Yes, seriously. Number one failure in sensationalized reporting is base rate fallacy: they point out a high absolute number, implying something strange is going on, whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there.
I don't mean this is the case here (I'm yet to read the article itself) - but this failure mode in reporting is so common that it's a good habit to immediately look for / question lack of base rate data.
I get that at some point murder becomes statistics, but I still feel the need to re-emphasize that this is murder. Not more folks getting the flu because there are more folks.
i disagree with the implication that murder somehow shouldn't be looked at in statistical terms. I am not saying it should only be looked at in statistical terms, but it is one important way of looking at it.
The larger point is that some (very small) percentage of people will be murdered every year. If the number of climate activists increases, the chance of one of them being murdered increases with it - possibly just by being involved in a random shooting or family drama, completely unrelated to their activism.
I agree that murder is horrible, but the article seems to try to sell that these murders are related to their activism, which is not something you can say just based on the absolute number. You need to have the ratio to compare to the last year and to the base rate in the general population to make a better statement. Without it, we can't be sure of the real cause and might try to fix this at the wrong place, leading to us to not prevent murders effectively - so yes, you need to get your statistics right, even when talking about horrible incidents.
>whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there.
there is not necessarily a reason to assume that the percentage of murder of activists is going to stay the same if you increase the number of activists, although it may be the case.
The point of having the denominator is so that you don't need to assume anything, you can just know which way the rate is going.
Perhaps you're right that in this case, the rate isn't going to stay constant. But in general, with news reporting, I found it safe to assume that if the rate was rising, they would've reported on the denominator too - the reason to omit it is usually because it would kill the story.
EDIT:
To expand on this further - and again, I'm defending the original question as a perfectly legit one, not trying to diminish the fact that we're talking about murders here - you always want to see the whole fraction spelled out, numerator and denominator, because the other common trick to deceive with numbers is by providing only the ratio itself. E.g. "over past year, incidents of $crime rose by 80%", or "$substance increases your cancer risk by 300%", where the unmentioned denominator is "3" and "0.00001", respectively.
The way I see it: even if we're talking about clear tragedies or acts of evil, it's always better to have an accurate picture of what is being talked about.
> there is not necessarily a reason to assume that the percentage of murder of activists is going to stay the same if you increase the number of activists
If activists are being murdered for activism, the rate among activists will go up. If a greater share of the population is becoming activist, and are being randomly murdered for non-activist reasons, that’s a different story.
if the number of police rise does the ratio of police being killed on the job stay the same?
what if 5% of the workers at big corporations are willing to kill activists for activism, those 5% are busy killing activists, if the activists increase unless the corporations increase the number of people they have willing to kill activists it follows that there are not going to be a significant increase in the number of murdered activists.
In short there can be all sorts of reasons why the percentage of activists killed for activism would not remain constant.
All you wrote is exactly why you want to know the base rate (or several, against different possible hypothesis). Otherwise, it's not possible to even speculate about these things productively.
as you'll notice in my first reply to you I never said I did not want to know the base rate - what I said was - first quoting you
>whereas usually the denominator - which they neglect to mention - has rose proportionally, meaning there's nothing newsworthy there.
then in my reply to you
>there is not necessarily a reason to assume that the percentage of murder of activists is going to stay the same if you increase the number of activists, although it may be the case.
again, nothing about not needing to know the base rate, just noting that there might reasons for the rate of murders to not rise proportionally.
After writing something so straightforward that it might as well be observing that water is wet I've gotten a number of responses from people whom, just as straightforward, seem to want to inform me that the sun is out today and are intent on hammering it into my thick skull despite my never having said otherwise.
These are murders of people. The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article. To say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders, just because you were personally interested in a number you couldn't find in the article, is crass.
No. These are murders of "people who do XYZ". If we looked at murders of people who play Fortnite from 5 years ago until now, we'd see a clear trend, for no reason other than the fact that the number of people who play Fortnite has ebbed and flowed.
I don't know anything about this particular situation, but your callous dismissal of this indisputably correct warning is wrong.
I didn't say there's nothing newsworthy about these murders. I said, in my paragraph, that sensationalized articles in general (and note that I didn't say this one definitely is in this category) often don't report the base rate, because it would reveal they're reporting a non-story. And I said that to counter cenophor's objection to ArchieMaclean's question, by pointing out it's pretty much the first question one should be asking when discussing an article/report that doesn't provide that number.
