A few pieces of data from the past few days:
* US Republican views on evolution have shifted significantly in the past 4 years. In 2009, 54 per cent said Yes to the question “Did humans and other animals evolve over time”, and 39 per cent said No. In 2013, those numbers have shifted to 48 per cent No, 43 per cent Yes. Other evidence shows that college-educated Repubs are more likely to have crazy views on evolution, climate science and so on than less-educated Repubs.
* Globally, November 2013 was the hottest November on record. In Australia, 2013 has been the hottest year on record.
* (Via Harry Clarke) Abbott’s senior adviser Maurice Newman has a piece in the Oz blaming the carbon tax/price for the decline of Australian manufacturing
Looking at the last point first, anyone who understands economics can see that the decline of Aust manufacturing is primarily due to the same long run trends that have reduced agriculture to a tiny proportion of economic activity, and secondarily due to the overvaluation of the $A (relative to PPP), reflecting the mining boom and other factors. If Newman doesn’t know this, he should. Newman’s nonsense on this point illustrates something more fundamental. You can’t deny climate science without screwing up your understanding of economics and politics.
This observation is strengthened by the second point. Climate “sceptics” claim to prefer data to models. But in fact they will all explain this data away. The truth is that they are all (I mean this literally, and without exceptions[1]) religiously committed to a position that no evidence will shake.
The final point illustrates the processes that are making it impossible to be a sane, honest rightwinger. The numbers reflect two processes
(i) People with sane views are ceasing to identify as Republicans, while those with insane views are shifting to become Repubs
(ii) Committed Republicans are resolving cognitive dissonance by becoming creationists
The processes are slightly different in Australia, where creationism remains a fringe position. But how can the likes of Akerman, Blair, Bolt, Devine and Stutchbury continue to parrot the arguments of American creationists without at least assuming that creationism is a defensible viewpoint?
The final step in the argument is addressed to a hypothetical sane, honest rightwinger. How can anyone take your stated views seriously when you fail to acknowledge that most people who share them are either fools or liars?
fn1. To be more precise, I don’t give up hope that some rightwingers will give up the entire package – climate denial, rightwing economics and all. But outside a conversion experience of this kind, these people are impervious to evidence.
John Quiggin 
Great post, but in the first datapoint there are no figures for the percentages, it makes the point a bit cryptic, not to mention ungrammatical… (But the link did give me the rough figures that I thought would be there.)
impervious to evidence?
That sums up Catallaxy
The question you pose is entirely rhetorical.
I was thinking similar things about Maurice Newman this morning – how can it serve any government to have someone who doesn’t understand the economy heading a panel of business advisers?
Why not wade into the debate instead of sniping from the sidelines.
The continuing fringe status of Creationism in Australia is probably because Evangelical Christianity has less influence than it does in the US, the mainstream churches have been more accommodating of evolution and also because Australia is less religious overall.
Climate change denial, however, seems to be rapidly becoming for the Liberal Party what Creationism is to the US Republicans.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid that I know a few people who are sane and honest but utterly delusional and appear impervious to the science of climate change.
They read News Ltd papers (and appear to believe what they read in them). This is why my passionate hatred of all things Murdoch runs so deep – he is destroying my country and my planet.
Newman is an embarrassment to a country whose origins are associated with names like Cook and Banks – we really are going backwards.
@Megan
Yes, I also have several acquaintances who read News Ltd papers (particularly The Australian and apparently believe what they read in it. The thing I find most disturbing is the reliance they place on the opinion columns, which are essentially fact-free.
@Megan @TimMacknay
The reason deniers read or pay attention to the Murdoch propaganda is because they are lazy and refuse to research or read data from the likes of NASA , NOAA , CSIRO , BOM , MET and many other top scientific bodies ..
I call then deniers because there are genuinely no skeptics left due to the serious amounts of data confirming climate change.. Many of these deniers who continually sprout the propaganda will have a hidden but vested interest as we seen with groups who are paid / sponsored by the polluters themselves .. Groups like Galileo Movement , Jo Nova / David Evans , Monkcton all have their fingers in the pockets of polluters paid to speak by them…
Pointing to vested interests only helps us partially understand Climate Change Denial. It certainly got the ball rolling and helps keep a lot of deniers in paid gigs now.
