Climate change: the Coalition’s new Hansonism
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The best moment in last night’s 4 Corners was when palaeontologist Bob Carter, giving one of his spiels about why climate science is rubbish to a group of rural Queenslanders, asked his audience who was under fifty. Two or three hands went up. Turn the sound off, and it could have been footage of a One Nation meeting in the 1990s: old, white, rural people, confused and unhappy. There’s a number of similarities between Hansonism and climate denialism. One Nation supporters were primarily older, conservative, low-income, poorly-educated voters, often in regional areas. Opposition to emissions trading is strongest amongst older and Coalition voters. And they share a similar approach to communication. Both are immune to rational argument, preferring “common sense” and invented or meaningless statistics over verifiable evidence or logic. Indeed, a salient characteristic of Hansonism was its equation of inarticulacy with authenticity. Pauline Hanson’s verbal maladroitness might have earned the derision of the media but, as with Joh Bjelke-Petersen, it was that very ineloquence that appealed to voters suspicious of verbal dexterity, suspicious of those with “all brains and no common sense”. Barnaby Joyce, not so much inarticulate as clumsy and gaffe-prone, appeals similarly as a “voice of the bush” despite being an accountant educated at a Sydney GPS school. And both Hansonism and climate denialism are more accurately understood as vehicles or expressions of other, more fundamental concerns. Many One Nation supporters were victims of a decade and a half of economic reform – blue collar workers left jobless by the decline in manufacturing, or regional communities where competition policy and agribusiness had cut employment and national businesses had packed up and left. It was their sense of abandonment by mainstream Australia that fuelled their embrace of Hanson, almost regardless of her views. Denialism in its more educated form is a resentment of the perceived success of “the Left” on the issue; on the basis of the views expressed last night, in regional and rural areas it’s about resentment toward the treatment of the bush (thus Joyce’s insistence that the CPRS is a giant tax, despite it being revenue-negative and agriculture being excluded from the scheme). And protectionism is common to both — Hansonism wanted to reverse globalisation and restore the cosseted Australian economy of yesteryear; denialism wants to continue subsidising heavy polluters on the basis that everyone else does. Both are driven by an innate hostility to the rest of the world which, for denialists, should do something about climate change before we do anything or, in its more extreme form, wants to use climate change to destroy Australia’s national sovereignty. And both, I’d suggest, are an angry rejection of the idea that there are forces beyond which communities and even governments have no control, whether globalisation or climate change. Some people, in the manner of say the 9/11 truthers, prefer the idea that a vast conspiracy is behind such phenomena, rather than forces unamenable to human control. It seems a much safer world if someone is in charge, even if it’s a sinister world government. But the biggest similarity is that both mean big trouble for the Coalition. Actual Hansonists were few and far between in the Coalition, but climate denialists are everywhere, although we saw a lot of familiar faces last night. Worst of all, two senior Liberals, Nick Minchin (strangely filmed watching his daughter play netball) and Tony Abbott, lead them — as Gerard Henderson has noted several times, Liberals appear to have a bizarre willingness to discuss party matters on the ABC in a manner guaranteed to cause internal trouble. While moderates wanted to take on Hanson, the instinct of many conservative Liberals in the late 1990s was to try to co-opt her supporters. “Hanson is a bigger problem for Beazley than she is for us,” one prominent Liberal said in 1998, not long before One Nation ushered in a Beattie Government in Queensland and nearly ruined John Howard’s bid for a second term. Asylum seekers gave Howard the chance to pull One Nation voters into his camp into 2001, but by then the antics of Hanson and One Nation MPs had already fatally undermined the movement. But there’ll be no Tampa for denialism (for that matter, any boats that arrive carrying climate refugees will just strengthen the case for action). Denialism is both a political and policy dead-end, something Tony Abbott in one of his more lucid moments earlier this year recognised when he said his party couldn’t move to a policy that was “browner than Howard.” It was John Howard who ultimately decided to criticise Hanson after steadfastly refusing to do so, and who eventually accepted the need for action on climate change via an ETS. Howard might have been an arch-conservative but it is his pragmatic instincts that his party is most in need of in dealing with climate change. |
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193 Comments
Well-put Bernard, hear hear.
I wonder if you could mention the gloriously unscientific new term “denialism” a few more times?
Actually, why not go with your heart Bernard and call them what you really want - climate change terrorists!!
Some irony that on the occasion of one very famous wall being pushed over, Rupert Murdoch announces he wishes to erect another, at the same time as Mikhail Gorbachev calls on world leaders to ‘pull down’ the new wall, the one dividing us on the issue of climate change. Ironic too that Howard, (no doubt like some of the East Berlin hardliners), realised that it was, in fact, time to go with the flow; another case of ‘leading from behind’.
But the dinosaurs of the Coalition think they can hold the wall? Dress up their pandering to ignorance and unabashed self-interest as ‘scepticism’?
It would be funny, except that the ETS we will get from this process is hopelessly flawed.
touche’ Bernard
Don’t forget the dog-whistling.
It is Rudd who is in need of Howard’s pragmatism — he won’t get an ETS without it.
“It seems a much safer world if someone is in charge, even if it’s a sinister world government.” Nice, succinct and thoughtful. Ta.
“…Denialism in its more educated form is a resentment of the perceived success of “the Left” on the issue…”
That’s COMEDY GOLD.
You’ve topped yourself today Bernard.
I propose a new drinking game version of Godwin’s Law: let’s call it “Keane’s Law”.
Everytime time ‘Denialist’ and ‘Hanson’ are used together the speaker can be said to have invoked “Keane’s Law”.
Congratulations Bernard on being the first.
Drink!
The brroadsheet right wing commentators - Albrechtsen, Devine, even Gerard Henderson - flirt with (or suck up to) the ‘ignorant’ constituency as a way of flogging the liberal-ABC-left for being alienated from commonsense normality. This has led them irrevocably into the denialist camp from which they will find it hard to escape.
There is much irony in last night’s 4 corners program and Mr Keane’s article. Senator Minchin denounces theories of human influenced global climate change as a “left wing conspiracy”. The overwhelming probability is that the consenus of the vast majority of scientists is right: human conduct is highly material to climate change. It is a matter of looking at the evidence in determining which theory best fits the available facts.
Mr Keane then uses the “conspiracy” notion to denounce 9/11 “truthers” when again it is a matter of looking at the scientific evidence to decide whose conspiracy theory, the American government’s one about 19 crazed Muslims directed from a cave in Afghanistan, or the 9/11 “truthers” best fits the evidence.
Mr Keane obviously hasn’t bothered to look at the evidence or he would see that he is just as guilty as Minchin, Joyce and the others of pushing a pet wheelbarrow.
Many a time on this forum the Rudd Government has been accused of trying to wedge the opposition on the climate change issue. Even if this were the case, Rudd and Wong could have spared themselves the effort, and waited patiently for the neo-con retrogrades from the Howard era to push the self destruct button.
All that Abbot, Minchin et al had to do, was wait for Turnbull and Macfarlane’s strategy to run its course. Which would have seen the Government reject at least some of their ammendments. Then Turnbull could have claimed the opposition’s attempts to constructively engage the government on the climate change issue were rebuffed.
If Turnbull is to retain any credibilty and probably his leadership, Abbot and Minchin will be kicked off the front bench. Somehow I doubt he has the authority.
On another matter, the main reason snake oil merchants like Carter and Plimer persist is because they are allowed to tout their association with James Cook University and Ade
The last bit should read “allowed to tout their association with James Cook University and Adelaide University respectively.
Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson are pretty much one and the same. I actually took pity on the farmers on 4Corners last night who had been brain-washed by this dangerous man.
I think your comparison between One Nation supporters and climate change denialists is a bit dodgy.
Most of the climate change sceptics I know are urbane, wealthy, business types who know that an Emissions Trading scheme will hit them where they hurt the most, their profits. Its got nothing to do with fear of the world or lack of education. Like most things in life, it’s all about self interest.
However, you are right in that true conservatives value decentralisation and less regulation to centralisation and “red tape” any day of the week. The idea of a big Federal government (let alone the UN) controlling everything freaks them out. And the problem with climate change is that it can only be resolved through big governments collaborating. No wonder they are struggling with the concept.
With style Bernard, excellent article. Interesting to recall when Howard finally decided it was in his best interest to start attacking Hanson, who did he entrust with heading the demolition mob? None other than that rightous, God fearing, man of the church Tony Abbott. Young Anthony showed his boss he could kick head with the best of them and was well rewarded for his dirty tricks. Meanwhile the Greens Christine Milne bleats on to anyone who doesn’t mind being bored to distraction, she sings from the same song sheet every time. Perhaps if she was less boring and tried to use language that was even mildly interesting there would be more takers for the Green position. She and Bob Brown have that great talent of being decidedly uninteresting. They should listen to some of the interviews and speeches of a few of the great interviewees and debaters, learn their trade, may help, although I doubt it.
A bit harsh on Bob Brown who of all politicians tends to hit nails on the head with well thought through brevity. However if the plans of Lee Rhiannon (upper house Green NSW) to succeed him come to fruition the Party might as well start digging its grave now. She has all the communication skills of Maan Fergson and the humour of Warren Truss.
“…It seems a much safer world if someone is in charge, even if it’s a sinister world government.
Bernard,
Your wonderful ‘League of SuperFriends’ analogy is particularly prescient considering Kevin’s career ambitions.
The girls and I enjoyed that one immensely.
Perhaps you could point us to your bellwether of good cooperative government.
It couldn’t surely be the UN. NATO? The G20 perhaps?
And if this “world government” was enacted to ‘run the planet’, explain to us exactly how it would be elected and administered?
One country : one vote?
Proportional representation?
Enlighten please or haven’t you got that far into your “Final Solution”.
Bush resentment latches on to all sorts of things. Beware of parallels between Hanson xenophobia and climate beliefs. The cattle, sheep and wheat lands of Oz ARE old and white. Hold a political meeting there and that demographic turns up. Barcaldine isn’t what it was circa 1890.
The clue is in Bernard’s phrase “but climate denialists are everywhere”- the climate push isn’t coming from urban ferals like Ipswitch Hanson, but activists in the coalition. Neither does it emanate from a rogue academic populist like Blainey. Polls show that most people (in the bush or not) are not too clear on climate change. Many in the Coalition think that signing up for a scary revolution sponsored by the ALP / Greens is political death. The climate is incidental. Turnbull and David Cameron are unafraid, but they may well be in the Tory minority. The Nats and their Lib allies see a political vacuum, so they’re hoovering up the grass roots.
Denigrating climate ditherers/sceptics/”denialists” by association as pig-ignorant bewildered white leftovers is precisely why the climate argument is currently being lost. You’d better have more respect for those who disagree or “don’t know”, Bernard. Look at the polls.
Scott, you may know some sophisticated skeptics. I was skeptical myself until recently, if not particularly sophisticated. At this stage in the game, a non-believing scientist is still worthy of the label “skeptic” no matter how outnumbered and outgunned.
But non-scientists who still claim, as Nick Minchin did last night, that greenhouse response is a conspiracy of the left “to de-industrialise the western world”, are mistaking democracy for a simple tug-of-war in which the ignorant — or in Minchin’s case the insane — pull with the same weight as the informed.
Voltaire never intended this. He made it quite clear that for a society to govern itself until people need to be at least enlightened enough to know what they don’t know. To speak up when they’re qualified and to ask someone intelligent when they’re not. “Common sense is not so common.”
i wonder how many people who comment about Climate Change in Crickey have any understanding of the about 200 years scientific history that has led us to where we are today. Its obvious not many of the Coalition members have taken the trouble to get a handle on even the most basic science involved. Its hard to develop a conspiracy theory back through 200 years.
The subject is too important to ever again allow the Coalition to be even part of the Government of Australia.
For those who should be interested try the web site of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.
Gratton Wilson
Conspiracy theory is very popular - viz Dan Brown’s ouevre - but essentially it is a form of escapism not an exercise in rational believability.
Bernard - have you given any consideration to the arguments put by Bob Carter, a distinguished scientist?
Judging by his performance at that meeting with farmers he has yet to earn the ‘distinguished scientist tag’. Frankly, he came over as a ratbag (and he wasn’t alone in that)
James,
“Voltaire never intended this. He made it quite clear that for a society to govern itself, people need to be at least enlightened enough to know what they don’t know. To speak up when they’re qualified and to ask someone intelligent when they’re not.”
The problem is that most of us are not qualified to understand climate change, including me. I honestly do not know what to think. And the experts contradict each other. Ian Plimer & Matthew England. I went to a breakfast where they both spoke and literally couldn’t agree on anything!!