> The pertinent comparison (for those interested in the whole "murders" thing) is with how many murders there were in previous years, whether it's gone up, etc, information which is covered in the article.
It wasn't, at least not directly. The numbers I saw are:
- 227 activists killed in 2020, the titular record number
- 4 activits / week on average being killed since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015[0]
You can tease out some insight from deconstructing the average (e.g. the 2020 number is above the average), but not much really. Not enough to tell you whether something has changed about this situation.
Also, please don't assume people asking for more clarity and better data are ignoring the human life context of the story.
--
There seems to be an error in the reported context of that figure - Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, but signed in April 2016 and became effective from November 2016 - per - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement.
This assumes that there is an infinite capability and willingness to kill activists.
If you have 100 ppl demonstrating against a hydro dam and 1 gets murdered later that night it does not follow that there likely would have been 2 killed if 200 ppl demonstrated.
Of course we should be doing all we can to prevent murder! It is just always hard to tell with statistics and having a more honest statistic (that, say, shows that murder rates have doubled while number of activists have increased 30%) would be preferable.
I’m not sure what kind of number you’re looking for. There’s no global registry tracking the population of environmental activists - just that when people are murdered by anti-green corporations, we can figure out that the person’s activism is what caused it.
nope. What has that got to do with my comment? Someone was implying that it was impossible, I was saying that claim was implausible. People estimate those kinds of numbers all the time for statistical purposes.
Quoting from the methodology section of the report:
> To meet our criteria, a case must be supported by the following available information:
> Credible, published and current online sources of information.
> Details about the type of act and method of violence, including the date and location.
> Name and biographical information about the victim.
> Clear, proximate and documented connections to an environmental or land issue.
When people are murdered, we can't be sure who did it unless there's evidence. The methodology doesn't seem to include gathering evidence of who the murderer was, only that the murder happened to an activist. Saying "when people are murdered by anti-green corporations" is begging the question, because the report doesn't pass on any evidence that they were murdered by anyone in particular.
> Who else do you think is going around conveniently getting rid of activists that oppose profit and greed?
You're missing the point. People are murdered all the time for all sorts of reasons, including people who happen to be activists. The question is: are activists being murdered for their activism or for some other reason? Until you can demonstrate that, you simply don't have grounds to suspect megacorps or their agents are doing the murdering.
For example, the number of people who listen to Ed Sheeran music has risen enormously in the last decade. So has the number of Ed Sheeran listeners who were murdered. It doesn't follow that they were murdered because they have dubious taste in music—just that as the population of Sheeran fans grows so does the number of people in it being murdered. That might happen even if the overall murder rate was going down.
It's important to see the direction we're going in. If the number of activists increased by an order of magnitude (for example), we would be on a great trajectory to reduce these murders. If the number of activists stayed the same, this would be a horrible development.
Of course corporate murder is horrible, but the world is on fire (quite literally). Without putting the numbers in perspective, there's no way to tell whether we need to put our resources towards fighting activist murders or, for example, clan criminality.
The increasing number of activists murders to me only indicates that the killers and especially whoever is behind them isn't being caught and is still free to eliminate again and again people they find inconvenient for their businesses. If each one of them was arrested and given a life sentence after each murder, whether committed or by contract, we probably would have solved the problem ages ago.
Those people have shitloads of money at disposal for hiring gunmen, so I expect they can buy other people among the local law enforcement too.
The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday". The typical way of computing "dangerosity" is through a ratio. Eg: number of death / kilometer for transportation systems, number of injury / game for sports, ...
Why should the dangerosity of the "environmental activism" activity be computed differently, by only taking into consideration a numerator, and dismissing the denominator ?
Despite this weird sub-thread, the article isn’t talking about “dangerosity”. They’re reporting on the increase in evil activities by anti-environmental mega corps, who are also murdering opposing activists.
What indication do we have that environmentalally unfriendly companies are murdering activists?
I cannot imagine that being their best PR strategy, not to mention the fact that murdering your opposition attracts a lot of scrutiny, investigation, and which corp exec would want to risk going to jail for ordering a hit on an activist. Far more practical to lobby or spread counter marketing spin.
> They’re reporting on the increase in evil activities by anti-environmental mega corps
Is there an increase, though?
