Latane’s dynamic social impact theory + Moscovici’s work on minority influence + the internet = support for the NZ Climate Science Coalition.
They just published their rebuff to the Royal Society of NZ’s statement that climate change exists. My favourite bit:
…the [Royal Society] committee is unrepresentative: five members are from Wellington and two from Hamilton…
Because it just ain’t proper science unless Balclutha is at the table!
(NZCSC discussed much better at Hot Topic.)
The UK papers and the rightysphere are all talking about David Cameron’s big speech in which he says we need to stop making excuses for fat people and poor people and criminals and recognise that they have made choices to be the way they are.
“We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people’s feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgemental, we have failed to say what needs to be said. We have seen a decades-long erosion of responsibility, of social virtue, of self-discipline, respect for others, deferring gratification instead of instant gratification.
“Instead we prefer moral neutrality, a refusal to make judgments about what is good and bad behaviour, right and wrong behaviour. Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more.”
There’s so much packed into these short paragraphs that its quite impressive. Its a very well-crafted speech that repackages all the talkback shibboleths as if they were something statesmanlike. I could write for ages about the way these ideas are packaged so shrewdly – note the sleight of hand in this next excerpt that equates “risk of obesity” to “risk of poverty” as if these were equivalent.
Refusing to use these words – right and wrong – means a denial of personal responsibility and the concept of a moral choice.
We talk about people being ‘at risk of obesity’ instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise. We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it’s as if these things – obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction – are purely external events like a plague or bad weather.
Of course, circumstances – where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school, and the choices your parents make – have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make.
The biggest problem with this emphasis on individual choice and individual responsibility is simply this – it doesn’t get you anywhere. If we conceive of social problems through a lens of personal choice, then right out of the gate we’re drastically limiting our ability as a society to respond to them. Instead of interrogating circumstances and environment and contributing factors, we focus on choice, and the incentives and disincentives that act on it.
And this even though we know full well that choices are made in ways far from the rational. To pretend otherwise is to deny what it is to be human. If we focus on social change in terms of choice we are doubly hampered, firstly because we are limiting our range of responses to “provide incentives” and “provide disincentives”; and secondly because the incentives and disincentives we can provide are profoundly weak. Our choices, when they are the product of reflection and weighing up of incentives and disincentives, will pay little attention to external impositions by the state. Far more important are influences from friends, neighbours, parents – the people you live among whose opinions will affect you each and every day. To believe that ASBOs have had any impact on the behaviour of your typical disaffected yoof goes so far beyond wishful thinking it lands in the realm of ritualised sympathetic magic. (Failed magic, I might add.)
Cameron likely made this speech to put his “hug a hoodie” comments behind him and to make a pass at populist intolerance while Labour support has collapsed too much to benefit. It will certainly give him a big bump in his popularity, and it is entirely in step with the overall project of the right. And it’s a shame. This is basically a retreat from the complexity of the real world into a deeply naive social science. These unhelpful ideas are already virulent enough without being dignified with this kind of high-profile promotion.
(I feel I should note, in case of misunderstanding – yes, personal choice plays a role in behaviour, and yes, incentives and disincentives can affect personal behaviour. My point is, that is an incredibly narrow understanding of the complexities of why a person, or a society, behave the way they do.)
Went along to Drinking Liberally on Thursday night, a packed house (including a couple of MPs) for NZ’s great investigative journalist Nicky Hager. Cal and I were both pretty under the weather so we didn’t stick around afterwards, but it was good to hear him talk.
Hager talked for a while about how he is frustrated by people who say the public is apathetic about politics, saying his experience is that people everywhere, at all levels of society, are interested and have opinions that go beyond pure self-interest. He blames the political process for making people feel excluded and helpless. Crosby-Textor, the “evil agency” employed by National to help with their campaign, were paradigmatic examples of this. They are carefully structuring National’s campaign to shut down anything that is interesting, so people experience the substance of politics as boring and have to focus on personality. The strict insistence on repeating the same statements over and over is rendering the political conversation empty, and that is the cause of perceived public apathy
He spoke mostly about the National opposition and its many sins, because it was a liberal crowd, but made a point of Labour’s failures and wrongdoing as well – he identified Labour’s years of shutting down debate, and (most damningly) its failure to build up a credible liberal community in New Zealand. It held on to power too closely and as a result, now that the wind is coming out of its sails, there’s no support ready to come to its aid.
He made a bunch of other interesting points (noting how fundamentally right-wing NZ is was one of them that struck home to me), but reserved most of his ire for the media, whose reactive press-release driven mode of operation clearly drives him to distraction. While careful not to attack them too overtly (“I have to work in that world”, he said) it was clear that he places huge accountability on the news media for the sad state of political conversation here (and presumably overseas as well). Why, he asked, had no media representative asked John Key if he was employing Crosby Textor? It had been a major issue for his predecessor in the role – and yet not one Kiwi journalist fronted up to Key and asked him if he was taking a different course.
