Bishop Hill Explaining liberalism to "liberals"
Jun 3, 2013 Climate: Parliament Toby Young has an excellent reponse to Ed Davey in the Telegraph, explaining some of the basics of liberalism to the (ostensibly liberal) climate change secretary. "John Stuart Mill", Young seems to be saying; "might be worth a read".
Even if we put the moral objections to state censorship to one side, there's a good practical reason for not muzzling your intellectual opponents. As JS Mill points out in On Liberty, either they are right, in which case you shouldn't try and suppress the truth, or they are wrong, in which case you have nothing to fear from the publication of their views since their wrong-headedness will then be plain for everyone to see. If Ed Davey really believes that the truth is on his side in this debate, he should encourage his opponents to air their views in public as often as possible, not criticise "some sections of the press" for giving them a platform.
28gate gets a mention.
Reader Comments (43)
But he doesn't believe it.
Neither do a lot of of other people.Especailly cynical politicians.But they cant say it just yet.
Only good thing that came from the Banking Collapse and the Economic Recession it killed off Climate Change.We cant afford Eco Vanity.
It really does stick in the craw when 'Liberal' Ed Davey seeks to suppress the opinion of others. Funny, but don't they normally seem to get off on helping certain minorities against certain other larger bodies of opinion?
All he's actually arguing for is further censorship of views different to his own. Coming from a senior government Minister that's truly feeble, especially when considered in context of 2 relentless decades of 'settled science, the debate is over'.
Yet this is the man is on the cusp of driving the UK's most recklessly stupid government energy policy in history. God help us if it actually passes.
Good old John Stuart Mill, just about the zenith of Western civilization. Unfortunately, Marx, Lenin, and other communists seem to have the upper hand today. Their view that the last ideology standing is the winner seems to be in the ascendancy. It fits in nicely with the work of PR firms.
Interesting comment below Toby Young's piece that Davey's brother is a 'green lawyer', so clearly madness runs in the family...
Why is it surprising that Watermelons like PPE graduate, Davey, seek to supress "inconvenient" views?
The Communists are past masters
Interesting jamesp. Perhaps the right tack on this is not madness but how expensive it is for some (assuming Ed also cares for his bro) to completely back down.
I too would like partake in this round of routine solemn procession of appreciation for Mill and condemnation of Marx.
Down with watermelons! Up with cucumbers!
Richard
"But he doesn't believe it."
I often wonder how many do. Makes one want to strap them all to polygraphs and find out what they really think about all kinds of official nonsense.
I was reminded of this in the doctor's waiting room earlier today. There was the inevitable display dispensing advice about everything, including alcohol consumption which, as I recall, is based on an entirely made-up figure from about 30 years ago, when the 'unit' was invented and the DoH wanted to promote some guidelines. Because a small amount of alcohol is beneficial, you have to drink quite a lot to cancel that out, so to be no worse off than a teetotaller, you, Mr Average, have to knock back over 60 units a week. The DoH wonks couldn't cope with this, thinking it would encourage anyone who habitually drank less to let the brakes off, so they plucked the 21 units/week figure out of the air, and we've been stuck with it ever since.
The displayed advice about testicular cancer, offered by a girl in tennis whites juggling a couple of balls, was a good effort, however.. :-)
Is Ed,s Green Lawyer Brother (is he a Martian) as good looking as him.Beauty does not obviously run in the family.
Him and his brother came second in a Jedwood Lookalike competition and Jedwood actually won it.
Here, jamspid, wasn't that 3rd place in a Wayne Rooney lookalike competition (courtesy of J.Dellingpole)?
sorry Bish but it is clear that Davey is another left-of-centre constituent of Scunthorpe. Nuff said.
jamesp: I must get down to my primary care surgery forthwith!
On not believing it I'd say Davey and the Lib Dems are prisoners of the electoral implications of the coalition, which by the way I believed they entered for some truly honourable reasons, because of the drastic state of the UK economy post-credit crunch. And they liked the sound of power. George Osborne had that nicely factored in.
Anyway, there is still a reasonably sizeable green vote, some of whom went for the Tories once Cameron started hugging a husky, while some stuck disconsolately with Labour / Miliband of Climate Change Act renown. With the Tories under pressure to move closer to a UKIP position on energy and climate policy, and the Lib Dems threatened with electoral extinction, they can't afford not to be seen as a good deal greener than their partners. But as the Bish said earlier there's precious little Davey can actually do. So he does some ritual attacking of evil sceptics instead - and someone like Toby Young easily shoots him down.
So no, he doesn't believe it. Nor, probably, does he believe he has much of a political future beyond the next election, But that's no reason to go easy on him, because we have a whole lotta reversing out of grubby and harmful green policies to do for the good of this country and all its people.
