While I’ve been distracted and gallivanting about, some good news has come in. The Australian government had set aside $4 million to give to Bjørn Lomborg, to create an institute of climate quackery at the University of Western Australia. I’m sure UWA could use $4 million (is there a university that isn’t strapped?) but they decided they didn’t need it that much and turned it down. I think most institutions of higher learning would similarly reject money for that purpose, or for building an astrology center, or a creationist think-tank.
It’s a little something called intellectual integrity.
(Universities sometimes fail in this regard, though, which is how the University of Minnesota ends up with a Center for Spirituality and Healing. But that’s a different story.)
As you might guess, conservatives are furious. Their standard line is that this was a violation of FREE SPEECH!
First to don the water skis for the shark jump was the education minster, Christopher Pyne, who vowed that he would find a new home for Lomborg’s questionable methodology.
“You can be certain it will happen,” said Pyne, before revealing that he had apparently been on the phone to “freedom of speech” and word had come back.
“Freedom of speech demands that it does,” declared Pyne (hashtag facepalm).
Many in Australia’s stable of conservative thinkers were so incensed by the decision of UWA’s vice chancellor, Paul Johnson, that the only balm to sooth their fiery rage was to quickly over-write 700 words for a Rupert Murdoch newspaper.
This was Australia’s very own “Scopes Monkey Trial” … a “disgrace to universities”… a “grotesque betrayal of the tradition of free thought” … a “craven surrender to the mob”. And that was just News Corp’s climate science mangler-in-chief, Andrew Bolt.
Free speech apparently means that the Australian government owes me $4 million right now. After all, I have things to say, and some Australians read them, and I want the money, and therefore if I’m not immediately given a government sinecure to say whatever I want, the principles of free thought have been destroyed.
Except, we’ve been over this before. Free speech means the government is not allowed to interfere with your expression of ideas, not that the government must subsidize your every word. Free thought actually is an intellectual tradition, but it does not mean that the universities may be bought — it means that they are allowed the freedom to practice some intellectual rigor and decide what the best ideas are. That means we have the freedom to say that some ideas are very bad, including the denialism of Lomborg.
I thought this comment by Will Grant was perfect.
Former Institute of Public Affairs fellow Tim Wilson, now a Human Rights Commissioner, accused the university of engaging in a form of “soft censorship”.
The Australian National University academic Will Grant pointed out that indeed universities did engage in soft censorship all the time. “It’s called learning”, wrote Grant.
Quite so. You know you’re dealing with a fool when they start arguing that freethought means you have to have an undisciplined brain that gives equal weight to both wise and foolish ideas.
Funny how conservatives just see the four letters “free” in a term or word, and think it means they can do anything they please. Yes, free speech says Bjorn Lomborg can attempt to publish in the science literature. Free speech also allows the editors and reviewers to state “this paper does not meet minimal scientific rigor for publishing as science”, and for the paper to be rejected. Nobody has to publish drivel.
PZ:
I’ve lost count of just how many times the commentariat has heard that exact argument here, from those who kneel to the blessed middle (both sides! both sides!), and confuse freedom to speak with platform.
“Jump the shark” is getting a little long in the tooth. How about “nuke the fridge”?
I’m reminded of the old chestnut “your mind should be open, but not so open that your brain falls out.”
He’s the federal member for the district I live in. I suffered a 1/2 hour of him prattling on at an Australia Day function on 26 January. Muted applause when he finished. Boy is he one big thicko. A true conservative of the worst kind.
Need some ointment for that burn.
Where the hell did “jump the shark” even come from? I’m not even entirely clear on what it means.
On topic, well done UWA! I’ve a friend currently living in Aus, he’ll love this.
And speaking of Aussie conservatives, what’s up with the “Liberal” party? They have got to be the most disingenuously named political party in the entire developed world.
It’s from the sitcom Happy Days, after an episode where the main character, The Fonz, jumped over a shark with waterskis. After that point, some people think Happy Days had run its course and tried to hard to be cool. Hence “jump the shark” means something like “played out”.
Reminds me of a thing that happened here in Sweden. So this Danish margarine tycoon dies, and in his will he bequeaths a bunch of money (about 30 million kronor at the time it became relevant, which is roughly 3.5-4 million US dollars) to whatever university decides to … drumroll … establish a professorship in parapsychology.
Being the rational Scandinavian master race, champions of secularism and smartiness, we would never fall for such stupidity, right? Hahahahaha yeah okay. (Last link Swedish, but it’s the most detailed one, so it’s worth a Google translate.)
Sometimes I hate my country.
Thumper: Who Presents Boxes Which Are Not Opened @ 7
They’re classical liberals in the Whig tradition, in that they believe the economy should be managed by the invisible hand of the free market. As opposed to the Tories, who believe it should be managed by the visible hand of the King. Liberal as in opposed to mercantilism/absolutism, not liberal as in “gives a damn about people who aren’t wealthy white cis male property-owners”.
And no, they haven’t updated their ideas since the 18th century. Which is impressive for an organization founded in 1945.