The BBC has sadly become known to be rather loose with facts. The answer to the upstream question here would let us know if there is an increase and what kind. Absolute? Relative? How big of a problem is this, really, or is it more of the BBC fomenting noise and anxiety for clicks.
We're trying to get information to understand the world better. People who run around insisting that x piece of information is irrelevant and how dare you ask either don't understand the question or have something to hide
You know what? Sure, let’s assume the BBC is “FUDing for clicks”. We’ll ignore the source report, and general common sense.
Do you think that these murders (as stable or as decreasing as you believe them to be) should not be reported on? And that your statistical skills somehow matter to the real world activists dying?
> Do you think that these murders (as stable or as decreasing as you believe them to be) should not be reported on?
Personally, I don't like this kind of discourse. It gets people excited, anxious, and not thinking clearly, as intended. That would be ok with me maybe, if there ever were some good results from that (e.g. effective environmental control, or good legislation), but there never, ever is.
I could go through and answer your questions as if we were talking for real, but your response is kind of a poison pill, designed to put me on the defensive ("Oh, of course I didn't mean...")
No. The adults in the room do need to know if activists are being murdered at an ever increasing rate, or if we can devote our limited time and attention to other very important matters. We don't like to be guided to the "proper" opinion by people who will shout But it's murder,
you cold-hearted nerd! if we go off track and ask for accurate information
Effectively you’re saying that a status quo of stable-percentage murders is okay. I (and others on this post) are saying that any non-zero percentage is bad. So I guess we fundamentally disagree then.
The article premise was not "Environmental Activists continue to be murdered at a rate higher than the general populace".
It instead implies that it is an increasing problem, without giving us the tools to evaluate the claim or understand the scope of the problem.
If you want to accept such claims as true, go ahead. That practice won't arm you to understand your world better, but will instead make you excitable and easily swayed.
Nobody thinks murder is okay, and if this is the way you conduct discourse you're probably working against your own goals.
There is a lot more behind a statistic than just a number or trend-line, one which often requires single or multiple policy changes that could take years. So yes, observing that the trend line goes and keeps going down is good, a sharp rise is a cause for concern. That is not the same thing, at all, as thinking the status quo is just fine.
Not everywhere is the First World. In many places of the world, you can buy protection from scrutiny and investigation of the local authorities, and remote authorities in London or New York won't likely give a damn about what happened somewhere in eastern Indonesia, for lack of jurisdiction.
Plus, given how dangerous some places are even for locals, you can always plausibly deny your involvement: oh, it was the bandits, they are awful to everyone.
>I cannot imagine that being their best PR strategy
The "backend" 80% of the world doesn't work with PR strategies.
Nobody cares if an activist is murdered in Nigeria or Mexico etc., same way few care about journalists in those area. There will be some reports (if that), most will never even reach your preferred news outlets, and that's it.
And in more subtle areas (outside the developing world) they can always make it look like a "mysterious" homicide case, despite e.g. known threats, beatings, etc, that had been reported prior to the murder.
There are interests of billions to be made, from mega-corps, local lackeys, corrupt politicians and cops on their pockets, and so on.
Same way nobody cares for 10-100 million dollar bribes all too common in big construction, supply, procurement, finance, and so on, tenders. One in 100 might get some scrutiny (usually after the party doing it is out of power with no way to be re-elected, so those affected don't have any clout anymore).
>not to mention the fact that murdering your opposition attracts a lot of scrutiny, investigation, and which corp exec would want to risk going to jail for ordering a hit on an activist.
Lol. No exec "orders a hit" (except if it's some local representative or director and knows the ropes in that area).
Foreign execs convey a message that "this thing is an inpediment", "something must be done" and so on, in the vaguest (but clear) possible ways, and people with a lot to gain locally, paid for those deals, know how to take care of things, with several layers of indirection.
Same way sweatshops and child labour (all the way to small kids working on cobalt mines) have "plausible deniability" from industry execs, and several layers of contractors between them.
Arguably, if journalists and activists get a credible understanding that investigating this activity is likely to just get you hurt or killed without achieving anything, that "a good deed won't go unpunished", then this reputation would decrease scrutiny and investigation.
The article isn't original reporting at all, it is basically a press release for a report generated by an NGO. It's fine to question the source material here.
> The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday".
Why would that be a real question? The activism itself should not be life threatening activity. If the amount of killed activists is proportionally the same every year ... then there is still have real issue.
