Interesting Links for 07-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• 9 Facebook Lies You Should Never Share With Your Friends
  (tags: lies facebook fraud meme )
• Xbox One will be best experienced with IPv6
  (tags: ipv6 consoles internet )
• Forget Shorter Showers - personal change does not equal political chane
  (tags: politics environment activism )
• Kofi Annan: Stop 'war on drugs'
  (tags: UnitedNations drugs legalisation

Comments

[momentsmusicaux]

I am sceptical about the personal change thing. For one thing, surely political change brings about personal change through changes in laws and so on?
Secondly, I am wary that it's just a nice comforting way for us to all let ourselves off the hook, start turning up the heating and stop recycling and book flights to wherever the fuck.

[andrewducker]

I didn't read it as "Don't make personal change" but as "Don't be fooled into thinking that personal change is anywhere near enough"

[andrewducker]

Oh, and laws definitely lead to personal change - which is why bringing in a plastic bag tax, for instance, leads to a 90-odd percent drop in bags. But saying "I use long term bags, go me!" doesn't have as much of a change :->

[momentsmusicaux]

But we have rubbish politicians who only pass laws when they think public opinion is behind them (unlike, say, lizards, who would just do the right thing). So plastic bag law will only happen when there's vanguard of people who are already doing it. Otherwise you get loads of people complaining, say, about councils only collecting bins every fortnight, and then Eric Pickles being a shithead.

[andrewducker]

Yes, public opinion is useful because that gets the political change going. That doesn't make the individual change useful for its own sake.

[alitheapipkin]

The thing that immediately had my hackles up was the tosh about climate change - scientists would be thrilled if the USA cut its emissions by 22%, they and China are the biggest producers on a per-country basis. And I don't know what that sweeping claim about needing to reduce emissions by 75% (of what level?) is about!

[andrewducker]

I thought we had to lower global emissions by 75% in order to return to "normal" levels?

[alitheapipkin]

You mean pre-industrialisation levels?
Find me a single scientist who thinks insisting on that is going to get us anywhere!

(Sorry, I shouldn't really get into this now because I'm in chaos at work)

[andrewducker]

The IPCC says that if we want to avoid more than a 4 degree rise, then we need to target 50-85% reductions in emissions by 2050.

(That's reductions on 2000-levels, not current levels)

[alitheapipkin]

Ah, I should check these things before I mouth off.

Still, without the 'by 2050', 'on 2000 levels' and 'to avoid a 4 degree temperature rise' his claim is pretty misleading. He really ought to have referenced properly.

[heron61]

For one thing, surely political change brings about personal change through changes in laws and so on?

Yes, and that's the point. Fighting for laws and for institutional change is awesome. Not bothering with that, and instead only changing your own behavior is utterly pointless, and thinking that doing so is both virtuous and will someone improve the world is even worse.

The problem is that the mass movements of the 1960s scared the hell out of a lot of conservative & centrist politicians and the rich people they serve. Starting in the late 1970s (at least in the US) we saw was concerted effort in the mass media to downplay and discredit that sort of mass activity, with similar efforts in the UK (Thatcher's infamous "There is no such thing as society" quote is also part of this. Instead, people have been sold the utterly false idea that instead of organizing and lobbying for structural and institutional changes, all they need to do to improve the world is concern themselves with their own lives and not rock the political boat.