We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Damian Thompson at the Telegraph is circumspect, but he quotes Jamie Dettmer, former war correspondent for the Times, who is not:
It has been common knowledge for years among British and American reporters that Bob can just make things up or lift other’s work without attribution and embellish it. I recall him doing it to me on a story in Kuwait about the killings of Palestinians at the hands of Kuwaitis following the liberation of the emirate. I remember also the time Fisk filed a datelined Cairo story about a riot there when he was in fact at the time in Cyprus.
Pope’s theory on this — why Bob gets away with it — is that fellow members of the press corp don’t like to dish the dirt on their colleagues. “The one time I decided to let it be known that a fellow reporter was cheating and passing off others’ work as his own, it was I who became the odd man out, an informer with a chip on my shoulder, and standing joke,” he writes. He notes also that “editors are reluctant to challenge established writers.”
It is noticeable that this collegiate solidarity only fractured when Fisk himself offended against it, by insulting fellow journalists.
(Via Tim Blair, also of the Telegraph, but a different one.)
I used to know a little girl with severe mental and physical disabilities. She had to be lifted and moved dozens of times a day as she was unable to walk or crawl. It was a source of great worry to her parents how they would cope when she grew up and could no longer be lifted easily. More distant, but greater, was their fear concerning how she would be cared for when they died. Their fears did not come to pass for the saddest of reasons; she herself died when she was still quite small.
I thought of that family when I read about Ashley. Ashley is another little girl with severe mental and physical disabilities; even more deeply disabled than the child I once knew. Ashley is fourteen, but is described as having the cognitive abilities of a three month old baby – in truth, if the description of what she can and cannot do is correct, a three month old baby is better able to communicate than she is. Her parents share the same fears as those of the parents of the girl I knew. They have taken drastic action: they have had her treated surgically and with hormones so as to ensure, within the limits of the technology, that she remains a child for the remainder of her life.
“It was carried out in the belief that her quality of life would improve as it would save her from physical discomfort and pain”, reports the Telegraph. The Guardian, which ran opposing comment articles on Ashley’s case, suggests that another motive was to reduce the effort of lifting her and hence extend the time for which her parents could care for her. I wonder if an unmentioned further reason – one that sounds ghastly but might make sense given human nature – was to try to ensure better care for Ashley when her parents are gone by keeping her cuter. It is a sad fact that many people will find their protective instincts aroused by the sight of a mentally disabled child (or apparent child), yet flinch at the sight of a mentally disabled adult.
Ashley cannot consent and cannot withold consent. This procedure might help – no, it very likely will help to give her the best quality of life possible, for as long as possible in the care of those who love her. Yet the potential for abuse is horrible. Her body is being irrevocably altered for the convenience of those who care for her (but that convenience is no small thing, and convenience is too weak a word; whether they can cope is a major determinant of her quality of life.) If we can do this to Ashley, what else can we do to future Ashleys? More severe modifications to more severely disabled people? To less severely disabled people? To any people?
I may be obsessed with this but the world is not. If I knew how to do one of those word cloud things for UK headlines over the past week or so, I think it would look like this:
Syria Ryan Giggs Euro Horsegate Olympic tube strike PC Rathband climate scientist controversy Leveson
Although in truth the font for “climate scientist controversy” would be too small to see. Partisans on both sides make the distinction I referred to earlier between lies about the way world is and lies as a ruse of war, so to us it matters whether the disputed document is proved to be fake or not, but all most people will remember in six months’ time is that there was some scandal or another. If they remember that much.
That said, whichever narrative wins among those who are interested does filter through to the general public eventually, if only as a vague preconception as to whether a controversy about a climate scientist will feature the scientist as villain or hero. I do not want either result but so it goes. Most human beings choose to be rationally ignorant about matters that do not immediately affect them.
So, on the understanding that whichever narrative wins among the partisans will be simplified almost to nothing, and that most people are not indifferent to truth, which narrative should those sincerely convinced that anthropogenic global warming is a threat want to be true?
So far, this has been decided solely on the basis of team loyalty. I am sure examples of blind loyalty can be seen on both sides but in this post I only wish to look at it from the side of those who believe in a serious danger from AGW. The lengths to which a wish to defend Gleick have been taken by some are illustrated by a post by Dr Greg Laden, who posts at a site called scienceblogs.com and clearly values his identity as a science blogger and all round rational person. He first put forward a fiendish and elaborate conspiracy theory and then pulled back and claimed it was all a joke when he saw some members of his own side were taking it seriously. Aside from the sheer lameness of his passive-aggressive “can’t you guys take a joke” coda, there is an unintentional parallel here to the way that Gleick, by his continued silence, leaves his own side to overreach in their efforts to defend him.