>The real question is : "Is environmental activism today more dangerous than it was yesterday".
Why would that be the "real question"? Just because all we have is the hammer of statistical analysis?
More people are getting killed, whether they are environmental activists is not that relevant.
What's relevant is that there is increased willingness to kill in favor of anti-environmnet interests.
>Why should the dangerosity of the "environmental activism" activity be computed differently, by only taking into consideration a numerator, and dismissing the denominator ?
It shouldn't be computed at all, the concern here is not to give people some dangerocity score to help them avoid being killed.
The concern is to stop the interests that kill -- that is, to stop the murders and the murderers, not to avoid them by having people not be environmental activists or be more careful about it.
(Same way we would want to reduce racist crime, not e.g. tell blacks to be more careful. We might also want that, but not as a first priority, as a treatment to the symptoms, not the cause).
So if bands of luddites stated murdering software developers, this would not be a problem if the overall growth of the industry was larger than the rate of murders?
Are climate activists expected to "take some loss" or what exactly are you implying with this question?
If people die because they engage in non-violent activism it's just wrong, plain and simple, there's no gray area (at least I have a very hard time thinking of one). The overall number of activists or the growth thereof has absolutely nothing to do with that.
it has everything to do with it. if the murder rate remains constant and a group doubles in size, then on average twice as many people in that group will get murdered.
Why would you expect the murder rate to be constant? It's plausible the opposite is true that the more murders there are, the more publicity they get overall and the more cautious would-be murderers become.
The commenter I replied to said "It (the number of activists) has everything to do with it". That is pretty strong language to me. I infer from that the commenter wanted to suggest that the number of activists is the only factor that matters because we can assume that murder-rate would remain constant.
If I am making the wrong inference here then I put it down to the strong and yet imprecise language of "it has everything to do with it".
I think their absolutist statement was more to do with responding in kind to the comment they were replying to, which said “The overall number of activists or the growth thereof has absolutely nothing to do with that.”
I don't think anybody is arguing whether killing innocent activists is wrong. But the implications of the headline are different if the increase in murders correlates with an increase in activism. That could for example imply that activists are murdered for being activists and not for being environmental activists specifically.
Seems this'd rather be proportional to the number of new logging and mining projects etc, from the article:
> Almost a third of the murders were reportedly linked to resource exploitation - logging, mining, large-scale agribusiness, hydroelectric dams and other infrastructure.
> in environmentally damaging activities such as logging.
That's most probably the case, yes. I live in a country (Romania) where a lot of illegal (or borderline-illegal) logging activities happen and a few environmental activists have been physically harmed while one or two foresters have actually been killed.
The issue is that many mountain communities (where the logging happens) are dependent on that activity for their actual survival, because honestly there's not that much one can do in a mountain village to gain your daily bread, and of course when outside forces (like the central administration that employs said foresters, or the environmental activists whose income does not depend on those trees being cut down) come in and threaten that survival the inevitable happens, i.e. physical violence.
The ones targeted by the law and activists for illegal logging are usually companies connected to politicians. They are indeed violent, but they don't get to benefit from any excuses like the one you presented.
Those companies are not using robots to cut those trees down and transport them, they're using local people who get paid for that. If you stop those logging activities then the locals don't get paid anymore.
Another thing is that a lot of people living in those mountain villages were dependent on those forrest trees for their winter heating and small things to do around the house, it was an unwritten rule centuries old, i.e. the forrest belonged to everyone from the village. In Western Europe the powers that be got rid of this custom some time ago, the French around 200 years ago thanks to Napoleon, the English I think even before that. Now, you have those foresters accompanied in some cases by the police who can send you to prison if you're carrying some undocumented wood, the same as your dad or your grand-dad or your ancestors used to do for centuries. Of course that will create havoc.
Wouldn't you expect the number of murders to go down if there are more activists united in one region?
To paint a clearer picture you would have to look at the distribution of both murders and new activists. I bet there are more online activists now, but it doesn't necessarily translate to having more helpers in poor areas. Which are where the natural resources are.
That's a good point. I'm not sure about murders going down with united activists - it seems the people targeted are generally the ones organising activists into groups, so if there were more they might be of greater focus. It's complicated though.
> How does this compare to the growth in the number of environmental activists overall?
