Monthly Archives: July 2022

Here we go again; the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador appears to be full speed ahead to move toward a giveaway of public land Crown land to private businesses.

This time, the big gamble is wind energy, but whats the rush?

Wind energy may be a profitable opportunity for the province and certainly warrants investigation. No doubt private enterprise can possibly play a beneficial, and leading, role in pursuing wind energy opportunities. But it seems that this whole process by the Furey Liberal Government is about as transparent as a muddy puddle. All Crown land, it was announced this week, is open for proposals for wind energy. But with our collective land assets, environment and future open for bid, youd think that a bit more information on this whole process would available at this point.

What role and opportunities for input will local peoples have throughout the process of development and management of wind turbines and infrastructure in their regions? Is the province looking for a stake in any venture to ensure income to the provincial purse? To what extent are the Crown lands for sale versus for lease, and who is making the decisions about the sale or lease for the province? How are conflicts of interest being assessed, by whom and mitigated? And how are considerations for the short and long-term effects on local ecosystems and traditional practices of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians being incorporated into the proposal processes?

These are just some of the questions that need to be publicly discussed before major decisions that will affect our present and future are made. I live in Central Newfoundland. The legacy of privatization of large parts of our forests to pulp and paper companies starting about 130 years ago still affect local communities and people as land use and access is complicated by the end of the industry in the region.

Lessons need to be learned and incorporated from our experiences with the pulp and paper industry. Wind energy may be a positive future opportunity, but transparency is needed as we explore these new and untested waters.

Danita Burke,Bishop's Falls

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LETTER: Why is the N.L. government rushing into wind energy? - Saltwire

Bainbridge Island City Council appears poised to adopt an ordinance that would alter zoning regulations to allow for a high-density affordable housing development on a few acres owned by Bethany Lutheran Church at the intersection of Finch and Sportsman Club roads.

That parcel beautiful open space and wildlife habitat is part of the islands Conservation Area under our Comprehensive Plan.

But a coalition of interests is pushing for rapid development. They include the usual actors with economic interests builders, land-use consultants, realtors, etc., who often have little regard for environmental protection but also a surprising roster of new players: race equity activists and liberal church congregations, both of whom have uncritically embraced growth as part of their respective social justice agendas.

The race equity lobby wants affordable housing to promote diversity and to dismantle what Councilmember Jon Quitslund lamented at their April 26 meeting as the exclusive and monochromatic character of our current island population.

He called for intervention to arrest that trend: We need a vision for a different future, he said, not planning only for the immediate interests of current residents.

Church leadership at Bethany, meanwhile, sees development as the way to respond [to] Gods call for us to truly be neighbors, despite the deep misgivings of the actual Finch Road neighbors about the disproportionate plan for 21 residential units on about 4 acres in an R-0.4 zone, which normally would allow one residence per 2.5 acres.

There are multiple problems with the Bethany proposal and the drafts of the ordinance so far.

First, to reach the desired density, the ordinance would confer a density bonus exclusively on property owned or controlled by religious organizations. But that likely runs afoul of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment o the U.S. Constitution.

As explained to the council in an April 28 letter from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the provision of a special benefit to religious organizations that is unavailable to other groups violates the Establishment Clause. That position is supported by Supreme Court decisions holding that to pass constitutional muster, governmental incentives (such as greater land-use rights) must be allocated on the basis of neutral, secular criteria that neither favor nor disfavor religion, and [be] available to both religious and secular beneficiaries on a nondiscriminatory basis. Mitchell v. Helms, 530 U.S. 793, 813 (2000).

But even if that constitutional problem is cured by a revised ordinance that is neutral with respect to religion, the proposed upzoning should be rejected because it is inconsistent with, and would thoroughly undermine, the Comprehensive Plan that this community has worked so hard to develop. The Comp Plan repeatedly emphasizes, as a matter of the highest priority, that open, natural areas are highly valued by this community and should be protected. They confer a special character and quality of life benefitting everyone, while promoting sustainability, respect for the land, and environmental protection.

To be fair, the Comp Plan also contains aspirational goals for affordable housing, but it expressly instructs that high-density development such as that under consideration at Bethany should be in the Designated Centers with adequate infrastructure, such as Winslow. Those developments should not intrude into Conservation Areas.

For example, Comprehensive Plan Land Use Policy 1.2 states: Outside of Winslow and the Designated Centers, the Island has a rural appearance with forested areas, meadows, farms and winding, narrow, heavily vegetated roadways. These characteristics represent an important part of the Islands special character that is so highly valued by its residents.

Land Use Policy 4.1 instructs planners to [f]ocus development and redevelopment on the Island over the next fifty years in designated centers that have or will have urban levels of services and infrastructure while increasing conservation, protection and restoration on the Island. Land Use Goal LU-6 directs that development efforts should avoid the conversion of undeveloped land into sprawling development and thereby [e]nsure a development pattern that is true to the Vision for Bainbridge Island.

While affordable housing is an important goal, it can and should be provided within the parameters of the Comp Plan, without degrading Conservation Areas like the Bethany property. The Comprehensive Plan embodies years of work and community input, and its overarching theme of respect for nature and open space reflects the priorities of Island residents.

It should not be lightly discarded, especially where affordable housing can be developed within Designated Centers like Winslow without irrevocably damaging the natural environment. Once the trees are cut down and the land scraped bare by earth-moving equipment, it will be too late to realize that Open Space vs. Affordable Housing is a false choice. Both can be achieved, without rushing toward an ugly future of asphalt and concrete. Theres no social justice in that.

Joe McMillan, a longtime Bainbridge Island resident, practiced law in Seattle for over 20 years before retiring in 2020.

Excerpt from:

Shredding the Comp Plan will not promote social justice - Bainbridge Island Review

A political row has blown up in west Cornwall with claims that a planning application for affordable homes was turned down because it is connected with a former MP. Plans for 29 affordable homes in Newlyn were refused planning permission at a meeting this week.

Plans for the new homes, which would have been a mix of rent and shared ownership, had been recommended for approval by Cornwall Council planning officers. However the council's west area planning committee voted to refuse planning permission.

The reasons for refusal were concerns about the impact on the local roads which had been highlighted by Cornwall Councils highways officer. However, there are now claims that Conservative councillors worked to get the plans rejected as they are connected to former Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George.

Read more: Cornwall Council rejects plans for 29 affordable homes in Newlyn

Mr George, who is now Cornwall councillor for Ludgvan, Madron, Gulval and Heamoor, is also chief executive of Cornwall Community Land Trust which had submitted the plans for the 100 per cent affordable housing project in Newlyn. Marc Hadley, a former Liberal Democrat candidate for Penzance Town Council, took to Facebook to accuse Conservative councillors of playing political games at the expense oflocal families.

He claimed: PZ Tory deputy mayor, Will Elliott, was overheard by a Town Councillor lobbying colleagues to seek a 'strike down', saying that Andrew George who is the CEO of CCLT 'mustn't get a win here if we want to get Derek Thomas re-elected'.

So here are the local Conservatives playing political games while MP Derek Thomas professes to be sincerely concerned about the plight of local people amid the housing crisis. Will Elliot is a town councillor but also works full-time as part of Derek Thomas' constituency office team.

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Responding to the claims Mr Elliott said: I am quite shocked. I made my position quite clear at the meeting, my only concerns were about the highways matter and biodiversity - that was the only sticking point for me.

