, and seek to cooperate and build up the world.

This is the path of true defiance. It does not surrender one’s life to the evils of egoism, or abandon the world to the lost. Instead it seeks to build something better through decisions made that go against the grain. With the understanding that we are all living a mutual co-existence, and that our choices and decisions reflect who we are, our character as people.

We do not have to be perfect. It is enough to be good.

On Politics, Being a Liberal, and The Canadian Federal Election 2021

by Josephius

On September 16, 2021

In Life, Politics

So, a bit of background to explain where I’m coming from. I’ve been on and off involved in politics since my university days, when I took a first year political studies course and participated in the online forum discussions. I also took a political philosophy course. Back then I identified initially as a Christian Socialist and a communitarian on most political issues. As my political values matured this morphed into support for centre-left modern liberalism. It was back then that I started going to meetings of the Young Liberals. I still remember, back in the day, shaking hands with Michael Ignatieff during a rally. I didn’t join the party though until a chance meeting at the Young Liberals with Sheila Copps, who convinced me to get more involved.

Thus, when the Liberals were going through yet another leadership race after Ignatieff stepped down, I joined the party and initially sought to support Marc Garneau, the former astronaut. He eventually dropped out and encouraged his supporters to support Justin Trudeau. While I was wary of Trudeau being a kind of princeling, I respected that he had charisma, and voted for his leadership candidacy. Afterwards I bought a copy of his book, Common Ground, and admitted it was a decent read, more relevant at least than Ignatieff’s The Needs of Strangers, which had told me little about where Ignatieff actually stood on things or why.

In 2015, there was an election. The increasingly tired Conservative government under Stephen Harper faced off against a refreshed Liberal party under Trudeau, as well as the NDP under Thomas Mulcair, the Bloc Quebecois under Gilles Duceppe, and the Green party under Elizabeth May. By then I was quite angered by Harper’s government, and it only got more so when he made a series of controversial choices that seemed to play to the xenophobia of the far-right.

When the election started, and Harper started using dog-whistles like “old stock Canadians”, I was incensed and felt motivated to kick these people out of office in favour of someone who, back in those heady days, I thought was a breath of fresh air. Back when Trudeau said “A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian”, taking a seemingly less than popular stand on the issue of second class citizenship rights to would-be terrorists, I thought of him as the closest we had to a Captain Canada, who would stand up for Charter rights and the Canadian ideals I believe in.

And so, after canvassing and making phone calls and doing a bunch of random odd jobs that needed to be done as a volunteer, I remember being a scrutineer for the Liberals on election day 2015, and hearing from the dejected Conservative scrutineers who’d just checked their phones and found out that us Liberals had managed to win a majority. Somehow.

Back then I was quite happy with things politically. After the election, the newly elected Liberal MP decided I was a reliable enough person that I was encouraged to run as VP Policy on the board of the riding association. I was acclaimed and sat for about a year, though work on the job front ended up distracting me greatly and I didn’t end up doing as much as I would have liked in terms of making things happen. I’d hoped to organize a town hall event for them and other things, but instead there was a rush to get our policy resolutions ready for the upcoming convention and the process wasn’t as grassroots as I would have liked. Neverthless, it was fun to be on the board of a sitting MP, who had stories to tell about Parliament Hill.

Over time though, the realities of governance led to my developing grievances with Trudeau and his way of handling things. I did not like his decision to essentially renege on the promise that 2015 would be the last election by First Past The Post. Electoral reform was an important issue to me, one that, while knocking on doors, I’d declared confidently that we’d do. So it was disappointing.

Other disappointments also happened. Things like SNC-Lavalin and the way Trudeau handled the Jody Wilson Raybould situation. Generally, I became somewhat disillusioned. At one point, I found myself in a debate with old Liberal friends on Facebook on these issues, as I showed my dissent within the party over Trudeau’s judgment.

So, in addition to being quite busy with work, by now having landed a job at a major tech company, I was not motivated to help out when the 2019 election rolled around, and I basically sat it out.

More recently, I’ve also noticed a drift in my political values, that I’ve gradually shifted leftward and away from the centre. While the Liberals still fit within my positions, I’ve also admittedly looked at other parties like the NDP and Greens, and provided them some modest donations (ostensibly to support all the progressive parties), if not actually volunteering or joining them. Locally, I still support the Liberals, because I tend to find the local candidates of the Liberal party to be higher quality in terms of who I would want to represent me in Ottawa.

I participated in the online Liberal convention this year. I voted for pharmacare and a basic income to be our policies in the future. To be honest, I was a little disappointed that the NDP are more interested in having these policies in their platform than whoever wrote the Liberal platform.

