When I first joined Facebook over ten years ago, I though it would be a fun little diversion. Over time, it turned into a invaluable communications tool, particularly with friends and family far away. I have a number of friends who have moved to Alberta, BC, and the US and I’m sure that without Facebook, I would have lost touch with many of them. I also grew up thousands of miles away from my cousins in Scotland and England (and later, Australia) and so I don’t know them very well, but I’m able to touch base with them and get to know them, to some extent, thanks to Facebook. I’m sure this is the case for hundreds of millions of other people worldwide.

One great thing about Facebook is that it allows you have direct conversations with your friends and also see what they’re talking about with other people. But that’s also a bad thing about Facebook. You see what your friends are saying and what their friends are saying, but nobody else. This sounds like what you would want. I want to hear and discuss my friends’ opinions on things. And why would I want to hear some random guy’s opinions on things if I don’t know him?

But by definition, your friends’ world views are generally similar to yours (or they wouldn’t be your friends), and their friends’ views are generally similar to theirs. Of course everyone’s different and friends can have different views on things but more often than not, you find yourself agreeing with your friends on many issues. This is not limited to Facebook – it also applies to Twitter, Instagram, and other social networks. Oh, and real life too.

The problem here is that social networks in general become what’s known as an echo chamber. When you post an opinion and see nothing but agreement, you start to think that this is a popular opinion, or even a consensus. But you’re only seeing your friends’ opinions and since most of your friends think the way you do, you are getting a skewed view of the population.

Take the most recent US election as an example. For months before the election, I saw many postings from friends talking about what a terrible choice Donald Trump would be for President, and I posted many such opinions myself. I saw some postings arguing the other way, but those were mostly reposts from my friends, along with a comment on how misguided the original posters were. I saw almost no pro-Trump postings directly from anyone I knew. In fact, I can only think of one person on my Facebook friends list who posted anything positive about Donald Trump. As a result, I started to believe that the vast majority of people were against Trump, and thus Hillary Clinton would win the election in a landslide.

Imagine my surprise.

Well, you probably don’t have to imagine, since the election results seemed to take everyone by surprise, whether they supported Clinton, Trump, or neither one. Since then, it’s been one surprise after another, though it really shouldn’t be since Trump is doing exactly what he told everyone he would do if elected. Many people, myself include, just couldn’t believe he’d actually get the chance, thanks to the echo chamber.

Did this actually affect the election’s outcome? Perhaps the Trump supporters were so determined to have a non-politician in the White House that they turned out in droves to vote. Meanwhile the Hillary supporters were so deeply embedded in their echo chambers that they didn’t think they had to. It sounds plausible but I’m not sure about it – after all, Trump supporters would have been living in an echo chamber of their own.

I don’t pretend to have a good solution for this problem. On Twitter, I do follow Donald Trump himself (both his personal account and @POTUS) just to see what he’s talking about. Before the election it was a source of humour because he couldn’t possibly win. Since the election, his tweets have been more of a source of anger and fear and usually make me shake my head, but I haven’t unfollowed. I did recently notice that a fairly prominent lacrosse coach was a Trump supporter, and I unfollowed him. He didn’t tweet much anyway so it wasn’t a huge deal. But by doing this I was simply strengthening my echo chamber, something I didn’t think of at the time. Maybe I need to revisit that strategy.

President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly said during the campaign that he’d immediately repeal “Obamacare” if elected. After the election, Trump met with President Obama and subsequently backed down on this, saying that there are parts of it that he likes. Maybe President Obama explained some of the finer details of Obamacare to Mr. Trump, who had never really understood them before, and having more information changed his mind. It’s good to know Mr. Trump has an open mind, and is willing to change it given evidence. I wonder what else might he change his mind on, given a conversation with the right people?

Secretary: Mr. President, the President of Mexico is here and would like to speak with you.
Trump: OK, show him in.

(two hours later)

Trump: My fellow Americans, I have decided to cancel the Mexican Wall project.

Secretary: Mr. President, there are forty-seven climate scientists here to meet with you. They have letters from hundreds of others.
Trump: Sure, I have a few minutes before my tee time.

