Welcome To The Sandpit
I love a good argument so please leave a comment
Please support the Sandpit
Do you feel lucky?
Recent comments
Top Posts & Pages
Blogroll
Play Chess online
check out the source of these clever cartoons by clicking the image
My Car Blog
Just personal and not that political
Sweet as, in Sydney
likes a drink
the name says it all
Cafes life and food
Life in London
Living and love
Amusing and witty Canadian
Photography NZ style
Gender Issues
No to feminist oppression
Good sense on Domestic violence issues
No Misandry here
Environment and global warming
String theory and debunking AGW from a physicist's point of view
Jo does it for me
Anthony debunks "Global Warming" with wit and style
AGW Scepticism NZ style
Steve knows his sums
Jennifer rocks!
definitely not futile
mainly the other side
Decaffeinated Soy Latte Sipper
libertarian central
Legal Eagle and Scepticlawyer
The good lefty
knowledgeable on Islam
Conservatives
a wise head on young shoulders
he rides true
Bing Bing
Feisty Carrot top blogger
Good stuff here!!!
Mild Colonial Boy
more than legal tender
Hated by leftards because he cuts them to shreds
Good sense on mid-east questions
from her bunker in Londonstan
Witty, amusing and hated by leftards
Has the right attitude to cyclists
Mark Richardson
Considering “The rise of white internationalism, from the US to Russia” By Jason Wilson
In typical leftist style Wilson uses an illustration that implies that the alt right are analogous to the KKK something that is rather too loaded and prejudicial.
During Hillary Clinton’s speech today attacking Donald Trump for his associations with the so-called alt right, she made at least one important point: that rise of the Right in the US is part of ‘a broader story ― the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world’.
The opening gambit of declaring the alt-right as “hardline” movement is like his illustration intended to set the notion that any alternative view is both bad and a threat to civil society.
Clinton squandered the moment somewhat by immediately pinning the blame for the far-Right surge on the ‘godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism … Vladimir Putin’. Countering Trump’s ‘dark conspiracy theories’ with beltway-approved conspiracy thinking did not enhance her point about the international dimensions of the problem.
Tend to agree than in invocation of conspiracy theory is a bad idea because such things are generally the stuff of a fevered and over active imagination.
But even if Clinton’s point was blunted by opportunism, the Left needs to start thinking about the way in which the US-based alt right is intertwined with a broader far-Right resurgence in a number of advanced democracies, including Australia.
No the left needs to take a long hard look at itself and ask why are the policies, ideas and notions that they are cultivating being so soundly rejected by ordinary people and they have to understand that they do not have ownership of all virtue.
Although the origins of the alt right are in US-based far-Right circles, the man who coined the term – white nationalist Richard Spencer – did so under the influence of the European ‘Nouvelle Droit’ or New Right, and its leading figures, like Alain Benoist.
I don’t care about the origins to be frank
Spencer told me that he was attracted to those ideas because he and others were ‘deeply alienated, intellectually, even emotionally and spiritually, from American conservatism’. They were disillusioned with Republican interventionism, but also with what they perceived as a softening on immigration and race.
I personally find it ironic that lefties like Jason Wilson are so hot to trot for all sorts of indigenous people’s movements, like Our aborigines, or the native Americans, support “black lives matter” and any other sort of activism for ethically defined groups seeing them as either noble victims of oppression or fighting the good fight but as soon as a group has pale skin Wilson and his ilk see them standing up for their own identity as something pernicious. Its simply hypocritical and innately racist to endorse the rights for one group and denounce another for doing the same thing.
Along with the reactionary tradition that includes Nietzsche and Heidegger, Spencer engaged with the New Right’s ‘identitarianism’ – which links race and identity – and its hostility to egalitarianism and democracy. By defining America as an outgrowth of Europe, he was able to adapt the ideas to his own political context.
What hostility to either democracy or egalitarianism? All that I see from the alt-right are objections to special pleadings from Feminists and other left wing activists for special treatment by way of quotas and other forms of “affirmative action”. If anything the alt right is very much for true egalitarianism and true democracy.
This international circulation of ideas on the Far Right is not one-way traffic, nor has it stopped. ‘Cultural Marxism’, for example, arises from a conspiracy theory claiming that the Frankfurt School seeded the New Left and identity politics as a way of undermining Western values.
Its not a “conspiracy theory” its a description of the facts on the ground and Wilson is a without a doubt a practitioner of Cultural Marxism himself.
The theory was first pushed by Americans William S Lind and Paul Weyrich in the early 1990s, as they tried to develop ways to get Republicans to unite around culture war issues at Weyrich’s think tank, the Free Congress Foundation.
Where the understanding cones form simply does not matter because the core observations are absolutely correct.
It has gone onto be an organising idea for the Far Right throughout the world, including in Europe, where it showed up in the manifesto of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, and in Australia, where versions of the argument have repeatedly been made in mainstream venues, like the Australian.
Sigh. anyone would think form Wilson’s polemic that Brevik is an admired for the alt right or a source of inspiration but nothing could be further form the truth. and invoking here in this context is simple more of his trying to paint the alt-right as being innately bad and monstrous.
The Far Right and their ideas have been given a significant push by the great recession of 2008, the orthodoxy of austerity in Europe, and a slow recovery in the United States.
Economic upheavals do tend bring about changes in the polity
Adding fuel to the fire is one of the principal legacies of the West’s war in Iraq – the Syrian conflict and its 4.5 million refugees.
The war in Iraq may be many things but to suggest that it is something we can blame on “the west” utterly misunderstand that it and other wars in the middle east are largely a consequence the Jihadists and their propensity to Kill in the name of their God. this is especially so when it comes to the civil-war in Syria.
The refugee crisis has allowed a kind of ‘white internationalism’ to coalesce. The Far Right has not renounced nationalism, but it has foregrounded a whiteness defined in civilisational terms, and defined against the alleged threat posed by Muslim immigrants and refugees throughout the West, and by Latin-American migrants in North America.
Its seems to me that Wilson is a proponent of the ideas inherent in “Whiteness Studies” a rather vile ideology that defines bad as having White skin and a European heritage, further to that he pretends that the threat of Islamic imperialism is imaginary, but what else would we expect from a chap who thinks that there should be a borderless world? Frankly I don’t think that the issue in the US is about Latin American immigration as much as it is about unauthorized immigration that simply depresses the Labor market and imports unwanted workers into a USA that has enough of its own poor people.
When these ideas become entangled with social media, this transnational whiteness – or transcontinental Europeanness – becomes the basis of a new kind of political subjectivity, which allows theory-building, proselytisation, and other forms of collaboration across national borders.
Wilson like so many of the left yearns for the halcyon days when he and his left-wing pals totally dominated social media like Twitter and Youtube The alt-right may be late adopters of these platforms but they certainly have become quite adept at using them over the last couple of years . Frankly this has improved our polity. That Wilson thinks otherwise and that he ignores the fact that his fellow minions of the left have done the same sort of outreach he talks about here seems to have escaped his attention.
White, European heritage becomes a rallying cry to be deployed against anyone from the global south who would enter, or stay within the borders of any Western nation, against established non-white ethnic groups, and against the descendants of slaves.
Once again we see here the way that Wilson tries to stigmatize European culture and paint it in a negative light, even though he himself is a product of a very European cultural and intellectual heritage. likewise he is suggesting that alone among the globes ethnic groups Europeans are wrong to want to defend their culture and values against any challengers, especially if those challengers are brown in any sense at all. Finally on this point I have to mention his bizarre notion that Slavery is something unique to European history. Servitude and Slavery are as old as human civilization
The alt right’s memes make all of this easy to digest for the adherents of a movement with an intensive, socially mediated existence.
What does this mean???
Their IQ charts, and bogus crime rate statistics are a way of making the bogus ‘racial science’ that underpins their beliefs more easily accessible.
I am unsure what Wilson is on about with his reference to “IQ charts” or “racial science”
Alt right Twitter accounts are as apt to talk about an alleged ‘rapefugee’ crisis in Syria as they are to make arguments about racially determined IQ, or black crime rates.
I say SO FUCKING WHAT??? anyone on twitter can talk about anything they please but for the record the incidence of rape and sexual assault have skyrocketed in the wake of the waves of uninvited Muslim migrants into Europe and its not the European men who are committing these crimes
More generally, the shibboleths of white internationalism – Halal panic, sexualised racial anxieties, the notion of civilisational struggle, and primitive images of the other – are shared among Far Right actors across the west, and can be seen as readily as Reclaim Australia rallies are on social media.
What Wilson fails to get is that the world does have a problem and its very simple to understand both here and in other first world countries, Namely there is am imperialist ideology called Islam and its followers, while purporting to be mendicants in need, are actually invading and then once they have become established they set about subverting the very freedoms that enabled their entry until they manage to recreate the very societies they claimed to be fleeing. at first they demand halal food for all, then its a small step to demand a repression of our open attitudes to sexuality and gender equality.
Still, the cartoonish character of the online alt right – its memes and jokes, its clear links to nerd culture, and its disinclination (so far) to street violence – should not lead us to underestimate the potential danger here.
Nor should we ignore the very real danger of the monster that left-wing political correctness has become. We have thought policing and pressures to conform to the leftist ideals thrown at us continually through all of the mainstream media and the social media still has a preponderance lefties and oh how they howl if just one person or right-wing idea is voiced in what they consider is their territory.
If nothing else, a networked, globalised political racism may forge a more generalised, adaptable, and ‘shareable’ set of political concepts. In a time of overlapping crisis, we can’t allow white internationalism to become a durable response.
The alt right is NOT about or encouraging racism, and the many alt-right people engaging the BLM movement provide a perfect example of how the orthodox leftists like Wilson have simply lost the plot. Wilson and his ilk naturally assume that because they consider Black people in the USA to be “oppressed” then anything they say or do is both acceptable and should not be subject to any scrutiny and when BLM protestors call for cops to be killed or express clear racist hatred to white people its a case of “nothing to see here”. No problem with Black racism because they are an “oppressed” group and in the leftist mindset those not in a more disadvantaged social position simply can’t be racist to those who are socially better off. But the alt-right calling out real by the dictionary racism of groups like BLM is not the racism that Wilson suggests it is in this essay.
Wilson is of course going to pretend not to read this and he certainly won’t change his silly leftist ideas any time soon. After all he has built himself a career by sucking up to leftist orthodoxy. That is the true irony of the man because when I was a young person to be a true radical one had to be a lefty you had to believe in a a sort of collectivist future. Well those ideals have taken over the establishment and now to be a true radical you have to be of the alt right and become a libertarian, The difference between contemporary radicals and the radicals of my youth is that today the enemy is the misguided and willfully blind lefties that we all once so naively wished to be.
Cheers Comrades
Just now to jamesman
jamesman
It is not the liberal left that is the problem. It is the far right xenophobia, coupled with neoliberalism and climate skeptism that are ruining the world as we know it.
You could not be more wrong there used to be a dichotomy between the left and the right but now the political divide is between the authoritarians and the libertarians and some of the worst authoritarians are in fact the so called progressives who have thus far dominated the social media and who have been more than ready to dogpile any one who challenges their ideas or who refuses to endorse their orthodoxies. The reason that Trump is likely to win the US election is that the very people the authoritarian progressives have tries to silence are rising up and saying that they will not be ignored any more. The mane calling and attempts to shame people by calling dissenter xenophobes bigots or racists simply no longer works as populists like Milo are leading a a new surge of political engagement by people who have previously just looked the other way.
The progressive left have been trying for a generation to undermine the notion of the nation state and in the light of many wars between nations that had a certain logic to it but the problem comes form their rather loopy idea that all nations are equal in their social virtues and that all cultures are the same with maybe only some superficial differences. The cold hard light of political reality demonstrates that this is at best naive nonsense. There is simply no equivalence between a religiously motivated repressive totalitarian state and a mature secular western democracy. To denounce anyone who points this out as a “xenophobe” as progressives so often do is the height of stupidity. It also shows how weak “progressiveness” has become.
Finally we come to the issue of “climate change” which has largely been driven by the former communists who moved into environmental causes after the collapse of communism in the eighties, to them this cause is just another vehicle through which they hope to acquire global hegemony. and its a mechanism that many now pay lip service too but few really believe. Its also a mask for the real global problem of over population. But we are on the cusp of a rather radical solution to that which I expect to be some sort of global pandemic that will devastate the their third world in particular , I use to think it would be HIV/aids but now I think that it will be something more mundane that will piggy back on the growing resistance of Bactria to antibiotics, either way expect to see Africa, south east Asia the middle east and South America severely affected much more than the first world because well ordered societies will be better able to respond to such challenges than those which are corrupt and chaotic. The black death reduced some populations by 2/3 in the middle ages but we may see an even higher death toll because any modern pandemic will spread far quicker thanks to global air travel.
Any way I digress the point is that there is value in having the discrete entity called a nation where the people have more in common that they have that is different, the progressive idea of a borderless world has been a total disaster that has seen previously stable and cohesive societies import cohorts of people who have no desire to assimilate into the indigenous culture instead they have formed ghettos that give provide the breeding ground for nihilism and hatred for the host culture. Calling that out is simply entirely valid self defense rather than “xenophobia” and we will see more of it as the “progressives” are shown more and more to be in reality “regressive” and that their ideology is profoundly illiberal as a consequence.
Cheers Comrades
Jason Wilson can’t stand Milo Yiannopoulos
DePaul University Tour Shut Down by Protestors, Lead by Self-Styled Free Speech Warrior Milo Yiannopoulos
May 27, 2016
At DePaul, the self-styled free speech warrior and his fans once again did not prove to be as robust as their rhetoric. When protesters arrived they begged for the intercession of cops, and cartoonish redpill tough guy Matt Forney complained about being manhandled.
What would you expect any speaker to do if their event was interrupted? Get the audience to beat up the hecklers? You can’t have it both ways when the police are tasked with keeping order and they fail to do this it is reasonable to be less than happy about it.
Nevertheless, the event received the usual hagiographic treatment on Breitbart and the Daily Caller, and once again Yiannopoulos was able to portray himself as the alt-right’s courageous truth-teller.
Which begs the question “is Milo telling the truth here?” Personally I would say that he is but lets see if Wilson even explores that question here
He was fortunate, in a way. On his current US campus tour, alleged threats to his free speech, and the back and forth between Yiannopoulos and his antagonists have been the only thing sustaining interest in the whole enterprise.
Hmm lets see If you hive a hall or lecture space and have your ability to perform is compromised by “activists” then isn’t that by definition his free speech being denied?
I know because I attended a Milo event at which there was no left reception committee. When he appears unchallenged, the Milo show is the dampest of squibs.
At the University of Oregon, where I saw him, it was not clear that he was especially grateful for the platform, or the lack of interruptions.
“Your professors are cunts, on the whole,” he tells the mostly student audience in an almost-full auditorium, “limp-wristed, pacifistic, sandal-wearing weirdos.”
It goes on like this for hours – the epithets are relentless and the provocations artless. Without hostile interruptions, Yiannopoulos’s act, which unfortunately relies entirely on him speaking, is a one-note affair.
So much for Wilson as a reporter! So much for Wilson as the man with a handle on the online traditions of shit posting and mischief making .
The Oregon engagement begins, like the others, with a one on one interview. Tonight his interlocutor is the co-president of the local branch of Young Americans for Liberty, who are sponsoring the evening. Then comes an open question and answer session, and Milo finishes up by giving fans an opportunity to take selfies with one of the right’s rising stars.
Its a tour around many campuses and were it any other type of tour there would not be any complaint about it having a running order or even a script that if followed on any of the legs of the tour.
But right now, that’s a long way off. First, we have to wade through the redpill boilerplate that constitutes Milo’s political views.
“There is an assault in this country”, he informs his interviewer, “on straight white men”, waged by “middle class women and cucks.” In this case the latter is being used to describe male feminists, who “don’t need to be castrated, they’ve done it themselves.”
Moving onto rape culture, which he considers a myth, he asks, with a theatrical moan, “Is there anything worse than consent?”
Wilson makes no secret of his disdain for Milo’s opinions, as is his right, however he undermines his own argument here by not even exploring the possibility that Milo has both the facts and the truth on the side of his talking points here. Wilson simply accepts all of the feminist orthodoxies without a single question
These opinions are odious, of course, but in another way utterly banal. Most adults will find Yiannopoulos’s show exactly as transgressive as a dirty joke told by a racist uncle. He wants desperately to cause deep offence to the left, and with some campus-based comrades, he clearly succeeds. Others will struggle to muster an eye-roll. I’ve heard pithier put-downs of progressives on Australian bar stools.
Why are his opinions “odious” would be an obvious thing to follow the opening claim of this paragraph but instead of that Wilson goes for that old favorite of the progressive the ad hominiem argument. The thing is having watched a lot of Milo’s shtick in his you tube vids he clearly gets a good response to his talk, his interviews and debates all show him to be witty clever and generally amusing. He may not be funny to the cohort of Wilson and his friends but as they are among the targets of Milo’s sarcasm, satire and wit it would be surprising if Wilson and his friends enjoyed being so mercilessly mocked.
So why are all these other people laughing?
After all, even if you agree with this stuff, there’s not much here that’s new. Milo described the alt-right, for which he as a kind of spokesman, as a group which is “young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies”.
But anyone who’s ever listened to Michael Savage or Mark Levin, or even waited around in a small-town barber shop has already encountered all of this guff at punishing length. If there’s a difference, it’s purely a matter of presentation.
Students of the art of humor will tell you that there are only a handful of proto -jokes and all of the huge lexicon of laughs derive from this small seed, so its not always what you say as much as how you tell them Milo’s shtick works because he is a consummate communicator and his audience likes what he says. Wilson is simply unable to do likewise because of his own political baggage and intellectual investment in left wing progressive ideology.
His core politics are similar to those of the mens rights movement – he hates feminists and claims they’re waging a war on the *real* victims, men. But everyone on the American right pretty much agrees with this. He calls lesbians names and questions whether there should be further Muslim immigration. But these are not novel sentiments either.
On the subject of feminism this interview with Dave Rubin explains far better what it is about contemporary feminism that deserves scorn and strong criticism. Wilson’s vilification and character assassination is based on the faulty belief that Milo objects to the now achieved (in western countries) goals of first and second wave feminism.
For sheltered campus conservatives in provincial college towns, though, it all sounds terribly naughty, even revolutionary. Not because of what’s being said, which is “redpill” boilerplate, but because of who is saying it.
Has Wilson not heard of the internet?
In an irony whose full implications escape his audience – who are not, on the whole, well-attuned to such things – his identity is the only real value he adds to an otherwise bog-standard litany of complaints.
Its seems to me that Wilson can not cope with the idea that am man can be both Gay and conservative
The conservative ecosystem is variously populated by talk-radio mastodons; dessicated, reptilian columnists; and near-vegetative think-tankers with about as much charisma as their lanyards. In this Jurassic world, Milo can self-consciously promote himself as something disruptive and new.
For someone who claims to be a “reporter” his political allegiances are doing great deal of harm to his objectivity
Of course, he’ll say he’s also bringing glamour. But as has been pointed out, the guy dresses like something out of a “Hey, kids!” PSA, or Poochie.
If Wilson’s profile picture is anything to go by Wilson would not qualify as any sort of fashionista himself, that said though if one takes the time to review Milo’s various media appearances its clear that the man is actually quite good at dressing for the occasion, most serious events will see Milo wearing a well cut suit but on the current tour he can of course be more frivolous.
Tonight, in pink t-shirt, bling, gaudy trainers and lightly distressed denim, he looks like he’s beamed in from the “boys casual wear” section of a decade-old Macy’s catalogue. Only the buttoned-down Randroids who run YAL could think that his frosted tips and ostentatious indoor sunglasses are anything other than normcore-gone-wrong.
Its called dressing for the occasion Mr Wilson and playing the game of political performance. Frankly I would have thought that asocial media pundit such as your self would understand that all politics is a performance art-form then again I can’t help thinking that Wilson would be lauding any “progressive” using Milo’s tactics here maybe this explains Wilson’s clear rancor because he simply can’t get his head around anyone other than one of his fellow progressives being so able to exploit the social media the way that Milo so clearly does.
The really entrancing thing for America’s reactionary dweebs and young fogeys is hearing this from a gay, British man in his thirties, rather than say, Rush Limbaugh.
It means that for an hour or two, they can put aside their niche anxieties about creeping sharia, or who is using which public restroom, and imagine that they are part of something subversive.
What Wilson fails to understand here is that while his progressive cronies have long held the upper hand in social discourse on the campuses of first world universities to be a conservative and to be openly Gay about it IS a subversive act just as much as being a communist was for my own generation
The bonus is that even in making this pitch, he comforts his audience with the knowledge that they don’t have to take the political demands of other LGBT people seriously. He drops hints that deep down, he hates queers as much as they do.
NO there is simply not any hatred for “LGBT people” in play here Milo does not “Hate Queers” either on the surface or deep down. His take on is is quite sane and very grown up He enjoys being a homosexual is the bottom line
One of his biggest applause lines in Eugene was the moment when he distanced himself from other gay men, averring that “the worst thing about being gays is other gays… They’re just such fucking fags.”
Its called being self deprecating and taking the piss out of your own subculture that Milo both endorses and celebrates
It’s all a bit like music hall for young tories: marginally risque but ultimately reassuring. It’s conservative all right, but not in the edgy way Yiannopoulos imagines it to be.
If only Wilson could understand that Conservatives are allowed to have a place in the polity that is not just to be the butt of progressive ire, and what Milo’s “Dangerous faggot tour” is really about is pointing out that conservatives no longer have to be hiding in the shadows of campus life any more, they don’t have to remain under the dishonest heel of political correctness , kowtowing to the craziness of third wave feminist nonsense
In fact he’s just one of a long line of performers who exist to endorse the whole slate of garden-variety petty bourgeois prejudices. It’s dull work, I imagine, but there’s a steady market for those who can give it fresh nuance.
For now, he appears to be on a roll. From his start as a Breitbart writer and gamergate troll, he’s energetically barged his way into the dress circle of rightwing celebrity.
Those over tight progressive underpants are in evidence again with this claim mainly because I don’t think that an Ideological warrior like Wilson cannot imagine that any legitimate criticism of progressivism is possible. Nor do I think that Wilson has any understanding of Gaming or the Gamergate movement he so casually dismisses. I asked him on twitter if he was a gamer and his response was to try to chnage the subject. so my guess is that his opinions all come from the likes of Anita Sarkesiain and those of her ilk rather than him having any experience of the subculture or the experience of gaming
He now rubs shoulders with the likes of Ann Coulter, with whom he shares a performative, post-Trump antipathy to established movement conservatism. He’s successfully positioned himself as a member of the “alt-right”, a movement for which he drafted a manifesto which also functions as an apologia for the open anti-semitism and racism of that community.
Hmm I simply don’t see the antisemitism that Wilson is claiming, in fact most of the antisemitism in the western polity comes form the left in their apologia for Islam and the Jihadists.something that I have seen Wilson himself flirts with on twitter where despite me giving him ample giving him ample opportunities to denounce the inherent bigotry of Islam he could not bring himself to admit that Islam is hateful to Gays or women.
(During the evening, he retails the anti-establishment sentiments which are themselves now de rigeur on the right, saying that “the Republican Party needs to be torn up, burnt to the ground and rebuilt”.)
The hustle has been competent enough to secure the greatest reward that a bogus generational spokesman can reap: a profile in the New York Times magazine. And now, he’s on a US tour, bringing his fabulous brand of bigotry to America’s universities.
If there is one thing that is fabulous its the way that Wilson portrays anyone who offers a counter to the “progressive narrative” as bigotry, Question the Black lives matter narrative and in Wilson’s view its bigotry, Question the silly claim that one in five students will be raped and its bigotry, In fact its seems clear to me he is just over invested in the “progressive” orthodoxy and he is terrified of having to rethink any of that he just digs his heels in and calls people names because its
In Eugene, around 350 prople show up (at DePaul, Breitbart claimed there were 500, but they have a habit of talking their employee up). A solid three quarters of those in attendance were men. Given Milo’s obsession with detailing what he sees the failings of women – especially feminists, lesbians, and those who aren’t thin – it’s no surprise that his events are such sausage-fests.
Would Wilson care if a Feminist had a predominately female audience or would he disparage a majority female audience as a “vag-fest” or some other derogatory term of a cohort of women ?
Indeed, the passages of the evening in which he talks about the many women that he doesn’t like are one of the few times that a genuine emotion – disgust – rises to the surface of his camp repartee.
When he describes lesbians as “horrendous, quivering masses of horror”, described feminism as “cancer”, he’s practically spitting. It’s the kind of vituperation you don’t usually employ unless you’ve encountered a real threat.
Like so many on the progressive side of politics Wilson has no sense of humor and no understanding that the anti-lesbian shtick is all part of Milo’s performance. As I have found in my own interactions with Wilson to him its inconceivable that any thing that a conservative says or does will not have some malign intention or purpose. Essentially he lacks any generosity towards conservatives and only sees them as a class enemy to be denounced.
I don’t know, or much care, whether Milo Yiannopoulos’s own contempt for women is a mask for fear. But he certainly appears to be answering to the fears of his audience.
This is utter rubbish from Wilson there is simply no reason to think that Milo has contempt for women nor does it follow that the audiences at his Dangerous faggot tour do either.
The sources of this disquiet are evident in the queues for the question and answer session, and later for selfies. It’s very clear in these moments that Milo’s core audience, his most devoted fans, are bewildered, young, reactionary, male nerds.
Once again Wilson shows his contempt for ordinary young men who have not taken up the progressive orthodoxy. That my friends is the core of the contradiction with in progressiveism It claims to be about inclusiveness and diversity unless you are a straight white man then you will be eternally the subject of scorn and derision
You get the vivid impression when you hear them talk that their antipathy to feminism has bloomed out of a much more intimate kind of frustration with the opposite sex. Unfortunately, they’ve come to the world’s worst source of dating advice.
Could anyone be more arrogant or more disparaging at a personal level than this? this is claim is all just an ad hom fallacy writ large
During question time, men ask for and recieve counsel about how to deal with feminists challenging them in their personal lives, and Yiannopoulos commiserated with them about “the oppressive hegemony of social justice”.
Although I have not attended one of these events I have watched several on Milo’s and other you tube channels and this characterization of the Q & A session is simply wrong and the questions and comments are as varied the people who attend
The whole ritual does no more than try to reverse the polarity of identity politics, insisting that actually, it’s white men who are oppressed. And the only way he can really make this case is to talk about class.
Wilson is correct that identity politics is a big issue for those who attend however in typical SJW style Wilson willfully misunderstands the arguments that are in play here. The point is not to try to seize a better place in the oppression hierarchy fro “white men” as he contends, but to dispute the entire social analysis of “oppression” that underpins the SJW notions of identity politics that would demonize every one who is straight, white and male.
Thus, he talks about the “awful, awful, terrible, diseased, and damaged people lecturing and hectoring the working class” who have “rightly had enough of it”, and whose only hope of salvation is “President Donald Trump”.
