Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on To celebrate the launch of Trump Towers Istanbul.

…somehow an advocate of both burning everything down and building everything up; an optimist, pessimist, realist and cynic; certainly naive: shat on but fierce, fierce but trying to help; not helping.

I get that. Hell, I have single days when I can whip through those states of mind. I currently think we’re totally fucked, and I would wish that when we go extinct, we take as few other species with us as possible (with perhaps the exception of our industrial agricultural domesticates, though they aren’t to blame for their own existence). At the same time, I would like humans to smarten up and succeed, because there’s so much more cool stuff to learn about how the universe works.

…the changing in the face of new evidence or new experience is a solid way of doing anything – business, government, science, theatre, photography, activism – everything I find of interest has required me to adjust in new and often unexpected ways.

We’re in the midst of a federal election in Canada. One of the parties (I won’t call it “major” because it’s new and has no hope of winning), the People’s Party of Canada, has a position on climate change (which it denies is a problem) that says that since 70’s talk of a “new ice age” didn’t pan out, we can ignore what climate scientists are saying now:

Climate change alarmism is based on flawed models that have consistently failed at correctly predicting the future. None of the cataclysmic predictions that have been made about the climate since the 1970s have come true. No new ice age. No steady warming in direct relation with increases in CO2 levels. No disappearance of polar ice caps. No exceptional rise in ocean levels. No abnormal increase in catastrophic weather events. No widespread crop failure and famine.In fact, CO2 is beneficial for agriculture and there has recently been a measurable “greening” of the world in part thanks to higher levels. Despite what global warming propaganda claims, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is an essential ingredient for life on Earth and needed for plant growth.

So not just not taking in new information, but denying there is new information to take in.

The PPC party leader, failed Conservative Party leadership aspirant Maxime Bernier, has had a number of well publicized twitter lash-outs at Greta Thunberg over the last months.

But it would be unwise to discount or ignore Bernier and the PPC, seeing what happened with Trump. Electorats can be fickle and unthinking. Today’s crank could be tomorrow’s head of government.