Jillian,
That’s exactly the reason I eventually gave up and concurred with it all. The more I read, the less I understood. In the end I stopped letting anyone try to convince me using fragments of scientific evidence, and I just looked at the websites of the world’s foremost scientific associations. They all said human-forced climate change is real and we need to fix it. Including all the major geological associations.
Don’t forget, there are still a few scientists saying that AIDS is not caused by a virus, humans are not evolved to eat meat or dairy products, and life could not have evolved by natural selection.
These outliers are an important part of the scientific dialog, they keep the science honest, a bit like an opposition in parliament. But they are outliers. And for non-scientists to venerate these outliers while ignoring the peleton is effectively to turn our backs on the whole notion of the Enlightenment.
Right, Bernard; there is certainly an element of Hansonist anti-intellectualism to the climate change “skeptics” - “what would scientists know about climate, they’re stuck in their ivory tower” kinda thing.
But I also think Baal hits the nail on the head, in that the role of the elites in this mess was critical. The educated right-wing commentariat latched onto global warming denialism as a stick to beat citified lefties with. So it became an us-vs-them issue when really, there is nothing inherent about global warming that should make it a leftist issue, and in fact there’s probably a big space for green conservatism on the political spectrum.
Now, though, the denialist elites are muddying the waters by continually citing crank geologists, or medicinal chemists, or whoever else will lend a nice scientific sheen to the nuttery. And so seeds of doubt are disseminated, and denialists get to cast themselves as Gallileo to the green movement’s Catholic Church, and we move ever further from a sensible solution.
It’s charming.
I think the scientific community have made some tactical mistakes communicating the message. They have attempted to fight the public-opinion war by overwhelming us with bits and pieces of evidence — Antarctic ice, penguins, sinking atolls, bushfires and so on. It added some immediacy when Al Gore did it, but now it’s gone too far.
By discussing detailed evidence in the public space, they imply that the rest of us are competent to judge what these things mean. This provides a means for the dissenters — who have a lot of money and fear behind them to amplify their arguments — to match them fragment for fragment until our heads spin.
I once worked for a short time in an eyewear shop. I was a shocker of a salesman. I tried to explain to this bloke one day why one pair of sunglasses was better quality than another, while his eyes glazed over. Eventually he interrupted me to ask, “Would you recommend these?”
He wasn’t sophisticated but he was mature. As far as he was concerned, my explanation could well be gobbledegook, but he considered I was the expert since I was working there, so all he wanted was my bottom-line recommendation. Smart man.
That’s the way to reach most people. Just show them a long list of quotes from the policy statements of the world’s major scientific associations. Including, for completeness and honesty, the few that dissent. Not just the IPCC, because some dissenters have spread the idea that it’s tainted, and people know it wouldn’t continue to exist were it not for its conclusions.
Also, stop calling them “denialists” with its holocaust-denial overtones, and call them “dissenters”. It’s more polite, but at the same time underscores that they are the minority.
There are three main questions to be addressed. One is whether human-induced climate change is a reality. The second one is how bad is it? The third one is what should be done about it?
Although the public seems to be very divided over the first two questions, the government is addressing the third question - in a way that involves large amounts of money.
If it were not for the prospect of an ETS, I don’t think the debate would be as heated.
A friend of mine pointed out that logging is still continuing in the Daintree rainforest. Surely this should be stopped even before getting into an ETS?
Most of this is political argy-bargy and does not derive from any impartial consideration of the scientific issues.
I offer you two definitions:
“Distinguished scientist” = an eminent scientist who agrees with you
“Ratbag scientist” = an eminent scientist who doesn’t agree with you.
I think we should be able to do better than this.
I’ve had a nagging fear for the last 20yrs since warming was first firmed up that it would lead to the inevitable -nuclear power for the benighted Northern hemisphere populations, too many in too small an unpleasant area. (most Oz on the kangaroo route, after their first winter, asked not how civilisation ever evolved in such a climate but WHY.) To maintain their current lifestyles the Northern white west must go nuke - they’re too old, too lazy and too exhausted to try anything new like adapt.
News tonight is that the UK is undertaking a crash program building of nuke AND clean (sic!) coal power stations. Bye Bye, Britain, hello Autocracy.
Journalism of the very lowest order and on a number of levels.
Jonathan Green will be pleased and a potentially meaningful career will turn the way of Mungo McCallum’s no doubt.
Well it is a mature technology. Should the best stand in the way of the good?
Michaelt - I suppose we should be dignified in our characterisation of the players - but when faced with mischief one has to be cruel
James McD, Baal, Jillian, MPM…
First and foremost, please remember that we are in Australia, where nuclear power is currently illegal due to federal statute. Anybody wishing to go nuclear must first address the reality that no political party is willing to propose a change to this situation.
Thus, nuclear is off the agenda. Quod Erat Datum.
Denialist, dissenter, ditherer, dodderer, whatever… those who deny that the vastly greater majority of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is both real and immediate don’t need a new name. They nead to take a good look at themselves and the damage that they are doing to the very real effort by the majority to deal with this issue in a rational manner. Bob Carter is certifiably insane, happy to hear the sound of his own voice, but not in any way a climate scientist.
To take advice from Professor Bob re climate change is about as sensible as it is to consult an expert in palmistry or tealeaf reading. He simply and demonstrably does not have the qualifications or experience in this field to warrant being trusted. He is a geologist. He knows as much about the world’s future as a dinosaur, and they dropped off about 67 million years back.
For those of you who are still reading, I thank you. Please check out the qualifications and peer reviewed literature from those who you consider believing, before you throw your lot in with them.
BTW, I am qualified in callings of engineer, scientist and manager. I am totally unqualified to advise on this subject.
But I do seek out and listen to those who are qualified.
Keep thinking. Use the brain that you were born with.
John,
“First and foremost, please remember that we are in Australia, where nuclear power is currently illegal due to federal statute. Anybody wishing to go nuclear must first address the reality that no political party is willing to propose a change to this situation.”
The Coalition was openly speaking of nuclear power as a serious possibility at the 2007 election.
JAMES McDONALD: It is eminently fair to call them denialists. In that rural congregation last night on Four Corners, not one of them would have even been aware of anti-Semitic or Holocaust overtones. Farmers, generally, deny everything. Did you ever say to a farmer, “It’s a great day!” They’ll deny it.
We saw last night, the real hard-core denialists. Certainly Nick Minchin, Steve Fielding and Tony Abbott-and their ilk see opportunistic mileage in bagging the assenters. In fact it was the Good Senator Steve Fielding who bravely announced (after his fact-finding mission overseas about Climate Change) , that CC didn’t exist, because God hadn’t thought of it first.
Why would you have any qualms about calling these people denialists?
Last night on Four Corners we got to see the real, the dedicated, denialists. Apart from the paleantologist Bob Carter-doubtless a madman or a paid political hack-or the politicians people like Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott who see it as in their own political interests to be in the corner of denial. Because a religious freak like Abbott right down where it really counts, is at one with Steve Fielding. They have this belief that to acknowledge CC is akin to denying god. How this assumption is arrived at is far beyond the imaginings of someone like me. But it is what they think.
The rural brigade last night, apart from being over the age of fifty, and male dominated; these farmers are precisely the people who have over-cultivated the land, starved it of water and refused to learn anything which has occurred as a result of their rape of this nation.
What better way of displaying their pathological hatred of the city-dwellers, without whom they would starve-than to dismiss anything which they don’t understand as being ‘the ‘alien’ from the city’?
Big business which has done even more than anyone else to destroy the eco-climate has got one advantage. Ultimately they will embrace the concept because they will see how to make a few billion bucks out of it. For example take Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. How many big business corporations were in favour of it? Not because they felt any moral repugnance about it, but because they make more money out of having more people in the work-force.
Last night we saw the loud check-shirts, the shoulders hunched forward, the bemused-faces and the lost souls-the One Nation supporters, if you like, the farmers whose brains are of the same depth as the top-soil on which they live. These are the people who depend on the wealth of the cities, who every time there is no rain, run whingeing to the government for drought-relief.
These people can’t live without the big cities, but have no qualms at all about kicking those same cities in the guts. Don’t forget of the ones who can read, their reading matter is the Weekly Times and the Herald Sun, (and interstate versions thereof) and the first thing they do after counting a few bales of hay, is to turn to Andrew Bolt’s column.
Its just possible that, crazed as they are, the nutters of the coalition are not the real problem here. Don’t forget that if they supported the current ETS we’d be getting legislation that does just about precisely nothing about reducing Australian emissions. Rud’s been able to do this while waving his hands about climate as an issue precisely becasue the coalition is so bizarrely way out on this stuff that they even oppose the pissweak and probably counterproductive legislation that Rudds ETS represents. And the media therefore fails to even hold Rudd adequately to account on his do nothing ETC. We’d all be better off waiting and going to another election and for Rudd simply to get on and do efficiently what the government can currently do (which is absolutely heaps) under current legislation. After the next election, fought on Climate Change as one of the primary issues, there is much more likley to be a greener senate and the capacity to pass real steps towards serious and practical abatement-take your pick from the myriad existing tecnhology policy options there are. Efficiency first, ending deforestation (here by the way, its not just the poor ignorants of the developing world that are trashing it), renewables etc. There is literally heaps that can be done. Great stimulus stuff too. Its just apparent that Rudd and co don’t presently want to get on with it, they are loving things the way they are. All spin to bash a stupid opposition and no real political pain for them, especially when programs like four corners let them off the hook so easily.
PPS: I admit to lacking any scientific expertise on CC. However, I’ve spent an awful lot of years with the rural brigade.
OKAY EDITOR. Why did you delete that long, and well thought out post of mine. What is it you’ve got against me? What on earth have I been doing to you? If you wish to desist in having a point of view, I’d be grateful if you would refund me my subscription.
“Turn the sound off, and it could have been footage of a One Nation meeting in the 1990s: old, white, rural people, confused and unhappy.”
Another acolyte of the new religion lowers himself to insults. Just like the Prime Minister, Mr. Rudd did last week.
Actually calling climate change/global warming or whatever people are calling it now to confuse the issue at hand a religion is like saying that Scientology is a religion. Tell a lie long enough and loud enough and people will believe it. Less sophisticated people, apparently.
Bernard, I’m 36 years old, live in the Eastern Suburbs and just happen to be a Labor party member (I will email you my badge number if you want) and I think that hetrogenic climate change/global warming is bunkum. And to clarify, I think the days and months that Pauline Hanson was able to spew her bile were some of the darkest in this country’s recent history so I think maybe your argument/apostasy is also bunkum.
Jillian and others who consider a nuclear option to be viable for Australia,
The Liberal spokesperson circa 2007 has apparently died or been muzzled.
Come on… who is currently vocally in support of nuclear? Names and dates, please.
I am happy to consider all options, however it is clear to me that the federal law is not currently under challenge.
Nuclear is not an option.
Solar PV has problems, not least of which are cost and sunset.
Solar thermal is possible but is floundering at present.
Hot rocks have claimed a corporate scalp in SA recently and appear to be years away.
Wind power is both unloved by the locals and unable to provide power when needed.
Tidal power is another way to describe bottling up an estuary in order to provide electrical power for the capital city - an ecological and political nightmare.
Wave power is unproven in other than micro situations.
Carbon capture and storage will cost at least 25% of the energy released by the coal which is burned and has not been demonstrated to be viable in any format.
There are many scholars who believe that biofuels (sugar cane, corn, etc) are more trouble than they are worth.
Coal seam methane and natural gas are better than some current energy sources but still have significant carbon footprints.
There is a problem, but where lies the solution? These are important and urgent questions.
Meanwhile, our politicians quibble and score points off each other over a “non-tax” which will reward existing polluters for continuing to pollute whilst achieving nothing at all about carbon (CO2-e) emissions.
I am ashamed and despondent.
What will my grand-children think of my generation in their adulthood? I have none at present, but the prospects are that by 2050 our generation will not receive good press, as species are lost and foreshores and water supplies are stressed beyond the capacity to adapt.
Where are the solutions? The problem is real, yet Nero (Bob Carter and friends) fiddles on.
Jack, I agree that the Coalition should be taking the opportunity to do something constructive. That is what Malcolm intends to do, if possible.
I despise Labor for being more interested in political mileage than addressing the real issues.
“i wonder how many people who comment about Climate Change in Crickey have any understanding of the about 200 years scientific history that has led us to where we are today…”
@Gratton,
And where are we today? Sunk in a miasma of half-guesses, that change as the wind blows. We’re nowhere near as sophisticated or knowledgeable as many folks want to believe.