I would never bring party politics or my job into my role as a town councillor and I try and keep party politics out of the town council. I am fully in support of affordable homes as long as it fits with local infrastructure.

Mr Elliott said that with almost 100 objections from local residents he was not alone in having concerns about the highways element of the scheme. He said that he was seeking legal advice regarding the comments made by Mr Hadley.

Cllr George has said that he strives to separate his role as a councillor from his position with the community land trust. He has also indicated that the land trust is planning to appeal the decision to refuse planning permission.

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Claims that Conservatives in Penzance are 'playing political games' by rejecting plans for affordable homes - Cornwall Live

The latest shocking crash at the base of the South Eastern Freeway is a sign of a greater problem with South Australias transport system, argues Matthew Abraham.

A humble cardboard sign hinted at divine intervention on the South Eastern Freeways killer intersection.

The sign, strapped high up a goose-neck light pole on the toll gate intersection, simply said: Jesus Our Only Hope.

Never a truer word for those countless thousands of motorists who take their lives in their hands negotiating the expanse of tar where the freeway empties Adelaides hopeful pilgrims onto Cross, Glen Osmond and Portrush roads.

Yea and verily, you dont need to be a believer to accept it was a miracle no-one died when a truck towing a trailer ploughed through seven cars and a bus at the intersection on Sunday afternoon, sending nine people to hospital.

Its certainly beyond belief that the 60-year-old Queensland truck driver arrested, charged with 14 serious offences and released on bail to return home to the Sunshine Coast was allegedly unlicensed. Lets leave that little question for the courts, shall we?

This is a deadly intersection. In 2014, an out-of-control sewerage truck smashed through cars waiting at the lights, claiming two lives. That led to long-overdue speed and other restrictions on trucks using the freeways down-track. They appear to have helped, but not fixed, the constant threat to the lives of motorists.

As bad luck would have it, Im a frequent visitor to this intersection. If youre stuck in a block of cars waiting for the lights to change, trust me, youre a sitting duck.

The whole catastrophe is a prime example of the haphazard approach by successive South Australian governments to transport planning in Adelaide.

Incredibly, no government for the last 50 years Labor or Liberal has put in the hard yards to draw up and fund a coherent, long-term integrated transport strategy for this city of 1.4 million people. They dont have a plan. They dont even have a clue.

Our governments prefer an ad hoc approach to transport spending, with priorities determined by pork-barrelling in marginal seats, ministerial whims, band-aid fixes and desperate grabs for Commonwealth cash.

How else do you explain needlessly blowing $61m of state and Commonwealth cash on the Cross and Fullarton road intersection, just a few hundred metres downhill from the toll gate? This doesnt include the $2m trashing of the sweet, heritage-listed Urrbrae Gatehouse, rebuilding it at a new location where few will see it.

The Department of Infrastructure and Transport says the upgrade will improve travel times and road safety, increase intersection capacity and enhance network reliability. The enhance network reliability line is a giggle because it assumes Adelaide has a transport network to enhance.

Trams to nowhere that cant turn right. The O-Bahn tunnel. No passenger train for Mount Barker. Its what we do.

And squatting on top of all this, like a hungry, hungry hippo, is the South Road upgrade.

Its a blessing new Transport Minister Tom Koutsantonis has gone back to the drawing board on the former Marshall Governments $9b plans for a wild mish-mash of tunnels, fly-overs and lowered roadways for the so-called missing link of the South Road upgrade.

Hes a smart guy. He should dump the project completely. The state simply cant afford to rack up $9b in debt for a project that promises to deliver so little for so much.

It might be a Boomer thing to remember, but Adelaide once briefly had a proper transport strategy the Metropolitan Area Transport Study, or MATS plan.

It was released in 1969 by then Liberal Premier Steele Hall, caused a public uproar, then was shelved by the incoming Dunstan Government in the early 70s. Dunstan at least preserved the land corridor. The death knell for MATS came in 1982 when the Tonkin Liberal Government started selling the land. It was killed stone dead in 1983 when the Bannon Labor Government abandoned land set aside for a North-South Corridor, the last remnant of MATS. Strangling MATS was a combined, apolitical effort.

Bob Day, former Family First Senator now head of the Australian Family Party, has been revisiting the MATS plan of late in his engaging email epistles to supporters.

Day, who at the time was working for the old SA Highways Department as a laboratory technician in the departments materials, research and testing laboratories at Northfield, describes cancelling MATS as an insane decision.

All the land for the new road corridors had been acquired and the project was ready to go, he writes. So distressed was Commissioner Keith Johinke by this announcement, he refused to sign the papers for the projects cancellation, leaving it to an underling to carry out the Ministers orders. The Department never recovered. Nor did Adelaides road transport system.

For its day, MATS was a crazy, brave plan. For a city that had only just moved on from horse-drawn omnibuses, the concept of high-speed freeways looping the suburbs was like something lifted from The Jetsons*.

Former Liberal leader Steven Marshall came up with his own crazy brave transport idea for the 2018 state election. Globelink remains one of the few genuinely interesting policies put to SA voters in decades. A lack of political will and a $2m feasibility study killed it off.

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Globelink promised an integrated road, rail and dedicated air freight hub at Murray Bridge, with a road and rail corridor running behind the Adelaide Hills, to connect both Highway One and the Melbourne rail line to northern Adelaide.

This would have taken nearly all heavy freight off the freeway and off Adelaides chronically-congested main roads, including parts of South Road. Its still on the books somewhere, gathering dust on the same shelf as the MATS plan.

Miraculously, the placard proclaiming the saving grace of Our Lord and Saviour survived last Sundays unholy crash intact.

Sadly, its now vanished, possibly taken down by an over-zealous, or Godless, clean-up gang.

Pass the Rosary beads, fasten your seat belts and good luck.

*Boomer klaxon. The Jetsons was a futuristic childrens TV cartoon series first screened in the early 1960s.

Matthew Abrahams political column is published on Fridays. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. Its a long story.

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Not even halfway there: Freeway truck crash shows we're living on a prayer - InDaily

Some conservatives are only willing to listen to Indigenous voices when they match their pre-existing views

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney are off to the Garma Festival in north-east Arnhem Land, where the PM is tomorrow expected to outline details of Labors referendum plans for a voice to parliament. The intention of the trip, as Albanese tweeted this morning, is to advance talks between First Nations peoples and the government on a voice to parliament an important step in what is a complex, compromise-heavy process that will obviously never please everyone entirely. But there is already trouble brewing in the Coalition ranks, threatening the chance of a bipartisan approach to the issue. As Nine reports, three senior Liberals are expressing grave concerns about the voice, prompted by conservative NT senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Prices fiery maiden speech this week. Liberal MPs Tony Pasin, Phillip Thompson and Claire Chandler have come out publicly against the voice, saying there isnt enough detail, and that they stand with Price. As Marcia Langton, a co-chair of the voice design group, points out, theres more than 500 pages of detail already available. Do Pasin, Thompson and Chandler really care about the perspectives of Indigenous Australians, or only those who align with their conservative views?