It's a legitimate question. Any answer other than environmental activists have increased/decreased by x is not an answer to the question. If it's an emotionally loaded response (e.g. Seriously? People are murdered while you quibble!), it's a non-sequitur.
No, it's a cynical question, which derails the conversation into an arbitrary technical debate. It implies/hints at/suggests there is methological issue. Murder is not some statistical event you have to expect, account for.
Language/communication doesn't work the way you argue here. There is context. OP's question would be valid and common for science on e.g. the connection of total brain cancers and smartphone usage.
No. The cynicism is the insistence that it doesn't matter.
> ...which derails the conversation
If the answer were "There has been a decrease in the total number of activists, therefore the record is worse that the absolute numbers imply" would you make this accusation? No. No you would not.
You would insist, correctly, that it was very relevant. You would rightly look with suspicion upon people who insist that the question "derails the conversation"
The "derails the conversation" accusation is itself a cynical attempt to control the conversation
No I would not make the argument in reverse as you suggested. Not in this context. This is atypical murder. The proliferation of murder is the only metric that matters. This is not your average crime context. It's more or less legitimate businesses/corporations stepping out of legitimate methods. Any murder in this context is noteworthy, an increase points at a catastrophic development of uncontained corporate power. A junkie killig someone in a robbery does not damage the foundations of our current society, where coca cola killing a union worker does. No amount of murder is to be expected, or assumed here, regardless of the activism extend. It's categorically different to "common murder".
Likewise you wouldn't discuss a rise in Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in relation to US population growth, or cartel excutions in relation to Mexico's birth rate. What you are interested in is the number of organized, state-like, violent offenders only, not the pool of their victims.
I hope my point gets across. Not a native speaker.
Maybe. But I guess I don't think "But it's murder and murder is always awful!" is a good answer to the question "Is this newspaper article accurate?" even if the article is about murder and skullduggery.
And I especially don't appreciate some of the histrionics of the "Don't question the accuracy!!" side.
Headline: "There is a 50% increase in the child-crushing rate!"
Me: "There's nothing in the article that tells us how many children are being crushed, exactly. Is this a big problem? Small problem?"
You: "You monster! Children are being crushed! Stop quibbling about how many! Even One. Single. Child. is too many!!"
I would like to Point out that the absolut number of environmental activists is hard to define. How would you start to count? Such a list would be a bad thing. So if there is no absolute number of all activist there is no way to compare dead and alive….but dead ones are more easy to count. And last thing…they are killed while trying to make the world a better place…the number of those people getting
Killed should allways be zero.
In another thread, someone argued that it might be rather caused by an increase in mining and logging activity instead (which in turn also might lead to more activists protesting this behaviour).
To be fair, they definitely do. Any kind of activism that campaigns against mountains of money comes with an innate probability to be killed. I suppose you could argue that it's not innate because someone else is instigating it, but if the conflict that gives rise to the murder is in itself a property of the activism...
OK, I see your point. "Innate" was a carelessly chosen word and on closer consideration a red herring. The risk of getting killed by opponents might just be inherent to protesting in a lot of places.
It seems they do, though. We're not talking about Extinction Rebellion people protesting outside a high school in a Western democracy, we're talking about activists working in nasty places, running interference against brutal governments and corporations. If the number of those activists is growing, then incidents of murder will be on the rise too.
That is, of course, entirely orthogonal to the actual problem being: those people out there are being murdered, this needs to be stopped, and people responsible need to be brought to justice.
The article mentions countries like South Africa, Honduras and Mexico, that have shockingly high rates of crime and murders. If you increase the population sample you will necessarily capture more incidents that are unrelated to the activism. The question is how much of it is unrelated. I think it is a fair question.
Not a rhetorical question, but genuinely interested: what is your context, given that you are aware that this is not a random distribution?
Of course the number of climate activists has risen, as we see the disastrous effacts of climate change more and more clearly and frequently on a global scale.
We also see a global political movement that has quite effectively prevented measures against climate change, using disinformation and propaganda and, as shown in the article above, deadly violence.
It's actually not like that. More rabbits means just a bit fatter wolves and not for long. Check Google for "r/K selection".
Wolves prefer to raise better quality of offspring, not more. Rabbits on the other hand just raise more offspring and don't care much for them since food is plenty.
> The police are in on it, the government is in on it, the corporation is responsible.