And I’m not saying the climate change scientists are wrong, but I am saying we have more than 200 years of history to show us that our understanding never - never - stays static.
John,
“The Liberal spokesperson circa 2007 has apparently died or been muzzled.”
Malcolm Turnbull is alive and well - I saw him last week. As Environment Minister, he spoke in favour of nuclear. Labor ran a scare campaign along the lines of ‘is there going to be a nuclear reactor in your suburb?’. It wasn’t a major part of the campaign, but it did happen.
I have been following this since Gore raised it firstly because I don’t trust politicions and secondly because the allegations did not corrospond with what I had read over the years about the Earths history.
Firstly the big question for me that hasn’t been answered is what in fact drives the Climate.The Earths surface is changing all the time and has been doing so since day one. Here we are prepared to throw billions of Australian dollars away for what. We can’t even forcast the weather 3 or 4 months away with any certainty and yet some of you reckon you can see hundreds of years into the future. Thats a “faith” position people not science.
As for the Science ,there are many more Climatologists who think this Co2/ heating paranoia is nonsense than are for it.
And for the argument that now is the time to save the Planet , thats just silly. The Planet couldn’t care less. Give it more Co2 and the plant life will flourish.And spending all those Aussie dollars to reduce our Co2 which is so minimal it probably doesn’t register against the world total is utterly absurd.
Climate change is a constant! Its not getting hotter there is new research coming out which makes that plain. I have been waiting for some one in Gov to get practical and say lets put money into the science of what drives climate change so that we can know what part of the earth is going to change so that we can prepare to help the Worlds population adjust and survive.Not blindly accept the AGW “faith” position that defies logic.The opposition should be forcing this debate but they’re utterly gutless!
We as a species can tolerate heat much better than cold. When, not if, the planet goes into its cold cycle we will want all the cheap power we can get and only Nuclear power stations can provide that.
dj
EDITOR: Oops. Sorry about that.
DJ, the idea of saving the planet generally relates to its capacity to accommodate humans and other animals. It’s a melodramatic expression in that, as you say, the planet itself is not under any serious threat.
I don’t think billions of dollars will be thrown away on this issue. It’s mainly Kevin Rudd who wants to do that and he alone, without the support of the Coalition domestically and other leaders internationally, will not be able to do it.
GEF05: I thought this was what we are all trying to do, learn and quickly about CC. Certainly there are many fairly dogmatic opinion holders, but unless I’ve gone completely insane…A big possibility. In Melbourne we have had the hottest November (36) day since records have been taken, and the longest period of the hottest days (4) with more to follow, since before records were being kept!!! Which should be of interest to the ‘denialists’….there is a strong undercurrent of people expressing concern and trying to learn about all of this.
To say that nothing is static means what? Apart from something we all learned in kindergarten. Everything is a process of learning, we all stand on another’s shoulders. Everything is seminal. But when I got up this morning the sky was a sort of hot, golden, almost metallic blue. So what else is news?
Or as Pauline Hanson would have said “Please explain.”
Sorry Bernie, but just because I am over 50 and live in the country does not mean I am a One National/Liberal Climate Change Denier.
Julian,I understand that. But you get that hysterical approach so often from sources that should know better it just gets up my nose.
As for Kevin ,he has a history of getting his own way and like all pollies puts his own perceived interests before those of his Country so I’m not so sure I can agree. Certainly hope your correct though.
On Co2 I recently read a very simple eplanation of Henry’s Law which suggests that atmospheric Co2 is regulated by the oceans , trouble is I cant find it right now. However there is very technical exolanation at http://www.john-daly.com/co2-conc/ahl-co2.htm which is above me simple soul that I am but the conclusion is easy enough to understand .
And I also came across the following which if the data is correct really puts it in perspective.
‘C02 is a very minor trace gas, presently it makes up just 0.038% of the atmosphere.
Of this 0.038% the total human contribution is less than 4%.
So lets just take 4%
4% of 0.038% = 0.00152% - this is completely insignificant. Natures contribution dwarfs our emission by 96%.
Also C02’s warming effects are logarithmic and at only 20ppm see’s almost 50% of its total warming potential.’
There are a lot of people scientists or not that think this whole Climate change nonsense or as it was once called AGW, is mistaken,plain wrong or a scam!
rgds
dj
John Bennetts: “Denialist, dissenter, ditherer, dodderer, whatever… those who deny that the vastly greater majority of climate scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is both real and immediate don’t need a new name.”
And Venise: “It is eminently fair to call them denialists.”
I’m not talking about what’s fair. The scientists say we are facing an emergency. I say, do whatever you have to do to get the job done. If that means showing more respect than you feel so you can negotiate with the other side, just do it. If it means being open minded about abhorrent energy proposals, just do it. History shows that technologies which threaten big profits get bought up, slowly sabotaged, and left to die. It’s an unfortunate fact about capitalism. That’s what will happen to renewable energy if you don’t give the miners something to replace coal profits.
The alternative is to try to bring on a perfect world. Best of luck. Hasn’t worked yet, and according to the IPCC the clock is ticking. This is one of those times the good guys have to choose between achieving what they want, or having the consolation of someone to blame it on when it all goes arse over turkey.
And keep in mind, this whole country has prospered from coal revenue, so in their eyes it’s a little bit precious to talk about their evil greed which we all have benefitted from.
DJ: “We can’t even forecast the weather 3 or 4 months away with any certainty and yet some of you reckon you can see hundreds of years into the future.”
If I roll a dice right now, you have little chance (1/6) of predicting what I’ll roll. But if I roll it once a day for the next year, after a few weeks you will be able to determine if it’s a good dice or a bit loaded, and you’ll predict within a very tight margin of error the total number of 1s, 2s etc for the whole year. But you’ll still have only 1/6 chance of predicting the throw for any given day.
DJ, there is a difference between climate and weather. James McD’s comment re rolling of dice is a good illustration of the difference between each roll of dice (weather) and the average (climate).
@DJ it’s pretty easy to predict what the weather will be in 4 months - which will be March 2010. There are over 100 years of measurements of weather in March. It we get an average and a standard deviation from that data, we can quite reliably ‘predict’ what the weather will be like.
Re nuclear options, which some clearly support. My point remains… nuclear is simply not viable in the short term due to federal law. Comment that Malcolm Turnbull may have favourably considered the nuclear option at some time in the past is irrelevant, because he has muzzled himself on this subject and it is certainly not part of any current political agenda. Whether or not I or you want nuclear, it simply cannot happen within a generation, due to the legal and political realities.
Besides which, the real lifetime cost of nuclear is not competitive .
Solar thermal, PV and wind are the only low CO2 options realistically available and gas turbines are mid-level CO2 producers which may be of use during a transition to less CO2 dense technologies.
DJ: “As for the Science ,there are many more Climatologists who think this Co2/ heating paranoia is nonsense than are for it.”
I beg to differ. DJ appears to have swallowed a fib.
John, it’s only legislation. If it’s not competitive, that’s different, but purely ideological objections are going to have to stand in line.
One way or another, the mining companies are going to have to continue to make profits from the new energy industry, or it simply won’t happen. Just the way it is. Analysts should be coming up with proposals like building sustainable energy plants at 50 per cent public expense, and letting coal miners merge with utility companies and take 100 per cent of the profits.
Come up with something along those lines and, hey presto! they will become believers.
Jillian….I despise Labor for being more interested in political mileage than addressing the real issues.
Me thinks Jillian you despise Labor period. Do you seriously believe your statement doesnt apply to all Governments? Obviously the 12 years before 2007 have been deleted fom your memory bank. Pork barrelling leading up to the last election ring a bell? Lets not go down that road, its full of pot holes.
@ John Bennetts Re: DJ, Totally correct, it is a rather sizable fib
Here is some evidence to support your view, which I just posted over in The Stump on the “ETS Chain saw Massacre”
””
@all the rest of you squeaky-wheel denialists
What our major parties are looking at when they work up their risk ratio (or should be in the case of the coalition), is the following:
Percentage of scientists surveyed agreeing that global temperatures have risen compared to pre-industrial levels: 90
Percentage of scientists agreeing that humans have played a significant role in this change: 82
Areas of Expertise Impacts Scientists’ Understanding of Climate Change
Percentage of climate scientists agreeing: 97.4
Percentage of meteorologists agreeing: 64
Percentage of economic geologists agreeing: 47
courtesy University Chicago Illinois press release Jan 2009
Notice the skew created by the economic geologists (…read employed by, or reliant upon, energy and resource companies)
””
I’m tired of the argument about how many scientists………. and what would they know. Here’s one for the ordinary man in the street or the farmer sitting on the John Deere with a wheat stalk up his bum. Global sea levels are rising - even The Australian newspaper agrees. Self-described sceptics like Professor Ian Plimer (he’s placed his name on the political party’s web site) acknowledge that sea level increase is caused by melting land-based ice reservoirs and the thermal expansion of water in the oceans. As far as I know there is only one explanation for such melting and thermal expansion and that is rising temperature.
Get into whatever wirlygig you like to join whatever band of crazies you want to be part of but don’t invent ridiculous explanations for non-existent phenomena or just deny them outright. If you think the thermometer doesn’t work or the computer model is suspect or there’s a socialist conspiracy that’s not going to get you out of it either. The temperature is increasing and it is expressed as sea level rise. Get over it.
@Evidently.
What about the reverse skew?
Government funding of climate change believers outspends oil/gas funding of climate change sceptics by a factor of probably 1000:1 if not much more.
We have just discovered what happens if a CSIRO scientist publishes ‘unpopular’ views according to the Kuddmeister:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/csiro-moves-to-put-gag-on-scientists/story-e6frg6nf-1225795565498
Climate believer scientists both unconsciously and perhaps consciously know what side their bread is buttered.
Also there would be absolutely no public funding for a scientist known to be a sceptic.
Apparently carrot and stick.
It’s an ignored truth that all scientists by their very nature should be sceptical. The trouble is that does not suit the liberal progressive establishment well ensconced in our universities.
Melbourne Uni or Sydney Uni are perfect examples. Sydney just awarded John Pilger the “Sydney Peace Prize”. David Karoly wheeled out by the ABC with monotonous regularity with eyes popping to scare the children has just received $900,000 of public funding over 5 years for a single climate change research project.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2009/11/inspiring.html
It’s beyond farcical to accuse your opponent of the very failing that you have used yourself to monster your opposition but not apparently for progressive liberal hypocrites.
Science, truth and the pubic are the losers here.
JILLIAN BLACKALL: You despise Kevin Rudd because he’s besotted with putting politics before trying to act on something. And Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t??? I seem to remember an extraordinary lie dreamt up by Malcolm Turnbull-during a difficult phase of trying to convince his own party re CC. A lie which attempted to smear Kevin Rudd for something he hadn’t done, and calmly throwing a diminutive member of the civil service-Godwin Grech-onto the alter of political expediency.
As for the people taking pot-shots at all forms of energy, nuclear, solar, wind, hot rocks and all the other forms of potential energy, I dare say the ancestors of these people were being carried of by members of the mounted police, for opposing the government who planned to install electricity into the previously gas powered lamp-lights of England.
A wise decision (this is a tautology when applied to any of the political parties today) by the Rudd government may be very expensive today, but at the rate the population is exploding, will be moderately inexpensive when the population reaches thirty-five million people (10 years time?).
Nuclear power would seem a good way to go. But, as someone insists, there is a Federal Law which prohibits it. Then bloody change the freaking law. Some people say it is morally repugnant. Ha! So is starving. It is too expensive. That’s what some people, way back when, said about air travel. And some people automatically can every idea they didn’t think of themselves.
By nature, Australians are denialists.
@Venise has contributed a work of dreams, not of reality. My comments re the ability of certain alternative technologies to replace high carbon sources of energy were written with a heavy heart, because even though these are the best and brightest currently being touted, they are simply too little, too late. I will continue to work with, for example, linear solar thermal arrays as and when the opportunity arises, but the governmental support necessary to complete the gestation of this technology against black and brown coal is little and infrequent.
It may be frustrating to consider that certain laws don’t align with your wishes, but I continue to remind people that changing laws which prevent neclear power deployment in Australia is much more than just wishful thinking or the waving of a magic wand. These laws were put in place in response to strong and deeply felt convictions held by members of our community and are now very difficult minefields for any political party to navigate.
“Change the frikkin’ laws!” is not a full and complete response. It is an expression of emotion, but not a blueprint for success.
The question is: “How, when and by whom?”
@Charlie McColl
I think you misunderstand that I was providing evidence for what politicians are using for their risk management. Fair enough?
First - I just think that everybody forgets that this is ALL about politics.