Its long been clear that Price, a Sky News darling who identifies as an empowered Warlpiri Celtic Australian woman, is going to play an interesting role in the national debate, using her platform to push back against what she sees as progressive symbolism. She came out hard against Greens senator Lidia Thorpe during last months flag debate, calling for Thorpe to be removed from parliament if she wasnt willing to show respect to the Australian flag. In Wednesdays maiden speech, Price railed against the voice, ripping into the PM for what she called a virtuous act of symbolic gesture a point that quietly ignores the fact that calls for an Indigenous voice to parliament originated with the hundreds of Indigenous leaders who came together to endorse the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Yesterday, she came to the defence of One Nation senator Pauline Hanson, after Hanson stormed out of the Senate in protest of the acknowledgement of country. I understand Paulines frustrations, Price told 2GBs Ben Fordham, arguing that the acknowledgement was being overdone, another symbolic gesture in place of real action.

Price is, of course, entitled to her views on the voice, on flags and on Hansons Senate walkout. (Although it does seem rather a stretch to suggest that Hanson who exited the chamber when the Senate president paid respect to elders past and present, shouting No, I wont, and never will! only stormed out because she cares too much about seeing real progress for Indigenous Australians.) Its worth noting that the maiden speeches from Indigenous MPs Marion Scrymgour and Jana Stewart in support of the voice did not receive the same coverage, as Crikeys Cam Wilson notes. The voice to parliament is a complex matter, and there is no model that is going to receive the full approval of the approximately 1 million people who identify as Indigenous Australians. But there is something deeply disingenuous about the way in which these white conservative MPs are opposing the voice by citing one or two Indigenous peoples views, when its pretty clear they were planning to oppose it anyway. Price has become a popular figure in conservative circles because she takes positions that are becoming untenable for white Australians, railing against the false narratives of racism. Conservatives are then able to stand with Price as a shield against any allegations that they dont care about Indigenous issues.

Price speaks passionately about wanting real solutions to Indigenous issues, and she clearly cares deeply about them. But the same cannot be said of the white conservatives who piggyback off her views. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has started spouting the empty symbolism line; apparently he didnt want to attend the apology to the Stolen Generations because the problems were not resolved , though he now acknowledges that was a mistake. While Dutton hasnt yet come out with a firm position against the voice, he seems poised to do so, speaking at the opening of parliament on Tuesday about the need for practical changes. But how much do these people care about taking practical steps outside of the times theyre using it to argue against symbolic acts?

At the end of the day, Price is right. Australia will need to undertake much more than symbolic gestures if we are ever to close the gap, which we are currently failing desperately at. Burney intends to take concrete actions, and having an Indigenous voice to parliament will surely help. (Thorpe, who Price often disagrees with, has some concrete ideasof her own.) Conservatives railing against a voice on the basis that we need real solutions really ought to stick by thatthe next time a chance arises to vote for a real measure to close the gap. Otherwise, their opposition will be nothing but to use Prices words pointless virtue-signalling.

Listen to The Politics Podcast, with Rachel Withers

Australians have got zero tolerance for this.

Infrastructure Minister Catherine King vows to overhaul the Building Better Regions fund, after a scathing auditor-general report found Nationals-held electorates received $100 million more than they would have if distributed on merit.

If Dutton were ordered to pay the full amount of Bazzis costs as assessed, then the practical outcome would therefore be a windfall gain for Bazzi.

Lawyers for Peter Dutton, who sued refugee activist Shane Bazzi for defamation and lost, argue he should not be forced to pay Bazzis $248,000 in costs because Bazzi crowdfunded much of his defence.

After five years of inaction, the Albanese government has made implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart a key item of business. Anthony Albanese has described it as a hand held out to the country. But there are still questions over whether a referendum will succeed. Patrick Dodson is telling colleagues they should put it up regardless if the vote is lost, the country will have to live with it.

The unprecedented cost (per megawatt-hour) that average wholesale electricity prices reached in the June quarter more than triple the previous quarter.

Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy has urged the government to immediately begin budget repair to contain the debt, warning of future crises ahead. Did someone say Stage Three tax cuts?

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Indigenous voice to the Coalition - The Monthly

The dusty truck bounced along the narrow streets of Jomulquillo, the village in the Mexican state of Zacatecas where my father was born. It darted in front of vacant homes, slowed past the church and finally stopped in front of the ranchos sole corner store.

There, I stood alongside my dad and a group of older men what was left of Jomulquillos population since nearly everyone else had left for East Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley decades earlier.

We eyed the man who slowly emerged from the pickup middle-aged, white, wearing sunglasses, a polo shirt, jeans and a smile. He asked in broken Spanish to no one in particular whether there were any houses for sale. Everyone was so bewildered at the sight of a gabacho in a tiny hamlet up in the mountains of central Mexico that we stayed silent for a bit.

Then came a chorus of polite, but firm No.

I asked in English what he was doing so far from the United States.

I want to move here, said the man, who never gave his name. Its too expensive back home.

Unprompted, he went on to complain about liberalism, about how the U.S. was a failed country, and how he wanted to spend his retirement in peace. He asked if we knew of any houses for sale in Jerez, the city to which Jomulquillo pertains.

Nope.

The man got back into his truck and rumbled off. Didnt even say gracias.

Although the encounter happened 22 years ago, I can remember that Ugly American like it happened yesterday in my front yard.

Any time even my own friends talk about relocating to a foreign country because the U.S. is just too much, the image of that guys smug countenance and his expectation that a dying town would welcome him always pops into my mind.

I tell my friends to not succumb to this most American of religions, one seemingly more popular than ever, its figurative pews filled with disciples both conservative and liberal, young and old but all with the money to move.

In Portugal, my colleague Jaweed Kaleem found former residents of the Golden State lapping up the Mediterranean nations temperate climate and taking advantage of the economic situation of the country, one of the poorest in Europe. This week, my colleague Kate Linthicum filed a similar dispatch from Mexico City.

In both places, natives have loudly complained that these new Americans are pricing them out of their homes and not bothering to learn local mores and traditions. Jaweed and Kate documented protests against the newcomers through Internet shaming campaigns and pleas for local governments to intervene. At the very least, argued the longtimers, Americans should understand their presence doesnt automatically improve the life of wherever they happen to be.

The response from many of the Americans Jaweed and Kate interviewed? Not just indifference but defiance.

Things were just becoming too much back home, but I didnt want to leave everything about L.A. behind, one transplant told Jaweed about Portugal, adding, we could keep the parts we liked and leave the rest as if navigating society is as simple as changing shoes.

It reminds me of being in a more friendly, more clean at times, Brooklyn, another told Kate of Mexico City as if one of the worlds great megalopolises is no better than a New York borough.

The Ugly American trope is nothing new, of course. So-called snowbirds long ago turned San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato and Zihuatanejo in Guerrero into south-of-the-border suburbs of Leisure World. New York hipsters have long haunted Mexico City as much as they do Los Angeles. Half of middle-class San Diego seems to have retired to an apartment in Rosarito or Ensenada.

I have no issue with people who leave their homelands for a better life elsewhere vaya con Dios, and all that. But thats not whats happening with this new generation of expats. Theyre emblematic of the type of people I call California quitters: privileged people who want all of the easy and none of the hard and decamp for what they think is the better life at the slightest hint of inconvenience.

That theyre ending up in foreign countries and living large while their new neighbors struggle is terrible yet so apropos for the type.

And theyre completely different from immigrants, which some of these expats insist that they are. But the differences between the two seemingly similar groups are as varied as those of a refugee and a tourist.

Expats have the financial capital to chase the good life. Immigrants never can. Expats know that if they fail, the cushion of their home country will break the fall; immigrants know theres no turning back so must plunge ahead.

Expats can move whenever and wherever they want. Immigrants cant. Expats connect to the countries they live in in the most superficial ways and add little to it; immigrants become part of their new homelands and fundamentally alter its course.

