THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Another attack on democracy in New Zealand

Another attack on democracy in New Zealand

Under their recently retired PM Ardern, significant power in the country was transferred to the Maori minority. The Parliament became no longer supreme. NZ journalist Marc Daalder has mounted another attack on NZ democracy. See below.

Daalder is a global warming true believer. And he doesn't let the facts get in his way. For a start his assertion that "Human civilisation has never before seen a world as hot as Earth is today " is quite false. It ignores the Medieval warm period and the Roman warm period. Is he saying that the ancient Romans were not civilized? Is he denying that it was hotter then? Elephants cannot now traverse the Alps the way they did under Hannibal.

And note in his third paragraph how he slides from saying (correctly) that there is a lot of CO2 in the atmophere today to linking that to New Zealand's recent weather disasters. Even the IPCC says you cannot infer climate from weather.

But he really nails his colours to the mast when he says that "It is incontrovertible that human burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of climate change". Incontrovertible? A lot of people have controverted it. He is just a foolish young man. He is not worth a Dutch dollar

National Party MP Maureen Pugh echoed an old adage of climate deniers on Tuesday when asked about her belief in human-caused global warming. The climate, she said, has always changed, but she was still awaiting evidence that humans are causing changes this time around.

This is a classic example of paltering - the use of selective truthful statements to create a misleading overall impression. Scientists are aware the climate has changed in the past, and it is the reality of these past changes that make our current situation so concerning.

The last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, New Zealand had crocodiles, Central Otago was hotter and more tropical than Queensland is today and conifers lined the coast of Antarctica. Human civilisation has never before seen a world as hot as Earth is today - let alone the 2.6C of warming we are on track for.

Clearly, past climates are not reassuring. But the human impact here is clear as well. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is increasing at the fastest observed rate in 66 million years of records.

It is incontrovertible that human burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of climate change and global temperature increase. That's the conclusion of 234 experts from 64 countries who wrote the latest review of scientific evidence for climate change for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They reviewed 14,000 scientific papers, responded to 80,000 comments from peer reviewers and produced a 2400-page report, as well as a summary for policymakers approved line-by-line by 195 countries.

The first line of that summary?

"It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred."

If that isn't enough, consider that the Royal Society of New Zealand first backed the scientific consensus on climate way back in 2001, back when Pugh had been a local councillor for just three years and before her nine-year mayoral term or seven years as an MP. It was joined by 33 other national science academies from around the world.

There's also the World Meteorological Organisation, the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, the American Geophysical Union, the European Federation of Geologists, the American Meteorological Society, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the Royal Meteorological Society, the American Medical Association and dozens of other expert groups.

When Pugh said she was awaiting evidence from Climate Change Minister James Shaw on the human influence on the climate, why were the views and research of tens of thousands of practising scientists worldwide not enough for her?

Now, of course, Pugh says it was all a misunderstanding. "Human-induced climate change is real," she now says. She had been "unclear", she says.

Pugh wasn't unclear, she was crystal clear on Tuesday morning. She was asked point blank whether she believed in human-caused climate change. She didn't say "yes", she said she was waiting for Shaw's response with the evidence.

It is not credible that Pugh accepted the scientific consensus on climate change when she gave these answers, which inherently contradict her later claim that she had seen all the evidence she needed.

"I'm not waiting on the evidence," she told reporters on Tuesday afternoon, three hours after she told the same reporters, "I am waiting on the evidence".

It's not credible either for her to have missed or ignored two decades of scientific research on climate change, only to have reviewed the science over lunch on Tuesday and come around on the whole climate change thing.

Neither what Pugh wants the public to believe nor any alternative generous interpretations of her swift about-face are feasible.

Even putting aside this dishonesty, the situation raises greater questions about the quality of our representatives.

Pugh is of course an example of the historically poor quality of National's candidate vetting.

When she first arrived at Parliament, she said she didn't believe in pharmaceuticals. In 2021, she was one of the last of the party's caucus to get vaccinated, saying she had not yet booked a doctor's appointment. During the Parliament occupation, she briefly wrote in support of the protesters before deleting the social media post.

The climate issue is perhaps the most significant question mark over her record, however.

In 2023, as climate-intensified storms and cyclones have already killed 15 people, rendered thousands homeless and caused billions of dollars in damage, not accepting the scientific basis for anthropogenic (human-caused) warming is unacceptable in a legislator.

It speaks to both a callous disregard for the mounting toll of victims of climate change and an irrationality we wouldn't allow on other issues. Would anyone trust an MP who was a flat earther to make the best decisions for their constituents and their country?

Legislators make decisions on policy that have concrete effects on people's lives and the country's climate response. It's clearly untenable for people who deny the fact of climate change to be making those calls.

The rapid backlash to Pugh's statements and her unconvincing retraction show that the public and most sitting MPs also see climate denial as an automatic disqualifier for holding office.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/sustainable-future/climate-deniers-should-not-be-mps

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Another attack on democracy in New Zealand

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