How to be a god: we might one day create virtual worlds with characters as intelligent as ourselves

The Conversation
January 29, 2022

Woman playing video games (Shutterstock)

Most research into the ethics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) concerns its use for weaponry, transport or profiling. Although the dangers presented by an autonomous, racist tank cannot be understated, there is another aspect to all this. What about our responsibilities to the AIs we create?

Massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (such as World of Warcraft) are pocket realities populated chiefly by non-player characters. At the moment, these characters are not particularly smart, but give it 50 years and they will be.

Sorry? 50 years won’t be enough? Take 500. Take 5,000,000. We have the rest of eternity to achieve this.

You want planet-sized computers? You can have them. You want computers made from human brain tissue? You can have them. Eventually, I believe we will have virtual worlds containing characters as smart as we are – if not smarter – and in full possession of free will. What will our responsibilities towards these beings be? We will after all be the literal gods of the realities in which they dwell, controlling the physics of their worlds. We can do anything we like to them.

So knowing all that…should we?

Ethical difficulties of free will

As I’ve explored in my recent book, whenever “should” is involved, ethics steps in and takes over – even for video games. The first question to ask is whether our game characters of the future are worthy of being considered as moral entities or are simply bits in a database. If the latter, we needn’t trouble our consciences with them any more than we would characters in a word processor.

The question is actually moot, though. If we create our characters to be free-thinking beings, then we must treat them as if they are such – regardless of how they might appear to an external observer.


That being the case, then, can we switch our virtual worlds off? Doing so could be condemning billions of intelligent creatures to non-existence. Would it nevertheless be OK if we saved a copy of their world at the moment we ended it? Does the theoretical possibility that we may switch their world back on exactly as it was mean we’re not actually murdering them? What if we don’t have the original game software?

Can we legitimately cause these characters suffering? We ourselves implement the very concept, so this isn’t so much a question about whether it’s OK to torment them as it is about whether tormenting them is even a thing. In modern societies, the default position is that it’s immoral to make free-thinking individuals suffer unless either they agree to it or it’s to save them (or someone else) from something worse. We can’t ask our characters to consent to be born into a world of suffering – they won’t exist when we create the game.

So, what about the “something worse” alternative? If you possess free will, you must be sapient, so must therefore be a moral being yourself. That means you must have developed morals, so it must be possible for bad things to happen to you. Otherwise, you couldn’t have reflected on what’s right or wrong to develop your morals. Put another way, unless bad things happen, there’s no free will. Removing free will from a being is tantamount to destroying the being it was previously, therefore yes, we do have to allow suffering or the concept of sapient character is an oxymoron.

Afterlife?

Accepting that our characters of the future are free-thinking beings, where would they fit in a hierarchy of importance? In general, given a straight choice between saving a sapient being (such as a toddler) or a merely sentient one (such as a dog), people would choose the former over the latter. Given a similar choice between saving a real dog or a virtual saint, which would prevail?

Bear in mind that if your characters perceive themselves to be moral beings but you don’t perceive them as such, they’re going to think you’re a jerk. As Alphinaud Leveilleur, a character in Final Fantasy XIV, neatly puts it (spoiler: having just discovered that his world was created by the actions of beings who as a consequence don’t regard him as properly alive): “We define our worth, not the circumstances of our creation!”.


World of Warcraft is massively-multiplayer online role-playing game.
Daniel Krason/Shutterstock


Are we going to allow our characters to die? It’s extra work to implement the concept. If they do live forever, do we make them invulnerable or merely stop them from dying? Life wouldn’t be much fun after falling into a blender, after all. If they do die, do we move them to gaming heaven (or hell) or simply erase them?

These aren’t the only questions we can ask. Can we insert ideas into their heads? Can we change their world to mess with them? Do we impose our morals on them or let them develop their own (with which we may disagree)? There are many more.

Ultimately, the biggest question is: should we create sapient characters in the first place?

Now you’ll have noticed that I’ve asked a lot of questions here. You may well be wondering what the answers are.

Well, so am I! That’s the point of this exercise. Humanity doesn’t yet have an ethical framework for the creation of realities of which we are gods. No system of meta-ethics yet exists to help us. We need to work this out before we build worlds populated by beings with free will, whether 50, 500, 5,000,000 years from now or tomorrow. These are questions for you to answer.

Be careful how you do so, though. You may set a precedent.

We ourselves are the non-player characters of Reality.

