How do you do anything about that? Somehow reality has become not just optional and uncertain in our policies, perceptions and opinions, but downright irrelevant. When there's no merit in even trying to be truthful and accurate, well... you get this.
Dismissing facts as lies is just... something to say. Bolsonaro and his followers know this is true but they simply don't care. Which is a reasonable political stance I reckon.
Well the difference is that people used to condemn the author when it got caught lying which doesn't seem to be the case anymore. People no longer pay politically when they lie. It all transformed into a world-wide propaganda machine where people think in war/dictatorship terms(we against them).
Most people accept that politicians lie. Saying that a politician lies is like saying "The Pope is Catholic" or "Water is wet".
What people care about is whether the politicians will instigate policies that are beneficial to them.
Bolsonaro ran with one of his main issues being law and order. In Brazil the crime rates are quite shocking (IIRC the murder rate is huge like 100s a day). It doesn't matter if he lies about the Rainforest if people see if cleaning up the streets.
Lying is now blatant, endemic and unapologetic. It's really more propaganda than just lying. Let's hope the sane people will tax these politicians otherwise we risk new Nazi systems.
Yeah, this is the norm now, scientific truths are lies and conspiracy theories are the ultimate truth. All populist politicians are doing this and their followers love it.
Well a lot of this is due to how this has been presented to by the media beforehand.
e.g. There is a scare story at least once a week that is plastered over newspapers/news sites such as "Having a bacon sandwich could lead to bum cancer!!!!", when the headline is clearly salacious. The actual research probably had a sensible conclusion of "Those who have had consistently more red meat, have an increased chance of cancer". If you hear see the same story hundreds of times, you are likely to ignore it or even despise it.
The same happens with the populist politicians. Take someone that isn't as controversial as Bolsonaro such as Nigel Farage in my home country.
A fair description of his political stance is a Patriotic Thatcherite that is anti-mass-immigration. When he was first becoming well known (back in the mid-2000s) he was constantly branded a racist and a fascist (there was no evidence of this) in an attempt to conflate his position with the likes of actual fascists of old like Oswald Mosley.
Now Whether or not you agree with his politics isn't important. In these attempts to constantly smear him he has become one of the most effective UK politicians in recent memory. To many he can simply do no wrong because they will dismiss any criticism of immediately, disregarding its validity.
There is a sizable intersection between the set of populists and the set of racists. Often the naming of people close or in this intersection is a judgment call.
Also, how can you brand somebody as "patriotic" when his party is a US-based corporation with links to the Russian government and tax havens?
Sad to see this rubbish on HN. Farage plays to the same racist tendencies as Trump and Bolsonaro do, with constant dog-whistling. He's absolutely controversial and hardly effective: he still has no MP in the UK Parliament after 15 years of trying, and has accomplished absolutely nothing over two mandates in the EU Parliament beyond annoying even his own allies.
It's not the "smearing" that build his success, but a situation of sustained economic weakness of the white working classes that fosters a climate of anger against migrants (who are seen as cheaper competition). That BNP fella was similarly successful for a while. Also, Farage's support is built on social networks, where his messages are spread without a debate, let alone "smears".
Unfortunately I should have guessed I would have someone miss the entire point I was trying to make (How the media constantly mis-represent things to the point that the public doesn't trust even if they accurately present the truth) because I was trying to be objective and politically neutral about a successful politician.
You just did the very thing I was complaining about!
They are claiming that how an image was cropped and where text was placed somehow indicates racism. You are concentrating on nonsense and not actually making an argument against any of his policies or any of the assumption of the advert.
As for my descriptions of Farage. They come from other Journalists such as Brendan O'Neill (runs Spiked!). As for the rest of my description they are fairly objective.
> Sad to see this rubbish on HN. Farage plays to the same racist tendencies as Trump and Bolsonaro do, with constant dog-whistling.
When someone says "Dog whistling" that is the same as when someone runs out of arguments and says "Well you know it true and you aren't admitting it". It isn't an argument of any sort.
You just did the very thing I was complaining about, and I don't think you even knew you were doing it.
> "Well you know it true and you aren't admitting it". It isn't an argument of any sort.
Most unfortunately, it's becomes impossible to make what we previously conceived of as an "argument" when one or more of the parties involved refuses to acknowledge the validity of objective reality (more commonly referred to as "facts").
> I was trying to be objective and politically neutral about a successful politician.
No, you were not -- you were (and still are) trying to pass your biases (Farage "patriotic" and unfairly portraited while being "uncontroversial") as objective, by attacking straw men in how public debate arrives at objective conclusions about him. I pointed you at one of many examples of why that is not the case, and you doubled-down on it while completely ignoring the bits of my post that are inconvenient to your biases.
> not actually making an argument
Because there is no argument to make: Farage's "policies" are just a hodgepodge of badly-thought-out slogans designed to appeal to the worst instincts of the electorate. Like on Brexit, which he campaigned for but for which (like all "hard brexiteers") he has no practical or coherent plan.
The main problem with populists is precisely that their policies are unassailable, because they are completely devoid of details. They sell emotions, typically negative ones.
> When someone says "Dog whistling" that is the same as when someone runs out of arguments
As sad as it might make you, dog-whistling is a widely understood term in political debate, and there is little doubt that it is precisely what the likes of Trump and Farage do. (Well, to be fair, Trump has gone beyond that in recent days, turning to out-and-out discriminatory language.)
> No, you were not -- you were (and still are) trying to pass your biases (Farage "patriotic" and unfairly portraited while being "uncontroversial") as objective, by attacking straw men in how public debate arrives at objective conclusions about him. I pointed you at one of many examples of why that is not the case, and you doubled-down on it while completely ignoring the bits of my post that are inconvenient to your biases.
In my original post I said something along the lines of "He was less controversial than Bolsonaro" not that he was uncontroversial.
You didn't point me at anything objective. The best you linked me to a guardian article about an ad-campaign that claimed it was racist because one white person was removed from the photo. I think that sort of logic is ridiculous.
As for me ignoring parts of your post, yes I ignored parts of your post because I thought they were irrelevant to the point I was originally trying to convey.
> Because there is no argument to make: Farage's "policies" are just a hodgepodge of badly-thought-out slogans designed to appeal to the worst instincts of the electorate. Like on Brexit, which he campaigned for but for which (like all "hard brexiteers") he has no practical or coherent plan.
Well UKIP's manifesto of 2015 is a 76 page document according to the BBC:
I chose this because this is the last time I believe they fought a general election with Farage as Leader. So this would be indicative of his policies (as he would have had a fair amount of input in the process).
From the BBC summary it seems quite comprehensive. It seems to cover a similar number of areas as Labour's manifesto of 2015.
> As sad as it might make you, dog-whistling is a widely understood term in political debate, and there is little doubt that it is precisely what the likes of Trump and Farage do. (Well, to be fair, Trump has gone beyond that in recent days, turning to out-and-out discriminatory language.)
I know what the term means. However many of those that use the term do so as an accusation. They don't mention who they are whistling at and what terms they are using to do that.
Farage is as controversial as any of the recent populist leaders, otherwise we wouldn't have the rivers of ink his outbursts command. Trying to paint one as less controversial than the other is just an attempt at making him more acceptable.
Refusing to accept that Farage's campaigns are fundamentally based on discrimination, is just denying reality.
> Well UKIP's manifesto of 2015 is a 76 page document
Yeah, and no UKIP supporter would likely be able to describe any of it, except the bits on discriminating foreigners and closing borders. Because, frankly, that's pretty much the only thing they care about. Farage's latest outfit, the brexit party, smashes together old marxists and capitalist cronies, in single-minded pursuit of discrimination.
> They don't mention who they are whistling at and what terms they are using to do that
Because it becomes tedious to do that after a while. The targets of dog-whistling are almost inevitably minorities, because they are the ones who cannot be attacked directly without falling openly into discriminatory language - commonly known as "racist".
> Yeah, and no UKIP supporter would likely be able to describe any of it, except the bits on discriminating foreigners and closing borders. Because, frankly, that's pretty much the only thing they care about. Farage's latest outfit, the brexit party, smashes together old marxists and capitalist cronies, in single-minded pursuit of discrimination.
Well you've just changed the goalposts again. After being quite clearly confronted with evidence that doesn't support your assertions (a summary of a manifesto with a clear set of policies) you change the goalposts to the UKIP supporter being thick or bigoted.
Have you actually talked to many UKIP supporters? I've spoken to UKIP when they knocked on the door and they seemed like pretty normal people.
> Because it becomes tedious to do that after a while. The targets of dog-whistling are almost inevitably minorities, because they are the ones who cannot be attacked directly without falling openly into discriminatory language - commonly known as "racist".
Right so you have plenty of energy to throw endless accusations around, accuse me of all sorts because I don't agree with you but when asked for specifics it is too tedious. Okay with that I think I will leave you to it. Bye.
> I've spoken to UKIP when they knocked on the door and they seemed like pretty normal people.
Yes, they are quite banal people, mostly. That means little - the worst political movements of the last century were full of very banal people, a certain Ms. Harendt even wrote a famous book about it.
> but when asked for specifics it is too tedious
I was explaining why most people in these debates cannot be bothered to go into detail. If we had to explain every term in the book, we'd end up reciting the opus of Bertrand Russell at every meeting.
Another subjective ad-hominem attack on people you don't really know much about.
> That means little - the worst political movements of the last century were full of very banal people, a certain Ms. Harendt even wrote a famous book about it.
Dropping names of someone that wrote a book isn't an argument. Doesn't address the actual tenor of what I was saying.
I notice that you haven't addressed the fact that you were completely incorrect about Farage and his policies. Let me remind you what your claim was, you said he had no policies. I showed you the Manifesto of 2015 (which is as substantive as their rivals).
> I was explaining why most people in these debates cannot be bothered to go into detail. If we had to explain every term in the book, we'd end up reciting the opus of Bertrand Russell at every meeting.
This is a ridiculous. You have spent more energy telling me why you won't do something than actually doing it.
@Toyg, you write: "otherwise we wouldn't have the rivers of ink his outbursts command".
Is this argument not backwards? Seeing an outsider, who will most likely remain so, get shot down with lots of ink, fits a pattern of repression does it not? Is no one in your country feeling also repressed?
This was davesmith1983's point I believe.
