Unexpectedly, for the first time in literally years, I’m having twinges of hope about fate of the planet this week. Prompted by these two things:
(1) A new Al Gore piece in Rolling Stone, in which he points out that the climate change battleground is shifting, using Obama’s recent moves to point out a whole lot of significant positive changes like rapid changes in solar.
(2) Climate Voter, an apolitical initiative by a number of NGOs (350, WWF, Greenpeace, Forest & Bird, Gen Zero, Oxfam) to basically build up a petition of people indicating how climate will drive their voting behaviour. This is a really elegant way to put these issues on the table. They’re hitting 15K as I write which is pretty solid but if climate change is an important issue for you I urge you to sign up as well. Do it now! I’ll wait!
Grantland has a great account of a convention for Diplomacy players – this game’s reputation as “the game that destroys friendships” is well-deserved.
I wondered out loud when someone would write about how Tumblr has changed comics. Kieron Gillen pointed me at this great article on how Marvel Comics is being shaped by Tumblr. I think there’s more to say – like how gender-bent/race-bent cosplay pics are changing the visual vocabulary of supers storytelling – but this covers a bunch of good stuff. Recommended to comics nerds of course but also anyone interested in social media as a phenomenon.
David R celebrated the 25th birthday of Tim Burton’s Batman with this supercut of Batman mentions:
Manfeels Park – hilarious new webcomic mashing together Pride & Prej images with man-pain internet comments. (by Marrog & Erin, hello Marrog & Erin)
Make up routine to make you happy. I have never learned as much about the intricacies of feminine psychology. (via Sophie O’Doom)
Charting the adaptation of Game of Thrones – which chapters to which episodes
Pugs as Game of Thrones characters
Being a neocon means never having to say you’re sorry
This story is amazing: guy who ended up irrevocably lost when he was 4 years old later tracked down his home by searching google maps for familiar scenes (via Sarah E)
And finally… Nick Offerman narrates this very funny short about an intrusive narrator in an old west saloon
I’m not sure I understand the Climate Voter thing. I feel like the vast majority of people who sign up to it are left-leaning (or will be assumed to be), so it’s not going to put any pressure on the parties on the right unless it gets improbably huge. In the unlikely event that Labour gets enough seats, they’ll go into coalition with the Greens anyway, who will do their best to progress climate policy. And we can lobby Labour then.
I feel like by registering on Climate Voter, I’m saying I’d vote National or Act if they had the best climate policy, and… I wouldn’t, because (a) all their other policies stink, and (b) the Greens’ climate policy is good enough for me, given (a).
So how is it not just a database of people who are going to vote Green, plus maybe a few Labour voters who are trying to convince their party to wake up?
Not just friendships! I met a woman once who (fairly convincingly) asserted that Diplomacy had destroyed her marriage.
Can’t say I’m overly buoyed by this week’s pro environment activities. Rushed law, logging on conservation estate. But hey awesome it will provide jobs, paid for by the removal of a natural resource that through the exploitation of the same resource in days gone past has created a niche market that says this will be a profitable activity. We do not need this. I certainly don’t don’t want to be a part of this. An especial fuck you to Damien O’Connor. You make no sense, apart from vote grabbing. Bah, the taste in my mouth is far more bitter than Friday hops.
Happy to pass Long Way Home on to you if you’re inetersted, Morgue. The big details are in the article above but the book’s okay!
Hey china – you raise a very good point. My perspective is really about pulling the frame wider. Climate change is clearly a cross-party issue, but I think we’re not too far from that being the case in practice as well as theory – maybe a decade or so, when parties will battle on the specific ways to meet carbon goals rather than whether a robust system is needed at all. So I see this initiative as a way to bring that day forward by making the climate change constituency visible, and forcing it into the conversation. Definitely a chunk of growth in the Green vote (mostly from Labour but also from National) is driven by this issue, and again, both big parties would love to grab those voters back.
In terms of this election – yeah, it’s pretty much gonna be people voting green (or people voting otherwise who want to signal that they intend to vote green to scare their preferred party). But to me that’s part of the bigger sweep of changing policy positioning among the parties, and also part of an evolving cultural conversation about this issue among the NZ public. The Nats and Labour both know they’ve lost people to the Greens over climate change. This campaign basically says those people are still in play. And to be honest I think they are – National’s not going to be naive enough to think every signatory is a potential Nat voter, but they also must be savvy enough to know there are blue ticks in there just waiting to be won back to the fold.
I don’t know if that all makes sense, it kinda feels like I just talked in circles. That’ll do for now tho!