Richard A. Bartle, Professor of Computer Game Design, University of Essex

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Scientists warn of 'a slew of ethical concerns' with Elon Musk’s brain implant technology

Alex Henderson, AlterNet
January 28, 2022

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has reached a deal with US stock market regulators over his use of social media AFP/File / Frederic J. BROWN


Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Neuralink technology, which sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, recently hired a director for clinical trials. The idea behind Neuralink is to implant coin-shaped devices that would allow people to operate computers and mobile devices with their brains. And in the scientific world, journalist Noah Kirsch reports in an article published by the Daily Beast on January 25, Neuralink is inspiring a lot of debate.

“In spite of the never-ending momentum for the world’s richest man,” Kirsch explains, “scientists are worried about the company’s oversight, the potential impact on trial participants, and whether society has meaningfully grappled with the stakes of fusing big tech with human brains.”

Neuralink has already been tested on animals, but testing it on people takes the technology to a whole new level. One of the scientists who has strong reservations about Neuralink is the University of Wisconsin’s Dr. Karola Kreitmair, an assistant professor of medical history and bioethics.

Kreitmair told the Beast, “I don’t think there is sufficient public discourse on what the big picture implications of this kind of technology becoming available are. I worry that there’s this uncomfortable marriage between a company that is for-profit.”

But Kreitmair also said that “this technology has the potential to be life-changing for people who are paralyzed” even though it “raises such a slew of ethical concerns.”

Another scientist who has strong reservations about Neuralink’s technology is Dr. Laura Cabrera, who specializes in neuroethics research at Penn State University in State College, Pennsylvania.

Cabrera told the Beast, “With these companies and owners of companies, they’re kind of showmen. They’ll make these hyperbolic claims, and I think that’s dangerous, because I think people sometimes believe it blindly…. I’m always cautious about what (Musk) says.”

The 50-year-old Musk, a Gen-Xer and native of South Africa, is now, as Kirsch notes, the wealthiest man in the world — a position once held by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and later, investor and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. Musk, who founded Neuralink in 2016, is estimated to have a net worth of $243 billion, according to Forbes.

Thai pig farmers angered by havoc from suspected African swine fever

2022/1/30 
© Reuters


By Patpicha Tanakasempipat

NAKHON PATHOM, Thailand (Reuters) -Business began unravelling for Thai pig farmer Jintana Jamjumrus two years ago, after dozens of her animals got feverish and died within days of a mysterious illness she suspected of being a viral disease with no known vaccine, African swine fever (ASF).

This month, officials identified the first case of ASF in Jintana's province of Nakhon Pathom, after years of saying it was not in Thailand, unleashing a political firestorm as pork prices hit an all-time high near which they may stay for months.

"There's no way they didn't know. Pigs died all over the country ... Why the cover-up?" Jintana, 75, asked about the deaths in previous years. "What can they do now? There's nothing left."

In parliament, an opposition lawmaker accused the government of a years-long cover-up, though a deputy agriculture minister denied this, saying authorities had successfully kept out the disease in previous years.

But small farmers, whose losses have driven 54% of them out of business in the past year, are sceptical, particularly as the viral disease, for which there is no vaccine, has killed hundreds of millions of pigs in Europe and Asia since 2018.

"I had to let the sick ones die and sell off the healthy ones," said Jintana. "My business was all gone."

Earlier warning would have saved their livelihoods, say the small farmers, and perhaps averted the pork shortage that drove retail prices in Bangkok to 215 baht ($6.47) per kg on Jan. 11, the highest daily average in a database stretching back to 2001.

The high prices led to a ban on exports of live animals until April, and consumer prices could stay high as production could take months to recover, putting further strain on rural communities already reeling from the hog losses.

Since the confirmation, Thailand has uncovered African swine fever in 22 areas of 13 provinces and culled more than 400 pigs, all on small farms, said Bunyagith Pinprasong, the director of the Bureau of Disease Control and Veterinary Services.

Between 2019 and 2021, livestock authorities culled nearly 300,000 pigs deemed at high risk of African swine fever, though it was never detected in any samples from dead pigs, Bunyagith told Reuters.

Most pig deaths earlier were because of porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), he said.

"We implemented strict and effective measures to prevent ASF, which is why it wasn't found before," he said. "We will control and curb its spread until a vaccine is developed."

LOWER PRODUCTION

By the time Thailand confirmed the first ASF outbreak this month, nearly 100,000 smallholders, or those rearing up to 50 pigs, had disappeared, leaving just 79,000, government figures on the livestock industry show.