There is co-dependency between TINA (there is no alternative) technocracies and populists: both use the other as a scarecrow.
May I suggest you both ramp up on political economics? eg. Yanis Varoufakis is most readable / YouTube watchable.
The ink on Farage is overwhelmingly in his favour - thanks to British tabloids. He's never been "repressed", to the contrary: he has a regular talk show, gets frequently invited on TV, and enjoys very favourable treatment by tabloids. He is not in opposition to "technocrats" at all, and typically votes in line with the EPP on anything related to the economy - the only exception being on increasing controls on tax evasion, to which he is strenuosly opposed.
I know Varoufakis, his parable was very different - he was ostracized after reaching power, by people who could not match his academic skills and felt threatened. The similarities with movements like Trump or Farage are barely skin-deep - Varoufakis does not enjoy the support of entire sectors of the media.
The same newpapers that declare "Having a bacon sandwich could lead to bum cancer!!!!" Are also the ones most enamoured with Farage. So the readership is supposed to be disenfranchised over how they're lied to over the cancer scare stories but then believe the stories about how wonderful Farage is?
That said, I don't think I disagree with your greater point.
Nigel Farage himself puts a lot of his success down to Facebook and Youtube and not the UK papers. Some of his speeches/rants (depends how you view it) against the EU in the Parliament went viral in the late 2000s.
I mean can you blame them when all you need to do to make a problem go away is say FAKE NEWS and people eat it up? It's much easier then presenting evidence yourself, especially when your motives go against facts, because then you need to find a way to create fake facts like the oil companies do with denying global warming.
I once watched, jaw somewhat agape as an attorney on twitter (or someone whose bio said she was an attorney) sparred with other netizens over a claim she had made about an event someone (a third-party) said was taking place in her community relating to a local business.
Respondents began to reply asking for additional information, how the claim could be verified, many simply asked for a source-others expressed concern for accuracy of information because they were potentially affected. Maybe one out of every few were “trollish” by popular definition. I read many of them. Very few seemed to be politically charged or even aggressive towards this attorney, they simply asked for more information.
Her responses were aggressive and antagonistic, calling respondents “trolls” and “enablers”. Even people asking in a considerate and mild mannered way because they were trying to inform themselves on the affair.
No facts ever came out. From the attorney or the local entity she claimed to have information on. She encouraged others to take the lack of information as proof that her friend’s claims were truth. Many did.
It was something to behold. An attorney was sharing what was effectively hearsay on twitter about a local business and actively combatting people asking for more information.
Then again, we all know that a lawyer's function is essentially to synthesize plausibility. But as with any job, there are of course people who are bad at it.
It's much more likely that rather than it being a political stance he profits from deforestation directly through investments in logging companies or indirectly through being paid off, or both. Saying its reasonable means you would have to think a politician using their position for personal gain is reasonable. That would be quite an extreme opinion to hold.
I think they are relying upon the concept that only a tiny fraction of the people who read Bolsonaro's claim will bother to seek out the websites of the organizations monitoring deforestation via satellite imagery, and bother to check for themselves.
For most, it'll be brushed off and then moved on to the next new shiny thing in the news/outrage/propaganda cycle.
Yes, but even if a couple thousand people (among millions) find incontrovertible evidence that it was a blatant and willful lie, that's not surprising and won't spread. The lie will have no consequences. That is the new norm, and it is weird.
The general lack of ability to engage in logical facts-based discussion is an existential threat to humanity. Even in this civilized forum reasoning not always wins. Things are definitely dire.
And that's fine. A productive discussion can be had along those lines. However if someone refuses to even acknowledge that there are facts then there's no discussion to be had.
It almost feels like we're in an age with a kind of new post-modernism. Everyone can have their own reality and make up their own "facts" to fit. This makes science and philosophy irrelevant because there is no shared reality that can be investigated and no "fact" that can be disproven.
IMHO, it stems from never updating our basic education from an information-scarce world to an information-flooded one.
I'm firmly in favor of making a media consumption class mandatory for primary education. Essentially a mix of logic & fallacies, evaluating sources, and meta scientific news literacy.
This would be actively fought against, at least in the United States, as an attempt to indoctrinate kids with "liberal biases".
Which is, if one thinks about it, the real problem at hand: when the political ideology of half a country requires complete and uncritical rejection of...yanno... the things happening in front of one's face, you can't actually fix the thing. People have to agree that it's broken first.
FWIW, I went to a public middle school in rural Michigan in the 90s (not exactly a liberal bastion), and we learned how to differentiate between untrustworthy/legitimate sources on the internet. It may have just been a one or two computer lab sessions, but it has stuck with me.
So, while I’d support a policy from high that guarantees everyone this type of education, a single computer lab teacher can have a major impact on their own.
Yeah, that sounds like you're touching on something important. I'm not sure that a bit of tweaks to basic education are anywhere near the whole story, but yeah, our society seems to be organized around information scarcity, and simply can't cope with information overload.
There are other problematic sacred cows that are really hard to broach that similarly touch on information overload. We've got copyrights that allow rent-seeking behavior even where the value lies not in the creation, but in the shared social history, and in any case have durations that are out of whack with the encouragements needed to create. We've got a first amendment protection of speech that protects very valuable discourse and the ability to criticize, yet is only protects from the government, not the increasingly important non-governmental organizations (like but not exclusively social-media platforms). And it's a blunt tool too; it protects from imposed silence, but it does not protect from drowning out with noise. There's no framework for dealing with, essentially, really smart spam - and even if there were some countermeasure, the first amendment would likely render it illegal! And while I think it's perfectly reasonable for corporations to have a voice, I don't think people really considered the downsides of lobbying and other intentionally misleading messaging when reinterpreting incorporation to include first-amendment protections.
But suggest that the first amendment is flawed now, and people immediately jump to the conclusion that you personally must want to live in a Stalinist dictatorship.
No amount of education is going to save you if the truth isn't viable. The truth isn't "climate change exists". The truth is "climate change exists and you are going to pay for it". And there isn't much of an alternative to that. I don't like populism either, but what alternative do you have? If the way to promise development is by cutting down the Amazon, that is what is going to happen unless there is a viable alternative.
I think this is one of the costs of democracy. We could always just take power away from all the uneducated who rely on emotion-based decision making. And then somehow punish the educated who do the same despite being equipped with the tools to parse the facts.
Making an educated/uneducated dichotomy is part of the problem, the educated have also made plenty of horrible decisions, not paying any price for it, and lecturing the rest all the same. Nassim Taleb's framework seems to be more interesting here: there are those with and those without skin in the game.
So what you're saying is general enough not to be disprovable.
But there are two conclusions you might draw from that: (A) that intelligence and education aren't helpful, or (B) that those making horrible decisions were being selfish.
Given the trumpian sentiment of "not paying my taxes makes me smart", and perhaps the fact that other people were even smart enough not to say something like that (but still to act on the idea), I'm thinking you need to consider (B) as a serious component here.
That would suggest that intelligence and education might still be useful - but only when dishonesty and selfishness is not a dominating risk. I suppose there are measures one might take to at least reduce those risks, since obviously completely eradicating those is unrealistic.
For instance, if the educated are good at serving themselves but pullign the wool over the electorate's eyes, then perhaps more audits would help. A culture of much harsher penalties for selfish leaders, even where the selfishness isn't illegal, might help. But perhaps also the electorate itself should be smarter too - and that's not entirely impossible in principle too; e.g. you could imagine a pyramid scheme of elections, not too different from the electoral college today - just with more levels (not just two), and with explicit decoupling of the elector from their vote (so no more "republican" electors or "democrat" electors - they too are free agents), and with the explicit aim of voting for people who you think you can most trust - intellectually, morally, and as a planner - instead of those you most agree with (since with multiple levels, that's kind of hopeless anyhow).
...So I'm not really serious with that last suggestion, but I do think we need to be exploring options. A disillusioned electorate mixed with manipulative, egotistical, untrustworthy politicians, spiced with lavish lobbying, no funding transparency, and media so full of noise the signal is hard to find - that's a recipe for serious food poisoning. It may seriously simply help to switch electoral systems every once and a while, even if there's no single best system - simply to shake loose the manipulative habits that settle in after a while.
Sadly, history has shown that the educated aren't any better at making decisions - especially now with education being very expensive and college admissions + post-college hiring being heavily biased in favor of elites. If we're going to limit voting based on some criteria (I'm not sure this works), education is not it.
I'm not entirely sure of this 1:1 relationship of intelligence/education to bad political ideas such as Bolsonaro's.
There is a lot of ideology involved, which correlates rather poorly with intelligence. There are, for example, quite a few Republican politicians that aren't obviously stupid, who still spent decades denying first the existence of climate change, then the human contribution, followed by the risks and, finally, our ability to act against it.
Other example: when people say "Barack Obama was not born in the United States" it is not intended as a statement of fact, which is why no amount of fact-checking and birth-certificate-producing stopped people from engaging in that particular conspiracy theory. It is an expression of ideology.
And because every comment on such topic must end with George Orwell: In 1984 the highest achievement of ideology is the expression of facts that are obviously wrong.
I think this was the case before. Nowadays it's a different, worse situation. We have more means of knowing but people a proactively smearing information. It's a super impressive neurotic trend of "modern" societies.
Now what to do ? I don't know, but I wish. It's kind of a quest, find knowledgeable and courageous people to gather, find ideas and enact them.
Well, last time the world chosen leaders like this, it led to a world war, so World War III, honestly. Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I don’t see things getting better until they get a whole lot worse.
In one episode of Parks and Rec, the lead character, councilwoman Leslie Knope, is trying to pass a bill that adds fluoride to the town’s water source, while being opposed by a councilman/dentist who wants to continue making money off of the many cavities that occur in the town. As she discusses the debate, she realizes, “On my side, I have facts, science, and reason. All he has is fear-mongering. Oh my god, he’s gonna win.”
Thanks for the clarification. This led me down a fun rabbit hole of understanding Brazilian exports. I would not have guessed that Lebanon and Saudi Arabia were the third and fourth largest importers of Brazilian beef after Chile and the Netherlands.
If you just read the article you posted, one military that was flying in a different airplane than the president was (it was a stand-by backup aircraft) was arrested with 39kg of cocain.