(two hours later)

Trump: Hey Mike, find that EPA guy I hired and fire him. No wait, firing people is my specialty. Get him in here.

Secretary: Mr. President, the ghost of Martin Luther King, Jr. is here and wants a word.
Trump: What the heck does he want? OK.

(two hours later)

Trump: Hey Mike, we need to cancel that whole “Camp Islam” thing we talked about.

Secretary: Mr. President, Dr. King is back again, he forgot to tell you something.
Trump: Wow, busy day. Sure, send him in.

(ten minutes later)

Trump: Mike, you’re fired.

A week later, Trump invites Hillary Clinton to replace Mike Pence as his vice-president and hires Neil deGrasse Tyson as his chief science advisor. Four years later, the US is a beacon of prosperity, multiculturalism, peace, and harmony. Unemployment is the lowest it’s been in fifty years. The third season of Cosmos made the NFL move Sunday night football because their ratings just couldn’t compete. America is leading the way with renewable energy solutions and the climate isn’t warming quite as fast as before. NASA’s budget has been doubled and there are projects underway to send Americans back to the Moon and to Mars. President Trump is re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in history.

Four years after that, he leaves office with a 96% approval rating. Trump closes his hotel in New York City and turns it into the biggest Presidential Library in the country.

And then I woke up.

When other countries have financial hardships, governments of the richer countries frequently offer to send money or other aid to help them out. Some countries spend billions of dollars in foreign aid every year. Currently, there are thousands of refugees fleeing Syria and looking for shelter in the US, Canada, and many other places, and providing shelter for all of these people will cost millions of dollars as well. But there are thousands of people here in Canada who are living in poverty. There are people struggling to make ends meet because they can’t find a job. I saw a posting recently about homeless veterans. Does it make sense to send this much taxpayer money overseas or spend it on non-Canadians when there are people here in Canada that are in trouble?

(Note that I’m specifically talking about Canada here, but it applies to the US and probably many other countries as well.)

I say no. We should cancel all foreign aid and fix our own problems before helping the rest of the world with theirs. I generally agree that if you have the chance to help someone who needs help, you help them, end of story. Of course, it’s rarely that simple, and when you’re talking about sending hundreds of millions (or more) of taxpayer dollars overseas, that’s just far too simplistic. As long as there are Canadians with problems that can be solved using taxpayer money, it is our responsibility to help them rather than sending that money out of the country. Fix our own problems first.

First we need to define what “problems” we’re talking about. The ones that come up most often are poverty and unemployment, but we can also talk about everything from healthcare to crime to drugs and many others. How many of these problems need to be solved before we will help other countries? Maybe we could just pick the most important two or three. But if we did that, there would still be Canadians who need help with the ones we decide not to solve. Are those people less worthy of help than those who we’ve already helped? Of course not, so we can’t stop with some of these problems, we must tackle them all.

Another question is how completely the problems need to be solved before we’re willing to re-establish foreign aid. Say we have 5% unemployment and inner city poverty is a real problem. After implementing some of the plans we will have come up with for eliminating problems like poverty and unemployment, we have 1% unemployment and have cut the number of people living in poverty by 75%. That’s pretty good, huh? Things are definitely better than they were but even with that improvement, there still are Canadians in poverty and Canadians looking for jobs. The problems aren’t solved. There are still Canadians who need help – again, what makes these people less important than the ones we did help? We can’t stop yet, not until all the problems have been solved. We can’t be satisfied with just improving the situation or reducing these problems, we have to eliminate them. Fix our own problems first.

All we have to do is completely eliminate all problems in Canada, including poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, substance abuse, and crime. We have to do this quickly and without raising taxes. Once that’s done, we’ll have lots of taxpayer money that we will happily use to help others around the world who are in need of it.

So I’m sorry, people living in squalor and dying of dysentery or starvation, and people hoping not to get murdered by rampant terrorists or your own corrupt government. We have people in Canada selling expensive drugs to rich teenagers, and we need to put a stop to that. Also, some people with medical issues have to wait months for an MRI, and we need to cut that way down.

Once we solve all of our own problems completely, we’ll have the perfect society and then we’ll be happy to help you out financially, though you and your children will probably be dead by then. That’s unfortunate, but we have to fix our own problems first.