Small farmers' herds were halved to 1 million pigs, accounting for the bulk of the loss in the national herd, which stands at 10.85 million, down 17% from last year's 13.1 million, the data shows.

Smallholders and small farms, or those with herds of between 51 and 500 animals, normally contibute about 30% of Thailand's pork production of about 19 million to 20 million pigs, about 18 million of which are consumed domestically and the rest exported.

"The current decrease in pigs is due to previous disease outbreaks, not because of African swine fever," said Bunyagith, adding that PRRS and classical swine fever were the most common diseases in Thai pigs, with vaccines available for both.

"But whether PRRS or ASF, there will be losses for smallholders without a good farm management system."

While small farms struggle, shares of Thailand's biggest food producer, Charoen Pokphand Foods Pcl, jumped in January to their highest in nearly seven months, and shares of peer Thaifoods Group Pcl hit their highest since April.

Further shrinking of small farms' market share threatens longer-term implications for food prices, said Kevalin Wangpichayasuk of Kasikorn Research Center.

"Smallholders' gradual disappearance means fewer players and lower competition, which will have an impact on price," Kevalin told Reuters.

Bunyagith said rearing new animals to bridge the gap would take up to 10 months, so the government plans to offer smallholders loans and new piglets to help rebuild.

But farmers said they had lost faith in the government and doubted pig farming could still yield a livelihood, at least until a vaccine is found.

Jamnian Iangjiam, 62, said she gave up pig farming after two attempts to restart with new piglets saw them get sick too.

"I'm in debt because I spent my last savings on raising new pigs, and now I have nothing," said Jamnian, her pig pens empty since May. "I'm done."

($1=33.22 baht)

(Reporting by Patpicha Tanakasempipat; Editing by Kay Johnson, Gavin Maguire and Clarence Fernandez)

A new treatment helped frogs regenerate their amputated legs – taking science one step closer to helping people regrow their body parts, too

The Conversation
January 28, 2022

Frog AFP/File / LUIS ROBAYO

Our bodies connect us to the world. When people lose parts of their bodies to disease or traumatic injury, they often feel that they’ve lost a part of who they are, even experiencing a grief akin to losing a loved one. Their sense of personal loss is justified because unlike salamanders or snarky comic book characters like Deadpool, adult human tissues generally do not regenerate – limb loss is permanent and irreversible.

Or is it?

While there have been significant advances in prosthetic and bionic technologies to replace lost limbs, they cannot yet restore a sense of touch, minimize the sensation of phantom pains or match the capabilities of natural limbs. Without reconstructing the limb itself, a person won’t be able to feel the touch of a loved one or the warmth of the sun.

We are researchers in regenerative and developmental biology and biomedical engineering. Our recent study in the journal Science Advances showed that just 24 hours of a treatment we designed is enough to regenerate fully functional and touch-sensitive limbs in frogs.

Kickstarting regeneration

During very early development, cells that will eventually become limbs and organs arrange themselves into precise anatomical structures using a set of chemical, biomechanical and electrical signals. In considering ways to regenerate limbs, we reasoned that it would be much easier to ask cells to repeat what they already did during early development. So we looked for ways to trigger the “build whatever normally was here” signal for cells at the site of a wound.

One of the major challenges in doing this, however, is figuring out how to create an environment that encourages the body to regenerate instead of forming scars. While scars help protect injured tissue from further damage, they also change the cellular environment in ways that prevent regeneration.

Axolotls are known for their powerful regenerative abilities.

Some aquatic animals such as the axolotl have mastered regeneration without scar formation. And even in early human development, the amniotic sac provides an environment that can facilitate regenerative mechanisms. We hypothesized that developing a similar environment could override scar formation at the time of injury and allow the body to reactivate dormant regenerative signals.

To implement this idea, we developed a wearable device made of a silk hydrogel as a way to create an isolated chamber for regeneration by blocking other signals that would direct the body to develop scars or undergo other processes. We then loaded the device with a cocktail of five drugs involved in normal animal development and tissue growth.

We chose to test the device using African clawed frogs, a species commonly used in animal research which, like humans, does not regenerate limbs in adulthood. We attached the device onto one leg stump for 24 hours. We then removed the device and observed how the site of the lost limb changed over time. Over the course of 18 months, we were amazed to find that the frogs were able to regenerate their legs, including fingerlike projections with significant nerve, bone and blood vessel regrowth. The limbs also responded to light pressure, meaning that they had a restored sense of touch, and allowed the frog to return to normal swimming behavior.

