Let’s Talk About ‘Political Discrimination’

A few months ago, MP Garnett Genuis tabled a bill which would add protections to Canada’s human right legislation for “Political Belief”.  Then, as the Ontario College of Psychologists moved to discipline Jordan Peterson for spreading hatred, he started crying that this was political discrimination, that he was being “persecuted” for his “politics” (spoiler - he’s not).

This concept of “political discrimination” is really little more than another construct to tell the same people who tried to overthrow a government in February 2022 that their grievances are justified.  You will note that Genuis invokes the grievances over COVID, and Peterson tries to globally call his activity on Twitter “political speech”. 

While it is true that politics is always loaded with opinion, we need to recognize that politics can be reasonably informed by facts and evidence. Is Peterson calling a non-binary person “it” a matter of “politics”, or is it simply a mean spirited attack on the person? Are the protests against vaccines based in a sound understanding of the science? I am not going to argue the veracity of those claims here, they are provided to illustrate the issue being raised. 

Politics is a complex space, and it’s no secret that malign actors have been deliberately injecting disinformation and misinformation into our discourse for some time. It’s also not hugely surprising that conservative politicians here are often aligned with the propaganda. 

It is no surprise that it is conservative politicians pushing this narrative now. It’s convenient, it aligns with their ongoing campaign against Trudeau, and it further undermines public confidence in the institutions of democracy. It fits incredibly well with narratives like “the election was stolen”, and the narratives used to justify practices like gerrymandering electoral districts. 

I find it particularly interesting to note that this is coming from an Alberta conservative though.  Political discrimination has been rampant in Alberta for years. Decades of single party conservative rule long ago made it perfectly acceptable for all sorts of activity that could fall under the rubric of “political discrimination”.  

Stories of bosses telling their employees how to vote in elections have been a common occurrence in Alberta for years; an overtly aggressive form of conservatism has long made it very difficult to openly hold perspectives at odds with conservatism (or whatever is wearing that cloak today). Candidates have had their cars sabotaged, and having signs from other parties is also a good way to find your home vandalized.

I’m not saying any of this is good, rather that it is more than passing strange that conservatives are pushing this narrative today, when they’ve actively engaged in creating a political environment in Alberta that supports “political discrimination” for years - without moaning about it once.

Looking at our Charter, an argument could be made that Political Discrimination is in fact protected under a combination of fundamental rights.  In particular, the fundamental rights in S2. I do not think that it could easily be ‘read in’ under S15 because S15 is generally reserved for immutable characteristics of the person, and political perspectives are reasonably subject to change over the course of one’s life. 

To be clear, nobody who lost their job for refusing to be vaccinated did so over “politics”.  They lost their job for failing to comply with a new requirement. Yes, you can moan all you like about whether that’s coercion or not - but it’s not politics.

There are some interesting, and perverse consequences to introducing such a clause into our non-discrimination laws.  For example, political parties (who are employers), would suddenly find it much harder to get rid of an employee whose political beliefs no longer aligned with the direction of the party. Employers would find the murky waters of “political beliefs” being brought up in dismissal suits, and so on. 

In fact, the concept of “Political Discrimination” is so murky that it could be twisted into all sorts of forms.  That means it’s far more of a political weapon today than it is an actual tool. 

Side Trip - Virtual Memory

It has come to my attention lately that the concepts around virtual memory and how your computer actually uses memory are not well understood by many people. What follows is a general description of what is going on when you are using your computer, and why at some points in time, your computer will seem to get really slow when there’s a lot of open processes.

1) The Physical

Your typical computer has two main types of storage:  Short term storage (Random Access Memory - RAM), and Long Term storage (the Hard Disk). Think of RAM as a great big whiteboard that is constantly being written on, and the Hard Disk as containing the contents of the whiteboard you want to keep as documents, programs, etc. 

A common computer configuration these days has 8 Gigabytes (Gb) of RAM, and 512 Gb of Hard Disk (HDD).