If Big Carbon pulled the cash flow from under it’s PR flacks today, Climate Change denial would continue to be with us for a long time yet. It’s become a badge of affiliation for TRUE CONSERVATIVES to show they are no greenie/commie etc.
Like with creationism in the US or Windschuttle’s ‘revisionist history’ here there will be a long residue of idiocy in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Big Carbon created a monster
@Zen Digital
I’m not so sure about “lazy”, I think it’s probably “confirmation bias”.
Murdoch peddles lies and propaganda – but it is of a kind some people want to believe.
I’d probably prefer “stupid” but the people I’m thinking of are otherwise intelligent (one is a retired medical practitioner). That’s why I tend to think it is like a religious belief. It is interesting that they use projection, like Newman does, to describe people who accept the science in terms like ‘cult’ and ‘crusade’.
Also John your link to Harry C is not working – I think because those of us who aren’t FB friends with him can’t see it.
Putting it another way I think many right wingers/conservatives are strongly committed to their priors. So they may be honest but it is so constrained as to, in reality, be false.
There may also be a process starting where Australian religious conservatives (Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal) move closer to US approaches – I think it has started in the area of women’s fertility at the present time, so creationism is less significant.
[note FB on an iPhone is not the most useful way to access posts.]
I don’t think John Quiggin’s view that “the truth is that [climate ‘sceptics’] are all (I mean this literally, and without exceptions) religiously committed to a position that no evidence will shake” can possibly be true.
Has anyone got any success stories? A couple of weeks ago at work there was a discussion between a Bolt-follower and a libertarian about climate change; the Bolt-follower of course thought it was utter bs and the libertarian thought that, while there was probably some truth to the scientific view on climate change, at least it isn’t going to be anything to worry about.
Me and the others who witnessed the discussion merely watched (I know at least some of their views); I didn’t know what to say, it was such a weird place to be.
Knowing what I know about human cognition, the discussion will only have tended both of them towards the odd position, where they shouldn’t be (and where it’s in everyone’s interest that they not be). Doing nothing was obviously the wrong thing to do; but I don’t have a clue what to do.
But what should I do? And is John right, or does anyone know how to get people who (in their field of work) are observant and intelligent into the land of sense?
@Michael S.
Agree with your view on a motivation being a badge of affiliation with”true conservatism”. However that makes them anything but conservatives, rather reactionaries whose views of the science are driven by (reaction to) the views of the left.
I think at least part of it is that the climate science is deeply scary.
Let’s imagine a large asteroid is detected on a direct course for the planet, with a collision date later in the century, say 2075. The danger can be averted, but it will take large resources.
A significant group of people are going to wish it away and imagine alternate trajectories to try and avoid mobilising those resources. Another group are going to say it can be dealt with in 2050, or 2060, or even 2070. There are going to be reactionary billionaires perfectly happy with the status quo. Some of those billionaires will own media companies. Some will be happy to fund sound orbit belief tanks.
@chrisl
Why? Because you can’t debate a loony. There is to but no fro – at least no fro that makes sense, that is open to factual engagement, that can be respected as honest engagement in debate.
While I am fairly certain human-induced climate change is happening, it is foolish to use individual weather datapoints to try to prove your view. If you use examples of high temperature, then someone will use examples of low temperature to prove that climate change does not exist. For instance, I can point to the fact that there is a ship stuck in ice right now that was meant to document the melting of the ice as an example of global warming not happening.
Alan has hit the point here. Al Gore had it right when he called AGW an inconvenient truth. And once the inconvenience of a truth is apparent, tribalism does the rest to create to create outright denial of it.
Let’s acknowledge that cheap energy is what has liberated us from nasty, brutish and short lives, and so it really would be a better world if we could continue re-oxidising all that Carboniferous stored solar energy without getting a pre-Carboniferous climate. But the hard fact is we can’t, so we need to put some effort into getting other ways of getting cheap energy.