Frogs that were given the device but without the drug cocktail had limited limb regrowth without much functional restoration. And frogs that weren’t treated with the device or the drug cocktail did not regrow their limbs, leaving stumps that were insensitive to touch and functionally impaired.

Interestingly, the limbs of the frogs treated with the device and the drug cocktail weren’t perfectly reconstructed. For example, bones were sometimes fragmented. However, the incompleteness of the new limb tells us that other key molecular signals may be missing, and many aspects of the treatment can still be optimized. Once we identify these signals, adding them to the drug treatment could potentially fully reverse limb loss in the future.

While prosthetic and bionic limbs can help amputees regain their independence, they do not fully restore function.
Nadia Ramahi/500px Prime via Getty Images

The future of regenerative medicine

Traumatic injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability in Americans. And limb loss from severe injury is the most frequent source of lifelong disability. These traumatic injuries are often caused by automobile accidents, athletic injury, side effects of metabolic diseases such as diabetes and even battlefield injuries.

The possibility of decoding and awakening dormant signals that enable the body to regenerate parts of itself is a transformative frontier in medical science. Beyond regrowing lost limbs, regenerating heart tissue after a heart attack or brain tissue after a stroke could extend life and dramatically increase its quality. Our treatment is far from being ready to use in humans, and we only know that it works when applied immediately after injury. But uncovering and understanding the signals that allow cells to regenerate means that patients may not have to wait for scientists to really understand all the intricacies of how complex organs are constructed before they can get treated.

Making a person whole again means more than just replacing their limb. It also means restoring their sense of touch and ability to function. New approaches in regenerative medicine are now beginning to identify how that may be possible.

Michael Levin, Professor of Biology, Tufts University; David Kaplan, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Tufts University, and Nirosha Murugan, Assistant Professor of Biology, Algoma University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ancient DNA suggests woolly mammoths roamed the Earth more recently than previously thought

The Conversation
January 28, 2022

Photo by Christopher Alvarenga on Unsplash


In 2010, small cores of permafrost sediments were collected by a team at the University of Alberta from gold mines in the Klondike region of central Yukon. They had remained in cold storage until paleogeneticists at the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre applied new genomics techniques to better understand the global extinction of megafauna that had culminated in North America some 12,700 years ago.

These tiny sediment samples contain an immense wealth of ancient environmental DNA from innumerable plants and animals that lived in those environments over millennia. These genetic microfossils originate from all components of an ecosystem — including bacteria, fungi, plants and animals — and serve as a time capsule of long-lost ecosystems, such as the mammoth-steppe, which disappeared around 13,000 years ago.

How exactly these ecosystems restructured so significantly, and why large animals seem to have been the most impacted by this shift has been an active area of scientific debate since the 18th century.

We can now use environmental DNA to help fill the gaps that have driven this debate.

Ancient DNA, cutting-edge technologies

Bacterial, fungal and unidentifiable DNA make up over 99.99 per cent of an environmental sample. In our case, we wanted a way to selectively recover the much smaller fraction of ancient plant and animal DNA that would help us better understand the collapse of the mammoth-steppe ecosystem.

For my doctoral research, I was part of a team that developed a a new technique to extract, isolate, sequence and identify tiny fragments of ancient DNA from sediment.


We analyzed these DNA fragments to track the shifting cast of plants and animals that lived in central Yukon over the past 30,000 years. We found evidence for the late survival of woolly mammoths and horses in the Klondike region, some 3,000 years later than expected.

We then expanded our analysis to include 21 previously collected permafrost cores from four sites in the Klondike region that date between 4,000 to 30,000 years ago.

With current technologies, we not only could identify which organisms a set of genetic microfossils came from. But we were also able to reassemble those fragments into genomes to study their evolutionary histories — solely from sediment.



Synthesis of dated bones, ancient environmental DNA and archaeological sites in Yukon and Alaska.
(Tyler J. Murchie)

Tremendous environmental change

The Pleistocene-Holocene transition, which occurred about 11,700 years ago, was a period of tremendous change across the globe. In eastern Beringia (the former Eurasian land bridge and unglaciated regions of Yukon and Alaska), this period saw the collapse of the mammoth-steppe biome and its gradual replacement with the boreal forest as we know it today.

This brought about the loss of iconic ice age megaherbivores like the woolly mammoth, Yukon horse, and steppe bison, along with predators such as the American scimitar cat and Beringian lion, among many others.


