Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Standing together, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Do we want to live in a world in which your legal rights are determined by the personal moral scruples of whomsoever happens to be your lawyer at that time?
As you've phrased the question, not so much. Ideally lawyers would decline to represent truly awful clients, yes. But that would require a legal system that is dramatically better at delivering justice than what we have now.
Given the legal system we have, lawyers who will do their utmost to represent their clients regardless of their personal feelings is not just a good idea, it's a requirement for the system to work at all.
For that matter, why should lawyers have a requirement imposed that does not apply to anyone else in the legal system? You don't see the police saying "we don't like you do we're not going to help you"... oh, wait.
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Here's an interesting piece from Geoff Gallop about the Labor collapse in WA recently.
the Australian Labor Party is a good case study in this politics of avoidance. Its membership base has all but collapsed, its primary vote is at a historic low and its constitution is corporatist and constraining.
The ALP is, however, still a nationally important organisation with a base in civil society and our political institutions, local, state and federal. This leads many of its leaders and managers – inside and outside parliament – to think that the crisis is part of the normal cycle of politics and good times will return.
As far as NZ goes, I find it quite easy to see The Greens proposal as them just being straightforward and honest and seeing what Labour say. Which seems to me, as a Green supporter, to be quite a natural thing to do. The question is who stood to gain from leaking that proposal, and I can't see the Greens being that party. But maybe this is a double bluff by the greens to cement Labour's reputation as tricky.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Russell Brown,
Oh, come on. There are about a dozen attacks on Labour in a not-very-long thread, a
In your honour I counted 42 comments, 12 critical of Labour of which I think 7 count as attacks. "Bad mistake on Labour's part", for example, is critical but not an attack, while "they reneged on rod and janette" I'm counting as an attack.
From which I gather you're counting any criticism of Labour as an attack, or you're reading with a bias where attacks shine through in a way that other comments don't.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Russell Brown,
Link here. Trigger warning for massive fits of pique from Russel’s Facebook followers
Russel, it seems you have picked the worst of the few comments that attack Labour and highlighted it. Which is interesting given your normal position on media angles. Especially since we're talking about Facebook here, where the standard of comment is often dismal.
I thought it was more notable that there was discussion of the importance of strategic voting and acknowledgement that Labour is necessary if The Greens want to be in government.
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Hard News: To be expected, in reply to Keir Leslie,
given the upside simply isn't that large, the natural tendency of cautious social democrats will be to avoid the risk.
Yes, and we've seen a lot of that. It seems to go hand in hand with falling polls. Oddly, rather than saying "polls go up when we announce definite policy, we should do more of that", Labour have responded by becoming even more cautious.
It would be tremendously sad if they ended up like the recent Labor result in WA where those who could be bothered to vote gave a solid kicking to both major parties. Especially since NZ elections allow for the "don't like any of them" option in a way that Australia's compulsory voting officially doesn't. I'd rather not have Winston First collect 5% of the vote just for not being Key or Cunliffe.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Farmer Green,
But as someone pointed out back then , my suggestions were unacceptable to most because they came from the wrong side of the fence.
But not to everyone. I've worked with The Maruia Society, I've worked with sincere Catholics (I'm a vegetarian and oppose pedophilia), I can work with most people. To a fairly large degree I'll work with anyone who's trying to make things better, even if some of what they do makes things dramatically worse. I look for a net gain, especially when the losses are things that don't affect the gains I care about (yes, even if you drive to the anti-AGW rally). Realistically, the gulf between me and Catholics is larger than most gaps, but that doesn't stop me spending occasional weekends picking plastic waste out of the local river with a bunch of them.
So I'm on the side of listening to people and finding common ground, rather than coming up with ever-more-precise ways to divide people.
It's worth noting that there are way too many people on the net who are just here for the debate. You've previously linked to some from the denier side, but there are examples here of people from the alarmist side doing the same thing.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Farmer Green,
I can honestly say that I have never encountered a sceptic who explicitly denied that the climate is warming. Where did you personally encounter such a person?