We all know that the world changed on September 11, 2001. Obviously the events of that day were tragic, and it seemed that America (and to a great extent, Canada too) completely shut down for a week just to recover. Gradually things got restarted and back approaching normal, but in the months and years following, a lot of things never returned to what was “normal” before, and in certain cases the new normal is a lot different from what was normal before.

The thing that everyone can point to as being very different is security, particularly for air travel. Before 9/11, everyone had to go through security before flying, which included being interviewed at customs as well as going through a metal detector, but that was about it. Now, we all have to take our shoes and belts off, throw away bottles of water and contact lens solution, and either consent to being groped by a TSA agent or go through a scanner that can take naked pictures of us. To quote Timon from The Lion King: “… and everyone’s okay with this?”

The site of the World Trade Center is now a memorial, but the amount of security required to get into it is unreal. It’s not just a public park that anyone can walk around. To get tickets, you need to provide your name, address, and phone number, and everyone over 13 needs picture ID that can be asked for at any time. During the cold war we used to laugh at Soviet society, where anyone could be asked for their papers at any time, and thrown into jail if they didn’t have them. Aren’t we lucky not to live in a place like that? Well, now we do.

This has bothered me for years, but why aren’t more people all up in arms about all of this? The belief seems to be that the additional security measures are inconvenient, but they keep us safe so we should just put up with them. But are we really safer now than before? The TSA themselves listed their Top 10 good catches of 2011, which mostly consisted of people trying to get weird things through security or things that would have been found by a metal detector anyway. No terrorists made the list. Early this year there was the cupcake incident, where a passenger had a cupcake confiscated because it could have been made of some kind of explosive gel.

The whole point of the TSA seems to be to protect the American public from possible-but-extremely-unlikely scenarios. Security expert Bruce Schneier calls it “security theater” – it gives all the appearance of providing security, but actually does nothing. You can’t bring more than 100 mL of liquids onto the plane in case they’re liquid explosives. So 100 mL of liquid explosive is not dangerous? And two separate 100 mL bottles (which are allowed) are not dangerous but one 200 mL bottle is? You can’t bring a two-inch-long nail file (security officers snapped one off of our nail clippers) because it could be a weapon, but you’re allowed a six-inch sharpened pencil. Then once you’re in the air, they bring you your dinner and give everyone a metal knife and fork.

The TSA is supposed to be protecting American citizens from terrorists. But how many terrorist plots have they actually foiled? The total number of people killed in the USA in terrorist attacks since 9/11 is 16. Sixteen people in eleven years. This means that either all of the law enforcement agencies all over the US have been extremely effective in preventing terrorist attacks, or there just aren’t that many. Certainly not enough to warrant the $8 billion per year that the US government spends on the TSA. While I acknowledge that it’s possible that a number of terrorist attacks have been foiled and they just haven’t made that information public, I suspect the actual number of terrorists stopped from blowing up / hijacking a plane is zero.

Back to the World Trade Center memorial, how likely is it that terrorists would target it for an attack? Obviously it’s a very meaningful place for Americans so there’s that factor, but a smart terrorist would bypass that entirely and just attack a subway station (zero security on subways, not even metal detectors) or a mall or, like in Tom Clancy’s book The Sum of All Fears, a jam-packed football stadium.

If terrorists want to attack the US again, they wouldn’t be able to do the exact same thing as they’ve done in the past, since we’ve got those bases covered. But if they were not idiots and really determined to find a way, the security procedures put in place by the TSA are unlikely to be able to stop them. But it’s possible that not a single member of Al-Qaeda has set foot in the US in eleven years. In reality, what they’re likely doing is laughing at all the silly hoops that they’ve caused Americans to have to jump through.

Warning: there are some expletives in this posting. Once you read it, I hope you will understand why.

On March 14, Wil Wheaton posted the following on Twitter:

To the “Japan had it coming because OMG Pearl Harbor” crowd that’s crawled out of the sewer: Go fuck yourselves, you ignorant pieces of shit

There are a bunch of people on Facebook and Twitter posting the kind of crap that Wil is referring to: that the earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan was somehow payback for the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941. People are even saying things like If you wanna feel better about the earthquake in Japan, google “Pearl Harbor death toll”. When I first read this I was utterly speechless. Once I was able to comprehend that this wasn’t someone’s idea of a sick joke, I basically thought what Wil said above.