We found ancient environmental DNA from a diverse spectrum of ancient fauna, including woolly mammoths, horses, steppe bison, caribou, rodents, birds and many other animals.

We were also able to observe how ecosystems shifted with the rise of woody shrubs around 13,500 years ago, and how that correlated with a decline of DNA from woolly mammoths, horses and steppe bison. With this remarkably rich dataset, we observed four main findings.

There was a surprising consistency in the signal between sites, suggesting our data was representative of ecological trends in the region.
Woolly mammoth DNA declines prior to the Bølling–Allerød warming, a warm period at the end of the last ice age, suggesting that megafaunal losses may have been staggered.
Forbs (herbaceous flowering plants) make up a substantial component of the mammoth-steppe ecosystem alongside grasses.
There is a consistent signal of woolly mammoth and Yukon horse persistence into the Holocene, as much as 7,000 years after their disappearance from fossil records.


An evolutionary tree showing the location and relationship of horses and their relatives with genomes reconstructed from bones and sediment.
(Tyler J.Murchie), Author provided

When paired with other records, our genetic reconstructions suggest that the transition out of the last glacial period may have been more drawn out than dated bones alone would suggest.

Mammoths, for example, may have declined in local population abundance thousands of years earlier than other megafauna, which is potentially correlated with the first controversial evidence of humans in the area. Further, grassland grazing animals may have persisted for thousands of years in refugia (habitats that support the existence of an isolated population), despite the environmental shift.

Woolly mammoths alongside humans

Our data suggest that horses and woolly mammoths may have persisted in the Klondike until approximately 9,000 years ago and perhaps as recently as 5,700 years ago, outliving their supposed disappearance from local fossil records by 7,000 years. However, it is possible for ancient environmental DNA to survive erosion and re-deposition, which could mix the genetic signals of different time periods, necessitating a degree of caution in our interpretations.

Until recently, there was no evidence of mammoth survival into the mid-Holocene. But studies have now shown that mammoths survived until 5,500 and 4,000 years ago on Arctic islands.

Researchers at the Centre for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen found evidence for the late survival of horses and mammoths in Alaska until as recently as as 7,900 years ago. They also found evidence of mammoths surviving as recently as 3,900 years ago in Siberia, alongside woolly rhinoceros to at least 9,800 years ago.

Steppe bison, which were thought to have disappeared and been replaced by the American bison during the Pleistocene, have likewise been found to have survived even as recently as perhaps just 400 years ago. We were able to observe the presence of distinct genetic lineages of both woolly mammoths and steppe bison in the same sediment samples, which suggests that there were likely distinct populations of these animals living in the same area.

There is a growing body of evidence that many ice age megafauna probably survived well into recorded human history, roaming the north during the Bronze Age and while builders worked on the pyramids of Egypt.


Researchers in Denmark found evidence of woolly rhinoceroses surviving in Siberia at least 9,800 years ago.
(Shutterstock)

Genetic archives of our ecological past

The growing sophistication of environmental DNA methods to study ancient genetic microfossils highlights just how much information is buried in sediments.

Permafrost is ideal for preserving ancient DNA, but as this perennially frozen ground thaws and degrades with a warming Arctic, so too will the genetic material preserved within, and the evolutionary mysteries they once held.

Advances in paleogenetics continues to push the boundaries of what was once relegated to science fiction. Who knows what undiscovered evolutionary information remains frozen in ordinary sediments, hidden in microfossils of ancient DNA?

Tyler J. Murchie, Postdoctoral fellow, Anthropology, McMaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Canada’s Military Aid Hypocrisy
No weapons for vulnerable Ukraine. Plenty for the villainous Saudi regime.

Mitchell Anderson Today | TheTyee.ca
Mitchell Anderson is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Tyee.

Canada has sold the Saudis 928 of these LAV 6 armoured troop carriers whose firepower includes 105 millimetre cannons and 30 millimetre chain guns. Photo via General Dynamic Land Systems Canada.

Besieged on three sides by a Russian military buildup, the Ukrainian government has pleaded with western countries for military aid to help confront what might be the largest land invasion in Europe since the Second World War. Following a three-day cabinet retreat, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declined to provide even pistols to Kiev apparently for fear of escalating a volatile situation.