And on that gloomy note, let me say Happy New Year to all before I head off to the party.
Faust Ahh Yes The ship stuck in ice in summer, All sorts of statistical jiggery pokery to prove global warming,but somehow all the modelling did not predict that there would be shiploads of ice down in Antartica. A PR disaster being played out in real time. Somehow in a warming world this ship has 10 kilometres of ice behind it ,up to 3 metres thick. It could be there forever!
Malcolm Turnbull? And maybe his namesake Malcolm Fraser.
As to the religious beliefs views, my climbate change denial friends throw the same accusation. It’s just insulting. Both ways.
@chrisl
I would assume that you are ignorant and are not being intentionally dishonest. See here It is why the mimimum sea ice coverage in the arctic is during September and not at the end of June. I imagine that the same thing occurs in the Antarctic.
Come back in mid March and tell us if there are any ships stuck in sea ice in the Antarctic.
I don’t self-identify as “right-wing” but I imagine that is where others put me. I will try for an answer, though the question isn’t very clear.
* I don’t think that most people who share my views are fools/liars, but then perhaps this is directed more towards the American christian right rather than an Australian libertarian. I agree that many on the christian right (and green left) are fools and/or liars. I agree that fools and liars sometimes agree with me, both left and right.
* On creationism, having been bought up a fundamentalist christian that is something I changed my views on when I better understood the facts. The vast majority of libertarians accept evolution, though I’m sure there are exceptions. BTW, most creationists I know support left-wing economics, though I don’t pretend that my anecdotal experience is necessarily true in general.
* On global warming, I have changed my views a few times on the science, and while I have long accepted that AGW is real and man-made, I do not having strong views about the magnitude. If forced to choose my best guess would be at the lower end of the IPCC range — what has been called a “luke-warmist” position. You may find it ironic, but the person who was most effective at convincing me that AGW is a real and man-made thing was Pat Michaels. He and I have shared a few chats about our shared frustration that some of our political allies seem to outright deny AGW. There are plenty of other libertarians who share my view, though I have also been heckled by some on the right. My complaint is that there has been exaggeration (mostly in the media/blogs/politics, not the science) and that few policy proposals pass an intellectually honest benefit-cost test.
* On “right-wing” economics, I am pretty confident that I am right and you are wrong on issues ranging from the corrosive effects of regulation on competition, to dynamic tax analysis, to open-economy macroeconomics, to welfare reform, to the minimum wage elasticity of labour demand, and beyond. But I don’t think that makes you a fool or a liar. Indeed, I used to enjoy our debates.
* This post seems to be focussed mostly on American politics and I admit that I don’t really know what’s going on over there. But I don’t think I should change my views based on the fact that an idiot in America might happen to agree with me on something.
I’m not going to come back to check this thread as I don’t enjoy the sorts of debates that happen on this blog anymore. But you know where to find me if you want to follow up. And happy new year.
The fact it is now hot and dry in the subtropics and unseasonably cold in subpolar latitudes is not reassuring if that pattern is amplified in future. I’ve mixed views about both conservatives and lefties. Conservatives help their mates (eg no pesky carbon taxes) while lefties help every other kind of undeserving group. I’d prefer if hard nosed pragmatists dominated the higher circles of politics and administration.
Maurice Newman is slightly loopy thinking the UN can cover up a climate conspiracy. Not likely on simple probability. On the other hand he has a point that wind power is not particularly cost effective in reducing emissions. Compared to 100% gas fired generation wind probably saves CO2 at a cost of over $200 per tonne whereas for now the official price is $24.15. He should make his criticisms more technical and less sarcastic. In the house it’s a shame we’ve got mainly ideologues rather than honest brokers like Oakeshott and Windsor.
Q. Can there be a sane, honest right-winger?
A. No.
Sane maybe, honest never.
@Megan
How do you prove (firstly to yourself) that it is not you that is “projecting” (assuming that bit of late Freudian jargon is useful)?