Secondly - Individual realities you describe need to be tempered by the realities of the parties that will do what they must do and they will then make it become an individual reality for you and me and everybody else.
The major parties are doing the numbers on the risk of getting the science wrong. which is why Rudd, Turnbull and McFarlane are pushing for this in a somewhat half a-sed way from both of them, and the other is public perception (which often has nothing to to do with the individual reality that you describe).
And thirdly - you can pretty much always guarantee that the scientists that deny, like those featured in the 4 corners piece, are geologists, not full-time climate scientists.
Re- Sea Level rise, sounds simple enough - I am going to look into it on your advice.
John,
The problem with a lot of sustainable energy sources is not their technical feasibility, not their costs, the lead times to commercial operation, or intermittency. The problem is the lack of economic moats. If big money cannot corner a good piece of the market in something, then it’s no use to them. If it’s no use to them, it’s competition. When technology and big money clash, the big money always wins unless the technology is useful to some other, even bigger money.
So, if you can find a way that coal miners can profit from your linear solar thermal array designs, then they will have a big future.
@JamesK
“What about the reverse skew?
Government funding of climate change believers outspends oil/gas funding of climate change sceptics by a factor of probably 1000:1 if not much more.”
I would very much doubt this when you take into account the mining co.s powerful lobbyists that insist that the royalties that we are supposed to be getting to pay for the coal and gas they are extracting from our land, goes straight back into hard infrastructure such as road rail that just barely keeps them operable for public use; subsidies to extract bore water, watering trucks to wet down dust. That is about as close as they get to giving something back to aussies anything from the onetime only unsustainable extraction. Meanwhile housing prices are driven up by well-paid miners on block shifts that fly-in and fly-out and care nothing about their local schools, kids, the elderly, hospitals, cricket ovals, cricket coaching, pony clubs and all the other things that maintain and grow communities. Where is the soft infrastructure?
“We have just discovered what happens if a CSIRO scientist publishes ‘unpopular’ views according to the Kuddmeister:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/csiro-moves-to-put-gag-on-scientists/story-e6frg6nf-1225795565498”
yes I know about this, it’s disgraceful - but it did happen at the CSIRO when johnny was holding the stick too (ref required)
“Also there would be absolutely no public funding for a scientist known to be a sceptic.
Apparently carrot and stick. “
I think you would be wrong there, there is plenty of funding for any side, and all manner of sources for minerals and energy eg. ARC, Smart Futures, ACARP etc
“It’s an ignored truth that all scientists by their very nature should be sceptical. The trouble is that does not suit the liberal progressive establishment well ensconced in our universities.”
Yes I agree with the ensconcement, but not just liberal progressive - I have had to work with top-hat tories, but here I think it is more to do with the pressure to publish that makes the schools and colleges within Faculties to specialise in a small and focused area so they can get higher forum interaction and engagement per academic per dollar spent.
“Melbourne Uni or Sydney Uni are perfect examples. Sydney just awarded John Pilger the “Sydney Peace Prize”. David Karoly wheeled out by the ABC with monotonous regularity with eyes popping to scare the children has just received $900,000 of public funding over 5 years for a single climate change research project.”
Don’t know your point here - do you think they should have chosen a one recipient from the right and left for each award?
“http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2009/11/inspiring.html
“It’s beyond farcical to accuse your opponent of the very failing that you have used yourself to monster your opposition but not apparently for progressive liberal hypocrites.
Science, truth and the pubic are the losers here.”
your link wouldn’t open for me, and I not sure who you are saying is supposedly making farcical allegations, and who you are saying is a hypocrite, I lay the blame for inaction on climate change inaction at the feet both major parties, and I have to say I’m bloody disappointed in the stupidity of deniers who just wont join the real fight… which is step up to the government to fulfil their promises of taking real action - whether they believe or don’t believe.
@Evidently again.
I notice that you were unable to answer my previous challenge to your perceptions.
However just with respect to your latest post:
Geology is actually one of the climate sciences. It is the source of the Mann-made infamous “proxies” by which global temperatutes were deduced before accurate measurements. They were the source of the flattening of the Medieval Warm Period and the supposed J-curve of the modern era Al Gore’s inconvenient lie pointed to using a cherry picker in his dishonest film.
Ian Plimer and other real geologists have an insight into global temperature cycles over the long term unlike say atmospheric physicists.
However Richard Lindzen is without doubt the most famous AGW sceptical scientist in the world.
He is an atmospheric scientist. From wikipedia: Lindzen is the “Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 books and scientific papers.[1] He was the lead author of Chapter 7, ‘Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,’ of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. He has been a critic of some global warming theories and the alleged political pressures on climate scientists.”
One of his most recent papers which actually measures data as opposed to manufacturing it in a computer model, if true, annihilates the IPCC models:
http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:irM9Vyu_lgMJ:www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf+Chou+Lindzen+2009&hl=en&gl=au&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjb-8SDGzDtWUyopQedJSlcSDmapKOAcrbe11YRVpEDnEDKKrU9AaAbGTwBnbeJouD-GxKASUPx2mi2JgiPW2UC_2ccqAYoIFeTFUcZq3PwKx84BYEQ4544ZfCnlys-y8Bq5NJw&sig=AFQjCNFVPw-hP-ts4iuIDOWUQqYCJ90jEA
Your ABC prejudice maybe…… but not mine
I just call the National Party ‘The Pauline Hanson In Pants Party’ now.
I’ve just thought of a new title for this nonsensical Keane article:
Climate change: The KRuddmeister’s old Hansenism: How a pipsqueak roared like a Mann
Appears JamesK has a personal axe to grind. His attacks on B Keane are unfortunate and regular.
@Evidently Ahh I ‘ve just read your response to my prior post. The Moderator is playing sillybuggers again. It is utterly tiresome.
Wrt to Pilger: he is a infamous extreme leftist and many stomachs including my own and Oliver Kamm’s would churn at the thought of him receiving any award but most especially for “peace”.
Wrt to funding: You are wrong:
http://sciencespeak.com/ClimateFunding.pdf
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/column_a_climate_of_fast_money/
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/07/massive-climate-funding-exposed/
@RaymondChurch
Never. Literally never an argument supported by facts or evidence from you. Always just opinion.
Nothing wrong with an opinion but an argument is far more interesting.
You may be wasting your time on him. He has a self-image that requires him to be opposed on principle to anything he deems “lefty”. The people to concentrate on are the ones who talk about jobs and exports — you can reason with them, in a way you never will be able to with the ones who still argue the science.
Addit. To join the dots: Pilger was deemed a worthy winner by Syd. Uni academics. What does that say about the politics of Syd Uni academics?
If you could not read the reference see Nov 5 entry from Kamm’s blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/
@James McDonald.
I disagreed with you primarily because you dishonestly suggested that you were libertarian when in fact you are a lefty.
I called you out on it and you didn’t like it. Still stinging?
Nothing wrong with being a lefty except being dishonest about it.
And now you are reduced to ad hominem slurs, I see.
(PLAY NICE PLS JK)
RaymondChurch,
“Me thinks Jillian you despise Labor period…”
Yes, I think you and I are on opposite sides of that game, although I acknowledge that the Howard government’s family tax policies didn’t harm its re-election chances.
Venise,
Ah, the ozcar issue again… Labor are in no position to complain. Look at what they and the independents unreasonably did to Nick Greiner in NSW. They actually forced him out of politics.
I don’t think you can divide the proponents and the skeptics into neat camps, Bernard. The difficulty with this whole issue is that there are a bunch of equally noisy debates bleeding into each other.
Is global warming real, are mankind’s emissions contributing in a large way, and how do we work as a global community to deal with the situation.
At each juncture, different groups branch off based on their ideological bias, accepting only the facts that they want to believe in. The public debate has been so thoroughly ‘polluted’, that in many ways it parallels the US hysteria over health-care reform.
Perhaps that is the deeper issue here - the ever greater corruption of public policy and science by private interests who peddle misinformation. Tracing the money trail is likely to tell you as much about the validity of science nowadays as reading through the research itself.
JamesK: I finally found it, had to google you. Sorry I hadn’t noticed it at the time. “Libertarian right or progressive liberal left James?” in a thread on refugees.
You show more understanding of libertarianism than most, I’ll give you that. Still, it didn’t stop you (a) supporting the conviction of the Benbrikas for dreaming about being terrorists, (b) defending the right of a doctor to impose his moral will on a patient wanting an abortion, ( c ) wanting to save boat people halfway across the world from their own bad judgement in boarding death traps, (d) wanting to the UNHCR to be supreme in enforcing an orderly queue rather than let people take responsibility for their own and their families’ safety.
I note you also support the alcopops tax for being a carefully measured harm minimisation, and the NTER because even a libertarian government would be negligent to stand around discussing philosophy while Rome burns. Fair enough, even right wing governments have to step in sometimes.
Well, according to those who believe in AGW, this is a case of Rome burning. Your attacks on AGW proponents as “leftists” shows, as you once quoted Herbert Spencer, a “contempt prior to investigation.”
But on closer examination, strip away your attempts to antagonise the Crikey crowd, and the substance of your objection to AGW responses is simply that you don’t agree that Rome is burning. Nothing about how much intervention you would support if Rome were, in fact burning. Not fundamental values or methodologies at all.
So why do you keep going on with the red herring about “leftists”?
“…defending the right of a doctor to impose his moral will on a patient wanting an abortion…”
Well, Liz did a good job of answering that series of comments from JamesK.
The title of the related article was “Abortion stand-off continues — and Queenslanders pay” for anyone who wants to read it.
I can’t understand the ‘pro-life’ mentality. If they are so concerned about human life, why don’t they try to help the people in Africa who are dying of starvation and drop these anti-choice campaigns?
@James McDonald
I remember. You like stating in a remarkably contorted way what you assert I say and then attack that straw man.
Wrt to your latest silly assertions:
(a) true but not for the reason you state
(b) false
(c) false bit I’m glad you agree that it is poor judgment to risk children’s lives on these deathtraps. Perhaps you should go further and question the parents who threaten their children’s lives in this manner?
(d) false. Furthermore the UNHCR is not supreme in this matter nor should be. But their definitionand theirs alone decide who is a ‘refugee’ that has legal ramifications for those countries that have signed the treaty.
Might I suggest that you bear responsibility for your comments and be prepared to defend them and I mine?
That’s how it usually works and for good reason.
JamesK, you’ve misread me if you think I agreed ( c ) is bad judgement on their part. I don’t say it’s bad judgment, I don’t say it’s good judgement. I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to second-guess the judgement of the man on the ground from halfway across the world.
Apart from practically jumping up and down to show your credentials as a paternalist — practically Lenin compared to me — you didn’t even begin to answer the main question. Which is:
Why do you object to anti-greenhouse measures? Is it on ideological grounds, or do you just think those you call “lefties” have misjudged the situation? And if you were to become convinced that it were a Rome-burning situation — hypothetically — what would you say about some of the proposed measures?
Is it a ‘Rome-burning situation’? In other words, a crisis.
I’m not convinced that it is - I’m not making a statement one way or the other.
However, if people like Rudd really believed in it being a crisis, they would not be playing political games with it. I heard that Obama is not even going to Copenhagen.
Bernard previously acknowledged that the Rudd ETS will cost a lot more than initially expected, if it goes ahead.
The main objection to anti-greenhouse measures that I’m hearing is that people are concerned about the ETS being another ‘tax’. This outweighs ideology and science.
And if I misread your reasons for the rest, why don’t you try being clear for a change, not just making attacks on everybody that are so obscure, they’re little more than private jokes between you and yourself.
Or maybe private jokes between JamesK and readers who are known to him and lurking in the background…
Jillian, if I catch even 10 per cent of JamesK’s meaning (and his witticisms are sometimes so cryptic that I’m not sure I do), he’s at least drifted in the vague direction of one valid point: the Rome-burning side of the debate is dominated to excess by people who think that coal mining companies are evil.
Like I said earlier, like it all not we have all prospered from coal revenue, both in tax and in vast amounts of trickle-down business activity. It’s a little bit precious to say now that they’re the enemy and should take the fall for the side-effects. And pragmatically, that just isn’t going to happen.
Rudd seems to have partly recognised this in his half-witted way. But his response appears to be, exactly as Bernard has said elsewhere, to reward big polluters for polluting. Unless I’m missing something huge, that’s moronic. Big coal companies face decades of uphill struggle before sustainable replacements can compensate for the penalties, and they won’t have control over those sustainable replacements anyway. Rudd’s answer is simply to slip them the cost of the tab under the table.
