First, from an earlier post:

…
Canadians, because of labels and their own ignorance, simply fail to recognize that President Obama and his actual policies are well to the right of our so-called Conservatives. I challenge anyone to name one major issue of public policy that would disprove my assertion, e.g.:

Health care
Afstan
Missile defence
Income tax levels
Foreign ownership of the media
Military spending
Immigration control of borders
Dealing with terrorism suspects
Capital punishment
Etc., etc., etc…

Earlier on the theme at Daimnation!:

Bush-lite

When will besotted Canadians wake up to the real Obama?

Stephen Harper is no Barack Obama

…

Now Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, much brighter than most of our dim pundit herd, makes the point that our Conservatives are hardly conservative compared to US Republicans–or Democrats sometimes (in fact much more often than Mr Gardner recognizes, see above):

…our erstwhile Reformers look remarkably moderate — which is to say, sweetly Canadian — and are getting steadily more so…

Yes, Conservatives and Republicans may both be “conservative” but they are remarkably different creatures. Name the issue. Health care? If the most right-wing member of the Conservative cabinet gave a speech about his government’s policies to Republicans, he’d be tarred, feathered, and put on the no-fly list. Multiculturalism and bilingualism? The Conservatives have said nothing that would offend a San Francisco city councillor. God, gays, guns? Stephen Harper is slightly to the left of Barack Obama on all three [emphasis added].

And so on down the list…

On economics, there’s an even bigger gap.

“Appropriate, well-timed stimulus measures have yielded dividends in jobs and growth,” Stephen Harper said in a press release this week. Got that? In effect, Harper said, “our Keynesian approach worked!” If he were a Republican, he would have been excommunicated.

To today’s Republicans, economic policy begins and ends with tax cuts. No matter what the circumstances may be — boom, bust, surplus, deficit, whatever — the solution is always the same. Always. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” Republican Tom DeLay once said.

But not just any old tax cut will do for Republicans. The focus has to be on cuts for the rich…

Much to their credit, Canadian Conservatives seem to recognize that cutting taxes won’t magically erase the deficit. And back when they had a surplus to spend, they took two points off the GST, which made the overall tax burden more progressive. In supply-side terms, that’s heresy. But supply-side is a religion with few followers among Conservatives…

Mark
Ottawa

Somebody who makes a lot of loot being pretty consistently wrong.  Dan Gardner in the Ottawa Citizen gives us the facts, man, just the facts:

Beware the rock star business guru

When a slick and smiling Jeff Rubin appeared in a Harry Rosen ad earlier this year, it was clear that the former CIBC World Markets chief economist has become more than a practitioner of the dismal science. He is a brand. A rock star. An international guru with a best-selling book and a long list of corporations eager to pay very large amounts of money to hear him forecast the future.

Unfortunately, the future the guru sees isn’t pretty.

“What will 2011 bring?” he wrote on his blog [it's here]. “Tripledigit oil prices.” Unless you happen to have an oil well in your backyard, that’s bad news. “Our last encounter with those prices was brief but decisive,” Rubin wrote. It was in 2008. The shock to the economy was so severe it caused the global recession.

So should we batten down the hatches in 2011? I don’t know. Unlike Jeff Rubin, I claim no powers of prognostication. I did, however, write a book about why expert predictions routinely fail, how experts delude themselves about their failures, and why people are drawn to the sort of expert who is most likely to be wrong. So I know something about the subject.

And what I know is that Jeff Rubin is an almost eerily perfect example of the sort of expert people should not listen to — but do anyway…

“Don’t think of today’s [oil] prices as a spike,” he told the Toronto Star in January, 2008, as the price was shooting upward. “Don’t think of them as a temporary aberration. Think of them as the beginning of a new era.”

In April 2008, Rubin released a CIBC report titled “The Age of Scarcity.” “Despite the recent record jump in oil prices, the outlook suggests that oil prices will continue to rise steadily over the next five years, almost doubling from current levels,” he wrote. Oil would be $130 a barrel in 2009; $150 in 2010; $190 in 2011; and a terrifying $225 in 2012.

The report says nothing about oil prices sinking the economy. On the contrary, it says both the Canadian and American economies will grow steadily in the second half of 2008 and throughout 2009. The Toronto Stock Exchange would soar to near-record levels in 2008 and hit 16,200 in 2009.