Here I can to some extend share Wilson’s concerns about the virtues of Donald Trump however I think that Wilson is sadly not detached enough from his left wing obsessions to understand why Trump is popular. What that popularity boils down to is a rather refreshing refusal to kowtow to the conventions of Political correctness and if there is one thing that those on the right appreciate its anyone who will slash through the bindings that have come from identity politics and the deathly fear of giving offense, But to explore this topic in more detail I suggest that you go to this article which also looks at Milo’s Trump shows but it does so with a far more even hand.
The problem – apart from the fact that this is delivered in an upper-middle class British accent, and that his audience are mostly college kids – is that he’s not really offering the working class anything except the permission to dish out racial slurs and minimise rape culture.
To be frank I don’t buy into Wilson’s Marxist assumption that the audience are what would be “working class” or that Milo being English or “upper class” makes a blind bit of difference to cut though to his audience. This is an audience who have grown up with the cultural diversity of YouTube and they simply do not care about Milo’s accent. Now would college students be what we in Australia would call working class because they (or their parents) are all paying to go to the colleges and that takes enough resources to place those audience members well and truly into the middle classes
He boasts about the scholarship scheme he’s set up for underprivileged boys, but he has nothing to say about the economy except hints of support for a Trumpian economic nationalism.
Why on earth does Wilson think that Milo should be any sort of economist?
In another hackneyed move, Yiannopoulos posits the “Working class” not as a product of structural economic inequality but as another kind of political identity, one that expresses itself in salty language and low-level sexual harassment.
Here I can’t honestly do better than recommend the Why people love Trump piece I previously linked to because it looks at the subject free from Wilson’s arrogant disdain for Milo and his audience.
This is the kind of caricature you can only believe in if you don’t actually know that many working-class people. Like every other right wing hack, Milo absolutely depends on the angst of wounded identity, and its quest for an alternative victimhood.
I am rather fond of arguing for a certain generosity when you discuss politics, that sort of generosity would have prevented Wilson’s unshakable urge to demonize anyone who is snot singing from the progressive play book as he does here. The thing that Wilson seems to miss entirely here is that its not about seeking “victimhood” at all its about saying instead that the labels and characterizations of the SJW narrative are nonsense, broken and or wrong.
The working class he spins fantasies about are exclusively white, because like every right wing hack, his principal concern is activating white male resentment. This rhetoric was developed precisely to divide the working class, and to keep them in their place.
The problem for Wilson here is that Milo is not working from the Marxist lens that he himself see’s the world through. No is it about something as negative as activation of anyone’s resentment. Its all about saying that we are all individuals rather than just being elements in one group identity or another, its the classic libertarian positions that Milo is drawing on here, ones that value individual enterprise and self reliance. Sadly for a Marxist like Wilson this is just incomprehensible.
At one point Yiannopoulos offers something of a credo: “The only way to respond to outrage culture is to be outrageous”. It’s handy because it’s a good cover story for pursuing his real goal, which is no more or less than the getting of attention.
Milo makes no secret of his love of social provocation and were he of the left rather than the right I am rather sure that Wilson would find this behavior to be praise worthy because like a lot of lefties he thinks that social transgression belongs to his side of politics
But Milo Yiannopoulos is not outrageous, nor is he of himself especially dangerous. He’s just a wanker. When the Trump wave recedes, he may in time be regarded, along with the rest of the flotsam it deposited, as a curiosity. More likely, he’ll return to the mean and become one more right wing talking head in a perennially shallow talent pool.
Wilson is particularly humorless when it comes to anyone not from his own left wing tribe and here is a perfect example of his lack political generosity that puts him very much into the authoritarian left. Its obvious to anyone else that the title of Milo’s “Dangerous Faggot” tour is meant to be ironic and trangressive to the SJW tropes about the use of language as with the word “queer” Milo seeks to reclaim the word “faggot” here by taking what was a term of derision and making it something positive
The ideas he promotes are damaging, of course. He talks a lot about “the public square”, but the fruit borne of his adolescent attacks on feminism are likely to play out in more private spaces, where the most important negotiations about sex, consent, and equality happen.
But its not all of feminism that Milo rails against its just the man hating third wave feminism that has blossomed in contentment universities over the last couple of decades that actively seeks out offense and it is that brand of feminism that Milo describes as Cancer
God help the woman whose partner is a Milo fan. At the very best, she’ll have to listen to this horseshit on a loop. At worst, she’ll be living with someone who has the tools to rationalise selfishness, abuse, and even sexual assault.
Pardon me? Is Wilson really suggesting that being a Milo fan is tantamount to being a wife beater? a rapist even? How shallow is Wilson?
What’s perhaps not considered often enough how much damage this nonsense does to those men who take it seriously. For one thing, it allows them to put off the day on which they grow up, and realise that the women who won’t sleep with them aren’t persecuting them, but making the kinds of choices characteristic of autonomous human beings.
No Jason that is utter nonsense. Men who “listen” to the argument against the SJW tropes do not become monsters and its not at all about disaffection because these men can’t get laid. In fact there is no evidence at all that those on the right are any less successful at finding sexual partners than Wilson’s fellow lefties. Nor is he correct to assume that those men on the libertarian right don’t see women as anything less that fully autonomous individuals just like themselves That he thinks otherwise is actually a sad artifact of his own collectivist thinking.
So as derivative as this whole enterprise is, it may cause problems. What’s to be done?
DePaul’s progressives had one strategy – protest – which I do not plan to gainsay. That’s a decision for local activists to make based on what’s happening on their campus.
So left wing “protest goo”d in Wilson’s mind
There’s been more than enough hippie-punching in recent months directed at those who protest at public events that attract the far right, and I don’t propose to add to it. Protesting serves many purposes: publicly articulating common positions, building comradeship, and making claims or counter-claims on public space. There should be more of it.
Unless of course its anti SJW protest, then its bad and should be confronted.. Hmm OK
It’s true, though, that on those occasions like the night in Eugene, where he is not met by protesters, Milo seems forlorn. His schtick goes limp; he’s revealed as a one-trick pony.
When a young man, identifying himself as a feminist, spoke up against him, Milo whisked him onto the stage for an extended chat. Briefly, the evening was enlivened, though no one was enlightened, because Milo doesn’t argue in good faith. But he knows that the audience comes for the fireworks.
This bit of Wilson’s piece shows just how little this left wing warrior respects the core value of democracy which revolves around a robust exchange of ideas. That Milo is willing to engage with and debate his opponents is not just “schtick ” its an example of his confidence in his argument. Nor is it ever the case that democratic discussions ore as one dimensional as Wilson implies here. There is simply nothing wrong or awry for a polemicist to make their events entertaining with a little bit of drama. Wilson needs to lighten up a great deal.
Absent opposition, it’s harder to convince supporters that he’s bravely overturning PC shibboleths and taking it to the SJWs.
Not in the age of social media it isn’t even if the event at Portland was lacking in “fireworks” ( it has been the exception rather than the rule for the “Dangerous faggot tour”) all that it shows is that the SJWs there are rather less bolshie than at other universities on the itinerary
Perhaps the decision by students at the University of California, Irvine, to offer a counter-event to Milo’s visit offers a promising way to deal with this nuisance.
When it comes to the right, “ignore them and they’ll go away” is generally bad advice, but skipping the Milo show, and using it as to build something positive sounds like something that could also build the left ahead of the Summer of Trump.
Thus Wilson ends with whimper here rather than a roar but that is hardly surprising given that Wilson has done nothing but give us an an extended ad hominiem attack on both Milo Yiannopoulos and the young Trump supporters who have been finding the Gay man so engaging. To Wilson they are just the class enemy rather than men and women who have as much right as his fellow lefties to be involved with the issues and debates about their society. In fact Wilson’s piece is an almost perfect example of why Donald Trump is more than likely to be elected President. What we are seeing here is a whole movement of young people who are refusing to see that the SJW emperor is wearing a fine well tailored set of threads. They are trusting their senses and they are daring to speak the truth about the regressive left’s saggy arse that is in the breeze on so many issues, Things like the Myth of “rape culture” and other third wave feminist tropes are being seen clearly and actively denounced, Likewise the willful blindness about the ideology of Islam that I have found Wilson himself guilty of is something that more and more people are no long willing to accept, especially after the horrendous slaughter at the Pulse night club. Finally though I just want to say that this essay is not intended to be any sort of personal attack on Wilson himself I have brought this humble blog out of its hiatus in part because I want to demonstrate to Jason Wilson that I have read and understood his piece but mainly I wanted to substantiate my suggestion to him on twitter that the “Why people love Trump” is a far better piece of journalism than the missive I have been considering here.
Guardian comments 16-6-2016
uptherecrazies
For anyone without blinkers on the transition is already happening and it is being lead by a globalised market keen to continue making profits.
Yeah but most of that is hype led by spivs
There are no profits to be made on an exhausted planet too toxic to carry a consuming population.
To paraphrase a well worn adage, reports of the planet’s death are both premature and over sold
VenetianBlind
The unavoidable truth here is that the only way that humanity will stop using fossil fuels is when alternative technologies actually do the same job both cheaper and better
Renewable would be cheaper than coal fired energy where I live but the locals reject it because they read this sort of thing. The main problem is mindset, not costs. The costs for, again where I live, insurance for eg has skyrocketed. The cost of no action will hurt Australia far more than renewables. Already started.
Until there is a viable and cost effective way to store energy form “renewables” there will be no alternative to coal for our electricity. Your claim that its all about the mindset is utter nonsense as is the cost of “no action” claim you make here.
For a thing to be a crime it actually has to be against the law, using fossil fuels is simply not against any law, ergo its no crime
No matter how many time the Guardian publishes stories like this one we all know that the chances of this happening are so low that continued calls for such things are utterly pointless. What this article boils down to is a rather futile example of climate virtue signalling. The unavoidable truth here is that the only way that humanity will stop using fossil fuels is when alternative technologies actually do the same job both cheaper and better. Until then no amount of whining is going to make the slightest bit of difference.
SimonEsposito
I should say that I accept the bipartisan policy, even to the point of believing that this government’s ONE achievement in its whole three years was Scott Morrison’s management of the boat turnback policy.
They have had other policy successes
Specifically that, though. The management of Manus and Nauru, and the failure to achieve honorable resettlement outside Australia, is a stain on the national character.
Those in detention there have been given a rather perverse incentive to keep playing “blink” with the government by open borders activist who give them false hope that they may eventually be allowed to come into the Australian mainland that is why they don’t do the sensible thing and accept any resettlement option offered to them.The key to the policy was that Manus and Nauru and Christmas Island should
serve a short-term purpose – offshore processing. There seems to have been no interest in the most difficult part, regaining the trust of the countries that we have to partner with to resettle the legitimate refugees (and that includes Malaysia, Canada, and New Zealand). Abbott and now Turnbull and Dutton (and Joyce) can’t shut up with their offensive and reckless comments long enough to give Julie Bishop any clear air. (And was she ever even interested?) Bribing small countries, as Jeff Sparrow shows in this article, is not an honorable solution (nor a solution of any kind).
Yadda yadda yadda teh fact that the number of the detained cohort has not been increasing, so once this cohort have been encouraged to either accept what can be offered by way of resettlement or reparation the problem will be solved because there are no more boat people coming to replace them.
It’s probably reached the stage where any foreign minister who could pull it off would merit a Nobel prize or something (or the prime-ministership). But I can’t see it happening without the reset of a change of government.
Nah if the Labor party get back into office the problem would be quickly made worse because the people smugglers know how weak they are on this issue, especially if the ALP dog is being wagged by a Green tail as it was under the Rudd Gillard Rudd years.
The amount of private debt may well be some what illusory because it is bound to include the debt that those like yours truly carry each month because we pay for everything on our credit cards and then pay it off in full before the due date at the end of the month.
cookie2255
Fact – The Coalition will spend less on hospitals!!!! Education, NBN, Climate Change and anything that really matters to everyday people.
Its not the amount of money that is spent that matters as much as how big the bang for the buck spent is and on that the ALP record is utterly woeful. On top of that the ALP is simply running up too much debt on their “spendometer”
Walsunda
Religious zeal combined with hatred is a most pernicious thing.
Agreed, which is why I constantly question the apologia for Islam that so many from the left engage in .
The recently deported visiting British cleric shared your views re not hating homosexual people but still claimed it was OK to put them to death for displaying their sexuality.
I share NO views with that man I simply do not believe that there is anything “wrong” with being homosexual He believes that it is Hiram and that its “compassionate” to kill gay people.
As you said “The religious zeal displayed by Warministas is greater than I have seen from many Born Again Christians”, I don’t even know what a Warminista is or what their relevance is to a discussion on science.
Don’t feign ignorance Wal, you are better than that! I’m sure that you realize that “Warminista” is a sarcastic way of describing a climate change true believer that also includes a hat tip to the association with Marxism.
I met a born again Christian about this time of year over ten years ago while while walking to the bus about 4.00 pm. I was feeling very happy as I was on my way to collect second prize in a pub trivial pursuit competition – free food and drink for a nights viewing of the State of Origin.
We talked as we walked up the hill about my work and the joy of preventing disease. He told me I’d go to heaven as I boarded the bus at the end of one of those beautiful Brisbane “winter” days. I told him we were already there.
Agree with you about this place being “heaven” its a bit cold here on my mountain today but I’m sure that a hearty breakfast will easily make that endurable.
In response to photographofgeorge
photographofgeorge
I suggest you update your reading to the works and opinions of right wing politicians like George Christiensen and Cory Bernardi just to see how much animosity is reflected towards homosexual people even from our politicians.
I suppose you are one of those who think that opposing Gay marriage as the guys you cite above do means that they hate homosexuals. It doesn’t
If not in direct quotes, but in actions as well. Both Christians too. Homosexuals still face brutality in this country and it is frequently not from Muslims.
Really when was the last example of anyone in Australia killing anyone because they are gay? Heck we don’t even have the bashings of gay men (just because of their sexuality) that were common when I was a young man. You are delusional if you think that our attitude to homosexuals is as murderous as it is in places like Iran or any other Muslim country.
For your information the Catholic Church does not condone homosexual acts either, nor do many other religious organisations.
So what? They certainly don’t condone killing them either unlike so many Muslims do.
The point I make is that because a person like Manteen is said to be a Muslim, yet with no apparent links to ISIS, he should not be used to tar all Muslims with the same brush.
To become a Muslim all any one has to do is make the declaration of faith and I’m sure that all it takes to join ISIS is to declare your allegiance, Manteen has done both.
I directed someone to a page in the Guardian that tells another story beyond the Trump-style, Pauline Hanson-style interpretation. There have been frequent mass killings with automatic weapons in the US, none of which involved Muslims in the least.
I will give you one minor concession here by accepting that most of these nutters do have various motives for the things that they do. But I simply will not accept your implication that we should ignore the religious motives that are clear from this man’s actions
The main problem seems to be the easy access and availability with little scrutiny to military grade weapons that can cause enormous damage.
No that is nonsense, admittedly the USA has been awash with guns for the last century however as with Paris and Belgium it is the ideology of Islam that has obviously motivated both the targets and the timing of this atrocity.
But even then, Timothy McVeigh the ‘Oklahoma bomber’ for example, a decorated soldier returning from the first Gulf War, was responsible for the much greater amount of death: 168 people and over 600 injured.
Yep and I bet you would have been right up there objecting to his well deserved execution
He used a massive ammonium nitrate bomb not even bothering with a gun.
Something he would not be able to do today
Now silently considered a terrorist, you won’t see his case be used to tar all Christians with the same brush even though he was a Roman Catholic. We do not also blame Batman and all Batman fans for the gunning down of the audience in a movie theatre in the US because James Holmes saw himself as the Joker, to the point of making himself up to resemble the character in a motion picture.
Yadda yadda yadda
Most of these people including Manteen had mental health problems on a grand scale.
You see its only you who is suggesting that “all Muslims” are the problem I am questioning the ideology that motivates the Jihadists, I am citing the unrelenting misogyny of that ideology and its overt and unapologetic homophobia and no amount of your false equivalence with other far more benign religions is going to make the ideology of Islam less pernicious
In response to photographofgeorge
To go on about the guy being homosexual does not negate the fact that he both swore allegiance to ISIS and he was a a Muslim. Heaven in a hand basket what do you lefties have so much trouble simply admitting that Islam is the single most homophobic religion on the planet?
When polled about 80% of Muslims say that homosexuality should be against the law and that 11 Muslim countir4es have a death penalty for homosexuality.
In fact the most recent reports suggests that he was full of self loathing because he was a homosexual Muslim.
In response to Petunia Winegum
Sadly Petunia I need to work on being less of a socialist just a bit harder
31 points LNP, 11 Labor, and shame to say 5 fro the greens
The problem with this survey is that it has too few questions
WombatsRamble
To be more accurate, I’d say “there’d be no more deaths then there are currently
with prescription drugs”.
Which is still quite a bit, as there’s always going to be people who think “one makes me feel better. If I take five of them I’ll feel five times better, no matter what my script says”. Instead they stop breathing
Actually I would say that the problem is is really more about peopel taking various drugs at the same time and there being serious issues as a conse
BJWard
In fact the name Ward is on my birth certificate and so are the initials BJ. I’m widely known by those initials. Having had an unfortunate past experience from broadcasting my first name in another forum, I’ve refrained from doing so in this one.
And I bet that you have been ribbed about calling yourself “BJ” many times in the past” and some friendly ribbing was all I was intending with may comment. Because you have to admit that your screen name does bring to mind a hospital room for those unfortunate blokes who could not convince their lovers to be careful with their teeth.
To the rest, I’ll just say that we have probably already spent more on Turnbull’s 60th-rate lash-up than the original proposal would have cost. Not that the cost argument holds water, really. The taxpayer wasn’t going to be asked to pay for it.
I’m pretty sure that you are wrong about that. And who do you think has both put up the money and more importantly wears the financial risks of this project? The good old Aussie Tax payer that’s who.
BJWard
Can’t resist the ad hominem, can you? It is my name, however.
I very much doubt that the name “BJWard” appears on your birth certificate, thta said I only mentioned it because your screen-name does have some amusing allusions some of which are a little but unfortunate.
Why should the government have to make a “business case” for building vital infrastructure?
Because its too much money to work on some sort of vague hope that it will be affordable for the nation.
It’s self-evident, I would have thought, that if you’re going to build infrastructure, you do it using the most effective available materials and methods.
History teaches us that every time a government buys into a form of technology it ends up being superseded by something else. My brother has wireless internet in his small town that is pretty good and it suggets to me that wireless may well be Bette than fiber to the home
In the case of a modern communications system, that is by using fibre to the premises.
maybe . maybe not
What you are obliquely advocating, however, is the 21st century equivalent of the proposal to make all Australia’s telephone lines out of iron wire, because it was cheaper. Certain politicians 100 years or so actually tried to make that case, but were overruled by the more farsighted. Pity we didn’t have a few more such visionary people around to put Mr. Abbott back in his box when he first advocated the destruction of this project.
No what I’m saying is those who want Champagne and caviar are being unrealistic ion the expectations for a country the size of our own when its population is a s small as it is.
No my unfortunately named friend. It was Labor who promised everyone a champagne and caviar NBN when they could not make the business case even for the MacDonald’s version.
The thing is I already have a car powered by the Toyota engine form the same period BP and it serves me quite well. Which is kinda may point . Just ebciuase something is an old design don’t kid yourself that it can’t do the job just as well as a “modern” product.
Oh how can your forget who over promised and under delivered on the NBN in the first instance?
The 120 Y was and remains a damn good car with nice simple engine that almost literally runs forever, If the NBN can achieve that sort of sterling service it will serve us well enough,
Its not stupid at all to redirect said money to help the reef, what else would it be spent on?
And Labor’s scheme would have given us a worse result and bankrupted the country in the process, You may need fast internet to announce your bowel movements via social media But grown ups know that not everyone wants a Champagne and caviar NBN we will do quite well enough on a meat and potatoes version that we get sooner.
RonJB
Apparently even you don’t read what you wrote.
whay do you think that?
Or you prefer going straight to abusive comments, when you know you’ve been called out on your usual bullsh!t. I do hope you’re getting a good wage for all the partisan crap you write.
No my friend, what I do here I do for a love of the truth and a desire to bring light into this darkness…
Mark Harrison
Well considering we are talking about networking, well yes; it is, you know, kind of important to have some idea what you are talking about before offering an opinion.
I do have some idea as it happens
While wireless may well be an option for a micro-village (a pub, post office, garage and two houses) anyone with any-freaking-idea-whatsoever knows that this technology does not scale.
Well the town my brother lives in has quite few more than that, even though it does not even have a pub and the service is a great improvement over the satellite service they had before.
Seriously, go back to making whirligigs!
Actually at present I’m making foot-bikes
Walsunda
Most Australians live in the coastal strip between Melbourne and Brisbane.
That still does not make any difference to the problem of distance
Walsunda
“Labor have always thought with suburban minds”.
Though living in Queensland you are unaware that the world’s first Labor Party formed in Barcaldine in the state’s central west. Some foreigners never seem to integrate.
I have actually been there Wal sat under the famous tree and all, even so they stopped having any rural sensibilities at least 70 years ago.
Australia is the most suburban society in the world at present as rural and far western areas shed population for reasons to do with restructuring of the rural economy and despite increased urban lifestyle in the major population centres.
Sure I understand that, much of it was due to mechanization
So most people live in the suburbs and in a democracy elections are decided by most people or the majority. You need to get used to democracy now you live here.
I am more than used to democracy and I have been voting for as long as I have been legally entitled to do so.
RonJB
But by your own logic, it is wasteful to built phone lines, electricity lines and roads in this spread out wide brown land as well.
You must have failed basic geography and economics.
Mark Harrison
Tell that to my neighbor who can’t even get ADSL The problem is not service to the cities its service to the rural parts of the country\
Actually, you’re wrong there too (shocking, I know). Many suburban (even inner city suburbs) cannot get ADSL connections either. Or if they can, ADSL1 only. Greenslopes in Brisbane is but one example I know of.
My guess would be that there has been a pause on creating new adsl capability with the expectation that the NBN would be rolled out instead. More to the point if you live in Greenslopes you will still get the better broadband before any one in the country simply because they get more customers for the service per dollar invested. I’d also expect that with Labor’s shambolic record on the NBN before they lost office in 2013 that things would be worse had they continued to control the project.
As for rural areas, the copper infrastructure will be so degraded, the only realistic options would be fibre or replacing copper to put in a node. It is just too absurd to contemplate but that is what the NBN police in LNP central have dictated you will have.
On the contrary my brother lives in a small Queensland country town and what they have just had turned on is a town wide wireless service that gives him extremely good internet that is fast and offers substantial band width. This is clearly a technology that works and is more cost effective tech than running fiber to every house in that town.
If getting a reasonable NBN solution is important to you, voting conservative is voting against your interests.
The thing that you don’t seem to appreciate is that for lots of people having a Rolls Royce internet is a nice idea and something that they would want but they also understand (in a way that you tech obsessed latte sippers don’t) that the internet is not the be all and end all or something that will decide our vote. Both sides make grand promises for the NBN but the Coalition have a small edge on their ability to deliver.
Mark Harrison
as a maker of various things
“Maker” of what? Whirligigs? You obviously have no idea about networking from your comments.
I haven’t made any Whirligigs recently but if that was what you wanted I could do it. That said though you are mistaken in thinking that “networking” is the be all and end all of the modern world.
Mark Harrison
You do not understand the technology, at all.
On the contrary, as a maker of various things I understand it rather well.
aquaPura
A Ford, no problem, a model T Ford definitely.
The model T is was and remains a great example of providing adequate and affordable way of getting around the place. Frankly if the NBN under the coalitions can do as well then it will be a good day for the country.
In response to Gregory Shearman
Tell that to my neighbor who can’t even get ADSL The problem is not service to the cities its service to the rural parts of the country and we rural dwellers will be better off under the coalition scheme because we will get an improved service sooner than we would under Labor’s Rolls Royce fantasy that would always be just a little bit out of reach.
parsivalmontde
Wrong there buddy. I live in outer Melbourne. No where near the inner city.
Yet you tell us that you can get fiber to you home and you are still whining? Mate you may live in the outer burbs but you still don’t understand geography at all!
See my response to Hotspringer
Bet that you have never got out of your latte sipping inner city ghetto in all of your short life.
Hotspringer
New Zealand could do it, but even their right wingers aren’t as stupid as ours.
New Zealand has a Land area of 268,021 km² but Austrlaia has 7.692 million km² so which do you think would be easier to hook up to an NBN?
Come on you must be able to do the very simple calculations here.
Labor have always though with suburban minds and as such they simply have NEVER truly understood just how spread out the Australian people are over the wide brown land . I live on the fringes of the Brisbane area and there has never been any likely hood that I will be able to get a better broadband service and my neighbor can’t even get the ADSL service I enjoy because there are not enough “ports” at the exchange. NBN???? not likely for years here and its not hard to understand why, my road has only one house other than my own and that means that just the cost of running Labor FTTH would never be recovered by the subscription even if my neighbor and I both wanted the highest possible speed from the top plan, but most people who have been using the net fro a while settle for something less that the highest speed an the biggest bandwidth which means less revenue that Labor has ever modeled. The bottom line here is that we are a continent of what? 23million people? and if we were all closely packed like countries physically smaller with the same population the Labor scheme might just be possible but that is not us so all of those dreaming of the promised Rolls Royce solution maybe you need to have a more realistic aspiration for something in the Ford line up instead.
Follow the Link Wal I posted that comment there because the original thread was closed down.
Walsunda
“Because the biggest emitters like China and India” (for the moment ignoring the second biggest emitter) “are expected to increase their emissions rather than reduce them over the next few years and if there is any meaningful reductions then its going to take many decades to makes it happen”.
Just because something will take many decades to happen doesn’t mean you should not set out to do it. Especially when the outcome is so advantageous.
You are of course ignoring the dire warnings that unless the global emissions are drastically reduced immediately then things like the GBR are doomed. So don’t you see the gap between what you imply is the best case scenario (above) and what you have been told is necessary to “save the planet”????”doesn’t your liturgy tell us that we have to be reducing” net CO2 “emissions like yesterday?”
I have no liturgy. Because of your religious delusions by proxy syndrome you are projecting your religious delusions onto me a practical scientist who is sufficiently in touch with reality to know we can’t do anything about yesterday except learn from it and that what is important from this point in time on is what we do now and in the decades to come.
You certainly do have a liturgy and you also know I was being sarcastic about doing it “yesterday” to point out the urgency in your own emissions reduction mantra”It is simply not going to happen as your claimed cure says it must happen if we are to avert climate disaster?”
By it do you mean global net CO2 emissions reduction? What do you mean by my claimed cure? Do you mean curing global warming caused by the increase in global net CO2 emissions
by reducing net CO2 emissions? But if that’s the case you’re saying that reducing global net CO2 emissions is simply not going to happen as my claimed cure of reducing global net emissions says it must happen if we are to avert climate disaster, which doesn’t make sense.
I’ll lay it out in easy to understand steps:
AGW theory tells us that we have to reduce CO2 emissions
Global emissions are expected to continue to rise without any global reduction expected in the foreseeable future
Advocates like you keep saying that we are all doomed unless Australia on its own decides to reduce its statistically insignificant contributing to global emissions.
I say that the probability that there will be enough reduction in global emissions at any time time in the next thirty years (at least) to have any effect on the climate is so low as to be unmeasurable. therefore anything we do to reduce our emissions is at best an act piety and faith because there will never be any positive consequences for our action no matter how extensive it may be in our national terms.