Then why does it not stop? If you look at the countries where this problem is occuring, they don't really have highly effective governments, they have lots of corruption, and generally high crime rates.
If the governments do not prosecute those responsible and hold corporations to account, this won't stop, and if the people in those countries by and large continue their support for their corrupt governments and police, then that will also not change.
If you look at the corporations named, none of them are owned by locals. They’re all global mega corps, owned and operated through Western parents. They exploit the local chaotic governance to their advantage - and evade prosecution in their home countries by virtue of it being conducted on “foreign soil”.
It’s good to see that (occasionally) international megacorps can be prosecuted for international crimes - I’d argue that a fine is more of a slap on the wrist, but it’s better than nothing.
I’d really like to see oil/wood/mining megacorps be brought to justice as well.
The US seems to be very trigger happy wrt foreign companies giving bribes on forgein soil, if they have a presence in the US. I think FCAP has been modified to be more efficient in this respect.
As someone who comes from a third world country, my view on this is that the solution starts with people voting for better governments. Governments that are willing to actually enforce the law. If most murder cases remain unsolved in a country then that seems like then that is a bigger problem that who gets murdered, and I can promise you that most murder victims in these countries are not climate activists.
Laws without rule of law won't work. We can then devolve into might makes right, which is the current situation, and in that situation most people lose out.
The year is 2087, the remaining scientists that weren't hunted down in the previous year, have issued a dire warning that time is running out for action on climate change.
The claim is rebuked again by a conglomerate consisting of Breathing apparatus manufacturers, Sunblock body-paint makers, Subterranean city developers, Biohazard swimsuit makers, Soylent green icecream industries, Nestlé, FEMA holiday camps, and the Corporate Emperor of USA.
But also remember the hysteria about ozone depletion, which served the interest of DuPont. It's a mystery how heavy halocarbon could reach stratosphere. Nevertheless, thanks to "environmental" activists, DuPont had become richer.
You seem to have mixed up your conspiracies, DuPont itself was the one calling ozone depletion "a science fiction tale … a load of rubbish … utter nonsense", according to wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion
Ozone isn’t a halocarbon and it doesn’t “reach” the stratosphere, it’s formed there. It’s also not a mystery; the upper ozone layer is formed from atmospheric oxygen and radiation from the sun. Since your predicating information is false then whatever conspiracy theory you’re implying probably isn’t true.
And while I’m sure some companies profited from prohibiting CFCs, stopping ozone depletion is one of the few things humanity has done with measurable effects. If a few companies made money from it that’s fine. It would be great if we could tie a profit motive to fixing climate change.
Since your predicating information is false then whatever conspiracy theory you’re implying probably isn’t true.
Halocarbons are heavier than air, they cannot travel up to stratosphere which is 10 to 50 km up in the air. Which is predicating information about why CFCs were bad.
If a few companies made money from it that’s fine. It would be great if we could tie a profit motive to fixing climate change.
Exactly. Both ozone depletion theory and current climate change theory are making rich countries richer and poor countries poorer. Which brings the question: maybe it's actually the point of these theories?
Gases don't stratify in the lower atmosphere. Pure argon is heavier than oxygen and nitrogen, but it does not sink down from the atmosphere to form a concentrated surface layer. Neither do CFCs.
Not entirely about environment issues, but there's a TV show with something similar as a premise - Continuum. A crime solving drama/sci-fi, where the protagonist is a time traveler coming to our times from year 2070-ish, time when the world is ruled by a Corporate Congress, consisting of thinly veiled allusions to well-known corporations of today. In between all the action and emotional drama, it also delivers some good critique of tech businesses, corporate overreach, and surveillance state.
Do you recommend it? It's one of the few scifi shows I haven't seen but stumble upon from time to time. It seems a bit low-budget and oldschool TV (pre-breaking bad quality of TV).
I do. It's pretty decent. It does go a bit downhill later on, but I'd say in the late S3 and S4 (I blame it on the show being cut short and having to wrap up everything too quickly).
In the genre of "seemingly a crime show, but really a deep sci-fi", I'd strongly recommend Person of Interest, if you haven't seen it already. It contains what I consider to be, to date, the best discussion of the topic of general artificial intelligence, and all its ethical and safety implications.
> It seems a bit low-budget and oldschool TV
It's definitely not big-budget, but there's decent FX in there, just judiciously used. Future tech is impressive, but not crazy flashy.
