Author: Milan
In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023.
1 Spadina Crescent
LIGO and beyond
A technical but fascinating discussion about the emergence of gravitational wave astrophysics and what it has been telling us about neutron stars, black holes, and the laws of nature:
CN Tower from U of T
U of T Front Campus
U of T and Yonge St skyline
University of Toronto Athletic Centre
Nice thoughts are not an obligation
You don’t have to think nice.
Instead of teaching you to think EI [emotionally immature] parents teach you to judge your thoughts. EI parents always turn thinking into a moral issue. They will attack their child’s open, honest thoughts if they feel threatened. By acting wounded, insulted, or appalled, EI parents make it clear that you are only good when your thoughts are nice.
It’s crucial to realize that you don’t have to think nice. There are no thought police, thank goodness, and you have the absolute right to think anything that occurs to you. Your original thoughts are a big part of your individuality and are necessary to solve problems with creative thinking.
Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 8: “Making Room for Your Own Mind”
Canada and the ‘Golden Dome’
Canada’s connection to US ballistic missile defence efforts goes back a long way and is interwoven with our shared history of continental air defence.
Now, Trump is proposing a ‘Golden Dome’ to supposedly make America safer from foreign threats, and Canada is part of the discussions.
Recently, the American Physical Society released a detailed free report: “Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense: Challenges to Defending the U.S.”
The basic weaknesses of the whole concept are simple to understand: it takes drastically more expense and hardware to (possibly) stop one missile than it does for a challenger to build one more missile. As a result, the technology is inherently likely to fuel arms races, as foreign challengers fear their deterrents will lose credibility.
Related:
- Open thread: ballistic missile defence
- Obama changing tack on missile defence
- Robert Gates posturing on missile defence
- Canada and Ballistic Missile Defence
- US security assurances and nuclear weapon proliferation
- Open thread: the global nuclear arms race
- Blair on the fragility of nuclear deterrence
- Consequences of nuclear weapon proliferation
- The military importance of space
- The nuclear razor’s edge
- Unproductive investments that harm the world
- Experiential education on nuclear weapon proliferation
See also my 2005 report: “Common Threats, Joint Responses: The Report of the 2005 North American Security Cooperation Assessment Student Tour“
Fiction, versus reality’s lack of resolution
In all the time while I have been concerned, and later terrified, about climate change and the future of life on Earth, I still had the narrative convention of fiction influencing my expectations: the emergence of a big problem will imperil and inspire a group of people to find solutions and eventually the people threatened by the problem will accept if not embrace the solutions. A tolerable norm is disrupted and then restored because people have the ability to perceive and reason, and the willingness and virtue to act appropriately when they see what’s wrong.
Now, I feel acutely confronted by what a bad model for human reactions this is. It seems to me now that we almost never want to understand problems or their real causes; we almost always prefer an easy answer and somebody to blame. The narrative arc of ‘problem emerges, people understand problem, people solve problem’ has a real-world equivalent more like ‘problems emerge but people usually miss or misunderstand them, and where they do perceive problems to exist they interpret them using stories where the most important purpose is to justify and protect the powerful’.
If the history happening around us were a movie, it might be one that I’d want to walk out of, between the unsatisfying plot and the unsympathetic actors. Somehow the future has come to feel more like a sentence than a promise: something which will need to be endured, watching everything good that humankind has achieved getting eroded and destroyed, and in which having the ability to understand and name what is happening just leads to those around you punishing and rejecting you by reflex.