Better to tax carbon-positive activities, while offering the heaviest carbon-tax payers first slice of some extremely generous grants or tax rebates (150 per cent rebates, that sort of thing) for carbon-negative activities. Allow them not merely to mitigate their losses but to profit from the whole scheme right from day one — if they do something useful. So for example the coal mining companies will have a head start in developing new power sources, they can still own the future of electricity generation and replace their old economic moats with new ones, if they play their cards right.
Make the deal sweet enough, and the most pollution-intensive companies will suddenly become AGW believers. And they will do a far better job of developing sustainable energy than the government ever could.
@James McDonald
Q: (A very ABC type formulation if I may say so, Jas) “Apart from practically jumping up and down to show your credentials as a paternalist — practically Lenin compared to me — you didn’t even begin to answer the main question. Which is:
Why do you object to anti-greenhouse measures?”
A: Because they will do more harm than good.
@Jillian
You to will have two stop firing brilliant insights off Jas like a pinball in a high scoring game….or will need to get a room at a motel.
if so, use a condom. It saves on a general anaesthetic 2-7 months later.
James, I agree that the right incentives need to be there. At present, lots of people are being scared off by the thought that it’s all going to be about costs to them or their companies.
Why is AGW seen as a left-right issue anyway?
Sorry, got submitted prematurely!
The German and French governments (both on the Right) have no problems with it, neither do the British Conservative Party, and neither does the Republican governor of California, one of the world’s largest and most technologically sophisticated economies.
Malcolm Street: left wing simply because it implies regulation, extreme left wing because it is ‘anti-business’, Australia because we our right wing has no political imagination beyond trashing what it likes to characterise as the left.
@Baal.
Frank Devine contacted me from the ‘Other Side’ to ask me to tell you that you are wrong many times over.
@Malcolm Street
Left and right are relative
The German and French governments govern left wing countries. To characterise them as right wing in their politics is either naive or disingenuous. Although I would agree that the French President and the German Chancellor are presently actually to the right of the US President. But that is because Obama is the most radically left US president ever. He is to the left of Jimmy Carter.
The end of communism saw radicals take over western environmental agencies.
A world regulatory body/government is a leftist/socialist/communist wet dream.
Rudd sees political opportunity that will change politics irrevocably here and across the world. I doubt the science is understood by him but that is largely irrelevant for his purposes.
Malcolm Turnbull actually believes in the greenhouse CO2-driven climate science which made Rudd’s pathetically small-minded speech last week to the Lowy Institute all the more outrageous.
Rudd actually accused Malcolm Turnbull, Barnaby Joyce, Janet Albrectsen and Andrew Bolt by name as ‘deniers’ who threaten our children and grandchildren etc.
It was a disgracefully petty divisive speech for any leader of a western democracy western. Unless your a leftist by the name of Bernard Keane.
@Jas&Jillian. Moderator has determined our conversation over.
A neat illustration of Crikey editorial bias appeared on the website yesterday, which I detail below. I wrote to Crikey’s web editors and journalists seeking an explanation. In the continuing absence of one, or indeed any reply at all, I’m making it open.
Dear Ms Nethercote, Ms Brown and Ms Jamieson,
Okay, so in your capacities as website editors/contributors, you gave prominent billing to an anti-nuclear piece by Greenpeace originating from Adelaide Now (The Advertiser), in today’s Environment section on the Crikey website. Fair enough. But why didn’t you mention that the piece was merely a response to a pro-nuclear article by Prof Barry Brook that previously appeared both in The Advertiser and online? More to the point, why haven’t you given Prof Brook’s piece at least equal prominence?
Between Prof Brook and Greenpeace, you should understand who has the greater credibility on environmental issues – and it isn’t Greenpeace.
Regards,
Dr Mark Duffett
@JamesK well wouldn’t you know it. He didn’t say why? or you took his word for it?
I agree Mark. Both articles should be published.
@Baal
Did anyone tell you that you look just like Jillian?
@Jillian
Do you and Jas have twin computers or do take turns on the same one?
JamesK, the Frank Devine joke just went right over my head. For all I know you could be agreeing with BAAL there. I do.
I agree with you on Rudd and Turnbull. To Rudd, AGW is little more than a pretext for bringing on his vision — a vague, wishy-washy vision that he’s still struggling to make up as he goes along — of a brave new world in which business serves government, not the other way around.
If Rudd had any real interest in AGW, he would not have required Turnbull’s prompting to include rewards for farmers sequestering carbon in their land. Hardly a new or radical idea, and even the tame CSIRO had been saying so for quite a while.
Turnbull has far more interest in fixing the problem. His problem is that his party will not let him do it. He’s a pragmatitist who shows little apparent interest in political theory, but in most ways a generally libertarian attitude. He may be looking enviously at Keating’s record and wondering if he joined the wrong party.
Having said that, Lord Monckton’s warning of a global Trotskyist dictatorship is a bit of melodramatic exaggeration. Monckton’s the kind of lunatic that give the Right a bad name.
@JamesK - Looks like you’ve reached some kind of limit now. I suggest deep breathing exercises are good for physical and mental health. Then check out today’s Crikey and see what you can find there to start you off again. It’s an endless cycle - beware…
@James McDonald
Lord Monckton…a “lunatic”?
Quitean assertion. Please demonstrate to all of us where he warned “of a global Trotskyist dictatorship”.
[Edit]
Here is the method leftists unfortunately nearly always use to respond to any criticism:
1. Polite: Call into question the quality of their opposition’s thinking or even better their sanity. Roll eyes…”deniers”…yawn…”the science is settled” etc. after tiresome etc…….
2. Angry: Alarm!!! Danger!!!!
If the oppositions arguments win the day then “the world will end!!!!”….. “This is the greatest moral issue in the history of the mankind” etc. after tiresome etc……….
3. Sleazy: Call into question their opponent’s motives:
They’re greedy. Malevolent Big Oil/Coal/Any industry that disagrees with us, any rogue scientist no matter how well hitherto well respected who disagrees with us is being funded by Big Oil or some dark Right wing Conglomerate…..
Unlike ‘we holier-than-thou’s’ …….They are ALL only doing it for money, wealth and power etc. after tiresome etc……………
Lastly, as I indicated before, Turnbull believes in the science of AGW. He has examined it and is convinced and unlike Rudd he is honest.
That does not make him right but merely honourable.
Admittedly that is no small virtue especially lately in our political discourse, most especially last Friday.
Eh Bernard?
JamesK,
James McDonald & I seem to be very much on the same wavelength, but I assure you we are not the same person or using the same computer or anything like that.
You can see my picture on facebook if you are a facebook user.
James McDonald,
“He may be looking enviously at Keating’s record and wondering if he joined the wrong party.”
Let’s hope not. We need Malcolm in the Liberal Party.
We need Malcolm in the Liberal Party…..who is we!!
wee willie winky
wee wee all the way home
or we who have no unity or leader
Raymond, when I say we I don’t have you in mind.
We who are serious about getting the Liberal Party ready for government, to rescue the country from the madness of krudd.
Ah Jillian you are far too serious, too much watching and listening to the Bishops, Abbotts, Ruddocks, Abetz types, not a humourous bone in any of their bods.
Time to sign off on this topic, getting dreary…lets delve into todays Crikey.
Thanks JamesK for the list of tricks used only by the left, by which we may know them: insults, alarmism, and sleaze. Next time I hear these I’ll know I’m listening to a lefty.
Monckton challenging Al Gore to a debate on the science of global warming (neither of them scientists, remember): “and if you don’t dare, I want you to remain silent about that subject forever from now on.”
Monckton on 2GB with Alan Jones on 20 Oct, arguing that the draft Copenhagen treaty is a concocted scare in order to rip off the Western countries:
“This will be a communist dictatorship, not a democracy, the new world government.”
“Believing in Global Warming is equivalent to believing in astrology.”
“They kept it secret in the usual way that they do.”
… and so on.
I didn’t really do justice to Monckton’s hysterics. Have a listen.
Also, Monckton on AIDS: “There is only one way to stop AIDS. That is to screen the entire population regularly and to quarantine all carriers of the disease for life. Every member of the population should be blood-tested every month … all those found to be infected with the virus, even if only as carriers, should be isolated compulsorily, immediately, and permanently.”
Monckton addressing the Minnesota Free Market Institute:
“How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it. And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.”
Week two ‘False Promises of the Blogosphere 101.’
We are the fools for trying to ‘debate’ the half-baked crankery proposed by narcissistic skeptics striving for recognition and credibility.
@ James McDonald
Wow a 22 year old article written at the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Sleaze plus JamesMcD.
The title of the article in American Spectator is reported as “AIDS: A British View” but other than that I could not find it to read and the context of your quote is therefore unknown to me. Your alleged title: “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS” may be incorrect or a subtitle. I don’t know.
Mind you what he says in your quote is, as a matter of course, factually correct but as to whether he was seriously advocating it as a policy is another matter.
If implemented it would indeed have stopped AIDS which was lethal within a short period of diagnosis at that time.
The point is that I could not find the article and that was doubtless true for you as well. But you’re not alone in quoting it are you?
I note it’s on a million leftist website blogs and that is where you found it.
Unlike a genius like yourself however, the same drivel is repeated word for word in the overwhelming majority of the google search results (that’s in addition to the actual Monckton quote itself.): “In an article entitled “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS”, written for the January 1987 issue of The American Spectator, he argued that….”
Mind you the majority were happily sliming Monckton to their fellow climate alarmists rather than pretending to debate a contrary position.
So may be they didn’t even bother to pretend n be original?
It was not on AIDS or gay websites funnily enough.
Well not really…. eh James?
Quite unnecessary to address the man’s arguments if you can smear him to the ‘Polite’ tecnique of belittlement: wrong thinking/ insanity/or a “lunatic” and “hysterics” (in your words), eh?
The point I made in my last post is still true and not addressed. You provide no counter arguments to Monckton’s precise criticisms of climate science (not quoted above funnily enough) nor his critique of the politics other than quoting his dramatic disclosure of the political machinations pre Copenhagen as if that were meaningful in itself by way of critique.
You actually should be singing Monckton’s praises.
When did you find out about serious negotiations that gave rise to a provisional treaty document that if signed in the present formulation would commit Australia to $7 billion dollars in reparations annually before we pay a dollar for permits or fines for CO2 overproduction or even bear the economic costs of implementation of an ETS let alone the damage to Australia’s ability to compete internationally?
Answer: Monckton’s Minnesota speech followed up on by Janet Albrechtsen (much beloved by Bernard):
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/beware_the_uns_copenhagen_plot/P25/
Now who didn’t you actually hear a word about this from?
Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong, our MSM, ABC, Bernard Keane et al
Now tell me what part of his speech in St. Paul recently that you quoted is untrue and why?
I recommend you download the speech and listen to it with the accompanying slides and actually enter a debate instead of snidely denigrating the man. You have repeated the techniques I demonstrated earlier that have been all too frequent a part of leftist methodology. Sadly rational argument supported by facts and evidence is all too often deemed unnecessary.
It’s what is not criticised that is so instructive.
JOHN BENNETTS: Did you say my comments was the stuff of dreams? Why, that’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in years!
Re: your comment about alternative technologies. When the people of Oz are living in caves and wearing clapped-out clothing is when the correct option will be taken. Silly me keeps persisting with the asinine belief that our pollies will be a little longer-sighted than yesteryear. I know, I know, such stupidity of mine has to have something to do with being born at the time of a full moon, or Virgo crossed with Aries in the kingdom of Taurus, or whatever.
I didn’t misunderstand the mood in which you wrote your comment, I just despair at man’s stupidity, crassness, greed, and desire to believe in a god, and the need to keep reproducing.
To be fair, Monckton has since clarified his views on AIDS, stating that “the article was written at the very outset of the AIDS epidemic, and with 33 million people around the world now infected, the possibility of [quarantine] is laughable. It couldn’t work.”
But it still indicates a certain mindset which is practically on a par with the communists described in the other Monckton quote.
He is trying to generate a massive scare campaign about Copenhagen, but the things he warns of will not happen.
@ James McDonald
?
This is my third attempt to get this by the wonderfully capricious Crikey moderator of the evening shift….. Jonathan is that you
Wow a 22 year old article written at the onset of the AIDS epidemic has been proven so popular all of a sudden………
The title of the article in American Spectator is reported as “AIDS: A British View” but other than that I could not find it to read and the context of your quote is therefore unknown to me. Your alleged title: “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS” may be incorrect or a subtitle. I don’t know.
Mind you what he says in your quote is, as a matter of course, factually correct but as to whether he was seriously advocating it as a policy is another matter.