That is why Nicky Hager is so valuable. He’s a legend, in my book. Kudos.
(I’m going to see the movie of his revelatory book on the last National campaign, The Hollow Men, in the film fest. Should be fun. Really should read the book, seeing as I’ve seen Hager talk about it, seen the play of the book, and will shortly see the film of the book…)
Side note: it does puzzle me why the DomPost, among other papers, happily publish ridiculous letters to the editor like today’s asking for Hager to be prosecuted for being in possession of leaked emails. Surely the capital city newspaper doesn’t think reporting on leaked documents is a crime? Why, then, do they allow such attacks to get into print at all? It surprises me.
DomPost man in the Beehive Vernon Small: As National leader John Key is fond of saying: Explaining is losing.
I find myself forced to question this – does he really say that? Google sure don’t find any instances. Gerry Brownless said it in the house a year ago, but that’s about it. So does Vernon Small really testify that Key says this when off-mike? That’s a hell of a bean to throw, if so, because it comes from the arch-demon himself:
“Explaining is losing.” This is the only direct quote I’ve lifted from the book, because it is key, absolutely critical. If your guy has to explain anything – his policies, his past, anything – then your guy is playing a losing game. Voters in general don’t want to be burdened with policy details and candidates certainly don’t want to get mired in personal explanations. Just forget explaining anything — anything at all — and move on. It’ll work. You’ll be amazed.
– from a summary of ‘Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George Bush Presidential’
Speaking of election advice and strategy, Nicky Hager’s continued that unfamiliar “journalism” thing with a report on how John Key and the National core have enlisted extensive multi-year support from despised election dirty-tricks experts Crosby, Stills & Textor. As usual with Hager’s stuff, his story is then picked up and covered mostly in terms of “who does that Nicky Hager think he is” and “how is he getting all this information” rather than actually paying attention to what he’s dug up. But that’s the way things are done now, sad to say.
(Hager is a special guest at this Thursday’s Drinking Liberally in Wellington. I’m gonna be there.)
Left-wing politics lost the working man the moment it started caring about women and minorities.
In talk about Obama/Hillary I’ve seen the above claim a few times, never spelled out, but sitting there under the text. And I have to confess, it has a certain explanatory appeal.
But I am not a history expert, and I am suspicious of this claim that seems to imply that prejudice is endemic among working-class white men. I don’t think that’s true.
So, people who read this blog. Is that claim in italics nonsense? Or is there enough truth in there that it is of some value?
(Dastardly is a tremendously good word. I want to use it more often but the opportunity rarely presents itself.)
The Sunday Star-Times continues its delicate balance of being 95% useless and 5% exceptional, this time with a followup to the Thompson & Clark (TCIL) spying-on-protesters revelations of a few months back. (You may recall the glee with which I greeted the news that Gavin Clark had been outplayed at his own game by a complete novice.)
This article discusses one of the outputs of TCIL, a monthly report on activist comings and going named “National Extremism”. Of course, it’s just a compilation of public domain knowledge about environmental activists and the like. The example given in the article is hilariously indicative:
One item, for example, says “bio-diesel bus carrying the Be the Change Climate Rescue Tour arrives in Palmerston North fronted by environmental activist and Auckland Save Happy Valley member Jo McVeagh”. The tour, sponsored by Greenpeace, Oxfam and Forest and Bird, “aims to encourage individual New Zealanders throughout the country to make a personal contribution to combating climate change”. This “intelligence”, for which Maf had been paying $1000 per monthly report, was taken straight from a “Be the Change” press release. Thompson and Clark’s contribution was a comment about the bus’s bio-diesel a by-product of meat production “not [being] the smartest of choices for someone like McVeagh who wants to take the moral high ground” (presumably a reference to her assumed vegetarian beliefs).
As ridiculous as this all is, it would be a mistake to dismiss it. The spin the article takes is “look at your tax dollars being wasted”, and it is indeed an example of this, but that’s a sideshow to the real concerns here. What this report shows is the exercise of (capitalist) power to demonise those who are campaigning for a system that values something other than money.
Look at the title of the report for an example: environmental activists are, by definition, “extremists”, and the word “National” suggests how the interests of the coal industry (for example) are conflated with the good of the nation.
It would be unwise to assume that all the customers of this report endorse its aggressive framing of activist elements; I’m sure many, if not most, take it with a generous helping of salt. Nevertheless, they find enough value in it to purchase it, and that framing of ‘national extremism’ pervades the surrounding discourse. (For example, AgResearch and Genesis Energy, as mentioned in the article, put enough stock in TCIL to parrot their prepared lines to the media when questioned over the report.) In a wider context, the TCIL ‘national extremist’ frame is reflected in whole Urewera 8 ‘terrorist cell debacle.
In short, the problem is this: Those in power see those who question their actions as dangerous, not just to the powerful institutions themselves, but to the nation as a whole.