Lomborg himself is also already whining, and the loathsome WSJ of course gives him a platform for this:
(link behind a paywall)
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-honor-of-being-mugged-by-climate-censors-1431558936
It will not surprise you that he is of the same “not giving me lots of money is censorship” school of thought.
@k_machine #8
Ah, thanks. So it means desperately struggling to keep something alive after it’s natural death. Got it.
@ Snoof #10
That sounds an awful lot like a Libertarian rather than a Liberal, in the shiny new modern sense of the word, to me.
Hah! Don’t you know that winning the thread only ten comments in simply is not the done thing? Just not cricket, old chap; give others a chance!
I’ve done a bunch of those “Which party would you vote for in [insert country here]?”, and in most countries the party I agree the most with has the word “liberal” in it somewhere. Except Australia. There the “liberals” are at the absolute bottom.
Now I know you guys love doing everything upside-down, but this is ridiculous!
(Get it? Upside-down, because the southern hemisphere is traditionally at the bottom of the- I’ll just shut up now.)
Thumper @ 12
There’s definitely a lot of ideological borrowing from the US libertarian movement with regards to economic policy, though socially they’re even less about the personal freedom and more about conformity and pandering to the Australian public’s racist, xenophobic and otherwise bigoted tendencies.
Out of curiosity, which party do actual liberals (right, left or centre) vote for in Australia?
IANAA, but a teeny bit of Google told me that Australia doesn’t have a First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of expression. It’s “implied” only. So…there’s that.
I love it when people impose American Constitutional values on non-US states.
@7,8
More specifically, it means “something that used to be good has declined to the point where it will never be good again.” In that sense, I think it’s misapplied here.
In the Grauniad:
I checked the source at the link, and it said “censors.” I wonder if the substitution was deliberate. Certainly it is hard to compete with actual data.
We’re not the only ones who keep voting for idiots. Certainly less important than a government funding loons, another tale from the Australian government shows them to be little different than our conservatives: The Minister for Agriculture took to the airwaves to show how tough he is by threatening to kill actor Johnny Depp’s dogs unless they “buggered off to the United States” (his words). Depp obviously broke Australia’s quarantine laws but going on TV to threaten anyone’s dogs is douchy (although, if making Depp leave forces him to spares us another Pirates of the Caribbean sequel…).
Pink Jenkin @ 13
The Australian Labor Party is the “mainstream” left party, though they’ve always had a strong (socially) conservative wing, being derived from labor movement. There’s also been a rightward shift over the last few decades following the Overton Window, and nowadays they’re only really left compared to the Liberal party.
The Australian Democrats were more explicitly leftist, especially socially, but they basically collapsed over the 00s and lost their last federal representatives in 2008, and as of last month were deregistered by the Electoral Commission.
The Greens have always been an environmentalist party, but they’ve also been moving towards a social justice agenda in recent years, and they’re currently the closest thing we’ve got to an actual small-l liberal party.
It should be noted that the Australian political system is basically a two-party system, with either Labor or the Coalition (the Liberal and National parties) holding government since 1910 or so. Third parties exist because they’re sometimes able to get enough seats to hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives or the Senate on a state or federal level and can thus exert political pressure that way.
Since this is all about “Free Speech,” Liberty University would appear to be a natural fit.
Pink Jenkin @ 15 Oh, and to answer the question you actually asked: I can’t speak for other small-l liberals, but I generally vote Green first, Labor second and then make sure to put the Christian Democrats last. I really should pay more attention to the independent candidates, but I’ve been pretty disconnected from the political scene for the last few years. Also, I live in a safe Liberal seat, so my vote doesn’t accomplish a great deal.
That reminds me of Project Alpha.
James S. McDonnell, wealthy namesake of McDonnell-Douglas Aircraft fame, gave a pile of money to Washington University in St. Louis to start a department of parapsychology in 1979. A few years later, the result was Project Alpha, an embarrassment of the “researchers” by James “The Amazing” Randi and two youngsters, Michael Edwards and Banachek, who became research subjects and cheated profligately.
Hindquarters facing outwards, as usual.
It’s worth noting that UWA (or more precisely the vice chancellor Paul Johnson) accepted the idea in the first instance. It was only due to the outrage expressed thereafter that the contract was cancelled. Johnson has determinedly not apologised for the decision to take on Lomborg; he’s merely realised that it’s not practical given that nobody else agrees with him.
The free speech banner was waved here a few years ago too when it was suggested via a small petition that the University of Notre Dame (down the road from UWA) shouldn’t be hosting Lord Monckton. The free speech angle was worked so hard that everyone seemed to take it as given that the petitioners (I had myself added to the end at the last minute) were a shadowy clique of fascist academics wielding a mysterious superpower to stop people speaking. Because that’s how the universe works.
This case pushes incredulity even further. Given that the proposed centre doesn’t yet exist, it’s rather doubtful it has any salient points to make.
We call them “small-L-liberals” to distinguish from those attached to the Liberal Party.
