Why the G20 is so depressing

All photos in this post are from the Toronto Star Photo Blog.

I was not at the G20 protests in Toronto over the weekend. I was sitting cozy in Montreal, following the news on Twitter and talking about it with friends. I have no first hand knowledge of what happened there, but I have been reading about it, looking at pictures, and getting in arguments about it.

I am not going to defend the actions of the so-called anarchists who spent Saturday smashing up downtown Toronto. I understand the frustration of caring about something you have no chance of affecting, but smashing storefronts and burning cop cars is beyond pointless. On the other hand, the government's crackdown on civil liberties and gift of expanded powers to the police were entirely reprehensible. The billion dollar price tag on conference security is obscene, and it makes me wonder why the federal government chose to host the G20 in downtown Toronto as opposed to a more remote location. I am completely unable to come up with a good reason, and the only bad reason that comes to mind is to gratify the egos of Stephen Harper and his government. Shutting down the city for a weekend doesn't seem to have any positive impact, but it sure does demonstrate to Harper's fellow heads of government that he is able to control the population.

What he was not able to do, however, was protect Toronto after provoking a large protest by locating the conference in the country's largest city. According to multiple sources, while the police apparently had the time and resources to assault peaceful protesters throughout the weekend, dealing with the handful of people smashing windows was too much for them. From the Toronto Star:

For the $1.2 billion the country spent on security, we saw very little protecting Toronto itself. This small group completely hijacked the peaceful message of the Saturday’s demonstration. The police did little to stop them. In the wake of their damage, the only people picking up the pieces were the street medics. [....] [The medics] didn’t really want to be performing the role that officers should have been doing.

What is it that stopped the hundreds of police in riot gear from moving in and arresting this small group of people? They had enough officers on hand to conduct several mass arrests throughout the weekend, but not enough to stop a group of hooligans in black from smashing windows as they leisurely made their way down Queen and Yonge streets.

I would suggest that this has been allowed to happen because provoking and instigating the violent minority at large protests has been a tactic of police in this country for years, going so far as to insert officers dressed as "anarchists" into the protest crowd as provocateurs (and does the man swinging the bag above look like a skinny vegan anarchist like his friends in the background to you?):

The police do this for two reasons: First, the actions of the fifty people smashing windows taints the public's perception of the thousands of others who are protesting peacefully, and secondly, once the protest has become violent, the police are able to move in, conduct mass arrests, and shut all of the protesters down. To this purpose, they even abandoned police cruisers in the path of the rioters for no reason other than to give them something to burn that will look good in the news later. In the words of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, it is "unclear why police cruisers would be in the vicinity of the protest. Throughout the week, police officers circulated in unmarked vans." Yet, somehow, police cruisers ended up parked and abandoned (at dramatic and photogenic angles) in the middle of empty streets when the police knew vandals would be heading that way.

It's slightly difficult to make out in this picture, but someone has clearly written "This car is bait!" on the car around the 9-1-1 logo. It seems that someone on the scene realized there was something fishy about the police choosing to abandon a cruiser, and it's unfortunate that they were unable to dissuade the others from destroying it. Abandoning this vehicle was part of a carefully orchestrated manipulation of the public opinion. From the comments on every news article about the protests to tweets from the normally sharp as a tack Andrew Coyne, the Canadian public is now generally opposed to everything the protesters stood for. All it took was a few numbskulls who like to smash things and the police being willing to let them run wild.

From the expanded police powers ("Papers, please," while refusing to identify themselves), to refusing to protect Toronto from vandalism, to the arrogance of hosting the summit in Toronto in the first place, it's obvious that Stephen Harper's government has little but disdain for the general population. Unfortunately, I don't believe that there is any alternative for Canadians that will have our interests at heart. We are at the point in history when nation states are beginning to recede into the background, and what is being protested at these events, however inarticulately, is the governments' willingness to hand the reins over to those who have no responsibility to worry about their people's welfare. The defining image of the summit is not going to be anything accomplished between world leaders, but the video of protesters being charged by police immediately after singing the national anthem.

It's going to be an interesting century.

Earthwobbles!

Yesterday I experienced my first ever earthquake. It wasn't a big deal, but I've never felt the ground shake like that before, so it was actually a little exciting. Honestly, I was kind of hoping for some aftershocks because I felt like I hadn't had enough time to properly appreciate the experience. I have a basement apartment, and for the first 10 or 15 seconds I just thought there was a big truck outside, rattling the windows. I didn't realize what was going on until the wall I was leaning against started to sway back and forth and the building began making alarming creaking noises.

The most entertaining part for me (aside from the CBC's jokes about how all of the office workers in central Canada were sent home from work because they were "so shaken up") is that I sent a text to a friend in southern Ontario that said, "I think I just felt an earthquake." She responded, "That doesn't make any sense." But then she immediately called me to tell me that her house had started shaking as soon as she had sent the text message. Making a wild estimate, based on the distance between her house and my house and the time lag between when we had felt it, I declared that the epicentre must have been near Ottawa. The official declaration placed it 61 km north of Ottawa. That semester of Earth Science 170 in university really paid off!

It brought to mind the first tornado I ever saw, which was last summer in Edmonton. That was also a minor event, but much scarier. Seeing big trees like the one pictured above torn up and come crashing down towards my house was a legitimately frightening experience, and I got a huge adrenaline rush as I was being herded into the basement. I feel like I have started a trend for myself of one new natural disaster each year. A tornado in 2009 and an earthquake in 2010. Maybe next year there will be a volcano, and then I'll be set for a meteor strike in 2012. I can't wait!