If Gleick is telling the truth, I don’t think it is good for their side at all.
There are two main scenarios.
Scenario (1) This is a glimpse into the way the happy world of climate science works all the time. First someone sends an anonymous and vague document to Gleick. Whether it is sting or genuine leak does not matter to this argument. An outsider might think a person sending anonymous tittle-tattle to the Chair of a Task Force on Scientific Ethics would be on a hiding to nothing, but X knows better. That correct expectation tells us something bad about the general culture. Then, we are told, Gleick’s idea of what constitutes a good means of verifying the document is to set up a fake email address and impersonate someone. Then in his turn he sends it out anonymously, lying to his own side in the process by representing himself as “Heartland Insider”. [Added later, prompted by this comment from “Fluffy”: he also by his own account lied to his own side by mixing up the anonymous tittle tattle with real, if stolen, documents and presenting them as of equal status.]
He does all this under no particular pressure. It just seems like a good idea. That tells us something yet worse about the culture. And Heartland? Who cares? The harm done to the belief in climate science is not undone by harm also being done to some advocacy group.
Scenario (2) One man, seething with wounded pride, goes off the rails in an effort to get personal vengeance. Peter Gleick goes phishing to get dirt on his enemies, and when the dirt he gets isn’t dirty enough he makes some more up. His actions from then on are the same as in the first scenario but the fact that they are done under strong emotion makes it a personal tragedy rather than a reflection on the general standard of ethics in climate science. Embarrassing, but containable.
1. The soundtrack to this post is “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” by the Electric Light Orchestra. The format will be a vomiting out of points as I think of them, numbered to bring some sort of order to the chaos. I expect to add more after publishing this post. (Update 28 Feb: some new points added.)
2. The title to this post was very nearly The Lying Will Continue Until Trust Improves, being a riff on this catch phrase, but since I do not think most of the people involved are consciously lying – though Gleick is – I decided against. AGW advocates better look out, though, because the widespread perception that some of them might be lying about global warming is going to be reinforced if a significant percentage of them continue to praise lying by Gleick.
3. Likewise the even more widespread perception that many of them might be credulous and deluded about global warming is going to be reinforced if a significant percentage of them continue to be credulous and deluded in public about very weak arguments in favour of the strategy memo being genuine.
Take the “evaluation” by DeSmogBlog that the memo was authentic. I have put scare quotes round “evaluation” because the word suggests it was done an impartial third party, but it is just the same guys as usually write the blog. It goes to a lot of trouble to show that the strategy memo “also uses phrases, language and, in many cases, whole sentences that were taken directly from Heartland’s own material. Only someone who had previous access to all of that material could have prepared the Climate Strategy in its current form.” – without seeming to realise that nothing in that contradicts the assertion that it is a fake.
To show that the reaction from AGW advocates was not always as unmindful of the future credibility of their side, read this blog post, The Cytokine Storm from a site called “lies.com”. The author, John Callender, is a liberal in the US sense and is quite a strong, longstanding and well-known AGW blogger, so doubly opposed to most here but definitely not some random bloke on the internet. His reaction to DeSmog blog’s” evaluation” was,
Having studied the contents of the strategy memo, and the arguments for and against its authenticity, my reaction to DeMelle and Littlemore’s argument was immediate and unequivocal: they’re wrong, and obviously so. They must either be actively lying or passively bullshitting (that is, willfully disregarding the truth to assert a position they favor, without bothering about facts).
4. Let’s jump back a step. My own position is that I think there is a severe and urgent danger to the world concerning global warming – namely the poverty and repression that will result from the measures that power grabbers and sincere crusaders put in to protect us against it. I am also somewhat concerned about global warming.
I think the current mainstream view of anthropogenic global warming is equivalent to a stock market bubble, with fear instead of optimism making it expand. The madness of crowds caused its “price” to become detached from underlying reality. I wish I’d bought shares in Imminent & Dreadful DoomCo. Ltd in 1995. I wish I’d then sold them in 2009. To say that they are massively overpriced, if falling, is not to say that they don’t have some genuine underlying value.
5. This affair matters and the point within that matters most is the disputed memo. There are two sorts of lies concerned, lies about the way the world is and lies as a ruse of war. Gleick having lied as a ruse of war diminishes trust a bit; proof that he has lied about the way the world is will diminish it far more – because lies about way the world is are the sort of lies AGW advocates are suspected of telling.
6. Did you notice? Gleick is already known to have told one lie about the way the world is. He signed his email dump “Heartland Insider”.