The main left-wing party is the Labor Party, but (I gather like the Democrats in the US) it’s often difficult to determine if they have any actual ideals for which to strive. The Australian Greens do have ideals. They are much smaller, but reliably get about 10% of the vote (on average) and the odd one or two seats. There’s also a whole zoo of “microparties” that emerge and disappear constantly, some of which don’t fit neatly into the left-right spectrum, or at least make it difficult to tell.
Indeed – the Australian Constitution is amazing for the amount of stuff it leaves out. It doesn’t mention anything about the office of the Prime Minister, for instance.
The courts have ruled that the requirement to have elections implies a right to free political discourse (not exactly full free speech). I find that an interesting line of reasoning.
Learning involves soft censorship? Tell that to Dawkins and Coyne. Teach the controversy!
WRT Australian politics: I’ve noticed that Green parties are often the go-to option for “small-l liberals” in many countries, which is a bit weird considering that there’s not really anything necessarily connecting liberalism and environmentalism. I mean, you can be a socialist or a conservative or a straight-up Stalinist or Nazi and still not want our planet to go belly-up like a poisoned tuna.
WRT parapsychology bullshit at universities: Has anyone made a list of places of (supposed) education that give these charlatans a platform? It would be interesting to compare countries. I know there was something in Scotland …
Hey, stop squelching the burn’s freedom of speech with ointment.
PZ et all – shockingly dishonest representation of Bjorn Lomborg’s work: “astrology center” or “creationist think-tank”. I get that you disagree with the man’s ideas but let’s at least accurately portray them.
From his WSJ op-ed: “The new center in Perth was to be a collaboration with a think tank I run, Copenhagen Consensus, which for a decade has conducted similar research. Working with more than 100 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, we have produced research that measures the social and economic benefits of a wide range of policies, such as fighting malaria, reducing malnutrition, cutting air pollution, improving education and tackling climate change.”
Seven Nobel laureates.
Don’t see too many of those working for creationist think-tanks now do you?
Now if you have some evidence-based objections to his research or his conclusions then by all means, but to compare him to an astrologist is just shockingly dishonest.
Any third party evidence, not just his words, which most of us doubt, to back up the claims? Not of Nobel Prize winners participating, which is a red herring. Nobel Prize winners can be as stupid about certain topics as anybody else. Many of us here are scientists, and have to live down a few assholes in our discipline.
@Pink Jenkin #27:
Let me check my crystal ball…
“conservative thinkers” — That’s almost an oxymoron, but that’s largely because conservative has become synonymous with bought by wealth and power. Conservative ideals, such as frugality and caution (you know, think before you act), are not inherently evil but they are only trotted out by Republicans when they want to sound like conservatives. In actual practice, there’s almost no thinking going into it. (Can we say Jeb Bush on the Iraq invasion?)
davidnangle @ #3 — ‘“Jump the shark” is getting a little long in the tooth. How about “nuke the fridge”?’ So you’re saying that jump the shark has jumped the shark.
zenlike @ 11 — “the loathsome WSJ of course gives [Lomborg] a platform…” Of course, it’s yet another Murdoch rag wasting paper and ink shilling the public for it’s super-rich patrons. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same piece ran in News Corp’s Australian papers.
David Cooper @ 25 — “(I gather like the Democrats in the US) it’s often difficult to determine if they [Liberals] have any actual ideals for which to strive.” Indeed. I think the ideals of both US parties, and perhaps all political parties, is the accumulation of wealth and power into as few hands as possible, but then I’m cynical. I recently heard Stephen Brill, author of America’s Bitter Pill about the healthcare industry and the Affordable Care Act, describe Democrats as a bunch of tort lawyers, while the Republicans represent wealthy business interests. Not a whole lot of difference between those two.
Tom Weisz,
Lomborg’s “research” consists of developing apologetics for those who would do nothing about climate change. He does so by making disingenuous arguments claiming that we cannot possibly mitigate climate change, because this would hurt poor people–and then proceeds to do nothing to advocate for said poor people. The “seven Nobel Laureates” are all in economics, and all Glibertarians. He knows nothing about climate science, nor about economics. He is not a credible voice to any but the most blinkered denialist.
Tom Weiss
Seven economists who got a price which has nothing to do with the Nobel prices.
But let’s keep it honest people!
@33 – Ray, Lomborg’s research is based in economics and he is making cost-benefit arguments. Most of his research is not devoted to climate change. And you and nerd and zenlike can try to wave away the distinguished group of intellectuals he is associated with, but neither you nor PZ can get to “astrologist” from there.
Comparing him to a creationist is someting a political operative who is speaking to sycophants would do, not someone concerned with facts and evidence and reasoned debate.
Economists are intellectuals?
Tom Weiss,
Actually you are right. It’s dishonest comparing him to astrologists. As much as a hate astrology, at least they are not taken as serious by our elected officials as economists. Lomborg and his clique of selected economists can do a lot more damage then astrologists.
Since we have evidence otherwise, your opinion isn’t taken seriously without you backing up your claims with links showing you are right. Nobody here is holding their breath. Your posts have obfuscation writ in capital block letters.