It saddens me to no end that there are this many people that think this way. The odd nutjob here and there I could see, but it turns out that there are lots of these scumbags – just click the “Facebook” link above to see a bunch of them. Luckily, since those all came from facebook, there are names associated with them. No more hiding behind the anonymity of the internet – now everyone knows who you assholes are.

First off, what happened at Pearl Harbor in 1941 was a terrible thing, no question. But that was seventy years ago, and Japan is now an ally of both Canada and the US. I did google “Pearl Harbor death toll”, and found that 2,402 people were killed during that attack. Thus far, there are 1,886 confirmed dead due to the earthquake, and thousands more are missing. But if you’re still looking for payback, perhaps you have forgotten that you already did get payback: you fucking nuked them – twice. The atomic bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 killed between 90,000 and 140,000 people and destroyed over half the city. Then three days later, 73,000 were killed when the US dropped another one on Nagasaki. That’s between 160,000 and 210,000 people dead. For each American killed at Pearl Harbor, most of whom were military, Americans killed between sixty-six and eighty-seven Japanese people, most of whom were civilians. That’s not including the hundreds of thousands of people injured or homeless, or the people that suffered for years or even decades with radiation sickness, or the children of the radiation victims, many of whom themselves suffered and died. The only nuclear weapons ever used during actual conflict were used by the USA on the people of Japan. And that’s not “payback” enough?

I wonder if there were people in Japan (or anywhere else in the world) who saw Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 and thought about payback for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those people, or anyone else who thinks that innocent people who suffer and die deserved it because of the actions of a different generation, would be scumbags as well, but quite honestly, in terms of raw numbers, the Japanese have a lot more to complain about than the Americans.

I also wonder if the people posting this anti-Japanese vitriol realize the irony of doing it using computers and phones that are chock-full of Japanese-designed electronics.

If you disagree with this and do think that the earthquake was somehow caused by karma or that Japan deserved it, you are entitled to that opinion. But please remove yourself from my friends list on Facebook. You are no friend of mine. But even so, I’m going to make a donation to the Japanese Red Cross Society right now, in your honour.

There was a letter to the editor in the Hamilton Spectator today, in response to another letter from yesterday regarding the “rights” of smokers vs. non-smokers. Today’s letter read:

We can debate this issue until the cows come home.

What I find intriguing is that non-smokers scream about their rights and their liberties, and how I as a smoker infringe upon them.

I say “ditto.” I, too, have a right to eat, shop and walk in an environment that is comfortable to me and not feel segregated or put down or looked down upon.

If I, as the letter writer says, wish to put as much nicotine and tar into my body as I like, let me do it when and where I wish.

Terri Hamm, Hamilton

I immediately wrote a reply and sent it in to the Spec:

You are obviously informed about the dangers of smoking and yet have chosen to smoke anyway. That’s your right and I will not argue it with you. If you want to put that crap into your body, go ahead. You’ve made that decision. But while you are putting that crap into your body, you’re putting that crap into the body of everyone around you as well, without their consent. Many others have made the decision NOT to put that crap into their bodies, and yet they’re subjected to it anyway. This will happen if I simply stand near you – I don’t need to interact with you or even know who you are. And you’re arguing that you should have the RIGHT to subject others to your smoke?

If I want to drink myself into oblivion, that’s my decision. But it’s ludicrous for me to argue that I have the right to pour alcohol down the throats of everyone around me just so that I don’t feel “looked down upon”.

It is absolutely stunning to me that we actually have to have this argument. If you want to foul up your body with cigarettes, that’s your decision and your right. But when your habit negatively affects my health, that’s where your rights end. If I get drunk and harass people at the door of the local grocery store, I will be asked to leave and arrested if I don’t. Nobody’s health is in jeopardy here, customers are just being annoyed. But if I smoke near the door and compromise everyone’s health, nobody cares and if they do, the smoker argues about “smokers’ rights”. I don’t get it.