Just so that you know, when Bolsonaro was a congressman and Indonesia was about to execute some Brazilians due to cocaine trafficking, he sent an official letter to Indonesian government asking them to be killed due to their crimes (source: https://veja.abril.com.br/blog/maquiavel/em-2006-bolsonaro-p...)
The bit about it being on a different plane is enough; Bolsonaro's response and that little anecdote are irrelevant. See for example Trey Radel, a former U.S. Representative who was arrested for purchasing cocaine after voting for a bill to drug test food stamp recipients: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trey-radel-drug-testing_n_430...
I don't have the time or patience to engage, but for the ones that don't have a side in Brazilian politics, the Amazon should be fine.
Bolsonaro is a fool with words, but has shown to be well intended. He'll probably come around on this particular issue (as it has already happened a few times during his government).
It's clear that you're unable to "engage" if you think he'll "come around" on the matter. I'm curious, if you're so busy you can't engage with current events, what do you have time for?
Okay, I'll engage once because your question seems genuine. I have plenty of skin in the game in Brazil (different than most Brazilians here who live elsewhere and see the country through biased headlines).
He recently suggested fixing diesel prices causing a big turmoil and was advised to go back on the idea, which he did. It happened a few times with different matters. That's why I think he'll come around. He's also former military (and they usually have respect for the environment).
> if you're so busy you can't engage with current events, what do you have time for?
I don't like to engage in political discussion because nothing good comes out of it, and prefer to use the time to get work done and to research information that can help me make better decisions (where to live and do business, how to invest capital, etc.).
I think it's even simpler than that. Deny anything that is a threat to their power/money/hegemony.
Their are plenty of people who will do and say anything (even if they don't believe it) for self gain. It's basic short-term vs long-term thinking. They stand to gain much in the short term and lose nothing in the long term because they'll all be dead when it comes time to collect.
Combine this with loose ethics/morals and we have a serious and intractable problem.
And it’s even simpler than that again! I forget the essay I read on this subject, but a huge factor is signalling group membership.
Truth is a terrible signal, if our group says that Dinosaurs died out 65 mission years ago, and humans rose about 100,000 years ago, anybody can pretend to be a member and agree with us. There is no cost to saying the truth.
And if your group’s beliefs are the same as every other group’s beliefs, there are no “switching costs,” so your members can leave easily. You have a really porous border between your group and the rest of the world.
But if we say that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, and humans rode dinosaurs, and there were unicorns, but they died because they didn’t board the Ark, and so on, well, you sound ridiculous to people outside of the tribe when you say that.
Saying that has a real cost, so saying that proves your loyalty to the group and by virtue of lowering your standing outside the group, drives you to seek your comfort and standing from the group.
I am not putting it rigorously, but it boils down to the fact that humans want to belong to groups, and groups that organize themselves around things that are untrue (or at least rejected by all other groups) generate more loyalty and more of a “we versus them” dynamic than groups that emphasize truth and uncontroversial beliefs.
So it doesn’t even have to be a belief that is self-serving to the group’s leaders (although it doesn’t hurt to have beliefs that the group leader gets all the money and all the young and comely followers as partners).
It’s enough to demand that the group’s members base their loyalty on their faith in beliefs rejected by everyone else.
(None of this disagrees with your point, after all, if a leader bases their power on the size and loyalty of the group, false beliefs are inherently protecting the leader’s power. You don’t need cults to see this. Most companies have a lot of beliefs that every reasoning person can see are false. They know that the diversity initiative is a sham in most companies. They know that “employees are our greatest resource” is said often, but the company behaves like a cobalt mine in the third world, and so on. But loyalty demands that everyone pretend these things are true.)
1) The economics of every process must take into account the cost of the environment. If it's not going to biodegrade, that costs. If it comes from an unsustainable logging practice, that costs. If came in a boat from across the world, that costs. Adding the cost of environmental consequences to all stages of production opens up the room for investors to sensibly bet on less damaging production methods. We will look back at this time and rub our eyes when we realise what an insane free-for-all it has been.
2) A global body needs to be created to handle environmental policy, probably balancing quality of life with environmental outcomes. This body should be elected, but independent from politicians. Just like monetary policy was been removed from the easily bendable hands of politicians, the environment needs to be too. This deals with i) the short term thinking required of politicians [elections] ii) the global nature of the problem.
> A global body needs to be created to handle environmental policy
I think some people have too much faith in the ability of politicians and bureaucrats to protect the environment.
A better solution would be decentralized decision making. Place ownership of the rain forest in private hands and let the market determine the most valuable use of the land. If a sufficient number of people believe the rain forest should be set aside for environmental preservation they will have the ability to act on that belief.
Letting politicians and bureaucrats decide will do nothing to preserve the rain forest or environment short- or long term.
If you mean form a government then I can't blame you. It seems so logical and yet the last 50 years have demonstrated the futility of this approach (as demonstrated by the article).
Power corrupts - politicians and bureaucrats act on whims and pressure from special interest groups. It doesn't matter if the entity is a county, a state, a nation or the world.
First, will contend that, say, the atmosphere cannot be effectively privatized.
Nor can courts. Who will uphold the correct fundamental rules of privatization? Who sets them?
Finally, it is the case currently that we have democracy, wherein the individual has power and domain via a vote and participation in discussions. Then we also have effective privatization, where pure financial acumen can make things happen, or stop them. That is the case currently. We do not need to increase the power of money such that more things can happen for us to be able to pay for the salvation of the environment. We can do that now. The suggestion to switch to privatization is to ask people to relinquish the former power and leave everything to those with the latter power. I don’t see the benefit. Especially as when I have done business, it has clearly been private money that has done stupid and greedy and inefficient things, and governmental structures prevented it for the benefit of all.
Government attempts to be a non-monetary contractual union that represents the mutual benefit of game-theoretical cooperation, in e.g. information sharing and consistency. It does work to do that.
> atmosphere cannot be effectively privatized.
It could be done. After all the ground below us is privatized (i.e. your property extends from the surface borders to a point at the center of the planet). Similarly it could be extended outward.
> Nor can courts.
Agreed. Courts are a necessary part of government by definition. I'm only arguing for the privatization of government controlled land - not anarchy.
I'm having difficulty unpacking the last part of your comment but I think the essence is that private individuals will act in ways you find disagreeable and that government can prevent that for the benefit of all. I would counter that a government is just as capable of acting in the same ways. Unfortunately in the case where an individual acts this way the consequences are limited to what that individual can do (and can usually be corrected by the courts) whereas when the government is the actor no competition is allowed and the only recourse is to challenge the power in periodic elections.
> Place ownership of the rain forest in private hands and let the market determine the most valuable use of the land.
I find it much easier to believe that this satire, because were it up to the “Market”, the rainforest would be gone, and every river polluted. Short-term profits are incompatible with environmental protection. Just because a few men get rich doesn’t mean the result is what’s overall best for society. The “market” (quotes necessary because it’s so much more complicated than that) has decided that continuing to burn fossil fuels is what’s best, and look how that’s working out.
The incentives have to change. Making money hand over fist typically only benefits a select few, to the detriment of the many. How many more examples do we need?
Exactly, only if the environment is given financial value will things change. I can see that being the only solution to the current situation. It enables financial optimisation, but results in protection. There will be much resistance though.
> only if the environment is given financial value will things change.
Or maybe we should try to help people understand that it's futile to see in terms of human concepts (like profit) the entity which literally created our species. Perhaps financialization of literally everything we should hold dear is the problem? The value of human life itself has at times been boiled down to a dollar amount, but that doesn't mean you can go around killing as many people as you want as long as your bank account is big enough (oh, unless you're a corporation of course).
> it's futile to see in terms of human concepts (like profit) the entity which literally created our species.
Why is it futile to understand our planet in terms of human concepts? What alternative means of understanding do you have in mind? Direct perception or revelation? Feelings?
Maybe I should clarify: I didn't mean that it's always futile to build mental models to understand the world. More that in this instance, our attempts to rationalize our behavior and use that understanding to guide future behavior (via economics, esp.) have clearly been at least partially a failure. If we continue to see profit as the ultimate goal of human endeavor, we do so at our peril. I think it's clear that economics is lagging behind the physical sciences in it's ability to successfully guide our behavior. It needs modifications to be able to properly deal with externalities; otherwise we're on a collision course with a future that I think most people would consider highly dystopian.
I disagree with your overall point of view. Profits (i.e. savings) is exactly what will save the environment by enabling the preservation of the rain forest and other desirable environments.
I do agree with you that incentives have to change. Humanity absolutely depends on industry to survive and leaving precious resources like the rain forests in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats will ensure their destruction through corruption.
It's funny how the HN community which is left leaning, start to whine whenever they see news like this.
Y'all let them CNN, The Guardian, and the BBC drive you. You all ask for hard evidence. Yet I am waiting for one of you to confirm you have been in the Amazon.
Why didn't you say anything for ~20 years when the duo Hugo Chavez/Nicolas Maduro have been destroying the Amazon? Destroying.
Why didn't you say anything about it for ~12 years when Chavez's friends Lula Da Silva/Dilma Rousseff were ruling Brazil?
I've seen first hand during decades what's been going on in the Amazon. Guess what.. Greenpeace does not give a fuck. They look the other way when it comes down to criticize left leaning government:
1. That's why they don't say anything about Maduro's impact in the Amazon.
2. That's why they don't say anything about Lula and Dilma's impact in the Amazon.
Most of you are the same ones who whine on the Donald Trump and immigrants issue, yet say NOTHING about Obama being the president who deported the most people out of our country. It's on the ICE website.
Of course people were reporting about it before Bolsonaro got elected. We are talking about a politician that had campaign promises thar openly attacking the environment! And one who is on a personal vendetta against the environment police, as evidenced by that time when he was caught ilegally fishing in a nature reserve.
He was seriously considering to extinguish the Ministry of the Environment, and merge it under the Ministry of Agriculture. In the end he did not because of the public backlash, and settled by only nomeating an environment minister that is fully subservient to agrobusiness...
The Bolsonaro administration is short sighted and paranoid of "leftists". Four of the areas that are suffering particularly bad because of this are the environment, education, foreign policy, and human rights. All of these currently have maliciously incompetent people in charge because Bolsonaro views these areas as opposed to his ideology.
Countries don't live in a vacuum. Economies are intertwined and dismissing valid comparisons as "whataboutism" isn't constructive.