Then there’s your CPU.  Most processors these days are 64 bit processors which have an address space that is 64 bits wide, and typically work with data in 64 bit chunks called “words”.  A 64 bit address space means that the computer can address up to 2^64 individual memory locations - about 18 Exabytes.  Address space is the absolute addressable memory for the CPU.  18 Exabytes is 1024^6 bytes, and 1 Gb is 1024^3 bytes (a byte being 8 bits, and commonly understood to be the base unit of meaningful information in a computer) - so an Exabyte is an absolutely huge range compared to the physical address space of your computer.

2) The Basics 

Your computer’s operating system, whether it is UNIX, Linux, or Windows, play some interesting tricks.  Let’s say you have 8Gb of physical memory, and your processor thinks it has access to a lot more than that, how do we deal with that requirement?  The first point is that we don’t just let the processor address all 18 Exabytes of its address space - usually the motherboard address bus takes care of that for us - and that’s partially why most motherboards restrict to a maximum of maybe 128 Gb of physical memory. The size of board required to have a full 18 Exabytes of physical memory would be mind-boggling. (Not to mention the cost!)

That means off the top, your operating system has to play some tricks to let the CPU think it’s got more memory than it actually does. In UNIX and Linux systems, that’s usually done by setting aside a chunk of disk as a “swap” partition, Windows usually makes this a discrete file somewhere on the disk, but the effect is similar. 

The operating system then divides physical memory (RAM) up into chunks called “pages”, and it will move pieces of a process onto the swap partition in order to keep enough RAM available to facilitate the demands of active processes for memory. This process is often called “paging”.  So if you hear your technical support person saying “your computer is paging itself to death”, it basically means that the computer is spending all of its time moving stuff to and from the swap area, and you have either too many processes for the amount of RAM, or your swap is too small - sometimes both. 

The combination of physical memory plus swap is the total amount of virtual memory you have available. Of course, this will lead some to think “wow - so if I buy a terabyte of disk, I’ll have tons of available memory”.  That isn’t always true. Windows, for example is much more conservative with its swap, and too large a swap file can cause other problems.  In UNIX/Linux type environments a huge swap may not cause problems, but it won’t buy you much if you aren’t utilizing it all. Remember, swap is much slower than RAM, even with today’s solid state disks.  So using swap always comes with a performance penalty of some kind. 

3) The Kernel View

The kernel of your operating system treats memory as a great big heap.  When a process is started, it requests a certain amount of memory to run in, and the kernel does some juggling to make that happen.  If there’s lots of physical RAM available, chances are your new process gets its request fulfilled, and everything continues on its way.  

If, on the other hand, RAM is getting a bit tight, the kernel may look at the usage of other processes, and force some parts of other processes into swap. More cleverly written algorithms will examine how often the process is accessing a particular page, and only move parts deemed to be “low frequency” off to swap, gambling that the cost in time is “cheaper” than moving other parts. 

The kernel acts as a librarian here, it controls how much physical memory and swap space your process is allowed to occupy at any given time. It may even have specific limits so that no one process can consume your entire computer (and yes, one ill-behaved program really can ruin your day).  

4) The Process View 

There are some interesting aspects of virtual memory that affect your process as well. Virtual memory schemes also mean that every process will “think” that it has access to the entire computer.  In other words, each process will believe that it has access to the full memory resources of the computer.  In principle, that means you can have multiple processes that all want 8Gb of memory, and they will all think they have access to it all.

Even more intriguing here is that the processes will all believe they can access the full 64 bit address space of the CPU - which is utterly huge.  There are a lot of reasons this is beneficial, but those are mostly of interest to programmers.  

The process thinks it has all the memory in the world, but it’s up to the kernel to maintain that illusion.  That means the kernel sits in the background and moves parts of the program in and out of RAM from the swap area on your HDD.

If this sounds a bit like it’s “black magic”, it kind of is - few people have the experience to really understand the underlying code in the kernel without spending a long time in that space. 

5) Tying It All Together

In a Virtual Memory environment, the operating system kernel “owns” the physical resources of RAM and HDD, and makes your computer appear much bigger than it actually is by using a combination of RAM and HDD space (swap) to give your processes the illusion that they all have full access to the entire computer. 

You sacrifice a bit of long term storage on your HDD to make this work, and there is definitely a performance price compared to everything being in RAM, but overall you end up with a lot more flexibility in how you use your computer.  