Walsunda
“Unless that” (every person does their own experiments to independently verify every scientific discovery which would present time management problems) “is the case then you have to be basing your acceptance of ” (what science finds out) “on some sort of belief, faith even , in the work of others.”
You’re creating a false dichotomy for yourself here. Let us look at the terms you use and how they apply to this situation and the situation within religions.
No dichotomy at all as far as I’m concerned.
Belief has two meanings.
The first is an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof. We know through experience that the work of others exists so we have proof of its existence. So belief in the work of others does not fit this meaning of the word belief.
Wal with the greatest of respect you don’t get exactly how these essentially philosophical questions work. You simply can not argue as you do in in the bold above that we can know something “from experience” without acknowledging that such “knowledge” is in fact one belief and you expectation that something is proven is another. Your knowledge or understanding of any thing in the universe is built on, in the first instance, our senses through which we perceive the universe, and secondly through the intellectual constrictions through which we try to understand the world we inhabit and as we can not do every basic observation and experiment we accept the claims of others who have done the experiments and who have made the observations and mostly we do so without replicating those observations and experiments. That my friend requires an act of faith.
Secondly belief means trust, faith or confidence in someone or something. When I order a new shirt on line I trust that it be delivered. This trust is based on experience that the work of the courier exists and is true in finding my front door. Trust is probably a better word in this context as it avoids the semantic confusion that you are demonstrating.
But what do you trust those in the AGW industry above other voices about the climate? They have not actually delivered anything as substantive as the shirts in your example above, all they have delivered is a great deal of dodgy predictions and much doom-saying.
Faith also has two meanings.
The first is complete trust or confidence in someone or something. My trust in the online sales system and the delivery bloke is probably not complete but so far experience has shown that it works.
And you also have an almost unshakable faith in the talk of the AGW doomsayers even though their delivery record is a great deal less impressive than online shirt salesmen.
The second meaning of faith is defined as a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion. You can’t use this definition of belief to establish that the belief signifies religion without falling into a circular logic trap.
Utter rubbish!
Faith is simply a strong belief in something that can not be proven and as the AGW proposition can not actually be proven it can only be claimed and that means that to believe in AGW you have to rely on your belief in the arguments made for it and have faith that is proponents are correct.
So your contention that acceptance of what science discovers based on belief and/or faith in the work of others means that trusting the work of others based on experience is a form of religion is both as ridiculous as it sounds and is based on semantic confusion on your part.
No semantic confusion at all on my side here Wal, That said the religious zeal expressed by so many Warministas is greater than I have seen from many Born Again Christians .To communicate meaning other than rhetoric you need to concentrate closely on the meanings of the words you use. I do understand why this may be difficult for you.
Walsunda
Note when I talked about reducing net CO2 emissions above, I was not talking about just Australia reducing our net CO2 emissions. If we (all the people in the world) all reduce our net CO2 emissions with such measures as a price on net carbon emissions plus many other effective measures, we can in time make a difference to the concentration of atmospheric CO2 and and slow its current rate of increase in the more immediate future.
“the cure simply cannot work because at a global level it cannot be made to happen.”
Why not?
Because the biggest players like China and India are expected to increase their emissions rather than reduce them over the next few years and if there is to be any meaningful global reductions then its going to take many decades to make it happen if it happens at all and doesn’t your liturgy tell us that we have to be reducing emissions like yesterday? It is simply not going to happen as your claimed cure says that it must happen if we are to avert climate disaster.
Walsunda
When I say that “No religion is involved in the reality of the current global warming”; you say ” On the contrary if you look at how religion is defined it is very easy to fit the belief in AGW” (anthropogenic global warming) “into said definition”. However as anthropogenic global warming is a reality their is no belief involved. As the belief you are talking about does not exist you are talking about nothing. I can’t discuss something which does not exist with you. All your talk about belief is meaningless as science is based on evidence not belief.
So are you telling to me that you and every other person who has taken the AGW proposition on board as a truth has personally made the empirical measurements and done the necessary experiments to substantiate the AG#W theory? Unless that is the case then you have to be basing your acceptance on some sort of belief, faith even, in the work of others.
“I ask again what do you think we” (the people of Australia) “can do about it” (global warming due to net carbon dioxide emissions) “and please don’t say ‘reduce’ (net carbon dioxide) ’emissions’ ”.
Why when the problem has been caused by net carbon dioxide emissions do you plea with me not to say reduce net carbon dioxide emissions?
“because even if we” (the people of Australia) “were to become the worlds greatest” (carbon dioxide) “emissions reducers on a per capita basis it would not be enough”.
It would not be enough to do what?
According to the AGW liturgy the entire planet needs to make VERY big reductions in CO2 emissions and as such reducing our less than two percent of global emissions, even to zero is never going to be enough to make any kind of difference, it certainly will not be enough to avert the disaster predicted by your Profits
What profits are you talking about when you say “according to your profits would it?”
They are the spokes people for the AGW industry who profit form its millinarian predictions.
Walsunda
Note: Iain has religious delusions.
The only religious delusion in play here is your denial that for so many who espouse the AGW orthodoxy do so because it is their religion.
Walsunda
People have survived in Barrier Reef waters for up to 36 hours after their boat sank though the attentions of Tiger sharks did pose a problem. They were luckier in this regard than the Titanic passengers.
36 hours is hardly that long and as long has you have fresh water you could survive that long quite easily.
The pragmatic and practical way to ameliorate and in the long run solve the current greenhouse warming is by reducing net CO2 as Australia achieved when it had a price on carbon. As with the practical management any problem all factors contributing to the problem must be address. It is most unpragmatic and impractical to ignore the major cause. You have to be level headed and realistic about these things.
You are simply kidding yourself if you think that IS putting a” price on carbon ” is going to save the reef. We could go to zero emissions tomorrow and it won’t make the slightest bit of difference to the global level of CO2. What you claim as the cure simply can not work because at a global level it can not be made to happen.
Walsunda
Firstly I responded to your last missive at my blog
No religion involved in the reality of the current global warming and the contribution everyone makes to the net CO2 emission that cause it. Australians contribute like everyone else and on a per capita basis contribute more than the most, hence have a responsibility to to take effective and pragmatic measures to reduce their net carbon.
On the contrary if you look to how religion is defined it is very easy to fit the belief in AGW into said definition:
religion
rɪˈlɪdʒ(ə)n/
noun
noun: religionthe belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
“ideas about the relationship between science and religion”
synonyms: faith, belief, divinity, worship, creed, teaching, doctrine, theology; More
sect, cult, religious group, faith community, church, denomination, body, following, persuasion, affiliation
“the right to freedom of religion”
a particular system of faith and worship.
plural noun: religions
“the world’s great religions”
a pursuit or interest followed with great devotion.
“consumerism is the new religion”
The definintions in bold all fit the AGW belief quite well especially when you add in the rather common “the end is nigh” doom-saying.
The Queensland state governments in the last seven years have run programs to protect the water quality of the southern two thirds of the reef from agricultural runoff and are planning further expansion of these regulations.
Well that is a good thing right?
These would have had little effect on the northern one third of the reef where the worst of this year’s bleaching occurred as there is not a great deal of agriculture north of Mossman.
So what could be done that night have any measurable effect within our lifetimes?
Even in the southern two thirds of the reef global warming and climate change; in the form of higher sea surface temperatures, greater extremes between drought and flood, plus increased incidence of extreme El Nino events; has a far greater effect on the reef both directly as well as exacerbating the runoff pollution problems. Ignoring the major problem is far from pragmatic.
I ask again just what do you thing we can do about it and please don’t say “reduce emissions” because even if we were to become the worlds greatest emissions reducers on a per capita basis it wouldn’t not be enough according to your Profits now would it?
kantonysen
What we are seeing now is what denier Agencies such as Heartlands, ALEC and IPA
have achieved. Stuffing up many coral reefs around Earth, creating temperatures difficult to withstand, causing damage to Earth’s air conditioner … the cryosphere.
They have achieved these matters; and more, by holding up adaptive and mitigation responses.
That is ridiculousness incarnate! Those on your side of the argument have out spent all of those institutions by many orders of magnitude so don’t blame skepotics because your fellow Warministas have proven to be utterly impotent at getting their ideas the intellectual hegemony you desire.
Scientists from ExxnMobil anticipated climate change in the 1970s; yet, ExxonMobil financed denier groups. There is a paper trail showing what scientists were saying, and a paper trail indicating ExxonMobil was resourcing denier groups. Fact.
If an idea is both good and true then it will withstand any counter argument that your ideology is still contested says that its arguments are not as strong as you might try to claim
ExxonMobil is being investigated by a number of Attorney Generals at present. Investigations had begun with the Attorney General of New York State. Fact.
So what?
A number of US papers have commented on this, as has the Union of Concerned Scientists.
So what?
RicardoK
Straw man, Iain.
No its simply the factual truth
Awesome water quality didn’t help the northern GBR this year.
The reason to focus on Water quality is not ever going to change the high water temperatures however it is the aspect of the problem that we can clearly make a difference to
The southern GBR was saved by a fluke pulse of cold, turbid water associated with ex-cyclone Winston.
So lets hear what you would suggest that we do to solve the problem, Just make sure that what you suggest can actuality make a measurable difference because the usual whining about our coal mining is no answer.
This policy is repainting the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Actually, to go with your Titanic metaphor its more like providing a few more lifeboats that will help save some of the passengers.
RicardoK
the government clearly has a most pragmatic approach to this problem, unlike you worshipers of the Green religion. We can have a real effect on water quality issues but even if we were to shut down our entire economy we can have no effect on global emissions, in fact Air travel produces more emissions than we do globally so grounding all jet aircraft globally would do a lot more for the global equation that this country ever could.
LorrieBelling
Why do liberal commentators always use juvenile language “spendometer” are we in primary school Ian?
Because Bill Shorten used the term himself and its actually such a gift to those opposed to Labor
Restoring all the savage cuts made by LNP is an honourable thing to do and is coming out of the $50 billion that Labor will not be spending on Corporate Tax Cuts to business which is not a priority at this point in time.
How precisely is it honorable to spend money that they do not have and to have absolutely no plan to pay off the national credit cards?
GrumpyOldDog
Where’s the money for those subs and corporate tax cuts coming from?
Not the issue here
And where does the money come to pay for negative gearing, middle class welfare, subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, running the Border Protection Force and the offshore gulags.
None of which is at issue here
If I hear one more time that inane comment about ‘where is the money coming from’ I will press the Report button. You guys have absolutely no idea about anything.
Citing Labor’s Shortencommings is not agianst the community standards here
You are a complete waste of space, oxygen, water, food and time!
None of which is the issue here either, just think mine might be the very vote that tips the balance against Labor….
Doncharles
No from Turnbull’s $50 Billion magic pudding!
I believe that this is worth repeating again:The thing about that magic figure is that even if we take labor at its word those so revenues largely occur outside the forward estimates but labor’s spend occurs almost immediately within the forward estimates! Labor have done a good job of deception with this claim and you have totally fallen for it!
Doncharles
No from Turnbull’s $50 Billion magic pudding!
I believe that this is worth repeating:The thing about that magic figure is that even if we take labor at its word those so revenues largely occur outside the forward estimates but labor’s spend occurs almost immediately within the forward estimates! Labor have done a good job of deception with this claim and you have totally fallen for it!
In response to mallorywasfirst
mallorywasfirst
It’s coming from the 50billion pay rise the LNP has promised their corporate buddies.
The thing about that magic figure is that even if we take labor at its word those so revenues largely occur outside the forward estimates but labor’s spend occurs almost immediately within the forward estimates! Labor have done a good job of deception with this claim and you have totally fallen for it!
Where is the money coming from again? Oh that”s right its straight onto the “spendometer”
That is the classic bait and switch nonsense Labor supporters are famous for, because surely you would have to admit that in the end we do not have a bottomless wallet to pay for labor’s promises here and if that tax cut was cancelled Labor would still not have enough money to pay for all of their promises wracked up on Shorten’s spendometer now would we?
Ozponerised
Rubbish. Priorities.
Sure, but how about you give some priority to the truth rather than ALP propaganda?
In your quest to endorse the Labor party you ignore the sad but true fact that health spending is very much a “how long is a piece of string issue” where even if we were to spend the entirety of our GDP on health there would still be calls for more money. We simply have to live within our means in our health spending just as we do in every other aspect of government expenditure. Because if we don’t our economy will collapse and then there will be NOTHING to keep the health system afloat.
You are talking utter rubbish about the proposed tax cuts for business, beside the fact that they start off far more modestly in the forward estimates than your block capitals suggest. In your quest to endorse the Labor party you ignore the sad but true fact that health spending is very much a “how long is a piece of string issue” where even if we were to spend the entirety of our GDP on health there would still be calls for more money. We simply have to live within our means in our health spending just as we do in every other aspect of government expenditure. Because if we don’t our economy will collapse and then there will be NOTHING to keep the health system afloat.
Reply to Walsunda
Walsunda
The worlds oldest and longest continually operating scientific institution has been located for 40,000 years in a large limestone cave.
Really what institution would that be? more importantly how may the wisdom of said institution be accessed?
As for flying don’t forget it’s your total per capita emissions that count not how you rack them up.
No Wal its the global total that counts not your personal emissions
I’ve never had a frequent flier point in my life.
Well I can be sure that you have more air miles racked up than I do
Do you fly home to England to see family or do you regard that as hypocrisy.
I have never returned to the land of my birth and as I abhor the idea of air travel I am unlikely to ever do so.
You’re the one who erroneously talks about jet travel as a major source of net carbon emissions not me.
According to this site the global aviation produces about as much emissions as our national total (2% of the global total) so if you can be concerned about our national emmisons then surely you can not ignore a part of the equation that is at least equal in significance to Australia’s total emissions?
With respect to my exemption from your devout concepts you say “No as one of the climate anointed, a scientist no less, there is a very great moral obligation to not only talk the talk but also to walk the walk”.
While I may often feel anointed by the Brisbane climate, as a scientist I am exempt from your beliefs as belief plays no part in my analysis and enjoyment of life.
No, your claim to be “above mere belief (paraphrase)” is in fact a type of belief and an article of your own personal faith in “science”
We all share a great moral obligation to reduce our net carbon emissions (walk the walk in your well used metaphor) as I have already done without trying too hard; and to understand the science that explains global warming (talk the talk) as you so demonstrably have failed to do.
The thing that your limited “science” education lets you down because you simply can not legitimately divide the metaphor as you attempt to do here. The metaphor is all about being consistent in your words and deeds, and as a heretic I am under no obligation at all to know or understand your own revered texts or your own special liturgical mantras
That someone such has you, whose belief system and habits prevent them from understanding the science of climatology, global warming and climate change, can achieve low net carbon emissions demonstrates how easily such a goal can be achieved.
You see I have a “low carbon footprint” because I respect the value of energy efficiency because efficiency gives me the pay off of a happy hip pocket nerve, any effect that I may have on the global climate change equation is entirely incidental, more importantly it has nothing to do with your faith.
Rational analysis of both objective and subjective reality have combined to produce a good existential outcome.
Hmm that sentence is so full of contradictions I think that you need to study a bit more philosophy but as a prerequisite for that study I suggest you first consider the meanings of the words above that I have emboldened.
Guardian comments 11.06.2016
jonniestewpot
You don’t appreciate the difference between a liar and a bullshitter written about in the article.
The distinction drawn in the article is actually the bovine excrement
A liar wants his audience to believe what he says; a bullshitter doesn’t care, as long as he gets what he wants.
But it’s a two way relationship the naive the gullible willfully play the willing dupes.
That is a nonsense distinction because a liar also has things that he wants to achieve through his dishonesty, even if its only that he will be approved of.
He also confesses when caught – and as such is of a less dangerous stripe than Donald Trump,
The serial bullshitter Trump will mock the disabled and then deny it. He has enough cunning to see that the willing dupes will back him. He doesn’t know why all he knows is it works.
I am endlessly bemused by the politically correct who will put up with anything form someone because they are lower down in the “oppression hierarchy” than they are. Trump simply is much more honest than those from the lily-livered left. And he certainly does know why that resonates with his supporters they too are sick of the bullshit of “political correctness” and the cultural nonsense of the left’s oppression Olympics.
jonniestewpot
What threat does Trump pose? I’m honestly asking – what has he “threatened”?
Disingenuous those are two entirely different questions. Let’s start with the first the leader of any movement facilitates the conditions for what kind of country he or she wants so when Trump offers to pay the legal bills of people who assault protestors he is providing the conditions which increases violence that’s a posed threat which will only increase if he becomes president. Imagine the full state apparatus of the most powerful country in the world under his control.
Almost without exception it has been the Anti trump “protestors” who have caused the violence by exceeding what we would consider to be “peaceful protest” The internet is full of examples of them assaulting Trump supporters or attempting to disrupt Trump events
Or the destabilising rhetoric on NATO in a part of the world that has rising tensions his answer is to jack up that tension by threatening to pull out of NATO another posed threat.
NATO exists because of the Soviet Union had control of eastern Europe and now its reason for being is LONG past.
If you want actual threats there are plenty from stating he would like to punch a protestor in the face. To threatening private sponsors who use their money against him: see here. To threats about sending Hilary Clinton to prison to threatening to expose Ted Cruz’s wife secrets for political gain.
Saying you want to punch a pest in the face is a long way from the fact the fact that so many of those protestors are violent and disruptive. And being candid about how you feel about financial supporters of your opponents is just being honest because its always been the way of the world anyway.
Trump has shown a remarkable thin skin to anyone who opposes him. Such a man if given access to the levers of power would it seems be more than happy to use them against real and imagined enemies.
No the man just calls a spade a spade and his supporters love him for his candor. In fact they find his refusal to use euphemisms band the usual bullshit of political correctness to be a great virtue.I’m an Aussie so I don;t get a vote in the US so I watch the election process there with some wry amusement and my conclusion is that Trump is likely to win the presidency, mostly because he is motivating a whole lot of folk to vote who would otherwise stay home. Hillery on the other hand has only the contents of her underpants as he major selling point and I don’t think it will be enough when that November day comes around.
In response to Louise Smallman
Maybe its just that they are better at their craft and/or that many women readers actually prefer their reading not to contain too much of the endless internal emotional stuff that quite few female authors seem to specialize in.
Yes I agree, My book selection, given the huge choice is more often based upon the style of the author which can be concerned by reading the opening and secondly I look at the plot synopsis on back cover/flyleaf. The very last thing that I even care about is the content of the author’s underpants.
In response to Louise Smallman
The bottom line here has to be that publishers want to sell books and as the article points out women buy more books than men do and it would seem to me that those women would have to be buying more books by male authors…
Why should it be surprising when the majority of books published have been authored by men? It therefore follows that the majority of works that are considered great are also going to have been authored by men there fore it is entirely reasonable that the school curriculum which should be choosing works that are considered most culturally important is going to choose a majority of work by male authors.
I overall agree with your comment but just want to add one more point the article says:
Although we haven’t done a corresponding study in Australia since 2006, when reading was found as a favourite activity of 73% of women compared with 50% of men, “women are the biggest book buyers” is a refrain I hear often from writers, booksellers and publishers.
Which would suggest that women are actually choosing to by male authored books more than ones written by women.
Personally I am what would be described as an “avid reader” and the female authors that resonate with me are the ones who avoid too much of the interior dialog that seems to be the focus of female authors, the over emphasis on their protagonists feelings etc. I’m reading a Kathy Reichs novel at present and its a jolly good yarn. In fact I would happily choose her above other authors in that genre because I know she delivers a good and engaging story.
Which brings me to the point you touched on about there being no breakdown by genre is this article, I too would be very interested to see the wash up of that sort of analysis.
In response to ColinOscarPeterson
For a “sugar tax” to be effective it would have to be at a level high enough to change behavior, if it is lower than the behavior changing threshold all that it would do is extract more revenue from the public.
Secondly it is only a minority who have issues with obesity and other related diseases so it is simply not moral to financially punish the entire population for the sins of a few individuals.
Finally I use the term social engineering not create alarm but to describe the reality of the situation.
RalphFilthy
“Knows nothing the wide range of health effects and assumes it’s just diabetes and fat people…
… Decides to poo-poo it anyway”.
On the contrary I watched my late mother struggle with type 2 diabetes for years, also saw first hand the horrible ulcer that eventually cost her a leg in the end. In the same vein as the family shopper and cook I am very aware of the value of making good eating choices about its about individual autonomy and agency over meddling and social engineering.
At least you are consistently dismissive of empirically based scientific evidence and any knock-on effects to an economic macrocosm.
Its about avoiding the disingenuous sanctimony in what is simply an unjustified tax grab.
So that’s something I guess….
You guessed wrong, again
Ryan Berg
Hells yes!!! I’d like the Mc Cancer Happy meal with an extra serve of bowel cancer thanks.
I just want to enjoy my occasional indulgence in “junk” food without being financially punished for the “sins” of others.
This is just more sanctimonious social engineering clap trap, It seems obvious to me that this is just the desperate attempt to replace the declining revenue from cigarettes with yet another :”sin ” tax. What is next? pictures of diabetic ulcers on soft drink cans?
In response to Petunia Winegum
Five tweets is not by any stretch of the imagination stalking anyone Petunia
Given the fact taht we in this country produce less than 2% of global emissions how precisely do you think we could effect a meaningful change to the emissions of the rest of the world?
By all means lets critique inaction on water quality and agricultural run off because that is something that we can and should change but to pretend that we can alter something that requires (impossible to achieve) global level action is simply delusional.
How many time do you Warministsas need to be told that “per capita” measures of emissions are pure propaganda and that its the global totals that matter?
How dare you ever run an air conditioner Wal!
Surely you should just be enduring the heat as an act of penance to Gaia for the climate sins of humanity!
Heck this unbeliever uses neither heating no cooling appliances in his house no matter how hot or cold it gets.
( sarcasm)
The problem with the Malaysian solution was that it was such a bad deal for us to take more from their camps than we would be sending there.
What you have to realize is that the people in destination countries will no longer accept the idea that they have to keep welcoming an endless stream of mendicants.
Walsunda
Ideology “is quite simply a word that describes a system of belief that anyone who has thought out the way they see the world has such a system of belief, even you.”
It is not necessary to have a system of belief to think out the way you see the world. My view of the world is based on evidence and rationalism, not belief.
What you describe is still a system of belief!
I have no problems communicating what I know.
I beg to differ…
You have problems in communicating about climatology as you don’t know enough about the subject.
LOL says the guy who won’t lay out the evidence that convinced him that the AGW theory is correct!
As C.P. Snow noted many humanity graduates simply do not know enough about science and you are a prime example of this ignorance.
I had never heard of this so I looked it up and here is the relevant quote:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?[5]
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.[5]
Now I am familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. and I understand Mass and acceleration as well (being a car builder) so I would actually argue that CP snow might have had an argument in the mid fifties when he made the speech but its less valid today
Having a politician in the family, I am well aware of the importance of persuasive speeches in the democratic process but also well aware of the importance that agenda being pushed is based on evidence and reality. Effective politicians access the advice of the best scientists in their field to develop an agenda worth persuading or convincing people of.
You still need to let go of your erroneous preconceptions about what constitutes “reality” and for that matter “evidence” as well.
I’ve corrected your wacky sentence structure too.
Typos don’t count as mortal sin Wal ;o)
I note that the definition of bullshit that you provided includes “untrue talk or writing” which concurs with my statement that bullshit is “something which is not true. Were you trying to make a point there.
Maybe.
Walsunda
Is this better? Science is the best way of understanding, both subjectively and objectively, the reality of what is.
It could be OK but then again its actually quite a religious sounding position!
Your definition of orthodoxy uses theory in the sense that it is used in the humanities. Scientific theories are something else where orthodoxy does not apply.
Utter nonsense! there is simply no distinction between using the term orthodoxy in the sciences or the humanities.
Your humanities education is showing. C. P. Snow is rolling in his grave yet again.
I thought that you don’t accept the existance of an afterlife? How can anyone who is dead roll in their grave? (sarc)
Why should I provide you with the key arguments that have convinced me and 97% of other scientists in this field that the anthropogenic global warming theory is correct when it’s already been done by others but you haven’t read their papers or even the popular books for those of low scientific literacy?
I’m thinking that you are obfuscating here because you know that its not something that you can do as easily as you have been implying, even though you love to big up your own science background
To determine if the bat you revived was M. australis not M. schreibersii you would need to make some experimental measurements of the animal concerned to know which species you were really dealing with.
Frankly it does not matter one way or another at this point in time.
I have seen the experimental evidence of the existence of anthropogenic global warming as I have read the scientific papers detailing the experiments that show the existence of this process.
Well then it should be a lay down misere for you to cite that evidence to me
but you are still squibing it instead.
You can do the same and don’t need me to hold your hand through this library research.
I am trying to defer to you claimed expertise here by giving you the opportunity to explain how you came to accept the theory as valid Your continued prevarication makes me think that yours is actually a position based on faith which is why you won’t cite your evidence.
My acceptance of the existence of these processes is based on the evidence provided in these papers and the scientific reasoning expounded by the authors. There is no faith involved.
If you can’t list those papers why should I think that they are why you believe?
You too can find out about the real world by reading the scientific literature or if that’s too hard the popular books such as the one I recommended previously. I also recommend learning about protein synthesis in ribosomes, a process with ramifications way beyond sausages.
Still spruiking Flanery ?
eye roll!!!
Walsunda
Because Ed and I went out with the same girl you somehow come to the erroneous realisation that I’m a woman. To paraphrase the Talking Heads, you’ve stopped making sense.
You are a man? OK, apologies for the error.
I haven’t avoided Al Gore’s movie but as with many other movies I haven’t got around to seeing it. If there are statements in the movie about the science that you claim are hyperbole and exaggeration, tell me what they are.
It has been one of the seminal icons of the propagation of the AGW theory and you haven’t seen it? Well take the time to watch it and then get back to me. Please!
My daughter went to Copenhagen. I realize this more than most. But scientists and effective moderate politicians are no stranger to tasks which are hard at many levels. That something is difficult or hard to do doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
You can’t honestly tell me that you think it can be don though can you? Come on be honest here!
Neither you nor I not need faith to know that something is achievable. The evidence of recent human history shows that agreements can be achieved as happened recently in Paris.
What did the Paris conference actually achieve in REAL terms? and excess of platitudes and empty promises
I note that you reproduce my earlier posts or sections thereof with no clear demarcation between what I said and what you are saying.
NO I use the “blockquote” facility and it clearly differentiates the quoted text on my PC screen presenting it in a slightly different shade of Grey if you are viewing on a phone that may be less clear though.
To claim that per capita emissions are irrelevant as you do is to lose contact with the reality that people produce net greenhouse emissions. Total emissions of any group of people is a function of their per capita emissions multiplied by the number of people.
Sure I understand that But. and its the important point, the problem is claimed to be the total of the emissions so a per capita measure is irrelevant to the end goal
All counties contribute to the total world net carbon emissions no matter how small or how large their population. Some such as Australia punch above their weight.
Its still all about the totals Wal
China is the world’s biggest emitter of net carbon emissions but it’s also the worlds biggest country.
China’s per capita emissions are similar to those of the European Union. India’s population is nearing that of China but their per capita emissions are much lower.