Tom Weiss, if you are making a cost benefit analysis of the economic cost of fighting climate change versus the various costs of not fighting it, while exclusively having ONLY economists and having no comparable consultation with climate scientists or ANY other kind of scientist who could tell you about the actual impact climate change would have, you are obviously stacking your cards in favor of your conclusion. Of course there is going to be economic costs to fight climate change. But it isn’t clear what the other costs, in terms of environmental impacts and their effects, will be if we don’t. And it is going to take a lot more than economists to actually address and give a satisfactory answer to that question.
In case anyone is unfamiliar with Lomborg’s schtick, his basic agenda is to argue that stuff like malaria, malnutrition, etc. is a much bigger problem than climate change and will yield better cost-benefit returns than tackling climate change. Ergo, tackling climate change takes money away from poor, starving, malaria-infested children.
It’s all based on a very crude fallacy, namely the idea that there’s this finite pool of resources for helping out poor people, and that money spent on any one cause necessarily takes it away from another. Of course, the Western world and the US in particular spends an embarrassingly small portion of its economic product, usually less than 1%, on aid to developing countries, so this is just bullshit. We could address all these problems with money to spare. For bonus hypocrisy, it’s people of Lomborg’s political persuasion (or at least his allies) who are the main obstacle to aid for developing countries, arguing that they must Stand On Their Own Two Feet. Even the ones who can’t walk due to filariasis, presumably.
This has been a long standing strategy of right-wing ideologues on the issue of climate change: Make it an issue of short-term economic costs. They also like to deny that it is all about the money for them, especially when you point out the oil industry interests and other business interests that really would prefer the status quo and would rather not sacrifice profits in order to decrease the amount of long-term environmental damage they are contributing to. Framing climate change policy as an economic debate is basically the key indicator that you are dealing with an idiotic and/or amoral right-wing ideologue.
Maybe I am biased, but whenever I hear/read think tank, I imagine a bunch of well-off quasi-intellectuals sharing morally and ethically questionable goals. Political, usually. Money making, more often than not.
OT to this thread, but:
Nerd of Redhead, you witless little shitstain! There you are! I’ve been looking for you. Feel like backing up your bullshit opinions about visa and asylum policies with some fucking evidence yet? I’m waiting, right where you left me hanging.
The full name of the prize is:
“The Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”
It’s not an actual Nobel Prize. It was obviously created as pro-capitalist propaganda during the cold war. The Nobel Foundation should be embarrassed by it.
[OT]
Pink Jenkin,
Really, don’t do that.
Thunderome, folks. It exists for a reason.
Why bullshit apologia is bullshit:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/university-of-western-australia-pulls-out-of-bjorn-lomborg-centre-20150508-ggxmrf.html
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/17/abbott-government-gives-4m-to-help-climate-sceptic-set-up-australian-centre
But he keeps avoiding me mama. :c
Pink Jenkin
Stick to the topic or get the fuck out of this thread.
Tom Weisz,
No, Lomborg’s methods are not based on cost-benefit analysis. Rather they are based on distortions of cost-benefit analysis specifically guaranteed to demonstrate that the cost of action will always exceed benefits.
Lomborg does this by using absurd discounts and by ignoring the fact that climate change causes permanent degradation of the global ecosystem to produce sufficient goods to maintain a functioning global economy. He ignores synergies that will undermine the effectiveness of the very measures he is claiming will be precluded by addressing climate change.
http://www.lomborg-errors.dk/
Even other economists concerned with climate change (e.g Stern) dismiss Lomborg as a shill.
Or if you don’t like Lomborg Errors, there’s this:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Bjorn_Lomborg
a_ray_in_dilbert_space
He isn’t even an economist.
I guess they took his advice to heart, and realized that spending $4 million on a pointless academic center clearly did not produce the best social value for the money spent.
The Rabett has a post that gives an idea of the quality of “scholarship” that goes into Lomborg’s analyses:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2015/05/bjorn-lomborg-demonstrates-why.html
Lomborg plays a shell game–using different discount rates to rank climate change vs. other proposals.
These fucking vile pieces of scum… Fuck my English is not good enough to express my rage right now.
While these fuckers are whining about “freedom of speech” THEY ARE WORKING TO REMOVE THE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE STATUS TO ENVIRONMENTAL NGOs.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-10/environment-groups-could-lose-tax-concession-status/6384554
I can’t even.
This is so blatantly duplicitous, so wildly dishonest. Fuck these old white privileged assholes.
Seven entitled economists support Lomborg? How quaint.
The latest PBS Nova is an episode entitled “the lethal seas“, about AGW on the lowering of the ocean’s pH. Somehow, liberturd economists like Lomborg will find this not a problem……
Again, Lomborg is NOT an economist. Nor an environmental scientist. Nor a climatologist. Nor an expert on developmental economics. Nor on any of the topics he bullshits about.
@40 Area Man – Thanks for trying to get to the substance of Lomborg’s arguments, unlike many others. However your mistake is assuming more foreign aid = less people in poverty. The developing world has been giving money to African nations for decades with little to nothing to show for it. If we want less poverty in the world we should be exporting freedom and capitalism, not pouring billions into corrupt governments.