> (pre-breaking bad quality of TV).
Could you elaborate on that one? I've only seen the first three episodes, after which I gave up, but from those three I thought Breaking Bad is a low-quality and extremely low-budget show.
Not sure what GP meant by 'pre breaking bad', but I'll give it a shot. It is quite low budget, but the writing does seem like it heralded a change of some sort. I think it's less formulaic but it's hard to really put one's finger on it.
To my understanding Breaking Bad was a show where the writers counted on people bingeing it, so they could tell a longer story instead of having to have every thirty minutes be self-contained.
I tried PoI, but it didn't catch me (first ep only). Maybe I try again. I would love a good, techy private detective series. Would love to find something like Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as a series.
For me, in Germany, Breaking Bad was the series which changed the game. After breaking bad, TV became the superior story vessel. There were some good series before, but after BB "everyone" around saw the appeal. It's a different narrative style than traditional TV series. Even gems like Battlestar Galactica, feel more episodically contained and are not bincheable like modern shows. BB wasn't pioneering but rather the turning stone(?), I think.
And yes, I do recommend giving BB another try. It starts so slowly, but it will get insanely intense! However, it's becoming uncomfortably stressful story-wise. If you don't like that sort of drama, you may not enjoy it. Then Better Call Saul is even better, but also even more slow progression. Tho, if you got into the BB style, the wrinting, acting and cinematography are unmatched IMO.
Going by your explanation, I understand you like serialized TV shows - vs. episodic ones. I'm not sure if BB was the turning point there - there's been a steady change in preferences from episodic to serialized over the decades now, probably starting with invention of VCR, and reaching full speed when Netflix introduced their streaming service.
PoI is somewhere in the middle. In S1, most episodes stand on their own, but they do spin out story arcs, that start to dominate later on. By S4, it's almost entirely serialized - but in a good way. It's definitely binge-friendly (I've done it multiple times, and didn't get bored yet).
I am not into voyeurism and sexually liberated enough to feel unashamed watching porn directly for erotic stimulation. So, I am rather looking for insights of a different substance.
Here is the original report [1]. For those of you who quip that the number of environmental activists has also been increasing in recent years (talk about being so close to realizing the point), I also want to clarify that Global Witness, the NGO who put out the report, has only been tracking these numbers since 2012.
You’re citing a report that literally doesn’t make that statement. Where do you get this information?
Here’s an excerpt about Columbia, where I’d expect drugs to be involved: “Colombia was once again the country with the highest recorded attacks, with 65 defenders killed in 2020.* A third of these attacks targeted indigenous and afro-descendant people, and almost half were against small-scale farmers.”
If you don’t see the connection, you’re either not reading the report you’re responding to, or you’re leaving out information.
As per the title, you are right that it is not strictly about climate change — they were often environmental activists fighting against destructive land use conditions. You can find more details on page 12 of the official report I linked.
If we consider human lives to be equal in value, concentration on a small, though outrageous death cause, may kill many more other people out of neglect / insufficient attention to another phenomenon.
On the other hand, 1000 more murders for 10 000 less cancer deaths does not sound like a good tradeoff either.
Being fully informed and cognizant about the true systemic machinations of the system that you're manipulating as a politician seems like it's a good thing, not a bad thing. Asking for more carefully split-out info before YOLOing a policy prescription is something I've pretty much never seen but would love to. On the other hand, declaring that you're right without a goddamned shred of statistical info is just wrong, no matter what side you're on (and that's most of the debate on this article, since there's no useful info presented).
The best engineers (and math/science people) I know ask tough questions about policies that their own parties are pushing; I've rarely seen a humanities major do that unless it was because of some niche "against-the-grain" identity issue they were plumping for. I do know a couple humanities folks who eventually realized they needed to learn more about math/stats to be able to justify their statements, and in every case they became more rationalist once they understood the toolkit.
So: bad tech people are dumbasses, just like bad humanities majors are (and they will always be if they don't understand math, science, and tech). We should stop electing both, but we never will.
But let's not throw the fucking baby out with the bathwater when it comes to preferences, please.
Yeah, becuase it is working out so well limiting the pool of politicians it to just grifters and conmen who were too shit to sell used cars for a living.
What do the BBC or Global Witness want me to do with this information?
Edit: Global Witness are campaigners. What do they want to happen as a consequence of writing this report?