Totals again!
You can’t show show me when, where or how its been tested can you.There not the room to show you all of that here but I have already referred you to one popular book on the subject and the copious scientific literature on the subject is not hard to find. You only yourself to blame for your lack of knowledge.
I’ll narrow the task a bit for you Wal How about you explain to me how it could have been warmer than it is now during the medieval Warm period and the time of the Roman empire even though the CO2 concentrations were apparantly so much lower than they are now.
If Lomberg bases his knowledge of AGW or anthropogenic global warming on belief it’s not surprising that his academic career is so lacklustre.
He also lacks the scientific, engineering and economic skills to assess the viability of current means of effectively reducing net carbon emissions.You would have to ask him why he accepts the AGW theory and as I understand it he is an economist.
Walsunda
I have recommended a number of times that you research and read the copious readily available scientific literature on climatology, global warming and climate change. You have not done this but instead expect me to, within the the word limits applied to posts on this forum, provide you with a potted summary.
Which is not unreasonable in any way
I’m not here to spoon feed you even if such a task could be done within that word limit.
Well why are so afraid to even try?
Other scientists have already published popular accounts of the science of global warming accessible to those such as yourself with relatively low levels of scientific literacy.
Well that should mean that someone such as yourself should eb able to do so as well
One local example is the book entitled “The Weather Makers” by eminent Australian scientist Tim Flannery.
Flannery???????
Pardon me while I have a laughing fit!!! He is not actually even a “climate scientist” is he?
Walsunda
“YOU are the one USING ‘ideology only as a disparagement which is very clearly a perjorative..”
You are deluded in that you see disparagement, admonishment and perjorative within what is a perfectly civilised and rational, rigorous and robust argument.
Like a lot of people you think that “ideology” is something that only thise you consider to be extreme have. It is quite simply a word that describes a a system of belief and anyone who has thought out the way they see the world has such a system of belief, even you.
Elsewhere you said you like a good argument. Why haven’t you addressed my repeated criticism of ideology per se?
Because one can not actually have a criticism of “ideology per se” You can certainly have criticisms of particular ideologies, like Marxism or Islam or the ideology of the ALP or the LNP
“You need to read the definition” (of rhetoric) “I posted again Wal.”
The definition of rhetoric that you provided makes no mention of relevance to my criticism of your use of belief in suggesting erroneously that there are only two types of rhetoric and that rhetoric is not based on evidence and hence reality.
That makes NO sense at all Wal
Your comment above about two types of reality sounds like something you learnt in a Micky Mouse communications course.
If there is one failing of science graduates it is that they often have severe weaknesses as communicators. That said my understanding comes more from understanding the role that persuasion plays in democratic politics. You should read more of the Bard or listen to some of the great speeches from history. That is where you will see examples of some very effective rhetoric. Have you ever heard any of Kennedy’s speeches? Or Martin Luther KIng’s “I have a dream speech? How about Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches” address to the British people when it looked like The Nazi’s would invade?
“You post enough confus(ed) sentences”.
The confusion is all yours.
Yes thanks to your some times wacky sentence structure!
“In the local parlance to spread bullshit is to lie and deceive”.
Bullshit is something that is not true. Whether this is because you have lied and deceived, I don’t know. It’s not true because it’s not based on evidence and hence is divorced from reality.
Definition:
bullshit
ˈbʊlʃɪt/
vulgar slang
noun
noun: bullshit1.
stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense.verb
verb: bullshit; 3rd person present: bullshits; past tense: bullshitted; past participle: bullshitted; gerund or present participle: bullshitting1.
talk nonsense to (someone) in an attempt to deceive them.
Walsunda
Science is the best way to understand the reality of what is both objectively and subjectively.
objectively and subjectively.what? You need to add more to this sentence for it to make any sense at all.
Science also has great practical utility in understanding and dealing with welding, climate change, biodiversity and epidemiology.
Sure
Accepting the validity of a scientific theory is based on the evidence gathered by means of numerous experiments. This has nothing to do with orthodoxy which is a term associated with religion and some parts of the humanities. Science is by nature of it processes unorthodox.
That is nonsense this is the definition I am using:
orthodoxy
ˈɔːθədɒksi/
noun
noun: orthodoxy; plural noun: orthodoxies1.
authorized or generally accepted theory, doctrine, or practice.
“monetarist orthodoxy”
synonyms: doctrine, belief, conviction, creed, dogma, credo, theory, view, idea, tenet, teaching, practice, received wisdom, article of faith
“the prevailing aesthetic orthodoxies”
Telling you to reads the readily available scientific literature on global warming, climate change and climatology in general is by no means a cop out. Why haven’t you done it already if you are so interested in the topic.? You’re the one copping out by not reading the literature.
I have essentially asked you to provide the key arguments s that convince you that the AGW theory is correct and you repeatedly squib it as you do again here
As for proof, what is your proof for the existence of Miniopteris australis?
Well I had one get it self caught in a water bucket in my house a few years ago and I had to warm it in my hands to stop it from dying from hypothermia. Utterly amazing experience.
What is your proof for the existence of the force of gravity?
I can see its effect every day
What is your proof for the existence of protein synthesis at ribosomes?
Why do I need to know that? will the process stop If I can’t prove it works? I don’t think so.
What is your proof for the existence of global greenhouse warming? Is the fourth question different from the preceding three other questions?
That is the question you keep avoiding answering
If you want to know the names of the null hypotheses involved in the many experiments unraveling the reality global warming, climate change and its causes, you will have to read the scientific literature yourself. It will do you good to do some proper study.
If you are so good at science then providing the evidence for your belief in the theory should not be that hard.
There is nothing to stop you doing this. Morphine is a cop out
There is a total lack of desire to allow you to continually cop out of substantiating your claims that the theory has been substantiated “by the scientific method” I say YOU should prove that claim or admit that your acceptance of it is an act of faith not reason.
Walsunda
“you are wrongly using rhetoric as a perjorative.”
I’m not. I’m criticising rhetoric as being divorced from reality.
It can’t be that because “rhetoric” applies to ALL forms of persuasive speech or writing which is exhaustively inclusive
My partner knew Ed when they were both teenagers. He was very obsessed with music as were the other boys in the band. I saw him with the Laughing Clowns in the early 80s. I didn’t know then that he hadn’t returned by friend’s brother’s Miles Davis records. I also didn’t know then that that friend would become the love of my life. We went and saw Ed playing solo electric guitar at Woodford this summer just gone. Wonderful music.
Oh I had not previously realized that you are a woman
“I am truly surprised that you are unfamiliar with this film” (produced by Al Gore).
I am familiar with the existence of the film. Why would I see it when I’ve read the scientific literature on climatology, climate change and global warming. I was studying climate change in the mid seventies.
You are being rather remiss by avoiding it when arguing about the topic here, Not because its has virtue but because it contains a great deal of hyperbole and exaggeration.
“Yes and motherhood is a wonderful thing” and like effective public health programs involving scientists such as myself cooperating with our colleagues from many different countries is also a good thing to do. There is much goodness and fine moral behaviour in this world.
I am not disparaging what has been achieved through international co-operation but you can not have failed to realize just how hard it is to secure any agreement at a global level and more important how hard it is for such agreements to be maintained in the longer term at a global level. That is at the core of my point here the “cure ” for climate change requires a level of international co-operation unprecedented in human history so why should we have any faith that it is achievable? The evidence of human history certainly shows that such an agreement has never been achieved before so what makes you think that it can be done now?
Global warming can be reduced by reducing greenhouse emissions as much as practically possible. The complete cessation that you suggest is most likely impractical, so you are wrong.
That is prevarication which belies the fact that the biggest players , like China and India are going to be increasing their emissions for the the foreseeable future no matter what lip service they may pay to “climate change”
The per capita emissions of both China and India are both way below those of Australia.
You know that in this context “per capita” emissions are simply irrelevant if your beloved theory is correct then what matters is the TOTAL amount of emissions from any nation and according to this china is the world’s biggest emitter
The theory is not wrong as it has been thoroughly tested. Bjorn Lomberg is neither a scientist nor an economist and has not produced work of sufficient quality to be accepted for a post at any Australian university even with a substantial financial inducement from climate change denying ex PM Tony Abbott.
Yet you can’t show me when, where or how its been tested can you? As for Lomborg what is significant about his work is that he believes in AGW BUT he also appreciates that the cure being pursued is simply not going to work and that its a false hope to think that it ever could.
Walsunda
“Ideology is not by definition a perjorative”.
You are the one mentioning perjorative. I am critical of ideology as it’s not evidence based or in other words has lost contact with reality.
YOU are the one USING “ideology only as a disparagement which is very clearly a pejorative
“I work with the simple and true belief that there are only two types of rhetoric, that which is effective in persuading and that which isn’t.”
Truth is about what really is. It’s not about belief. There are many types of rhetoric but all are not based on evidence of reality hence are synonymous with the Australian term bullshit.
You need to read the definition I posted again Wal
It is obvious that you completed a degree in communications. Your fantasy about people who find these two terms synonymous is not borne out by my public speaking abilities nor those of my family.
Really? You post enough confused sentences to suggest otherwise Wal
“your mistaken belief that Rhetoric is by definition bad or a form of deception.”
The terms “bad” and “deception” are your terms in respect to rhetoric not mine. My criticism of rhetoric is that it’s not based on evidence and hence not connected to reality. It doesn’t tell you the truth about the real world.
You have repeatedly suggested that “rhetoric is synonymous with “Bullshit” and in the local parlance to spread bullshit is to lie and deceive.
“You can’t see it” (scientists who overestimate the certainty of their projections) “because you agree with their message.”
Scientists find out the reality of what is happening. Reality is not a message it’s simply what is. I agree with their science in most instances and hence accept the reality of what they find. I can’t see instances where scientists exaggerate the certainty of their projections because I can’t find such instances. You have to find something before you can see it.
There is none so blind as she who will not see.
SimonEsposito
Ridiculous, very likely. But impossible? In my experience of school and university there’s nothing in the core subjects of Arts and Science for anyone not to enjoy and score 50% in across twelve years of schooling, and without the ugly cramming they do in some countries.
I have two school age children and I have been rather disappointed by just how superficial so much of the teaching actually is however I also realize that children are already overburdened with a great deal of SJW indoctrination and what you suggest would simply not work because a lot of the children simply can’t absorb that much information in the time frame you are suggesting.
Any eighteen-year-old should be able to travel back to 1650 and intuitively explain the principles of modern knowledge to a scientist of the day. It’s only our ‘el cheapo’ education system that makes it impossible.
That and a lack of any workable time travel technology
We probably agree, more than anything. I don’t think any precious time from those years should be wasted on training specifically for jobs.
Being functionally literate and numerate is a core skill that is needed as is understanding of our history culture and dare I say it how to behave with all of the right social graces.
But nothing is a waste if it has anything to do with how stuff works (including society), how to find out how stuff works, and how not to be bullshitted to.
Much of that is really the responsibility of parents though, and to expect the schools to teach such things is to give the generally left wing teaching profession too much influence over our children. Sadly those in the education unions think that they know better than parents but they are wrong.
Walsunda
There is a shit load of philosophical stuff that doesn’t make sense. It’s clear that you don’t understand what reality is.
No I am entirely sure that I understand what reality is, for me, but the problems arrive from questions about whether reality can be properly described as being objective or subjective. That is a deep philosophical question all on its own
I have not suggested you are younger than you are but it’s clear you are not too old to learn new tricks.
I learn new welding tricks all the time Wal but that is because they have practical value to me. Formal scholarship would simply take up too much of my time, time I don’t have to spare at present.
There are advantages in the challenges presented by formal scholarship when it comes to learning a discipline. You may not be up to making the effort. Pain killers don’t help.
I have been on Morphine for quite a while Wal and although it does allow me to function you are right that it does have some drawbacks in terms of concentration.
Climate change is a reality not an orthodoxy. You are confused. AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is an established scientific theory not an untested hypothesis.
Accepting the validity of the theory constitutes the orthodoxy I am referring to here Wal
It has withstood the tests of many experiments. It explains the mechanisms behind the change in the temperature of the Earth’s climate that we have seen.
what tests and what experiments Wal? and please don’t cop out and tell me to refer to the literature, or to learn maths and chemistry
Theories of anthropogenic global warming are as provable as any scientific theory.
How precisely is it provable?
As many null hypotheses have been experimentally disproved these theories of anthropogenic global warming have with stood the test of decades of scientific scrutiny and hence best reflect the reality we are dealing with.
Name them and explain how this was achieved.
meant
when you get to China and India they will go to war rather than forgo development.
Walsunda
The worst mistake you can make in politics and advertising is to believe your own bullshit or rhetoric.
On bullshit I agree but as I have previously explained you are wrongly using rhetoric as a pejorative.
Politics is also best when reality based and even the art forms that I like are best when connected to reality as is the art of Emily Kngwarreye and the post punk explorations of Ed Kuepper.
Are you talking about the Saints by any chance?
Much of your bullshit or rhetoric about climatology derives from your lack of understanding of the underlying science and of how science functions as a discipline.
Not so, I do understand how it works well enough its just that I won’t genuflect to the priests in their white coats.
In the light of that it’s far from silly to suggest that you would greatly increase your ability to understand the scientific literature on the subject by expanding your scientific background beyond high school biology.
Maybe that would be useful but I have nether the time nor the inclination to do so.
I’ve not seen any movie by Al Gore.
try here then but it will be an hour and a half of your life that you will never get back! the point of me citing this is of course that its one of the biggest propaganda tools used to spread the message of doom and gloom about the climate. I am truly surprised that you are unfamiliar with this film
I’m not sure what you base your knowledge of global politics on
About 45 years of studying it, being interested in it and argeuing about it.
of science is that much can be achieved at the international level in response to problems identified and solvable by modern science.
Yes and motherhood is a wonderful thing
Your perception of human nature has more to do with ideology than fact. Scientific theories are hypotheses which have withstood the test of repeated tests over time. To suggest they are moot is to lose contact with reality and enter the realm of bullshit.
Correct me If I’m wrong but isn’t the claimed “cure” for climate change a total cessation of all man-made GHG emissions, not in a century but within the next decade or so? Do you think this can be achieved? I don’t because apart form some radical Greenies in the first world no one is even thinking about doing it and when you get to China and India they will go to war rather than for go development. Thus it becomes a moot point for us to argue about the validity of a theory that if wrong simply does not matter but if correct there is nothing that we can do at a global political level which will stop it. Its whay I have a fair bit of time for Bjorn Lomborg who argues that all of the focus on mitigation is futile and we had better think about adaptation instead.
Walsunda
“But its” (the Guardian’s) “definitely NOT a science journal is it.”
You’re the only one talking about it being a science journal.
No you are implying it is one because you keep admonishiong me because U am not corresponding to its articles in a scientific enough manner
The Guardian provides better coverage of scientific discoveries than other Australian newspapers.
Hmm I think that the Oz does OK but both it and the Guardian are both willing to publish longer pieces on the subject
Sensible moderate, middle of the road politics is not based on the ideologies of either the extreme left or the extreme right of politics but instead is based on reality, which is why it is the best way to govern a country.
As I said all of those who play at the game of politics have ideologies even those in the center that you are eulogizing here Ideology is not by definition a pejorative as you are trying to suggest
You can keep your ideologically bound politics which is divorced from reality.
Rubbish as I showed you previously my politics are very much of the center and I am utterly pragmatic in how I approach the issues
As the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques, rhetoric has no connection with reality and hence is synonymous with the term bullshit.
No matter what you may think even your style of arguing is a form or rhetoric so if you want to be admitting to producing bovine excrement then we can go with you understanding. But I work on the simple and true belief that there are only two types of rhetoric, that which is effective in persuading and that which isn’t. The claim that “rhetoric” is only to be seen in pejorative terms is really the plaintive cry of those who are utterly ineffectual at either public speaking or persuasive writing denouncing those who are more skilled with tongue or pen.
What those on the left do is of no importance to someone such as I on the moderate right of politics, but in any discussion on science rhetoric or bullshits lack of connection to reality is a valid criticism.
I think that you are far more left wing that you think you are
I don’t lack rhetorical skills but realise their limitations and prefer to be truthful rather than to bullshit.
You really need to get over you mistaken belief that Rhetoric is by definition bad or a form of deception its isn’t.
I find much of the advertising I see on TV and receive by means of cold calls on the phone to be rhetoric or bullshit. They are not trying to communicate any information of use to me. Communication degrees are notorious for being divorced from reality. The mute button was one of the great inventions of the 20th century.
I agree with you about the mute button but mostly I am to lazy to use it. as for anyone who cold calls me I am on the “do not call” register and I delight in reminding those callers that they should be fecund and departing form my electronic presence.
I have not seen the scientists who are the players in the field of modern climatology or climate science overestimate the certainty of their projections. You claim to have seen this but have offered no proof.
You can’t see it because you agree with their message
Walsunda
I realised you were talking in metaphor but stated reality to show what a poor metaphor that old aphorism is particularly for someone of your relatively tender years.
There is a shit load of philosophical stuff about defining “reality” and I simply don’t see it the way that you do. If I was a woman I might be flattered by suggesting that I am younger than I am.
It is a shame for you that you no longer wish to learn.
I try to learns something new every day WaL but i have no interest in taking up formal scholarship if any subject.
Indeed it’s the analytical skills of a lifetime in science that stops me falling for trite orthodoxy.
But you are firmly welded to the orthodoxy of “climate change”
You are stuck in the orthodox rhetorical loops of your arts degree training with minimal connection to reality and logic.
I am in fact quite logical but unlike you I don’t see the logic of futile belief in the AGW hypothesis when it is unproveable one way or the other and even if it was provable we can’t do anything about it,
Walsunda
This is a general magazine which means it concerns itself with politics, science, the arts and many other topics.
But its definitely NOT a science journal is is?
Sensible middle of the road politics is based not on ideology but like science it is evidence based.
ALL politics is based on one ideology or another and to think taht any brand or branch of thinking is above or out side of ideology is just silly and wrong.
Rhetoric is a polite term for bullshit.
No not in the least Here is the definition I go by.
rhetoric
ˈrɛtərɪk/
noun
noun: rhetoric
the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.
I realize that many from the left try to use the word only a a pejorative but they are utterly wrong to do so. Its about how we try to persuade others to concur with our own opinions. It was considered to be one of the classical skills of player in politics regardless of their ideology and frankly its only those lacking in rhetorical skill who consider it to be “bullshit”.
If that’s all you learnt in your degree you have my sympathy and further encouragement to study a reality based discipline.
Both my Drama and my media studies were about trying to understand about how ideas can be effectively communicated, learning about things like how advertising works and how works of art communicate their core concepts have served me well when considering the politics of the issues you and I have been discussing in these threads. When it comes to your favorite, Climate change, I have repeatedly seen players grossly over estimate the certainty of their predictions and rely on emotional arguments and all sorts of dodgy persuasive devices and when I point this out the claim that I need a science background to do so is silly.
Scientific argument is based on evidence and logic not on rhetoric or bullshit.
What is Al Gore”s film if its not an example of “Rhetoric or Bullshit” No side of an argument is free from using hyperbole or exaggeration if they think the ends justify the means .
You may delude yourself that you are countering scientific arguments with your rhetoric or bullshit but you a failing abysmally to make a scientific counter argument.
my primary aim here is to point out the politics of the issue are NOT on your side because as I have pointed out MANY times no matter how right you may be about the science(and you could be) I know global politics and I know human nature and its a scientific fact that we humans simply can not work together in common cause at a global level for the millennia that your AGW theory says that we need to do if we are to “solve” the climate problem. Beyond that simple truth the validity of the theory is entirely a moot point.
Walsunda
You’re not a dog. You’re human and you’re not that old.
You are too literal Wal its a metaphor and I am old enough to value my time enough not to waste it (and incur a debt) by taking on further study.
The best way to mitigate the depredations of ageing is to learn something.
I have done so and as a consequence I am now a reasonably passable mig welder
If you wish to comment on scientific matters you should first learn about that which you wish to comment on. If only to stop making a fool of yourself.
Actually I think your thinking has been just a little too funneled through the filter of your scientific background when it comes to discussion these issues because it has made you far too much of a slave to orthodox thinking.
Fucmal
As an English graduate
After reading many of your posts, I take it you are about my age and gained your degree back at a time when grammar and spelling was not a priority in education.
How old are you then?
Your answer to the question is false and shows you know nothing of the scientific method “so please”.
How is my answer “false” and “so please” what precisely? You need to finish that sentence better if it is to have any meaning at all.
Fucmal
No it is a question that is worded to specify if you know anything about the scientific method quite basic really.
As an English graduate I am well aware that the way in which we both select and order our words is most important in ensuring that the meaning that we wish to impart is actually the meaning which us understood by the recipient of our message. As such I dispute your claim quoted above because I certainly do understand how the scientific method works and I still think that your original question still has a serious problem with specificity.
So I shall rephrase the question to suit a more general field.
Which I will take as a general admission that I was right to query your question.
What is the goal of a research scientist in any field of science?
The answer is of course to learn more about their topic of study
This is a question that basically asks you if you have an understanding of the scientific method.
No its a question about the scientist’s job description
Walsunda
Are you blaming the quality of the teaching in your Drama and Language in the Media Degree for the manner in which you “argue” on line? I suppose drama and language in the media is not a good grounding for scientific arguments.
As I have pointed out to you before this venue is not a scientific journal it is a forum about politics and even when the topics here have a scientific question at their heart they are still really about the politics of that issue. Thus my degree gives me a more than adequate background in understanding the rhetorical structures of the arguments put and the best way of countering those arguments.
Walsunda
You should study some science.
Have you heard the one about an aging canine and the futility of trying to teach him new tricks?
Fucmal
No they need to be competent in numeracy and literacy and the basics of science.
Are their any of the LNP or you for that mater competant in the basics of science.
Of course there are
Answer this question
What is the goal of a research scientist?
This is such a vague question and one that is surely dependent upon which “research scientist” you are talking about that you think that there is a single definitive answer for you question is very concerning and shows that you have a rather narrow and blinkered way of thinking.
If you cant answer this question please shut up.
Of course I can answer any question but you will have to be far more clear cogent and specific in how you frame your question first.
Walsunda
Says a man with a degree in “English literature”.
My degree is actually in “Drama and Language in the media” rather than literature but its because I have such a degree that I know what bollocks so many humanities courses are.
bestusername
You and your Gamergate playmates are one of a million reasons why Gender Studies is a valid subject.
Tell me what the rest are please because I need a good laugh!
truthrevealed
Its called “education”, even if the courses that are studied dont take into relevant occupations, these people have a higher level of education, which broadens their minds, their understanding of many things, their future prospects, even if it is to become an entrepreneur, a business owner, an innovator.
I used to think like that bit then I got my degree before the internet and other tools for the autodidact made self education so much easier.
Not too many people these days stay in the same occupation, especially those with University educations, they have many different & diverse occupations, but the bottom line is, they have had a university education, which is not a waste of money, its the beginning of their careers, sometimes to be in occupations they would never have dreamt of.
That is the eternal line that is used to justify humanities degrees but
having got one that I have never used (except for arguing online) I am no longer convinced its all that true any more.
Take this away, & we are all the less for it.
Education is the key that opens many doors, & educating only the brightest is an even bigger mistake. Many students may struggle through, but if they have that burning desire to succeed, they are in a way more likely to be successful in life.
Because they want it more.
The thing about degrees is that when they are rared then they have higher value in the way that you can leverage them to build yourself a better future, but when they have become ubiquitous they give you no advantage at all. So the higher the percentage of our high school kids we send to Uni the less value they get for their efforts.
further it has got to the ridiculous situation where degrees are now being asked for as a prerequisite for jobs that will not even use a single bit of the things that have been studied.
GrumpyOldDog
You have always posted ridiculous comments, but this one must surely take the cake for ignorance and stupidity.
So kindly explain HOW what I am saying is wrong and why having ever more of our young people wasting years of their life learning things that they will never use again in their working lives is a good way to spend public money?
Just go away and let the real human beings work out how to make this world a better and fairer place for everyone.
Pragmatism does not sap ones humanity you know.
SimonEsposito
Iain_Hall: The only way I could possibly agree with you is if we improved our school education so much that by the end of Year 12 everyone had achieved the equivalent of a basic combined Arts & Science bachelor’s degree.
That is both impossible and ridiculous
But that idea needs funding, anyway. And – sorry, however you cut it – education these days (even for engineers, bless them) means getting broad perspectives on society (gender!), science (climate!), history and critical thinking (the bullshit detector!). Just think of it as Liberal Values and you’ll be fine with it.
No they need to be competent in numeracy and literacy and the basics of science.
Fucmal
On education, Labor says it will introduce a Student Funding Guarantee to remove the need for higher tertiary fees. It also wants to boost university degree completions by 20,000 graduates each year from 2020.
notice how this line does not say that these extra graduates have to be in STEM fields the next line which does mention STEM does not say that these new palaces have to be in STEM either
It wants science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) occupations to become a “national strength,” and will offer 100,000 Stem award degrees over five years, with the entire Hecs-Help debt to be written off upon graduation.
Its actually making no claim about how much of those 20K places will be in STEM now is it? They just want a higher attendance at UNIs in general
tiggerhigh
I know one so called Australian that would benifit from a Uni degree, Ian you were not even able to grasp the core of the higher education part …
STEM!!!!!!!
I have a degree from UQ and its spelt IAIN
Trish Mo
Seriously? ‘useless learning’? You argue for less education?
I am arguing for a much better focused education spend and that means we try to produce graduates with useful skills at the end of higher learning.
You do know that access to education is a primary indicator for health, wealth, lack of crime etc, ie well being in general, on both an individual and state level?
That is only so IF the learning gives a graduate a kick-start to their adult life and a useful return for their time effort and money. Something like “Gender studies” is utterly and completely useless
And then say the left is regressive? Sorry but that is just an astonishingly ignorant statement!
You simply need to stop remembering what a grand time you had a t uni and ask yourself the ultimate question? does that effort make someone a more useful member of our society or does it just give them a flash looking CV to tote around during an extended period of looking for something worthwhile to do with their lives?
happyhorizon
I completely disagree. Who gets to decide what is useful?
The society that ultimately has to pay for the education
Let people learn and expand, life is complicated and we need broad thinking.
And there are lots of free MOOC courses that anyone can enroll in to do that.
Who wants to live in a world that tells people their interests and talents are worthless?
Realists
That’s not only cruel but self defeating.
Its all about value for the expenditure
Robyn Chapman
Evidence that the country needs more rather than less education.
How so?
quintal
Hi Iain
To some extent I agree.
:o)
But given that the STEM subjects are the way to progress why is it that the Liberlas are science averse and hellbent on dumbing our country down?
There is sadly already a great shortage of jobs for graduates of theses disciplines
Think CSIRO as an example.
Even given more funding they can ot possibly employ ally of those we are training in STEM
Think of university as a place for the young liberals to polish their infighting skills while studying law so they can ascend to the privilege into which they have been born.
We have 150 members in the Reps how many apparatchiks (for all parties ) do we need?
