Ford’s Trumpish tendencies
According to Ian Lee, a professor at Carleton University, Doug Ford’s political victory in Ontario (15 June) is unrelated to rightwing populist trends in the US and Europe. However, the new Conservative premier’s background and public behaviour is quite Trumpish, including Ford’s record of publicly belittling gay pride activists and the developmentally handicapped.
Lee also credits Ford’s victory to the province’s rejection of defeated Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne, “who had steered the province to the left”. Such simplistic analysis imagines sharp ideological borders that encourage exclusion rather than compromise. Lee’s quoted remarks may well reflect his quantitative perspective rather than the messy complexity of reality.
Morgan Duchesney
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
An asteroid problem to crack
There’s a problem with your article on asteroid mining (There’s gold in them thar asteroids, 22 June). It talks of small spaceships that could be “propelled using super-hot water vapour heated to 1,000C”, and that would be able to “refuel in space either directly with water [from the asteroids] or the hydrogen and oxygen that can be created from it.”
You need two things to get a vessel moving in the vacuum of space: some mass to throw out the back end and a source of energy to get that mass moving.
In a conventional rocket the fuel fulfils both functions. The water from the asteroid could provide the mass, but not the energy. Sure, recombining its oxygen and hydrogen could produce energy, but you need energy to break the water down to oxygen and hydrogen in the first place.
So, absent such an external energy source, of which the article makes no mention, instead of being able to “zip around merrily with no end to their useful life” these spaceships would be stuck on their asteroids for all eternity.
Stuart Corner
Enmore, NSW, Australia
Abortion and women’s rights
I can support an argument for liberalising Ireland’s abortion law (1 June) as a legal compromise aimed at protecting women from unsafe backstreet abortions. But I find incomprehensible a claim that this is a “victory for women’s rights”. Anyone with a knowledge of human biology knows that every cell in the foetus is genetically different from the rest of the mother’s body. This is a vulnerable human being at an early stage of development and needs the protection of the law.
This is what makes abortion a difficult legal dilemma, one that is side-stepped by so-called radical feminist rhetoric. Isn’t this just another example of the hypocrisy and double standards involved in applying human rights discourse?
Vinoth Ramachandra
Colombo, Sri Lanka
Libraries need human touch
You mention in your 22 June editorial (Libraries give us power) that in Britain (and other countries), library hours are being extended by leaving them unstaffed. Needless to say, this idea, from many a librarian’s point of view, is not a good one, especially when security is at stake. To say nothing of the possibility, as pointed out elsewhere in the same issue (Slave to the algorithm, by James Bridle) that technology may exceed itself “beyond our control”.
In the case of libraries, only the presence of a real librarian can provide personal, non-robotic user assistance, as well as proper management of a library’s uniquely valuable riches. As Bridle says, “Computers are not here to give us all the answers.”
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
Briefly
• It’s a bit late, but the heading I would have found most appropriate for the interview by Decca Aitkenhead with Anthony Scaramucci (15 June) would have been “The amoral meets the immoral”.
Aitkenhead reminded me of an earnest relative determined to put the best face on the lifer she visits regularly in prison. How else to interpret “quick-witted, funny, fabulously good company” included as her forgiving epithets for this appalling little man? Not hard, indeed, to imagine the look on his face when he read his flattering profile in one of England’s quality papers.
Bill Finn
St Paul, Alberta, Canada
• Jon Midgley is right that most Canadians support the (Kinder Morgan) pipeline (So sorry about Canada, Reply, 22 June) but he fails to add that a similar proportion of Canadians oppose spending government money on it – let alone buying it as Justin Trudeau has done.
Simon Erskine
London, UK
• Re: School air pollution worse inside than out (1 June). I was a high school teacher for a few years in Montreal, enduring the hot, humid summers and many a plea for outdoor classes. Good on the Guardian for drawing attention to this problem and, more importantly, for crafting a new arsenal of arguments for today’s youth.
Jesse Gutman
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• I laughed to see, in Signs of life on Mars (15 June), that this life was long dead. Mars is a vision of how Earth will look when we’re done with it.
Doug Porteous
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
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