The Narrative on Multiculturalism has Changed

The Narrative on Multiculturalism has Changed. By Alice Smith.

The old, romantic view of multiculturalism was food, festivals and colourful clothes.

The new, realistic view of multiculturalism is grooming gangs, cousin marriage, polygamy, child rape, self-imposed segregation, tribal feuds, honour killings, and filth.

Those on the left (who benefit from immigrant votes) pretend not to have got the memo, but they knew all along (by Zarathustra):

Commenters:

There’s no way Obama was sincere about this. …

Maybe. It’s more interesting as a historical thermometer of where Democrats were, and how radically they’ve shifted. Saying this today would be career-ending. …

I feel like the Obamas have really gone the way of the Clintons as far as their reputation among left leaning voters. They were once poster children and are now bordering on disavowed. …

There is a long list of quotes that major Democrats said in the 2010s to the 90s which are now considered far right extreme talking points. …

Then they realized mass migration was the only way they could win elections

Iran War Update

Iran War Update. Three interesting points of view.

AG:

I hope people understand what’s happening because it’s been the same story over and over again.

The Islamic Republic and their allies leak their preferred details as if they are agreed to western sources. Then when U.S. refuses to agree to those absurd terms and insists we stick to the deal that had already been under discussion, they claim the U.S. is backing out of the deal.

Then they blame America or Israeli influence for the lack of a deal instead of The Islamic Republic making unreasonable demands for a settlement after they lost the military fight and are facing an economic crisis.

We saw the same thing with Gaza repeatedly.

Gerard Baker in the WSJ:

Let’s start with the most important point about the agreement President Trump is apparently about to sign with Iran. There were no good options. …

That’s what you get when you launch a strategic expedition on a tide of hubris and ignorance, a “little excursion” you insist will end in “four to five weeks” in “the unconditional surrender” of your enemy — an enemy so obdurate that it values its own existence far above the lives of its own people. …

It’s unfair to blame Mr Trump alone, because this strategic failure is not new for the US. It’s also what you get when you embroil yourself in another conflict in the greater Middle East based on a bleakly familiar combination of misjudgments: a massive underestimation of the enemy’s defensive capabilities and will to resist, and a massive overestimation of your own offensive capabilities and will to prosecute a costly war to a conclusion.

So, yes, negotiating the best deal was the right choice. What were the alternatives? Maintain the state of blockade and siege? That would have done greater harm to the US and world economy, with limited chance of success. Return to the bombing campaign? More costly depletion of munitions, jeopardizing our other military commitments, in exchange for reparable damage to Iran’s military infrastructure.

Escalation? That might have promised a more conclusive outcome. But how likely was it and at what cost?

Howard Kunstler:

The news media apparently forgot what it broadcast a couple of weeks ago: Iran’s oil storage capacity was nearing the red-line. If the wells have to be shut-in, such is the geology that it would wreck the oil fields themselves. Perhaps this is happening now. Nobody is reporting on it. But the news media doesn’t really report on anything. It opines. It spins. It constructs story-lines for advantage, it gaslights, it perverts the consensus about reality out of existence, it just plain lies.

If Iran is jerking the US around again, this will be the last time. They will prove to be negotiation-incapable, as the Russian phrase goes. They will punch their own express ticket back to the 12th century, lights out, bridges down across the rugged terrain, back to donkey carts, magic lamps, and vizeers instead of mullahs.

Outside of the participants, who knows?

The Carbon Dioxide Scare Is Gradually Dying

The Carbon Dioxide Scare Is Gradually Dying. By Peter Clack:

Harsh climate scenarios have spent decades painting Earth’s likely future landscape as dystopian, dark, barren and forbidding.

Yet, recent physical data argues exactly the opposite. Instead of plunging the planet into chaos, it’s becoming eye-catchingly greener — and CO₂ is the key. The formal models predicted a scorched planet, but NASA satellites unleashed a world that is biologically thriving. This silent miracle of global greening isn’t some theory, it’s the physical reality captured by the orbiting space platforms; MODIS instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites.