My whole point here is that we should be focusing tertiary education on producing the well trained professionals that we need NOT just providing extended schooling that serves no great social purpose costs the society and the individuals a lot of money
On tertiary education it beggars belief to claim that having more young people complete useless degrees will be of any benefit to them or the country. The only people who will benefit from such an increase is the staff who will teach them and the institutions that will such government revenue to fiance this useless learning.
What we need instead is a freeze on new places in our universities and true merit based entrance to study that will create the professionals that the country needs NOT more people who have degrees in “gender studies” or other courses for activists to blight our society with the regressive left’s silly values.
MikeTaree
Depends where you live. Despite my user name I now live in the NSW Northern Rivers and my shopping day takes me to Aldi and Coles at Casino which are just round the corner from each other. Dead simple to check the Coles catalogue online, make a shopping list for both stores, hit Aldi first for the bulk (which are definitely not “generic” as in the 1980s, they are pretty top quality) then hit Coles for any good specials and the regular items that I buy there such as maple bacon. Then lunch at the RSL next door.
Perfect shopping day.
My shopping day is like yours may day out and like you I have my rituals and I use the same process each week. My wife usually gives me a list of things that she particularly wants but as its never exhaustive I simply always start at one end of the supermarket and work my way up and down the aisles from one end to the other finishing at the frozen food so it is out of the freezer for the minimum time. Further because I always park in the same part of the car park if I can I walk past Aldi on arrival and departure so I could easily divert there if I wanted too. But it takes me a little under an hour to do the main shop I simply don’t think its worth the extra time to split my shopping between two stores. Oh and I too have a choice of venues for a nice lunch afterwords.
I do the family shopping and have done so for more than forty years so I am well acquainted with the hype form all retailers and there really isn’t that much in it between Coles and Woolies on your total spend and the few times I have been into Aldi I have been rather unimpressed by its all generic offerings. I like to buy the brands that I have come to like and which I know will meet my expected standards.
Now I could, as some shoppers do, become obsessed about chasing the specials and splinting my main shopping depending on who has what at the cheapest price for various commodities but it actually takes an awful lot of your time to do that. Instead I buy essentially the same things each week and try not to be seduced by the special offers unless its something I was going to buy anyway. For me though its NOT all about the money I save when I can and you can do a lot of saving if you buy big ticket items like coffee or Olive oil when it comes up on the cyclic special schedule. Your time is worth something too so shopping in the same place can save you a lot of time because you do learn the layout of the store that way.
I think you must be making that up no NBN would be that bad
I enjoyed it more when it was a State Forrest Janee as did many other locals the change of status was simply Labor party politicking rather than meeting any need for the place to be a National Park.
Janeee I
A predictable response Iain, but entirely your right, of course. If you don’t already live in Queensland, maybe you should move there (particularly given what the Senate is going to look like in the Federal Parliament post July 2; I don’t think you will find it pretty).
As Wal points out I do live in Queensland and I have done so for the majority of my life. I must correct a couple of errors in his explanation to you, while I do live near Mt Mee I am actually a bit further south that Wal thinks I am and while he may think declaring the former state Forrest a national park is an absolutely good thing I don’t think it is as good as he does for a number of reasons, firstly it is very far form being in any sense pristine as it has been harvested for firstly red ceder and the eucalyptus saw logs for more than a century, secondly I am concerned about the reluctance to do adequate hazard reduction burning in “national parks” and thirdly locking up the renewable timber resources is not such a good idea to me. And Yes I have spent a fair bit of time in what is now that National park
The interesting thing about the abolition of the upper house is that it was done by the ALP, that said I don’t think that having just one house in the state parliament is such a bad thing if it saves us from the pernicious influence of the Greens and other minor parties who want to have more influence than they deserve based on their vote at elections.
Janeee
Well, I will concede this to you.
A good start
Though you don’t know much about how legislation works,
You keep saying that but you are still wrong
nor how to construct an argument,
Your mistake here is thinking that not having the same politics as you do is equivelent to being unable to frame an argument.
you are very good at being patronizing. Well done.
Its one of the few privileges of being a curmudgeonly old codger…
Janeee
You would do better to educate yourself about the way the legislative process actually works, because you clearly do not understand it, and to rant less.
My dear I expect that I have forgotten more about parliamentary practice than you even know or understand, as for “ranting” I simply don’t do it.
Democrat22
“Pie in the Sky” cannot be regarded as argument, it is simply insult.
No it isn’t is an entirely apt descriptor of any policy dreamed up by the Greens as this definition shows
Janeee
1) Evidence of not doing enough to protect the environment
Lets see how that holds up
the great barrier reef
Sure I think that the government should do more on addressing the things it can change and it is trying
the depletion of groundwater
definitely addressing this one
This one like the Barrier reef is a “how long is a piece of string” thing they are doing what tehy can
pollution of aquifers
is that really a problem? please explain
and this is just off the top of my head
eye roll
2) The fact that the legislation passed by a government is repealed. this can happen to any legislation, whether inspired by a minority party or the government of day. The percentage of the voters who support the Greens is irrelevant to the role they can play in the legislative process.
No Janeee in a democracy numbers mean everything
YOu don’t understand the legislative process and how it works and you are not interested in evidence
.
Gee my having followed politics for more than 50 years suggests otherwise
You are simply interested in having an anti-greens rant that is not based on an accurate understanding of our parliamentary system and is uninterested in evidence. End of story.
My comment on this topic was not long enough to qualify as a rant and I don’t need to apologize for thinking that the Greens are loopy.
Janeee @ 7m ago said:
The evidence does not suggest that the major parties have done enough on environmental protection.
What evidence Janeee?
Secondly, you misunderstand the nature of the legislative process. Incumbency is not necessary to have legislation passed into law, so to say that the Greens have no power to implement their agenda because they are not the government is simply incorrect.
Unless the party which has a majority in the legislature is prepared to support a private members bill it won’t get past the first reading stage
They have used their parliamentary presence to impede legislation to which they are opposed and they have successfully amended legislation that does support their agenda. The pie in the sky argument is just wrong.
When the Greens were in cahoots with the Gillard government every thing the leveraged their vote to achieve was both a disaster and repealed as soon as Labor lost office. Even so with less than 9% of the vote they simply can’t expect to have to prove their pudding with any eating at all.
austmel
I don’t think he’s infamous.
I am actually, even though it is rather undeserved
He’s just another right wing troll without any logical argument.
My argument here is entirely logical
His comment above is typical of the argument or evidence free nonsense he constantly posts.
If you want evidence that The Greens can’t form government kindly consult the electoral results from the last election
Halimede
“lock everything up mentality of the Greens “
Tried to set foot on a mining or forestry operation lately? Even those that are on crown or public land? No, you haven’t, because you can’t. They are “Locked up”.
Tried to exercise your democratic right to free assembly and political expression by protesting lately? In a number of states in Australia Lib/Lab parliaments have attempted to make this illegal, additionally arbitrarily banning people from entering public spaces, effectively “locking up” even places like the CBD of cities, harbours, national parks, and public parks.
I’ll give you credit for the attempted bait and switch but we both know taht si not what I was talking about.
MadDuck
It’s up to the electoirate to decide whether it might remain in the sky or fall to the plate… this is why Parties announce policies before elections. The Greens are a Party. This is a policy. There is an election a month ahead.
Sure but the undeniable reality here is that at a little over 8% of the vote they can not form a government even if they were to double their vote.
Janeee
You seemed to have missed the more obvious point is that the Liberal and Labor Parties have been in power and have done very little to protect the environment.
that is simply not true and you know it, were it not for teh Major parties we would not have any national parks or legislation to enforce environmental standards in development. Now you may well argue that they have not done enough but just look at the rest of the world and make the comparison, we do better than most nations on the planet.
Based on the evidence, locking up is better for the environment than open slather.
Well no that is simply not true
Face it, you are just anti-green and anti the environment and that is your right.
No that is not true at all I am. as I write, looking out on unspoiled bush-land and I have the greatest love and respect for the Environment. My disdain for the Greens political party has never been disguised
But it is probably better if you are just open about your agenda rather than trying to advance incoherent arguments that have no evidence to support them.
What further evidence do I need here? the Greens polled a little over 8% at the last election so they are no where near to being in a position to make any of their policies into law so I am entirely and absolutely correct to characterize their policy as “pie in the sky” nonsense.
Thooley
sorry mate, me thinks if you want to be taken seriously, you might need a new nom de plume…
I post under my real name. You should try it sometime
Janeee
Those silly Greens and the silly people who vote for them.
There is many a true word said in jest (bold above)
Don’t they realize that the environment is doing so well under the duopoly of Labor/Liberal governments?
Which misses the point that only a party which can form government will be able to DO anything for the environment.
From the Barrier Reef, promoting old growth forests and protecting prime agricultural land and their aquifers, it’s all going so well with the status quo.
No but its going better than it would be under the lock everything up mentality of the Greens
Bearmuchly
Seems to make more sense than a “Wind” Commissioner !
One bad idea is no excuse for another!
Democrat22
More comment nonsense from the infamous right wing blogger Iain Hall.
Kindly demonstrate how my comment above is in any way inaccurate, as for my so called “infamy” well its largely an exaggeration and I am in fact just an ordinary bloke who likes a good argument.
More Pie in the sky nonsense from The Greens
I have an ambivalent attitude to this issue on one hand I stridently desire that there should be no way that those who abuse children can get away with their vile criminal behavior I am also deeply concerned that there have been many examples in the UK where activist social workers have got it horribly wrong and mistakenly pursued individuals who have done nothing wrong. Likewise we need to be aware that accusations can be entirely false. Sadly this issue is a can or worms no matter which way you look at it.
Guardian comments
Snowden probably caused the deaths of many agents of his country in the field which is treason and deserving of a capital sanction
They were not “desperate” people they were arrogant and greedy people who gambled their lives and lost The world is a better place without them, its as simple as that.
guffawer
The ALP wont win an election promising another Tax on energy that was rejected not 3 years ago. The ALP wont win an election when Chris Bowen demonised anyone who negative gears
think the policy is all about shoring up their primary vote by trying to lure back those who have defected to the Greens the problem is that there are far more who will defect away to the government than will return to the fold over this.
They don’t like it up em!!!!! fro those who don’t get johngood123456’s allusion
Don’t assume that criticizing the carbon tax proposed By Shorten means that anyone has to endorse or defend “direct action” both are bad but Shorten’s new scheme is going to be orders of magnitude worse by any measure that matters.
What would delight me more would be you ceasing to cut and past big slabs text from elsewhere instead of commenting properly like the rest of us
voltron1966
Especially with your mate, murdoch, spreading lies and misinformation for you flat-earthers. Hopefully, he’s too busy with his new succubus, I mean wife.
Murdoch certainly does not have the sort of power and sway that you imagine he has.
Helicalgroove
Its still a return to the Carbon tax
No it isn’t. I’m not going to repeat what Doomglitter has already told you, but no it is not.
As far as the voting public are concerned if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then its a duck no matter how much you and your ilk claim it is some new species of bird.
Thanks for illustrating what I was referring to with my comment about Liberal misinformation though.
I am being utterly truthful here
markingstar
BHP revealed it paid $4.25 million to the Minerals Council of Australia to help its campaign against the mining tax in 2010. You will be delighted.
That is utterly irrelevent
thefinnigans1
Direct action has a carbon tax/price
Well I don’t support that scheme either frankly we should do nothing rather than waste money on futile actions. That said it is a lesser evil than the Carbon Tax but not by much
DoomGlitter
The Clean Energy Act of 2011, which established the emissions trading scheme as a mechanism to deal with climate change, talks about a “price” on carbon, not a tax.
The Gillard government typically referred to a “carbon price” when communicating its policy.
You can hide behind semantics in your comments as undoubtedly the Labor party will hide behind semantic during the election campaign but taht won’t change the public perception that this is still a Carbon Tax being proposed by the Labor party. Its a poisoned chalice filled with climate change Kool Aid.
an amount so small that it can not be measured…………. this is an attempt to raise the Carbon tax form its well deserved grave and the public will reject it in greater numbers than they will welcome it
Its still a return to the Carbon tax and while that may play well to the “Greens” demographic the rest of the country will refuse the poisoned chalice in droves even with out a government campaign against it.
A sneaky Carbon Tax is still a carbon tax no matter how Labor try to dress it up in almost impenetrable complexity. And no matter how complex the Lab0r party make its New carbon tax it will still make absolutely zero difference to the climate.
Like you Murph73 I have long favored the idea of creating a separate legal instrument to meet the needs of same sex couples, but sadly the activists are unwilling to accept that because of their fallacious idea that apples are precisely the same as oranges when everyone knows that you can make a pie with apples but you can’t do the same with oranges even though both are fruit.
coppersmith
While I share the concerns expressed in this article, I wonder if reflexive intolerance isn’t a normal, even necessary, part of the dialectic of social change.
two wrongs do not make something right More importantly behaving badly to others no matter how much you feel it is justified hinders rather than enhances your cause no matter what it might be.
Marginalised people and there supporters who are on the verge of achieving a hard-won victory over conservative and reactionary forces in society are likely to see that success as fragile.
How they feel simply does not matter
Shaming people for expressing dissenting views may be quite deliberately silencing debate in an effort to ensure that their acceptance is firmly entrenched as part of “the new normal.”
That is just a form of bullying and its often counterproductive as well
While I don’t like to see reasoned debate on an issue shut down, I would be very willing to have critics of transgender people (or Islamic identity, or aboriginal peoples, or what have you) loudly shouted down in the public square until we stop seeing video of people on busses loudly abusing some minority that they are personally offended by.
How very totalitarian of you !
Look if people don’t have the freedom to offend then they have no freedom of speech at all. And if they don’t have freedom then you won’t either.
Maybe a rule of thumb: When vile prejudice if no longer acceptable on the political right, then we’ve reached the point where the left needs to be ready to ease off the knee-jerk response. On many of these issues, we’re just not there yet.
That is ridiculous. under your regime we would never be there, just as it was under Stalin
coppersmith
While I share the concerns expressed in this article, I wonder if reflexive intolerance isn’t a normal, even necessary, part of the dialectic of social change.
Marginalised people and there supporters who are on the verge of achieving a hard-won victory over conservative and reactionary forces in society are likely to see that success as fragile. Shaming people for expressing dissenting views may be quite deliberately silencing debate in an effort to ensure that their acceptance is firmly entrenched as part of “the new normal.”
While I don’t like to see reasoned debate on an issue shut down, I would be very willing to have critics of transgender people (or Islamic identity, or aboriginal peoples, or what have you) loudly shouted down in the public square until we stop seeing video of people on busses loudly abusing some minority that they are personally offended by.
Maybe a rule of thumb: When vile prejudice if no longer acceptable on the political right, then we’ve reached the point where the left needs to be ready to ease off the knee-jerk response. On many of these issues, we’re just not there yet.
laclem
Also, what are the arguments against same sex marriage that aren’t based in bigotry and homophobia? Genuine question, as I haven’t heard one yet.
There are quite a few of us out there who are for individual liberty to have any kind of sexual relation ship with another consenting adult that pleases you but have reservations about changing the definition of marriage to include same sex couples.
PDGFD1
I see no ‘problem’ there. As long as the discourse doesn’t descend into abusive language.
Maybe that is because you feel the advantages of politicla correctness within the bubble of your fellow minions of the left here where contary opinons are so very often denounced or disallowed even when they are presented in a polite and respectful way.
IF ‘tother side will brook no opposition at all, or claims any and all criticism is ‘intolerance’ then you are dealing with someone who isn’t capable of civilised discourse.
Actually it is your side of the arguments who do that Just look at any thread about feminism and you will find tons of comments removed , supposedly for violating community guidelines but what they have really done wrong is disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy here. Its things like that which does the politcally correct team no favors.
Yes even readers like me agree with the thrust of this article
JohnTiler
its no more biased that the sources you cited and no matter what its bias you can not deny what it says about your citations which is that all of the ‘research about same sex parenting has a faulty methodology caused mainly by having a rather small and self selected sample rather than a larger more randomized selection and a suitable control group.
John
I can google studies that support my opinion as well:
In his study, published earlier this year, Sullins examined the National Health Interview Survey’s results from 1997 through 2014. The survey, which has been done since 1957, gave Sullins 1.6 million people as his total sample size, including 207,000 children and 512 same-sex couples raising children.
Sullins said that the size of his study gave it a specific strength that other studies on the issue lack. He pointed to 47 studies that say children raised by same-sex couples are not worse off than children raised by opposite-sex parents, all done prior to 2010. “The mean sample size of all of these studies was only 39 children.”
“Only four studies used a probability sample….And the largest of these probability samples was only 44 female same-sex families,” said Sullins. Sullins cited Canadian researcher Doug Allen, whose work has famously showed that children are better off when being raised by parents of the opposite sex, to highlight another flaw in those studies — that the participants are often recruited through the LGBT community via ads and other methods, and therefore have tremendous biases.
The results of Sullins’ study are clear — 7.4 percent of children raised by opposite-sex parents have emotional issues, while 17.4 percent of kids raised by same-sex parents have similar issues. Similarly, 10.2 percent of kids raised by opposite-sex parents have ADHD and other emotional issues, while 19.3 percent of kids raised by same-sex parents have the same issues.
More than 10 percent of opposite-sex parents get their children treated for emotional issues, while more than 17 percent of same-sex parents do the same. And 6.9 percent of kids raised by opposite-sex parents are prescribed medication, compared to 21 percent of children raised by same-sex parents.
“Parent education and income makes no difference” in how children turn out, said Sullins, nor does “family stability” or “age, race, and sex of the child,” or emotional issues that parents have.
Sullins also criticized the popular idea that the children of same-sex parents are bullied and otherwise ill-treated compared to their counterparts raised by opposite-sex parents. He pointed to the National Health Survey (NHS), which he noted has “several good measures” related to such matters. When he looked at the NHS survey, Sullins found that children “with opposite-sex parents were stigmatized at a higher rate,” and that “the differences were augmented — it didn’t explain the differences, it aggravated the differences.”
Source
As i said same sex couples can certainly do an adequate job of parenting but lots research has found that children raised by both of their biological parents do better in life and as such that is the model that we should support and encourage.
JohnTiler
the day that a same sex couple can produce offspring without the intervention of technology and a third party gamete is the day that I will endorse Gay marriage…Gay couples can also adopt, foster and become legal guardians for children.
Which is both admirable but irrelevant to the point you are trying to counter here
Gay marriage would therefore endorse and strengthen this social endorsement of an enduring pair-bond which has been a foundation stone of human society (your criterion).
No it wouldn’t because a same sex pairing is not the same as heterosexual pairing when it comes to raising children it can be certainly be adequate in a functional sense but children do better when they can experience both male and female examples while they are being raised .
Try again Iain, this really is getting tedious.
Well I enjoy the journey of a discussion as much as its destination.
John
the day that a same sex couple can produce offspring without the intervention of technology and a third party gamete is the day that I will endorse Gay marriage, until then I will continue to argue that instead of co-opting marriage same sex couples should be seeking a separate legal instrument to meet their need for pubic affirmation of their relationships. A separate legal instrument solves all of the political problems and achieves the desired endgame of legal recognition without alienating those in our society who so strongly believe that marriage is only possible between a man and a woman.
JohnTiler
Really? that must surely give the Christians, who by and large are tolerant of homosexuality the moral high ground then.
No matter how much some individual church people opine against homosexuality the reality is that most Christians are not advocating for it to be criminalized and if you ask them privately they will admit to a “live and let live” attitude. That is tolerance, heck that attitude is evident even in Australian Christian Lobby leader, Lyle Shelton.
Perhaps your definition of tolerant is different to the rest of the world?
My definition of tolerance does not require anyone to like that which they will tolerate, in fact accepting something that one strongly disagrees with is by definition “tolerance”
JohnTiler
Because marriage is a heterosexual institution for the continuation of the species
It’s a real wonder our species managed this continuation prior to us ever inventing the institution of marriage.
Marriage, or a social endorsement of an enduring pair-bond has been a foundation stone of human society for as long as we have been a distinct species because it takes so long to bring our offspring to maturity.
rattis
Aggressive, sharp, arrogant responses.
And why is that a problem?
Your dissection of everyone’s commentary demonstrates how much you’re enjoying arguing your point, regardless of who you offend.
Yes I enjoy the process here and I am unmoved by the possibility that someone might be offended in the process because I assume that all here are grown ups.
Like a true bully, your thriving on a knowing that regardless of who you harm, you can hide behind a simplistic ideology that in a way excuses your prejudices.
Commenting here is entirely voluntary and given the fact that those arguing for your side out number the other by orders of magnitude its a bit rich to claim that I am bullying anyone.
As I mentioned to another individual who constantly looks to battle via this issue, I’d bet anything that behind the lines, theres a perfect stereotypical fit of somebody who thoroughly enjoys offending the gay community- middle aged, white heterosexual Christian male (someone who hasn’t had to fight for an inch of social justice because they’re the @ssholes who have dictated notions of social normality for centuries).
Sorry to disappoint you but I am a life long atheist, I am a bit past middle age and I have absolutely nothing against the concept of homosexuality per se. In fact I have repeatedly argued for every individual’s right to copulate with any other consenting adult regardless of gender.
And gay marriage is just another social change that further diminishes your position of power at the top of the class.
You see I reject the “hierarchy of victimhood” that is implicit in your claim above and the very last place that I would be is “top of the class in a position of power” I’m just putting the argument I believe in in an open forum, just as you are.
rattis
Iain, you clearly have more time than me to argue a point.
Not by an measure a crime to have more time as far as I am aware
I’m no longer interested in your rant.
Sorry to bear that you have been an interesting interlocutor
But you should know that in the midst of your discussion is a message being sent to gay people that you believe their relationships are not worthy of marriage.
Its not a matter of “worthiness to marry” as much as its a case of a same sex relationship does not meet the necessary prerequisites for the institution.
This in turn suggests you consider them inferior.
Not inferior just different
This is a message that hurts people who are born different to you.
engaging in our polity on any issue is not for shrinking violets ratis and if someone is ‘hurt” by disagreement then they need to toughen up a bit
I can walk away from this debate knowing that all I am hoping for is an inclusive society that finally recognises the value of a gay relationship and that the law of the land finally embraces same sex relationships as equal.
Well I think that forcing the latter in pursuit of the former may well backfire
You have to live with the thought that you’re campaigning against the rights of a minority who want nothing more but recognition in the eye of the law that who they love is acceptable and meaningful. And I don’t think your determination is doing anything for your cause.
The thing is I believe that you have a substantive acceptance of homosexuality in this country and I am very pleased that is the case its just that I believe that changing the definition of marriage is a bridge too far.
SeanoQ
Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.”
Yes I take that as a personal mission statement.
In response to BulbousAlsoTapered
BulbousAlsoTapered
the moral imperative to yourself is to demonstrate to those people how to do tolerance properly.
Which has been my practice of a life time
A starting point would be to support SSM and Safe Schools.
No that does not follow
Joshua Monkie
Intolerance exists on both sides. Singling out only progressives for this seems pretty intolerant in itself.
I’m not saying my side of the argument is entirely blameless but my experience has been that the progressive side is somewhat worse.
rattis
So Christians are ‘tolerant’ of homosexuals.
In our country they largely are, it seesm to me taht your vision of Christianity would see them all from the same mould as the Wetsbrough Baptists when taht si simply not so in this country
Do they consider them equal?
I don’t speak for them but I would say that the vast majority think that all people are equal in their humanity
Why is there a broad movement by the Church to remove the safe schools program (designed to teach acceptance of difference) from state funded schools?
Because the content of that program is as you progressive like to say “problematic” on a number of levels and it does not actually teach acceptance as much as it teaches a “social justice” orthodoxy that is of questionable virtue.
And why is there an aggressive push to ensure the gay community are locked out of the concept of ‘marriage’?
Because marriage is a heterosexual institution for the continuation of the species
Why? Because Christians ‘tolerate’ homosexuals but they do not consider them equal.
No because a same sex couple can never create children without the intervention of a third party
They never have, and they will continue to campaign to supress them.
We live in a pluralist society and that means that Christians do not have to like or approve what you choose to do, they simply have to let you do as you please as long as you hurt no one else in the process. It seems to me that you are desperate for their approval and that you will hate on them until they give it to you.
You are supporting a movement of bullies.
No I’m not supporting your side of the argument who are the real bullies here.
FatzKatz
So, you are saying Christians are bigots by default Iain?
Certainly Not
Not very clever at this intellectual jousting are you?
Better than you, by any measure though…
laclem
By which you mean criticism of Christians, of which you are intolerant. #irony
You and everyone else here is entirely welcome to criticize Christians and I’m just as free to point out when you and your pals commit precisely the same sins that you accuse Christians of.
In response to Davesnothereman
Davesnothereman
Yes Iain, I am intolerant of bigots and will make no apology for it.
Really? that must surely give the Christians, who by and large are tolerant of homosexuality the moral high ground then.
rattis
What, intolerance of bigotry and an intolerance of Chrustians who refuse to tolerate homosexuals as equal?
If Christians* were being intolerant (which the clear majority certainly are NOT intolerant) then surely the moral imperative to yourself is to demonstrate to those people how to do tolerance properly.
Christians playing the victim is utterly absurd. If you want to be tolerated, all you have to do is accept others for who they are.
As Jesus famously said “let those among you who is without sin cast the first stone” The point that John Haldane was making about a lack of generosity in debate is clearly evident in your own comment firstly you mock Christians with unnecessary sarcasm (* above) and then you demonstrate precisely the sort of behavior you are complaining about from Christians.
And before you denounce me as a Christian I will tell you that I am an atheist.
You can bet london to a brick that there will be lots of evidence of intolerance form progressives in this thread
iBreed
So as long as our troops were better than our enemies, we should not be critical of our troops at all, even a century after the fact?
We should not be “critical” of them in a way that implies a general sort of bad behavior that was not actually the case.
He is a stupid stupid man who fails to put the very few incidents into the proper perspective, namely that such behavior by Australian troops is/was considerably more rare than it has been by the totalitarian enemies that this country has fought wars against. There was not “comfort women” for Aussie soldiers as there were for the Japanese. and any Aussie bad behavior has always been subject to the military justice system.
Exactly right Linda flirting is one of the things that puts a sparkle into life and its not something that anyone should have got upset about.
Mike
My argument is not at all about “ideology trumping science” its very much about putting what you claim is “concern” and “dismay” into its proper social context. I think that you are simply letting your confirmation bias see the public opinion of this issue through a distorting lens.
58656e
I think you are completely wrong about the public’s feelings …
No doubt you do. However when your perception is so jaundiced, as to allow you to describe the very real concerns raised by the best available science as ” [t]he sky is falling millenarian rhetoric of the AGW panic merchants,” your credibility as a witness is impugned to the point that no reasonable person can take you seriously.
On the contrary I make a point of having a very wide and diverse social circle
ratehr than just the latte sipping echo chamber that you obviously inhabit. None the less you do raise an important point when you talk about concerns, as IO pointed out in my reply to MikeFlanagan the public’s “concerns” are directly proportional to the immediacy of the threat so something that is claimed to be a disaster this afternoon is far more worrying that something that is predicted to be an issue in 100 years. We have had about decades of dire predictions and that has put this issue very much into “the boy who cried wolf” territory. Frankly if anyone is living in a bubble its you. Most of the people I meet pay lip service to the AGW orthodoxy but they don’t have any heart in it.