I ask this in the contrarian spirit of one who knows that we can do b-all about climate change, not even as a nation. I was going to add a whole lot of other things we can do nothing about but now pose the question which has popped into my head as not unrelated to climate change and the future of the earth: could we not, by paying pensions to families in Africa (or some parts of it) whose females continue childless and being educated until the age of 24 do something on a large scale that we could afford and which would be of immense benefit to poor Africans and Africa’s environment including its wildlife and biodiversity? There wouldn’t have been the slightest problem from the left about that before 1933 (though the Catholic Church and some Ayatollahs and no doubt African kings and tribal chiefs might have objected for different reasons) so, if you recoil at the suggestion and are even attempted to utter the no longer sayable E word (which is coming back actually and never was a problem outside the Western world) please tell me why it is not longer right for the left to have such thoughts.
Reading some of the odder comments on this blog by Professor Quiggin, Ikonoclast and others makes me wonder what this blog would have looked like about two centuries ago…
I can imagine Professor Quiggin waxing on the virtues of the French Revolution and questioning whether the “backward Tory and Whigs” will see the light etc etc… right up past the murders and public executions and through to the Napoleonic era… All the while extolling the virtues of Republicanism soon-to-be Bonapartism and wondering why “backwards” people like Edmund Burke just don’t “get” the “empirically superior” way of doing things elsewhere.
Sadly having read too much literature from that period my intellectual wanderings in this post are not too far from the truth. Had some writers and this blog existed in centuries gone past they would have justified even the most ruthless of centralised command and control despite the destruction of personal liberty.
@Felix Alexander
You sound like a very sensible person Felix Alexander. And at least when struck by that imperative “we must do something” [frequently the unfortunate result of being given a remit as the tendency of any committee appointed by a higher authority to suggest action, often expensive in the final washup, demonstrates: cf. parliamentary committees of backbenchers and eager young staff] you don’t just grasp at anything but admit that what to do gives reason for pause. [Sorry if that sounds a bit patronising: clearly you don’t deserve to be patronised by the self-appointed know-alls].
Allow me, in the contrarian spirit which I find more invigorating than reciting catechisms, proffer the answer I was fed on Boxing Day when the cricket was a bit slow. The suggestion is that, since nothing Australia can do or say about CO2 will make any difference to whether Tuvalu’s problem with rising seas is worse than its existing overpopulation problem, millions of Bangladeshis are drowned or displaced by ever more dangerous flooding, Africa destroys its wildlife or Australia’s climate warms up dangerously, or at all, or our seaside suburbs need seawalls we should encourage making as much in taxable profits out of exporting coal and making cheap electricity from it as we can. That way we will be able to make choices about things we can do something about. What would you have answered to that? (I am sure she would have allowed for spending around the edges on scientific research. Like me, I take it that she gets quite statist and expansive with other people’s money when the arts or hard sciences are the beneficiaries…. pity about some of the human beneficiaries of course…. 🙂 …..)
@Faust: The latest data isn’t the proof I rely on, it’s just yet more confirmation of a scientific analysis of climate change that has long since been established beyond reasonable doubt.
On chrisl, it’s great to have an example of the process showing up. And, as it happens, the silly “ship stuck in ice disproves warming” claim, now circulating through the usual channels, was one of the motivations for this post
Aha, JQ, I think I have an explanation for just how wobbly I sometimes think your arguments are given that you are a full professor who is even numerate. You actually spend time reading those you write of in the following quote (no wonder your humours are disordered from time to time).
“But how can the likes of Akerman, Blair, Bolt, Devine and Stutchbury continue to parrot the arguments of American creationists without at least assuming that creationism is a defensible viewpoint?”
I don’t (read them) though I have met the former Labor government staff member Bolt a number of times and, apart from his displaying the compulsive and/or professional opinionators problems arising from feeling compelled to emit too many words, he seems a sensible enough fellow. For those who would like to see him put in his place (whatever that is) it seems a pity that Ron Merkel and others engaged in their self-defeating use of Sec. 18C for a quasi-criminal prosecution rather than have the more credit worthy plaintiffs sue Bolt for libel. After all, the case against him succeeded only to the extent that he had made errors which would have sunk his defence to a libel action by at least one or two of the plaintiffs. Instead of thus diminishing to some extent his credit as a journalist the case made him something of a martyr and certainly obscured the real issue of inaccuracy about some individuals while making sure that the Section which Merkel would want to preserve is repealed or gutted. But I digress…..