Expats extract; Immigrants improve.

The movement of Americans to Mexico in particular reminds me of what happened at the turn of the 20th century, when American industry moved en masse and usurped billions of dollars in wealth while adding nothing to the country except exploitation. So after I read Kates piece, I called up Adrin Flix, a UC Riverside ethnic studies professor and fellow jerezano who specializes in studying Mexican migration, specifically from Zacatecas.

He laughed when I told him about my long-ago Jomulquillo anecdote and said hes heard similar stories in recent years from other ranchos around Jerez. And he admitted to hating the term expat, which for him is radically different from people who are forcibly displaced, whether by economics or war.

Flix pointed out that Americans coming in with their money fundamentally change local economies, making them more dependent on dollars that can easily flee in what he calls an extractive industry. But whats even more tone deaf, Flix argues, is that these new residents skip through Mexico in a mobile cocoon that largely protects them from the real world around them.

The surrounding areas and permanent residents are hit hard by violence and poverty, he said. On the whole, expats are immune to that.

Its playing the game of life on someone elses server with cheat codes.

Its a privilege afforded to American expats, and allowed but they should at least be honest about their hell of an advantage.

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Column: Smug American expats in Mexico need to face the truth - Los Angeles Times

Asked recently whether Boris Johnson, Britains soon-to-be-ex-Prime Minister, would ever return to the highest elected office in the land, super-loyalist Nadine Dorries enigmatically replied: Who knows what the future will hold?

With Johnson allies reportedly looking to trade a safe Conservative seat in return for a peerage with any elderly MP hoping to secure a retirement in ermine, it looks like the hero of 2019 is, at the very least, thinking of making a come-back before he has even gone. Indeed, most polls suggest the next general election will be disastrous for the Conservatives and predict Johnsons constituency of Uxbridge will fall to Labour. With being an MP a prerequisite to standing in any leadership contest, Johnson is keeping his options open.

But, while like Dorries, we do not know the future, we do know the past. And if that is any guide, Johnson is unlikely to make a return to the party leadership and No. 10. For in modern times only one politician has accomplished that double trick: William Gladstone. After losing the 1874 election, Gladstone stepped down as Liberal leader but and here Johnsons ears might prick up at the end of the decade led a popular crusade against Conservative foreign policy. Notably, his campaign focussed onits failure to punish the Ottoman Turks for brutally suppressing an uprising of Bulgarians seeking independence from their rule. The series of speeches Gladstone delivered to mass audiences, all faithfully reported in the press, constituted what historians now regard as the first modern political campaign. Gladstones highly personal pitch was aimed as much at the government of Benjamin Disraeli as those lesser mortals who replaced him as Liberal leader, and it catapulted him back into the leadership of his party and country in 1880.

Since those distant Victorian times only two former party leaders and prime ministers Arthur Balfour and Alec Douglas Home - have returned to the cabinet, both as Foreign Secretary, a role Johnson has already performed and at that pretty poorly. In any case, even his likely successor Liz Truss, currently selling herself to Conservative members as a Johnson loyalist, has publicly rejected welcoming his over-powering presence in her cabinet.

The experience of other ex-leaders and premiers looks even less encouraging. Edward Heaths great sulk on the backbenches after being deposed by Margaret Thatcher in 1975 saw him make frequent attacks on his successor. Heath imagined Conservatives would turn to him after what he hoped would be his successors brief and disastrous tenure. Perhaps that is Johnsons fantasy too. But Thatchers prolonged electoral success meant Heath instead became an increasingly isolated figure in his own party.

It is unclear how seriously Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair ever wanted to return to power. But each certainly sought to be back seat drivers and attempted to keep their parties on the policy path with which they were most associated. Blair however failed in that regard: indeed, Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership in 2015 on the basis that he was the only non-Blairite in the field. Keir Starmer has recently praised his predecessor but every time he does, he is met by a fusillade of hateful tweets from party members claiming Blair is a neo-liberal war criminal.

Perhaps Blair will enjoy a more positive influence once he has made his final journey. Death certainly enhanced Thatchers influence in her party. She made her immediate successor John Majors life a misery when he failed to live up to expectations; but while she let her displeasure be known she could do little to overthrow him. In todays Conservative leadership campaign however both candidates claim the mantle of Thatcherite. Rishi Sunak has made a pilgrimage to Grantham, Thatchers birthplace, while Liz Truss dresses in strikingly similar ways to the late leader. More seriously, both adhere to something close to her core vision: a deregulated market, a small state and tax cuts, even if the timing of achieving those ambitions is different.

Thatcher, like Winston Churchill, has reached the statue-erecting stage of influence. Like him she has become a mythical figure which the passage of time and poor historical memories means she can be mobilised for a variety of different causes. During the Brexit referendum Churchill was famously claimed by both Leave and Remain. One of those who indulged in this practice most egregiously was Johnson himself. He was also all too happy to encourage supporters to project onto him various Churchillian characteristics, however factually bogus they might have been. It helped him become party leader.

Churchills mythic status derived from his role in helping save Britain from losing to Hitler in 1940 while Thatcher is the woman some believe saved Britain from the unions and an ever-expanding state in the 1980s.

Johnson might achieve a similar legendary status for Getting Brexit Done: to some he already has it. Just now, though, how far Brexit is done and what its impact on the economy is remains uncertain. But, let us say, in five decades, the length of time Jacob Rees-Mogg once said it would take for the benefits of Brexit to become fully apparent, there may be Johnson statues adorning London, Henley and Uxbridge. With partygate and the other reasons for his downfall long forgotten there might be Conservative leaders falling over themselves to claim his mantle. But by then Johnson will probably be past caring. As he might himself say: thems the breaks.

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Could Boris return? - The Spectator

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Removing several hundred billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere is now considered necessary to avert the worst effects of climate change. Using nature to help achieve that goal, by allowing habitats to regenerate, would seem to offer a win-win solution for the environment and the climate.

The sediments beneath mangrove forests, saltmarshes and seagrass meadows are rich in organic carbon which has built up over many hundreds of years. Businesses and states keen to offset their emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO) are exploring ways to do so by funding the restoration of these so-called blue carbon habitats.

Many academics and private sector groups support the idea, assuming that the rate at which these ecosystems remove CO from the atmosphere can be accurately predicted well into the future.

We are researchers who study how marine life, chemistry and the climate interact, and after examining the processes by which coastal habitats draw down (and release) planet-warming gases, were not convinced. Whether the climate benefits from restoring these habitats by planting mangrove trees, for example is far from certain, and theres a real risk that the scale at which they can mitigate emissions has been massively oversold

Our new analysis found several reasons why it is extremely difficult to work out a reliable figure for carbon accumulation by coastal ecosystems under current conditions. So we have a very shaky basis for calculating the future carbon offsets that restoration projects might provide over the next 50 to 100 years.

Estimates of the rate at which blue carbon habitats remove CO from the atmosphere vary widely. Across several hundred scientific studies, there was a 600-fold difference between the highest and lowest estimates for carbon burial in saltmarshes, a 76-fold difference for seagrasses and a 19-fold difference for mangroves.

Applying the average value from all these studies for a particular habitat is the easiest shortcut to estimate the carbon sequestration that can be expected from a new restoration project. But the variability means that the expected carbon offsetting could be badly wrong. And because there are many low values reported with just a few very high ones, there is a much greater chance of overestimating the climate benefit.

