We’ve all heard the phrase, “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” Sometimes it’s initialized as INABIAF, pronounced “inab-ee-aff.” In the nineteenth century, when the word bug was first used by engineers as a synonym for defect, bugs were always bad. Mechanical failures could hardly be anything else..In the 1970s, when computer programmers started talking about INABIAF, the connotations were more ambiguous. After all, the nerds of the seventies saw evolution as a series of bugs in the genetic code that turned out to beget biological improvements such as they..Today, programmers have turned the seeming improvements of apps downloaded to our smart phones into ways to track and manipulate the users — us. Today, that is, many features are deliberately designed as bugs. They are not irritating accidents. That’s one more reason to be wary, indeed suspicious of artificial intelligence..INABIAF has also become a metaphor in everyday speech that refers to public policies, trends, even laws, that look benign but in fact are designed to result in bad consequences. Planned obsolescence, for example, explains why cut flowers wilt after a few days or why my parents’ washing machine lasted for twenty years while today washers last four or five..One can track INABIAF phenomena as well, by reading news stories with a critical eye..Bill C-18 requires social media platforms to pay legacy media for news content generated by the latter. Instagram, Facebook, and Google refused to pay and said they would cease to carry Canadian news. As Nigel Hannaford pointed out recently in these pages, the way the Liberal government handled the issue ensured that “the only options were bad ones, and everybody loses.”.Well, almost everybody..The “cynics on the second floor of the Langevin Block,” where the PMO is housed, he said, have never embraced the notion that those whom Justin accused of harbouring “unacceptable views” should ever have unrestricted access to the Internet. That path, as we have been told many times, leads to disinformation, which is code for information that Justin and his henchmen in cabinet and the PMO do not like..Hannaford concluded that Bill C-18 did “leave the government with what it wants more than anything: control of the Internet in Canada.” He then characterized this result as “second prize.”.But what if we apply INABIAF reasoning? What if that was the intended outcome? That makes it first prize..Or take transfer payments to which Albertans have objected over the years. They object most vehemently in the context of the Government of Canada’s war on Western hydrocarbon resources that pay for so many social programs in Laurentian Canada. How can you shut down the oil sands, commonsensical Albertans wonder, and expect us to pay for equalization?.Rex Murphy, writing in the National Post, asked: “Is it that they don’t know better? Or they simply do not care?”.Here’s the INABIAF conclusion: The Liberals and Laurentians want to destroy the economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan by shutting down hydrocarbon production and by pillaging Western revenues by way of transfer payments — and by other financial rip-offs as well..The same strategy was involved in the assertion that anthropogenic climate change “caused” the “unprecedented” wildfires in Alberta earlier this year, along with those of Ontario and Quebec more recently. Justin said so. End of story..Nothing was said of lousy forest management or of the history of wildfires, which peaked in 1989, both in numbers and in acreage burned. How did 2023 compare? So far, pretty well. Only Danielle Smith thought of the possibility of arson. Why nobody else? Because the most obvious suspects would be those environmentalists we call ecoterrorists..Enough has already been said of the “Just Transition.” But consider Bill C-21, the proposed gun confiscation law. Even Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino knows that a gun ban will do nothing to prevent criminals from getting guns. He said C-21 would not target “law-abiding gunowners.” But this is absurd: by definition, any gun control bill targets only legally registered firearms. As a former Ottawa cop noted in a letter to the National Post, criminal gangs “exist to break the rules; that is what they do for a living.”.The INABIAF conclusion is again obvious: because Bill C-21 cannot disarm illegal gun-owners, it is designed only to disarm hunters and recreational target-shooters..One of the worst examples of deliberate failure proposed and implemented by the Government of Canada, as Adam Zivo pointed out in a brilliant series of articles in the National Post, is the sponsorship of “harm reduction” and “safe supply” programs. These furnish addicts with “free” drugs such as hydromorphone. The premise, that addicts can be weaned off potent drugs by addicting them to weaker ones, is remarkably stupid, even for the Liberals..The consequences could have been anticipated by anyone with a shred of commonsense: free weak drugs incentivize recipients to sell them and use the proceeds to purchase more potent ones such as heroin and fentanyl. Indeed, that’s just what the addicts have done..INABIAF reasoning says: that’s the whole point. Create more addiction..To answer the question “why?” apply the same logic to a related policy: Medical Assistance in Dying, MAID. Here the objective is to encourage suicide as a solution to unhappiness, especially among the poor, among addicts, and among former soldiers suffering from PTSD. If we get rid of enough chronically ill and incurably poor, then healthcare will become more affordable and pension payments will decline..The connection between “safe supply” policies and MAID reminds one of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” published anonymously in 1729. The first part of his essay described the miserable condition of the Irish peasantry, much as reports of chronic poverty and of drug addiction are chronicles of contemporary misery. Swift’s satirical solution? Sell peasant children at a profit to their parents to feed rich ladies and gentlemen. “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old,” he said, “a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”.Thus by analogy does contemporary INABIAF reasoning find a solution to addiction, PTSD, and other unhappy conditions in MAID..No wonder when Pierre Poilievre shared Zivo’s evidence with Carolyn Bennett, Liberal Associate Health Minister, she accused him of being “irresponsible and polarizing” and — you guessed it — “sharing untrue information” about harm reduction and safe supply. To deal with such rubbish, we need another Jonathan Swift..The most obvious criticism of INABIAF logic is that it leads to “conspiracy theories.” Such criticism is plain silly because that all the examples — and there are plenty more — are well documented by hard-nosed journalists who do not believe in fantasies. Besides, as Machiavelli pointed out, conspiracies are not unknown in politics. The modification of his insight it that he thought conspiracies were necessarily secret affairs whereas we have seen that INABIAF logic allows them to flourish in plain sight.