7. I agree with everything Megan McArdle said (and quoted from Stephen Mosher) about the reasons to suppose the memo is not genuine. There is one simple, psychologically plausible hypothesis that explains the existence of this sloppily worded, unauthored, undated, untraceable-because-scanned memo containing wonderfully quotable lines that put the Heartland Institute in a very bad light, plus chunks of barely altered text from the other documents but scarcely anything else numerical about Heartland – and what there was erroneous, plus flattering mention of Gleick, plus a whiff of paranoia about the hated Koch brothers and Gleick’s particular enemy in Forbes magazine, plus terms like “anti climate” that no actual AGW sceptic would use, plus Gleick’s idiosyncratic punctuation. Gleick wrote it. He phished the rest of the package, saw it would be insufficiently appealing to journalists, and whipped up something that would. Think of the Danish Mohammed cartoons. They weren’t quite enraging enough on their own, so provocateurs added a couple of fake ones too. People do such things.
8. You think he wouldn’t do something so crazy and damaging to his career? Think about what he is already known to have done. And think also about the sad story of Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, who still is a highly regarded historian. He rubbished his rivals’ books on Amazon and praised his own, then, despite having signed the reviews “orlando-birkbeck”, denied with legal threats ever having done so. Then he got his wife to say she’d done it. Then he confessed. People do such things. Well-regarded academics do such things.
→ Continue reading: The Gleick Earworm
If it is true that venom has medicinal uses, the leading figures of the Australian Labor Party must be the healthiest people on Earth.
Entertaining stuff, but one thing keeps bugging me. In about half the articles giving background information on Kevin Rudd I read, I see something like this:
When Gillard, then deputy prime minister, moved against him in 2010, she did so against a backdrop of internal disquiet and profound electoral disappointment.
Rudd had back-flipped spectacularly on an important pre-election pledge to introduce a carbon tax and his sky-high popularity with voters had slumped. (One of the major figures who urged him to listen to the mining and business lobby and jettison that promise was the deputy who would later depose him.)
You would think from that that the righteous planet-protective wrath of the Australian people was directed at Rudd for his failure to fulfil his pledge to introduce a tax (actually an emissions trading regime) intended to retard global warming. Cobblers. He had backed out of laying the tax because the voters loathed the idea. In fact so unpopular was the proposed carbon tax that it also resulted in the ousting of the opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, from leadership of the Liberal party, he having offered bipartisan support for the scheme. While it is true that voters do despise retreat and will punish a politician who backs down even when they howled for him to do so, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was only politically attractive in the sense that the song of the siren was attractive to Odysseus. Any Australian political leader who began to find that tune catchy had better hope that his Parliamentary colleagues had tied his bindings firmly and plugged well their own ears.
(Ears. Plugged. Rudd. Don’t think that thought – too late.)
Nor has the curse abated since then. One big reason for Julia Gillard’s unpopularity is that she in turn “back-flipped spectacularly on an important pre-election pledge” not to introduce a carbon tax. I studied Australian politics at the University of Tim Blair’s Blog and I know that much. Why doesn’t the Guardian?
Robin Horbury at Biased BBC made a similar observation about a BBC story in July 2010. The link to the BBC story is dead, but, trust me, it was one of many.
Added later: another story from the Guardian exhibiting the same symptoms:
Ms Gillard’s once famously popular predecessor as Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, lost first that popularity and then his leadership partly because he failed to steer through the legislation he had promised to deal with what had earlier been called “the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time.
This sounds like fun: An online and open excercise in stylometry/textometry: Crowdsourcing the Gleick “Climate Strategy Memo” authorship
If enough people participate, it might become a story in itself.
UPDATE: I would like to add a few more thoughts.
– First, as I said in the comments, battle has been joined. Joe Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute, has openly accused Peter Gleick of forgery in this video interview for the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. There is no going back for either of them. Gleick must now sue Bast for libel if he is to maintain what’s left of his reputation.
– Second thought: the key question in determining whether Gleick’s story of receiving the strategy memo in the mail is true or not is whether the strategy memo was created before or after the authentic documents. Thus Gleick to prove his innocence, or Bast to prove Gleick’s guilt, must concentrate their attentions on the period between “the beginning of 2012”, when he says he got the strategy document, and the creation of the other documents.
For one thing, we need an actual date of receipt rather than “the beginning of 2012”. If it can be proved that there is information (e.g. specific figures) or chunks of exact wording in the strategy document that was not in existence at the date that Gleick says he received it, then he did not receive it but created it. Of course we also need to see the paper copy and the envelope it came in. Dr Gleick has no reason to refuse to provide this; if he has been the victim of a fraud or sting himself he should wish to uncover the culprit.