Differences in carbon removal rates exist even over distances of just a few kilometers. Many extra measurements are needed for credible carbon accounting, but these take time and effort, raising the cost of a restoration project.

Problems run deeper than that. The carbon burial rates reported in studies are usually determined indirectly, by sampling sediment at different depths to estimate its age. Burrowing organisms disturb and mix younger and older layers, causing errors in this dating process by making sediments seem younger, and carbon burial rates greater, than they really are.

Much of the carbon buried in coastal sediments comes from elsewhere, such as soil swept from the land and carried by rivers. The proportion of imported carbon can be as little as 10% or as much as 90%. Imported carbon should be excluded from estimates used in offset accounting to clarify how much was buried as a result of restoring the habitat and how much might have simply been buried regardless.

Unfortunately, imported carbon may be more resistant to decay. In a study on one saltmarsh, the proportion of 50% imported carbon near the sediment surface increased to 80% in deeper layers. Since the deeper value represents the habitats long-term carbon burial rate, the direct contribution of a restored habitat to removing carbon may be much less important than thought.

Other processes which are difficult to quantify might increase rather than diminish the climate benefits of restoring blue carbon habitats. If plant debris from a coastal habitat is washed out to sea instead of accumulating in the sediment, it could still end up being stored for a long time elsewhere. It might sink to very deep water in the open ocean, for example. But scientists dont know enough about the amounts of carbon typically involved in such processes to properly account for them.

Turning an oil palm plantation back into a mangrove forest or flooding a coastal area to make a saltmarsh should help the land accumulate carbon. But that same land could also release more methane (otherwise known as marsh gas) and nitrous oxide both powerful greenhouse gases leaving no net climate benefit.

Thats because these gases are formed when there is insufficient oxygen in the soil or sediment, the same conditions that favour carbon accumulation. Technically demanding measurements are needed to find out exactly what is going on.

And then there are calcifying animals and plants which grow in these habitats, particularly seagrass meadows. The strap-like leaves of seagrass are often covered by a white crust of shelled worms and coralline algae. When these organisms make their calcium carbonate covering, CO is produced.

At an underwater meadow in Florida, more CO was released than removed by the seagrass itself. At other places, conditions may favour a chemical reaction between dissolved CO and carbonate in the sediment, resulting in extra carbon uptake. Again, sophisticated measurements are needed at each site to sort out the importance of these effects.

Finally, theres the future to consider. Will restored coastal ecosystems withstand the ravages of climate change, including heatwaves, storms and sea level rise? And will they be sufficiently well managed to protect against encroachment by agriculture, aquaculture, tourism and other industries and activities that may have caused the habitat to disappear in the first place?

Every effort should still be made to halt, and wherever possible reverse, the worldwide loss of coastal vegetation. Blue carbon habitats are, after all, more than carbon sinks they also protect communities from storms, nurture biodiversity and species targeted by fisheries, and improve water quality.

We fervently hope that future protection of blue carbon habitats will be effective, and that global warming can be kept below the thresholds considered critical for their survival, ranging from 2.3C to 3.7C above pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, that is far from certain. And if those temperature thresholds are exceeded, newly accumulated stores of carbon may be returned to the atmosphere when the vegetation is no longer there to prevent the sediment eroding.

Since the scale of long-term carbon removal and storage by blue carbon habitats is so uncertain, it is too risky to rely on as a means of offsetting continued emissions. The consequences of failing to deliver are too great. The priority must therefore be to double down on emission reductions, only using carbon removal methods to help achieve net zero where we are confident that they will work.

Phil Williamson, Honorary Reader, University of East Anglia and Jean-Pierre Gattuso, Research Professor, CNRS, Iddri, Sorbonne Universit

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Climate change: Why we can't rely on regrowing coastal habitats to offset carbon emissions - Down To Earth Magazine

A few more thoughts about Viktor Orban's controversial remark saying that he didn't want Hungary to become a "mixed-race nation".

UCSD is against "race mixing," flat out, when it comes to people of color (but not Asians!) mixing with whites. I think this is un-American and wicked. For many years, as longtime readers will attest, I have been warning that the Left's embrace of racial identity politics unavoidably justifies the same thing on the Right, with white people. You can't have it both ways.

3. I spent much of today at the National Museum in Krakow, called in Polish the "Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie". The Slavic root word narod means "race" or "people". It occurred to me that we Americans think that "nation" is a synonym for "country," and use it that way all the time. But that is not so in Europe. The concept of "nation" here in Europe is synonymous with "tribe" and "race". This is a hard thing for Americans to understand, given that our country has always been mixed-race, and was not based on a sense of tribe. In Hungary, for example, the word for "Hungary" is "Magyarorszag," meaning literally, "the nation of the Magyars" -- the Magyars being the tribe that settled in the Carpathian basin roughly a thousand years ago. When we Americans hear the phrase "the Jewish nation," we think of the State of Israel, naturally, but for the most part, the idea of there being a Jewish "nation" prior to Israel -- a concept that was uncontroversial in Europe -- is hard to grasp. Hungarians -- like Poles, Armenians, and many other peoples -- consider all those who share their tribal and cultural ancestry as somehow being part of their discrete "nations." The idea that "race" is a synonym for "nation," "tribe" and "people" is not new.

4. Language frames concepts. The word "race" is so loaded in American discourse that you have to be very, very careful in using it. I am told by a two Hungarian-speaking friends that the word Orban used in his speech the other day -- faj -- is a delicate term in Hungarian, and that the prime minister ought to have used a more neutral one. One friend who is an Orban supporter expressed frustration that he used that word, saying that this is like his 2014 use of the term "illiberal democracy" to describe his favored political model; the friend said that Orban made an essentially defensible concept harder to explain and defend by deploying a controversial term when others would have worked.

5. Nevertheless, he said what he said, and has to own that. But there are plenty of people who are eager to think the absolute worst of Viktor Orban. I regret that at best, he made their job easier. But for those who are fair-minded, there are some interesting things to think about -- things that cannot easily be dismissed with the usual lazy-liberal claim of, "THAT'S RACIST!"

6. I have said before on this topic that the Hungarians are WAY more sensitive to preserving their identity among the nations because there are so few of them. A Polish friend explained to me today, "There are not even ten million of them. Survival for them as a people is much more paramount than for Poles, who are part of an ethnic group of 150 million people." I am sympathetic to the Hungarians on this point, as I would be sympathetic to any people threatened with extinction of their identity through assimilation or some other means, though it must be said that the different nations/peoples/races who lived under Hungarian domination prior to World War I and the Treaty of Trianon, which rewarded those "nations" with territory taken from Hungarian lands, might not be. I have read about forced Magyarization on subject peoples in the past, and it is not a pretty or admirable history.

7. Again, modern Americans -- with the vivid exception of Native Americans! -- really cannot understand this without effort. Maybe the Cajun people of my native Louisiana can. Their distinct culture has been under assault, both actively (in the past) and passively, by the dominant English/American culture. There are still some elderly Cajuns alive who can remember when they were punished in school for speaking French. But American pop culture has managed to do what the persecution of Cajuns by the English majority could not do: erode Cajun language and identity. If a Cajun Orban had warned in 1930 against French-speaking Cajuns mixing too much with English-speaking non-Cajuns, who make up the majority in Louisiana, out of fear of losing their culture and identity, what would people have said? From the point of view of 2022, he would have been right -- but it's too late. The Quebecois of Canada, this is what their obstreperousness on the question of language is all about. Can you blame them? Sometimes they come across as bigoted about their French identity, but given how hard it is for Francophones to resist Anglophone culture, it's not hard to sympathize with them.

