Canada Wants to Punish You For What It Thinks You Think
Trudeau can't-stop-won't-stop, Good grades, Old man yells at baseball, Work vs. leisure
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Good morning! Do you ever feel understaffed? Or like there aren’t enough hours in the day? That’s what work has been like for me over the last few weeks so here’s my pre-apology for another short and choppy blog. I’m also feeling particularly bummed out this morning because my Google Search just informed me that tonight’s debut of Peaky Blinders season 6 is for U.K. viewers only. Rubbish, innit?
Anyway, here goes!
→ Justin Trudeau can’t-stop-won’t-stop. Over the past couple of weeks, Canada has drawn the ire of many who think that the ruling elite is out of touch with the working class. By now you probably already know that Justin Trudeau invoked an emergency act that gave him the power to freeze the bank accounts of anyone who held “unacceptable beliefs” (aka Canadian Truckers). This week the Canadian government managed to distance itself from reality even further by introducing a bill that would effectively grant them the authority to punish you for what they think you think. That’s not a typo—read it again if you have to.
This means that someone can report you for what they think you might do if that action falls under the category of “hatred”. That might seem fine to some, but what does it mean exactly, in this scope? An action of hatred? The words hate and hatred appear 37 times in the bill and I still have no idea even though there’s a direct attempt to define it:
hatred means the emotion that involves detestation or vilification and that is stronger than dislike or disdain
- Bill C-36
Here’s my attempt to define it: a broad, all-encompassing word that covers anything and everything that rubs the government the wrong way.
So you’ve been reported to a judge for something you haven’t done, but someone thinks you might do—what now?
Best case scenario the judge is on Team This Law Is Fucking Nuts and you’re free to go. If they’re not and they decide that the snitch who reported you is Nostradamus reincarnated, then you’ll have to enter recognizance, which is French for “you do what we say”:
The only thing that’s clear to me from the vague language in this bill is that the Canadian government is trying to create a License to Silence. A legal avenue to suppress “unacceptable views” under the guise of social justice and public safety.
P.S. This all reminds me a little of Minority Report. If you haven’t seen it, it revolves around a world that is crime-free because there’s a set of precognitive triplets that can predict crimes before they happen. These triplets work for the police. By work for the police I mean they are kept in a drug-induced captive state from which the police harvest their foretellings. The police then go out and catch the bad guys before they commit their “inevitable” crimes. The movie’s good not great.
→ On getting good grades. Paul Graham is one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists in the world. He writes essays periodically on various topics, usually relatable in some way to just about anybody. I look forward to these essays the way a hip-hop-head looks forward to the next big album drop. Here are some of my favorites:
When he’s not putting out bangers (essays), Graham can often be found dropping wisdom on Twitter in the form of lessons to his seemingly endless supply of 9-year-olds.
I don’t have a lot to add other than I wish it’s something I would have been told back when I was memorizing the Pythagorean Theorem and the Quadratic Equation, two concepts I have yet to put to practical use in my adult life. I did it anyway—the memorizing—but knowing this then might have made the experience more palatable.
→ Old man checks in on baseball. MLB is on the verge of canceling Opening Day unless team owners decide to stop pinching pennies at their meeting with the Player’s Association (MLBPA) this afternoon. Here’s a live look-in at the negotiations.
Meanwhile, NCAA baseball stepped in to fill the void and has taken Twitter by storm led by a big fella who social media has dubbed Tommy Tanks who can’t stop hitting dingers.
As a former NCAA baseball player, I love to see the game getting more attention, even if it’s at the cost of the game at the pro level. What I don’t like are some of the changes I’m seeing on the field.
Why does a fielder want to know what pitch their pitcher will be throwing? It gives them an idea of which part of the field the ball is likely to be hit to. Put simply: a fastball is less likely to be pulled by a batter than an offspeed pitch. It gets more complicated, of course, once you introduce pitch counts, situation, scouting reports, etc. to the equation. There’s more to it—the game within the game. Let’s say a shortstop sees that an offspeed pitch has been called and he cheats a step or two to his right to get in a better fielding position. A smart hitter might pick up on this subtlety and deduce what pitch is about to come his way.
At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, I don’t think tech should be on the field. Sign communication in baseball is an art. It’s a skill that can be learned, improved on, and even exploited. When I played both in high school and in college, stealing signs (and making sure yours didn’t get stolen) was just part of the game. If you were a pitcher who wasn’t playing that day and you hadn’t been assigned one of the many detailed charts we kept for scouting reports, then you were expected to act as a codebreaker and attempt to decipher the other team’s sign relaying system.
“But Pablo, that’s cheating”.
No, it’s part of the game. If you don’t want my guys teeing off on yours then you’ll need to add an extra layer of encryption to that weak-ass sign system you’ve got in place because I spent years developing this skill and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some lazy wearable-technology having ass punks kill that part of the game.
→ All work and no play. Or is it the other way around? This chart doesn’t surprise me. It shows the relative importance of work to leisure for U.S. workers by age.
What does surprise me is that my own personal view breaks with the trend of my fellow Millennials. Right now (age 32) I place more importance on work than I do leisure—much more. If you asked me 10 years ago my answer would have been flipped. Maybe I should’ve been born in the Gen X cohort? I think the reason behind my specific outlook is that I let my addiction effectively mute my professional growth in my 20s so I feel like I’ve got a lot of ground to make up for.
In any case, it’s an interesting chart that will inevitably need a new Y-axis once Gen Z is old enough to be surveyed. I’ve gone ahead and added my forecast for history’s most confusing generation here:
The wrist bands are a HUGE LOAD of BS. Atta way to kill one of the "you wouldn't understand unless you played" aspects of baseball. What is a runs scored record holding pinch runner supposed to do while he's waiting for his time to shine now?
I have a lot of thoughts. First, when I was reading the Canadian laws I thought MINORITY REPORT! That seems freaking insane especially considering the amount of power it gives the jurist.
Second, you played baseball in college?! That’s so cool. Once when my husband and I were dating we (broke into?) went out on our college’s field to play catch and he told me to throw it far to his right so he’d have to run for it. He attempted a diving catch and to this day I can still see his Vans-clad feet in the air as he slid face first across the outfield. He did not make the catch. A for effort. What position did you play?
And I cannot BELIEVE the bs about Vanderbilt and the tech. That is SO LAME. Incidentally our university was up the road from Vandy.