Luckily, New Zealand is small and heavily interconnected. It is hard to effectively demonise an Other when everyone is only a couple degrees of separation apart. The TCIL report reveals part of the hidden discourse of power but also shows how vulnerable it is to ridicule. Heck, our Powerful aren’t even that Powerful. While this problematic tendency has real and horrible consequences (again, look at the Urewera arrestees for an example), I suspect it is not strong enough to truly become widespread in the assumptions of those in positions of power. Other, larger, countries cannot be so confident.
In any case, TCIL are to be condemned, and their reports and the ludicrous framing they perpetuate must be held up for the nonsense they are. These frames don’t just misrepresent their subjects, they pervert the discussion of vital public issues and thereby the functioning of democracy itself. Thompson and Clark are buffoons, but they are buffoons who must be held publicly accountable for the consequences of their foolishness.
(see also No Right Turn on this)
(and also Mundens)
The changeover of all Parliamentary offices so waste is sorted at peoples’ desks (into recyclable and non-recyclable) has met heavy resistance from, you guessed it, our party of personal responsibility, ACT New Zealand.
ACT office staff are in full revolt after being told by parliamentary bosses that they must take part because it is Government policy.
ACT leader Rodney Hide said it was an example of the “nanny state gone barking mad”…
In a show of defiance, some ACT staff have turned their recycling cubes into pen holders and are ignoring the instruction to sort their waste.
Full story, with dramatic photo of ACT leader Rodney Hide not recycling some paper
I guess in this case ACT figure that personal freedom trumps personal responsibility, right? Because that makes hella sense.
And they’re pushing the NZ political return of Roger Douglas to solve our economic ills, blithely ignoring that the man’s radical free market reforms in the 80s did incalculable damage to the country from which it’s only now starting to recover… See also Gordon Campbell’s excellent review of ‘Working With Lange’, Michael Bassett’s book on the Lange years that paints the Rogernome as a misunderstood genius held back by selfish fools… Michael Bassett is not much loved by me and this review just gives more confirmation that he’s vile and self-deluded, and we can apparently add ‘virulently misogynist’ to the list as well.
It’s all so very, very sad.
I used to think that there were no differences of substance between the Right and Left of U.S. politics, per Nader and John Ralston Saul. The election of Bush Jr. showed me that I was wrong.
Obama’s secured the Democratic party candidacy. Good. It is nice to see that the most powerful democracy in the world won’t spend nearly a quarter-century with presidents alternating from two dinner tables – twenty years is quite long enough.
Obama will be working with Elizabeth Edwards on healthcare. Good. Healthcare is a huge mess in the U.S., concerns about healthcare cross partisan lines like no other issue. Obama’s weakness on healthcare also sent many voters to Clinton, who was stronger on this issue (e.g. ).
The election will be messy and nasty. The Republican strategists were ready to go mean on Clinton – they’ve been building ammo on her for years. Obama is much trickier, a relative naif with little dirt in his backstory, and what dirt there is has been played out in the dem primary. They’re left with all the dogwhistle stuff – he’s black, his name’s Hussein, he’s a secret muslim. There will be a lot of this crazy insinuation coming through until the election hits – witness this astonishing Fox News characterisation of a standard-issue fist bump as a terrorist fist jab.
The election should be a walk for Obama. It won’t be, though, because the U.S. is not a sane environment and its political culture has been thoroughly debased. Nevertheless, I eagerly anticipate the first president of the U.S. who’s not a white dude. He can’t be any worse than the current office holder.
Roll on the new era.
Israel warns it will attack Iran:
“If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective,” Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. “Attacking Iran, in order to stop its nuclear plans, will be unavoidable.”
The strategy is not to actually start another war – there is no resource to invade and conquer Iran, and Iran’s not in a position to move outside its borders – but to create a diplomatic situation that will allow Israel to conduct a bombing campaign on Iran without censure from the rest of the world.
Israel is champing at the bit to do this, and they know there’s not a thing Iran can do to stop them or retaliate against them. But the diplomatic costs would be huge, still. A bit more fearmongering around Iran is necessary before this option really becomes viable.
The second Drinking Liberally in Wellington happened last night. Michael Cullen, Finance Minister, came to talk on the back of his electoral-fighting budget – he spoke well about his background and the principles of social democracy, then took a bunch of questions which challenged him on his claims to being a Keynesian and asked about the Treaty resolution process, among other things. Before and after Cullen was mingling, and I was pleased to see a fair few faces there who were also at the one before, even though once again I couldn’t stick around much past 7pm.
It all felt a lot more sure of itself this time, it seemed that the mingling and conversation which was so hesitant at the first one was pretty engaged this time out. All as it should be – the concept is a perfect fit for a small capital city with a strong liberal base and plenty of bars… It was promising, and I’ll be along again, hopefully to get some solid chatter time in for a change.