Virtual Memory is what enables you to have a ton of PDF documents open, your word processor going, and your web browser all at the same time. Much of the time, the stuff you aren’t actively using is sitting on swap, and just enough is left in memory to allow it to become active when you switch to that process. 

6) What Virtual Memory Isn’t

Virtual Memory is not infinite - even when it seems so vast.

Virtual Memory should not be confused with “Virtual Machines” (VMs).  A virtual machine is a software abstraction of a complete computer - from hardware all the way to software. Just to make your life more interesting, a Virtual Machine may well have its own virtual memory system when it’s running, and your computer hosting it will subject that VM to the rules of your computer’s Virtual Memory system.  

7) What About Buying A Computer?

The rule of “the more RAM the merrier” still applies. If you have an option to buy 16Gb instead of 8Gb, do it. Software continues to grow in complexity and resource needs.  4 years ago, 8Gb was lots, now the floor is moving towards 16Gb.  (… and back in the 1980s, Bill Gates once quipped “640 Kb ought to be enough for anybody”) 

For disk drive, look for arrangements that will let you put the OS on one drive, and your files on another drive entirely. Today’s solid state SSD and NVME drives are awesome, but they do have a limited number of read/write cycles before they degrade.  Being able to swap out your operating system drive without losing your data is a good thing. 

… and for goodness’ sake - backups matter. Get a nice big external disk for backups and use it regularly.  

Let's Talk About "Time Theft"

So, this morning, I woke up to find the lurid headline "What is Time Theft, and Why Are Some Employers So Worked Up About It?" on CBC.  After reading it, I'm still spitting nails angry with the article and its suppositions. 

First, let's start with the general idea of "time theft".  Fundamentally, this notion has been around ever since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Whether it's called "slacking off", "goldbricking", or now "time theft", it's the fundamental idea that if you aren't going full out 100% of the time at work, you are somehow "stealing time" from your employer.

The roots of the idea lie in a very old, feudal concept that you "owe" your employer somehow for the privilege of having a job, and the deep suspicion of the "nobility" that the peasants will do everything they can to short-change their "lord". In the feudal era, that was a very direct, tangible exchange. The "lord" was entitled to a percentage of your crops, or whatever it was you produced.

It works well when things are tangible and concrete. Work hasn't been that concrete since the end of the 19th century. The emergence of administrative workers, supervisory jobs, and knowledge workers very quickly started to erode the direct and tangible exchange going on. In today's world, where an increasing number of people are doing work that is knowledge work, the idea of of "time theft" is not only archaic, but downright wrong. 

Let me explain. Consider a software developer for a moment - it's a relatively new profession - only really in existence since the 1950s, and the struggles around measuring developer "productivity" are much better documented than in other domains I can think of.  At first, it was mostly seen by management as some kind of voodoo, and programmers pretty much got to do as they pleased without oversight because there was no understanding of what exactly they were doing. Then various attempts at "managing" things crept in - setting deadlines around projects, trying to "estimate" how long it might take to do particular tasks, and so on. 

None of this worked particularly well for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the most notorious attempt at measuring productivity came in the form of "Lines of Code".  Basically, the idea there was that the programmer was now being measured on how many lines of code they wrote in a day.  Except that turns out to be a terrible metric because a lousy programmer can churn out hundreds of lines of absolutely useless code, and a talented programmer might only turn out a handful of lines, but they would be robust and reliable. 

The observation that comes out of this is that a lot of "work" happens in people's heads, and doesn't necessarily mean that it's "stolen time".  I've had many times where I have spent hours thinking a problem through only to find that the solution was a handful of lines of code - or even a mere few characters in one line of code. In the time I was thinking about the problem, I might get up and go grab a coffee, go downstairs and grab a snack, vacuum the rugs if I was working at home, etc.  None of that is "stolen time" per se, even if the monitor boss thinks I wasn't "working".  

The argument being made is essentially that "doing anything that benefits you" while "at work" is somehow "theft" because you're being paid for it.  In the context of working from home, that means that doing things like starting a load of laundry, or running a vacuum over the floors is somehow "stealing" from your employer.  The reality is that those "thefts" of time always happen, whether one is working at home or in a formal office. What do they think those conversations in the water cooler, or in a colleague's office amount to?  It doesn't mean that productive work isn't happening, it means that the person is taking a break in order to be able to finish thinking something through. (and yes, thinking something through often means giving the brain a rest)

This is basic human factors stuff. Whether you are working at physical tasks, or doing something that is more abstract, it's necessary to take breaks, do other things for periods of time in order to maintain productivity. You could argue "well do something else, just as long as it's work related".  Except that's not how people function. 