There's an economic cost to preserving forest which developed countries didn't pay in the past, aren't paying in the present but hypocritically expect developing economies to pay.
All the while buying cheap soy, beef and labor from developing economies. Funny how everyone wants all the benefits but none of the compromises.
Leaders do not operate in an environment where they can tell the truth and do things based on facts on the ground.[1]
Leaders have one real job, that is to reward (through jobs/money/political clout) people who help them. If they don't think telling the truth about deforestation or global warming will help their sycophants, they will tell lies.
In that case should they not at least project an aura of being in touch with reality.
On this issue voters either don't care, in that case they wont mind you telling the truth. Do care about deforestation but value jobs over environment, in which case you're losing their votes. Do care and value the environment over jobs, in which case they still don't want to be lied to, and the lying doesn't exactly pander to them. I cant think of many other reasonable political outlooks. So what is this? virtue signalling to some group? Is there a group so out of touch with reality that only lies sound reasonable? I don't know.
This cynicism is pernicious. There are plenty of people, on both ends of the political spectrum, who seek public office in order to do things which they view as for the greater good. On the right it is things like criminalizing abortion. On the left it is things like preventing catastrophic climate change. They may barter votes or bend their positions in the name of incrementalism or long-term strategy, but it is the rare politician that is 100% corrupt, seeking office so as to sell their authority for personal gain. Believing this, that all politicians are purely corrupt, and arguing that others should believe it, is to facilitate corruption, not fight it.
Again, for the ones that don't have a side in Brazilian politics but do have a concern for the Amazon, and what the president may or may not do, I'd suggest checking out https://www.brazilianpoliticspodcast.com for unbiased political information/analysis on the country and its policies.
I see remarkable similarity in Bolsonaro's response on a national scale to nearly every American's response when choosing between making money and the environment.
Suggest to an American to fly less and over 99% will say, "But my job. . ." as humans fly more than ever. Not to dwell on flying, we could talk of miles driven, plastic discarded, air conditioning empty rooms, eating more beef than ever.
The scale is different, but the emotional response is similar.
An alternative: we could see ourselves as part of something greater than ourselves that benefits us all including ourselves. We want Bolsonaro to feel that way. We can do it ourselves and reduce our waste each by a good 75 to 90 percent.
As Frankl said, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
> Suggest to an American to fly less and over 99% will say, "But my job. . ." as humans fly more than ever.
I see it as the reason why individual solutions will never work and why you need the government to step in to make sure those negatives externalities (aka killing the planet for our children) are properly priced in so that we subset those practices.
Something, something, game theory, and especially the subset of games that have a cooperate/defect dynamic.
Left to themselves, individuals want to defect and get a free ride on the backs of those who cooperate. But if a critical mass of individuals cooperate—by choice, force, or persuasion—everyone wins.
—
It’s intellectually fine to be a libertarian and say, “even if the overall good is served by cooperation, there is a higher value in having the freedom to defect.”
But you are correct that on the balance, it takes a society working together to achieve certain large-scale good outcomes that demand widespread cooperation.
Whether those large-scale good outcomes are worthy of having less liberty is what certain debates are really about, even if people try to frame them otherwise, e.g. “Individual good, government bad.”
The problem with having the government step in is that well, the vast majority of the population would disagree with any attempts to limit consumerism/things that may damage the environment, and any politician who tried them would be a political pariah.
I mean, imagine a government actually trying to limit how often people/companies could fly/run planes, how much meat they're allowed to have, what kinds of cars were allowed, etc.
The immediate reaction would basically be:
A: Most of the population flat out ignoring them and their attempted guidelines, leading to bad press if they tried to enforce them.
B: The opposition having a golden opportunity to win over the current ruling party's supporters with claims they'll revert said changes after the next election.
C: Said main party's polling support crashing straight through the floor as most of their supporters abandon them.
D: Tons of bad press in general, especially if certain people/companies seem to be 'getting away with' behaviour they don't allow the rest of the population to indulge in. You can already see this (for good reason) with complaints about stuff like Davos and how all these politicians and actors/celebrities are taking private planes everywhere.
E: Their own party members jumping ship, especially if it's a larger/established party which went all eco intense.
F: If things got bad enough, outright civil war/revolution/military coup/riots/etc. And given the percentage of people who'd back such restrictions/law changes is so tiny, it probably wouldn't end in their favour.
The government stepping in would (if done as strictly as some articles/guidelines suggest), lead to a lot of civil instability and any political party implementing it basically collapsing.
So the options are basically either 'hope everyone becomes more environmentally conscious (unlikely)', 'get the government to step in' (unlikely, may lead to wars and revolutions, would sink their reputation), 'hope some sort of invention makes carbon capture much easier/resource efficient or makes clean energy super cheap'.
The physics of air travel make clean energy not super useful. At best, we could try to figure out a carbon-neutral way to create combustible fuel, like biofuels.
You're right that in general people don't like government policies that potentially lower people's standards of living. Gas taxes are usually very unpopular. But I think "hope everyone becomes more environmentally conscious" is more possible than you think. This is very much a generational issue and I think as the negative effects of climate change become more apparent, the public will begin to see the light.
In the US, it would not take a huge change in public opinion to make truly effective environmental policy more tenable. With the current trend, it may only take another decade for over 60% of Americans to believe that climate change should be a top priority: 44% already claim to prioritize it, up from 26% in 2010. Of course, some of these people may not actually like how environment-focused policies affect their lifestyles, but that may change as well.
Even though Bolsonaro is a stupid animal, his policies wrt the Amazon are only the result of capitalist thinking, which is the standard way of western society. So much so that he has strong support from the rich in Brazil and in other countries as well.
The reason Amazon is being deforested is simple: is not that they hate the Amazon and want to destroy it. Is that doing this is very profitable. You get FREE land to raise cattle and grow soy. You can get rich(er) from day to night. With that money you buy your way with politicians, both in Brazil (easy) as well as in other countries who will turn a blind eye on this. And its not only people in Amazon getting rich, Americans are buying like crazy into the cheaper meat, wood, and soy. And Americans will find this great, because now you can get "hormone-free beef", cheap "earth-saving" soy products, and beautiful, cheap wood products. People in America peddling these products are getting rich and telling everyone that they're making their lives "better". This is what capitalist society calls a "win-win".
The problem there is that making more money is not good to everyone as they want us to believe, and in particular not good for the environment, or to the thousands of native people who will die or be dislodged from their native land, or to the several thousand people that will have to toil on land stolen by others. There is no way capitalism can prevent this, because it only benefits a certain part of society that decided to live under its auspices (most of them in rich countries) - Brazilians making cents per day have close to zero power in the market. Making more money is not good for the workers that will be squeezed for this profit to happen. It is not good for the kids that will grow without education because their families are forced to participate in this process. In other words, making more money does not solve problems, it only create more problems, even if these problems are going somewhere you cannot see or care about. The world needs to break this vicious cycle of money making before we can find a solution to these grave problems that cannot be controlled under capitalism.
Which is why the fix must be economic, not moral. LED light bulbs and wind power in the Midwest aren't successes because everyone decided to pitch in, take their place on the line and give it all for Captain Planet, they're successes because they fulfill the fundamental promise of efficiency: do more with less. They save people money.
It's a concept most environmentalists I encounter look upon as the dark side of the force, like if they used economics and human selfishness towards a positive end it would somehow take away their environmentalist virtue. Guess it's hard to be a martyr when you take away the sacrifice. Doesn't help that they usually look down on the individuals in question, and can't seem to understand why "pay more and do less so you can make a negligible personal impact on the problem, because it's the right thing to do." is a hollow argument for many people. Maybe that person in the concentration camp who gave his last piece of bread died, and maybe you don't want to be that person.
There are no economic fixes, there are only fixes to growth. In that we reduce the growth of the economy and the growth of population and consume less... until such a point that our consumption of resources matches their production by the environment. Anything else is rhetorical bullshit meant to placate the masses... and make them feel better about being Bolsonaro which all you are.
I call it environmental austerity in order to pay the environmental debt accrued through economic development.
> It's a concept most environmentalists I encounter look upon as the dark side of the force, like if they used economics and human selfishness towards a positive end it would somehow take away their environmentalist virtue. Guess it's hard to be a martyr when you take away the sacrifice. Doesn't help that they usually look down on the individuals in question, and can't seem to understand why "pay more and do less so you can make a negligible personal impact on the problem, because it's the right thing to do." is a hollow argument for many people.
Do you think an environmentalist would read this description and think, "that's me to a tee!"? If not, do you think you are more perceptive about the motives, beliefs, and strategies of environmentalists than they are themselves?
Your point would be better made without the dubious theories about the beliefs and motives of environmentalists.
No, they probably wouldn't think that. But that's how it comes off in many cases. Not all, but many. See the parent comment relating environmentalism to the romantic martyrdom of those concentration camp prisoners who offered comfort to others and gave up their last piece of bread. And its argument that Americans who refuse to stop flying/driving/using plastic for their job are somehow "emotionally" the same as Bolsonaro's politically motivated denialism.
You need look no further than any Hacker News discussion of climate change to see tons of comments of how people should stop eating beef, stop eating all meat, stop driving so much, stop flying, pay more for clean energy, pay more in taxes, even stop having children (at which I will never cease to /facepalm), all with the theme of "There is no way you have any valid argument against any of this, so if you refuse to make these sacrifice you're part of the problem."
I'm all for environmental regulation, I'd even be in favor of a carbon tax, but modern environmentalism has a huge messaging problem that makes both nearly impossible in the US outside of deep blue zones. It's way too moralistic and way too unwilling to adapt(ironic, given its cause). Maybe if environmentalists turned down the volume on climate change and talked more about good jobs, clean air, clean water, they'd make more headway. Find common ground and go with that, because in a functioning democracy we all move forward together (given a large majority) or not at all. And in my opinion anyone who truly cares about solving climate change should prioritize progress over virtue.
I live in the midwest and my friends still complain that the government forced them to switch to the new bulbs.
There's a lot of weird anxiety about doing things to help the environment from a lot of folks that makes them not want to do even things that benefit themselves.
It's perfectly reasonable to complain about the government banning incandescent bulbs. For a drop in the bucket of energy savings, they took away a choice that many people preferred in favor of mainly fluorescent bulbs which are an environmental hazard. Thank God for decent LED lights in the last few years or the irony would still be pretty thick.