"The Frustration Aggregator"

For the last few weeks, I have been participating in the semi-private beta test of the new, heavily funded by venture capital site, Quora (and if you're like me and cringe with cognitive dissonance every time someone uses a singular verb form with a plural noun, brace yourself). Quora aspires to be a "canonical" (whatever that means) repository of knowledge, which people go to for the answers to all of life's problems. In practice, it seems to be a fairly straightforward cross between Yahoo! Answers and Twitter, with a dash of Wikipedia thrown in for a little Web 2.0 seasoning. As a Quora user, you are expected to posts questions and answer others, presumably in your own areas of expertise. You are able to follow other users, to see what they're posting to the site, but you are also able to follow topics like, "Startups" or "Pizza" or "Restaurants in San Francisco" (while my personal favourite is "Questions That Are Actually Assertions"). Any user is able to add or remove topic tags to any question, edit any question, and suggest edits to other users' answers.

The interesting thing about Quora, for me, is the incredibly skewed demographics of the current userbase. Because it was in a semi-closed, invitation only beta, the vast majority of the users seem to be Silicon Valley people. This means that the site filled with charming Silicon Valley quirks such as:

• A penchant for conveying information in short, bulleted lists.
• Seemingly random usage of bold fonts for emphasis.
• The unique worldview that develops from the combination of being extremely young and fabulously wealthy.

They have turned a small minority of the population, hyperambitious yuppies who feel like their incredible arrogance is justified by their financial success, into a local majority. As a result, they seem to look at me as a kind of retarded alien when I unwittingly trip over their tech startup orthodoxy and offend them. But if you can handle being called a dumb cunt when you imply that denying public education to people of below average intelligence is a disturbing idea, the site is an extremely interesting insight into how this small but influential sector of the western population thinks. Questions like, "What other reasons could be there to create a startup if not to get rich?" and "Why are the working class more authoritarian than other socioeconomic classes?" give some insights into the bizarre, quasilibertarian ideology shared by many of these people, while questions like, "Which parties can I attend that have male attendees with a net worth of $10 million or more?" and "What are the best practices to follow when meeting someone in person for the first time through online dating?" open a hilarious window onto the dating scene among awkward, rich nerds and the beautiful, manipulative women who love them.

In any case, Quora is now open to the public, and it will likely soon be losing its character as the unwashed masses pour in. I would encourage anyone who is interested in it for its anthropological interest to get in there before it's too late. They have not worked out a real way to deal with determined trolls, so I would wager that the site is not going to be in its current form for much longer.

Q. How many apes does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Yesterday, I got in a little hot water for posting a link, in a Boing Boing comments thread about the riot video, to a YouTube Doubler mashup featuring the riot and a famous scene from a movie. A few people accused me and David Pescovitz, a Boing Boing blogger who reposted my link to the front page, of being racist. The first comment in the new thread reads, "Wait, you're really going to post a video showing civic violence in a mostly latino neighborhood side by side with a bunch of actors in ape suits, and compare the rioters to "subhuman primates" in as many words? Do you not think about racial implications at all before you post?" This is obviously ridiculous, and not just because there are members of several races present. The comparison is not disrespectful to anyone, aside from the specific people captured on film (coincidentally, members of several races) whose actions resemble those of chimpanzees and monkeys to an uncomfortable degree.

Seeing this riot video brought to my mind a question I have been struggling with for some time. How far have we actually come since our ancestors were discovering how to crush animal skulls with femurs? The fact that a group of humans in 2010, with all the benefits of millions of years of evolution and millennia of human culture, behave in such a similar fashion to "lesser" primates seems to indicate that the answer is, "Not much." In the video, they circle the car, every moment of inaction increasing the tension until one member of the group darts forward, accompanied by the same shrill shouts of encouragement and fear that could have been heard on the savannah hundreds of thousands years ago, to kick a headlight or slash a tire, before quickly retreating back to the safe anonymity of the group. As the group gains confidence, the individuals move in closer and displays of bravado and aggression become more frequent, until the sound of an approaching predator sends them scattering, shrieking warnings to each other. Obvious monkey behaviour. On the other hand, half of the people in the video are filming or taking pictures of the proceedings on extremely high tech pocket tools. How do we reconcile the behaviour with the technological heights humans have reached?

I'm beginning to suspect that, as a species, we are only intermittently self-aware. It seems to me that if even a small segment of the population operated on pure primate instinct all of the time, it would be impossible for a civilization to cohere. If it dominated the life of any individual, it would be extremely difficult for that person to hold down a job or perform any functions that required higher order thinking or analysis. At the same time, even the most intelligent and successful people exhibit absurdly irrational behaviour occasionally. If this is the case, it's possible that what we think of as "intelligence" is simply the ability to maintain self-aware control over our instinctive behaviour, and those who can do it more consistently or for longer durations benefit from this talent.

Our species has somehow always managed to contain both individuals who are capable of monumental feats of engineering, and those whose greatest contribution to culture is scrawling their names on the side of those monuments the way our ancestors might have scrawled their names on cave walls. It should not be surprising to us when we see a video of people behaving badly; what is surprising is that we have so risen above our natures that these events are notable when they occur. If you look for it, you can see the primate dynamics playing out just under the surface in any large group of people. And in that light, I think that we are doing fairly well.