Click the link I posted. There are quotes there from people denying that the climate is changing. Admittedly it's an alarmist site, but the quotes appear genuine and I find it's often easier to get key problematic quotes from people's opponents.
I agree with you about the other problems you pose, I just think they're secondary. They're important more as symptoms of the reason we as a nation/species make really dumb decisions, even though they're actually bad decisions in their own right.
To be clear, I'm not convinced at all that we can wipe out humans, let alone all megafauna/ mammals/ life. What I fear is that AGW will make technological society impossible. I'm not convinced that isolated bands of humans living on manual labour is a desirable future, and I think it's worth spending a huge chunk of our technological resources to avoid it (rather than watching helplessly as we lose those resources).
Ben:
Would a new word for people who accept climate change but are skeptical that it will be a catastrophe be helpful?
Possibly, although Bart's point about the extremes being loudest militates against it. Personally I find it hard to understand how someone can beleive on the evidence that the climate is changing but it won't be catastrophic. I count them as unreasonably optimistic. Montreal notwithstanding, we have a very poor record as a species at dealing with long, slow catastrophes.
It's also a position full of people who don't want to be labelled extreme, regardless of their beleifs. On the one hand I do like that we have people like that, because they're the reseviour that fills out social change movements once the momentum starts to build. Unfortunately, they'll often move in whatever direction the momentum goes rather than deciding on the evidence, then complain if that turns out to have been the wrong "decision". They'll say "someone should have been more persuasive"... on that basis "someone" should have just made the decision and left them out of it. Say "moo".
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Bart Janssen,
but different sets of people need different kinds of data to be willing to change their minds
This is very true. I've had great discussions with a wide range of people over the years on controversial topics, and often the initial formulation of the controversy appears to be responsible for most of the controversy. And listening through the problems can resolve a lot of them, often by finding common ground (surprisingly few farmers actually like the mega-dairy-farm corporations, for example).
But today where there's aggressive out-of-context quoting used as an attack tactic by the extremes, it's very hard to produce those segmented messages that convey meaning accurately. You just can't say to the gamers "I bought a signed Mein Kampf because it's uber memorabilia" while saying to everyone else "I'm a rich idiot and it seemed like a good idea at the time, ooops". With climate change that really means that the extremes get to push chosen messages to out-of-band audiences specifically to inflame issues. Even just specific words, like "theory" and "statistic", leading people like me to scream "gravity is just a sodding theory too!!".
At times there's a lack of experience leading to lack of empathy, and that's hard to work around. Conveying to, say, an educated person the lack of job options faced by a less fortunate blue collar worker can be very hard, but that lack explains a disturbing amount of the objections to (say) ending native forest logging.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Farmer Green,
Because that is not in dispute by those that you label sceptics.
I quoted that rather than claiming it, but I'm happy to stand by it. I disagree with you, for example two of the top 10 myths here feature quotes from people I'd label skeptics who explicitly deny that the climate is warming.
Why do you claim to be a denier, and what are you denying? Since you think climate change can be a threat, I assume you're either denying that humans have anything to do with it, or that we should do anything about it. Your only recent comment on the topic seems to be
I am a denier because I doubt that people in Godzone, 100 years from now , will be worse off than we are today.
Which doesn't really address the issue. I hope they'll be better off because mankind acts successfully to reduce and mitigate AGW (and other threats), for example, so we have that "denial" in common.
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A very topical article :
In April and May of 2013, Yale Law professor Dan Kahan — working with coauthors Ellen Peters, Erica Cantrell Dawson, and Paul Slovic — set out to test a question that continuously puzzles scientists: why isn’t good evidence more effective in resolving political debates? For instance, why doesn’t the mounting proof that climate change is a real threat persuade more skeptics?
So the answer to Russel's original question may be: we can't solve this problem by providing more information, or even by the pro-climate-change people gaining more information. Their study shows that it's effectively a social mechanism - people are more likely to beleive what those around them do, and choose their facts accordingly. That's great for individuals, but can be fatal for communities.