It's a great example of poor environmental policy and you dismiss criticism as "weird anxiety". It's not weird to dislike other people forcing you to make choices that they think are for your own good.
Incandescent bulbs last months, LEDs last years and use 5x less energy.
> Thank God for decent LED lights in the last few years or the irony would still be pretty thick.
Do you think we would be better off using incandescents?
I think the main thrust of your point is that you don't think the government should be able to tell folks they can't use crappy bulbs. I think without government intervention LEDs wouldn't be where they are today, which is partly due to that weird anxiety I mentioned, and that's unfortunate.
It's still a drop in the bucket compared to, for instance, closing the SUV "light truck" efficiency loophole. Which one was more politically palatable? The one with the grand gesture and minor actual savings of course. Forgive me for getting a little cynical about government policy, it must be that weird anxiety creeping up again.
Also you need to take into account the total manufacturing cost of the light. I believe that only recently have some LEDs (and not good ones with a decent spectrum) reached parity with incandescents in terms of TCO.
Finally, I would look at the market for computers and find how much government intervention it took to advance the technology in that industry. Why would the market for light bulbs be any different? Businesses had already switched to fluorescent for cost savings, why can't consumers be allowed to make similar cost/benefit choices?
I'm not sure environmentalists doubt the economics, or your blanket dismissal. More the huge delay in waiting for the economics to maybe win out. Hence calling for subsidies to the alternative, not as we currently do, subsidise the (formerly) profitable incumbents.
I suppose I reluctantly wear the environmentalist label as that's how some see me. It's not how I would see myself.
A fix is removing all subsidy from fossil fuels and instead subsidising renewables along with increased insulation and combined community heat and power schemes. Except I don't see that as environmentalism, just common sense, whether considering an individual family and house, or a town or national scale.
Nitpick: the Worker's Party was in power up to 2016, when president Dilma Rousseff was impeached and their former allies, centrists Democratic Movement, rose to power. Even Dilma wasn't particularly friendly to the environment, as can be seen on the 2010-2016 data.
Bolsonaro's presidency is on another level of pandering to illegal loggers and agribusiness, though. The current Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, is openly hostile to anything relating to preservation. Including risking a free investment by European countries to the tune of about half a billion dollars
The data from INPE is accurate, but no one is talking about what is showing us: most part of the deforestation is happening in Bolivia and Peru. In the last decades, deforestation in Brazil was been decreasing a lot.
The article is great a sample of the way Bolsonaro thinks.
There must be a stage in infant development where the child is still unable to extrapolate and can't fathom that things exist outside of their own immediate line of sight. Bolsonaro is basically stuck in that stage of intellectual development.
Basically, he interprets reality strictly through the synthesis of his own everyday experiences + "news"/memes shared by fans through social media. A corollary to that is that he's utterly incapable of synthesizing data, statistics, analogies, etc -- basically any kind of abstract thought -- into his own worldview. Thus, when those pieces of abstract thought contradict his day-to-day experiences, he immediately dismisses them as "communist propaganda" or "fake news". In his own sense he is right -- in his reality, those things are not real because reality is only what he himself experiences or gets through memes.
Amazon deforestation can't be real, because he flew over the Amazon and saw many trees.
Europe has no forests, because he traveled through it and didn't see any.
Brazil has no hunger problems, because he never saw any hungry-looking bony person on the streets.
All of these examples are literally things he has said.
The new crop of wannabe autocrats call every inconvenient fact a lie. They imply a vast conspiracy to undermine their "always right" supporters and the one and only leader who can fix things.
In democracies with bad leaders you might get "it needs more study" or "we can't afford it" or just silence. At worst opponents are labeled "misguided". But the new autocrats end all conversation by turning facts and those who believe them into conspiring enemies.
You can put the blame for Trump, Brexit, Bozo-naro and other populists squarely at the feet of the previous administrations.
The political elite alienated the population.
By spying, failing to prosecute financial criminals that decimated economies, stealing several billion dollars, failing to pro-actively prevent a human calamity in the Russia x US proxy wars in Syria, squabbling amongst themselves as the non-politicians gained in popularity.
Can you blame people who’s savings and jobs were annihilated by the GFC and saw no major arrests voting the incumbents out?
Can you blame the underprivileged domestic populations in Europe from turning right and nationalistic when they see spikes in homelessness, criminality and culture friction when their small towns are flooded with desperate immigrants?
Can you blame people voting out de-facto organised crime from power after they rob billions from a third world economy?
I don’t think it’s right. I think Bozo-naro is an embarrassment of a human being. But I empathise with the people who threw the previous job out.
The people responsible for the machinations (loosened regulations, underfunded financial oversight agencies, underfunded consumer protection, etc) are now/still in power.
Blaming the elites of old is a fallacy, because the elites of old are the elites of new. Brexit is a conservative issue, due to conservatives underfunding education, healthcare, fire brigades and the police and blame it on the EU and immigrants.
Trump is put in place by the same party that caused the GFC.
And Bolsonaro is probably even more corrupt than Dima et al. Yet people voted for him.
How, why? Because they were not aggressively authoritan. Trump openly flouts with totalitarianism. Let's see how Bolsonaro will fare.
(And I'm not trying to somehow wash the previous administrations clean. Clinton loosened the financial rules, he could have vetoed it, but I don't think that would have mattered, the lack of funding for competent oversight is the main point, and that was under Bush.
Similarly I don't have any love for the Labor govs in UK, but fiscal responsibility aka. let's underfund the stuff that only poors use is a classic conservative trope.)
I don’t blame the elites. I blame the people who were in place with the power to restrict the elite’s behaviour.
Corrupt, incompetent or inconsequent politicians can not be rewarded with re-elections they need to be voted out. However when the population stops believing that any political party presents a credible choice we get populists. We get the “non-politicians”.
Of course they solve nothing. They’re worse than the established politicians.
There were ... really no one to reign in the elites. That's why they are the elites. Only a subgroup of them can meaningfully challenge a different subgroup of elites. (Not counting revolutions, and other serious regime changes.)
Alas the re-election rate is astoundingly high. There's no consequence for being a sellout. Populism thrives on these imbeciles.
Well if we had native resources that had been protected for years and suddenly we had a President that had little concern for environmental issues we'd probably also be increasing the destruction of it in order for his political supporters to increase their profits.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadHow do you do anything about that? Somehow reality has become not just optional and uncertain in our policies, perceptions and opinions, but downright irrelevant. When there's no merit in even trying to be truthful and accurate, well... you get this.
What people care about is whether the politicians will instigate policies that are beneficial to them.
Bolsonaro ran with one of his main issues being law and order. In Brazil the crime rates are quite shocking (IIRC the murder rate is huge like 100s a day). It doesn't matter if he lies about the Rainforest if people see if cleaning up the streets.
e.g. There is a scare story at least once a week that is plastered over newspapers/news sites such as "Having a bacon sandwich could lead to bum cancer!!!!", when the headline is clearly salacious. The actual research probably had a sensible conclusion of "Those who have had consistently more red meat, have an increased chance of cancer". If you hear see the same story hundreds of times, you are likely to ignore it or even despise it.
The same happens with the populist politicians. Take someone that isn't as controversial as Bolsonaro such as Nigel Farage in my home country.
A fair description of his political stance is a Patriotic Thatcherite that is anti-mass-immigration. When he was first becoming well known (back in the mid-2000s) he was constantly branded a racist and a fascist (there was no evidence of this) in an attempt to conflate his position with the likes of actual fascists of old like Oswald Mosley.
Now Whether or not you agree with his politics isn't important. In these attempts to constantly smear him he has become one of the most effective UK politicians in recent memory. To many he can simply do no wrong because they will dismiss any criticism of immediately, disregarding its validity.
Also, how can you brand somebody as "patriotic" when his party is a US-based corporation with links to the Russian government and tax havens?
Sad to see this rubbish on HN. Farage plays to the same racist tendencies as Trump and Bolsonaro do, with constant dog-whistling. He's absolutely controversial and hardly effective: he still has no MP in the UK Parliament after 15 years of trying, and has accomplished absolutely nothing over two mandates in the EU Parliament beyond annoying even his own allies.
It's not the "smearing" that build his success, but a situation of sustained economic weakness of the white working classes that fosters a climate of anger against migrants (who are seen as cheaper competition). That BNP fella was similarly successful for a while. Also, Farage's support is built on social networks, where his messages are spread without a debate, let alone "smears".
> This would be the same Farage that made sure his anti-immigration message in the 2016 Brexit campaign had "the only prominent white person in the photograph obscured by a box of text": https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farag....
You just did the very thing I was complaining about!
They are claiming that how an image was cropped and where text was placed somehow indicates racism. You are concentrating on nonsense and not actually making an argument against any of his policies or any of the assumption of the advert.
As for my descriptions of Farage. They come from other Journalists such as Brendan O'Neill (runs Spiked!). As for the rest of my description they are fairly objective.
> Sad to see this rubbish on HN. Farage plays to the same racist tendencies as Trump and Bolsonaro do, with constant dog-whistling.
When someone says "Dog whistling" that is the same as when someone runs out of arguments and says "Well you know it true and you aren't admitting it". It isn't an argument of any sort.
You just did the very thing I was complaining about, and I don't think you even knew you were doing it.
Most unfortunately, it's becomes impossible to make what we previously conceived of as an "argument" when one or more of the parties involved refuses to acknowledge the validity of objective reality (more commonly referred to as "facts").
No, you were not -- you were (and still are) trying to pass your biases (Farage "patriotic" and unfairly portraited while being "uncontroversial") as objective, by attacking straw men in how public debate arrives at objective conclusions about him. I pointed you at one of many examples of why that is not the case, and you doubled-down on it while completely ignoring the bits of my post that are inconvenient to your biases.
> not actually making an argument
Because there is no argument to make: Farage's "policies" are just a hodgepodge of badly-thought-out slogans designed to appeal to the worst instincts of the electorate. Like on Brexit, which he campaigned for but for which (like all "hard brexiteers") he has no practical or coherent plan.
The main problem with populists is precisely that their policies are unassailable, because they are completely devoid of details. They sell emotions, typically negative ones.