If only the Ukraine were Saudi Arabia, such moralistic hesitation on arms exports might not be so problematic. In 2020, sales of Canadian military equipment exported to the Ukraine totalled $351,964 — about half the value of a cheap condo in the Lower Mainland. That same year Saudi Arabia — a country with one of the worst human rights records on the planet and a primary player in the wretched civil war in Yemen — enjoyed over $1.3 billion in Canadian arm exports. In 2019, Canadian arms sales to the same Saudi regime that butchered Jamal Khashoggi in their Istanbul consulate reached almost $3 billion.

A scathing report in 2021 by Amnesty International Canada and Project Ploughshares documented how Canada may be violating international law by providing lethal weapons almost certainly being used in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Photographs of Canadian-made light armoured vehicles and sniper rifles in the Yemen were blandly dismissed by the Department of National Defence as “battlefield losses,” rather than obvious evidence that Canadian arms are being deployed in one of the world’s worst war zones in explicit violation of written assurances to the contrary provided by the Saudis.

Canada’s indulgent support of the Saudi regime ramped up in 2014 with a $14.8 billion deal to provide 928 armoured vehicles configured for carrying troops, for “heavy assault” armed with a 105 millimetre cannon, or for “direct fire support” with a 30 millimetre chain gun.

The Saudis also ensured that details of the sales be sealed under a confidentiality agreement, which also benefited Canadian politicians seeking to duck moral responsibility for a deal so at odds with professed Canadian values. Former prime minister Stephen Harper described these lethal weapons as “trucks.” Trudeau characterized them as “jeeps” — a ruse eventually revealed when the media obtained documents showing how grotesquely inaccurate this description was.
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Other Saudi arms exports from Canada included 58,506 rifles, including large caliber sniper rifles lethally effective to two kilometres. Canadian aerospace companies have been providing maintenance and training support to the air forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates whose bombing campaigns in Yemen have left 24 million people at risk of starvation.

Canada was one of only four countries flagged by the UN Human Rights Council’s panel on Yemen as “helping to perpetuate the conflict” through ongoing arms sales. Global Affairs Canada responded to such criticism with the absurd position that “Canadian exports of military goods and technology to [the kingdom] contribute to regional peace and security.”

Such moral origami aside, lucrative sales by Canadian arms manufacturers located in several federal swing ridings are unlikely to end anytime soon. The Saudis have a secretive 14-year arms deal benefiting over 500 Canadian companies extending to 2028. The four million Yemeni refugees — mostly women and children — do not vote in Canadian elections, nor are they represented by well-heeled industry lobbyists. The continued cynical political calculus seems inevitable.

In light of our wretched record regarding Yemen, for Canada to maintain that is does not wish to enflame the volatile situation in the Ukraine is hypocrisy taken to the level of performance art. In lieu of actual military aid, the prime ministers office’s communications department apparently instructed cabinet ministers to pose with pieces of paper professing their steadfast support for the Ukrainian people. Such vacuous virtue signalling has sadly become emblematic of the Trudeau government on everything from the climate crisis to Indigenous reconciliation.

In a written statement, the Ukrainian embassy in Ottawa expressed their understated disgust regarding Canada’s lack of concrete measures to help meet this crisis. “We have hundreds of Russian tanks and armoured vehicles deployed along the Ukrainian border and in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s territory. Facing the risk of a further Russian invasion, we need to defend our land. The U.K. and the U.S. have already shipped the military equipment and we would appreciate if Canada follows suit.”


How to Destroy the Conservative Brand

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War is of course the worst of all possible outcomes. However, those professing this laudable view should also not presume that Russian President Vladimir Putin shares their sentiment. Domestic critics of the Putin regime often find themselves thrown out of windows, poisoned by nerve agents, or shot in broad daylight outside of the Kremlin. Thirty-one journalists — and counting — have been murdered in Russia since he came to power in 1999.

Like it or not, Canada is a major arms producer. Many Canadians — myself included — might not enjoy that reality but it is the truth. At this pivotal moment, it is worth asking why such an outsized portion of these lethal exports are somehow bound for the benefit of one of the most murderous regimes in the world, rather than a besieged strategic ally standing up to geopolitical forces fundamentally opposed to the principles of democracy. Canada can and should do better. As always, history will judge us accordingly.

We can't ignore the rise of the far right.



Katie Perfitt - 350.org 

350@350.org



As of this morning the “Truckers for Freedom” occupation has entered its third day in Ottawa, choking off access to the downtown core and putting hate symbols on open display.1 Whether they were watching on the news from the other side of the country or from their front doors in downtown Ottawa, people across the country were disgusted by the harassment, vandalism and hate.

