This is really tragic, and a symptom of a deep dysfunction in our body politic.

For those wondering, I voted for @RubaGhazalQS of the same party, and convinced many friends including anglophones to support them, on the basis they had the best climate agenda.

Thread... https://twitter.com/GNadeauDubois/status/1294373427424288769

A disclaimer/ warning: Québec bashing or those accusing me of doing so will be blocked.

Let's start with benefits of the app. Yes, they are hypothetical! We have good reason to believe it will help, and if we wait until we have perfect information, it will be too late.

Leadership requires making decisions under uncertainty.

How about risks from this application? Well, those are not proven and documented as he claims, which is odd for an application that is open to inspection by anyone, including tens of thousands of people that can read the source code.

Canada's federal government has a privacy commissioner, and their office studied this application. Not surprisingly, they concluded this was a good, privacy-conscious solution.

How is it a politician and public intellectual so disagree?

@graemeblake alerted me to this article, which provides an answer.

I don't know whether the supposed expert is incompetent or a fraud, but I am concerned by media and politicians that uncritically accept that statement: https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/mobile/covid-19-contact-tracing-app-would-attract-cybercriminals-expert-1.5064575

Now maybe @GNadeauDubois is aware of all this, and cynically using a battle for partisan advantage. That seems really unlike him.

The most likely problem is simple and frustratingly common: he can't smell bullshit, and can't triangulate who the relevant experts are.

So, back to the deep dysfunction. Even when one rises above partisan nonsense, it's clear many people are merely parroting talking points.

Do these elected officials not merely believe but *understand* climate change? Have the emotionally processed what that means?

There's a reason climate scientists trust the epidemiologists. Beyond the baseline scientific understanding, there's an emotional maturity required to accept reality and expend effort to understand it.

Table stakes for a reality based community.

When I hear politicians that said the right things about climate go on to defend homeopathy or "vaccine choice", I doubt whether we're in that same community.

Politicians probably can't do all the work by themselves, and they have to surround themselves by people that care about reality.

It takes active work to ensure the bullshitters don't pull a fast one on you, like the private investigator pretending to know about that cyber stuff

One annoying thing about people that care about reality is they want to prevent problems before it's absolutely necessary.

Expensive things like preparing for a pandemic, cutting carbon emissions or securing explosive in a Beirut warehouse.

Before the pandemic hit, Canada had a strategic stockpile of PPE. We knew emergency rooms and homeless shelters were overcrowded.

We knew these would cause trouble. We -those of us who paid attention to epidemiologists- knew it was coming.