> When someone says "Dog whistling" that is the same as when someone runs out of arguments
As sad as it might make you, dog-whistling is a widely understood term in political debate, and there is little doubt that it is precisely what the likes of Trump and Farage do. (Well, to be fair, Trump has gone beyond that in recent days, turning to out-and-out discriminatory language.)
In my original post I said something along the lines of "He was less controversial than Bolsonaro" not that he was uncontroversial.
You didn't point me at anything objective. The best you linked me to a guardian article about an ad-campaign that claimed it was racist because one white person was removed from the photo. I think that sort of logic is ridiculous.
As for me ignoring parts of your post, yes I ignored parts of your post because I thought they were irrelevant to the point I was originally trying to convey.
> Because there is no argument to make: Farage's "policies" are just a hodgepodge of badly-thought-out slogans designed to appeal to the worst instincts of the electorate. Like on Brexit, which he campaigned for but for which (like all "hard brexiteers") he has no practical or coherent plan.
Well UKIP's manifesto of 2015 is a 76 page document according to the BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32318683
I chose this because this is the last time I believe they fought a general election with Farage as Leader. So this would be indicative of his policies (as he would have had a fair amount of input in the process).
From the BBC summary it seems quite comprehensive. It seems to cover a similar number of areas as Labour's manifesto of 2015.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32284159
So I think your characterisation is quite unfair.
> As sad as it might make you, dog-whistling is a widely understood term in political debate, and there is little doubt that it is precisely what the likes of Trump and Farage do. (Well, to be fair, Trump has gone beyond that in recent days, turning to out-and-out discriminatory language.)
I know what the term means. However many of those that use the term do so as an accusation. They don't mention who they are whistling at and what terms they are using to do that.
> You didn't point me at anything objective.
Want more? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11465505/Nigel-Far...
Refusing to accept that Farage's campaigns are fundamentally based on discrimination, is just denying reality.
> Well UKIP's manifesto of 2015 is a 76 page document
Yeah, and no UKIP supporter would likely be able to describe any of it, except the bits on discriminating foreigners and closing borders. Because, frankly, that's pretty much the only thing they care about. Farage's latest outfit, the brexit party, smashes together old marxists and capitalist cronies, in single-minded pursuit of discrimination.
> They don't mention who they are whistling at and what terms they are using to do that
Because it becomes tedious to do that after a while. The targets of dog-whistling are almost inevitably minorities, because they are the ones who cannot be attacked directly without falling openly into discriminatory language - commonly known as "racist".
Well you've just changed the goalposts again. After being quite clearly confronted with evidence that doesn't support your assertions (a summary of a manifesto with a clear set of policies) you change the goalposts to the UKIP supporter being thick or bigoted.
Have you actually talked to many UKIP supporters? I've spoken to UKIP when they knocked on the door and they seemed like pretty normal people.
> Because it becomes tedious to do that after a while. The targets of dog-whistling are almost inevitably minorities, because they are the ones who cannot be attacked directly without falling openly into discriminatory language - commonly known as "racist".
Right so you have plenty of energy to throw endless accusations around, accuse me of all sorts because I don't agree with you but when asked for specifics it is too tedious. Okay with that I think I will leave you to it. Bye.
Yes, they are quite banal people, mostly. That means little - the worst political movements of the last century were full of very banal people, a certain Ms. Harendt even wrote a famous book about it.
> but when asked for specifics it is too tedious
I was explaining why most people in these debates cannot be bothered to go into detail. If we had to explain every term in the book, we'd end up reciting the opus of Bertrand Russell at every meeting.
Another subjective ad-hominem attack on people you don't really know much about.
> That means little - the worst political movements of the last century were full of very banal people, a certain Ms. Harendt even wrote a famous book about it.
Dropping names of someone that wrote a book isn't an argument. Doesn't address the actual tenor of what I was saying.
I notice that you haven't addressed the fact that you were completely incorrect about Farage and his policies. Let me remind you what your claim was, you said he had no policies. I showed you the Manifesto of 2015 (which is as substantive as their rivals).
> I was explaining why most people in these debates cannot be bothered to go into detail. If we had to explain every term in the book, we'd end up reciting the opus of Bertrand Russell at every meeting.
This is a ridiculous. You have spent more energy telling me why you won't do something than actually doing it.
I know Varoufakis, his parable was very different - he was ostracized after reaching power, by people who could not match his academic skills and felt threatened. The similarities with movements like Trump or Farage are barely skin-deep - Varoufakis does not enjoy the support of entire sectors of the media.
That said, I don't think I disagree with your greater point.
Yes.
I know that everyone's jaded by various neo-fascist leaders, but this stuff does need to be called out, else it gets normalised.
Respondents began to reply asking for additional information, how the claim could be verified, many simply asked for a source-others expressed concern for accuracy of information because they were potentially affected. Maybe one out of every few were “trollish” by popular definition. I read many of them. Very few seemed to be politically charged or even aggressive towards this attorney, they simply asked for more information.
Her responses were aggressive and antagonistic, calling respondents “trolls” and “enablers”. Even people asking in a considerate and mild mannered way because they were trying to inform themselves on the affair.
No facts ever came out. From the attorney or the local entity she claimed to have information on. She encouraged others to take the lack of information as proof that her friend’s claims were truth. Many did.
It was something to behold. An attorney was sharing what was effectively hearsay on twitter about a local business and actively combatting people asking for more information.
Strange times indeed.
Run that by me again.
How is denying something you know to be true a reasonable stance.
How is taking (or actively not taking) a course of action you know will harm the people you've been elected to serve, a reasonable stance.
This is pretty basic stuff for a democratically elected official.
:(
For most, it'll be brushed off and then moved on to the next new shiny thing in the news/outrage/propaganda cycle.
It almost feels like we're in an age with a kind of new post-modernism. Everyone can have their own reality and make up their own "facts" to fit. This makes science and philosophy irrelevant because there is no shared reality that can be investigated and no "fact" that can be disproven.
I'm firmly in favor of making a media consumption class mandatory for primary education. Essentially a mix of logic & fallacies, evaluating sources, and meta scientific news literacy.
Which is, if one thinks about it, the real problem at hand: when the political ideology of half a country requires complete and uncritical rejection of...yanno... the things happening in front of one's face, you can't actually fix the thing. People have to agree that it's broken first.
So, while I’d support a policy from high that guarantees everyone this type of education, a single computer lab teacher can have a major impact on their own.
I think the good faith available has rather remarkably drained out of even that, today.
There are other problematic sacred cows that are really hard to broach that similarly touch on information overload. We've got copyrights that allow rent-seeking behavior even where the value lies not in the creation, but in the shared social history, and in any case have durations that are out of whack with the encouragements needed to create. We've got a first amendment protection of speech that protects very valuable discourse and the ability to criticize, yet is only protects from the government, not the increasingly important non-governmental organizations (like but not exclusively social-media platforms). And it's a blunt tool too; it protects from imposed silence, but it does not protect from drowning out with noise. There's no framework for dealing with, essentially, really smart spam - and even if there were some countermeasure, the first amendment would likely render it illegal! And while I think it's perfectly reasonable for corporations to have a voice, I don't think people really considered the downsides of lobbying and other intentionally misleading messaging when reinterpreting incorporation to include first-amendment protections.
But suggest that the first amendment is flawed now, and people immediately jump to the conclusion that you personally must want to live in a Stalinist dictatorship.
I'm sure this would work out horribly.
But there are two conclusions you might draw from that: (A) that intelligence and education aren't helpful, or (B) that those making horrible decisions were being selfish.
Given the trumpian sentiment of "not paying my taxes makes me smart", and perhaps the fact that other people were even smart enough not to say something like that (but still to act on the idea), I'm thinking you need to consider (B) as a serious component here.
That would suggest that intelligence and education might still be useful - but only when dishonesty and selfishness is not a dominating risk. I suppose there are measures one might take to at least reduce those risks, since obviously completely eradicating those is unrealistic.
For instance, if the educated are good at serving themselves but pullign the wool over the electorate's eyes, then perhaps more audits would help. A culture of much harsher penalties for selfish leaders, even where the selfishness isn't illegal, might help. But perhaps also the electorate itself should be smarter too - and that's not entirely impossible in principle too; e.g. you could imagine a pyramid scheme of elections, not too different from the electoral college today - just with more levels (not just two), and with explicit decoupling of the elector from their vote (so no more "republican" electors or "democrat" electors - they too are free agents), and with the explicit aim of voting for people who you think you can most trust - intellectually, morally, and as a planner - instead of those you most agree with (since with multiple levels, that's kind of hopeless anyhow).
...So I'm not really serious with that last suggestion, but I do think we need to be exploring options. A disillusioned electorate mixed with manipulative, egotistical, untrustworthy politicians, spiced with lavish lobbying, no funding transparency, and media so full of noise the signal is hard to find - that's a recipe for serious food poisoning. It may seriously simply help to switch electoral systems every once and a while, even if there's no single best system - simply to shake loose the manipulative habits that settle in after a while.
There is a lot of ideology involved, which correlates rather poorly with intelligence. There are, for example, quite a few Republican politicians that aren't obviously stupid, who still spent decades denying first the existence of climate change, then the human contribution, followed by the risks and, finally, our ability to act against it.
Other example: when people say "Barack Obama was not born in the United States" it is not intended as a statement of fact, which is why no amount of fact-checking and birth-certificate-producing stopped people from engaging in that particular conspiracy theory. It is an expression of ideology.
And because every comment on such topic must end with George Orwell: In 1984 the highest achievement of ideology is the expression of facts that are obviously wrong.
It’s a veiled way of signaling they are willing to discriminate against certain races to other racists, while claiming plausible deniability.
I think this was the case before. Nowadays it's a different, worse situation. We have more means of knowing but people a proactively smearing information. It's a super impressive neurotic trend of "modern" societies.
Now what to do ? I don't know, but I wish. It's kind of a quest, find knowledgeable and courageous people to gather, find ideas and enact them.
Best series ever.
Not healthy for your organs and also not really helping with teeth.
Source: https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/bra/show...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48787996
The president's response? "I just wished the arrest happened in Indonesia", where they have death penalty for such crimes. (source https://g1.globo.com/jornal-nacional/noticia/2019/06/29/pena...)