If implemented it would indeed have stopped AIDS which was lethal within a short period of diagnosis at that time.
The point is that I could not find the article and that was doubtless true for you as well. But you’re not alone in quoting it are you?
I note it’s on a million leftist website blogs and that is where you found it no doubt.
Unlike a genius like yourself however, the same drivel is repeated word for word in the overwhelming majority in the google search results as (that’s in addition to the actual Monckton quote itself): “In an article entitled “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS”, written for the January 1987 issue of The American Spectator, he argued that….”
Mind you the majority were happily sliming Monckton to their fellow climate alarmists rather than pretending to debate a contrary position.
So may be they didn’t even bother to pretend n be original?
It was not on AIDS or gay websites funnily enough.
Well not really…. eh James?
Quite unnecessary to address the man’s arguments if you can smear him to the ‘Polite’ tecnique of belittlement: wrong thinking/ insanity/or a “lunatic” and “hysterics” (in your words), eh?
The point I made in my last post is still true and not addressed. You provide no counter arguments to Monckton’s precise criticisms of climate science (not quoted above funnily enough) nor his critique of the politics other than quoting his dramatic disclosure of the political machinations pre Copenhagen as if that were meaningful in itself by way of critique.
You actually should be singing Monckton’s praises.
When did you find out about serious negotiations that gave rise to a provisional treaty document that if signed in the present formulation would commit Australia to $7 billion dollars in reparations annually before we pay a dollar for permits or fines for CO2 overproduction or even bear the economic costs of implementation of an ETS let alone the damage to Australia’s ability to compete internationally?
Answer: Monckton’s Minnesota speech followed up on by Janet Albrechtsen (much beloved by Bernard):
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/janetalbrechtsen/index.php/theaustralian/comments/beware_the_uns_copenhagen_plot/P25/
Now who didn’t you actually hear a word about this from?
Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong, our MSM, ABC, Bernard Keane et al
Now tell me what part of his speech in St. Paul recently that you quoted is untrue and why?
I recommend you download the speech and listen to it with the accompanying slides and actually enter a debate instead of snidely denigrating the man. You have repeated the techniques I demonstrated earlier that have been all too frequent a part of leftist methodology. Sadly rational argument supported by facts and evidence is all too often deemed unnecessary.
It’s what is not criticised that is so instructive.
Monckton demonstrates all three methods that JamesK listed. Questioning the opposition’s sanity (“Believing in Global Warming is equivalent to believing in astrology”); alarmism (your government is going to sign away all sovereignty and democracy to be ruled by a communist world government); and questioning the opposition’s motives (he claims the whole global warming theory is a plot chiefly by poor countries to take money from rich countries).
Of all the things I’m worried about, signing away sovereignty to a communist dictatorship is not one of them. Simply because I’ve never heard of a government willingly giving away its power without either a gun to its head or a hope of gaining more power by doing so.
@JamesMcDonald ‘took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year’
lol at Monckton’s friends in Greenpeace. I’m sure he had just as many friends in Greenpeace as has friends with AIDS.
Kirk, I think he is using ‘friends’ in a very loose sense - maybe other English aristocrats he has met once or twice.
@JamesK:
“It saves on a general anaesthetic 2-7 months later.”
So you’re pro-choice now?
JamesK, there are a lot of things wrong with the world’s proposed response to global warming. Chiefly, as I have said many times, it reflects too much the ideology of the scientists from whence the warning originated. There should be more separation between those who advise there is a problem and those who implement the solution. The loudest voices in this ideology are indeed fascist, they consider big business to be evil and they anticipate with a certain glee the big mining companies being bled to death.
Monckton may have his heart in the right place; he may even have a clearer overall perspective on the situation than those who will be running the Copenhagen circus; he may be perfectly sane but using the language of the lunatic fringe in a calculated move to reach a wider audience, given there’s not much time left to make any difference. Yes, based on your defence of him, I’ll concede that much.
But his methods are a disgrace, and I stand by the other half of my statement that he gives the Right a bad name. Just in that one Alan Jones interview that I provided a link to, he uses all three of the below-the-belt techniques that you rightly denounced earlier.
Meanwhile I have heard very few voices from the Right saying anything similar to what I suggested above. If the scientific consensus is that we must reduce the carbon in the air — and it is, notwithstanding some respectable dissenting voices such as you’ve drawn attention to — then the Right needs to take ownership of the solution. Monckton would achieve a lot more good by saying what Sir Humphrey Appleby said: If you must do this silly thing, don’t do it in this silly way.
Turnbull, as you’ve said, actually believes in the problem and is focussed on solutions that can work. I’ve proposed the barest sketch (see above) of a policy to make the taxpayer foot the bill — which voters said they wanted to do in 2007 — and give mining companies a way to come out ahead. We should have heard a lot more of that sort of plan by now. I have no idea how to design such a scheme on my own.
Too much of the Right is still fighting a fact-finding battle which is already over. As a result it is missing out having a voice in the response, so is ceding that to the Left too.
In my post currently awaiting moderation, I used the wrong word “notwithstanding”; I meant “despite”.
JamesK that was a piece of work. You’ve gone in hard as usual but you’ve noted the need to debate the arguments without being insulting. Advice that you could follow a bit more but that aside a solid comment.
Bernard I’ve a slightly different thesis about people who don’t believe humans are heating the world. There’s a problem and it worries people. They think they should do something but don’t know what and feel powerless. By rejecting the science (basic Hanson) and clutching on tho any alternate theory they can say there is no problem and I can relax. In fact I can be relaxed and comfortable. Not so much someone is in control but that there is no need to worry.
Dr. Patrick Moore, ecologist and co-founder of “Greenpeace” is a climate change sceptic along with Monckton.
He has said that a “reason that environmental extremism emerged was because World Communism failed, the wall came down, and a lot of peaceniks and political activists moved into the environmental movement, bringing their neo-Marxism with them and learned to use “Green” language in a very clever way to cloak agendas that actually have more to do with anti-capitalism … than anything to do with ecology and science.”
Sounds very similar to Monckton’s charge to me.
Why wouldn’t they be friends Kirk?
@Jillian.
LoL….I never believed that got thru’ the moderator!
Most of mine don’t.
@SBH
Jim H-a-n-s-e-n not the puppeteer but the pied piper?
Ignorance is bliss…..
And here’s the draft Copenhagen treaty Monckton is talking about.
If it means governments handing over all sovereignty to an overarching power, like Jerusalem opening its gates to Alexander, as I said I’ve yet to hear of a government doing so without a gun to its head or a hope of gaining more power than it loses. I don’t like Rudd very much but I can’t see him going to so much effort to win power just to give it away.
The theory I have heard is that Rudd wants to be the leader of the world government and so he could give power away from Australia to the UN and then take over the UN - but I agree that these theories are getting really extreme. Even the madness of Rudd does know some boundaries.
@james mcdonald - I think you failed the ‘Hitler test’ by invoking fascism to abuse the ‘loudest voices in this ideology’. The aggressive right as I understand it aligned themselves with business in the 1920s and 30s, certainly in Italy, to create the corporatist state. They may not have liked each other but they both hated socialists more. It’s confusing - deep greens have been called Nazis and fascists and presumably you would cast them in the opposite camp from the people who believe there’s a world government conspiracy? And that is in itself odd because that’s what the fascists wanted.
I don’t think you should use the term except in its historical/political sense otherwise it debases the language and your argument. It’s sloppy and inaccurate and merely becomes a term to abuse people whose opinions and actions you find unpalatable - to marginalise a group and set them beyond argument, as if their existence was unworthy of recognition except as pariahs.
@ JamesK - it looks like your comment didn’t make it through moderation, I only received it by e-mail, so now my response looks a bit weird, but that’s ok. These things happen. I probably should wait until comments appear on the page before I respond.
@James McDonald
I’m confused Jas (well not really)…….are you suggesting that it doesn’t say what Albrechtsen and Monckton say it says?
Do you think that it is newsworthy?
Are you at all surprised at the failure of our 4th Estate?
Does it concern you after many rounds of negotiation involving Ministers from many western democracies and surely with the knowledge of their respective executive heads of governments that it could have got as far as it has with no free peoples anywhere the wiser?
Monckton made it perfectly clear in the speech you blithely decry that almost certainly this even if signed in its present format (itself unlikely according to Monckton) would not be binding on the USA because that would require a supermajority 2/3 in the Senate 9never going to happen). Whilst the Dems have a filibuster-proof majority in both Houses it could pass into Law but that could later be undone.
But he asked the salient question, as did Albrechtsen which you failed (intentionally or ? thru’ ignorance) to acknowledge almost certainly because you neither read the transcript of his speech nor watched the video despite decrying his speech meaninglessly.
The real question he posed is: how could this have got so far with none of the public in the western world being made aware of of it?
The document even calls this regulatory body with powers over sovereign nations a ‘government’.
I ask you again James McDonald:
Shouldn’t you be grateful to Monckton for the scoop if nothing else? Wherewith our 4th Estate?
Tell us of the axe you grind for Monckton?
Actually: don’t. Those questions are rhetorical………
A bit like the essence of James McDonald’s suggestion that ‘we move along nothing to see here’.
That is the reason Rush Limbaugh talk show host in the US calls the MSM the “drive by media”.
If the MSM is partisan then we have a problem.
We have a problem.
@Jillian.
I never get emails. The posts are all marked ‘under moderation’…presumably because I’m a known troublemaker and then 60% just disappear.
Sometimes later some reappear magically.
I think various moderators are in a civil war at Crikey.
I’m pretty sure Jonathan Green is the one on Dark Side…….
Addit. Christopher Monckton in April of this year on the Watts-Up-with-that blog(Watts is one of the two chaps who discovered the lie of the J-curve made infamous by Gore in his disgustingly dishonest film):
“Finally, I have never said what one of your less polite correspondents has said I said about HIV. However, in 1987, at the request of the earliest researchers into the disease, I wrote articles in journals on both sides of the Atlantic recommending that AIDS should be treated as a notifiable disease, just like any other fatal, incurable infection. Had that standard public-health measure been taken – immediate, compulsory, permanent, but humane isolation of the then rather few carriers – many of the 25 million (UNAIDS figures) who have died and the 40 million who are currently infected and heading for death would have been spared. Sometimes, unfashionable points of view are right, and sometimes ignoring them can be a matter of life and death.”
That blog was after the Dem controlled congress blocked Monckton from addressing their congressional committee on cap on trade in response to Gore’s address.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/23/monckton-not-allowed-to-debate-with-gore-today/
Nothing to see or hear here…move along or even better “Move-On.org” eh?
BAAL, there was nothing Right about Italy in the 1920s. Fascism takes many flavours, of which Nazism and Bolshevism were just two. They are all of the Left, never mind the clever Bolshevik invention of claiming to be the enemy of fascism.
Socialist progressivism is another flavour of fascism, although it’s much more benign and usually doesn’t call for killing anybody or removing an ethnic group. But then the Soviet Constition was a very benign document too, declaring freedom of religion and all sorts of things that Soviet citizens ended up being purged for. The fly in the ointment was Article 6 which changed everything: “The leading and guiding force of the Soviet society and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations, is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union … All party organizations shall function within the framework of the Constitution of the USSR.”
I’m going to quote Jonah Goldberg’s definition of fascism from his recent book “Liberal Fascism” (Penguin, 2007, p23):
Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the “problem” and therefore defined as the enemy.
What surprises me is the moderator(s) allow these 2 way conversations to continue, the 2 James , when they go over ground already dug up to deepest depths. If the two are so interested in chatting to each other, swap your phone numbers, email addees, faxes, use pidgeons…anything but this. Free country sure, not free to be tediously overdone.
The totalitarian control by the state would seem more right wing than left wing James although in the world we live in these labels like ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ have lss and less utility.
JAMES McDONALD: And when mixed with religion becomes genocide. North Korea encapsulates all that is wrong with totalitarianism. Not only is Kim Il-sung a god, but his son, Kim Jong-il, inherited his father’s throne. Recently Kim Jong Il announced that one of his sons will inherit the throne.
Kim Jong Il is the son of god: doesn’t this resonate with those who believe in the Christian fairy tale of one somewhat muddled gentleman, a mendicant priest called Jesus?
@JamesK if “Monckton made it clear …. could later be undone”, that just proves he knows better than other statements he made which are at odds with this, and he’s engaging in some very hysterical exaggeration in order to reach a wider audience. The kind of audience that likes to bandy the word ‘truth’ around the same way the Taliban likes to bandy the Koran around.