Before the 2021 election call, I moved to a new riding. I noticed that the race here has historically been a close one between the Liberals and Conservatives, similar to my old riding. So, I got into contact with the local Liberals and the candidate. In some ways the candidate reminded me of the past candidate I’d helped. Understated, yet a strong, thoughtful, and thoroughly professional person who seems to sincerely care about their constituents and want to do good in Ottawa. These are the types of Liberals I find that keep me with this party.

I’ll admit I still have reservations about giving Trudeau another mandate. A part of me wonders if it wouldn’t be better to see turnover at the top. But then, in the English debate, I was reminded of why I voted for Trudeau. Even Jagmeet Singh admits that Trudeau seems to really care. Singh seems to think he doesn’t do enough, but respects that Trudeau at least shares some common values.

When Trudeau called the election, I didn’t like it. I thought it was unnecessary in the face of this pandemic. But at the same time, I respect that Trudeau did a lot when the pandemic first hit, that he has guided the country fairly well all things considered in a very trying time. And when the odious PPC protesters shout and throw gravel at him, a part of me wants to defend him. He may be wrong sometimes, but overall, he’s decent-hearted leader, trying his best to balance the complexities of Canada and the world.

So, I am volunteering for the Liberals again this election. I do so with somewhat more mixed feelings than I did in 2015, but I still think this is the right thing to do. To be engaged in politics and democracy and be present in the processes that lead to the leadership of the country. I may not be a candidate or anyone of particular importance, but I think it’s important to participate in politics. For the greatest good of this country, and the world.

The Tragedy of Afghanistan and The Promise of Democracy

by Josephius

On August 17, 2021

In Politics

As a Canadian, I am upset at the situation in Afghanistan. Regardless of whether we should have been there in the first place, what does our word as a country mean if we cannot protect even those who supported us when we were there.

The people now falling from planes trying to escape were people who believed in us when we said we came to help their country. People who were willing to believe in this now apparent siren song of democracy and modernity that we claimed to represent.

What is the value of a promise by a western liberal democracy worth now? Who will trust us to honour what we claim to believe in and stand for?

You can’t force democracy on people, that’s a contradiction in terms, because democracy is by definition built by popular support rather than imposed from outside.

But even so, we led a generation of people to believe in something that is now, for all appearances, abandoning them to their fate. And that is a tragedy all in itself.

The history of Afghanistan is already tragic. It is a graveyard of empires, but also a place of poverty. It is not always well known that the Taliban originated from the CIA-backed Mujahideen that were equipped and trained by the Americans to fight the Soviet-backed Communist regime that ruled before them. In that light, the idea that the Afghan civil war has nothing to do with America, is at best naive, and at worst duplicitous.

Afghanistan is what it is because of American foreign policy. The same policies that helped overthrow democratic governments in Iran and Chile historically when they didn’t favour American interests. That America now wants to leave the country alone after all of that has been done?

Perhaps in time Afghanistan will heal. But the damage to western credibility is done. People will remember. What lesson will they learn from all of this? That our flowery words ring hollow? That “democracy” is a trojan horse for the interests of an unstable, unreliable American empire?

It’s just very disappointing. And of course, tragic for the people who must suffer for the hubris of others. Tragic for people who still believe in democracy and hope and aspire to its ideals. What hope is there for the world if the great city on a hill appears to be nothing but a mirage?

It’s just very disillusioning to see these events play out. After 9/11, America had all the goodwill in the world. Somehow in 20 years they’ve managed to squander it. Even in the Obama years people still had faith. But now I find it hard to defend the ideals of democracy when the practice and execution are so poor.

On paper democracy is great. Everyone gets a vote and their voice heard. The foolish ideas cancel out and the truth prevails because differing experiences agree on them. The wisdom of crowds leads us forward. Or so it should be.

In practice, large media conglomerates owned by wealthy power brokers essentially decide what people think is true. That or isolated conspiracy theory infested online bubbles, foreign state-influenced fake news outlets and the like.

Democracy is further corrupted by such malfeasances as gerrymandered districts, or electoral college shenanigans in the U.S. If democracy is the will of the majority, then the winner of the popular vote should always lead, but frequently this is not the case in many countries whether Presidential or Parliamentary.

So, the truth is that many of our so called democracies aren’t really democratic. At best, they are elected dictatorships, built to legitimize the establishment and create a false sense of popular will for the powers that be. It’s hard to say what a true democracy would look like, or whether it will necessarily be the best government either, but we should stop pretending like our system is 100% absolutely the best thing full stop.

There is much room for improvement. I’m naturally inclined towards reform from within the system, because I think it’s salvagable. But we need to stop assuming that liberal representative democracy is the end of history, the solution to all problems.

Else we sell a false dream that can be dashed by the realities of a world that is far from perfect. As I watch people fall from the sky, their dreams lost to the cold, uncaring march of history. We must do better.