This is how these jarring narratives have been unfolding:

  • Official Climate Narrative: Rapid, systemic desertification and global canopy loss due to rising temperatures.
  • Hard Reality: Persistent structural greening across more than 30% of the global vegetated area over the last two decades.

 

  • Official Climate Narrative: CO₂ acts strictly as a destructive atmospheric pollutant driving extreme weather.
  • Hard Reality: CO₂ is plant food, driving down stomatal conductance, making plants use water more efficiently and expanding the leaf area index

 

  • Official Climate Narrative: Global food supply chains are on the verge of climate-driven collapse.
  • Hard Reality: Agricultural yields bolstered by CO₂ fertilisation are expanding green cover in semi-arid zones like the African Sahel and Western Australia. …

 

Higher, more robust CO₂ is not a death sentence — which is what they argued. It allows vegetation to open their pores (stomata) less, yet absorb the same amount of carbon. This drastically reduces water loss through transpiration. It’s why the world’s arid desert regions are blooming and the fragile living desert is raging into life — plants are also becoming more drought-resistant. …

A vividly coloured renaissance is dutifully taking place, sweeping away all doubts.

 

Global greening in action near Bega, NSW

 

Steve Guest:

[Left-wing] Vox with a BOMBSHELL admission in the wake of the demise of RCP8.5. [the alarming official climate scenario that was recently officially dropped as too unrealistic]:

“Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.”

Commenters:

I appreciate the honesty here, but there were plenty of people (like me) who have been saying this for decades. We were called climate science deniers by the press. We told the truth. We were attacked for it. Now people act as if it was not obvious at the time. …

It was absolutely obvious at the time that scientists were using fake models to scare people about climate change. That’s the truth, and every person who participated in that charade owes a lot of apologies to the people who they smeared.  …

The worst consequence of their alarmist reporting is 15+ yrs of horrific energy policy like RPS & net zero that cost Americans billions of dollars. Democrats, NGOs, and media all championed the “energy transition” to save the planet. I have no sympathy for lazy reporting. …

“I didn’t always know” is a bold-faced lie. Every climate journalist could have looked at the data and seen what a scam the hockey stick was from day 1 — they just didn’t want to.

Skeptic Research Center Team:

Around 1 in 3 liberals think the world will end in 10-15 years because of climate change.

Musa al-Gharbi:

It’s a big problem that tons of climate journalism/ discourse has consistently used the worst case outlier model and presented it as a prediction of what was most likely to happen. But as it stands, even the worst-case scenario is being radically adjusted down. Hopefully climate journalists/ advocates don’t just adopt the next worst-case model and instead discuss the most likely scenarios modelers have painted.

The Floyd/BLM riots were the most destructive riots in American history; leftists sill don’t know

The Floyd/BLM riots were the most destructive riots in American history; hardly anyone knows. By the Skeptic Research Center Team.

One of the most persistent false beliefs in American culture is that the Floyd/BLM riots were incredibly peaceful, causing little damage to life and property.

In fact, the Floyd/BLM riots were the most destructive riots in American history, leading insurance agencies to designate them as a “catastrophe event.”

 

Thomas Johansmeyer at Inver Re (an insurance company):

US civil unrest became a significant insurance industry problem in 2020, arguably for the first time. …

There were only 12 riot and civil disorder catastrophe events from 1950 through 2019. The largest was the 1992 riot in Los Angeles at nearly $800 million in insured losses (not adjusted for inflation). And even that was an outlier. The average loss to the insurance industry from riot and civil disorder catastrophes over those 70 years was only around $90 million.

In 2020, the George Floyd protests became the first civil disorder catastrophe event to exceed $1 billion in losses to the insurance industry. In fact, it has exceeded $2 billion so far and could still go higher. This “catastrophe event” was also the first to affect more than one state.

The left are lying, big time:

Sunny Hostin: “There was very limited destruction of property and violence during the BLM uprising.”