If the tasks of the job aren't getting accomplished, you might have reason as an employer to address with the employee whether or not they are doing their job.  However, especially in knowledge work, or other kinds of labour that is now possible to do remotely, we have to recognize that current approaches to tracking productivity are mostly garbage. Intrusive technologies like activity logging are arguably abusive, and make the same error as the old "lines of code" metric, and "a bum in a chair" is similarly a less than useful way to track someone's working habits. 

We are also a long ways from the days of it being practical to directly oversee the work going on - far too much of the work in today's world is abstracted by technology, and more and more of the physical work is being automated to the point that those jobs are gradually disappearing. (Yes, this is a problem, but it's another issue entirely).

Employers are essentially demanding absolute "loyalty" from workers, but offer little in return except a paycheque at the end of the day (and if the employer goes bankrupt, workers are at the end of the line for creditors - another part of our system that is broken). Arguably, employers who refuse to pay their workers a living salary, or engage in active wage suppression games, are themselves engaging in a form of theft from their workers. 

It is high time for a new compact between employers and workers, and this one has to be legitimately reciprocal. It has to be built with a less cynical view on both sides. 

In Response To A Comment

The previous post on the actions of conservative legislators attacking the fundamentals of democracy brought the following reader comment that I wish to address in more detail.

The comment itself reads as follows: 

In the case of Scotland's Gender Recognition Act, it should be up to the national government to protect the rights of women, and not simply throw them under the bus to satisfy a smaller, vocal group. Canada, on the other hand, simply threw women under the bus while claiming to be feminist. You might find that reading the Cass Report would be helpful in understanding the situation in the UK. You might also notice that in the UK, Stonewall had free rein for years mis-informing businesses and governments about what the law actually said. Housing male rapists in female prisons (generally the rapists are white, and the overwhelming number of women in Canada's prisons are aboriginal) should be considered outrageous. Having women forced to share spaces like change rooms and hospital rooms with men is definitely a loss of women's rights. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2xhZm9f8t4 Gender Ideology Destroying Women's Prisons with Heather Mason - Life Through a Distorted Linds - YouTube. Article 25, fourth paragraph, and Article 29, second paragraph, of the 1949 Geneva Convention III provide that in any camps in which men and women prisoners are accommodated together, separate dormitories and conveniences shall be provided for women. In Scotland, men then "detransition" after serving time in women's prisons https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-prisoners-switch-gender-again-once-freed-from-womens-units-qjjsd0nlx The left SHOULD be outraged, but will not look at any of the details of the idea of self-ID.

This is broadly off-topic relative to the point of the post, but it warrants being addressed in its own right.  If you're feeling brave, read on. 

Conservatives Are Dismantling Western Democracies

It's been a bit of a whirlwind lately, but there are some very disturbing patterns emerging in the politics of western democracy these days. At the top of the list, is what appears to be a steady effort on the part of conservative politicians to dismantle western democracies, and in particular the concept of individual rights.  

This is happening on numerous levels, and because each country is slightly different, the specific attacks are distinct.  The pattern, however, is what matters. In general, the attacks are either aimed at the judiciary, or at the rights of individuals, with a general approach of fomenting what will become constitutional crises. 

Although not the first occurrence of this, the UK government's decision to exercise rarely used powers to deny royal assent to the Scottish Parliament's recently passed Gender Recognition Reform Act.  My first thought on this was "that's an odd move - exercising those powers in the UK is going to provoke a constitutional crisis.  Then I thought about it a bit further, and a few months ago, when Alberta's newly minted Premier Danielle  Smith was musing about an "Alberta Sovereignty Act", the topic of whether the Federal Government could exercise an equally obscure power called "Refusal".  