I put it to you that beliefs rampant in the denialist bubble you appear to inhabit do not necessarily reflect the views of normal society.
You see this is a matter of science so why do you use the language of faith? Maybe its because the whole climate change industry is really a misanthropic Millenarain cult which is terrified of heresy.
And you forget or ignore the fact that a lot of people are subscribed (as I am) just to see what the other side are doing.
I took a good look at the 2014 survey and form that its pretty obvious why they dropped the whole deal. Its a very vague and rather unfocused effort that really does not tell us much.
Frankly to use the term “dismay” in relation to the public’s level of concern is, well hyperbole. Dismay is what you feel when your life is in immediate danger or your child is very ill. Even if the AGW proposition is correct its impossible for the public to feel a sense of threat after so many dire predictions that have not come to pass (Tim Flannery and Al Gore can take a big bow on that score) and on top of that the public understand that nothing they can do is going to make much of a difference anyway. So the natural consequence is that people down grade their real concern about the issue accordingly. When people are powerless tpo change something they cease to worry about it in any real sense , sure they may do things like be more energy efficient, recycle or even keep chooks “for the planet” but they are still rather sanguine about the issue. You see I am a Boomer and that means I spent my formative years under the shadow of the Cold war and the MAD doctrine and try as you might the vague possibility that the climate may change in a way that is bad for humanity simply does not have the same urgency as the very real fear that the bombs may obliterate us.
Mike
I think you are completely wrong about the public’s feelings about climate change they are simply over the endless The sky is falling millenarian rhetoric of the AGW panic merchants. They will happily accept things like improved energy efficiency. But they reject the hair shirt policies of the extreme Greens.
Lesm
Technology has been around for the last two hundred years and has been used at different times by employers to replace human beings with machines.
Actually Len its been around since long before the industrial Revolution
Those instances were the proximate causes of various revolutions in some countries, and Parliamentary reforms in others of a more democratic bent.ve continually, with minor interruptions, to a more civilised society
Maybe so but neither are likely in contemporary Australia there is simply a total lack of awareness of the implications of things like self serve checkouts in supermarkets and even our public libraries, Personally I refuse to use them and I try to spread the word to all and sundry. Never the less So many of you socialists simply don’t seem to get it that if self serve checkouts are too successful then there will be fewer jobs in retailing, not that you lot generally care about such low status jobs
. In the end these are matters for decision by the people in a democracy and the people will ultimately decide, in much the same way as they have over that last two hundred years, to protect the rights of human beings over machines. As someone so wisely said, “machines are good servants, but bad masters”.
The machines have already got a very decent foothold and in fact it may well be too late. But you are wrong to imagine the machines becoming our masters what they are going to become are willing slaves who will compete with those workers who are now getting double time and a half on Sundays. And as you yourself point out machines make VERY good slaves, they never ask for more pay and they never complain about working longer hours.
You forget the one thing that this will drive more than any other and its already a problem, namely businesses will simply get machines to do the job instead of a casual, or haven’t you noticed the self serve checkouts at the supermarket ?
droverscat
Part of these Fair Work powers wold be to ensure employers did not have the right to just ‘seeya’, in the same way that would ensure ‘phoenix’ companies would be banned.
There are way around it if you are that keen/desperate.
The Greens haven’t peaked – they’re about to increase their influence substantially
The public are rapidly tiring of their far left thought bubbles
bestusername
Plenty of businesses already offer 3 month casual contracts as a trial period. The Greens are simply trying to make it a standard contract across the board in order to boost permanent job numbers.
You simply can not wind back the clock to the time before widespread casual employment because all of the service focused businesses, your food and retail businesses would not be profitable without casual labor.
You’d know this if you did something other than sit on your computer all day trying your damnedest to channel Andrew Bolt.
On the contrary I have been hunched over an angle grinder and Mig welder for most of the day. That said YOU would not run the line you do here if you had the slightest inkling about how business works, Hint it has nothing to do with socialism.
MarekBage
Thankfully the Greens have peaked and we will never have to deal with this stupid policy but if it did happen all that would happen is that at the end of the qualifying period employers would say See ya and employ new workers.
That said I agree that the banks need to lift their game when it comes to the way that they view workers like your wife when it coems to getting a loan but this proposal won’t do it.
I wrote my blog for a decade ant that particular obsessive made it her mission in life to harass me for most of that time.
And no its not doxing to know more about the person harassing you, the fact of the matter is that I could have “doxed” her but I chose not to even though she thoroughly deserved to have the world know all about here secret internet hobby.
For blogging to be truly civilized I think that you have to give up any notion of anonymity because then all players tend to behave better knowing that they can be held responsible for their deeds. You see over the course of that decade of blogging I have had every sort of threat that you can imagine, (yes even rape threats) I have had hate sites devoted to me created, my children threatened I have had fake Gay dating profiles created and had my face pasted into bestial pornography. I have been repeatedly misquoted and attacked for things I did not say or do. Its simply too tedious for words these days which is one of the reasons I am so sanguine when a woman complains because someone has been unkind to them on twitter
. The internet is simply not a “safe space” and it never will be you just have to know that and be tough if you want to play there no matter what you have in your trousers.
My children are quite a bit further along than yours but it may be something you are familiar with but she was never a “girly girl” and she was not consciously channeled into what would be the traditional role for a girl either, For a start I was always the primary carer for my children changed most nappies provided all of the nurturing when they were small, it has always been me they come to if they have scraped a knee or need emotional comfort so their family is not traditional. Even so certain gendered behaviors have emerged anyway which is why I am fairly convinced that those must be innate (for the most part) as for the crying thing well I council both of my children to be tough and stoic because I reckon that has very good survival value for both genders. But at two expecting a boy not to cry is a bit much.
I don’t know about the claim that “boys need more care” Both girls and boys both need care but what each needs is not always the same you have to feel your way through it and just do the best you can, frankly don’t sweat it too much try to persuasion rather than being a domestic dictator and most importantly no matter what they throw at you stay calm because if you don’t they will lose respect for you authority.
Frankly all of the tough stuff is ahead of you and gender will be the very least of your worries.
Third time lucky
I say that online bullying is a problem for all users, both male and female and I personally don’t think there is substantially more of it directed at women then is directed at men, but I do think that women are more likely to complain about it than men are which would skew the figures somewhat.
I am absolutely certain about her identity, little things like her posting from the same IP address is a dead giveaway as are straight out admissions when I caught her out but no matter what name a person uses they can’t disguise their rhetorical style, or even things like them making the same typos under different personas. But like all liars what trips them up is the lack of consistency in the lies they tell and when you have them commenting at your blog on a daily basis its easy enough to keep track of what they say.
I wrote a political blog for a decade and was often abused for doing so and the worst offender was a woman who kept inventing new personas every time I banned and told her to go away.
steerpike82
I do have one of each, with such small age gap they might as well be the same age. I’ve seen the difference in treatment. But thankyou so much for your condescendence, it really is s breath of fresh air.
Unless your children are fraternal twins there must be a minimum of nine months between then and that is not an insignificant gap in terms of their development. I find it hard to believe you when you claim to have seen ” difference in their treatment” because you as the parent would have to be the primary source of their socialization. But if you mean that you noticed that each child had different aptitudes consistent with the expectations that we have for each gender maybe its just their different natures being perceived and reinforced by the adults around them.
What our children become is obviously derived from both their innate qualities and the things that we as parents teach them.The notion that its all about nurture rather than the nature of individuals just does not stand up to any sort of close scrutiny.
In response to Aussiealltheway
Aussiealltheway
That’s likely – not. Ian Hall is just a very angry, obviously humiliated person. Let him have his little sook. Boo hoo hoo.
I am neither angry nor do I feel humiliated
steerpike82
They aren’t treated equally though.
When you have one child of each gender as I do you may kid yourself that you can make them the same by the way that you raise them but reality soon knocks that silly idea out of your head. As much as I wanted to teach my daughter about the use of my workshop she was having none of it where as my son LOVES making stuff. As a parent you can and try very hard to treat them equally but that does not equate to treating them the same.
Wizzby
No the theory is sound but often poorly understood by those who would rather it didn’t require so much effort.
If the gender theory that claims all identity is a construct rather than an expression of innate qualities then it would not be so hard to mold individuals according to the theory.
In response to Aussiealltheway
Aussiealltheway
Clearly, you do not.
As it happens I have a 16 year old daughter and an an eleven year old son which is why I know that that your wild gender generalizations are utter bullshit. Neither I nor any of the other parents I know treat their children as you suggest.
GRP2015
On line bullying of women is still on ongong problem and is getting worse.
It isn’t actually and it does women no good service to pretend that disagreeing with what they may say online is bullying.
Unsupported allegations against women by online bullies who are afraid of influentional women is getting worse.
No it isn’t
It is totally unacceptable when even Ministers of Govt engage in such activities.
Like what?
One has to ask just what is wrong with these people.
Sadly too often people like you ,make such claims (while anonymous) without a shred of evidence
Are they so frightened by these women that they have to resort to unsupported claims against such women.
I still think that you are mistaking robust online “debate” for bullyingNo doubt the Guardian will investigate their activities and hold such people to public account.
We await the Guardian’s response to defend women from such online bullying.
Peter
Legislation is only a small part of an MP’s duties
The LNP were the kings of obstruction in opposition, they are now merely reaping what they have sewn.
I saw not one needle and thread in the hands of the LNP in the run up to the 2013 election, sorry but I could not resist :o)
TheotherClaw
You rebel you!
I’ll take that as a complement
That’ll learn them, they’ll shaking in their boots when they find out your sharing your strategy.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who takes advantage of the system
Eileen Kelly
You are fortunate to be able to “pay it off in full at the end of month”.
We live within our means and take this as our mantra:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Unless the cash to make those monthly pay-offs is coming from under your mattress though, you are still holding funds in a bank account somewhere. Fees and charges will apply to holding accounts and your credit card. In my eyes the banks are still the ones sticking it to you (just slightly less than they’re gouging some others).
Our account is always in the black and as such it does not attract “fees” I also make sure that I don’t use ATMs that are not owned by my bank.You can avoid most of the fees if you make the effort.
equalsfortytwo
you’re almost as smug as mal, it’s a trait people don’t appreciate.
just a free tip for you
Sigh……………
bestusername
Shows just how useless the LNP is when they can’t pass legislation with a majority in both houses and a cross-bench mostly made up of conservatives.
If the government had a majority in both houses (which they don’t) then the leanings of the cross benches would not matter
Peter Mitchell
Iain they’re paid to pass legislation, failure to do so is a failure to do their job.
No they are paid to represent the voters in their electorates, legislation is only a small part of the job.
Politics is about knowing when to compromise, the Liberals see that as a sign of weakness but by not doing so they are ironically powerless.
Tell that to the cross bench who have been ridiculously obstructive
moveonover
The Gillard minority government successfully passed 561 bills through the parliament
.
That did not save them from being our worst government in living memory and don’t forget that their most contentions legislation like the carbon and mining taxes were quickly repealed because they were so bad.
I would suggest it is the ideological poor quality that constipates the coalition legislation , most of which I might add is still sitting in parliament and is reflected in their budgets.
and you would be wrong in that suggestion
dargie
Yet strangely , when a Labor govt. has a hostile Senate the Coalition thinks it’s quite ok to thwart them. Bit of logic please.
I think that a hostile senate is bad no matter what
ID0423880
Wrong. They haven’t been able to pass legislation because the legislation they have put up is ideological crap that’s not in the national interest.
No you are just too incline towards the left to realize that having an obstructive senate (no matter who is in power) does the country a great disservice.
The cross bench aren’t the problem, it’s the governments policy.
Frankly I think that giving six nutters the power to block legislation is profoundly undemocratic
Delusional to think otherwise.
Our senate is a profoundly undemocratic institution and you only have to see how many votes it takes to elect a senator in Tasmania and compare it to how many it takes to elect a senator in Victoria to see why.
RMcC63
It’s a theory and a bloody good one, you might feel uncomfortable thinking about it but deep down you know it’s true.
If you believe that then have I got a deal for you on a slightly used bridge…
karmapolice
We vote for policies and parties here, not a president- that’s the fatal mistake Turnbull also made.
Actually we vote for MPs who then elect a PM However the Government will be bringing down its budget shortly and that will contain more than enough “policy” to make any one happy.
MikeTaree
Iain, even if Turnbull just scrapes in he will have lost many of the backbenchers in marginal seats who supported him in his coup over Abbott.
I really don’t think that will be the outcome
To quote Gandalf at the end of the Two Towers film “Sauron’s wrath will be terrible, his retribution swift”.
And clownshoes will be back on his rampage.
Tony Abbott is simply not Kevin Rudd no matter how hard you want pretend that he is.
Wheelspinner
Your last, best hope is that the people will find the Leader of the Opposition more objectionable than your lot when they go to the ballot box.
On the contrary I think a lot of people are sick of change for its own sake and they will appreciate stability. especially if a DD cleans out the cross benches or gives the governemnt a more workable senate
After almost 3 years, there is no policy platform to stand on, no record of achievement to point to and no future direction for the country. Nothing.
“Steady as she goes” is pretty good for most folk, except you minions of the lefty who want to constantly reinvent everything even when its not broken.
ID0423880
And somehow Turnball has made the genital herpes option attractive.
Go figure.
Only to those who attend “conversion parties”
Stephen Prowse
Not any more, we need to get the “least worse” (to paraphrase FDOTM) and at the moment our PM is performing very badly. The ALP has credible policies on the table.
Only in the eyes of those like you who would NEVER vote for the LNP under any circumstances.
I’m not wrong, Under labor there were leaks form the Gillard and Rudd camps
Really? We both know that for the ordinary generally nu-engaged voters its the personality of the leader that matters and Shorten is as popular as genital herpes
Actually being able pass their legislation will make a biog difference to the government and its the reason that they have not, as you put it , been able to do the job they are paid for.
No it won’t because the alternative is Bill Shorten and that is a most unpalatable choice indeed.
If you want to stick it to the bank then do as I do buy everything with your credit card and pay it off in full at the end of the month…
Guardian Comments 6 May 2016
Refugees don’t self-harm because of me, Peter Dutton, they self-harm because of you
We simply do not need to convince an already decided public about anything MGEvans
Yes, its an LNP issue. Anyway, the LNP is the only group that wants them all dead. It may be true that many in the population don’t want them here. But they would be happy to see them go elsewhere. The LNP will not send them anywhere. They must die as examples to others.
Utter rubbish!
Its more of a perverse dream held by open borders advocates because they want to use any deaths as a stick to beat supporters of the current policy with.
The facility on Nauru is now “open” and residents can come and go as they please already
Not true MG Evans He is my local member and I expect he will retain his seat with ease
Jim its a simple equation, either we finance the camps for a small number who are there now or we will be washed away by the flood of uninvited migrants the way Europe is suffering now , It is very sadly the lesser evil and unless you can come up with a better idea then your rancor is pointless
Mikes005
And while we’re at it, seeing as you’re so hot for Dutton and Morrison’s ‘management’, the billions spent on Nauru each year worked out to be $just under $3,500 per refugee *per day*. Yet they’re denied basic medical care and are given food riddled with maggots.
They are getting first world healthcare mike and better than we can supply to some of our own people and that cost per detainee is has a reducing total as more of them accept the resettlement options we offer or they go home. Under labor and the Greens there would be more arriving into the system than depart currently, THAT would be an economic burden that would impoverish us all
WHere’s that money going? That’s *your* money, byt the way. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would be fucking livid.
No one wants to save the money more than those who support the government on this policy and what we are livid about is people like you giving theses people false hope that if they just hold out long enough our government will give in, the voters won’t let the government give in.
Do you believe this emotional claptrap?
Sadly I think that you do
LoudonCleary
The issue is not how to manage the refugees, but how to manage Anglo-Aussies,
Utter rubbish the problem is people arriving uninvited is the only problem here, not the natural instinct to defend our territory and resources from interlopers.
whose widespread racism has been fanned from a fading smoulder back to full flame, first by John Howard with Pauline Hanson’s assistance, and then by Tony Abbott, purely for political purposes.
Your definition of “racism” is obviously far to partisan and too broad. Those who object to open borders do so for lots of reasons that have nothing at all to do with race.
The shame Australia is rapidly re-earning is not its treatment of refugees but its increasingly obvious desire to treat non-whites this way.
Racism is simply not the issue its the decision by claimants to try to come here uninvited
Change that and all else follows. Fail to change that and we deserve all the shame we are getting.
Most of us feel no shame at all , many of us feel a certain pride that our governments have taken the hard decisions to do something that is effective in stemming the flow of unwanted mendicants.
JayJay13
“Its the children that I am concerned with”
Your concern for children is bogus. It’s just another one of your smokescreen. The effect on children when a gay couple marry is no different from the effect on children when a straight couple in their 70s marries. It’s non-existent.
My concerns about children are entirely genuine, its just that you know that its the area where your own argument is weak so you dismiss it
“Won’t someone think of the children” is the oldest trick in the bigot book.
Yawn!!!!!!!!
JohnTiler
There has never been such a prerequisite because it was always an unquestioned assumption that marriage = children
Well, except for the approx. 170,000 years Homo sapiens have been procreating *prior* to the invention of marriage.
And your proof for this claim is what precisely? Human beings have always had a way of recognizing their enduring pair-bonds
How did the human race ever survive?!
We are a resilient species and unsurprisingly Homosexuals had very little to do with the continuation of the species.
JayJay13
Ahh the slippery slope fallacy. Get real Iain. Just because we consider gay people equal to straight people does not mean that me must consider a man with seven wives equal to a man with one wife. For reasons that are blindingly obvious to anyone who isn’t scratching around for something to hide their homophobia.
Once again, when asked to provide a reason to oppose marriage equality on its own merits, you fail miserably. There’s a pattern emerging Iain and it points only to one thing.
I am a social conservative and I think that any one who wants to change a foundational institution in our society needs to prove that there will be no untoward consequences of that change and its very clear that all sorts of activists are just waiting in the wings to use your cause to justify their own. Its clear that any chnage to the marriage act will be only the beginning of the push to remake society in a bad way. You are the one who wants change so the onus is on you to prove that there will not be negative consequences from doing so.
JohnTiler
The Netherlands (2001), Belgium (2003), Spain and Canada (2005), South Africa (2006).
In the past 15 years across five countries and three continents, you cannot cite one single example in order to substantiate your point?
Duly noted Iain, duly noted.
As I said the time frame is too short to provide meaningful data 15 years is nothing
Check these out then John its the next big campaign just waiting in the wings…
JayJay13
Iain, it is quite simple. You can keep honking away, repeating the same old nonsense, but it won’t stop being nonsense. Marriage does not and never has included biological reproduction as a condition or prerequisite. That is reality. You can bang on all you like about biological reproduction, but that isn’t reality. It is a fantasy of what you think marriage should be, not the reality of what it is.
There has never been such a prerequisite because it was always an unquestioned assumption that marriage = children and the idea that making children is a thing we choose to do rather than something that happens as a consequence of being married is a rather recent idea. Your notion that a marriage is primarily about two people being utterly co-dependent on each other is a recent affectation.
And gay people marrying takes nothing from you. All that crap about “to the detriment of us all” is unadorned homophobic bigotry. The legal status of other people’s relationships is at the top of the list of things that have no conceivable effect on you.
Its the children that I am concerned with as you should have noticed from the arguments I make in these threads
And I would never break bread with you Iain. Your views are abhorrent to me. Despite all your protestations to the contrary, as a gay person I think I have the right to call out homophobia when I see it and your views are homophobic. Own it for fucks sake.
That would be because you are such a black and white thinker who does not appreciate that supporting your right to live and love as you please, and to do so openly as I do, does not require me to agree with your desire to change the marriage, heck even a number of Gays have reservations about Gay marriage would you claim that they are “homophobic” too?
JohnTiler
…it seeks to change a foundation stone of our society to suit a tiny minority to the detriment of us all.
What “detriment” would that be, Iain?
Ah what a slippery slop such changes put us on There have already been noises from people who want to “marriages between more than two people recognized, and they have cited the gay marriage push as justification.
Perhaps you could cite some actual references from countries where gay marriage is legal to make your point, as your opinion is obviously biased and without foundation.
That would be a rather thin data set given the fact that such jurisdictions have not been playing that game for very long.
John
A lesbian couple, who are married, make use of sperm donation to fertilize one of their eggs. They both parent their child as a married couple, which is of benefit to all concerned (child, parents, and society) according to your own criteria.
What do you have against sperm donation?
My objection is all about the probability that any child thus created would be alienated form their biological father, something that has long been understood to be deeply upsetting for donor conceived children.
JayJay13
Basic homophobia is what it is. Marriage is a social construct not a biological one. The ability to procreate has never been a prerequisite for marriage and marriage law makes no reference to procreation or children.
Marriage is a social construct, that is based on the biological realities of reproduction and our laws do make reference to “children of a marriage ”
Do you still manage to convince yourself that no one can see through this lousy smokescreen that you try to put up to avoid admitting that you are really motivated by homophobia? There is no difference between anti-gay and anti-gay marriage.
I have no doubt that in this place there are very few who agree with my position on this topic however there are quite a few of us out there who totally disagree with your silly claim that “There is no difference between anti-gay and anti-gay marriage.” I have absolutely no issue with you being gay I’d happily break bread with you or any other Gay person but changing the definition of marriage is about so much more than just accepting a minority sexual orientation, it seeks to change a foundation stone of our society to suit a tiny minority to the detriment of us all.
JohnTiler
if your offspring need nurture then there is an advantage in both parents rearing that offspring.
Yes, as happens with the adoption of newborn babies. The new parents, whether gay or straight, would benefit from being married, according to your own criteria.
My words that you quote do into include the word marriage and they refer to the biological parents. That is not to say that I disagree with you that adoptive parents need to have an enduring bond if they are to share parenting. I simply does not have to be called a marriage under our law if that couple are homosexual,
With human beings it takes many seasons to raise our offspring so an enduring pair-bond simply makes sense, especially as we produce our children sequentially.
worth repeating;My words that you quote do into include the word marriage and they refer to the biological parents. That is not to say that I disagree with you that adoptive parents need to have an enduring bond if they are to share parenting. I simply does not have to be called a marriage under our law if that couple are homosexual.
Yes, as happens with babies born from IVF. The new parents, whether gay or straight, would benefit from being married, according to your own criteria.
My words that you quote do into include the word marriage and they refer to the biological parents. That is not to say that I disagree with you that adoptive parents need to have an enduring bond if they are to share parenting. I simply does not have to be called a marriage under our law if that couple are homosexual, plus if a same sex couple use IVF or any other reproductive technology they must thanks to biological reality enlist the aid of a third party to provide the necessary gametes that they can’t and there as a very good chance that any offspring will therefore be alienated form one of their biological parents
Why are you so vehemently opposed to gay marriage?
because I don’t believe that a same sex pairing qualifies for the institution and I favor a separate legal instrument to meet the needs of homosexual couples who wish to have an enduring relationship recognized in law
BlueThird
Your first statement is in response to an obvious suggestion of bias towards far-right conservative Christian websites in your research, and that statement is clearly intended to imply that your search was one of disinterested neutrality: the far-right websites that JohnTiler identified ‘just happened’ to turn up first.
No that is simply wrong I never sought to imply ” disinterested neutrality:” and if you think that you are mistaken I was searching for particular research that i had seen before and the pages questions were the first I found consistent with that criteria
Your second statement owns up to the bias that you had previously tried to deny.
The question was about why I chose christian research with the implication that I did so because of my own covert Christianity. My position on this topic is not at all denied
Once again, in attempting to deny your intellectual dishonesty, you’ve merely provided further evidence of it.
No once again you are making mountains out of mole hills
Am I indignant about someone with your lack of intellectual honesty clogging up the threads here with thousands or even tens of thousands of words of this bilge just about every day? Yes.
My count yesterday would be only a few hundred words in total, probably less than you yourself posted
Am I entitled to continue using your own behaviour here to demonstrate that you have no intellectual credibility? Of course.
No you are not, under the community guidelines that would be “personal abuse”
If you don’t want people to hold you to account on that score, you have two choices. Eschew deception; or stop posting.
Who appointed you moderator here?
JayJay13
Man, you are so dreary. If marriage is so critical to raising the next generation, how come every other species on the planet manages without it? Oh but you’re not anti-gay are you Iain. Oh no…
its basic biology, if you produce young who are independent from birth/hatching then you don’t even need a pair bond, if your offspring need nurture then there is an advantage in both parents rearing that offspring. With human beings it takes many seasons to raise our offspring so an enduring pair-bond simply makes sense, especially as we produce our children sequentially.
And finally I’m not anti Gay at all I’m just anti Gay marriage.
Protovek
Err…no it isn’t, it’s creating egg or sperm cells from other cells which can be combined with egg or sperm cells, that’s not even remotely close to cloning
Both cloning and this bright idea require the harvesting DNA from a cell and implanting it in a gamete. That is close enough for me.
BlueThird
What you fail to realize is that when I said “They just happen to be the first results that I find when seeking a citation via google” I was talking about searching through the results to a generic search but that those citations were the first ones that I found that suited what I wanted to argue because I had heard of these surveys before.
Cue the usual indignation from you.
mcon
we are an animal who takes many years to raise its young and that there is an advantage in both biological parents sharing the task.
for virtually the entire period of human evolution, humans did not have antibiotics or efficient medicine and it was very common for women to die in childbirth and for men and women to die in accidents or of routine infections and common diseases at a young age.therefore children have evolved to attach to anyone who gives them care and attention, whether or not they are genetically related to them. This explains the prevalence of adoption, wet nurses, children being raised by wider families and communities throughout history
While the attachment behavior you cite does have value as a contingency it does not negate may argument that there is an advantage for the biological parents to raise the next generation
you hilariously invoke SCIENCE, but then ignore the vast reams of facts that contradict you, because you have to pretend that the only purpose of marriage is for parents to have/raise their genetic children because that is the only thing that straight couples can do that gay couples can’t
I am neither ignoring any counter arguments nor am I pretending anything.But you are right to make the concession that Gay parents simply can not raise children that they are both biologically invested in
so you present this hilariously obviously cherry-picked view of science to support your ideological views, even though they don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
my views stand up quite well as it happens , its just that you don’t agree with them
and that’s not even getting into the fact that many people already marry who don’t have children at all, or who raise stepchildren or adopted children that aren’t biologically related to both parents.
None of these exceptions undermine my central argument
why do you think that endlessly repeating this failed argument will suddenly make it work on the 100th attempt?
Persistence is not a sin , even here
JohnTilern
And yet, your sources on this particular topic tend to rely on the LifeSiteNews or WinteryKnight blogs, both far-right conservative Christian websites. I wonder why.
They just happen to be the first results that I find when seeking a citation via google
RalphFilthy
The problem for us is that IN NO WAY is the uneducated, stupid masses capable of making a decision on anything important.
Its amazing to me how time and time again those of the regressive left have absolutely no faith in the basic decency of their fellow human-beings.
DO you think that the US would have gotten rid of Jim Crow laws in inbred Mississippi if they’d done it via a plebiscite?
I do actually because there was a groundswell of support for the civil-rights movement in the late sixties that would have made it so
The public are not fit to decide matters of “adult rights”.