 

Reality:

 

Germa Revolta:

There were 37 murders associated with the Floyd/BLM riots. Besides David Dorn whose murderer was arrested and tried, most of the victims got no media and their murders are unresolved. If you mention it online, the left calls you a liar. The irony? A large percentage were black.

The Counter-revolution might look like this

The Counter-revolution might look like this. By James Kunstler.

The Lefty-left is mainly about acquiring power through bad faith in order to push everyone around, tell them what they’re allowed to want out of life, and severely punish anyone who objects to that treatment.

What’s often overlooked is the role that sadism plays in the psychology of the Lefty-left. They seem to love it when illegal aliens rape and strangle 19-year-old American girls. (You don’t hear them deplore it, do you? Their house-organ, The New York Times, won’t even report it.) More than anything they want to subject you to the most savage humiliations.

We are at a dangerous pass this Memorial Day. Mr. Trump and his people are methodically rearranging the works to expel these grifting demons. Their resistance to being expelled will manifest in ever more dirty fighting as spring blossoms into a summer of violent “activism.” They will try as hard as possible to wreck the country’s 250th birthday celebrations. It might look like civil war. They will not stop trying to kill Donald Trump and possibly other figures around him. Even if they manage that, it will not stop what it is coming for them.

This time around nobody believes their sob stories, their whining about “oppression,” their bullshit about “equity” and “justice.” This time, they will not be allowed to get away with sheer lawlessness. They will not be able to pass off fake martyrs such as George Floyd. The elections this time — if they can happen — will be clean and fair. That can be the only way they will be allowed to happen.

This will be the most emphatic counter-revolution in modern history, a complete rejection of childish unreality — the cavalcade of absurdities you have been told to swallow for a mad decade:

  • That you can change your sex “assigned at birth.” (Assigned by whom? By some cosmic committee of gender komisars?)
  • That merit has no merit (don’t be good at anything).
  • That men and maleness represent some inferior way of being human?
  • That people from outside American society, from faraway lands, deserve to live here under a special gift economy of vast subsidies, at your expense, to set up antagonistic counter-cultures?
  • That words don’t mean what they mean?

Possibly related???

The Musk Empire is leading humanity into space

The Musk Empire is leading humanity into space. By Glenn Reynolds.

Damn, how I wish [science fiction author] Jerry Pournelle could be watching this. …

When I was still a kid, I read Jerry’s column “A Step Farther Out” in Galaxy magazine religiously. Jerry saw it all coming: vertical takeoff and landing spaceships, the need to lower costs to orbit, and the absolute necessity for both reusability and launch volume to make things cheap enough, and reliable enough, to build an interplanetary economy. He wrote about the immense resources of space (both in terms of energy and material), and the wide-open human future they could support. …

There are still bugs to work out, and capabilities to add, but what we saw on Friday was a full-fledged interplanetary spaceship. Starship v.3 is big enough to carry cargoes to the Moon and Mars. It uses methane fuel which … can be manufactured on-site from the Martian atmosphere using 19th Century chemical technology.  …

It will also support missions to asteroids, which are loaded with precious and valuable metals, carbon compounds, and other useful stuff. (Even rock is useful for radiation shielding, and using stuff that’s already in space is generally cheaper than launching it from Earth.)

A moon base is practical with Starship. Artemis, for all the hype, uses NASA’s SLS rocket, which is based on technology over half a century old — Congress mandated that it use Space Shuttle technology — and costs literally billions per launch.

Large structures in Earth orbit are practical with Starship. Elon wants to build data centers in orbit, and others are following his lead. …

Space solar power plants, converting the 24-hour, unfiltered sunlight of outer space into electricity that is beamed to Earth via microwave (a technology long-since demonstrated) are practical with Starship.

And it’s not just lift capacity. The Musk empire also stresses AI and robotics. When we were thinking about large space structures in the 1970s we assumed they’d be built by humans, like offshore oil rigs. In my Space Law seminar last fall we did some rough modeling on how much faster you could build them using robots controlled by AI. The answer was rough, but clear: Much, much faster. And more cheaply, and without labor issues. …

 

 

After the mission concluded, the SpaceX crew was chanting “USA! USA!” Jerry always said that it was nearly certain that space would ultimately be settled by humans, but that it would make a big difference which humans got there first.

