I’ll be voting Green again this year.

Although the common usage of the term has mutated bizarrely in recent years, I consider myself basically a political conservative. I’m motivated mainly by a desire for society that’s stable, pragmatic and planning for the long term. I want politicians who have a sense of perspective, and are willing to care about what’s important in the broad sweep of history, not what the public and media are obsessed about this week.

As far as I’m concerned, the main issues in this election are climate change, ocean acidification and peak oil. Same as last time, and the time before that. Short of unforeseeable and near-mircaulous developments, they’ll continue to be the main issues for the rest of my lifetime. I have my opinions about health and education and how to run the economy, but they’re sideshows. My evaluation of political parties starts with their positions in areas where our civilization is in fundamental jeopardy.

ACT has a policy to dump the Emissions Trading Scheme. Likewise with the Conservative Party (I can’t see it on their website, but they sent me a pamphlet). I’m open to a discussion on the relative merits of emissions trading scheme, carbon taxes and other measures to deal with our problems, but it turns out they propose nothing to replace it. There’s some nonsense about how we shouldn’t be “leading the world”. As if there were any risk of that.

New Zealand First has a vague statement on their site about “Environment”, and how it is good. It’s on the page labelled “Policy”, but does not constitute anything I’d recognise as being policy.

I couldn’t find anything from the Māori Party.

Mana gets points from me for mentioning Peak oil, but their policies aren’t concrete enough for me. I’ll watch them in future.

Labour has a lot of specific policy on their site, but it took me a long time to find anything about climate change. It turns out there’s a PDF policy document here, which is linked to from their site, but otherwise the topic isn’t mentioned. The policy is perfectly sensible, and I believe there are elements within the Labour Party that take it seriously, but the degree to which it’s been buried makes me doubt whether the whole party cares. I appreciate that the public is distracted at the moment by shorter term economic issues, but as I said, I want politicians who are capable of looking further ahead that the general public can.

National has a climate change policy that’s easier to find. They apparently intend to keep the current ETS and tinker with it. I can’t work out what they intend to do about agricultural emissions apart from “reviewing” it. I believe they understand we have problems, which is something given their history and constituency, but I don’t see them going anywhere.

That leaves the Green Party. As you’d expect, their policy is comprehensive. Labour’s comes close, and in some places I feel it’s a little stronger on specifics, but I know the Greens are serious.

I’ve been following the weird controversy over the Cordoba Center in New York with some interest, inasmuch as it’s a fascinating example of the politics of fear.

As far as I can make out, the arguments against it seems to be that Muslims shouldn’t build a cultural centre in Manhattan because it offends some ill-defined group of other people who think all Muslims are terrorists. Usually the actual person making the case acknowledges that the Cordoba Center people aren’t terrorists, so they have to come up with some quite bizarre logical gymnastics to explain why we should disregard what they know to be the case in favour of the ill-conceived notions of ignorant people who may or may not exist.

That would be bad enough if the Cordoba Center were a neutral organisation for private worship. In fact, it’s exactly the kind of organisation that’s on the front lines of combatting terrorism. Islamist terrorist groups do exist, and they operate by brainwashing young Muslim believers into thinking that Islam is locked into an unavoidable battle with the terrible Crusaders of the West. Thankfully these groups are tiny, and their message doesn’t stand up well to the day-to-day experience of most Muslims living in the West, but it’s a constant battle within Muslim communities to contain the influence of these cultish groups. This is where the real fight against Al Qaeda is being waged, and the Cordoba Center should be seen as a fortress defending the United States against terrorism.

Because… you know who wants you to think that all Muslims are terrorists? Osama Bin laden, that’s who.

I have two rooms coming available soon, if you or someone you know needs a place to live. Both are large, and close to the university and the chocolate shop. Must be a grown-up and like (or at least tolerate) cats.

Sometimes the best ideas are nothing more than reformulations of existing ideas in a convenient package. The iPad springs to mind, but that’s not what I came here to talk about. Another fine example is this hierarchy of disagreements by Paul Graham (via Marbury). There’s nothing there that hasn’t been observed countless times in human discourse, but the innovation lies in arranging the types of disagreement into a hierarchy according to how convincing they are, and (especially clever) giving them short labels. Thus:

• DH0. Name-calling.
• DH1. Ad Hominem.
• DH2. Responding to Tone.
• DH3. Contradiction.
• DH4. Counterargument.
• DH5. Refutation.
• DH6. Refuting the Central Point.