Just so that you know, when Bolsonaro was a congressman and Indonesia was about to execute some Brazilians due to cocaine trafficking, he sent an official letter to Indonesian government asking them to be killed due to their crimes (source: https://veja.abril.com.br/blog/maquiavel/em-2006-bolsonaro-p...)
Bolsonaro is a fool with words, but has shown to be well intended. He'll probably come around on this particular issue (as it has already happened a few times during his government).
He recently suggested fixing diesel prices causing a big turmoil and was advised to go back on the idea, which he did. It happened a few times with different matters. That's why I think he'll come around. He's also former military (and they usually have respect for the environment).
> if you're so busy you can't engage with current events, what do you have time for?
I don't like to engage in political discussion because nothing good comes out of it, and prefer to use the time to get work done and to research information that can help me make better decisions (where to live and do business, how to invest capital, etc.).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jair-bolso...
Then why start?
> Bolsonaro is a fool with words
On politics, I never saw a fool whose problem are just words. He is authentic, the real deal, dumb all through.
Their are plenty of people who will do and say anything (even if they don't believe it) for self gain. It's basic short-term vs long-term thinking. They stand to gain much in the short term and lose nothing in the long term because they'll all be dead when it comes time to collect.
Combine this with loose ethics/morals and we have a serious and intractable problem.
Truth is a terrible signal, if our group says that Dinosaurs died out 65 mission years ago, and humans rose about 100,000 years ago, anybody can pretend to be a member and agree with us. There is no cost to saying the truth.
And if your group’s beliefs are the same as every other group’s beliefs, there are no “switching costs,” so your members can leave easily. You have a really porous border between your group and the rest of the world.
But if we say that the Earth is about 6,000 years old, and humans rode dinosaurs, and there were unicorns, but they died because they didn’t board the Ark, and so on, well, you sound ridiculous to people outside of the tribe when you say that.
Saying that has a real cost, so saying that proves your loyalty to the group and by virtue of lowering your standing outside the group, drives you to seek your comfort and standing from the group.
I am not putting it rigorously, but it boils down to the fact that humans want to belong to groups, and groups that organize themselves around things that are untrue (or at least rejected by all other groups) generate more loyalty and more of a “we versus them” dynamic than groups that emphasize truth and uncontroversial beliefs.
So it doesn’t even have to be a belief that is self-serving to the group’s leaders (although it doesn’t hurt to have beliefs that the group leader gets all the money and all the young and comely followers as partners).
It’s enough to demand that the group’s members base their loyalty on their faith in beliefs rejected by everyone else.
(None of this disagrees with your point, after all, if a leader bases their power on the size and loyalty of the group, false beliefs are inherently protecting the leader’s power. You don’t need cults to see this. Most companies have a lot of beliefs that every reasoning person can see are false. They know that the diversity initiative is a sham in most companies. They know that “employees are our greatest resource” is said often, but the company behaves like a cobalt mine in the third world, and so on. But loyalty demands that everyone pretend these things are true.)
I'm pretty sure the standard term is "Fake news".
1) The economics of every process must take into account the cost of the environment. If it's not going to biodegrade, that costs. If it comes from an unsustainable logging practice, that costs. If came in a boat from across the world, that costs. Adding the cost of environmental consequences to all stages of production opens up the room for investors to sensibly bet on less damaging production methods. We will look back at this time and rub our eyes when we realise what an insane free-for-all it has been.
2) A global body needs to be created to handle environmental policy, probably balancing quality of life with environmental outcomes. This body should be elected, but independent from politicians. Just like monetary policy was been removed from the easily bendable hands of politicians, the environment needs to be too. This deals with i) the short term thinking required of politicians [elections] ii) the global nature of the problem.
I think some people have too much faith in the ability of politicians and bureaucrats to protect the environment.
A better solution would be decentralized decision making. Place ownership of the rain forest in private hands and let the market determine the most valuable use of the land. If a sufficient number of people believe the rain forest should be set aside for environmental preservation they will have the ability to act on that belief.
Letting politicians and bureaucrats decide will do nothing to preserve the rain forest or environment short- or long term.
Power corrupts - politicians and bureaucrats act on whims and pressure from special interest groups. It doesn't matter if the entity is a county, a state, a nation or the world.
Privatization is the solution.
Nor can courts. Who will uphold the correct fundamental rules of privatization? Who sets them?
Finally, it is the case currently that we have democracy, wherein the individual has power and domain via a vote and participation in discussions. Then we also have effective privatization, where pure financial acumen can make things happen, or stop them. That is the case currently. We do not need to increase the power of money such that more things can happen for us to be able to pay for the salvation of the environment. We can do that now. The suggestion to switch to privatization is to ask people to relinquish the former power and leave everything to those with the latter power. I don’t see the benefit. Especially as when I have done business, it has clearly been private money that has done stupid and greedy and inefficient things, and governmental structures prevented it for the benefit of all.
Government attempts to be a non-monetary contractual union that represents the mutual benefit of game-theoretical cooperation, in e.g. information sharing and consistency. It does work to do that.
I'm having difficulty unpacking the last part of your comment but I think the essence is that private individuals will act in ways you find disagreeable and that government can prevent that for the benefit of all. I would counter that a government is just as capable of acting in the same ways. Unfortunately in the case where an individual acts this way the consequences are limited to what that individual can do (and can usually be corrected by the courts) whereas when the government is the actor no competition is allowed and the only recourse is to challenge the power in periodic elections.
I find it much easier to believe that this satire, because were it up to the “Market”, the rainforest would be gone, and every river polluted. Short-term profits are incompatible with environmental protection. Just because a few men get rich doesn’t mean the result is what’s overall best for society. The “market” (quotes necessary because it’s so much more complicated than that) has decided that continuing to burn fossil fuels is what’s best, and look how that’s working out.
The incentives have to change. Making money hand over fist typically only benefits a select few, to the detriment of the many. How many more examples do we need?
Or maybe we should try to help people understand that it's futile to see in terms of human concepts (like profit) the entity which literally created our species. Perhaps financialization of literally everything we should hold dear is the problem? The value of human life itself has at times been boiled down to a dollar amount, but that doesn't mean you can go around killing as many people as you want as long as your bank account is big enough (oh, unless you're a corporation of course).
Why is it futile to understand our planet in terms of human concepts? What alternative means of understanding do you have in mind? Direct perception or revelation? Feelings?
I do agree with you that incentives have to change. Humanity absolutely depends on industry to survive and leaving precious resources like the rain forests in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats will ensure their destruction through corruption.
[0]: https://rebellion.earth/act-now/resources/citizens-assembly/
Y'all let them CNN, The Guardian, and the BBC drive you. You all ask for hard evidence. Yet I am waiting for one of you to confirm you have been in the Amazon.
Why didn't you say anything for ~20 years when the duo Hugo Chavez/Nicolas Maduro have been destroying the Amazon? Destroying.
Why didn't you say anything about it for ~12 years when Chavez's friends Lula Da Silva/Dilma Rousseff were ruling Brazil?
Yet, Bolsonaro hadn't taken office and The Guardian was talking about it: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/09/brazils-...
I've seen first hand during decades what's been going on in the Amazon. Guess what.. Greenpeace does not give a fuck. They look the other way when it comes down to criticize left leaning government:
1. That's why they don't say anything about Maduro's impact in the Amazon.
2. That's why they don't say anything about Lula and Dilma's impact in the Amazon.
Most of you are the same ones who whine on the Donald Trump and immigrants issue, yet say NOTHING about Obama being the president who deported the most people out of our country. It's on the ICE website.
Of course people were reporting about it before Bolsonaro got elected. We are talking about a politician that had campaign promises thar openly attacking the environment! And one who is on a personal vendetta against the environment police, as evidenced by that time when he was caught ilegally fishing in a nature reserve.
He was seriously considering to extinguish the Ministry of the Environment, and merge it under the Ministry of Agriculture. In the end he did not because of the public backlash, and settled by only nomeating an environment minister that is fully subservient to agrobusiness...
The Bolsonaro administration is short sighted and paranoid of "leftists". Four of the areas that are suffering particularly bad because of this are the environment, education, foreign policy, and human rights. All of these currently have maliciously incompetent people in charge because Bolsonaro views these areas as opposed to his ideology.
There's an economic cost to preserving forest which developed countries didn't pay in the past, aren't paying in the present but hypocritically expect developing economies to pay.
All the while buying cheap soy, beef and labor from developing economies. Funny how everyone wants all the benefits but none of the compromises.
Leaders have one real job, that is to reward (through jobs/money/political clout) people who help them. If they don't think telling the truth about deforestation or global warming will help their sycophants, they will tell lies.
[1] CGP Grey's Rules for Rulers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
In that case should they not at least project an aura of being in touch with reality.
On this issue voters either don't care, in that case they wont mind you telling the truth. Do care about deforestation but value jobs over environment, in which case you're losing their votes. Do care and value the environment over jobs, in which case they still don't want to be lied to, and the lying doesn't exactly pander to them. I cant think of many other reasonable political outlooks. So what is this? virtue signalling to some group? Is there a group so out of touch with reality that only lies sound reasonable? I don't know.
Voters in democracies around the world have made it overwhelmingly clear that they don't want that.
Suggest to an American to fly less and over 99% will say, "But my job. . ." as humans fly more than ever. Not to dwell on flying, we could talk of miles driven, plastic discarded, air conditioning empty rooms, eating more beef than ever.
The scale is different, but the emotional response is similar.
An alternative: we could see ourselves as part of something greater than ourselves that benefits us all including ourselves. We want Bolsonaro to feel that way. We can do it ourselves and reduce our waste each by a good 75 to 90 percent.
As Frankl said, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
I see it as the reason why individual solutions will never work and why you need the government to step in to make sure those negatives externalities (aka killing the planet for our children) are properly priced in so that we subset those practices.
Left to themselves, individuals want to defect and get a free ride on the backs of those who cooperate. But if a critical mass of individuals cooperate—by choice, force, or persuasion—everyone wins.
—
It’s intellectually fine to be a libertarian and say, “even if the overall good is served by cooperation, there is a higher value in having the freedom to defect.”
But you are correct that on the balance, it takes a society working together to achieve certain large-scale good outcomes that demand widespread cooperation.
Whether those large-scale good outcomes are worthy of having less liberty is what certain debates are really about, even if people try to frame them otherwise, e.g. “Individual good, government bad.”