You probably know by now that members of Canada’s far-right movement organized the convoy, and the protest has attracted the sympathy of thousands more who are angry and disaffected by a system they know is rigged.2

In fact, the current convoy camped out on Parliament Hill looks remarkably similar to the Yellow Vest convoy that descended on Ottawa three years ago. Claiming to be in opposition to Trudeau’s carbon tax, it similarly became swept up by anti-immigrant and far-right sentiment.

Right wing politicians and their operators have been pouring fuel on working class frustration ever since. Instead of addressing the problems we face, they’ve successfully tapped into working people’s rage in order to further their visions of everything from fossil fuel expansion to privatization to white nationalist ideologies.

We can’t combat the rise of the far-right by ridiculing or ignoring it away. We have to out-organize it. We have to build a movement big enough to stop them — one that holds space for people’s anger against a broken system, and channels it into a positive vision for the future.

That means organizing our communities around the vision of a bold, inclusive just transition that responds to this moment of crisis without leaving anybody behind. On March 12, people across the country will do just that, standing up to demand action on Trudeau’s long-promised Just Transition Act.

So far, 20 communities have registered to hold actions and events, but that’s well short of the 60+ we reached for our last big Day of Action in September. Eugene, will you take a moment and register to host an event in your community on the Day of Action for a Just Transition?

The convoy has generated a lot of media coverage and that’s been frustrating to see too, especially when I think about how often Canada’s news outlets ignore and marginalize our own, much bigger movements. These so-called “Truckers for Freedom” are sidelining the majority of transportation workers – particularly immigrant and South Asian truckers who are currently struggling against poor working conditions and wage theft.3

The Day of Action for a Just Transition is a chance to come together across movements and build power in our communities to win the future we deserve. Get involved now by signing up to host an action on March 12.

I’ve connected with everyone who signed up to host an action so far and I can tell this Day of Action is going to be powerful. Along with our partners at the Council of Canadians, we’ve asked organizers to come up with ways to bring the Just Transition to life in their communities and they’ve come back with creative ideas we never even imagined. Together, we can push this Parliament to meet the moment and pass sweeping just transition legislation that acts at the speed of the climate crisis, creates good, green jobs, and leaves no one behind.

We need a broader vision of equity

January 31, 2022

Alberto Miranda

By Jay Caspian Kang

Last Thursday, I wrote about the Harvard affirmative action case and what I see as a broken system of racial preferences at elite colleges. Today, I want to broaden the scope a bit and talk about higher education in general and what life might be like after the Supreme Court ultimately decides the fate of affirmative action.

I try to avoid the prediction game, but it seems unlikely that a conservative majority on the court will judge in Harvard’s favor. The decision will almost certainly be limited to school admissions, but it is likely to open the floodgates for lawsuits that target racial preferences in all other parts of American life. This practice, aimed at achieving racial balance — often to counteract racist policies and systems — will be under direct threat. This sets up a dilemma that a pro-affirmative action student I interviewed in 2019 expressed by saying: “I don’t want to defend Harvard. But it’s the better of two evils.”

He may very well be right. Given the destruction that could come to all programs that resemble affirmative action in any way, perhaps Asian applicants and their families should accept a system that certainly seems to discriminate against them, at least in the case of Harvard admissions, but whose dissolution will also lead to a more inequitable world. This, for years, was my position on the matter. But such magnanimity usually requires a great deal of privilege and comfort — it is the capitulation of people like me who have already reaped all the rewards of prestigious degrees.

It’s nearly impossible to build a collective political vision around such abstract ideas of self-sacrifice. It might work to ask assimilated, progressive Asian Americans to overlook clear instances of discrimination and assume the role of the guilty white liberal. But even if the goal is to create a more communal and less cutthroat vision of education, is it fair to ask working-class families with no cultural capital to send their children to U.C. Santa Cruz instead of Stanford?

I recently watched Debbie Lum’s documentary “Try Harder!” about Lowell High School in San Francisco. Up until 2020 when the San Francisco school board changed Lowell’s admissions policy, it was test-in, much like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science high schools in New York City. Most of the students at Lowell are Asian American, as is the case at those New York schools.

In a scene early in the film, a physics teacher at Lowell addresses a classroom full of kids about their upcoming college applications. He suggests they temper their expectations. “You look at the Ivy League schools and even if you are a student who should be accepted at a school like this, you may not get in anyway,” he says. “And that, in many cases, has to do with a little thing called ethnicity.” He then flashes a slide that reads, “You’re Asian! And these country club schools don’t want their precious campuses turned into U.C. Irvine!” (U.C. Irvine is about 41 percent Asian.)