Here’s the larger point. Lomborg has legitimate positions backed by research and scholarship which are based on very different political value judgements than PZ and most of the echo chamber here. To partisan political operatives, facts and reason don’t matter, Lomborg’s political value judgements do.
I would love, just once, for someone to just state this fact outright – that anything Lomborg or anyone else even remotely associated with the right wing in US politics says is wrong by virtue of that association alone.
Tom Weiss
Citation needed.
Sorry, that’s your strawman, not ours.
Since there is no link, you are lying and bullshitting us. That is the difference between RWA dogma, and science. Science require third parties not paid and bought by RWA fascists like the Koch brothers and their minions.
F.O.,
I don’t want to let your blood boil any more, but just today come another tidbit of Australian news:
Australia lobbies Unesco to stop it from listing Great Barrier Reef as ‘in danger’
The Australian government, bought an paid for by the mining industry.
Tom Weiss
Hey, didn’t we do that in Iraq and Afghanistan? Remind me how well that’s been working.
Also, Tom, are you that unaware of America’s long history of overthrowing democratically elected governments in order to install puppet dictators around the world?
@58: big wiggly middle finger to the phrase “echo chamber”.
People agreeing with each other doesn’t constitute mindless lock-step obedience just because their opinion doesn’t match yours. If it did, every political party or stamp-collecting club would be an “echo chamber”. Anyway, let’s just quit that particular ad hom, shall we? That Bjorn “we shouldn’t even try to fix our damage, give me millions to tell you why” Lomborg is a crank is not some minority opinion whispered in the margins of the internet or on Mercola.com; it’s a reasonable conclusion based on his own words and actions. There’s a reason he’s not set up shop in his home country or anywhere else that has the cash to fund him. And the main reason his pet think-tank at UWA was shut down was due to more or less the entire faculty objecting strenuously to the administration.
The current Australian arch-conservative government, through its denialism and gutting of any reasonable research & funding, have made this country a pariah among those nations of the world concerned with reducing emissions and increasing renewable generation. As a bonus, the PM’s chief business adviser (of course it was the business adviser; the chief conservative arguments against doing anything about the climate always appear to boil down to protecting someone’s profits) just publicly called climate change a United Nations conspiracy designed to assist in taking over the world; PM Abbott himself is on record saying “climate change is crap”. That this government, in which such opinions are commonplace if not universal, is willing to throw public money at someone like Lomborg even as it dismantles and de-funds institutions that were either tasked with or formed to actually tackle the problem scientifically should give any reasonable person pause.
zenlike: I have to keep reminding myself that violence is not the solution, because right now I want to break something.
Still, this reminds me that both environmental activism and the UNESCO are useful.
I may start volunteering for some worthy group, hope to investigate the Australian Conservation Foundation later today.
Tom has jumped the shark. This is absolutely meaningless bullcrap even by Loonytarian standards.
1. The vast majority of the world is already capitalist!!! Capitalism isn’t magic. Nor is it one simple single thing. Some versions like Loonytarianism produce dystopic disasters.
2. Our last attempts to export freedom to Aghanistan and Iraq didn’t work very well.
They weren’t to borrow a phrase, cost effective!!! We spent ca. $4 trillion and killed hundreds of thousands. To produce a huge disaster that we have no idea how to fix.
If we want less intellectual and moral poverty in the USA, why doesn’t Tom Weiss and the rest of the Gibbertarians just take off for one of those Loonytarian paradises you are so sure exist. I believe the current leader is Somalia. No government to speak of but you can get as rich as you want. The leading occupations are “warlord” and “pirate”.
Tom Weiss
You are a racist.
Go away.
-speaking for the HiveMind®
(that’s OK isn’t it, HiveMind®?)
From what I’ve read Australia is already feeling the effects of climate change.
1. Giant bush fires, what we call wildfires.
2. Heat waves that are dramatic even by Australian standards.
3. Prolonged droughts in many areas that are impacting agriculture.
Since Tony Abbott was elected, it seems like a majority of Australians either hasn’t noticed it or don’t care.
We have the exact same thing here on the west coat of the USA. But strangely enough, people have noticed. Or at least noticed the water shortages, water rationing, and more and more common forest fires in California.
Tom Weiss @58
Bahahahahahahaah! That’s the most hilarious thing ever. Quite.
It’s funny in the tragic sense that capitalism pours more money into the hands of corrupt governments than foreign aid ever would. Except one thing tangible benefit that you receive as one of those doing the expatriation of capitalism, whether you like to admit that you’re aware of it or not, is the cheap fucking labor on the backs of wage slaves, whose poverty you’re relying on to live a good life back home.
If you export capitalism, then there will be no more fucking wage slaves, or literal slaves, to exploit for capitalist ventures in the global economy. Profits will shrink. The ruling class clearly doesn’t want that.
You only enjoy the benefits of capitalism due to the -isms that preceded it. Imperialism, fascism, totalitarianism. Capitalism is just another in a chain of feifdoms ruled by the few and exalted by it’s bumbling profits, such as yourself.