Graham notes that there’s a distinct shift in quality after DH3. Up to that point you have rhetorical techniques that will always unconvincing. DH4 is the first level that has any capacity to convince.

I believe there’s a simple reason for this shift in quality. DH0 to DH3 do not require that the speaker make any attempt to understand what their opponent is actually saying. You can do DH4 while missing the point entirely, but it at least involves staying on roughly the same topic.

I am particularly interested in what happens when one participant in a discussion is operating in the range from DH0-3, and the other is operating at DH4-5 (DH6 is, I think, seldom attainable). That is, one participant is discussing the topic and the other is just playing games. It’s tempting to just assume that this is a fixed state: no discussion is possible because one person is a troll, and they’re not going to change. But this isn’t the case in practice: sometimes people do shift from DH0-3 to DH4-5. The trick is to work out whether there’s any potential for this in any given conversation.

It’s hard to find a suitable historical precedent for what just happened at Copenhagen. There have been abject failures of leadership at a national level, and huge regional mistakes like the Treaty of Versaille, but I can’t think of any case as comprehensive as this. The leadership of the world has met in the face of a very obvious collective threat, and betrayed every person on the planet.

We’ve known for years how this has to work. Emissions trading, binding caps, and investment by the developed countries in cleaner infrastructure in the the developing countries. It’s been thrashed out many many times.

I understand the politics, and all the pathetic excuses for why this country can’t do this until that country does that, but you can’t reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere by whining at them.

If you’d like to see me limp dramatically up and down some stairs, now’s your chance. Plus, you also get a crucifixion, birdpeople and an overwrought cow-woman. All the great things that have brought people out to the theatre for over 2400 years.

Prometheus Bound runs 8pm 9-12 December, at the Old Queens Theatre on Hereford Street.

More information at the Facebook page.

My bike lock stopped working. I bought a new bike lock, with four keys and a special bracket to attach it to the frame. The next day my new bike lock fell off the bracket in transit and is now lost. As a temporary measure, I went back to using my old bike lock as a prop. You can pull it apart without a key, but it looks like my bike is locked. Yesterday I forgot to take my old bike lock key with me at all, which wouldn’t have been a problem except that my old bike lock has unaccountably started working again, so I had to walk home. Now I find that I can no longer locate my old bike lock key.

As is so often the case, Plan D involves a hacksaw.

I am rehearsing two plays. In one I will be required to crucify a dude. In the other I shall be an aeroplane.

It is very important I do not get these parts mixed up. The Little Prince‘s themes of yearning for lost childhood and the suffocating banality of adult society could possibly survive the unexpected introduction of a crucifixion scene, but I’m almost certain that Aeschylus (if the author was indeed Aeschylus) did not intend for Hephaistos to bear Prometheus around the stage on his shoulders making neeeyaaaaar noises.

While riding my bike north from Christchurch today, I met some guys driving south atop a giant smoke-belching steam engine. They were towing a spacious-looking homemade caravan, and behind that a mid-size commercial truck.

Me and those guys are ready for Peak Oil.

Do you like to talk? At length? With other people? And with nice food?

Here is the basic idea behind Talk Club:

1. We meet at 4pm on a Sunday evening.
2. Everybody brings a plate of food, and drink as you see fit.
3. Everybody brings something to share. It can be an idea, a question, a poem, a piece of music, a game to play, a powerpoint presentation… anything that people can discuss.
4. Everybody gets a card with their name on it.
5. We put the cards in a hat or a velvet bag or somesuch, and draw one out.
6. If your card is drawn, you present your presentation.
7. Following the presentation, discussion is allowed. Sometimes it’ll be the point of the exercise, sometimes it’ll be more like “what did everyone think of that?” Discussion will continue until it’s done.
8. Repeat steps 3 to 8 until everybody agrees we’re done for the evening.

If you think there should be other rules… we can talk about that.

First meeting is at my place from 4:00pm to 10:00pm on Sunday, 4 October 2009. Email me if you need the address.