Do you JQ actually know any right wing people? Presumably you don’t spend time with dim skinheads or fundamentalists. I wonder what your conception of a right wing person is and what it is based on. Is it sufficient that you proudly identify yourself as left and so, if someone disagrees with you on something political (or capable of being political like creationism) that you regard them as right wing?
FWIW (and that mightn’t even include clarity) I used to say I was of the radical centre but I now regard that as far too extreme and prefer to take a stance against all bad arguments.
UPi seem to have, as do some of the Commenters, a problem about people you classify as right wing being honest or intelligent. Yet, at the outset, it might be worth considering all the no doubt many intelligent people you know who honestly hold various religious beliefs. Whether you are, as I suppose, or not, an atheist (at least not a theist) then you must wonder at people who not only believe in a Creator God who is omnisicient, eternal, omnipotent and cares about us, and even for us, but somehow get over the fact that he didn’t make sure his message was unambiguously affirmed to one of the succession of those claiming to speak in his name or to the Buddhists, Hindus and others. Is that a different problem from understanding the variety of world views and associated tribal beliefs of those on the left and on the right?
On the question of what you mean by right wing, I wonder how you deal with the American conservatives who have nothing to do with the evangelicals but are either palaeos or neos or just plain intelligent like the publisher, till recently, of The American Conservative and many of the contributors and contributing editors. I subscribed for a while on the basis of what I learned about the publisher who apparently bought the mag from a couple of palaeo-conservatives who shared his views about the Iraq war being a bad mistake. His name is Ron Unz and he was said in a Newsweek article to have had the highest IQ recorded by the Guinness Book of Records which may not be true but I found a Los Angeles Times article about him which noted it had been measured at 214. A friend of mine who studied physics with him at Harvard said that he really knew what a superior brain was when, before they each headed off to graduate school they took jobs writing software over a summer. Unz made such a fortune out of it that he has been able to be a political activist ever since. His latest cause that I am aware of is making a case for a much higher minimum wage. How about that coming from what some (you?) would call the right? He apparently has it coming up as a referendum proposal in California….
So can we expect a little more definition and nuance in discussion of the “right”?
@John Quiggin
Is it useful to your argument or at all to say
” Globally, November 2013 was the hottest November on record. In Australia, 2013 has been the hottest year on record.”
A barrister for the sceptics/deniers would say that you were being non-responsive. “So what” they would say because they (presumably) say that we are indeed in a period when there has been a great deal of warming since the end of the Little Ice Age (which they usually put at about 1860 though I would have thought it was quite a bit earlier). They would say that what tells against the dangerous AGW hypothesis is the fact that there has been no statistically significant continuation of the uptrend in line with increases in CO2 in the atmosphere since 1998 (and please don’t hold me to affirming that statistical assertion unless you are willing to deploy your mathematical expertise to give us all a solid technical refutation that we can use, but it is sometimes said that the chap who was/is head of the East Anglian institution from which the emails were leaked has affirmed it). They invariably point to something like 30 year cycles in global temperatures for a century or so including a down cycle from the 1940s to the 1970s and I have heard mention of the Chow Test (well after my time learning mathematics – but perhaps not yours JQ?) as showing that there was a major shift in the late 1970s most consistent with some oceanic cause of major change. It seems reasonable to suppose that, assuming that there is still an upward tendency of global temperature from greenhouse gas effects another big oceanic shift has put a damper on rising temperatures since about 1998 and may do so for some time to come…. after which….? On the sceptics side it would no doubt be argued that it is apparent that vastly too much has been claimed for the very many different models which have all been fitted to the rising temperatures of all or much of the last century. Clearly the admissions by the East Anglia people were honestly candid when they accepted that the years after 1998 (even allowing for 1997 being an exceptional El Nino year – or was it La Nina?) were an embarrassment to the modelers. Have you, as a mathematician, examined the models? Can you say anything about their mathematical and empirical merit? In the same inquiring vein, what do you say to the argument that i have heard put by sceptics that the models, if they are adequately capturing all the important factors, should be able to retropredict all the major climate shifts of the past few thousand years durinig which vastly greater changes occurred than anything we have seen to date. I have heard Prof David Karoly asked something like that question and he asserted that the models did explain such events as the great droughts which dried up the Nile and the Sahara and destroyed the Egyptian Old Kingdom but it wasn’t followed up on either side. Maybe you know how it should have been.