Most countries you’d think of today as “free and capitalist” almost universally developed that way organically and from within – and often not peacefully. France and the US went through bloody revolutions to depose the monarchies that were leeching off them; Britain spilled much blood internally on its way to its parliamentary system and ceremonial monarchy, and the subsequent globe-spanning British Empire more or less collapsed under its own weight in the 1950s.
Others who had commerce & democracy thrust upon them went through enormous socioeconomic upheavals – opening up a reluctant Japan in the late 19th-century to international trade and diplomacy was not done via invasion or conquest but it was almost as traumatic. Recent attempts by the US at “exporting freedom and democracy” (which is, I suspect, the chief exporter that was being alluded to) have ended up with a unified socialist Vietnam, a split Korea with one half officially run by a dead man and his insane descendants, a radicalised Iran, a repeatedly broken Iraq, a pockmarked Afghanistan, a set of Latin American nations still recovering from their wounds, a communist Cuba that was locked out of business with its largest neighbour for 50 years, a handful of obscenely wealthy & brutal Islamic theocracies (known officially as “allies”), more murderous Islamist paramilitaries than you can shake a stick at and an off-leash Israel doing its best to absorb what’s left of what used to be the sovereign nation of Palestine, to name but a few. And that’s just since the end of WWII.
So maybe it’s understandable that I’m a tad dubious about “exporting” freedom and capitalism, if it’s to be done the way the US usually defaults to. Political freedom and reasonably free markets should be encouraged everywhere, if they can be instituted fairly and peacefully. “Exporting” them – which almost invariably involves doing so whether the locals want them or are even ready for them, whether via fostering coups, invading, imposing anti-human trade deals like the TPP over the heads of the affected citizens or just swooping in to gather all the resources and offshore all the profits – all falls on a spectrum between irresponsible and flat-out murderous.
In my 30’s, I spent too many years in graduate school in Economics. I concluded (and shared the opinion of several of my professors) that Cost-benefit Analysis CAN be done in good faith, but often isn’t. You have to make so many assumptions to quantify both “costs” and “benefits”, as well as the classic “All other things being equal” that economists use constantly, that with a little tweaking, you can make the results of the analysis come out any way you want. Too often, it is just a lot of hand-waving mumbo-jumbo to make a preconceived conclusion sound “scientific”.
Sorry Tom no. 58 but Lomborg is considered a crank and his opinions on environmental matters are dismissed by the great majority of specialists in environmental studies, to say nothing of climate science. Also his integrity has a scholar is also in question. You might want to try the book The Lomborg Deception by Howard Friel and Thomas E. Lovejoy.
As for your comment:
Aside from the fact, mentioned by others, that many in the west have and continue to support dictatorships in various African countries. This is more than a trifle naïve. First much of that aid has been deliberately designed to support corrupt dictatorships, and secondly a lot of it is designed to provide massive indirect subsidies to western businesses. And of course a lot of it is simple payment to buy political influence. Much of the time whether or not it actually helps people is secondary. Finally the bottom line is that the cash outflows from Africa to pay for loans from western banks and institutions exceeds foreign aid last I heard. I doubt it has changed much.
The reason there is little to show is at least partly because of the way the aid is structured and delivered. As for Capitalism in Africa. Sadly in most places it is corrupt crony Capitalism and frankly most of the west has little interest in changing that.
As for this
The above describes Lomborg perfectly.
Tom Weiss, here’s a primer on why Lomborg should not be taken seriously on the matter of global warming (and yes, his credibility for economic solutions rests on his understanding of the science): http://www.climatecouncil.org.au/the-low-down-on-lomborg
I could not let these malapropisms pass.
zenlike @34
Shouldn’t that be prize and prizes? But, it works either way.
Throwaway @69
Shouldn’t that be prophets? Again it works either way
And let me just clarify my #71: I don’t actually believe that when the US says it’s trying foster freedom overseas that that’s what it’s actually doing. It isn’t like its interventions have been based on honourable intentions and then have failed through naivety or incompetence; it’s just that phrases like “exporting freedom/democracy/capitalism/free trade” are just handy euphemisms for setting up client/compliant states; they also provide plausible deniability whenever it ends up going south (Iran, following the overthrow of the installed Shah) or turning into an outright bloodbath (…shit, just pick one). “Hey, we were only trying to bring them Freedom™ – don’t blame us because they weren’t ready for it and/or mistook our noble intentions for an attempt at punishing their non-compliant government!”
@74, ginckgo, you read my mind – I’d just started to read that.
For those who might not know, The Climate Council was formed, via crowd-funding, from the ashes of the Climate Commission, a non-partisan organisation tasked with providing independent climate advice to the previous Australian government. The Climate Commission was one of the first bodies to be abolished by the Abbott government following their election; that abolition was one of the first of countless acts of vandalism aimed at social programs, the arts, education, health, the environment and science in general. It was almost at the top of a wish-list provided to Abbott’s grotesquely mis-named Liberal Party by an arch-capitalist think-tank convened by billionaires and CEOs known innocuously as the Institute for Public Affairs; Abbott’s government has been beavering away trying to tick off as many IPA wishes as they can since their election. Once elected, Abbott crowed that his mob had a mandate from the people; however, they’ve spent the last 18 months ignoring what “the people” are telling them and instead taking their policy cues from fringe-right one-percenters such as the IPA, the coal mining lobby and Rupert Murdoch.