Even Janet Albrechtson, in the article you linked to, concedes:
“Monckton’s warning to Americans that ‘in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your President will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever’ is colourful. But no more colourful than the language used by those who preach about the perils of climate change and the virtues of a hard-hitting Copenhagen treaty.”
So, the use of ‘colourful’ style by the Left justifies using similarly ‘colourful’ style by the Right? You can argue that morally it does, but in doing so the Right gives up its rational and sober high ground. And I think that’s a great lost opportunity to introduce some sobriety into a greenhouse response which is going to happen, one way or another.
I took the AIDS quote from wikipedia. I can’t find the AIDS article without paying for it, and rather than pay for it, I’ll concede on that point. With the proviso that your quote and my quote from Monckton on whether USA would ever be able to exit from the treaty clearly contradict each other, so I do not quite trust him to accurately review his past statements. See, that’s what happens when a person uses a bit of creative exaggeration for a noble cause, he loses credibility.
As for a scoop, yes you and Monckton and Albrechtson are correct that it’s a poor performance by the press to have missed the draft treaty. However, we also have laws in Australia keeping cabinet discussion documents secret, for exactly the reason that ill-informed public hysteria can overwhelm an open policy debate before it’s begun, and make contributors afraid to express their views for fear of political incorrectness or hysteria.
Albrechtson also pointed out that the document “isn’t even called the draft treaty. It’s called a ‘note by the secretariat’.” That’s because it is a note by the secretariat (whatever that is), not a treaty, not a law, and probably not a document that even Rudd or Wong had seen before Monckton started ranting about it. In the document itself, it calls itself a “negotiating text”. It’s a contribution to the conference, nothing more. Even the most leftist governments will laugh it out of there in the first five minutes, because if Monckton’s reading is correct it means giving up their power. If there’s one thing I can trust even the most leftist government to do, it’s to hold onto power any which way it can.
Not quite “nothing to see here”, but a lot less to see here than he claims.
Monckton would do better to take a sober, rational position, ridicule the paper, then devote his obviously considerable intellect to suggesting a more intelligent approach.
BAAL is correct to an alarming degree when he says “our right wing has no political imagination beyond trashing what it likes to characterise as the left.”
SBH, as far as the Right is concerned, all dictatorship is of the Left. That’s based on the historical observation that even the most humanitarian caring-sharing dictatorship sooner or later becomes corrupted into oppression. World War 2 in Europe was just an almighty turf war between different Left-extremist flavours, each claiming to be more righteous than the other, and that the others’ roads to Utopia were heading in the wrong direction. As far as the Right is concerned, all roads seeking Utopia lead to the same place by a different route.
The only interference in people’s lives that the Right recognises as legitimate is restraining people from misusing their liberties to invade the liberties of others. The dividing line can be devilishly hard to find but it is there. Rightists can easily miss that line, so it’s legitimate for JamesK to question if I fall into the common trap of being a progressive liberal under cover of libertarianism. And it’s legitimate for me to question if he falls into the trap of moralistic reactionism under cover of conservatism. Even if either or both of us are wrong about that, it’s always a valuable warning.
JAMESK: I never thought I would agree with you about anything. But, on the subject of ‘being moderated’ I am in total agreement with you.
I don’t even know what I’ve done to be called a trouble maker. Weallllll? No, not really. Does ones comment ever get read? Or is there a machine which recognises a name, then all the trouble makers get lumped together while someone up there flips a coin to see who gets in?
Passionate people suffer more than the non-passionate variety. There should be some sort of ‘ism’ to cover that.
[This comment has been approved for publication by the Crikey Moderation Unit]
@JamesK, you have to tick a box after your first post on each thread in order to get the notification e-mails. I have been bombarded by such e-mails for several days.
I get the impression that there is automated moderation. For example, certain users have been set up to be automatically moderated, like maybe Venise. For other users, their comments go into moderation if they put up a link or use certain keywords or refer to the names of users who are automatically moderated like Venise. Then there is a delay while the person moderating reviews the items that have gone into automated moderation and decides to let them through or not. I work with systems, so without even intending to do it, I find myself speculating about how these things work. A civil war among moderators would add a further level of complexity to the interaction between automated and human moderation.
@James McDonald, where would you draw the line between a progressive liberal and a libertarian?
Kudos James McDonald!
Jonah Goldberg marvelous book ‘Liberal Fascism’ quoted and apposite too.
I know I keep harping on about this Rudd speech. I was frankly quite a bit saddened to see Bernard Keane make approving noises.
Jo Nova absolutely swings an absolute haymaker at this speech:
http://joannenova.com.au/2009/11/global-bully-rudd-fights-for-foreign-committee-against-citizens/
You don’t need to be a sceptic in order to find Rudd’s hateful speech disgusting.
It would have done Bernard Keane’s respectability and career no end of good to have written a scathing critique here instead of disagreeing with Rudd on the minor matter of caving in to rentseeker author luvvies.
He writes well and he should know right from wrong. But his partisan nature prevents him from doing the right thing.
Nothing to say Bernard?
James Macdonald seems to be arriving at the point where the Left is the Right and vice versa. As for Goldberg’s
‘definition’ it seems rather post facto and catch-all to be useful - ‘religion of the state’? is not a definition, it’s rhetoric. Back to the drawing board (or the encyclopaedia of all things)
‘All dictatorship is of the left’ James? So Stalin, Hitler, Franco were Leftists? Surely your being mordant. I’m disappointed and that world war 2 analysis is, forgive me, simpistic and wrong. My left is predicated upon joint decision making and collective action not rule from on high, the antithesis of dictatorship. And I’ve fought the stalinism in the ALP as vigorously as anyone (not to much effect I’d say)
It’s probably better to see the broad division as comprising groups of opportunists who put aside their differences temporarily to beat up the other side, like those agraian socialists the NFF who don’t want government regulation unless it helps the get a bigger slice of the common pie. Of course there’s leftist corollaries.
My point is that the L and R tags are cast around with little thought or utility.
@Jillian: the line is between taking away people’s choices just out of righteousness, and restraining people or government from taking away someone else’s choices. There are two ways to stop chewing gum getting stuck to people’s shoes: ban littering, or ban gum. Banning gum is the more effective way so that’s fascist Lee Kwan Yu’s choice of method.
@SBH: Yes. All three of them were leftists. It was a clever Stalin trick to start repeating again and again that Nazism was of the right until people started redefining the right to accomodate this “truth”. Since then the terms have become confused and a lot of people give up on them altogether.
@BAAL: In the 1920s, what I wrote would not have sounded strange. Mussolini’s father was a member of the First International along with Marx and Engels. The confusion you speak of was an invention of the Bolsheviks in the late 1930s.
SBH: “My left is predicated upon joint decision making and collective action not rule from on high, the antithesis of dictatorship.” Exactly what the Soviet constitution said. The libertarian right knew all along that it wouldn’t stay that way, although the sheer speed and ferocity of its inevitable reversion from benevolence to oppression was surprising. The rest of my reply is awaiting moderation.
yeah, well as I said, I aint no stalinist, have good weekend kids
@James McDonald - unless I missed something we haven’t gone back to the 1920s, have we
@JamesK, the “draft treaty” is somebody’s negotiating paper, that’s all. It’s the wishful thinking of some space cadets at the UN. Some bits may find their way into a final agreement, or not. If presented in that form, it will be laughed out of there on the first day. Like cabinet papers, there is no need for it to be made public, for exactly the reason that we’re seeing now: people overreact.
If the Coalition had not got carried away with their own ideological posturing and excess use of power in recent years, it would be them going to Copenhagen now, not Labor.
@ James McDonald: “the line is between taking away people’s choices just out of righteousness…” Well said.
@BAAL, that’s for sure. In the 1920s there were still people who remembered the Enlightenment before World War 1. We are now in what A.D. Hope called “the Arabian desert of the human mind.” But not in the nice way he meant it.
Well, I must say, I feel honoured to be educated with such solicitude and good humour. The only quote I can offer you comes from Brute Snotto - Tug Scuffard’s alphabetical compendium of wisdo (Red Rover Press, London 1972)’ A is for ambition but if you weren’t born with it, anxiety will have to do’. Hive a good weekend
Jillian, sorry I didn’t give a good example. Preventing school teachers from hanging crucifixes on the classroom wall, where parents have a choice of what school to send their children to, is an example of progressive liberalism, not libertarianism. Some might argue otherwise, that parents’ choice of school is financially limited and the crucifix is invasive of a non-Christian’s religious liberty. But really, it’s regulating religion, and just another form of religious bigotry.
Yes, I’m thinking of someone like Clover Moore. Are you a Sydney person James? If you are, you will know what I mean.
Wot RayChurch sed - is there any software I can buy that would skip anything (and I mean ANYTHING) written by the various James, assuming that they are separate entities, which i doubt.
@ James McDonald.
The version we’ve got is from late Septemer.
70 odd days before Copenhagen.
That is after many ministerial level grand conferences with the teams of firemen and nerds behind the scenes hammering out figures and what any sentence would mean for their relevant ministers political safety and the country they represent.
It is beyond belief that Rudd didn’t read it. He just lied yet again when he said that he hadn’t.
There were real figures there like 0.7% of GNP annually for developed countries by way of reparations.
No doubt(?) it would not have been signed in its present form. But it is highly significant.
It will not be signed at all reportedly but that might merely be one of their tricks and then the rabbit is miraculously pulled from the that when no one was expecting it …drum roll….tah dah!
c/f Pelosicare passing the Congress largely on the basis, if you believe some of the congressmen with their necks on the line, that they voted for it only because they know it can’t pass in its present form in the Senate and the wanted to move the process along etc. etc. Besides it protects the Unborn. Imagine Dems concerned about the unborn!
Nobody thought the public option was going to get thru’ Congress. They assumed that battle had been won. They were not possibly going to run against the will of the people were they?
But they are cocky and hope that next year the plebs will have forgotten. Feed them some pork at the right time and well and appeal to the immorality of leaving things as they were with 450 million uninsured in the richest nation on earth etc etc …… besides it’s the Senate’s fault etc …. we were just trying to move a stagnating process forward etc after nauseating puerile weasel word etc
That is textbook filthy, creeping and eroding Alinskyite poltic methodology. It is divisive, casting your enemies into the wrong thinking mode as I demonstrated in my earlier posts.
Rudd reads from the same playbook as Obama. It is disgusting stuff.
Eternal vigilance is the price of our liberty but don’t look to the 4th Estate as they’re more than simply merely part of the problem.
And remember Rudd and Obama are their men. So was Latham.
@SBH: “And I’ve fought the stalinism in the ALP as vigorously as anyone (not to much effect I’d say)”
I hope you take this as a compliment: I see you as a Menshevik. A very fine group of people whose moderate, democratic, peaceful form of revolution tried hard to prevent Lenin’s totalitarianism and violence. Not to much effect I’d say.
“It’s probably better to see the broad division as comprising groups of opportunists who put aside their differences temporarily to beat up the other side, like those agraian socialists the NFF who don’t want government regulation unless it helps the get a bigger slice of the common pie.”
That’s just democracy and freedom of association, no different really from a trade union. The adversarial legal system also expects a lawyer to serve only the interests of one party, in the confidence that the other side will also be represented. Any honest libertarian would defend the right of trade unions, and indeed the labor party, to exist, but would come down hard on any attempt to coerce workers into joining. And if unions can’t monopolise the whole labour force, it’s much harder for them to hold an entire society to ransom without the support of the people.
“My point is that the L and R tags are cast around with little thought or utility.”
The tags are bandied about all the time, in the most useless, divisive, ignorant manner. That’s why — sorry, Raymond Church — we had to talk about this sooner or later.
AR: well the article was about Hansonism and climate denialism. Where did you expect it to lead, just a bit of general bitchin’ about denialists?
If you find anything AR I will gladly go halves with you….the only good thing about Bolts blog, his mods know when to zip a thread when bloggers diahorea starts. This blog has been smothered in it by the James gang
I think Crikey is more of a community than a blog or electronic bulletin board.
RayC - I’d donate it gratis. The blogorrhoea could be dealt with by the moderators (anyone noticed how snippy they’ve become lately, esp. to protect Rusty on PP?) by a simple word count - anyone who can’t make their point in less than 500 words, IN TOTO, is trolling.
People are not necessarily just here to make a specific point, but also to meet like minded people and to exchange ideas.
EDITOR: “This comment has been approved for publication by the Crikey Moderation Unit” Very droll.
Ha! 
Oh, get over it.
(Venise and Jillian, that last “get over it” was aimed at the whingers by the way, not at you.)