In June 2008, with oil prices rising even faster than Rubin expected, he revised his call. Oil would top $200 by 2010, he forecast…

In short, Rubin’s forecasts were utterly wrong…

There’s lots more. Mr Gardner is a bright light in our dim journalistic firmament–more here.

Update thought: Mr Gardner’s bugbears include misuse of statistics and unclear thinking. This excerpt from a Globe and Mail editorial today is a prime example of the problem:

…
Children being caught in a crossfire or shot as bystanders is not rare [emphasis added] in Toronto. Three other examples: 15-year-old [a child?] Jane Creba, shot dead on Yonge Street in 2005 while shopping; Shaquan Cadougan, age 4, shot in the knee while outside his home, also in 2005; and 11-year-old Tamara Carter, shot in one eye, on a city bus in 2004…

Four–or should that be three?–examples over six years. How many young people are there in Toronto? Hundreds of thousands? Their chance of being shot “in a crossfire or shot as bystanders” is almost infinitesimally rare, if words have meaning.

Mark
Ottawa

I kid you not. And I thought they didn’t believe in negative campaigning. Dan Gardner (talk about muscular writing) of the Ottawa Citizen reveals what’s at the core of Jumpin’ Jack Layton’s thought, Vladimir Ilyich he is not.  No ringing call for “Peace! Bread! Land!”

New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton faces a problem that has plagued the left for 30 years: Nationalization and wealth redistribution have vanished from the intellectual climate.
Photograph by: Mark Blinch, Reuters, Ottawa Citizen

…Layton elaborated. “If you look at the new approach to energy, for instance, it’s all based on decentralization, particularly around energy efficiency. My buddy Amory Lovins likes to talk about negawatts. If you can save a megawatt cheaper than you can produce one, then go out there and save it. And by the way, you’ll also create more work by doing that. And we’ve got lots of negawatts out there. We’ve got lots of homes, we’re moving into the heating season, and they’re turning up their furnaces, if we have people out there with caulking guns, insulation, and new tripleglazed windows, all over the country, people apprenticing, young people having jobs in their local area, you wouldn’t have to fly to the tarsands for a three-week shift or a two-week shift and then go back home for a week. You’d be able to work right there in your own community, upgrading the building stock.”

Now, I like triple-glazed windows as much as the next guy, but we were talking about global politics at a pivotal moment in history. This sounded like the third bullet point on page six of a really boring campaign brochure. Could there be a clue here about why the left is failing to seize the day?..

The piece is Norman Spector’s “The column I wish I’d written” today. Well chosen.  As for the V.I. guy:

Nice threads, at least Jack has that in common.

Mark
Ottawa

Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen, in his constant quest for clear thinking, shows how both right and left fail to assess properly the Irish economic collapse:

The ‘road to prosperity’ isn’t at all clear

The “road to prosperity” is clear, wrote Pat Toomey in a book published last year. Cut taxes. Deregulate. Get government out of the way and let the free market rip. This isn’t dogma, emphasized Toomey, a former Republican Congressman and former president of the Club for Growth. It’s empirical fact. Why, just look at the miraculous economy of Ireland.

Yes, just look at it.

Once hailed as proof that cuts are the cure for whatever ails the body politic, Ireland is now broke. A burst real estate bubble gutted Irish banks, knocked the economy flat, and crushed the government with Brobdingnagian debt. Unemployment is more than 13 per cent. And thanks to severe austerity measures required by an International Monetary Fund-EU bailout package agreed to this week, things will soon get worse.

Does this give Pat Toomey pause? Does it make others wonder if Toomey is perhaps excessively confident in his judgments about prosperity and how to get there? Apparently not…

…Ireland, the formerly sleepy and stagnant European backwater experienced stunning economic growth. Emigration became immigration. Major corporations set up shop. Ireland became the “Celtic tiger.”

What caused the transformation? Cuts, said countless people on the right. Cuts to government spending. Cuts to income taxes. But most of all, cuts to corporate taxes.