That might be a little OT, but I think it provides important background to the government that saw fit to enable Lomborg, the Dr Oz of climate science, to set up shop in a public university.
Raven @68
It’s not so much that Abbott and his team of cronies was voted into power than that the Labor incumbents were voted out due to their perceived incompetence. With the help of Rupert and his right wing media Abbott swept into power with hardly any published policies. Shortly after getting into power Abbott’s mob achieved what no government in Australia’s history had ever done, that is to crash in popularity to below the government they replaced literally as soon as they moved into head office and started to trash the place. His meteoric descent also undid two state Liberal governments after just one term in office and that’s so unusual in this country to frighten most Liberal party hopefuls. In around 18 months we get to see if Abbott’s spin meisters can keep the corpse of the conservative vote animated long enough to win a second term. I personally doubt it.
Tom Weisz,
So you are not bothered by the fact that Lomborg, in ranking his global priorities, used different discount rates for climate change compared to the other issues? And hid this fact in the discussion of the methodology?
I find that a rather egregious lapse in ethics.
As to what is possible in Africa–are you familiar with Ghana? An excellent example of what can be accomplished when the rule of law becomes established in an African country.
Tom Weisz, so you are not bothered by the fact that Lomborg used a different discount rate for climate change than for his other issues in determining priorities? And that he hid this fact in his methodology? This does not bother you? Or is this sort of thing commonplace for rightwing economic research?
Also, ever hear of a country called Ghana?
@58:
Even if this were true, and I’m pretty sure it’s not, it would actually undercut Lomborg’s thesis. If fighting African poverty didn’t do any good, that would be an argument for spending our resources fighting climate change instead. Lomborg is trying to make the exact opposite case — that fighting poverty is a superior policy. But as I pointed out, we aren’t remotely close to the limit of our resources, so the optimal policy is to pay for both. If Lomborg wants us to spend more money bringing clean water to Africa, or whatever, than he should advocate that we spend more money bringing clean water to Africa. But that’s not what he’s doing. He’s using it as an excuse to spend less money fighting climate change, which shows that he’s either dishonest or doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The fact that nearly all of his supporters don’t want to fight poverty anyway, as you so helpfully demonstrate, underscores how incredibly disingenuous his agenda is.
I remember the words of an owner of a focused social networking site: I believe in free speech. But that does not mean I have to fund the bandwidth for everyone’s words.
Certain words made posting attempts fail. Posts asking about the bad word list were deleted. OT rants vanished. Some OT posts were relocated to the proper forum.
His attitude: many people like the space I created. Pests are not welcome in my space.
Are you saying Lomborg asserts that fighting poverty is a worthy expense, but fighting climate change (while commendable) would require ALL our resources so money could not be spent fighting poverty. I.e. despicable result from spending money on the right thing for the wrong reason… with more pretzeling logic circles following?
Or is he another: “Climate change is a problem, yes, but too big to spend all our money on when we could spend it on fighting ‘real world’ problems, like poverty in Affffrrrrrriiiiiiicccca.”
To figure out why foreign aid hasn’t ended poverty overseas, you’d have to take a close look at how that “aid” is structured, and to whom it generally ends up earmarked for. Maybe it’s that none of the foreign governments know what to do with our charity or that they all are corrupt, or maybe it’s that these aid programmes are actually structured to subsidize domestic interests rather than help foreign ones.
Tom Weiss@29
Lomborg is a liar and a pseudo-scientist no matter how many “Nobel” economists support his lies and pseudo-science. That’s where the parallels with creationism and astology are.
Tom Weiss@58
There speaks someone without the ghost of an idea about either the facts of poverty reduction or how capitalism actually works, but well able to mouth glibertarian slogans*. By far the greatest reductions in poverty over the past few decades are down to the Chinese Communist Party which – whether you consider it capitalist or not** – certainly shows very little (positive) interest in freedom. A number of Asian and in recent years, South American countries have also made considerable strides in reducing poverty; in all cases, the state has been heavily involved.
In the wider scheme of things, capitalism has always involved a gulf between rich “core” states, where the most technologically sophisticated and profitable economic activities are concentrated and poor “peripheral” states which supply raw materials and cheap labour. There are some “semi-peripheral” states (e.g. China today), and individual states may change category over long enough periods, but the overall structure, with its abundant opportunities for the rich to exploit the poor, is remarkably persistent, and probably an unchangeable feature of capitalism itself.
*One of the troubles with glibertarians is that they have no interest in or knowledge of economic history, so they have no idea how “actually existing capitalism” works, how it came to be that way, or how it might develop in future.
**China is now part of the global capitalist system, and the CCP has adopted a lot of pro-market reforms; but the economy remains heavily state-owned (around 50%) and state-directed, particularly in such key sectors as energy, transport and finance.
