Steve Hind at Election Blackout:

Tony Abbott announced last night at the ‘people’s forum’ at the Broncos Leagues Club that he would campaign non stop from today until the election on Saturday. It seems he literally plans not to sleep until Saturday – even campaigning on graveyard shift radio between midnight at three AM.

That. Is. Totally. Insane.

Yep.

And how does this stack up against the perception that KRudd was often in poor form because he didn’t sleep enough? I don’t know that voters are really looking for a PM who wants to jeopardise their own judgement and health. Or some sort of weird self-immolation or sacrifice in our cause.

I really get the impression with Tony Abbott that all this frenetic cycling and running around, and the desire to be constantly active, is something deeply personal. Where it comes from I don’t care to speculate.

But I do wonder how he will cope if he loses.

Again, on his own admission, he went into a funk when the Howard government was booted out. Much of the thrust of his campaign, aided and abetted by the Dear Ex-Leader himself, has been to wipe away the wound of that defeat.

I don’t think he’s going to be a good loser.

Let’s try to sort through the issues Abbott’s interview raised. For me, there are three key points:

(a) Even if one were to accept Abbott’s claim, an interview with Neil Mitchell on radio, where he made his “no new taxes” pledge a month before he pledged a Great Big New Tax, hardly constitutes heated political debate. Any Opposition Leader should be prepared to be upfront and open about their policy orientation in a formal interview. If Abbott can’t handle the pressure of such a situation, he shouldn’t been in the game;

(b) This leads to the second point – Abbott, the so-called street fighter, is a lazy and inept politician, doing none of the hard yards on policy formulation, and hoping it will always be right on the night. When confronted with this, he reverts to some sort of adolescent “aw shucks, I’m just a charming and crazy boy, please forgive me” posture. This is consistent with his overall persona – constant confession and oversharing, and an inability to understand that his own failings don’t earn him an endless series of absolutions. Abbott, it could be argued, is incapable of taking responsibility for his own words and actions;

(c) Abbott is wrong that everyday interactions do or should involve stretching the truth or thoughtless hyperbole.

Jonathan Green:

“Most of us know when we’re talking to people or when we’re listening to people, I think we know when we can put absolute weight on what’s being said and when it’s just the give and take of standard conversation.”

Well no Tony, most of us conduct ourselves in life from a starting point of fairly straightforward sincerity. Our day-to-day conversations are in fact built on trust and simple truth; to behave otherwise is to set life and its relationships on something shakier than a house of cards.

Unless of course you are entrusted, by an honest, hopeful, vote of the people to address the challenges of national government. Or aim to be. Then, it seems, you can lie through your teeth.

Still Life With Cat:

No, ‘most of us know’ that when we’re talking to normal people they’re usually telling the truth. This may be because most normal people don’t have all that much to hide.

I think there’s a real difference between Abbott’s carelessness with language and cavalier relationship to the truth and the problems Kevin Rudd has had with promises – while I’ve been highly critical of the ETS backdown, I don’t question Rudd’s genuineness in seeking to do something about climate change.

I do question his political will, his political skill, and his choice of policy responses.

But I don’t think that what we’re seeing here is some sort of generalisable phenomenon whereby all politicians tell lies. We have to take Abbott at his word on this, though the paradox of doing so has been pointed out more than once. His description of his own conduct really does go to his character and his ability as a politician.

This is not just a “gaffe” or a storm in a teacup.

NB: Previous discussion on LP here.

Indeed, those who study the climate itself rather than the bogus debate in the newspapers and the blogosphere understand that climate science and popular perceptions of climate science are diverging rapidly, not least because the news on the former is getting worse.

Indeed. But there’s something of a perception lurking around here that ‘science’ is one thing and ‘politics’ another, which I think is false.

It’s certainly the case that whatever ammunition denialists use against climate science is not itself part of the ‘skepticism’ which is said to be integral to the scientific method. Rather than proposing an alternative hypothesis which would better explain the range of observations made, any line of attack is used, no matter how contradictory with others it may be. So, what we have in denialist discourse is all politics, and no science. No scientific method.

It’s important to underline this point. What denialists cannot provide is anything which can approximate to a truth statement. Methodological doubt, Cartesian style, is supposed to be a prelude to the uncovering of a truth, not a rhetorical strategy of dismissal. Climate change skepticism, contrary to the claims of some of its proponents, has absolutely nothing to do with ‘The Enlightenment’. Quite the contrary.

Their other classic move is to hold science itself to an impossible standard. Somehow the findings of climate science have to be unequivocally true. What we actually see, then, in this contre-temps is a debate over what constitutes truth. Statements made by the IPCC, for instance, are couched in terms of Bayesian probabilities, rather than ‘predictions’. It’s the same form of statement as with genetic predispositions individuals may have to particular diseases; having such a predisposition does not imply that one will necessarily develop the disease. Probability is not destiny or fate. But probabilities of 90%, as in the IPCC’s Fourth Report, are very strong indeed.