The USA is the planet’s beacon of freedom and hope — and, frankly, the only country that could have supported the development of a company like SpaceX, with a freewheeling and creative yet utterly results-oriented culture. If we get there first, the coming millennium will look very different than it would if it was, say, China who got there first.

The US still wins things.

If Elon Musk were in Australia, Anthony Albanese would be a 47% partner in all he does. How demotivating!

Bigger government or less government? Suddenly there’s a choice in Australia

Bigger government or less government? Suddenly there’s a choice in Australia. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.

Bigger government:

Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers delivered a nation-changing budget that decisively cast off the milquetoast centrism they’d affected … It embraced instead the wild big ­government, massive spending, hyper-regulating approach of Gough Whitlam and Jim Cairns in the disastrous 1972 to 1975 Labor administration, which so savagely damaged the Australian economy.

This is a budget of historic consequence, a nation-changing moment.

Less government:

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s speech in reply was equally historic. Just as Labor is proposing a European approach but worse than Europe, which no Australian government has attempted since Whitlam, Taylor is proposing a counter-revolution.

Taylor’s declaratory ambition is as great as that of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Malcolm Fraser, the big conservatives the dysfunctional 1970s threw up. …

Taylor has committed to specifics which the Liberals can’t now run away from. They would transform Australia if implemented. Taylor’s key promise is to index tax brackets. At the moment, inflation relentlessly pushes income earners into higher tax brackets — bracket creep. It’s confiscatory and guarantees ever bigger government. It’s dishonest. Government grows by stealth.

Chalmers claims Taylor’s policy would cost $250bn over a decade. That demonstrates bracket creep’s moral and economic infamy. For anything which tax indexation “costs” is the extra amount government will take from taxpayers through bracket creep.

Taylor isn’t promising tax cuts, just tax neutrality. Government has become addicted to relentless, ultimately ruinous, tax increases. Nonetheless, Taylor’s tax indexation would be hard to sustain.

If a government wanted to do new things it would need to explicitly raise new taxes or cut out something else.

CGT and net zero, strangely keeping quiet:

Taylor promised to reverse the weird, damaging increases in tax on capital gains. He explicitly, even fiercely, rejected net zero. That’s Coalition policy yet hardly any Liberal frontbencher talks about it. But you can’t win arguments by silence. Opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson, in a generally good Press Club speech, didn’t mention net zero and only cited tax indexation once.

You can’t prosecute policy revolution from opposition by stealth. Every sinew of Coalition effort must proclaim the Taylor revolution for it to have any chance.

Given how cynical voters are about mainstream politicians, if the Coalition doesn’t follow through, voters will conclude that once more it’s not serious. …

Losing by copying the UK:

Australia is drifting into very dangerous 1970s-style stagnation. The US is leaving us in its dust on per capita living standards and productivity. Our economy is growing weaker and narrower.

Loser’s tax:

Australia’s tax arrangements are monumentally uncompetitive.

Consider four tax realities.

1. Our top marginal income tax rate of 47 per cent is one of the highest in the world. The US and Canada have top rates in the 30s (even with state taxes, lower overall rates than Australia). Most ­European nations have lower top rates than ours.

2. Our top rate cuts in at an absurdly low salary level, $190,000. In 2007, the top rate cut in at $180,000. This inertia is insane. In the US, the top rate cuts in at well over $US600,000, nearly $1m. In Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, the top rate cuts in at more than €270,000, which is well over $400,000.

3. Our corporate tax rate, of 30 per cent for sizeable companies, is one of the highest in the developed world.

4. Our tax on capital gains is now one of the highest in the world. Hardly a country taxes capital gains at the same rate as salary income. Capital gain involves greater risk and economies need capital formation. Some, such as Singapore and New Zealand, don’t tax capital gains at all.