Understandably, Ireland’s collapse has given many on the left a certain schadenfreude. This “is what the conservative agenda looks like, played out to the end,” wrote NDP strategist Brian Topp. British writer Johann Hari suggested Naomi Klein take her “masterpiece” of a book, The Shock Doctrine [aaarrgh!], on an I-Told-You-So tour of Ireland.

I wonder, though, if both sides haven’t made the same mistake.

What was the evidence that made free-market enthusiasts certain that Ireland had proved cuts are the “road to prosperity”? It was simple: Ireland made big cuts; the economy boomed; therefore the cuts caused the economy to boom…

See the problem? The shaman shakes his rattle over a sick man; the man gets better; therefore rattle-shaking cures illness. This is the logical fallacy known as “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (after this therefore because of this). It’s a simple mistake. And people fall for it all the time.

Particularly when it suits their ideological tastes.

Note that Ireland did much more than cut tax spending and taxes. It joined the European Union and got huge subsidies for infrastructure. It invested heavily in education. It adopted the euro. It created the “social partnership,” which sees government, labour and business negotiate collective agreements at the national level. And a long, long list of other policies.

But those were seldom mentioned when free-market activists touted Ireland. Instead, they plucked out the few policies that fit their ideological assumptions and declared “post hoc ergo propter hoc!”

Which is exactly what leftists are doing now. Ireland cut government and taxes; Ireland crashed; therefore cuts to government and taxes caused Ireland to crash. No mention of the policies that don’t fit that narrative, and no analysis more rigorous than “post hoc ergo propter hoc.”

The problem here goes straight to the heart of social science…

Indude.  More posts featuring Mr Gardner here and here, and his website here.

Mark
Ottawa

An article in the Daily Telegraph looks at one by Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen–one of our best, er, pundits.  Even though one may disagree with his conclusions he does his research and thinks clearly:

…
Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear

I wasn’t sure whether to include this book: its subject is deeply entwined with matters of brain science and psychology, but it is both broader and narrower in scope than other books on this list, dealing with politics and the media, and staying solely on the topic of risk perception. He also has an explicit agenda of his own. But Gardner’s book is so enlightening on so many aspects of modern life that it deserves to make the cut.

Our mind, he says, is built to work in a Stone Age environment…

It’s straightforward and witty, and best of all – despite some of the subject matter – hugely optimistic. This is the best time in history to be a human being: we are safer and healthier than any people who have ever lived. We live in unjustified fear, says Gardner, in a clarion call to the world to stop worrying so much. A cheering read…

Mr Gardner’s latest book’s title hits my sweet spot:

Future Babble : Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway

Mark
Ottawa

Robert Fulford makes a case, much better than I might, that I’ve been thinking about:

…
It’s become clear free speech and free inquiry are among the chief targets of the Islamists. They have developed the term Islamophobia as a stick to shame their critics into silence. At the same time, Islamists and their sympathizers have devoted themselves to finding reasons to be enraged. In this pursuit what they call Islamophobia is their rhetorical ally.

In 2005, after a Danish newspaper with a circulation of 120,000 published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, rabble-rousers in Syria, Lebanon and Iran stirred up furious protests. These led to mob violence. Police began shooting and some estimates place the resulting fatalities at 100 — in most cases fellow Muslims.

These killings inaugurated a new form of intimidation and censorship. Around the world many editors who would otherwise have published the cartoons decided against it, lest they inspire more demagogues to inflame more crazed gangs and thereby lead to more deaths.

It is as if Islamists were saying to the world: Don’t offend us or we’ll kill a lot of our people.

Because an idiot Christian pastor with a minuscule church in Gainesville, Fla., threatened to burn copies of the Koran, Muslims announced they would riot again.

Evangelical leaders, having failed to persuade the firebug pastor to desist, asked Muslims not to take his plans too seriously. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, argued no one should imagine one obscure minister, with a congregation numbered in the dozens, was speaking for 300 million Americans.

Anderson, poor fool, seemed unaware Islamists, trying to incite mindless violence for political gain, have no interest in accuracy or a sense of proportion. So protests began in Afghanistan; about the time the pastor was announcing he would suspend his bonfire, the first death was reported.

Something similar, on a larger scale, happened this week in the controversy over the 11-storey Islamic centre and mosque that may be built near the 9/11 site in New York.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who is responsible for the building, moved the issue to a more ominous level when he said on television on Wednesday night the results will be dire if the controversy causes the centre to be located elsewhere.