Corporate and Political sociopaths/psychopaths abound. These are dishonest rather than insane. Only concerned with their own personal short-medium term goals. Say and do what suits these goals. Otherwise the world can go hang. Others of us, who can only see and believe what fits with our ‘tribal’ affiliation, we are the insane ones, but not necessarily dishonest. And there are plenty of these in the apparently-rational camp, too. Ain’t life funny (when you think about it)?
Happy New Year to you, JQ, and your readers and commenters.
The question in your thread is too difficult for me to think about and this is not exclusively due to the time and date at which I am writing now. However, I am able to say that Mr Maurice L. Newman seems to be out of his depth on economic matters and the basis of his claims on climate science is a total mystery to me. I do hope the climate scientists at UNSW will publicly challenge Mr Newman to present the material on which his claim on climate science is based in an appropriate forum such as a televised academic seminar with the usual questions from the audience, composed of scientists and economists.
Well Professor Quiggin, since we are in the spirit of acknowledging empirical truth, maybe you too can acknowledge that “terrible” right wingers have done things like help abolish slavery, fought for Roman Catholic emancipation, opened the world up to free trade, outlawing women and children in mines, opened up democracy to previously non-franchised, and enacted progressive reforms such as primary education and an expanded university system.
On the ice-bound ship – apparently it’s stuck in Commonwealth Bay because an unusually enormous iceberg called something like B-909 has clogged the mouth of the bay and therefore the pack-ice is backing up when it would usually be expected to flow out to sea.
@Faust
Now that really is some rolled-gold Poe!
What is Poe?
Care to respond with substance?
The world according to Faust:
right wingers have done things like:
-help abolish slavery,
-fought for Roman Catholic emancipation,
-opened the world up to free trade,
-outlawing women and children in mines,
-opened up democracy to previously non-franchised,
-and enacted progressive reforms such as primary education and an expanded university system.
Is there any evidence to support this?
@Neil Hanrahan
When you held judicial or quasi-judicial roles, were any of your decisions reported?
Please provide links or general citations, thanks.
@faust
That’s some impressive extrapolation there, Faust. As Megan says, Poe’s Law applies, but I’m going to assume it’s intended seriously.
If so, you don’t need to hypothesize about the French Revolution. There have been plenty of comparable instances in the recent past, where you can actually check my record
* The Iraq war, where the warbloggers mentioned above (Bolt, Devine and so on) went through exactly the sequence you describe
* The Cold War, where advocates of both sides continually justified and excused appalling crimes by their own side, while condemning those of the other
Since you’re slandering me from behind a pseudonym, I can’t check your record on these issues, but you can easily check mine. And while my views on the French and Bolshevik revolutions are obviously formed with the benefit of hindsight, here they are
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/19/you-say-you-want-a-revolution/
Abolition of slavery: US Republican Party, UK Coalition of independent, Tory and Whig MPs lead by William Wilburfore who supported the Tory administration of William Pitt the Younger.
Roman Catholic emancipation was under Duke of Wellington.
Free trade and and the outlawing of women and children in mines was under Tory administrations in the 1830s and 1840s, specifically the administration of Robert Peel.
Primary schools were enacted in the mid 19th century and the opening up of the voter base was secured under Disraeli. But one reason why there were ‘Working Men Conservative Clubs’ in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
Opening university education and further social reform was secured in the 1930s and the 1960s in both Australia and the UK.