After you have convinced people that you fervently believe your cause to be more important than telling the truth, you’ve lost the power to convince them of anything else.
– Megan McArdle
Do you ever find the structure of a situation in the news fascinating in its own right, as you would the plot of a novel, almost irrespective of how it pans out in the real world?
Some documents were tricked or leaked out of an anti global warming thinktank, the Heartland Institute. Most of these documents have been admitted to be genuine, and while opinions differ as to how shocking they are, they were certainly not stuff that the Heartland Institute had wished to share with the world. So far the tables are turned on the the Climategate affair.
Only…
The juiciest document, the one that had the really damning quotes (it spoke of “dissuading teachers from teaching science”) is different from all the others. Megan McArdle, not herself in the sceptic camp, says it is looking faker by the minute.
If it does turn out that it is a fake, then the tables are turned on the table turners. But… but… why would anyone be so daft? Having pulled off the trick, got the goods, why put your gains at risk for such a trivial advantage as that of providing a quotable summary?
One of the reasons for the veracity of this particular document being in doubt is that it is sloppy. It contains errors of fact and is written in an unprofessional style. Still, that happens sometimes. “Organisation Contains Sloppy Writer” is not exactly a headline to make them hold the front page. Maybe the sloppiness is a reason to suppose it genuine. But let us run with it being fake for a while – was the faker in a hurry for some reason? It reminds me (and a lot of people) of the Rathergate memos. What a daft error it was to publish them in the default Microsoft Word font of 2004 when they were meant to have originated in the 1970s. I thought then and still think now that they were a first draft released too soon. Could something similar have happened here?
The Guardian pulls in its horns a little. Its story now carries a rather grudging little update saying that the Heartland Institute now claims one document is a fake. The Guardian does not make it as clear as it ought in my opinion that the doubtful document is the very one that had all the good quotes.
At this point, like all good detective stories, a whole new sub plot bubbles up. The climate sceptic blogs have a suspect and name him with what seems to me ridiculous confidence given that the stated evidence against him is vague; mostly a matter of similarities of style. Now who’s risking all they have gained for a trivial advantage? If their suspect turns out to be wrongly accused, the story, which they had snatched back and made into one about fakers rather than leakers, will be forfeit again.
And so it goes – and so it stalls, last time I looked. The person named has not responded to emails; he appears to be offline. But why shouldn’t he be offline? Do you spend your Saturdays checking your email to see if you have been accused of any career-ending shenanigans in the last few hours? Meanwhile other strange portents are seen; open letters are published then retracted and both sides go about with an air of knowing more than they are letting on.
Agatha Christie would put in the second murder about now.
UPDATE, 21 FEBRUARY:
The second body duly falls.
That “person named” to whom I alluded so delicately was Peter Gleick. He has now admitted obtaining the documents by deception. I note that the very thing that led to his name being mentioned as a suspect were similarities of writing style between Gleick’s published writing and the “different” email. Nonetheless he claims that he did not alter any of the emails he obtained. As to that, here is a page listing 100 interjections of the sort that express emotion without actually pinning one down to having said anything. Choose as appropriate. I quite like “hmm” and “ahem” myself, but my favourite must be “uh-huh” (affirmation) differing by only a breath from “uh-uh” (negation).
Hat tip to Douglas2 in the comments.
… to save the NHS, says Ed Miliband.
My first thought was, gosh, that’s nice, three months in which to kill it. I suspect that I am in a minority: the outpouring of love, loyalty and vows to defend the NHS unto death coming from the Guardian commenters to this report and to Miliband’s own article resemble nothing so much as the frenzied cries of “Deus vult!” that greeted Pope Urban II when he declared the First Crusade. I further suspect that when it comes to this issue the knights of the Guardian would indeed get support from the peasants of the Sun and the Daily Mail.
Heigh-ho. Just for the record, I shall repost an article that is now more than ten years old. It is by Anthony Browne, once Health Editor of the Guardian‘s Sunday sister, the Observer, and at one time a passionate supporter of the NHS:
Even as you read this, in almost every hospital in the country, there will be elderly, vulnerable people left for hours and sometimes days on trolleys. Each year, thousands of British people – the young, the old, the rich, the poor – die unnecessarily from lack of diagnosis, lack of treatment and lack of drugs. They die and suffer unnecessarily for different reasons, but there is just one root cause: the blind faith the Government has in the ideology of the National Health Service, and our unwillingness to accept not just that it doesn’t work, but that it can never work.
With a whoop and a holler the Guardian reports that Bjorn Lomborg’s climate sceptic think tank is to close. Before anyone tells me, yes I know that “climate sceptic” is not a good description of Lomborg’s opinions. The article itself is more accurate.