Australia’s tax regime is neither internationally competitive nor pro-growth. …

Dr Jim Chalmers:

Only two Labor treasurers have had PhDs — Jim Cairns [Whitlam’s treasurer] and Jim Chalmers. Neither was in economics. They studied instead Labor history. Like all true tribalists they suffered acute sub-cultural myopia. They didn’t know the world, they knew Labor lore and legend. …

Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison:

The Liberals’ dismal nine years in office is evident in one detail. The top marginal tax rate — now recognised as grossly too high by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, among countless others — was unchanged in that whole time.

We’re going to get poorer before any improvements. Of course, if mass immigration continues, we will never recover.

Dave Hughes issues rips into the PM with brutal spray

Dave Hughes issues rips into the PM with brutal spray. By Kylie Stephens at The Daily Mail.

Aussie comedian Dave Hughes has called on Anthony Albanese to call an election two years early unless the federal government scraps its major tax reforms.

The Prime Minister and Treasurer Jim Chalmers have come under heavy fire in recent weeks over claims they broke election promises by restricting negative gearing to new investment properties and introducing a minimum 30 per cent capital gains tax (CGT). …

Hughes took to social media to slam the government in a furious spray while detailing a conversation he had just had with a business owner in Brisbane about the Federal Budget.

‘The capital gains tax has killed him. He’s got a 100 staff and doesn’t know what he’s going to do as he has no motivation anymore,’ Hughes began. …

Hughes said that he would never have voted for the Albanese government had he known the CGT discounts would be axed within a year.

 

 

‘I voted for Albo and Chalmers. They did not have a mandate for changing CGT,’ he said.

‘It’s now the highest in the world. No one is going to want to invest in Australia.

‘What the f*** are you doing?’

‘This affects every working Australian, and everyone who actually pays tax.

‘And you’ve just doubled the take on it to waste, because you’re f***king incompetent.’ …

‘You didn’t have a mandate for it. You lied blatantly, so it’s not valid.’

At least John Howard called an election before he implemented the GST. We had the opportunity to vote it down.

Albo has lost John Hughes. How many others? The tax changes could spell the end for this Labor Government.

Foolish Albanese doesn’t understand the pricing of risk, so we all lose

Foolish Albanese doesn’t understand the pricing of risk, so we all lose. By Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian.

This country was built on the back of risk-takers. From explorers like James Cook and Matthew Flinders to military men like John Monash, the risk-takers have left a mark for the better on this country.

Australia has flourished from farmers taking risks on the land, and migrants boarding ships to a country they knew little about. In business, too, the risk-takers have transformed Australia, from miners like Lang Hancock to media titans such as Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer.

The risk-takers aren’t all big names. The country has 2.5 million small businesses, meaning an even larger number of Australians are taking risks every day. …

The Labor Party people who made this budget have no clue about business risk:

The Prime Minister is a former Labor Party official and research officer. Though the federal Treasurer has put Dr in front of this name, this has not added gravitas to his skill set. His CV, before taking charge of the Australian economy, was political adviser, academic researcher and chief-of-staff to Wayne Swan.

The Finance Minister was a community housing worker and ACT political staffer. The Foreign Minister was a union lawyer, industrial officer, and policy adviser. The Defence Minister was a lawyer at ALP-aligned law firm Slater & Gordon and a union official. The Immigration Minister was a union organiser and industrial officer. The Education Minister was a policy adviser and political staffer.

In other words, no risk-takers there. No one with any clue about the pressures of being responsible for a profit and loss account, navigating business red tape, signing contracts with suppliers and creditors, dealing with workplace rules that invite litigation.

With no hint on their CVs of any previous experience understanding what it’s like to run a business, no wonder the budget is bonkers. …

Ideology takes the place of experience:

One of the hoariest myths in the socialist lexicon is that it’s “fair” to tax income from labour just the same as income from capital. This has its roots in the kind of class warfare and ideology we all thought had disappeared when the Berlin Wall fell. We had all hoped that while Albanese may have felt safe in telling the 1991 ALP national conference in a debate on inheritance tax that “accumulated income in the form of capital is for all socialists at least part of the source of many social injustices”, he had learned a bit more about the real world since then.