My personal views were, ashamedly, in favour of the Iraq War which I mistakenely trusted that the UsS administration actually had a clue of what they were doing. My support lasted precisely 9 months after the invasion when I recognised that these guys had no idea what they were doing.
I shall read your Crooked Timber post with interest.
Apologies for the bad spelling. I am typing this out on an iPad.
A legal argument approach to settling questions of science seems to me to be as ill suited as the approach of the Inquisition to such questions.
Similarly, a legal argument approach to settling questions on political notions such as ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ seems to me to be as ill suited as using my academic background, economics with specialisation in mathematical economics and finance. Hence I don’t proffer an educated comment. However, I can observe that Dr Angela Merkel’s party, the CDU, would be considered ‘right’ in the relevant local spectrum of political parties, but she has a PhD in physics and it seems this is more helpful than legal training in dealing with climate science questions and this seems to be reflected in policies. It might be helpful to consider ‘Right’ and ‘Left’ not as two points close to zero but rather as two possibly long line segments such that, when time is taken into account, at one point in local histories, ‘the Right’ and ‘the Left’ might be indistinguishable to the casual observer while at another point in the local history at least one point represent a nutty (crazy) position. It seems to me Prof Q is talking about some local histories where ‘the Right’ has reached such a nutty position. But this is merely my way of thinking about it. I conclude specialist knowledge in the area of politics is required to interpret the arguments presented by Prof Quiggin. I don’t have such knowledge and therefore ‘can’t think about the question’ of the thread (in an appropriately educated sense). However, I can rule out the validity of an argument that rests on moving forward and backward on a time line even without me checking the historical accuracy of the claims. I can do this because it is a synthetic history (cherry picking, I think, is the term used) which distorts the empirical evidence relevant at a point in time.
Happy 2014.
@Faust
Kudos for openly admitting you were once fooled by the lies that so many of us were loudly protesting at the time as being just that – lies designed to take us to war and slaughter innocents.
It’s odd that you can’t seem to question other concepts to which you hold but which, I for one, argue are as equally fallacious as your (once held) belief in the Iraq invasion.
I view that as a supreme “war crime” in the Nuremburg sense. And I would still call for those responsible to be brought to account.
Now I have read up on Poe’s Law I think it is wise to state that this original post is an example of that. for Professor Quiggin has not explained what he means by ‘right wing’. If you look at the current crop of LNP, you will see people who are socially and economically ‘conservative’ like Barnaby Joyce while you also social and economic ‘liberals’ like Kelly O’Dwyer. Who is rightwing when you have that breadth?
@Faust Fair point, how would you describe the consensus of right wingers in Australia? The current lot seem to be a bad tempered ill educated superstitious bunch of bombasts.
When it comes to climate change right wingers will look no further than what looks like a winning argument to allow them to ignore (and worse, oppose and obstruct efforts of others to deal with) the climate problem; that one or two more la Nina years over el Nino’s over a period as short as that from 1998 will skew the trend isn’t hard to figure out. But the problem is they don’t want to. (Not sure if the public being unaware of this a consequence of climate scientists being poor communicators or the Mainstream Media’s incompetence and top down/groupthink bias).
People who are skeptical (or hold positions of trust and responsibility that should make being well informed an essential part of being trustworthy and responsible) could ask what natural internal climatic variation was doing over that time, or ask what other indicators of a warming world like ocean heat content have been doing or getting an appropriate reading list and reading), but being well informed imposes an unwanted burden that is most easily avoided by the simple expediency of choosing to make no efforts to be well informed or choosing the made to order BS the Right’s think tanks and lobby groups provide to make such a choice easier for them.
If there is any actual desire within Right politics to figure it out or be better informed it’s not apparent; doing those appears on the face of it to lead policy leftwards that is mostly a consequence of mainstream politics deliberately framing the issue as left and green rather than mainstream and central to future prosperity, and failing to develop ideologically sound market based solution themselves and offering a credible alternative.
They keep choosing ignorance and rhetoric based on their own BS but have been doing it so long now that it’s no longer recognisable as expedient spin; they have unwittingly entrenched opposition to action most strongly within their own base and cannot now shift position without alienating that base.