I mean, imagine a government actually trying to limit how often people/companies could fly/run planes, how much meat they're allowed to have, what kinds of cars were allowed, etc.
The immediate reaction would basically be:
A: Most of the population flat out ignoring them and their attempted guidelines, leading to bad press if they tried to enforce them.
B: The opposition having a golden opportunity to win over the current ruling party's supporters with claims they'll revert said changes after the next election.
C: Said main party's polling support crashing straight through the floor as most of their supporters abandon them.
D: Tons of bad press in general, especially if certain people/companies seem to be 'getting away with' behaviour they don't allow the rest of the population to indulge in. You can already see this (for good reason) with complaints about stuff like Davos and how all these politicians and actors/celebrities are taking private planes everywhere.
E: Their own party members jumping ship, especially if it's a larger/established party which went all eco intense.
F: If things got bad enough, outright civil war/revolution/military coup/riots/etc. And given the percentage of people who'd back such restrictions/law changes is so tiny, it probably wouldn't end in their favour.
The government stepping in would (if done as strictly as some articles/guidelines suggest), lead to a lot of civil instability and any political party implementing it basically collapsing.
So the options are basically either 'hope everyone becomes more environmentally conscious (unlikely)', 'get the government to step in' (unlikely, may lead to wars and revolutions, would sink their reputation), 'hope some sort of invention makes carbon capture much easier/resource efficient or makes clean energy super cheap'.
You're right that in general people don't like government policies that potentially lower people's standards of living. Gas taxes are usually very unpopular. But I think "hope everyone becomes more environmentally conscious" is more possible than you think. This is very much a generational issue and I think as the negative effects of climate change become more apparent, the public will begin to see the light.
In the US, it would not take a huge change in public opinion to make truly effective environmental policy more tenable. With the current trend, it may only take another decade for over 60% of Americans to believe that climate change should be a top priority: 44% already claim to prioritize it, up from 26% in 2010. Of course, some of these people may not actually like how environment-focused policies affect their lifestyles, but that may change as well.
The reason Amazon is being deforested is simple: is not that they hate the Amazon and want to destroy it. Is that doing this is very profitable. You get FREE land to raise cattle and grow soy. You can get rich(er) from day to night. With that money you buy your way with politicians, both in Brazil (easy) as well as in other countries who will turn a blind eye on this. And its not only people in Amazon getting rich, Americans are buying like crazy into the cheaper meat, wood, and soy. And Americans will find this great, because now you can get "hormone-free beef", cheap "earth-saving" soy products, and beautiful, cheap wood products. People in America peddling these products are getting rich and telling everyone that they're making their lives "better". This is what capitalist society calls a "win-win".
The problem there is that making more money is not good to everyone as they want us to believe, and in particular not good for the environment, or to the thousands of native people who will die or be dislodged from their native land, or to the several thousand people that will have to toil on land stolen by others. There is no way capitalism can prevent this, because it only benefits a certain part of society that decided to live under its auspices (most of them in rich countries) - Brazilians making cents per day have close to zero power in the market. Making more money is not good for the workers that will be squeezed for this profit to happen. It is not good for the kids that will grow without education because their families are forced to participate in this process. In other words, making more money does not solve problems, it only create more problems, even if these problems are going somewhere you cannot see or care about. The world needs to break this vicious cycle of money making before we can find a solution to these grave problems that cannot be controlled under capitalism.
And if you doubt the efficacy of said approach, just look at Texas renewable numbers. Texas is arguably the capital of the American oil industry and is a solidly red state. And yet it's gone from 6% Wind to 19% Wind in 10 years, with Dallas likely to be 100% renewable by 2030: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/a-snapshot-of-t... https://www.windpowerengineering.com/business-news-projects/...
It's a concept most environmentalists I encounter look upon as the dark side of the force, like if they used economics and human selfishness towards a positive end it would somehow take away their environmentalist virtue. Guess it's hard to be a martyr when you take away the sacrifice. Doesn't help that they usually look down on the individuals in question, and can't seem to understand why "pay more and do less so you can make a negligible personal impact on the problem, because it's the right thing to do." is a hollow argument for many people. Maybe that person in the concentration camp who gave his last piece of bread died, and maybe you don't want to be that person.
I call it environmental austerity in order to pay the environmental debt accrued through economic development.
Do you think an environmentalist would read this description and think, "that's me to a tee!"? If not, do you think you are more perceptive about the motives, beliefs, and strategies of environmentalists than they are themselves?
Your point would be better made without the dubious theories about the beliefs and motives of environmentalists.
You need look no further than any Hacker News discussion of climate change to see tons of comments of how people should stop eating beef, stop eating all meat, stop driving so much, stop flying, pay more for clean energy, pay more in taxes, even stop having children (at which I will never cease to /facepalm), all with the theme of "There is no way you have any valid argument against any of this, so if you refuse to make these sacrifice you're part of the problem."
I'm all for environmental regulation, I'd even be in favor of a carbon tax, but modern environmentalism has a huge messaging problem that makes both nearly impossible in the US outside of deep blue zones. It's way too moralistic and way too unwilling to adapt(ironic, given its cause). Maybe if environmentalists turned down the volume on climate change and talked more about good jobs, clean air, clean water, they'd make more headway. Find common ground and go with that, because in a functioning democracy we all move forward together (given a large majority) or not at all. And in my opinion anyone who truly cares about solving climate change should prioritize progress over virtue.
I live in the midwest and my friends still complain that the government forced them to switch to the new bulbs.
There's a lot of weird anxiety about doing things to help the environment from a lot of folks that makes them not want to do even things that benefit themselves.
It's a great example of poor environmental policy and you dismiss criticism as "weird anxiety". It's not weird to dislike other people forcing you to make choices that they think are for your own good.
Incandescent bulbs last months, LEDs last years and use 5x less energy.
> Thank God for decent LED lights in the last few years or the irony would still be pretty thick.
Do you think we would be better off using incandescents?
I think the main thrust of your point is that you don't think the government should be able to tell folks they can't use crappy bulbs. I think without government intervention LEDs wouldn't be where they are today, which is partly due to that weird anxiety I mentioned, and that's unfortunate.
Also you need to take into account the total manufacturing cost of the light. I believe that only recently have some LEDs (and not good ones with a decent spectrum) reached parity with incandescents in terms of TCO.
Finally, I would look at the market for computers and find how much government intervention it took to advance the technology in that industry. Why would the market for light bulbs be any different? Businesses had already switched to fluorescent for cost savings, why can't consumers be allowed to make similar cost/benefit choices?
I suppose I reluctantly wear the environmentalist label as that's how some see me. It's not how I would see myself.
A fix is removing all subsidy from fossil fuels and instead subsidising renewables along with increased insulation and combined community heat and power schemes. Except I don't see that as environmentalism, just common sense, whether considering an individual family and house, or a town or national scale.
2018 was a bit higher than 2017, but there is a clear downward trend. Honestly I would like to see more data points before crucifying Bolsonaro.
With those dates in mind, look at your data again.
Bolsonaro's presidency is on another level of pandering to illegal loggers and agribusiness, though. The current Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, is openly hostile to anything relating to preservation. Including risking a free investment by European countries to the tune of about half a billion dollars
I would like to see the data for at least 2019 and 2020 before jumping to conclusions
There must be a stage in infant development where the child is still unable to extrapolate and can't fathom that things exist outside of their own immediate line of sight. Bolsonaro is basically stuck in that stage of intellectual development.
Basically, he interprets reality strictly through the synthesis of his own everyday experiences + "news"/memes shared by fans through social media. A corollary to that is that he's utterly incapable of synthesizing data, statistics, analogies, etc -- basically any kind of abstract thought -- into his own worldview. Thus, when those pieces of abstract thought contradict his day-to-day experiences, he immediately dismisses them as "communist propaganda" or "fake news". In his own sense he is right -- in his reality, those things are not real because reality is only what he himself experiences or gets through memes.
Amazon deforestation can't be real, because he flew over the Amazon and saw many trees.
Europe has no forests, because he traveled through it and didn't see any.
Brazil has no hunger problems, because he never saw any hungry-looking bony person on the streets.
All of these examples are literally things he has said.
In democracies with bad leaders you might get "it needs more study" or "we can't afford it" or just silence. At worst opponents are labeled "misguided". But the new autocrats end all conversation by turning facts and those who believe them into conspiring enemies.
The political elite alienated the population.
By spying, failing to prosecute financial criminals that decimated economies, stealing several billion dollars, failing to pro-actively prevent a human calamity in the Russia x US proxy wars in Syria, squabbling amongst themselves as the non-politicians gained in popularity.
Can you blame people who’s savings and jobs were annihilated by the GFC and saw no major arrests voting the incumbents out?
Can you blame the underprivileged domestic populations in Europe from turning right and nationalistic when they see spikes in homelessness, criminality and culture friction when their small towns are flooded with desperate immigrants?
Can you blame people voting out de-facto organised crime from power after they rob billions from a third world economy?
I don’t think it’s right. I think Bozo-naro is an embarrassment of a human being. But I empathise with the people who threw the previous job out.
Blaming the elites of old is a fallacy, because the elites of old are the elites of new. Brexit is a conservative issue, due to conservatives underfunding education, healthcare, fire brigades and the police and blame it on the EU and immigrants.
Trump is put in place by the same party that caused the GFC.
And Bolsonaro is probably even more corrupt than Dima et al. Yet people voted for him.
How, why? Because they were not aggressively authoritan. Trump openly flouts with totalitarianism. Let's see how Bolsonaro will fare.
(And I'm not trying to somehow wash the previous administrations clean. Clinton loosened the financial rules, he could have vetoed it, but I don't think that would have mattered, the lack of funding for competent oversight is the main point, and that was under Bush.
Similarly I don't have any love for the Labor govs in UK, but fiscal responsibility aka. let's underfund the stuff that only poors use is a classic conservative trope.)
Corrupt, incompetent or inconsequent politicians can not be rewarded with re-elections they need to be voted out. However when the population stops believing that any political party presents a credible choice we get populists. We get the “non-politicians”.
Of course they solve nothing. They’re worse than the established politicians.
Alas the re-election rate is astoundingly high. There's no consequence for being a sellout. Populism thrives on these imbeciles.
Oh wait... Sigh.