Sadly, no. …

Income and capital are very different. They have different sources and drivers and it is decidedly unfair to tax them in the same way or at the same levels. …

Capital gains are uncertain and require the taking of risk. Employment income is generally predictable, certain and risk-free.

It’s like the difference between equity and debt — one is high risk but potentially high reward (or no reward) while the other offers certainty and thus no upside or downside. No economically literate person suggests the cost of debt should be the same as the cost of equity.

The Albanese-Chalmers taxation principle ignores human nature. Why would any sane person invest in a risky venture if the taxman treats you the same as if you invested in a risk-free venture? …

Without some incentive to take risk or to innovate by investing capital, new business growth dies, and the economy suffers. If you doubt this, talk to some of the venture capitalists and start-up entrepreneurs who are dismayed by the budget changes to capital gains tax.

 

Money will walk (By Brad Thomson in The Australian.)

Gina Rinehart says the Albanese government’s capital gains tax changes will ultimately hurt the federal budget bottom line as mining and other business investment moves offshore.

Mrs Rinehart said the tax changes were ill considered and left wage earners facing a double whammy if they chose to invest in mining to boost their wealth in what was already one of the highest taxing jurisdictions in the world. …

“These CGT changes will make it even harder for junior and medium explorers to raise the money needed to search for and develop new projects,” she told The Australian.

“Smaller and medium mining companies rely heavily on investors willing to back high-risk exploration years before there is any return. If you reduce the incentive and ability for people to invest, you reduce future discoveries, future mines, future jobs, future revenue and future growth for Australia at a time when our country sure needs it.

“Additionally, what is also being missed in the CGT increase is that people are investing money they have already paid tax on through PAYG and other taxes, and yet any profits they make on that reinvestment is now going to be subject to even higher taxes.”

Most financial scams work by mispricing risk. A high-risk product is sold as lower risk than it really is, thereby apparently justifying a higher price. The mark doesn’t know or can’t assess the risk accurately.

Albanese’s tax changes ignore risk almost completely, treating employees and investors the same. At one fell swoop, all investment activity has been penalized and all risks have been adversely repriced. Where it can, much of that money will now leave Australia. The outlook 20 years ahead is poor.

The awfulness of HR and young bigotesses

The awfulness of HR and young bigotesses. By Emerald Apple.

My most unhinged run-in with HR was while working at a biotech company as a senior scientist, a long time ago.

They were doing racism audits, and me being an Asian, they targeted me in an inquisition-style interrogation. In essence, it was about 30 minutes of them… Gen Z women with a chip on their shoulders, trying to make me say that I experienced racism at the company.

It was them framing every little comment, quip, joke, and conversation that my ‘white’ coworkers had with me into some sort of racist dog whistle. They wanted me to “out” my work friends as “racists” so that HR could crucify them. I knew they were recording the whole time, so I had to be very careful with my words.

I kept my answers brutally short, usually with a single-word answer of “no”, or that lacks context, or that’s a misframing.

They were literally trying to manufacture problems to go after people to justify their existence. They were trying to goad me, to extract the “right” answers from me that I refused to play their stupid game.

After the interview was over, and after their little racism witch hunt didn’t work, they moved on to other targets, other minorities, other stupid problems no one cared about.

 

 

We were recently hounded by a race-obsessed young woman eager to find infractions, so she could gather praise from her PC elders, at a family function in Canberra. Of course, she is in danger because — inevitably — she will realize that left wing woke nonsense doesn’t fly in the real world, outside of HR departments, some NGOs, and academia. The come down might be earth shattering for her, with serious consequences. It’s not as though it hasn’t happened before.

The Liberal Party still mouthing uniparty waffle on Net Zero

The Liberal Party still mouthing uniparty waffle on Net Zero. By Joanne Nova.