This is the perceived reality for many Asian American students and their parents. The response to these concerns cannot be the typical gaslighting and denial that’s become normalized in progressive circles. Nor should we ask teenagers to balance their own academic ambitions with some vaguely stated progressive goal of diversity.

I do not believe that there is a culturally or biologically determined reason Asian students have done so well in academic fields. Rather, the push for perfect G.P.A.s and SAT scores comes, in large part, from the realization that if you’re an immigrant with a distinct language barrier, zero connections to the professional workplace and very little understanding about how this country works, the academic grind is the only clear pathway for your child to move up in socioeconomic status. This is true not only for many Asian immigrant families, but also for many first- and second- generation Black and Latino immigrants.

What’s needed in an increasingly multiethnic country, then, is a broader vision of equity that’s less obsessed with racial disparities and representation at elite institutions and far more focused on how people from all backgrounds can invest in higher education as a collective good. Harvard’s comical racial machinations and the wealth of its student body should be more than enough to convince the public that there is no vision of true equity within the gates of the Ivy League.

OK, but what about affirmative action at nonelite colleges?

There’s a common misconception that every college in the United States employs some form of affirmative action. The truth is that a majority of colleges in this country let in most of their applicants and serve a relatively local population that more or less reflects the demographics of the area. For example, only 14.1 percent of undergraduate students at Cal State East Bay are white. By comparison, 78 percent of undergraduates at Chadron State College in Nebraska are white. This doesn’t mean that Chadron State discriminates against minority applicants or that Cal State East Bay has the greatest minority recruitment program of all time. The reality is that both schools aren’t selective — Chadron takes everyone — and their student bodies simply reflect the people who apply.

In 2014, there were only 352 colleges that publicly stated that they considered race in the admissions process, according to a 2017 study. That’s less than 10 percent of all the two- and four-year colleges in the country. The study also found that most exclusive schools considered the race of the applicant. This makes sense. The only schools that need to make decisions based on race are those schools that need to choose among applicants at all.

So what can we do?

I’ve written in an earlier edition of this newsletter about the role that community colleges could play in ensuring a more equitable and open path toward upward mobility in this country. Public colleges already take thousands of kids a year from the working and middle classes. Expanded and fully normalized pipelines from community colleges to state universities could provide opportunities not only for poor students of color, but also for economically disadvantaged students from all backgrounds.

This system, which would be modeled, in part, after the Canadian public university system, would reduce the stress on high school students to meet the impossible standards of elite colleges. The University of Toronto, which U.S. News and World Report ranked as the top university in Canada last year, has an enrollment of over 74,000 undergraduates, far more than the number of students enrolled at all eight Ivy League schools combined. There are highly competitive, specialized programs at Toronto and other universities in Canada, but they exist within the overall structure of the public university, which means that for the most part, there isn’t a college track for the elites of Canada and one for everyone else. If you care about your grades in high school, chances are you will be able to attend the university in your province. And you will almost certainly not be exclusively surrounded by the wealthy elite.

Last September, House Democrats released a bill that included language curtailing endowment taxes on private colleges, provided they offer “sufficient grants and scholarships” for some students. This move coincided with a banner year for many elite universities that saw their coffers swell during the pandemic. Cornell, Dartmouth and Yale all reported over 40 percent returns on their investments in 2021. This only accelerated a longstanding trend: Between 1990 and 2010, the capital endowments for universities with endowments larger than $1 billion grew roughly 50 percent faster than universities with endowments that totaled less than $100 million.

Rather than offer these universities what amounts to a break on their taxes, the Biden administration should raise them considerably. Lowering tuition for a select number of students who have already gotten into highly selective schools does very little actual good — most of those schools have robust financial aid programs anyway. I believe that the money raised from aggressively taxing endowments should be used to fund community colleges and state university programs instead, so that more students could benefit.

Taxes, alone, will not suddenly create a more communal vision of higher education, nor will they persuade everyone to fight for it. A profound cultural shift is needed that is likely to take decades to see through. The good news is that nobody really seems to like the system we have now in the United States, with its brutal competition, its winner-take-all mentality and its undue focus on a handful of elite schools. Why would we center so much of the conversation on places that most students will never even visit, when we could be building a more robust public system that educates everyone?

Have feedback? Send me a note at kang-newsletter@nytimes.com.