Then who precisely is fit to decide our big social questions? Just you or some other self-appointed guardian of political virtue? We live in a democracy not a dictatorship.
celsius233
we are an animal who takes many years to raise its young and that there is an advantage in both biological parents sharing the task.
There’s also an advantage to treating asylum seekers with dignity and respect, but we don’t do that, do we?
We do treat them with dignity and respect, its just that you think that doing so requires giving them the residency they so desire I don’t
Your playing the ‘advantage’ card on this issue is fatuous and transparently partisan.
No I’m not because I reject your false equivalence on this issue.
RalphFilthy
“Science” has a place for procreation roles for homosexuality.
How so?
Don’t tell me you didn’t bother learning anything about this before commenting? (Apart from reading up on trash on ACL’s site it seems).
The ACL are not my primary sources on this subject , not by any stretch of the imagination
Pray tell how you’d righteously tell a seahorse they’re being “all wrong against science” or the distinct patterns of homosexuality in ape (chimps and bonobos) that are similar to humans?
How are either even relevant? The former has nothing to do with homosexuality in the way that certain species have the male nurture their young, (emus do it as well) as for homosexual behavior in primates its clearly about dominance in social hierarchies rather than “love”. I’ve seen dairy cows attempt to mount each other as well but that does not make them lesbians
You sound like you’re infected with “ACL” and therefore your motivations are less than honorable.
I’m an atheist and I always have been
In response to Gregory Shearman
Gregory Shearman
There’s actually an advantage in the whole FAMILY and COMMUNITY in raising children, nothing to do with the gender of the primary care givers.
As socialist ideas go that is one of the few that have some merit however it does not alter the fact that we are biologically programed by our DNA to be more invested in the welfare our own biological offspring.
Janeee
Then explain the prevalence of same sex relationships of long standing among many animal species.
Such pairings are simply an aberration and serve no biological purpose whatsoever.
Protovek
Except the fact that science has advanced to the point where two people of the same sex can theoretically do just that….
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/dec/24/science-skin-cells-create-artificial-sperm-eggs
name me one jurisdiction where that would be permitted even if it is technically possible what you are talking about is a variation on cloning banned for human beings in every civilized country on the planet.
Doncharles
References to your science please? This is the christian lobby attack plan for AME to talk about science and children. Where were they when their children were being molested by their priests and pastors?
Why do you think this false equivalence is even relevant?
As for my science references just google human child rearing duration to discover that we are an animal who takes many years to raise its young and that there is an advantage in both biological parents sharing the task.
ManoSand
“Science tells us that purpose of the enduring pair-bonds that we call marriage is so that two people who are biologically invested in the next generation can share the task of raising their mutual offspring.”
Looking forward to seeing your peer-reviewed paper in Nature, Iain.
A predictable response
In response to Aussiealltheway
I don’t agree, a plebiscite will provide a true and accurate measure of just how much of our population truly thinks that we should change the definition of marriage to include same sex couples. Activists are very keen to spruik the “85%+ support ” as shown in various surveys which if correct means that they will easily win the vote but personally I think that the result will be a closer run thing than that and a closer result is what really scares the Gay marriage activists because they have built so much of their sense of moral rightness for their cause on the idea that their position overwhelmingly endorsed by the public.
So bring it on I say and if the vote is overwhelmingly in favor we can have a change that will be clearly socially endorsed and if its against then we can take the wind out of the sails of a very noisy cohort of activists and retain the status quo for the foreseeable future. It will end the issue as a point of conflict with in our polity either way.
Amazingly so many of the left deify science in all things except the Gay marriage debate. Science tells us that purpose of the enduring pair-bonds that we call marriage is so that two people who are biologically invested in the next generation can share the task of raising their mutual offspring. A same sex couple can not be the mutual providers of a child’s gametes so they have no conceivable reason to imagine that their pairings can serve the same biological and social purpose.
On the other had a separate legal instrument to create civil partnerships in our law can provide a same sex couple with every practical utility that changing the marriage act might give them without the rancor that forcing such a change onto our society is likely to produce.
There is no reason to believe that , and plenty of good operation reasons to argue the contrary that no agency is gong to publicize their weakness
Littlemissv
But that is simply not adequate for treason
Chelsea Manning had a moral and legal (see Nuremberg) obligation to reveal U.S. war crimes, and is a Hero of the Highest Order for having done so.
Manning is no hero
Too bad that real criminals like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, etc. are not serving Life Without Parole for their War Crimes.
War crimes? not according to any court
History will not be kind to the U.S. empire.
All empires are flawed but most others are far more flawed that that of the USA
The blood of the agents and informants revealed in the documents he stole is on his hands
When a person has committed a crime a serious as treason the having a great deal of time to contemplate the error of your ways seems most apt to me
koba67
Removal of freedom is the punishment.
But that is simply not adequate for treason
don’t you realize that carrots don”t want to be eaten either?
Alpo88
“thus I see the truth untainted by political bias… “….. Ha, ha, ha…. your concept of “truth” is totally hilarious… It’s time that you increase the optical power of your glasses, mate, and get clear lenses, not blue-tinted ones!
Glad you enjoyed my self deprecating sense of humor
Ever thought of joining a circus, btw?
I have the top hat but my allergy to cats means that my lion taming career is on hold…
ManoSand
So, you agree that the vast majority of Australians — those who don’t hold healthcare cards — will be out of pocket for services that were previously bulk-billed?
Only for a small amount after the rebate, but more importantly this measure should discourage doctors from over ordering unnecessary tests. Which is the point of the exercise
Helicalgroove
Now, now, you know what they say about imitation, Iain.
I am more than happy to thus flatter a worthy adversary Helicalgroove
smogdownunder
My question was rhetorical. I’m expecting the answer to be no, as Malcontent continues to channel his inner Abbott. Could there have been a more sorry disappointment and dashing of expectations since Mal took over? (Note: that’s another rhetorical question – no need to answer).
I am a political realist who understands that as much as I liked Abbott a government led by Malcolm Turnbull is still orders of magnitude better in prospect that one led by Shorten.
Stereophonic
Key word ‘expect’
It should be ‘will’, but even you subconsciously concede there is doubt.
Give me a break no one can be certain what will happen in an election that is the joy of living in a democracy.
celsius233
Are you referring, by any chance, to Labor’s carbon price mechanism, as brought in by Gillard? The one which led to a measurable reduction in emissions from power generation, since reversed by its dreck Direct Action successor?
As you may recall I am no fan of either direct action or the Labor schemes, both are silly and wasteful in my humble opinion we need neither. That said no matter what YOU may think of the Labor scheme and no matter how much you think it the best invention since sliced bread Shorten reviving its Ghost is a total gift to the governments coming campaign.
But Labor, as I understand it, aren’t looking to price carbon this time around. Shorten will bring in a market mechanism very similar to the one initially favoured by Turndull, ca 2009.
You do realize that its 2016 don’t you? Which means that it simply does not matter what Turnbull favored seven years ago.
ManoSand
Yep! From 1 July: pathology fees for unwell Australians; tax cuts for well-off Australians.
Pathology services will still attract a rebate and still be bulk-billed for healthcare card holders and as for tax cuts of any sort, if there are any tax cuts in Tuesdays budgets they will be very much smaller than you imagine.
That should play well in the polling booths on 2 July.
Alpo88
“I expect that once it is actually on the government will put up a better show than they have been doing recently”…. Always wearing those blue-coloured glasses, eh Iain?…. But careful, stop, that’s a red light!
I do as it happens wear glasses but they are actually clear and thus I see the truth untainted by political bias… I can recommend my optometrists for you if you wish.
celsius233
In other words, turd-polishing is about to go ballistic.
Shorten has already started trying to polish up the fecal Carbon tax….
Helicalgroove
They’ll need a better lot of astroturfers.
How much will the labor party be throwing your way then?
Reschs_Monkey
Nothing has changed since September last year, new captain, same ship of fools.
Better this crew for all of their faults than a return to Labor who are orders of magnitude worse. And thankfully for the country Shorten is trying to revive the Carbon tax Zombie which will be a electoral godsend for the government.
smogdownunder
Woudn’t be difficult. But will it be true?
Yes
Ozponerised
Dream on. The problems in the regime are insurmountable . There is no clarity just one confusing policy after another.
I am well aware of how deeply involved you are in commentary here, most likely to the exclusion of all other engagement with the polity. Which means that your view of politics is unduly colored by the company you keep here.
The election has not been officially called yet and I expect that once it is actually on the government will put up a better show than they have been doing recently. I think that what we are seeing is the Labor party using a great deal of their electoral ammunition far too early in what is bound to be a long campaign. In any event the budget is due in a few days and its obvious that the government is going to make selling its budget the biggest part of their campaign for re-election.
Love it, a good use of technology
So tell me Rattis just how YOU are changing the world with your words here?
beigewash
Iain_Hall – You post on Guardian enough not to be considered an election “troll” & you appear to believe in what you say enough to repeat similar conservative thinking regularly.
Yes I’ve been here a while
Your comments demonstrate exactly the inhumanity & indifference that Whatdoisay is despairing of.
Not “inhumanity’ at all but I will admit to a certain amount of indifference
The fact that the PEOPLE, (because they are human beings), are in these “prison centres” because the Australian Govt has intercepted, detained, transported to & locked them up there; puts the onus on the Australian Government to look after their welfare – not just lock them up & throw away the key.
.
All in this kind of detention are choosing to stay there and its obvious that they are doing so because they hope to outlast the government’s sadly necessary resolve that none shall be allowed to come here
It’s pretty hard to argue against. It appears that just locking them up is illegal, without even considering the other traumatic incidents.
I don’t see it that way Its legal and has survived all challenges in Australian courts. The PNG ruling has not changed anything in real terms and I expect that what PNG is really trying to do is get more, money frrm our government.
Just being locked up indefinitely would be traumatic enough – without the other specific incidents – which would have an impact on the whole population of each centre, not just the victim or their family.
As I said before these detainees are choosing to stay and when they are offered anything other than resettlement here they refuse it, if they were genuine they would take any opportunity, even an imperfect one.
Add to that these people have come from wretched war torn countries, so their initial state of mind & wellbeing is pretty damaged. And they have been formally assessed as genuine refugees under international law. ie FORMALLY ASSESSED – ie like they joined the non-existent formal queue & were formally assessed
Of the men on Manus more than half have been accessed to have no valid claim for asylum can we at least agree that those men should just be deported? The rest will probably have to go to Nauru eventually, unless they can be encouraged to go home.
For people who live their comfortable first world lives to be deliberately cruel, dismissive of the suffering & making excuses for the Governments actions & asylum seekers treatment is pretty abhorrent.
I am not an internationalist and I simply don’t think that we should be obliged to make a place in our country for everyone who has come from a third word dysfunctional society and lobbed on our doorstep. Those who come here thinking otherwise are sadly going to have to be disappointed and fix their own social and economic problems.
In response to Whatdoisaytothekids
Whatdoisaytothekids
‘Allegations of rape are easy to make and hard to prove , and frankly I and most sensible people have no sympathy for the guy who burnt himself trying to blackmail us into letting him come here’.
A young woman lay unconscious after a seizure waking to find semen on her body. Pregnant from that rape she sought an abortion.
As I said such allegations are easy to make but hard to prove and your counter just reinforces my point
A young man protested his treatment by setting fire to his body. He was reported to have been pacing the hospital screaming in agony. It took 22 hours to get to a hospital where he could be properly treated. He died.
Most people who self immolate die, its an extremely stupid thing to do and anyone with very extensive burns on Nauru is likely to die, heck people with such extensive burns in this country are just as likely to die and be in as much agony.
This is inhuman treatment. Crimes against humanity. There are clearly many people in Australia that think like you. I honestly do not know how you live with yourselves. Truely pitiful.
No its entirely realistic treatment, the woman should have reported her allegations to the local police (which I bet she did not do). and as for the burned Iranian well his fate was entirely self inflicted and most of us not see suicide as in any way heroic no matter how horrible the method may be.
In response to Whatdoisaytothekids
Whatdoisaytothekids
Or force the people of Australia to do something.
Whay should we be forced to act against our own interests?
There is a national sickness around both these issues.
Only in those who advocate higher energy prices and open borders
The two stories I have read today around asylum seekers shame us all. A woman raped and not given access to needed medical attention and a man burn, protesting the inhumanity of his treatment by the people of Australia, left screaming in pain in a hospital ill equiped to treat him.
Allegations of rape are easy to make and hard to prove , and frankly I and most sensible people have no sympathy for the guy who burnt himself trying to blackmail us into letting him come here.These would be seen a crimes in a war for goodness sake.
Truely dark stories that reflect a nation that has lost an essential part of its humanity. The politicians in Australia are pathetic and have been for such a long time. But the people, so many of our people are so indifferent to the horror we allow in our name. We have become a nation of casual torturers.
Rubbish we have just become immune to the attempts to emotional blackmail encouraged by left wing advocates in pursuit of the sort of open borders policies that they believe in. It the Activists giving these people false hope that has prolonged their time in detention because without that false hope they would have either returned home or taken up resettlement offers in places like Cambodia.
BlueThird
When someone who is intellectually honest (essentially: open and unbiased, with the disposition to eschew deception) is challenged on an matter of logic, they revisit their statement, re-examine their use of logic, and own up to their mistake, if they made one.
The problem for your argument is that we are not discussing empirical evidence or mathematical propositions we are discussing politics and as such what you are calling “logic” is actually differences in opinion which come from different underlying assumptions. You clearly have some quite different underlying assumptions and the arrogance to think that yours are the only correct way of seeing things.
When you’re challenged on an issue of logic, rather than re-examining your statement, you simply contradict the challenge, and typically switch to obfuscation. In other words: rather than eschewing deception, you compound your original deception (the failure in logic) with a further deception.So you’re intellectually dishonest.
Once again (and its worth repeating) Deception is thus defined :
deception
dɪˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/
noun
noun: deception; plural noun: deceptionsthe action of deceiving someone.
“obtaining property by deception”
a thing that deceives.
“a range of elaborate deceptions”
synonyms: deceit, deceitfulness, duplicity, double-dealing, fraud, fraudulence, cheating, trickery, duping, hoodwinking, chicanery, underhandedness, deviousness, slyness, cunning, craft, craftiness, wiliness, artfulness, guile, dissimulation, dissembling, bluff, bluffing, lying, pretence, artifice, treachery; More
Now I could very well be wrong about anything but that is not a deception and you simply can not prove any willful intention to deceive . In fact by your own standards YOU are being intellectually dishonest by refusing to withdraw your claims now that I have pointed out that you lack any proof of an intention to deceive in this forum.
I’m not the only person here to make that observation – not by a very long way – and to point it out is hardly a personal attack; it’s more a matter of holding the debate to reasonable standards.
It is now you have been shown the error of your logic (namely you need to prove intent to substantiate your claims of “deception”) you need to withdraw that claim
As I’m sure you’re very well aware, I’m not attempting to suggest that you write everything that you post here: I’m simply observing that in a typical day you post thousands or even tens of thousands of words, which is perfectly correct. To suggest that I don’t understand the difference between writing and posting is, in itself, an act of intellectual dishonesty, even if it’s a very minor one (by your standards).
You complaint is facile there is no posting limit here and I’m rather sure that there are other people who post as often or as much I do but as it happens I was making no suggestions at all about what you do or do not understand I was simply stating an empirical fact. Speaking of empirical facts I just cut and pasted all of my comments posted today and the word count excluding this comment comes to 1972 and that includes things like thread titles so shall we discount that total by 100 words for them and that makes it about 1872 words for today which is hardly excessive by any measure and its not by any stretch of the imagination your “tens of thousands” a day is it?
Those last three words, of course, could be construed as a personal attack. It’s probably within the guidelines, though.
No its a statement of fact, and as it happens a fact that you do not deny.
MGEvans
There’s a concept of intergenerational justice that you don’t understand. Even though the damage we do to the environment won’t effect us, it will effect future generations, and in a real sense that’s exactly as if what you do effects your immediate neighbours, the people who live right next door to you, but in such a way that they can’t stop you doing it. If you threw your rubbish over your fence, and they couldn’t stop you from doing it, that would be an unreasonable and reprehensible thing to take advantage of and keep doing, wouldn’t it? The only moral choice would be to stop doing it, right?
I do understand where you are coming from and believe it or not I do care about the future for my children its just that besides my doubts about the AGW proposition I simply do not believe that the proposed “cure” is at all viable.
Yes, I have forsworn air travel, I haven’t flown since 2000 though I am a professional with a large extended international family. Yes i do repair and recycle rather than replace. I drive as little as possible and am careful with my energy budget. Do you? Or do you imagine everyone is as wasteful and hypocritical as you are? You are so wrong.
Absolutely I do in fact I have NEVER been on an airplane, I personally repair everything I can around here in fact I am a paragon of energy virtue even though I am an AGW skeptic
BlueThird
Apart from an occasional snide remark, born out of frustration with your rhetorical style, which I’ll happily admit to, my attacks are essentially on your ideas, not you.
That is simply not true
It’s not that I think it’s wrong to argue in favour of your beliefs; it’s that your arguments become dishonest when you consistently make logical errors while insisting that you don’t. If something is logically wrong, it’s wrong (since we’re not talking about subjective logic here). Pointing that out isn’t arrogant.
What is arrogant is the judgement that you make above claiming thta I am being “dishonest” dishonesty requires a deliberate intention to deceive and I have no intention to deceive. So I may be right or I may even be wrong but I am wrong it will be through an HONEST error. Your repeated claims that I an being “intellectually dishonest” is just a personal attack
If posting as many as 10,000 words in a day, or thereabouts, isn’t clogging up threads, what would be? Nothing personal – I objected to it just as much when it was Clarke68, and told him so.
There is no daily word limit here and as I have told you before at least half of anything I post here are the words of others that I am resounding to. In any event it is not your place to count the words of other people and unlike Clarke68 I don’t just post stuff I have copied from elsewhere
As I said before, confirmation bias is the wrong charge. Arrogance is a better one. But it’s also just an opinion, and one of your opinions, at that. Sorry, that was snide.
Your arrogance is self evident.
In response to TheIPAResistance
According to google I am 51 k from the nearest of the Glasshouse mountains, which is more than double your original estimate and two and one half times you”10 ks at most” claim above. Just concede the point man, you have lost it
BlueThird
It’s hardly as if you’re the only person I respond to. But you post endlessly – often thousands or even tens of thousands of words in a day. Unless I change my interests I’m going to come across you from time to time. When I do, your arguments are invariably flawed – both logically and scientifically.
Your arrogance is breathtaking
And there is, unfortunately, a well-known glitch in human psychology that your posting style attempts to exploit (whether that’s consciously or unconsciously). People tend to assume – quite wrongly – that if someone is talking at great length, and in great detail, they probably know what they’re talking about.
I never think like that, I just enjoy having a good argument about topics I’m interested in
Your only significant rhetorical advantage – the terrible ubiquity you achieve, particularly by dissecting arguments and getting nearly every slice wrong, but refusing to accept that – only increases the importance of challenging what you attempt to pass off as reasonable argument, but is essentially dishonest.
How is it dishonest to argue for the positions I believe in? Because that is what I am doing here
You have a terrible case of confirmation bias there!
There are errors in your thinking here: in effect, you’re assuming that what I post amounts to the totality of my thoughts about you and those who respond to you, and that I think everyone who responds to you is intelligent and reasonable. But I don’t think anything of the sort.
I am making no such assumption here about your thoughts or the intelligence of my interlocutors. In fact I seldom even consider what sort of person has written the words I respond to. I read the comments and if what I read ticles my fancy I respond.
Quite obviously, there are large numbers of people responding to you in other threads who might reasonably be described as idiots. Equally, there are plenty of posters elsewhere (I’d include almost anyone repeatedly talking about the COALition or LIEberals, for example) who post drivel that has nothing to do with you. Invariably I simply ignore those people, largely because they’re not worth the time or effort*: collectively, they’re an irritation, but as individuals, they don’t have your terrible ubiquity; they aren’t clogging up the threads, and nor are they dressing their bias up as pseudo-science in the way that you do.
Clogging up threads? My oh my ,your arrogance knows no bounds does it?
To reiterate, I’m not saying that everyone who responds to you is automatically intelligent and reasonable; I’m only saying that at least a small handful are. The reality is that I was offering incomplete observations on behaviour (now expanded), rather than offering an argument towards any sort of conclusion, never mind a pre-formed conclusion. You might not like my observations, but confirmation bias is the wrong charge.
No confirmation bias is precisely the right charge because you have the arrogance to try to defend, at all costs, those who you find political affinity with against little old me. Its simply not your place to moderate any thread here and that is clearly what you are trying to do with your attacks on me.
John
Science is the new secular religion because of the way that it revered as an authority on all things , just as the the church used to be revered as an authority in all things. You may not like that but it is no less true
BlueThird
Like everyone else here, yourself included, I argue for the fun of it.
Obviously I enjoy the conversations that I have here with other people, but I’ve never enjoyed the exchanges I have with you. They’re purely about duty, and I think it’s pretty much the same for everyone else in this thread.
Why on earth do you feel duty bound to respond to me? there are literally thousands of other people you can choose to talk to other than me.
What I see is a group of intelligent, reasonable people holding their noses, gritting their teeth, and trying to unblock the overflowing sewer of misinformation that you’ve created.
You have a terrible case of confirmation bias there! You really do need to get out more!
In response to TheIPAResistance
TheIPAResistance
The fact we even give him the time of day is much more than he deserves from his little home in the Glasshouse Mountains.
You must be further away than you claim because I don’t live near the Glasshouse mountains even though I do have a good view of them from the top of my road.
58656e
As an atheist I long ago worked that religions exist for two main purposes, to provide comfort about a life after death because we are mortal creatures and to try to make a social template for a workable society and as I’m sure that you will agree that on the latter some do far better than others. The rise of science has provided much by way of understanding the workings of the world and to a lot of contemporary secular people do revere it in a very religious way. In days cone by it was a case of the laity being told to trust the priests because they had the ear of the almighty and now we are told to trust the white coated ones insteadno where is this more the case than in any discussion of “climate science” where original sin has been replaced by GHG sins real and imagined and like the gospel preachers of old we are told that if we don’t repent then we are going to see the destruction of the world. All the while some of the preachers like Al Gore get fat on fleecing the true believers or promoting ponzi schemes to to “trade emissions” or other “market mechanisms” to mitigate climate change.
Blue third
Do you feel better after that rant?
I’m not going to refute your rant line by line as I usually would Instead I will just point out a couple of salient facts, Firstly the AGW orthodoxy is a global level belief system and you and the other true believers are always shouting about just how strong its intellectual hegemony (did I hear a “97% consensus claim before??? Oh yes I did) is an it is that hegemony that I am arguing against. That vested interest It does not matter a jot to me what amounts of money you claim go here there or any where.
I think the only reasonable explanation for your position here (and on most other arguments) is that you’re the victim of internal psychodramas that completely undermine your ability to think rationally.
No its just that I am not a card carrying left-winger and I like a good argument . Maybe you need to get out of comfortable forums like this one where most of the people share your politics and learn to mix it with those who disagree with you.
58656e
Time poor so quick response
Its not there at present
It really is mate. And surely the time must … forget it.
I don’t buy your line of argument here because no matter what the physical theory you still need more than correlation.
[W]hy does it matter to you if I don’t have your faith in the AGW proposition? is your faith that shaky that one dissenting voice here is going to do you spiritual harm?
Oh my faith is strong Iain! 🙂 But it is not in climate science per se, but in science generally. It so strong that should the evidence speak otherwise I will gladly abandon any concern that our re-engineering of the atmosphere has the least impact on climate. (And while it is faith, it is not religious, there being no faith in supernatural agency, quite the opposite.)
Science is simply the new secular religion even though it does not contain reference to the supernatural or a specific deity n(its a bit like budism in that respect)
Why do I care? Two reasons. I hate to see another human suffering from such delusion, when there is no organic reason (psychosis) that they do so. And I care for the same reason I care about the public pronouncements of anti-vaxxers (or radiophobes) … the harm they do.
What harm do you think I do?
Now that does not mean I do not appreciate dissent. I’m not that straightforward. I would hardly concede that McIntyre’s skepticism has made a contribution to the science. Actually Richard Lindzen has probably contributed much more and my favourite skeptic must be Chris Landsea … he proved that he was right! But with all due respect Iain, you and I are not expanding the boundaries of human knowledge here. And specifically this is not informed skepticism that you are practising.
I see the glimmer of agreement here, namely this is a place where the essence is the enjoyment of argument and debate even though I disagree with you that my skepticism is not informed.
Have a good weekend m8.
Sure will, finishing of making a couple of kickbikes and doing an engine swap in my car as much fun as you can have in the shed with yer clothes on.
cont;
Have you actually read the paper read the paper(s) regarding consensus? I guess not so here are a few references.
James Lawrence Powell
http://www.jamespowell.org/index.html
Utter rubbish
Doran and Zimmerman (2009)
http://tigger.uic.edu/%7Epdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
Shows error 404
Expert credibility in climate change
PNAS vol 107 no. 27 (William R. L. Anderegg), 12107–12109, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1003187107The consensus project John Cook et al.
http://theconsensusproject.com/#sharePage
Love these numbers note the filtering process in play
The Consensus Project measured the level of consensus in published, peer-reviewed climate research that humans are causing global warming. In the most comprehensive analysis to date, we analysed 21 years worth of peer-reviewed papers on “global warming” or “global climate change”. Among the 12,465 papers, we identified over 4,014 abstracts authored by 10,188 scientists that stated a position on human-caused global warming. Among those 4,014 abstracts, 97.1% endorse the consensus. Among the 10,188 scientists, 98.4% endorse the consensus
They unreasonably subdivide the whole to acquire the 97% figure of the subset that are more in agreement with the AGW proposition. Its nonsense like this that make me so cynical of any resort to statistics to support a scientific proposition
….many of the climate activists are totalitarian Marxists who are using as a stalking horse to oppose capitalism…
This comment just about sums up your whole argument and I can see that your paranoia makes any appeal to reason a futile exercise.
It is only paranoia when what you believe is not true
4) Explain how the scientific process works.
You still have no idea. I don’t need to google it I know it pretty well.
See my citation of how the scientific method works above
PossumBilly
My response:
What an outlandish and absurd comment. You know as well as I do that science covers multitude of disciplines. Not every scientist studies climate, however such is the overwhelming cross discipline support for the AGW theory that, I repeat, not one scientific institute / university faculty that disputes that fact. All we have is your fallacious inference that, for example, there are proportionally fewer climate scientist to say astronomers the AGW theory is incorrect.
My point that seems to elude you is “institutions” paying lip service to AGW orthodoxy proves nothing and it is no guarantee that those in scientific disciplines other than climate science even have a considered opinion on the subject.
I have a science degree. I am not a climate scientist yet I do not make assumptions that those highly qualified in their field are incompetent to research, measure, analyse and report with scientific rigor.
I’m not a scientist or even a science graduate but I do very well understand that a whole tribe can believe something and they can all be in error. The AGW proposition makes a number assumptions that they simply can not prove (like the sensitivity of the climate to increases in CO2) Furious agreement simply does not falsify a hypothesis as you should understand
At what stage do you give a dentist the opportunity to do a quadruple bypass? Your logic is as twisted as it is transparent.
