- Jack Halberstam’s Flying Circus: on postmodernism and the scapegoating of trans women – The argument turns on the fallacy that trans women are being insufficiently radical, and that our fight for dignity is really just a cynical play for respectability and power. It is a very Foucauldian argument, in that sense. We just need to allow ourselves to be more transgressive (in terms defined hazily by Halberstam), otherwise our personal behaviour is complicit with oppression, and thus wrong. This is how we can make sense of Halberstam’s valedictory prescription to “move on, to confuse the enemy, to become illegible, invisible, anonymous.” His whole point is, ironically, to discipline what he sees as the defective personal behaviour of those he disagrees with.
- Shaking off the northern bias in temperature reconstructions – Road to Paris – ICSU – These northern-biased reconstructions – which are based on studies of tree rings, coral, ice cores, subfossil pollen, boreholes and lake sediments – have played a decisive role in our ability to separate out natural from human-caused global warming. But what about the other half of the planet?
- After a Police Dog Bit His Leg, This Protester Was Jailed Thanks to a Cop’s Testilying | VICE United States – The expensive consequences of New York City’s heavy-handed approach to policing protest have been on display lately. In December, the city finally settled most of the lawsuits stemming from its mass arrest of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Earlier this month, falsely arrested Occupy Wall Street protesters announced the largest settlement yet between participants and the powers that be, with the city poised to shell out nearly $600,000 in damages. NYC already paid $350,000 last year to settle a suit over its destruction of media equipment and Occupy’s library during the 2011 eviction of Zuccotti Park, $82,500 this past December to settle an Occupier’s suit claiming that police beat him up across the span of three arrests, and $50,000 the month before to settle a suit by people arrested on suspicion that they might later attend a protest.
- The 20 most hipster neighbourhoods in the world | Skyscanner – On the ‘other’ side of the IJ, the big bit of water behind Centraal station that no-one notices because they head in the other direction when they arrive, has been growing in coolness for a few years now. Previously a bit of a wasteland, now the disused warehouses host creative start-ups, festivals, restaurants and, once a month, mega flea market IJ Hallen,
- Octavia Butler Roundtable Index « The Hooded Utilitarian – This is the index for our Octavia Butler Roundtable. Posts are listed in chronological order.
Articles with the Tag Climate change
Heat – George Monbiot
Heat
George Monbiot
277 pages including index
published in 2006
Thanks to the climate change camp in London held this past week, global warming is back on the news agenda again. Despite the rear guard action fought by the Exxon-Mobile sponsored climate change denial groups, the media has sort of accepted the reality of it over the past two years, but as Alex Harrowell fulminates against, it’s largely treated as a consumerist, lifestyle issue:
As with most British media green pushes, there’s little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it’s a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change — nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn’t going to work. And, again, it’s all consumer guff.
This is not something you can accuse George Monbiot of doing here. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning he quickly dismisses consumer driven solutions like the 10:10 campaign in the introduction. The entire point of the book is that we cannot solve the problem of climate change with lifestyle choices, but only through solutions that apply to everybody, not everybody else, as he puts it. He starts with the assumption that the only way to migate the consequences of global warming, as we cannot prevent it anymore, is to keep runaway climate change from happening and that can only happen if we can keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees celsius (above pre-industrial levels) in 2030. If not, major ecosystems begin collapsing as the ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide is exhausted. To keep this rise from happening we can’t just switch incandencent lightbulbs for LEDs, we need to cut 90 percent of our CO2 output. The challenge Monbiot sets himself in Heat is to show that we can do this without giving up our post-industrial lifestyles, by taking the United Kingdom as his test subject and looking at various aspepcts of our lives to see how CO2 output can be reduced in them. It is not a complete blueprint for change of course and you may not necessarily agree with all his solutions, but it is a genuine attempt at putting together a national plan of action that could be implemented relatively quickly and doesn’t require all of us to piss in hayboxes.
Balanced News
There’s a good report up on Medialens of how something that looks at first sight to be a balanced newsreport, on further investigation,isn’t. No prizes if you guessed this might have something to do with climate change, and in particular, that High Court judge and his supposed finding of “nine errors” in Al gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The BBC did their usual piece on this, by interviewing the involved parties, but they let themselves been snookered as they never looked into how the complainant, Stuart Dimmock, a lorry driver and school governor could afford to bring his complaint all the way to the High Court. If they had, they would’ve found that he was sponsored by the climate change skeptic New Party, itself sponsored by Scottish millionaire Robert Durward. By not reporting this in their interviews with Dimmock, the BBC therefore provided a clearly false picture of this court case while still adhering to the doctrine of “balance”.
This is only one example of a widespread practise, not just at the BBC but in all news media, where instead of journalists trying to determine the truth behind the surface story, only the claims and counterclaims of the involved parties are reported. This is not necessarily a bad thing; in politics especially it is often hard to objectively determine the truth of a story, or the story is about the conflicting interpretations of government and opposition for a given incident. It’s then that a summation of claim and counterclaim is justified, but not when relevant facts are left out of the story.
But even when this sort of reporting is justified, a story can be balanced and still be unfair. An example of this was on display in a news item I heard last night on the Radio 4 six oçlock news bulletin. The story was about the Scottish government’s opposition against a replacement for the UK’s current Trident based nuclear deterrent. since the Trident submarines are based in Faslane in Scotland, making the country therefore a nuclear target, it’s clearly a legitimate concern of the Scottish governement, even though technically it falls outside their jurisdiction.
On the BBC news however this was framed with a soundbyte from Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Labour opposition in the Scottish Parliament, who said she didn’t want English politicians speaking for Scotland on matters like healthcare and therefore Scottish politicians should not speak out about English or British matters either. This was immediately followed by a question from the BBC reporter to the Scottish National Pary’s spokesperson on whether the SNP did not go too far in its opposition to Trident replacement. With that, even though both sides, Labour and SNP, got their say, the bias of the story was clearly in favour of Labour; but you wouldn’t know that it was biased unless you paid close attention.
It’s a borderline dishonest way of reporting on stories, and it’s far more common than you think. Much of the reputation of a Jeremy Paxman or a John Humpries for being “tough”, it seems to me, is due to mock aggresive oneway questioning like this, where only the weaker party is attacked like this. The BBC may pride itself on being independent, but in important matters it will almost always take the side of the vested interests, the establishment.