Cucumbers? What're they then? Green on the outside, but wet and slimy underneath? I guess that matches Cameron then.
There is no similarity at all between post modern "liberals" and the classical liberalism of Mill. In fact they are opposite. While classical liberalism extols debate and criticism and the only means we have to make progress, the post moderns hate dissent and will act to supress it (look for example at the current US IRS scandal). While classical liberalism promotes individual action and responsibility, the post moderns extol the collective and their own concepts of "social justice." And so on down the line.
And consistent with the above, if you try to explain this to a post modern, there is no uptake at all. After all to a post modern liberal, it is not a matter of different points of view and which is best. Theirs is the ONLY point of view. In this way they are on the road to totalitarianism.
Cucumbers. Green, long and narrow outside, white inside. Some even look like one, See, Dellers. There is another Cucumber, also with a name beginning with D, who has it in it for Watermelons, but I just can't remember his name right now.
Useful things, cucumbers
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers."
Jonathan Swift
Thanks Messenger.
I think I have just cured the "no solar energy at night" problem.
jamesp,
Any chance you could have a word with my doctor? Just the other day she asked me how much I drink. "60 units a week" I told her. She looked shocked. She should already have known, as a nurse had asked me the same question a while ago. When I told her the answer she looked shocked too, and said "I'm not putting that on the computer! I'll say 30 units."
I've just read the actual speech by Davey. Let's get straight to the real meat:
And at the end:
The 97% is in the very last sentence! Though now I think it's the truly mystic 97% of 'governments, scientists, campaigners, businesses, journalists, the whole of society' who are somehow deemed to agree, in flat denial of all opinion polls. We're all in the excrement together?
This is beyond appalling, given the shakiness of Cook's work. Those that wrote this are not guiltless of the deaths that will come as electricity becomes even more needlessly expensive to line the pockets of already rich 'new energy' providers.
Well put, Noblesse Oblige (4:19 PM). Davey may be a vacuous lightweight from whom we shall hopefully hear little more after the next election, but his attitude is an unsettling one. Well done Toby Young for highlighting it, and the Bish for doing the same here.
Donna Laframboise has also published some keen insights into this shocking episode of low-grade politics: Ed Davey, the UK's Energy Bully
Thanks John. Donna's on the mark as usual. I've been mulling over my statement that Davey doesn't see much political future beyond the election. What odds a nice fat salary from Big Green?
Firstly it is an individuals right to say what they want - within the law - and it is not for Ed Davey to say otherwise. I don't know, but it seems that the top level politician / functionaries are still running in the air with their little legs pumping hard, long after they have run off a cliff, just like certain cartoons, and they have no idea that they are 'out there'. It seems that the rest of the population, and - very late in the day - some elements of the media are finally waking up to the fact that the projected man made global warming has not happened, and the only product of climate science; their computer generated predictions have not modeled anything in the climate since these Nintendo computer models were created.
Richard Drake (5:58 PM) -
To me, it's not so much the shakiness of Cook's work -- because I think it *is* true that most scientists think that a significant portion of global warming is anthropogenic (whether the portion is a majority as Cook would have it, or some lesser fraction). It's the twisting of that into "this is dangerous" and "this is important enough to incur significant expense to mitigate." That step in the syllogism is elided more than it is expressed.
.
We saw that earlier in the tweet attributed to Barack Obama (but not actually from his office) which gratuitously added "dangerous" to Cook's claim of consensus.
HaroldW: Agreed of course. But Cook's work for me includes the twisting into "this is dangerous" in the public space. If you disagree, when have you seen him complain about this? Most notably, was it Cook that complained publicly about the Obama tweet or our own Richard Betts? So for me it is the shakiness of all his works - plus in this case it's the extremely misleading and misguided application of the 97% to the whole of society by Ed Davey's speechwriters at the end. It's hard to find the right words. Pathetically bad will do for now :)
Richard Tol has been shredding the Cook et al. paper. See WUWT current thread which links to draft response by Tol, demonstrating the Cook and Nuccitelli are unfit for "scientific" research.
97% is the perfect PR life preserver.
Cook's work has been and will be shredded but not before it has served its purpose.
Why the constant reference to watermelons (e.g. in Josh’s recent cartoon)? I suspect that, in my peripatetic life away for t’internet, I’ve missed something.
James E
You could introduce your doctor to this character, writing on a forum I checked earlier:
"Have to say, I was drinking extremely heavily for about 10 years, 100-150 units a week easily, drinking every day, and when I finally sought treatment for alcoholism last year, they did tests and an ultrasound on my liver and found it was completely healthy. Now under no circumstances do I recommend drinking that much, but that experience, and having an okay liver at the end, did lead me to suspect the government guidelines on booze might be shite."