8. Modern liberals (in the sense that all of us are liberal), especially Americans born after 1960, tend to think strongly in terms of individuals, not races. I think this is mostly a good thing, and certainly a necessary thing, after segregation. But then, we Americans share a common language and culture to the extent that European peoples simply do not. Both Spaniards and Slovaks are European, but they are very different, compared to, say, an Oregonian and a Floridian. As someone who travels a lot in Europe, I cherish that difference. I'm in Krakow now, and really appreciate the particularities of the Poles.

9. Now, if one likes the particularities of the Poles (or the Italians, the Dutch, the Swedes, et al.), then one should be interested to know how we can preserve those particularities in an age of mass homogenization. This is not something that people in larger nations have to worry about as much as people like the Hungarians do, with their small numbers and unique (and notoriously difficult) language. It is a chronic concern of Hungarians, though. My guess is that because they are so few, they are more acutely aware of the challenges to national identity and cohesiveness than those who live in much larger European nations. They have to think about things that most of us Americans don't.

10. For example, I did not realize until I began traveling extensively in Europe how profoundly Protestant -- and English Protestant -- the United States is. When I read Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington's controversial 2004 book Who Are We?, which is about the roots of American identity, I came to understand in a more intellectual way what I had only intuited before from my European travels: that despite out superficial diversity, the American identity is built on an English Protestant conception of the world. Even our Catholics and Orthodox have been Protestantized, because they live in a Protestant nation, for better or for worse. When in earlier decades we Americans insisted that immigrants assimilate, what we expected them to assimilate to was a culture based on English Protestant values, which were the values of the country's founders. Huntington's concern in that book was that we Americans no longer had the cultural confidence to compel the mass waves of Latino migrants to assimilate to the foundational culture, and that therefore we were inviting political and cultural division into the country. Huntington was widely assailed by liberal bien-pensants for his opinions, which ran counter to standard liberal dogma.

11. Viktor Orban regards the mass migration of Muslims into Europe as an existential threat to the distinct culture of Europe. He was asked why Hungary was so willing to accept Ukrainian war refugees but not those from the Islamic wars of the last decade. He said it's simple: Ukrainians live right next door, and broadly share European faith and culture; Muslims from the Middle East and Afghanistan do not, and would find it far more difficult to assimilate. He might have also said that if Hungary did develop a sizable Muslim minority that did not assimilate to Hungarian norms, then it would inevitably have to accommodate them by changing its own laws and cultural norms. Why should Hungarians who like to keep things the way they are agree to that?

12. Plus, it is agonizingly obvious from reading the news about cultural clashes and crime in European countries with sizable Islamic migrant populations that importing large numbers of people who carry radically different cultures in their heads is a recipe for civil strife. Why should any nation want that, if it can avoid it?

13. Moreover, Viktor Orban is a Calvinist Christian, like 25 percent of the Hungarian population. The rest of the Christians there are Catholic. Forty years of state-sponsored atheism left Hungary as not a very religious country. Orban has said in the past that he hopes to re-Christianize Hungary, to encourage Hungarians to return to their ancestral faith. He surely understands that as difficult as that task is today, in post-Christian Europe, if a sizable Islamic minority came to live in Hungary, it would be impossible. Now, for Westerners who don't care about religious faith, or who think of it as a lifestyle accessory, this is hard to comprehend. But for people who believe it is the truth, and that the eternal fate of souls depends on religious belief, they cannot afford to be indifferent to it. No devout Muslim could, for example, remain indifferent to the future of his own Islamic country, if given the choice of whether or not to import a large number of Christians.

14. Does proving one's own liberal bona fides require one to surrender his country's religious, cultural, and ethnic identity? That is a hell of a big ask. Again, it's hard for Americans to understand how this question sounds to people from other countries, because ours is a nation of immigrants -- immigrants who manage to get along, more or less, because everybody has historically been assimilated to Protestant norms, if not the Protestant faith. I wish Orban had not favorably cited Jean Raspail's racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints -- even though, as I wrote here in 2015, there is some valuable truth in that ugly book. The most important thing is that it's not really a book about Third World immigrants; it's a book about the total spiritual and moral collapse of Western elites. The real villains of that novel are the governmental, religious, media, academic, and other elites of France, who are exhausted, and who welcome their replacement and domination by the Other.

It's a horrible book, as I've said, and it is to Orban's discredit that he cited it. I don't think the one good point it makes redeems its flat-out racism. You can read a far less nasty version of the same argument in Michel Houellebecq's novel Submission, which is not really about Islam per se, but about the decadence of contemporary French society and culture. The French of that novel are so demoralized that they turn to French people with a strong culture -- French Muslims -- to lead them. Houellebecq's point -- though he is an atheist -- is that no society can do without a religion, and that godless France will eventually either recover its faith, turn to a different established faith, or (as he has written about elsewhere), invent a new one.

15. A Christian friend chastising me for mostly defending Orban said that why should I care if the West collapses? Isn't it already too late to shore up the imperium? My answer is that the West, for all its problems, is my home. Why did I care when the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris caught on fire? Why was that fire more meaningful than a Costco burning down? Christianity was not born in Europe, but Europe is where Christianity was chiefly formed, and grew. It matters to me whether or not people go to church here, and practice the faith. It's hard to be hopeful about Europe returning to the faith right now, but for those European people and leaders willing to defend what they have, why should Christians not support them (unless they engage in immoral acts in so doing)? At the moment, Christianity is in a bad way in most of Europe. Here on the streets of Krakow, in the most religious country in Europe, I've seen more young people in the past day with occult tattoos and sigils around their necks than I have anywhere else, ever. Something is happening, and it's not good. If Europe loses its Christianity for good, then it will have lost itself. There will still be people of European genetic stock here, but it won't be Europe, in the cultural and spiritual sense. I honestly don't understand why it is considered a bad thing to love and to defend what is your own?

16. Americans too lack any sense of history regarding Europe's centuries-long struggle with Islam. Europe hasn't had to worry about it since beating back the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna in 1683 -- this, as part of a war that saw Christian forces drive the Ottoman conquerors out of Hungary. If you think Europeans today shouldn't worry about a reconquista from the Islamic world, you're fatally naive as to how historical memory works. But this is how moderns think: anything that happened the day before yesterday might as well not have happened at all, unless it is useful for gaining political power today (cough, cough, 1619 Project).

17. Over at The Bulwark, Cathy Young lays into me and other supporters of Orban (but mostly me) for supposedly favoring "ethnonationalism." Bill Kristol tweets his agreement. This is curious, and not just because I reject the idea that the United States is or should be ethnonationalist. It's because both Young and Kristol are Jewish, and supporters of the State of Israel and its right to exist, as am I. In what sense, then, are they not in favor of ethnonationalism? Is it only okay to think of your people as belonging to a nation that has a right to exist on its own terms if you're Jewish, but not if you are Magyar?

(Side note: Why don't Young and Kristol care about the fact that Hungary is one of the safest places for European Jews to live -- versus the more liberal France, Germany, and Belgium? As Laszlo Veszpremy writes in Newsweek today:

This accusation [that Hungary is anti-Semitic] is inaccurate, and it only serves to whitewash the dire situation of Jews in certain Western and Northern European countries. These countries struggle to confront their own antisemitism because acts of Jew-hatred there are most frequently committed by immigrants from the Islamic world. By contrast, Hungary, which has a very small number of those immigrants, is one of the safest places in Europe for Jews to live.