I am not as willing as you are to just defer to authority or assume that only thiose in the club should have an opinion on the subject.
You have the opportunity via the internet to read the peer reviewed papers, journals and other learned papers but you chose not to.
Sure and on occasion I have done so
3) Prove specific example of spruiking [sic] the AGW position where the data are inconsistent with statistical modeling and so distort the conclusion.
That is the problem,” statistical modeling” can be twisted to prove anything, I want to see the AGW proposition substantiated not by statistics but by the scientific method:
The scientific method is a way to ask and answer scientific questions by making observations and doing experiments. The steps of the scientific method are to: Ask a Question. Do Background Research. Construct a Hypothesis.
The point I am making here is that the study of climate is only a small fraction of all of the scientific study done on the planet, and as such even if all of those studying climate are in energetic agreement about the AGW proposition there are many more people in other scientific disciplines who are far from being committed to the idea of AGW. Yet proponents like you will insist repeatedly that “97%” of scientists (not just climate scientists) support the AGW proposition It is obviously an exaggeration to suggests that only 3% of every scientist on the planet questions the proposition but that is the usual MO. So do you get the point I am making here yet?
Yes of course it is, but you add nothing to the argument. Your argument is vacuous considering the multiple consensus projects that each add to the 97% conclusion.
THAT IS MY POINT ABOUT CLAIMS OF CONSENSUS!
Viridis
How much hotter and colder, wetter or dryer? Obviously you have recorded the data as you make such confident statements. How about sharing it here right now with us? That way you could easily prove your point instead of looking like a bit of an idiot.
I’ll tell you a couple of anecdotes to explain how I know the climate has been cyclic up here, about thirty years ago we were living in a place where we had to ford three creek crossings to get to our house at the time we had a Japanese fwd car and we spent about five years being regularly unable to leave or return to our house because we could not cross those fords, We then bought a Landrover which heralded an almost decade long drought That takes care of wet and dry variation. Like most people who live in one place for a while I can remember what the weather was like in each year that we have lived here. The last winter was rather mild and we did not use a heater at all the one before it less so.
MGEvans
That’s not the first time you’ve glibly confessed you don’t care because it doesn’t effect you.
For heavens sake lighten up man! neither you no I are really going to effected by any changes in the climate, unless we are going to be able to live for a very long time
This is the main feature of your style of argument, to put yourself completely outside of civilised norms and pretend you have a valid point.
“outside civilized norms”? Eyeroll!!!!
But your extreme selfishness automatically disqualifies you, you lose every time. But please, keep wasting your own time.
Tell me what you do in your life that really makes a difference to the climate. Have you for instance forsworn using jet air travel? Do you renew your technology whenever the new thing comes out even though your existing machines are still serviceable. do you repair or replace when thing in your house break or fail?
My comment about the beach being closer was a lighthearted joke
MGEvans
Iain_Hall vs the rising sea, the wide world and the stars above, he will never surrender, just keeps droning on until the sky falls down
Well i live on a mountain that is 400m above sea level which means that even if the sea were to rise 100m above its current level my place would be fine , heck it would just make the beach closer!
AllStBob
Woah! I am pretty sure I am not a “totalitarian Marxist”. I’ve worked in banking most of my life and have a deep belief that capitalism, despite its faults, is the best way forward for humanity.
I did not say that you in particular are a marxist Bob, that said glad to hear that you endorse capitalism though!
BlueThird
Over in Hall-World™, the first unstated rule is that whenever there’s a choice between two vested interests, the more powerful one is automatically right. The second rule is that you never admit to the first rule.
On this topic the more powerful vested interest is actually the one I am arguing against, namely on this occasion, the AGW orthodoxy
So he’ll always shift the argument onto the behaviour of the less powerful, just to waste your time and energy, and no matter how much intellectual dishonesty it involves on his part. The next stage is to dissect. On the face of it, this allows him to claim that there’s some sort of intellectual process in what he does, but again, it’s really about wasting your time and energy.
In this place the AGW orthodoxy is manifestly more powerful as it has been for many years
When he forwards an argument, the same mistakes in reasoning will be repeated time and again. Reasonably soon, we’ll get to the point where someone will note that his posts conclusively prove that he doesn’t understand science, or even logic, and he flatly states that he understands it well enough. By that time, there’s likely to be another argument going.
The same can be said of everyone who participates here because most are unwilling to shift their position. Maybe you need to understand that commenting in places like this one it is the journey rather than the destination that matters
Deflect, dissect, deny, repeat. You can see the process in any number of threads.
really and your back catalogue is so different?
In this case, while you’re arguing about the merits of science, and he tries to get you to engage with him in more and more detail, the larger, more powerful vested interest gets a free pass.
Once again I remind you that the more powerful vested interest here is the AGW orthodoxy which I am questioning.
Almost everyone else here can see that by far the larger potential for corruption comes from the fossil fuel industries rather than climate scientists, but that’s not how things go in Hall-World.
How so? “fossil fuel industries” do not rely on the public purse for their very existence the way that purveyors of the AGW orthodoxy clearly do.
Think of the school bully’s weediest friend, strutting alongside, chest puffed out, imagining all of that power is his, and you’ve got the basic psychology of it. Along with the freedom to feel genuinely sorry for him.
You imbue me with far more power than I, in all of my humility, even aspire to like everyone else here, yourself included, I argue for the fun of it.
58656e
Steve McIntyre does a fine job on debunking [Tamino]
You think?!
yes I do
and you offer no serious counter argument
Oh no, discussing the meaning of words involves … semantics!!!!!! Say it isn’t so Iain.
The claim I was referring to is this one:
An ‘alarmist’ is someone who exaggerates the dangers, not someone (like Tamino) who quantifies it.
If someone quantifies the ‘dangers is such a way as to magnify or over emphasizes them then that is by definition being an alarmist, the gentleman in question is heavily invested in the notion that we are in a climate crisis and his every word , graph and formulae is pressed into service to create a sense of urgent concern in his readers
Anyone who argues that the world is going to fry, as he does, is by definition an alarmist.
No Iain. The definition of alarmist is someone who exaggerates dangers e.g. so as to cause panic. When Tamino, for example, writes: “Our own sun, 5 billion years or so from now, will expand to red giant size and possibly turn into a Mira-type variable. It will get so large that it will engulf the earth and fry it,” he’s not being alarmist, he’s stating the facts to the best of our contemporary knowledge. Ergo it is possible to argue that “the world is going to fry” and not be an alarmist.
Now you are being silly he is seeking to cause urgent concern about climate change NOT the inevitable decay of our star. Correlation does not prove causation
Nor does it even imply it. OTOH, Causation implies correlation.
Check the links to see why you are wrong and why I said your claim made no sense
Thank you for providing us all with this insight into your level understanding of what correlation tests Iain.
Two seconds on google vindicated me
The “evidence” as you put it is simply not there
Surely the time must come when the evidence forces even you to face up to reality? Obviously that time is not yet.
Its not there at present , but why does it matter to you if I don’t have your faith in the AGW proposition? is your faith that shaky that one dissenting voice here is going to do you spiritual harm?
AllStBob
What makes me lack faith is largely who has been pushing this issue because so many of the climate activists are totalitarian Marxists who are using as a stalking horse to oppose capitalism, Furtehr to that we have had so much hyperbole form the likes of Flannery Mann and Gore et al that its hard to take any of the AGW proponents seriously. but as you suggest time will tell and all we can hope for is that none of the futile climate measures like Shorten’s new carbon tax get up and hopefully the government will drop their ‘direct action policy too.
AllStBob
I am sorry ( I am a statistician) but that statement is just nonsense, the predictive value of trends is entirely within the context of the system for which they are measured.
Well as statistician you must appreciate that if your data set is small (as ours is on climate because it only covers a little more than a century) then that limits its value as a predictive tool
In this case there is a well understood physical cause for the trend upwards in average temperatures, the theory predicts an increase and that is what we see. All you are really saying is: “I don’t believe it”.
Sadly you are right I don’t have your faith in the Climate religion.
Actually MGEvans Its just little old me and I am answering in between other chores at home
yashers
The argument for it being natural variation is well supported by the times in our history when it has been warmer than it is now , like in the time of the Romans and in the middle ages at neither time was there the mass burning of fossil fuels that is cited as the “cause” of the current warming.
But hang on – in all your other posts you dismiss comments based on the fact we don’t have accurate records for temperature that go back much beyond a 100 years. Yet you’re now talking about how warm the world was 2000 years ago. Make up your mind.
You are right that I have questioned the idea that the last few weeks have been unprecedented or truly exceptional on the basis that or record does not go back far enough. But suggesting that the anecdotal evidence form history is that the climate was warmer in the past is not a contradiction because I am talking about the general rather than the specifics of any particular month.
That the climate is changing is uncontested by me, its the endless desire to blame humanity that I disagree with.
OK, so even if it’s not humans, say it is just natural variation, what exactly is the issue with researching and investing in cleaner technologies, reducing waste, recycling more, stopping deforestation and all the other myriad ideas?
(I have removed “halving CO2 emissions, ” from your list here)
Absolutely nothing and I try to do all of those things in my low impact lifestyle, further you won’t find me arguing against better and more efficient energy use anywhere.
If you reply saying you don’t have an issue with any of this and that it’s purely the fact you don’t like the opinion that humanity is having an impact on climate change, well that seems petty.
Its not petty its at the very heart of the issue because the misanthropy at the heart of the AGW proposition is the problem.
Whilst on the subject of petty, please learn the difference between its and it’s.
No one likes the spelling police, especially on things as trivial as that.
In response to TheIPAResistance
TheIPAResistance
More bullshit from IH. I live within 25km of him and the weather is not running anywhere near average. And this:
Really that close, then we should do coffee sometime I’m sure it would be an interesting chat. That said I have lived here for nearly thirty years and and I have noticed the local cycles which seem pretty average to me
This man is deluded and should be ignored as a troll. The climate echoed can be traced for at least 600,000 years using ice bubbles. Game over, pal.
You do know that you can’t accurately measure temperature from ice bubbles don’t you? Proxies of all kinds at best give you a very rough idea of the prevailing climate and all that you can tell from ice burbles is atmospheric composition, not temperature.
Stereophonic
That would be when humanity dies off from extreme droughts?
Careful your bum doesn’t get burnt with you head buried that far in the sand.
No it would be when we have a cold year again as will happen eventually just as it has happened before . Its the same with our occasional flood events like in 74 and more recently here in Queensland these things come around when they are due.
PossumBilly
I refer to your comment…
“No you may have the self serving global climate science community spruiking the AGW proposition but they do not speak for all on the planet who do science”
What this article is about is not the short term variations in climatic conditions but longer climatic changes. This is not difficult to grasp.
I have not argued otherwise
However what is typical of anything that does not fit a preconceived idea. the misguided, misleading and ‘politically driven’ are disingenuous. The conflation of two issues is a convenient tactic of obfuscation.
Which is relevant how precisely?
Science knows and understands long term variations and it also know and understand the overlying influences of AGW. This is taken into account. Just take the time to look it up
There is no monolith called science that does anything of the sort.
The specific invocation of science within your argument is not political. You invert the scientific argument which by own admission you are ‘unqualified to make’ and as far as I can see you do not understand.
No I go to first principles, if the period for which you have data is too short (as is our instrumental temperature observations at only a little more than 100 years) then its rather a stretch to say that any data point (like our recent April temperatures) are truly significant
You are yet to answer my question which I will now rephrase so that you might understand it. I have decomposed it into bite size questions so not to confuse you. (Examples and references are needed, do not use not political rhetoric or meaningless slogans. In other words base your answers on fact.)
yawn!
1) Who are the people on the planet that ‘do science’ ( I assume you mean ‘real’ science’ Please define them, their field and competence.
For the sake of this argument shall we say anyone who has science degree? And of that cohort only a very small percentage study the climate
2) Who are the scientists you refer to that at not ‘real scientists’ and explain why they are not part of the mainstream science community. In other words explain the difference between 1) and 2).
That makes no sense I do not classify “scientists” as “real” or “non real”
3) Prove specific example of spruiking [sic] the AGW position where the data are inconsistent with statistical modeling and so distort the conclusion.
The point I am making here is that the study of climate is only a small fraction of all of the scientific study done on the planet, and as such even if all of those studying climate are in energetic agreement about the AGW proposition there are many more people in other scientific disciplines who are far from being committed to the idea of AGW. Yet proponents like you will insist repeatedly that “97%” of scientists (not just climate scientists) support the AGW proposition It is obviously an exaggeration to suggests that only 3% of every scientist on the planet questions the proposition but that is the usual MO. So do you get the point I am making here yet?
4) Explain how the scientific process works.
Google the scientific methodI believe that you have little concern for the facts neither do you care about science.
Remember there is no Scientific institution on this planet that disputes the existence of AGW. None, zilch, nein …. Interesting isn’t it?
Really Even those from disciplines other than climate science? Prove this claim please. because no theory has that amount of support from diverse disciplines
What you have is a ‘dead parrot’, good luck with your search for ignorance.
look in the mirror mate
58656e
Citing that nutty alarmist Tanimo does you no favours BTW!!
Desperately labeling Tamino “nutty alarmist,” simply because he can actually show us the maths, does you no favours Iain.
Steve McIntyre does a fine job on debunking this hero of yours
An ‘alarmist’ is someone who exaggerates the dangers, not someone (like Tamino) who quantifies it.
That is semantic hair splitting at best
Unlike describing you as a ‘denier,’ because you actually fit the strict denotation of that word –someone who denies established historical or scientific “facts”*
Its not appropriate because I don’t deny “historical or scientific “facts”” I just question an hypothesis about the nature of our climate that is unable to be tested by the scientific method
–calling Tamino an ‘alarmist’ is mere name calling. It’s not symmetrical.
Anyone who argues that the world is going to fry, as he does, is by definition an alarmist.
[*inasmuch as the word ‘fact’ is capable of denoting the best available science]
The ‘best available science” on “climate change” does not meet the definition of a “fact”
You do yourself no favours either Iain, by having invested so very much of your ego in defending the counter-factual position. Look how much jazz you are posting on this one thread alone! For your own sake you need to slow down. The only thing you are convincing people of is that you are, as you put it, “nutty.”
I am by no means the most prolific poster at COF and in any event I enjoy the journey of the argument
Surely the time must come when the evidence forces even you to face up to reality? Obviously that time is not yet.
The “evidence” as you put it is simply not there and even if it were the proposed cure is not possible because of global politics.
Oh, I couldn’t resist one last thing …
Correlation does not prove causation
Nor does it even imply it. OTOH, Causation implies correlation.
That makes no sense
yashers
Okay, there is a chance it could be natural variation, however it is highly unlikely. All of the scientific research that has been conducted points to the fact that climate change is happening, and at a worryingly fast rate.
On the contrary I think that its more likely than the tiny (in the overall scheme of things ) increase in the concentration of a trace gas is going to chnage the whole climate.
The rapid warming we’ve seen over the past 50 years is inline with how the climate should respond to a steep rise in greenhouse gases (which humans are largely responsible for).
The argument for it being natural variation is well supported by the times in our history when it has been warmer than it is now , like in the time of the Romans and in the middle ages at neither time was there the mass burning of fossil fuels that is cited as the “cause” of the current warming.
The rise in temperature is also inconsistent with the scientific understanding of how the climate should respond to natural variation.
Sorry but that makes no logical sense
I don’t believe natural variation to be a sound argument for what’s happening.
Well I think the evidence suggests that it is (as per what I said above about other periods in pre-industrial history that were as warm or warmer than now
I also don’t understand why you are so against the idea that climate change is happening and the detrimental affect it will have? Do you just like being a contrarian?
That the climate is changing is uncontested by me, its the endless desire to blame humanity that I disagree with.
PeaBea
We don’t need to assume how CO2 works, we already know. This is established physics.
Really then why is there no finite number for climate sensitivity to Co2 increases?
And as for the idea of a big conspiracy to keep climate jobs, you should talk to scientists one day. Most are in their field because of passion and interest, money rates very low in terms of motivation.
Take away the funding and see how many continue to do the same work.
And studying how our climate and global systems work is an end in itself for the majority of scientists, so they’d be interested with or without climate change.
Scholars in the middle ages used to say the same thing about their speculations about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin
Finally, scientists tend to have big egos. Any scientist would love to make a discovery that turns scientific understanding on its head. As such there’s more personal and financial motivation and gain possible in disproving climate change than supporting it.
They also have a very strong herd instinct and a desire to find a place in the existing academic pecking order which mitigates against then being at all heterodox in their thinking.
PeaBea
Satellites and the surface temperature record are measuring related but different things. If you claim to read a lot and be educated about this topic you should know that.
I know that my point is however unaffected because what I am trying to point out that each of them is more accurate than a Proxy when it comes to measuring temperature and climate
AllStBob
I am guessing you don’t have any actual data but you can go to this website and find the temperature record for the nearest weather station.
I have no doubt that this has been a warm April but I really don’t think that is extraordinary enough to panic about the end of life as we know it
And then plot, for example, the average maximum temperature for April. See if the numbers are generally rising and if previous peaks correspond to your recollection.
The temperature record only goes back for 100 yeas in this country if the record went back further I expect that we would find other instances when it is as hot in April as it has been this year.
I don’t think this proves anything about global warming as space averaging smooths out the variability but not the trend, so just using a single local temperature record it might indeed be hard to spot the trend.
“Trends” really have very weak predictive value and its really only in retrospect that we can see what has truly been happening with the climate.
In response to NickThiwerspoon
NickThiwerspoon
Citing that nutty alarmist Tanimo does you no favours BTW!!!
As opposed to listening to your facts-free diatribes?
A diatribe is by definition a lengthy epistle, where as my comments are more succinct, That said Steve McIntyre does a good job of pointing out why Tanimo is as I describe him.
Niall Connolly
‘More likely’ it is natural variation? How so? (what is the evidence for your assertion of ‘likelihood’? How many coins tossed heads or tails in a row is that?
We have a reasonably accurate instrumental record that is about a century long and it shows quite a large variation in our weather over that time. so its reasonable to assume that the variations will be natural given the current data set
And as for my other point, prior to the Industrial Revolution atmospheric CO2 was stable at about 270/280 ppm for at least 800,000 years according to well established and scientifically accepted data.
Correlation does not prove causation
Are you a ‘religious’ denier or a ‘just because’ denier?
I am neither because I do not deny the changeability of our climate. I just accept things as they come and don’t share your hubris in thinking that humanity can act together at a global level for long enough to control the climate (assuming the assumptions about the effect of an increased Co2 concentration are correct). As a species we are simply not co-operative enough for that.
In response to markmywords1963
markmywords1963
is that really your logic? Every little bit makes a difference and cumulatively it all adds up. How old are you?
Only if there is an inevitable global take up of emission reductions which simply is not going to happen. so our efforts will make no difference even if we ceased to emit any co2 at all
Helicalgroove
Why do you think that I endorse direct action?
I don’t care whether you do or not. The fact is that almost everybody on this sit is questioning authority in the form of government policy.
But you avoid my point that almost everyone here does not question the authority of the climate gurus.
If consensus is not valid for those like me who question the AGW proposition then why should it be valid to claim that the consensus from a different cohort proves the validity of that same proposition?
In response to Erik Frederiksen
Has it occurred to you the problem in India is that the population far exceeds the carrying capacity of the land much more than its the climate?
PossumBilly
In defence of AGW denial runs a fatuous line that it’s the ‘self serving scientists’, it’s ‘grab for more funding’ or it’s a commie plot for world domination. A level of paranoia , with an associated objectivity disconnect and typically insubstantial evidence beyond ‘hearsay’ and ‘political dogma’.
So what would the individuals in the AGW industry do without a dire future to warn against?
It is impossible to discuss any scientific principles or research with people who are only able to recite the’ Pavlovan’ mantra.
This is not a scientific discussion forum, its a forum about politics so if you can explain how the prescriptions of the AGW proposition can be adequately manifested at a global level then the theories of the proposition may be relevant but if you can’t explain how that cure can be made to happen politically then how right or wrong the underlying theory is simply becomes a moot point.
Now , if you have any proof that the science is incorrect then address it in a mature, logical and clearly rationed argument such that might be taken seriously.
I was unaware that arguments on this subject had to be rationed
Produced a paper of such conviction that the scientific community sits up and takes notice. The problem is that you cannot , never have been, or will able to do so in the future.
Your sentence construction needs work Billy, that said I have never claimed to be a scientist, but then again the boy who pointed out the Emperor’s nakedness was not a qualified fashion expert either
One question that always exposes the insincerity around the science;, is ‘define explicitly and in scientific terms the level evidence that you would personally satisfy the AGW theory?
When the AGW proposition can be demonstrated by the scientific method I will accept it. Suppositions based on faulty or unsubstantiated assumptions is all that we have at present
B
eyond a scientifically defined baseline everything else is irrelevant.
What is that supposed to mean?
.
You statement effectively says ‘but everything changes’ a dishonest basis to your argument, it means absolutely nothing.
Change is actually the only certainty
If that is all you have to offer you might find it more fruitful doing some serious research. Education is a wonderful thing. But knowledge evidence and history are not on your side.
Really? well only time will tell
Helicalgroove
Oh for the ethos of the sixties( when I was growing up) that argued that we should question authority , now the left go to the barricades mindlessly defending the current orthodoxy. What happened to your independent minds?
I question whether you actually have gown up.
After a recent birthday my bank tells me I am now a “senior customer” so that is as grown up as it gets I suppose ;o)
As for questioning authority, what do you call the people who make the laws, who visited this unworkable “Direct Action” on us, who hold the reins of government and therefore set climate policy?
Whay do you think that I endorse direct action? While I do think it is a lesser evil that the Labor schemes past and present I still think that its a waste of money
Go back to the 60s and do some more maturing.
Sorry, my Tardis is in for a service at present so time travel is off the agenda.
TheotherClaw
Ian is the type of chap who forms an opinion and then goes looking for disaffected crackpots to support his “hunch”.
No that is not how I work at all
The conspiracy theory about the great majority of scientists who are actually qualified to comment on this issue, being involved in some sort of group think or worse, fraud, is a disgrace.
Really? The fact that those in the climate change industry would be unemployed should the AGW proposition collapse has nothing to do with their dire predictions I suppose?
No matter how true the AGW proposition may be there will be almost no chance that they can get up the claimed cure of a massive reduction in CO2 emissions in the sort of time frame they say is necessary so we are far better served by planning to adapat if and when we have to than wasting effort and energy trying to get up futile “mitigation” schemes.
witness67
‘Natural variation’ which has seen hot weather records consistently broken as opposed to cold weather records – its been a while since I have seen any of those broken. That would signify a warming trend, would it not?
Then the period of your observations is simply not long enough
If it was just ‘natural variation’, one would expect roughly equal numbers of hot and cold weather records broken.
Given time they will be the instrumental observations only go back about a century in this country and given the evidence that the climate varitations run in longer cycles than 100 years we need a far more extensive record to call upon
I think you need to educate yourself a bit more on climate science – read some more articles and improve yourself.
I have read plenty on the subject.
TheotherClaw
Natural variation can be used to explain you.
Sure
Climate change however shows persistence outside anticipated variation.
That is nonsense, variation can not be predicted it can only be observed.
Statistically were heading for ruin unless we make some changes.
None of the proposed panaceas have any chance of making the slightest bit of difference to the global climate.
Happily the changes we need to make, align with a technological improvement and may enliven a fast stagnating economy. So get on board and quit your whining.
None of them are politically possible so it does not matter what the theories claim could happen on way way or another.
Alpo88
Hey, Iain, how have you calibrated your personal “climatevariometer”?… Do you get your “climatevariometer” annually serviced?…
Yes and yes
Surely the records from your “climatevariometer” are more recent than the instrumental records going back to the 19th century,
In this country the instrumental records do not really go back much before the beginning of the 20th century
and the use of proxys that extend our window to thousands of years!….
Proxies are actually orders of magnitude less accurate than the instrumental record which is itself orders of magnitude less accurate than global satellite observations that only began in the last quarter of the last century. The further back in time that you look the less accurate the picture we have of the global climate. Or don’t you understand that?
Remember: learn first and blog later, never do the opposite!
That is what I have been doing for years
AllStBob
Apparently the length of time you have been living here is long enough to make a definitive claim that it is due to natural variation but not long enough to determine if a record has been broken or not.
I have lived in SE Queensland since 1963 and since coming here I have seen both hotter and colder wetter and dryer weather.
Interesting that you talk about how long we need to make observations for something to be a record because it brings to mind the fact that we have only had a detailed instrumental observations for about the last century which means that any “record” is not covering any of the experience before we began making those observations. In geological/ climate terms a century is simply not a long enough time frame to claim that our current experience is at all unprecedented or unusual.
Stereophonic
We used to get frosts for a couple of months north of Brisbane in 1994. Now we don’t see them at all.
If you wait long enough you will see them again, that is how natural variation works
Niall Connolly
So is no month below the 20th century average since February 1985 ‘natural variation’?
Most likely it isAnd atmospheric CO2 at 400ppm higher than it has been in 800,000 years??
Where do you get that claim from?
In response to NickThiwerspoon
NickThiwerspoon
I live here. You don’t. I see the effects of a warmer climate every year. You don’t. And meanwhile global temps continue to rise.
I’ve lived in Queensland since 1963 Nick and in that time I’ve experienced hotter and colder years this one is not that far out of the normal range. And as I said our instrumental record does not go back that far (little more than a century) and anecdotal evidence of the climate only goes back to 1788 in this country.
Citing that nutty alarmist Tanimo does you no favours BTW!!!
Michael_GPF
I’d rather accept the evidence of the world’s scientists, as have the world’s governments have, than the broken down reactionary hacks who merely peddle anti-left political spite on this topic.
Oh for the ethos of the sixties( when I was growing up) that argued that we should question authority , now the left go to the barricades mindlessly defending the current orthodoxy. What happened to your independent minds?
Mikes005
OK, I’ll reply to the troll this once: Look, son – you have the entire – *entire* – global scientific community with cumulative expertise running into the centuries saying the world is warming and point to exactly why after a collective millions of hours of research.
No you may have the self serving global climate science community spruiking the AGW proposition but they do not speak for all on the planet who do science.
And then we have you, who just makes shit up.
No I don’t
Please, shut your pie hole. No one cares about your opinions when facts are drowning you out.
You care enough to denounce me though don’t you?
In response to NickThiwerspoon
Its called “natural variation Nick and its clear after living here for most of my life that the range of variation in this country has always been quite high and thsi recent moth is actually no exception. Further more the record that is claimed to have been broken here does not go back far enough to be that definitive anyway
Latest Posts
-
Considering “The rise of white internationalism, from the US to Russia” By Jason Wilson
During Hillary Clinton’s speech today attacking Donald Trump for his associations with the so-called alt right, she made at least one important point: that rise of the…
-
Just now to jamesman
Iain_Hall Just now 0 1 jamesman It is not the liberal left that is the problem. It is the far right xenophobia, coupled with neoliberalism…
-
Jason Wilson can’t stand Milo Yiannopoulos
This is probably going to be long. It stems very much from a conversation I have been having with Jason over twitter where he insisted…
-
Guardian comments 16-6-2016
We have a stark choice: protect the global commons or give in to special interests In response to Alpo88 You are a priest of the…