But asking science to articulate truth, if truth is understood as incontrovertible knowledge, is asking it to do something it cannot do.

Nor is the process of reaching a consensus the only method of achieving scientific truth. Statements such as that a 2 degree rise in global temperature is a ceiling beyond which catastrophic climate change will occur are artefacts of a particular process, which is not unrelated to the previous adoption of that range in EU public policy. That’s not to say that it has no merit, or isn’t ‘true’. If anything, the likelihood is that things a lot worse than envisaged will happen if temperature can be restricted to this range, for a range of reasons. The ‘consensus’, then, is likely to be more conservative than the actuality.

That’s also because the model of expert knowledge being the foundation of public policy is an out-dated one – politics and values always intervene, and must intervene, in the process of arriving at a mediation between science as truth and policy as truth effect. To the degree that scientists are being asked to do something other than what a notion of a bounded rationality would suggest, it’s best that they, and we, recognise this. The imbrication of science and values is not of itself a problem, or need not be. Here we can learn from Max Weber’s insights in Science As A Vocation.

In Hamilton’s writing, as in the work of others who are concerned about science communication in a political context, there seems to be an implicit belief that communication is a straightforward process of explaining science to a public. That is not so. And not just because some publics lack knowledge of scientific process, but also because there are different cultural and affective dispositions which inflect how the message is received.

It’s not the case that communication on climate science fails because it’s mediated through a political lens, full of noise created by denialists and politicians and the media. Or rather, it’s not wholly true, because communication is never linear, but always mediated. The challenge is not better to communicate a truth, but rather to realise that the construction of a truth is always via mediation, and that values and politics are, and must be, part of that.

To circle back to the question the post posed; Pilate asked a good question. But the answer to it is not that the truth cannot be discovered. It is to recognise that truth is a matter of persuasion, involving particular dispositions among interlocutors. Values and fact, therefore.

It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.

But there’s a broader point here.

We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Therapeutic cultures, cyber-utopian discourses, marketing moves – all encourage us to tell our stories and rearrange the bits of the world as narratives (if not ones entirely of our own making). There’s something here of what Michel Foucault diagnosed as the diffusion of the practice of confession – and an incitement to tell one’s truth – from the Church outwards into the culture. Now, it would be too simplistic to condemn this (or, for that matter, to offer an enconium to it). Sweeping judgements on social trends tend to say more about those doing the judging than the reality – revealing, all too often, the value judgements they attempt to conceal.

One question, though, could be addressed to Stutchbury – what is, in fact, involved in the demand that policy conform to a narrative?

It’s a demand journos, particularly at The Australian, seem to make very frequently. It obscures a heap of ideological baggage. It can’t be just any narrative. It has to be the preferred ‘reform’ narrative.

Let me get one last thing straight. I’m a fan of story-telling. I like to tell stories myself. But a narrative doesn’t have to be coherent, or sustained by evidence. It’s not the same thing as an argument. It might be a good thing if that were realised – that accountability to reason and truth and evidence can be the price of seeing everything in terms of narrative.

Update: On Paul Kelly.

Myth #1: The Obama turnout meant that Prop 8 won in California.

But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly. Exit polls suggest that first-time voters — the vast majority of whom were driven to turn out by Obama (he won 83 percent [!] of their votes) — voted against Prop 8 by a 62-38 margin

- Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com

Myth #2: The Democrats’ victory wasn’t comprehensive.

What happened? Overall, the Democrats gained a bit in 2004, a lot in 2006, and some in 2008. But we knew that (see the time series plot in the blog entry linked above). We also see a bit of scatter. Beyond this, yes, there are some patterns. In 2006, the Democrats particularly gained in Republican areas–see how those dots in the lower left of the second graph are way above the 45-degree line? In 2008, the swing is more uniform… Returning to the “How well did the Democrats actually do in 2008? question, I think that one problem is that people are comparing Obama’s vote to Kerry’s vote but then comparing the congressional Democrats in 2008 to the congressional Democrats in 2006. I think it’s more appropriate to compare 2008 to 2004 in both cases. As Paul Krugman put it, “Maybe the reason people don’t see this is that the Democratic House gains were spread over two elections.”

- Andrew Gelman.

Myth #3: Obama would be politically sensible to govern as a moderate gradualist.

So a serious progressive agenda — call it a new New Deal — isn’t just economically possible, it’s exactly what the economy needs.The bottom line, then, is that Barack Obama shouldn’t listen to the people trying to scare him into being a do-nothing president. He has the political mandate; he has good economics on his side. You might say that the only thing he has to fear is fear itself.

- Paul Krugman.