More:

The 2018dataprovided by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) can be taken as the baseline; the agency explored, by conducting surveys in local Jewish communities, the extent to which Muslim extremist immigrants were represented among antisemitic assailants. It is important to note that the numbers below were reported by the members of the communities themselves and were not disclosed as official statistical data. In France, those "with a Muslim extremist view" were reportedly responsible for 33 percent of antisemitic attacks, in Germany, 41 percent, in the Netherlands, 35 percent. In the U.K., they were responsible for 22 percent of all attacks, which earned this group "second place"; radical left-wing perpetrators "won" with 25 percent.

Veszpremy, by the way, is a historian of the Holocaust.)

What about the Japanese people, many of whom believe that their island nation ought to remain either exclusively Japanese, or at least heavily dominated by Japanese? They might be wrong about that, but for heaven's sake, the way those people view their relationship to their tribe and its land is totally normal in human history.

For that matter, the Left now has this penchant for ritualistic tribal land recognition. Of course it's true that European settlers wrested tribal lands from Native peoples. I don't oppose reckoning with that, though I think these are silly gestures that do nothing but signal progressive virtue. But those who believe in such things should explain why it was bad for whites to displace Indians in their historic lands, but not bad for migrants from elsewhere to displace European peoples in their historic lands.

18. A Hungarian friend who used to live in the American South messaged me today:

Yeah, as I keep telling people, don't believe what the Western news media tell you about Hungary. Go see for yourself. It's not at all what they say. Of course it's not paradise, and has its own problems, like any country. But there is a reason Davos Man and his minions single out Hungary for special abuse: it is a country whose democratically elected leadership is unapologetically in favor of the natural family, a traditional Judeo-Christian moral framework, and defending national identity, even if it means controlling borders. I believe that Orban did not mean with his comment what his critics say he meant, though I fully acknowledge that his favorable mention of The Camp of the Saints makes my defense of him difficult. But assuming the worst -- that his remark was racist, and that he meant it to be -- I still think it's crazy to dismiss the entire speech on that basis alone. Read it for yourself and see if you agree.

19. Finally, this question of whether or not people of a single nation/tribe/people have a particular right, moral or otherwise, to keep those who don't share their ethnicity/religion/culture from occupying the same place of land, is a lot more complicated than most of us think. Consider, at a hyperlocal level, the question of gentrification. The Left hates gentrification, seeing it as a process whereby wealthier people -- white people, usually -- buy housing from poorer people of color, and gradually displace them. It is seen by many on the Left as a form of white supremacy. On the other hand, the Left also despises white people who move out of neighborhoods where gentrifiers-of-color are moving in. The only solid principle seems to be: whatever the whites are doing to benefit themselves must be wrong.

That said, what we call "gentrification" is a tough issue to be on the right side of. I've written in the past about how I was once a gentrifier in Old East Dallas. When we moved to Dallas in 2003, we didn't have much money. We bought a house we could afford, in a gentrifying neighborhood. (One of my wife's uptown friends said, "Y'all live where our maid comes from.") We loved the house, and didn't mind being close enough to hear shots fired a few blocks away on cold nights. Our next-door neighbors were a retired Hispanic couple, wonderful people that we befriended. They told us eventually how much nicer the neighborhood was with "all the new people" (read: middle-class whites) moving in. They said that in the 1980s and 1990s, our street was a big drug market, and it was too dangerous to sit on your front porch at night, for fear of being hit by a drive-by drug-related shooting. In fact, one of the previous tenants of the renovated house we bought, they told us, was a junkie who would pass out from heroin on the front porch. Gentrification really improved the neighborhood in tangible ways, as well as saving an architecturally significant part of the city from ruin.

However, the poor and working class Latinos who lived there were undeniably being driven out. I say "driven out," but I don't mean mobs of whites leaned on them to make them go away. They were offered good prices for their houses that were falling down, and that were too expensive to fix. Why shouldn't they have sold out and moved away? It seems to me that in a liberal democracy, people have to be free to buy and sell housing wherever they like, and that things like restrictive covenants (barring sales to Jews and people of color) were evil, and are rightly done away with.

Nevertheless, can we really say that something of value isn't lost when communities where people feel united to each other are dispersed, even if it can't be helped? I've written before about a taxi ride I had in Washington DC in or around 1992, when I first moved there. The city was in the throes of a massive crime wave. I took a taxi from Dupont Circle back to my apartment on Capitol Hill. My driver was an older black man, a DC native. We drove through a part of the city which at the time was one abandoned block after another. When he found out I was new to the city, the old man told me stories about how all these streets used to be home to thriving black-owned businesses. He began to wax nostalgic for the days of segregation, because, he said, black folks had real community. I didn't take him at all to be wishing that segregation was back, but rather bearing witness to the tragic result of ending segregation: the destruction of a cohesive community for black Washingtonians like himself. That thought has sat with me for a long time, and I still struggle with it.

20. One of my favorite essays ever is this 2012 piece by Will Wilkinson on the culture of country music. Excerpts:

Now, conservatives and liberals really do differ psychologically. Allow me to dropsome science:

Applying a theory of ideology as motivated social cognition and a Big Five framework, we find that two traits, Openness to New Experiences and Conscientiousness, parsimoniously capture many of the ways in which individual differences underlying political orientation have been conceptualized. . . .

We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I score very high in openness to experience and worryingly low in conscientiousness. (When I was first diagnosed with ADD my very concerned psychiatrist asked Do you have a hard time keeping jobs?) This predicts that Im extremely liberal, that my desk is a total mess, and thatmy bedroom is clutteredwith books, art supplies, and cultural memorabilia. Its all true.

Is country music really conservative music? Its obvious if you listen to it, but here are a couple telling tables from Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Goslings fascinating paper The Do Re Mis of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences:

As you can see, country is the most upbeat and conventional genre of music. A preference for upbeat and conventional music is negatively correlated with openness and positively correlated with conscientiousness, and so, as you would then expect, self-described conservatives tend to like upbeat and conventional music (more than any other kind), while self-described liberals tend to like everything else better.

Again, those low in openness are less likely to visit other countries, try new kinds of food, take drugs, or buck conventional norms generally. This would suggest that most conservatives arent going to seek and find much intense and meaningful emotion in exotic travel, hallucinogenic ecstasy, sexual experimentation, or challenging aesthetic experience. The emotional highlights of the low-openness life are going to be the type celebrated in One Boy, One Girl: the moment of falling in love with the one, the wedding day, the birth ones children (though I guess the song is about a surprising ultrasound). More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through lifes stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I was a girl with a mother, now Im a mother with a girl. My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them. I was once a teenage boy threatened by a girls gun-loving father, now Im a gun-loving father threatening my girls teenage boy. Etc. And country is full of assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives.

My conjecture, then, is that country music functions in part to reinforce in low-openness individuals the idea that lifes most powerful, meaningful emotional experiences are precisely those to which conservative personalities living conventional lives are most likely to have access. And it functions as a device to coordinate members of conservative-minded communities on the incomparable emotional weight of traditional milestone experiences.