I warmed to this chap, too:
"I drink a bottle of wine every night. That's over 60 units a week. I have done this for about 5 years so by all accounts i'm a middle aged alcoholic with a penchant for binge drinking. Utter crap! I feel perfectly healthy, never drink before 5pm and haven't had a day off ill in all my 31 years of continual employment. Why can't the Government just govern?"
In fact it turns out, after Tol's corrections of Cook's shoddy analysis, that the vast majority of the papers offer no endorsement or evidentiary support for the causal hypothesis of AGW. 95% of the papers do NOT add to any case for AGW. This is all a squalid shell game by charlatans like Cook, Nuccitelli, Oreskes and Conway, et al. Most papers which mention "global climate change" etc. are starting from an assumption and then discussing some aspects of mitigation, effects, adaptation, etc. but not providing any evidence of AGW per se.
WUWT thread on Tol refutation of Cook et al.
The call for critics to be silenced always comes from those whose own case is weak and unable to stand up to the questioning. And that why its so often seen from AGW proponents has far from the 'science be settled ' has they claimed time and again .
There much that is still unknown or poorly understood , which in any other area of science would lead to debate and adjustments has a matter of course . Its only in religions do we find the idea that once a 'dogma ' is laid down it should not and cannot be challenged nor changed.
In these calls we see a weakness of argument combined with approach that own far more a religions conviction than the approaches used in science,
Radical Rodent
A watermelon is green on the outside and red (ie Marxist tendencies) on the inside.
In a book called Watermelons that he wrote, James Delingpole slated the greens, their philosophy, their dogma and their proposals.
Richard Drake (6:30 PM):
"Cook's work for me includes the twisting into "this is dangerous" in the public space."
Agreed. They stayed away (more or less) from that theme in the paper, but Cook certainly seemed to relish the expansion of the paper's weak conclusions and of its import. But as the purpose was PR, not science...
I think Tol's first summary was wonderful: "a silly idea poorly implemented."
I would argue that folks have been very late waking up to Ed Davey's line of argument. This has been put forward from the earliest days, starting, with the Boykoff paper of "false balance". There simply isn't any more room for smiling and shrugging of the shoulders saying, "look, how quaint, they want to shut us down".
"You should listen to the experts and you don't have to listen to the rabble, when it comes to climate" - this has been a message in the making for a long, long time. Look at the Garnaut review in Australia. It had a section/submission on the value of consensus.
When the Cook gang came up with the 'escalator graph', I was amazed they could sell something so useless. But sell it they did, and soon enough, there was a US senator exhibiting the graph in his talk.
Davey will have to get a new speech writer once this 'Register of Lobbyists' is up and running.
There's nothing more likely to turn journalists sceptical to be told not to report on it. To be told not to report on something by a politician is another goad. If there was some way to work a sex scandle in, it would hit the front page. The only way Ed could have done us a greater favour would be to proposition Lawson in return for keeping quiet about climate scepticism.
@Richard Drake
"The next few years will be definitive in the fight against climate change."
They've been saying that for decades now. They should change the record, now that it's becoming obvious the worst predictions of the IPCC et al. were overblown.
What is puzzling about the supposed 97% consensus (which seemingly now extends to the community at large, according to Davey) is why on earth they are so concerned about the opinions of the 3%? How is that any kind of threat?
People like Stalin regarded even 3% dissent as intolerable, but most modern politicians seem to rub along with a bit more than half (if they are lucky) of the community supporting them, while the rest are indifferent at best and loathe them at worst.
There is a very nasty undercurrent in all these demands for 100% uniformity.
Jun 3, 2013 at 6:38 PM | Skiphil
Unless, of course, that "scientific' research is being carried out upon them.
Even if Davey really believes the 97% twaddle, it is not wise for a politician to deliberately characterise and insult whole sections of the electorate.
Dominic Lawson has his number, too:
Link
The press don't seem too impressed with Mr Ed - indeed, it looks like he may have succeeded where the rest of us have failed!
Jun 3, 2013 at 2:39 PM | jamspid
"...Only good thing that came from the Banking Collapse and the Economic Recession it killed off Climate Change.We cant afford Eco Vanity."
///////////////////////////
The financial crisis may have cost trillions of dollars, but as you point out, it may also have saved the world from wasting trillions of dollars on climate change. Perhaps we have something to cheer the bankers for!
Davy was shot down by Peter Lilley on BBC Daily Politics. The 97% was debunked however the host quickly ended the interview partially obscuring Lilley's reply.
Davey's vacuosity was amply demonstrated by him interrupting Lilley within 5 seconds of Lilley answering the host's first question put to him with an impertinent question: "Are you a Sceptic or a Denier?"
I love Davey's claim that if we don't decarbonise the economy we will not be competitive in the future. A quite astounding inversion of the facts.