In both cases, the exercise of the power in question would trigger a political and constitutional crisis in both countries. Such a crisis would call into question both the division of powers, the role of the Federal level of government to intervene in the affairs of a lower level of government, and in fact with the judiciary had any power at all to mediate such a dispute. Such a crisis could in fact be serious enough to break the political consensus that had led to the constitutions of the respective nations being formed as they are. 

Let's consider for a moment that the objective in both cases is not in fact to assert novel powers, nor to overrule the legislation of an errant lower level of government, but rather it is to provoke the crisis that would allow the conservatives to dismantle the much more liberal constitutions - especially the civil rights aspects of those documents - which conservatives have for some time seen as an obstacle to their legislative agendas. 

Looking a little further, in Israel, a recently elected hard right government under Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to massively overhaul the role of the state's court system.  Conservatives have long argued that courts had become "activist" - usually in the context of the fact that much of their legislative agenda runs at odds with the concepts of individual rights. Here in Canada, Harper feuded with the SCC over matters like mandatory minimum sentencing, and lost on fundamental matters associated with the court's interpretation of the Charter. 

In the United States, the politicization of the courts by the GOP took hold under GWB, and during the Obama years, the GOP refused to allow any of Obama's nominees to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to be affirmed. This set the stage for a series of GOP candidates to be appointed under Trump, and then for the now-conservative aligned court to reverse course on abortion.  

Both of these moves are designed to ultimately place the courts firmly under the yoke of political masters, and to roll back much of the legislative and case law decisions that conservatives don't like.

Then in both Canada and the US, we are seeing provinces and states teeing up legislation designed to create conflict with their respective Federal governments. This isn't merely a case of "the usual grievances", as demonstrated in both Alberta and Saskatchewan, the provinces are attempted to assert unique powers to ignore Federal laws - not a good thing.  Ontario's conservative government has threatened to use the S33 "Notwithstanding" clause multiple times on matters where it seems capricious and unnecessary to do so. 

In both Canada and the US following their 2020 and 2021 elections respectively, extreme elements fostered by increasingly radical conservative politicians attempted to overturn the results of elections - in both cases by launching attacks on the seat of government itself, claiming in one form or another that the government was unjustly elected, or that it was acting against the people. This is no coincidence - the specifics of talking points differ, but the tactics of both were strikingly similar, with the Canadian Convoy occupation clearly drawing from the organizing and funding efforts around the US Capitol riots of 2021, and the Convoy shifting towards almost a siege model, instead of direct attack - clearly based on "lessons learned".  Mysteriously in both cases, the public backing of these events by conservative politicians is both prominent and not actively discussed in the news. 

How does this all tie together, you might ask? The same way it always does of late. Conservatives have been increasingly organizing with each other internationally through organizations like the IDU. I do not think it is a coincidence that there are direct and indirect connections to the IDU where these various activities are taking place.

Any one of these could be viewed as nothing more than a spat between levels of government, it comes at a time when political divisions are running high, and the far right has become increasingly emboldened. However, it seems increasingly unlikely when conservative politicians around the world are expressing suspiciously similar sentiments, and are making disturbingly parallel moves to address long standing conservative grievances. 

No, Peterson is Not Being “Persecuted” For His Politics

Over at National Post, we have one of Peterson’s lawyers arguing that the Ontario College of Psychologists is “succumbing to the woke mob”, and persecuting him for his politics. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

A casual review of the complaints against Peterson reveals gems expressing clinical opinions about other people, invalidating trans people for their identity (and someone’s existence should never be “politics”), shaming people for their appearance, and so on. 

I’ve already spent some time explaining the ethical and code of conduct analysis that is likely going on here from the OPC perspective. That isn’t the purpose of this column.

Levitt and Marshall are trying to frame this as a “freedom of speech issue”.  (This is Canada, so technically the correct phrase is “Freedom of Expression”):

This would be a lovely case … were it even remotely true that his commentary was fundamentally political in nature. It isn’t, and it never has been. 

In order for it to be reasonably seen as “political”, it has to be based in some kind of reasonable analysis, and have nothing to do with his position as a psychologist. For example, to make a second hand diagnosis that Trudeau is “mentally 14 years old” would be fine - if Peterson wasn’t a licensed psychologist and didn’t buttress the comment by authoritatively stating something about his years of clinical experience.  That made it a ‘professional opinion’, and that’s a problem. 