I should have known better than to trumpet capitalism in the comments section of a more-or-less socialist blog.
Nick Gotts@85 – I’m having trouble understanding your logic. CCP has adopted a lot of pro-market reforms + by far the greatest reductions in poverty in the last few decades come from the CCP (debatable, but lets go with it for now) = glibertarian slogans don’t work.
You trot out the typical collectivist critique of capitalism (class warfare) on a global scale. “The rich exploit the poor…”
The problem with your line of thinking is that the rich ONLY exploit the poor in a socialist or authoritarian state. It is generally not possible in a marketplace where exchange is voluntary and mutually beneficial for anyone – anyone – to be exploited. True, people in such a system will often choose to do things that in a perfect world they’d rather not do, but they are not coerced by the hand of government to do so.
They are so coerced in a socialist state. The government holds all the power and doles out favors to its preferred partners. Here is a corollary – Bill and Hillary Clinton made $25 million dollars not for giving speeches, but becuase Washington has so much power to regulate industries in the US that those corporations are expecting a return on their investment. You don’t see the CEOs of Google or Facebook or Apple making that kind of money giving speeches because they don’t have favors to hand out.
They don’t have that kind of power. And they all know they could be out of business very quickly if they made the wrong decision. The Clintons (and the Bushes for that matter) are a dynasty that has far surpassed its sell-by date.
I’ll leave you with one last thought. I wonder if all the working people in North Korea wish they were being “exploited” like their brothers and sisters in the South. Nah…nevermind, they’re probably fine with their situation.
@Tom Weiss
Feel free to trumpet, but perhaps attempt to prove that Capitalism is inherently superior first rather than simply assuming it is?
I’m also interested in what your definition of socialism might be, and why you might characterize this as a socialist blog. Based on such a description I’d assume that PZ often wrote of his support for socialism, but I read Pharyngula quite regularly and I’m struggling to think of examples.
Spoken like an ignorant and arrogant liberturd when they are refuted with evidence. It isn’t the fault of your idiotology, but rather the people not paying attention to your sloganeering about your evidenceless idiotology. Nevermind we know all about it, and the fallacies therein.
So, Tom doesn’t even make a pretense of actually addressing the very serious and substantiated allegations of academic misconduct against Lomborg. Rather he goes right to “Yerallcommies!”
Devastating logic. Tom, I’m glad you are on the other side.
@89 – Dilbert – perhaps I missed the “academic misconduct”, please direct me to it again. I just read throught the climate council piece linked to above, and while it does present the other side of Lomborg’s arguments it doesn’t even come close to proving that he is on par with a “creationist.” Which is where I started my critique to begin with.
Lomborg has an argument, one that 7 Nobel prize winners are on board with. Now, you can’t claim that X% of scientists are on board with climate change predictions on one hand and then dismiss the other side’s experts on the other just because you don’t like their conclusions. Unless, that is, you’re a partisan who cares not for facts and reason – a desription which applies to many around here including the proprietor.
As for this being a socialist blog, I didn’t think that was a controversial statement. PZ isn’t shy about it and I thought he used to describe himself as a socialist. He endorsed Bernie Sanders a couple days ago, who is a socialist. I don’t understand it but you all are perfectly free to hold whatever political views you want. That’s the thing about small “l” liberals and libertarians – our political philosophy has room for you. Yours has no room for anyone else. The bottom line is I wouldn’t care if, in fact, you were all commies, as long as you weren’t trying to coerce me into being one as well.
Except that’s what authoritarian political systems always atttempt to do…
Tom Weiss:
95%+ of all climate scientists = 7 Noble Prize Winning economists
Sure.
Your “7 Noble Prize Winners” is an argument from authority. It doesn’t work. It wouldn’t work even if we bought the premise that ONLY discussing the economics of the situation was a perfectly swell way to address the issue of climate change.
I have yet to see PZ identify as such. No, endorsing a socialist candidate is not saying that you identify as socialist.
And now we start the debate about gibbertarianism.
Fancy fucking that, the one handwaving and spewing out apologia for climate change is also a glibertarian, randomly spewing out pro-capitalist and anti-communist propaganda.
Tom Weiss, actually talk about climate change, and addressing it, which is an actual scientific question, and science based policy decision, or shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up about Noble Prize winners. Shut the fuck up about “cost benefit analysis”. Shut the fuck up until you deal with the actual fucking science, you useless, pandering, idiotic shill.
Robber barons: Never happened.
And obviously unions and business regulations are completely unnecessary!
Typical idiotic libertarian. All slogans and no thought. The Free Market is a glorious and perfect state of affairs where nothing can go wrong. And government is always at fault, for everything, ever!
Standard abject ignorant, and evidenceless assertion from a liberturd. All you can do is stand there and call people fascists or commies, since they expect you to behave as if you are part of society and help people, and not be a selfish unempathetic turd.
Until you can show with third party evidence you have a point, you have nothing that shouldn’t be dismissed as liberturd stupidity and selfishness.
You want a debate? Intellectually mature so that there can be an evidenced debate, not just you yelling your unworkable slogans at us.