JamesK, you’ve asked why the media did not pick up on the draft treaty/discussion paper/fanciful daydream/whatever it is. The reason why is explained very well by Turnbull in this interview with Alan Jones:
===================================================
ALAN JONES: … I’m just wondering why in all of this debate you people haven’t put the heat on Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong to tell the electorate the truth about this scheme and to give us the economic model in terms of what the consequences of this legislation will be on the national economy.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: But Alan…
ALAN JONES: Where can every person read this?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: But Alan that is exactly what we do. Can I just say to you part of the problem with the debate is that far too much time is spent on the essentially theological question of whether we should do anything at all about climate change and far too little time is spent on the detail. And what the people that are both literally and metaphorically at the coal face of this issue are saying to us is we want the Liberal Party to be practical, constructive and effective, and that is what I am intending to be. That is the man I am. Those are the values I stand for.
ALAN JONES: Supposing climate change, though, doesn’t exist, supposing this is just the new religion like Y2K, what would you say to that?
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well if it turns out in 20 years time that all of the science, which every nation in the world accepts, is working on the assumption is correct, is wrong then we will…
ALAN JONES: Well they were wrong on Y2K.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well Alan…
ALAN JONES: They were wrong on the report of Rome, the Club of Rome Report was wrong in 1960 which said that we’re going to run out of food.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: But you see, Alan, you see what you are doing here, with great respect m’lord, is you are taking the heat off Kevin Rudd because you are getting into the theological issue of whether climate change exists or not. The real question is why don’t we talk about the thousands of people whose jobs are at risk in the coal industry. Do you want me to explain why they are at risk?
===================================================
That’s the problem on the right wing. It’s allowed itself to become characterized by the head-in-the-sand position. That position, a combination of “skeptics” and “denialists” which the man in the street finds hard to tell apart, has a great advantage over the Turnbulls of this world who are looking for a win-win strategy.
Turnbull’s problem is that his position is a very poor source of sound-bites. This makes it very easy for the Moncktons of this world to drown him out on the Right side, and for the Left to conclude that there is nothing but rent-seekers and Hansonites on the Right.
It is very hard to explain to an electorate accustomed to choosing between different flavours of command-and-control (I’ll leave out the f-word which seems to be inflammatory and is probably filtered by now) that sometimes there is such a thing as a win-win option. They have become persuaded over many years that nothing worthwhile can be achieved without sacrificing somebody. And the intellectual poverty on the Right has allowed this to happen.
“far too much time is spent on the essentially theological question of whether we should do anything at all about climate change and far too little time is spent on the detail.”
This seems like a reasonable statement from Malcolm.
Part of the problem is that people have been led to believe that the ETS, if it goes ahead, will be like another GST. Someone even asked me ‘how much are grocery prices going to go up? I want to know the percentage.’ I said we don’t know because whatever costs there are will become costs to businesses and it’s a matter of whether they absorb the costs or pass them on to customers…. Apparently on the climate sceptics website has been speculation about specific price rises…
With respect Turnbull does nothing of the sort.
I cannot fathom why you think its just dandy for a provisional document of this nature to be intentionally hidden away from public awareness.
And please don’t insult me by suggesting that it wasn’t.
Furthermore you should be doubly deeply concerned that it was Monckton and not the 4th Estate that had the ‘scoop’.
And, I notice, you make no attempt to parse the documents significance or meaning. Rather you repeat the down your nose official line admonishmen.
Now any libertarian would be deeply concerned.
But as we already know, you’re not one of that sort.
[Edit - your opinions on other commenters are not relevant to the discussion]
I listened to that interview which was an appalling one by Jones.
A disgrace even.
Turnbull was both patient and reasonable and came off very well.
Jones did absolutely nothing to demonstrate the real concern about this document that I described in a previous post.
The one that Albrechtsen nailed.
@Jillian
Also there will be a lag in the degree of ETS (CPRS for the dishonest) price rises because the petroleum price rise will not start to begin to ramp up for 3 years whilst the price rise in electricity will begin 2012. And the scheme needs to passin 2009. Why?
Yes, what is driving the urgency?
There is need for urgency, but if you look to politicians to demonstrate that this need is high on their priorities, think again.
There is much work yet to be done by way of public education and pressure if the CPRS or whatever is going to meet any real objectives, the prime one being retention of a habitable, productive planet.
Effort spent trying to bash opponents is effort wasted. Educate, persuade and rally. Three positives.
The urgency? Ah, that has to do with Rudd’s personal ambitions. Never tarry to do the job properly when you can be first past the post.
@John Bennetts.
Even if you believe the IPCC hook, line and sinker:
The CPRS will not make one jot of difference in ameliorating or preventing the ensuing ‘catastrophe’.
That’s true even if instead of reducing our emissions by 5%or 25% or even 40% by 2020, we actually reduce them 100% right now this instant.
Explain how: “Educate, persuade and rally” will make the slightest difference to that fact please?
I’m know, because people like you tell me all the time, that I’m merely a recalcitrant denialist luddite but for the life of me, (evidently literally) I can’t see how activities such as you describe will save us.
Sorry. Sorry to question.
I mean, I know in this postmodern kruddite dystopia that’s w-r-o-n-g. Right?
JamesK, if that’s the best Copenhagen has to offer, then it’s a cause for concern for being so stupid. And I’m glad this time we didn’t give both Houses over to one party.
The mind boggles what Labor would be doing if they had control of both Houses.
As for “scoops”, you need to learn more how the media works. Reporters almost never originate scoops. The most famous media “scoop” of all time, in 1974, was anything but. This has been a failure of most of the Right up until now, to take any angle other than “this isn’t happening”.
JAMESK: I am not about to get sentimental, but it is terrific to read/see your acerbic wit returning to full force. I haven’t laughed so much in ages-unless it is to read First Dog.
I will never agree with what you say-not totally. But I love to laugh!
Cheers
Venise
PS: ie “Jonathan Green will be pleased and a potentially meaningful career will go the way of Mungo McCallum’s, no doubt”
@Jillian
I suspect that it’s not Labor that’s mad except maybe maybe the extreme left wing.
It’s Rudd. His personal poll popularity is what keeps him there and his colleagues fear of returning to opposition.
I doubt there is much personal loyalty from or even mutual conviction with his colleagues.
Committing to legislation the roles played and costs to be paid by various Australian interests before we know neither agreed targets for other similar and competing economies nor the means they’ll use to get there is simply stupid.
No other accurate word really.
This is still the party of hard heads. It is still the party of Hawke and Keating. Grow the pie and make sure workers and not just unionists get their fair share of that growth.
Good piece by the glorious Annabel Crabbe:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/a-shapeshifter-in-the-lodge-20091113-iem9.html
@Jillian
I suspect that it’s not Labor that’s mad except maybe maybe the extreme left wing.
It’s Rudd. His personal poll popularity is what keeps him there and his colleagues fear of returning to opposition.
I doubt there is much personal loyalty from or even mutual conviction with his colleagues.
Committing to legislation the roles played and costs to be paid by various Australian interests before we know neither agreed targets for other similar and competing economies nor the means they’ll use to get there is simply stupid.
No other accurate word really.
This is still the party of hard heads. It is still the party of Hawke and Keating. Grow the pie and make sure workers and not just unionists get their fair share of that growth.
Good piece by the glorious Annabel Crabbe:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/a-shapeshifter-in-the-lodge-20091113-iem9.html
And thank you Venise. Very kind of you.
2 Jameses:
I said nothing about CPRS being an answer, far from it. However the issue which CPRS pretends to address, ie global climate change, is certainly urgent. Not a joke, not a political point scoring excercise.
You both seem to be poorly educated, so that is the first task… build a real understanding of the issue in the population at large and sideline those who, for whatever reason, don’t get it.
Persuasion is needed to maximise the demand for change for the better in our world’s energy options.
Rally, not necessarily in the physical sense, but in a more general team-building sense - get vocal, change the poll results so that politicians realise that failure to act effectively will lead directly to their being voted out of office.
Not on Gaia’s side? You will either very soon be shunned by the majority, or we will all find life tougher and much more brutish as options and resources such as arable land, clean water and safe society become scarse.
Now, I know that some of the poorly educated and closed minded of the of the current generation will probably never agree totally about the real and increasing of effects of AGW, but that’s really an issue for them alone. The main problem for the future of the world is shaping up to be climate change brought about by Westerners, and as this reality becomes even more abundantly clear, the nay-sayers will find themselves isolated and despised.
That is what humans tend to do with difficult, irrational minorities.
I dearly wish that it was otherwise, but the writing is well and truly on the wall for all to see, and time is running out.
BK’s article, especially his advice to the Libs, is spot on.
Why, James Macdonald, you’ll turn a girl’s head with that kind of talk. Oh it’s years since I’ve been called a Menshivik.
That said, AR and Raymond have a point. The comments section is turning into facebook for boilers.
John: “sideline those who, for whatever reason, don’t get it”
And you call us uneducated.
You didn’t even pick up the main point I was making, again and again, which is:
You can either try to make this into a revolution, or you can work with business on this.
If you choose the former, you will have to swallow your pride and allow big business to continue making profits out of a new, clean, energy regime. Among other things, this requires artificial economic moats for the ones that currently have resource-based economic moats that they stand to lose. In this scenario, there will be a significant taxpayer cost, but the public have effectively voted a mandate for it, and in doing so have volunteered to fund it. That includes me.
If you choose the former, that revolution will lose. Everybody loses. You will sacrifice the environment in doing so, but at least all the true believers will be able to have a group hug and console each other that it wasn’t their fault. Is that what you want?
Correction: the first “If you choose the former” should be “If you choose the latter”.
@John Bennets
(EDIT: again, keep it on issue pls).
You have not even pretended to address the argument addressed to you above.
Instead you address an argument I did not make.
You created a straw man and attacked that.
One of the Aristotelean logical fallacies and you use more than one of those and more than just occasionally I notice
You twit.
Another good article on Rudd’s hate speech.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/11/australia-state-of-intolerance
(EDIT: No need for that)
And SBH: don’t deny this was going to turn into just another interminable round of denialist-bashing before JamesK and I weighed in with some angles outside of the usual. Something different, shock horror!
Just for you, I’ll stay right out of the next one so youse can all whine pointlessly about the stupid denialists to your hearts’ content.
As for the Mensheviks, what can I say?
I sing what was lost and dread what was won,
I walk in a battle fought over again,
My king a lost king, and lost soldiers my men;
Feet to the Rising and Setting may run,
They always beat on the same small stone.
- Yeats
Still Marxist, but what a different world it would have been. JamesK, I know what you’re going to say, don’t bother.
Oh don’t be like that, at least you and the other james talked about the politics of global warming unlike some other posters who just desended into some kind of freakin’ lovin. And so far we are still well under 200 posts unlike …………….
And thanks for the Yeats , f@ck knows where english literature would be without the Irish giants.
Marxist, yes but I’m no Althussarian
@SBH:
Mr Rudd, above all others, is the man W.B. had in mind “to dry the marrow from the bone”
After his failure in Singapore he said:
“There are only two choices here - action or inaction.”
Apparently he doesn’t know the difference between a choice or two…….
I wonder if John Bennets attended Nambour High?
JamesK that is an excellent Quadrant article. Rudd’s contribution to Australian politics is a disgrace. All the more so considering he was elected for his supposed intellectual nerdiness. He never fooled me.
May I declare this circular exercise in piffling pedantry and other forms of low great exhibition is now closed?
sorry that’s low-grade exhibitionism
@Baal
Are all people who disagree with you engaging, seemingly somewhat ironically given your particular choice of words, in a “circular exercise in piffling pedantry” or just the ones with whom you apparently have no intelligent argument to counter?
Counter what? It’s just boring having to field/delete all your repetitious points on an hourly basis, many of whcih don;t make sense and you should realise that
Yes Baal. Brilliant even.
Some love the sound of their own voice, others get off writing and reading their endless paras of repetitive jiz…you got it in one BAAL, agree 100%
Of course you do Raymond
See Tony Kevin’s article today (Crikey item 16). Finally, a voice of reason — considering the whole article, not just individual bits that one or other of us may disagree with.
No one is forcing you people to keep ticking the “Notify me of followup via email” box.
Nor is anyone expecting yu to go on and on the way you do. I find the box useful. It keeps me informed. You just take up space. Be off!
Noooo, James is one of my favourite people on here. Keep posting James.
These interminable threads are a perfect exampole of why the dominant paradign reigns. Rational people think that common sense is ..err.. common. As Yeats said in the 19thC, “..the good lack all conviction and the bad are filled with passionate intensity”.
Life is too short to read this crap which is EXACTLY the intention of the trolls - they’re terrified that something may happen.