It seems the Danish government cut off funding:
… Denmark’s general election last year ushered in a new administration less keen to support his views. Earlier this month, the Danish government confirmed that it had cut more than £1 million in funding for Lomborg’s centre. As a result, he only has funding in place until the end of June.
Good news for the Danish taxpayer, one might think, but I suspect that the stream of kroner diverted away from Lomborg’s think tank is unlikely to be returning their way.
The Guardian commenters, mostly warmists in a much stronger sense than Lomborg, assume that this closure (if it happens) is a benefit for their cause. I doubt that is entirely true. They are living in the world before the internet. In that world, the major weapon in the battle of ideas was the catapult. The difficult bit was throwing your ideas hard enough and far enough. These days, though the loss of a big catapult is still a blow, anyone who cares to fight can find a little catapult and, er, my military metaphor has gone the way of the mangonel, but the new difficult bit is not projection but acceptance. Getting believed. If your problem is that the people are already half inclined to think that your opinion has a little too much of the pravda, the official line about it, the last thing you want to do is have it known that the opposition were silenced by anything other than argument.
They said it would never be agreed. Then they said it would never be launched. Then they said it would fail. When it was a success, the euro-haters still insisted that the single currency was a recipe for economic chaos and political instability. The phobes are proving to be wrong again. At a time when so much of Europe’s political leadership is in flux, the single currency is the steadying point in an uncertain and worrying world.
Imagine that the recent turbulence on the continent had occurred when Europe still traded in pre-euro currencies. What would have happened to the French franc when neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen forced the Prime Minister to quit? The franc would have plunged. What would have happened to the Dutch guilder when an anti-immigration party with a dead leader impelled itself into government? The guilder would have plunged too. Before a German election too close to call, even the stolid old mark would be gyrating. And instability in currency markets would be fuelling even more political chaos: a vicious, downward cycle.
That this has not happened is thanks to the euro. The single currency has taken all this political upheaval in its calm stride.
– From an anonymous editorial in the Observer headed “A tolerant euro”.
From 2002, in case you were wondering.
Hey, “tyranny” was his word, not mine. Sid Ryan writes in the Guardian:
There have been some serious incidents at the camp in the last few months including: thefts, tents being slashed and minor assaults. These problems are not of Occupy’s making, but they’re happening on its watch. When anyone is challenged about people’s behaviour they’re quick to cry “persecution” and appeal to the founding principles of inclusion. If Occupy can’t solve the problem of behaviour on-site, a hostile media and the police will end the movement before it gets going.
Even people who aren’t aggressive or violent can derail the movement. The very nature of the general assembly (GA), whereby everyone can wield a veto, makes it inevitable. A block should be used only if the blocker feels so strongly that they would rather leave the movement than see it carried through, but it is rarely used as such and rarely with a full understanding of the issues at stake. Occupy proudly states that the GA is “real democracy”, in fact it is a tyranny that makes it possible to drown out a hundred rational voices with a single irrational one.
Schadenfreude aside, Mr Ryan’s article provides an interesting case study of an attempt at non-coercive organisation, a subject that interests many libertarians. Perhaps what stops it working for them is Original Sin. I refer to the sinful desire, shared by both the reformist and the revolutionary wings of Occupy, to coerce others.
Added later: Guardian commenter Forlornehope mentions the Seige of Münster. One hopes events will not come to such a pass that St Paul’s ends up being adorned in the manner of St Lambert’s Church:
Vigorous preparations were made, not only to hold what had been gained, but to proceed from Münster toward the conquest of the world. The city was being besieged by Franz von Waldeck, its expelled bishop. In April 1534 on Easter Sunday, Matthys, who had prophesied God’s judgment to come on the wicked on that day, made a sally with only thirty followers, believing that he was a second Gideon, and was cut off with his entire band. He was killed, his head severed and placed on a pole for all in the city to see, and his genitals nailed to the city gate. Bockelson, better known in history as John of Leiden, was subsequently installed as “king”.
Claiming to be the successor of David, he claimed royal honours and absolute power in the new “Zion”. He justified his actions by the authority of visions from heaven, as others have done in similar circumstances. He legalized polygamy, and himself took sixteen wives. (John is said to have beheaded one wife himself in the marketplace; this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.) Community of goods was also established. After obstinate resistance, the city was taken by the besiegers on June 24, 1535, and in January 1536 Bockelson and some of his more prominent followers, after being tortured, were executed in the marketplace. Their dead bodies were exhibited in cages, which hung from the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church; the cages still hang there, though the bones were removed later.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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