Polls in the AFR today point to a wipe-out of the old centre-right. … One Nation could win a blockbuster tally of between 46 and 59 seats in the Australian Parliament. The Liberal Party would be reduced to between 7 to 21 seats and the Nationals to zero.

 

It’s the Blob versus The People, but the Liberals are on the Blob’s side. One Nation voters know this is a fight for the country against corruption and globalist power, and they’re hardly going to be won over by a team that says they’ll stick with the UN because they’re a bit busy. What is Angus Taylor thinking?

The Coalition’s half-pregnant policy position is that Net Zero absolutely has to go, but the Paris Agreement absolutely has to stay. … There is no principle here except something else is going on and the Liberals don’t want to tell us what it is. …

The difference between Net Zero and Paris is mere wordplay:

Senator Malcolm Roberts of One Nation explains that “No, Angus Taylor & Matt Canavan, it is not just ‘a piece of paper’”. That’s just a word game, and it’s clear the spirit and intent of Net Zero lives in there.

The phrase ‘Net Zero’ was deliberately left out of the Paris Agreement, as it was deemed too politically charged. Instead, they inserted the legal definition of Net Zero into Article 4.1:

“Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible … so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century…”

According to Onassis, Farhana Yamin is credited with ‘getting the goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050 into the 2015 Paris Agreement’ and was a key IPCC architect. She later joined Extinction Rebellion. Even Wikipedia says, ‘Net Zero was basic to the goals of the Paris Agreement’ with the IPCC’s follow-up to Paris, the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5*C, popularising Net Zero as a short-hand for the phrase already used in the original document. …

The Paris Agreement is a legal tool to pave the way to cement the intent in domestic legislation. …

China was caught funding eco-lawfare suits in the USA to sabotage American energy dominance. Do we want to make it easier?

The UN has told Australia (but not China) that digging up our own gas might be a breach of “international law”. In another instance, a Blobocrat Court has ruled that perfect weather is a “human right”.

Even if the UN hasn’t succeeded yet in legally bombing a nation back to the stone age, we know it wants to. …

Suggestion for the Liberal Party:

If the Liberals keep pushing these contradictory messages which are obviously hiding their true intent, they look weak. If they are just doing this so the Liberals in Teal seats have a safety line, it isn’t worth it. Give the Teal voters the full force of the UN quagmire and failures and the fence sitters will be all yours.

This is the sort of Uniparty waffle that will lose even more voters to One Nation.

Probably not related. Ms Nova included this picture in her blogpost, but I don’t really get it. Something to do with sea level rise? The uniparty net zero monster? Anyway, it looked cool so here you are:

UPDATE: Joanne says it’s the Paris agreement, green on the outside but sick and deadly on the inside. Or something.

Social media and Modern Politics

Social media and Modern Politics. By Toby Ralph in The Australian. Toby Ralph is a marketer and researcher specialising in persuasion. He has worked on more than 50 elections globally.

Politics, like retail, pornography and organised religion, has gone where the eyeballs are, and they are now permanently staring at phones…

While a television commercial for a political party might reach everybody watching the footy, a social media campaign can reach divorced men aged 38 to 54 in outer suburban Queensland who own a HiLux, dislike immigration, watch hunting videos and are three mortgage repayments away from joining a populist uprising. This excites vote hunters. …

One reason that One Nation is succeeding:

One Nation succeeds because grievance is the native language of social media. Outrage engages and persuades faster than policy, and anger shares better than nuance. Platforms built to maximise engagement inevitably reward emotional intensity, tribalism and conflict. A furious man recording a rant from inside his ute will usually outperform a carefully researched Treasury explanation delivered by some bloke in a navy blazer standing in front of three Australian flags. …

The article omits that the main reason for the rise of One Nation is that One Nation is the only party offering what most people want right now. Immigration has become the biggest issue now, and One Nation are the only party credibly offering to severely curb it. Ditto Net Zero.

