As Elon Musk continues to clear ascending levels of diabolical madness, many Twitter users are understandably disgusted with the whole thing and looking for alternatives. Many are flocking to Bluesky, an initiative of Jack Dorsey, the original creator and CEO of Twitter.
The Gini index is a measure of income inequality. If everyone in a population earns exactly the same income its value is 0. For maximum inequality its value is 1, or 100%. How it's calculated is a bit complex, but one way to think about it is this: take two random members of the population and determine the difference in their incomes, compared to the mean income. Do this many times and take the average.
The comparison with the mean is important, because it allows you to compare different populations with different mean income, a rich country with a poor country. But it also has the interesting effect that the Gini index is particularly sensitive to income disparities around the mean. There are other ways of measuring income inequality, like comparing the total income of a small percentage at the top with that of a larger percentage at the bottom, but this is not so sensitive to disparities around the middle.
Anyway, here is a graph of 60 years' worth of data for the United States:
As we see the likes of Donald Trump in the US or Pierre Poilievre in Canada, or Danielle Smith in Alberta, and many other similar characters rise to power through elections around the world, many of us are left wondering
why on Earth would anyone vote for these people.
I think I know the answer to this.
Many people are wondering how come so many people vote for Trump/Poilievre/Milei/ <or insert your local conservative leader here> . The answer I believe lies in all those ads that are everywhere. My better half has seen ads from our local white supremacist yahoos Take Back Alberta on Wordle, a word game by The New York Times.
Those ads are written by marketing specialists who know how to sell anything: cars, cruises, beauty products. It's interesting to consider exactly how they do it with politicians.
In the light of the story of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people's decision to leave home and establish themselves in India, this quote seems seems very relevant. It tells us a lot about the mindset behind their actions. The writer is Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, and the quote is from his book “What makes you not a Buddhist”:
Fire grows and spreads because it creates the conditions to do so by itself. A small local fire turns up the temperature and drives away moisture in its immediate surroundings, creating the conditions for combustion. Once its immediate surroundings are lit on fire, the conditions are created in the layer surrounding that, and so on. In this way, a spark, an ember blown by the wind, a cigarette tossed carelessly out of a car, can start a vast and uncontrollable conflagration. Most living beings in the forest are burned to death, and the few that escape can never return, because the very conditions for life have been destroyed.
There are several reasons why I have started this writing project by focusing on the story of the Dalai Lama: for one thing, it's a great story and I love stories! But also, there are lessons here about politics: about power, how to allocate it, and what to do with it, a topic that I always seem to keep coming back to these days.
By early March of 1959 the situation in Lhasa had become untenable. It was clear that the Chinese were about to capture the Dalai Lama, and it was equally clear that the thousands of Tibetans that surrounded Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama's summer palace, were willing to sacrifice their lives to prevent that from happening. The oracle had been consulted several times and he insisted the Dalai Lama should continue to communicate with the Chinese authorities. Then, on the 17th.
A quick note to explain one reason why I am writing so much about the Dalai Lama these days. As we have seen, the Dalai Lama becomes the political as well as the spiritual leader of his people through a very (to western eyes) bizarre, and decidedly “undemocratic” [1] process. He is declared to be the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama through some dodgy evidence, isolated and rigorously trained, and appointed the leader of the Tibetan people at 15 (!). Before I continue with his story and tell you how that turned out [2], I want to pause and talk about why this is significant for me.
Tibetan buddhists believe in rebirth. To someone who is not a believer in any form of life after death this seems an absurdity. Which it is, if taken literally. But if speech was limited to considering only facts that are known to be true by experiment, we wouldn't get very far at all.