How Canada's Tories destroyed the country's memory, and its capacity to remember

Why wouldn’t you?
In my last year at university it was suggested I do the entrance exam for the civil service. My tutor, a really nice guy, told me it was a waste of time because what they wanted was not people of an investigative bent who would ferret out the truth, but people who would make up arguments in favour of whatever the politicians wanted to do (so long as they were Conservatives, of course.)
So I didn’t do the Civil Service exam and wondered if I had done the right thing until I met a guy who had done it, joined, and then left for precisely the reason stated above. He told me he was still being harassed every year by MI5 who sent someone round to tell him that if he revealed some of the things he knew, he would go to prison for a long time.

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To be fair, lots of politicians have been hiding in closets for many years.

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here are a few Conservative Canadians reading here.

Sure, but there are plenty of conservatives who want nothing to do with Harper.

In general, there are people and systems responsible for backing up important data. Anything important would typically be saved to an archived, distributed file system, maintained by professionals. Those are not particularly vulnerable to accidents, which could lead scientists into a sense of complacency until they realized that people were actually working maliciously to destroy that data.

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Never trust anything. A superreliable computer system is still vulnerable to a mistaken human decision (“these files are to be purged” …long delay until the change propagates to backups… “oops!”), or to outright malice.

Complacency sucks. I did not mirror one NASA server with technical reports, and then some politico came and said there are sensitive informations there and they have to be reviewed, and I think the server is still down because there is no money/manpower to do the reviews. One. Bastard. Senator.

…and I did not download a lot of rare tracks off Napster and WinMX back in their heyday. Now the superrare stuff got unbelievably difficult to get in comparison, while the high-profile top-forty tracks are easy as a pie - insult to injury.

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For sure. At work, everything I work on is confidential IP, so I trust the pros doing the backups, because redundantly backing up everything myself would be a violation of all kinds of policies.

:musical_note: It’s a just, just world after all :musical_note:

Yes, but to be fair, they came here thinking it was a porn site.

They’ll be Disappointed in BoingBoing.

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Why not go out for a rip?

The Ceeb’s Ideas has just started a series, Science Under Siege reporting on some of this. I had to turn it off, it made me too angry and I was driving.

I also must recommend the very excellent work by York University Science Librarian, John Dupius, who was updating the War on Science. I vaguely recall Cory posting about him a while back.

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I hope he meant extreme distress.

Done. Let’s see what happens to the edit over time.

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And let’s not forget that very shortly before the crash the Conservatives changed the rules to allow/encourage the bubble to come to Canada as well. They changed them back after the crash and there wasn’t enough time for real harm to be done. But if the crash had happened a year or two later (market crashes being like earthquakes are unpredictable) then we could have been just as screwed. In other words, the fact that we weren’t screwed was no fault of Harper/Flaherty.

Approximately 30% have. Add in 5-10% who vote for whoever promises to cut them the largest personal check and you have autocratic rule thanks to our wondrous electoral system. (Probably not this time, fortunately)

Approximately 30% have. Add in 5-10% who vote for whoever promises to cut them the largest personal check and you have autocratic rule thanks to our wondrous electoral system. (Probably not this time, fortunately)

I would guess that even those who voted Conservative weren’t privy to these plans, and I can only hope that these people recognize what a horrible thing they have in part caused because of the votes. Somehow, I doubt many of them really care.

I mean, I guess I should adjust 30% down to 15% because of voter turnout, but I can’t give people any credit for not knowing what they were voting for. A lot of them might have voted “Harper Knows Best” on a hunch without any idea of what he would do. But I think most of those that did so would go on to aggressively defend what he did, regardless of what that was.

Thanks - your comment is spot on, it will be interesting to see if any whitewashing is attempted by Geiger or Harper’s minions.

The problem in Canada is that there really is no Conservative party to support.

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