If One Nation’s vote was rising merely because it aired grievances on social media, why didn’t it do better from 2010 onwards after social media started? Because immigration has only become a huge, obvious problem in the last few years, as Albanese imports two million more voters from the third world, and Bondi etc.. Duh.

The audience:

Most persuadable voters aren’t political obsessives. Persuasion in politics involves seducing people who actively don’t want to engage with politics.

They don’t spend evenings reading policy papers or debating economic theory. They distrust politicians, avoid ideological intensity and would generally prefer not to think about government at all. Many wouldn’t vote if they could avoid the fine and are more concerned with who’s rooting who on Married At First Sight and how to stop the bank repossessing the ­family SUV. …

Persuasion works at the soft edge of credibility, by finding a belief and pushing it further until it converts to behavioural change. That distinction is increasingly lost in Australian politics. …

Farrer by-election lesson:

A recent example was the Farrer by-election, where One Nation secured a landslide victory despite massive activist spending against it. GetUp reportedly spent around $600,000 campaigning in the seat, saturating digital platforms with highly researched advertising, focus-grouped messaging and sophisticated targeting. Then despite starting as equal favourites, they lost badly.

Their operation was a success. The patient died. Partly because the messenger was wrong. In many regional and outer suburban electorates, organisations like GetUp are viewed not as grassroots movements but as manifestations of precisely the urban elite voters feel already dominate political attention. The campaign unintentionally reinforced the very grievance structures One Nation thrives upon.

Focus groups fail — the “shy Tory” effect:

But there was another problem. The research itself was manifestly misleading, for it suggested all was fine, the messaging was right and the independent was in the box seat, yet they no longer were.

Modern research suffers from a fundamental flaw. It relies upon people honestly articulating what they believe in artificial environments surrounded by strangers. Focus groups produce what psychologists politely call social desirability bias, and what normal people recognise as people bullshitting because they don’t want to look bad in front of others. …

In the groups they unconsciously conform, moderate controversial opinions and mirror perceived social expectations, then consultants charge enormous sums reporting data generated by Peter and Peggy from Penrith who were probably fibbing and may not even fully understand their own motivations.

The political class readily mistake articulated opinion for actual behaviour, particularly if it suits their internal narrative. We saw misleading focus group research during the Indigenous voice referendum, the federal election and again in Farrer.

How to measure opinions when they might be “disapproved of” (i.e anti-globaslist):

My preferred methodology is much cruder and, I’d argue, more useful. Stimulus boards combined with one-on-one intercept interviews conducted in pubs, shopping centres, cafes and cinema foyers with people who haven’t been recruited to have an opinion and therefore don’t feel obligated to manufacture one.

You get very different, deeper answers when an ­individual isn’t trapped in a fluorescent-lit room with others, trying to impress earnest sociology graduates. …

Social media politics is simpler and dumber:

This is how information is now consumed by people under 40.

Social media has profoundly transformed the structure of political communication because in the Attention Economy it has altered the mechanics of human attention itself. Before persuading voters, politicians must first avoid being scrolled past while somebody explains five secret tricks to hacking airline loyalty programs.

That fundamentally advantages simplicity, emotion and conflict.

Many politicians still approach social media as though they are filming a workplace safety induction video from 2007. Those succeeding understand the platforms reward speed, emotional clarity and conversational tone. …

The mistake political professionals repeatedly make is assuming complexity performs well online. It doesn’t. Content that cuts through is usually emotionally understandable within three seconds.

Which is terrible news for anybody hoping social media might usher in a golden age of reflective democratic debate. Instead, politics increasingly competes within a giant algorithmic entertainment slurry alongside influencers, comedians, gambling advertisements, fitness coaches, Only Fans wannabes, pseudo-intellectual podcasts and a never-ending industrial conveyor belt of attention-seeking opportunists. …

Social media platforms disproportionately reward emotional grievance, outsider identity and anti-establishment sentiment. Traditional parties still partly communicate as though voters are citizens deliberating thoughtfully upon the national interest.

Well aren’t you a dinosaur, reading a site like this 🙂