“The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack,” Rauf predicted.

He said it would threaten U.S. troops and otherwise undermine U.S. security.

“This crisis could become much bigger than the Danish cartoon crisis,” he warned…

In the climate that was created by 9/11 the fear of Islamophobia has created another threat, more serious in the long run: It inhibits the serious discussion of Islam.

Of all the great religions, Islam is unique in believing it should not be analyzed or criticized. The key point is the divine nature of the Koran. Because Muslims believe it is unalterably holy, any discussion of it is an affront.

In this sense Islam remains medieval. In 15th-century Europe, before Martin Luther, criticism of the Gospels and the Christian church was forbidden. In the year 2010 Islam still maintains that principle.

The Koran has never been scrutinized in the way the Bible has been studied since the 17th century. Ibn Warraq, a brilliant, Muslim-raised scholar whose books bring standard scholarly principles to the Koran, finds it necessary to travel with security guards…

Adrian makes a pretty good case too:

The Integration Efforts Are Not Going Well…

Plus from Dan Gardner in the Ottawa Citizen, after some quoting from the Bible:

…if vicious descriptions of the horrible fates awaiting unbelievers is your kick, be sure to get an unburned copy of the Koran. “I am with you,” God is said to have told the angels, “so keep the believers steadfast. I shall instil terror in the hearts of the unbelievers, so smite above the necks and smite off every fingertip.” Then things get really ugly for unbelievers. After death, the Koran says, “they will be the inhabitants of the Fire, abiding in it forever.” Sam Harris made a list of all such passages in his book The End of Faith. It goes on for pages.

The Koran also has good advice for how believers should deal with unbelievers, “the most vile of beasts”: don’t. “Do not take close aides or friends except believers, others would never miss any opportunity of exploiting any weakness of yours. They only desire your ruin, rank hatred has already shown itself from their mouths, and what their heart conceals is far worse.” Not a lot of mutual respect and tolerance there, I’m afraid.

Of course religions can evolve. It is true, for example, that most Christians do not support the immediate execution of all homosexuals and very, very few would think it appropriate to kill a man who had carnal relations with a sheep. Or kill the sheep. That’s progress.

But, even if religions evolve [Islam? see Mr Fulford above], religious texts don’t. The language of brutality and bigotry is still there, in books said to be holy…

Mark
Ottawa

Dan Gardner of the Ottawa Citizen is usually very logical (see this post at Daimnation!, with a jab also at Giggles of the Globe and Mickey I.). But in the case of this column he misses the real logic.

As Mr Gardner argues, David Frum–in maintaining it is rather early to judge the outcome, beneficial or no, of the Iraq invasion [see 2) here]–minimizes the length of time it took for South Korea to become a prosperous democracy after the Korean War ended in 1953. However Mr Gardner claims that this specific bit of trickiness on Mr Frum’s part in itself refutes his larger point:

…
See the trick? The Korean war ended in 1953. South Korea was neither wealthy nor a democracy in the 1950s. Or the 1960s. Or the 1970s. Even as late as the mid-1980s, in the Freedom House rankings, South Korea got the same score on civil and political freedom as apartheid South Africa. Only in the late 1980s did freedom begin to flourish in South Korea. And only in 1996 did South Korea join the OECD.

So what Frum did, in effect, was to erase a full 40 years of history: There was a war; South Korea became a wealthy democracy; therefore, the war was worth it. Sounds plausible enough. But only if those four decades are removed…

I think the logical Mr Gardner is now being somewhat tricky himself. Is he implying that, if the United Nations (read overwhelmingly the US) had not fought the Korean War and thus prevented North Korea (with massive Chinese assistance after the first months) from conquering and annexing the south, the South Koreans would now nonetheless enjoy the prosperity and democracy they do?

That is clearly absurd. Does Mr Gardner moreover believe that the lack of democracy in the south, though with growing prosperity, in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s was equivalent to being ruled by Kim Il-sung and that the war was therefore unjustified?

Sometimes spotting a flaw in another’s argument can lead one to making even worse flaws in one’s own counter-argument.

Mark
Ottawa