More:

But why would you want your kids to grow up with the same way of life as you and your grandparents? My best guess (and let me stressguess) is that those low in openness depend emotionally on a sense of enchantment of the everyday and the profundity of ritual. Even a little change, like your kids playing with different toys than you did, comes as a small reminder of the instability of life over generations and the contingency of our emotional attachments. This is a reminder low-openness conservatives would prefer to avoid, if possible. What high-openness liberals feel asmerenostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life. If your kids dont experience the same meaningful things in the same same way that you experienced them, then it may seem that their lives will be deprived of meaning, which would be tragic. And even if youre able to see that your kids will find plenty of meaning, but in different things and in different ways, you might well worry about the possibility of ever really understanding and relating to them. The inability to bond over profound common experience would itself constitute a grave loss of meaning for both generations. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes ones own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive ones children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another. And what kind of monster would want that?

Country music is a bulwark against cultural change, a reminder that what you see is what you get, a means of keeping the charge of enchantment in the little things that make up the texture of the every day, and a way of literally broadcasting the emotional and cultural centrality of the conventional big-ticket experiences that make a life a life.

A lot of country music these daysisculture war, but its more bomb shelter than bomb.

Read the whole essay -- it's fascinating.

What does this have to do with Hungary and Viktor Orban? You should know that Orban does not do well with voters in big Hungarian cities. These are places full of high-openness people. His voters are rural and suburban -- low-openness people. We have the same thing with the rural-urban divide in American politics. I want you to think about this line of Wilkinson's: "What high-openness liberals feel asmerenostalgia, low-openness conservatives feel as the baseline emotional tone of a recognizably decent life."

This tells you a lot about why certain people hate Viktor Orban, and others love him. What high-openness liberals feel to be a racist attitude towards immigration, low-openness Hungarian conservatives feel as the baseline state policy of a recognizably decent life. In France, you hear and read lots of older French people complaining that they don't recognize what their country has become, in large part because of mass migration. Western liberals -- including people like Kristol and Young -- sneer at these people as bigots who don't appreciate that particular blessing of liberty, and you know, maybe these people do hold sinful attitudes towards those of other races. But maybe too, to borrow from Wilkinson's analysis, the loss of the ability to bond with one's neighbors and one's children, over profound common experience, constitutes a grave loss of meaning -- one that's not coming back.

High-openness individuals don't understand that, and react with accusations of racism, et cetera, to people like Orban and his voters. High-openness individuals are also the kind who are likely to have risen to positions of power in Western cultures. But low-openness people have rights too, you know -- including a right to be taken seriously, and considerately.

I say that as a high-openness person myself, one who has suffered personally from rejection by my low-openness birth family. They rejected me when I came back home in 2011 because in their view, I had followed my high-openness desires, moved away, and became the sort of person with whom they could not share the most important aspects of life. I firmly believe they were wrong about this, and I very much hate the actions they took. Ironically, having been a high-openness conservative for most of my life, I am able to understand where they are coming from, even as I judge them wrong for their conclusions and actions. My family was caught in a culture of high mobility, and had never had to deal with a family member who moved away, or who even thought and lived differently from them. Their anger at me, and their sense of betrayal, was a function of their grief over the fact that to them, I was lost. Their mistake was assuming that because I wasn't entirely like them, they couldn't have meaningful communion with me and my family. Their low-openness ended up causing the family to disintegrate.

But here is what I learned from that. Communities are like families: organic and fragile. They have to be tended. I learned from my own bitter experience that negotiating the shared space between high-openness and low-openness people is really hard. Too much of either can destroy community, as it can destroy family. If you want to keep a family, a community, or even a country together, you have to figure out how to balance the needs and desires of both kinds of people.

And, it is a demonstrable fact that high diversity within a limited geographical area diminished social capital. This is what Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, a liberal, found in his massive 2007 study on how diversity affected community cohesion. As John Leo write at the time:

Putnams study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of ones own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isnt ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to hunker downthat is, to pull in like a turtle.

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce bad race relations, Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reformmore, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings mayunderestimatethe real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.

Neither age nor disparities of wealth explain this result. Americans raised in the 1970s, he writes, seem fully as unnerved by diversity as those raised in the 1920s. And the hunkering down occurred no matter whether the communities were relatively egalitarian or showed great differences in personal income. Even when communities are equally poor or rich, equally safe or crime-ridden, diversity correlates with less trust of neighbors, lower confidence in local politicians and news media, less charitable giving and volunteering, fewer close friends, and less happiness

So, where does that leave us? One conclusion to be drawn is that Viktor Orban is a provocateur who might hold objectionable, illiberal views about race. But he is also a leader who is capable of drawing obvious conclusions from the terrible experiences with migration in other European countries, and who is willing to act to preserve the stability of his country and the happiness of the majority of his own people (who, after all, elected him). We in the United States are not governed by leaders, Republican or Democratic, who are capable of going against the high-openness liberal view of migration, even when a majority of their own people want them to. So naturally our ruling class denounces Viktor Orban.

The interesting thing is, Orban himself is likely high-openness -- you don't get to be leader of a modern European democracy if you aren't -- but he understands that he was elected to serve people who are, on the whole, low-openness, and who are that way in part because they have a legitimate fear of being assimilated out of existence. Imagine that: a Hungarian leader who puts Hungary and Hungarians first. Whoever heard of such a thing?!

UPDATE:

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'Race', 'Nation,' And Modern Times - The American Conservative

People from both extremes will argue if you dont know, vote no when it comes to a federal Voice referendum, regarded by our new federal government as their first step towards a treaty. In the same way minority monarchists managed to split majority support for a republic during John Howards tenure and kicked the republic can down the road for a generation so the disparate opponents of the Voice will exploit ignorance, suspicion and fear to try to stymie it.

In Victoria, where no referendum is needed and moves to a treaty now have bi-partisan support, Premier Daniel Andrews is about to legislate the legal framework for the first Treaty Authority. It is a vital piece in a complex process with multiple moving parts. We need to learn who, why and what the process is about.

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The initial step was the creation of the First Peoples Assembly. This is who. It is the elected Aboriginal leadership, chosen by mob the now preferred description of Indigenous communities. Although a disappointing proportion of Victorian mob voted, the assembly is better connecting with a larger constituency now that it is up and running.

Second, was the creation by the state government of the Yoorrook Justice Commission. This is the why. It is a hybrid Indigenous version of a royal or judicial commission, already progressing with the harrowing task of hearing about discrimination and trauma. In an oral tradition, it relies on storytelling.

Thirdly, will be the Treaty Authority. This is the what. It will be an independent umpire for resolving disputes about the contents and identity of parties who enter into treaties.

Fourthly, there will be a Self-Determination Fund the bank. It will be a trustee, receiving and distributing money. The full extent of its income and expenditure will depend on what is in the treaties.

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Treaty processes in Canada and New Zealand are particularly instructive. Both are decades ahead of us, but they are ongoing and dynamic, not quick, nor neat. One size does not fit all.

Not for one moment have treaties solved all the social and economic problems of First Peoples in any country. But it is unarguable that they provide the architecture for cultural and economic improvement.

Opponents of all moves towards a treaty say if we do not know what will be in it, we cannot possibly support it. This is absurd and puts the cart before the horse. The notion that either the state or a federal treaty can be delivered on a platter, ready to be signed, before it is negotiated betrays a patronising condescension that we will offer them a treaty on our terms to be taken or rejected. That is tokenism, not negotiation.

There is a profound obligation for us all to seize the opportunity to at last tell the truth and close the gaps, plural.

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A tale of two treaties - The Age