Peterson knows full well that he has every right to criticize the government, and there are a thousand ways to express those opinions without straying into the realm of making clinical statements about a person’s mental health status.  

This case falls outside of normal employment law because Peterson is not an employee of anybody.  The College does not act as an employer. He is not “being fired” either, and in fact given that his current means of earning an income has little to do with being a registered psychologist, one has to wonder why he bothered to retain his licensure since he claims to have not seen any clients since 2017. 

The fact here is that the College is a regulating body with a defined code of conduct and the discipline of psychology in Canada has a well established code of ethics that the OCP Code of Conduct references.  The boundaries of behaviour are fairly well defined. Membership in the college is a requirement to practice psychology, not to be a public grifter. 

As I previously discussed, most of the complaints against Mr. Peterson in one form or another can be argued to violate either the Code of Conduct or the Code of Ethics.  I don’t think anybody cares what precisely Mr. Peterson believes politically, the concerns are much more about his apparent willingness to use his position AS A PSYCHOLOGIST to lend greater credibility to his stated opinions.

It isn’t about whether his opinions are “liberal” or “conservative” in their alignment, it’s about whether his expression of those opinions create an environment which is harmful to others.  Mr. Peterson loves to argue about the validity of transgender people, but it is the manner in which he goes about it which creates problems. He does so in a manner which I am only going to politely say violates the general principle of respect for others.

While Mr. Peterson is making a great deal of hay of the notion that he is being “persecuted for holding conservative beliefs”, there is no evidence whatsoever that supports this. The breadth of the complaints against him are related to how he has expressed himself and the potential harms that his various commentaries are potentially doing to people beyond his immediate audience. There isn’t a shred of evidence that, for example, the Federal Government is going after him for comments about the Prime Minister.

Mr. Peterson has done the one thing that long ago became a “cardinal sin” for a practitioner in any caregiving domain: He has demonstrated contempt for people that could come knocking at his door seeking professional help.  

While nobody has directly challenged the power of regulating colleges to hold members accountable for their public statements on various matters, I find it difficult to believe that the courts in Canada are going to hold that as an unreasonable limit on the exercise of Freedom of Expression in this case. 

The most that Peterson might achieve here is a ruling that changes the way in which complaints are adjusted within the regulatory college - but that also presumes that the OCP has acted in a manner which the courts find to be arbitrary and/or capricious. Not being personally familiar with the investigation and procedures of the OCP, that is not something I can do more than speculate on. 

So Jordan Peterson Is Being Disciplined?

Jordan Peterson is running about making a big fuss because his social media antics have garnered the attention of the College of Psychologists of Ontario (CPO).  "I won't comply!", he cries into the void; "I'm going to mount a Charter Challenge!", he declares to his followers.  

To be clear, I am not privy to the content of the specific allegations in the complaints the CPO is currently processing. So, what follows is equal parts speculation, inference, and my own thoughts on the matter.  

[Update:  January 6, 2023]  It seems that Dr. Peterson has made a copy of the complaints public on his Twitter feed, and Rachel Gilmore took the time to go through them.  It’s worse than what I discuss below - far far worse.  Link:  https://twitter.com/atrachelgilmore/status/1611405636931141632  

/Update] 

As a mental health practitioner myself, I have found plenty of Mr. Peterson's declarations to be deeply troubling from an ethical perspective.  The ethical concerns that come up for me are twofold.  First, he has a nasty tendency of posting what are arguably diagnostic statements about people, and backing that up with his experience as a psychologist.  The second area of concern has been his commentary on matters related to gender identity which have consistently drawn absolute positions that are at odds with the broader themes of the research literature in the area.  

I am not going to say something like "he's not entitled to his opinions" - that's not the issue here. It is more about making authoritative statements about matters where he is the "perceived expert" - which is deeply problematic with some of Peterson's commentary. 

Relevant Documents: 

For the purposes of this discussion, 2 documents are particularly relevant:  

The CPO document "Standards of Professional Conduct" (CPO, 2017).  I will refer to this as the SPC in this discussion.

 The Canadian Psychologists Association (CPA) "Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists (4th Edition)".  This will be referred to as "CPA Code of Ethics" in this discussion.