In 2003 possibly the biggest march London ever saw, failed to stop the UK going to war in Iraq, and nobody got killed on the march. Sabotage with a monkey wrench does tend to make a practical difference but also means you're at risk of a beating or worse from from the work site guards.
Nobody cares -- that's the sad truth. Most people are just running to stay in the same place on the corporate capitalist hamster wheel. I don't think people are free enough to care about morals and things that matter beyond their own life. I know the bourgeoise on here hate to hear these things, but it's true.
People certainly claim to care about climate change, but most do so only in order to reap the identity benefit. If saving the planet means making less money and living a more modest lifestyle, most people will say no. The outrage is mostly superficial.
True, but you don’t have to parrot what those in power tell you to say. Use their own terms against them, or use a completely different terminology - just make sure you’re the one who defines the terms, and that you’re the one to create context (i.e. meaning). Gather enough people who share the world-view you’ve created and you have a chance to overthrow existing power structures. But even if you don’t, you’ll be “free” - at least in the mental sense. Of course, depending on how radically different your views are from the status quo, you might also seem insane to some people (in which case its probably best to smile, nod and agree to what others are saying)
I skimmed the report.[1] Very few corporation names can be found, unless I missed them. I found some attributions in highlight stories, e.g. Tate & Lyle Sugars in a Thailand case of sugar plantation taking land by force; but those are few and isolated.
IMO a list of names of people murdered means almost nothing to any reader beyond the symbolic value. Now, if you also attach the names of responsible/beneficiary corporations in each case, especially the multinationals, it would be a lot more powerful.
Are you saying that an environmental activist being murdered is only newsworthy if you can find a way to pin the blame on a Western corporation? That seems a fairly callous attitude to take.
Yes, of course multinationals are Western - they're creatures of the Western system of bilateral investor-rights treaties and the largely Anglo-American corporate legal system. Chinese and Russian companies may operate outside their own territory, but they don't have the distributed ownership and management to qualify as multinational.
Coming up with your own narrow definition of a widely accepted term and attacking someone else for using its widely accepted definition is a one-way ticket to a toxic interaction, which ends here.
Huh, you're right - guess that comes from growing up during the '80s, when "multinational corporation" was practically synonymous with "transnational corporation". My bad and thanks for the correction.
So I was a little curious about some of the names from my country. I checked out the name of Isravel Moses.
According to The Wire.in, an online publication, whose credentials one would not doubt when it comes to criticizing the government or corporations had this to say
> On the night of November 8, Moses was hacked to death by alleged drug dealers, as a fallout of his reportage on the distribution and sale of ganja and the illegal encroachment of poramboke lands.
Though he was an activist, I am not sure he was an activist against global warming.
His death is regrettable and India has had an alarming rate of murders of journalists and activists along with a rise in nationalism. And most people never really hear about it, which is even worse.
Though this country has never been good to whistleblowers, journalists and activists. This has been happening for decades, not something very new honestly.
The list is of murdered environmental activists, not just global warming activists.
And while yes, this has been happening for decades, it seems important to note that this is the second year in a row that the counted murders have reached new records.
So I'm really not sure what your point is; it reads like a vague call to complacency.
Well, I don't really have the power to make societal level change, hell, I can't even change my father's mind when it comes to lapping up propaganda...
Only thing I am working towards is leaving here as soon as possible.
I think the parent is implying a disingenuous broadening of the definition of "environmental activist", including people who are not expected to be part of that definition, and artificially magnifying the "number of environmental activists killed" for sensationalism.
I would just like to point out that it is somewhat reductionist to think environmental activists only exist to combat global warming. I am seeing a lot of this false equivalency here in this thread and it is surprising to me that people think this.
Every electronic good you buy contributes to these murders. The raw material sourced in these places are used for manufacture of these products and environmental activism threatens their ability to continue to exploit nature and profit from it.
... and still here we are, from the comfort of your our laptop/mobile commenting on something happening half-way across the world. I am personally not willing to give up this comfort and chances are most people aren't either.
One could even argue that the "West" benefited for centuries from the blood and resources of others, and the only reason why they afford today to talk about climate change and fair trade is their plundering past. At the same time, the poorer countries just do whatever they need to survive and develop. One could even call this type of activism callous and think the only reason the "West" has for pushing this agenda is to ensure there are still poor people from whom to steal in the future.
When someone doesn't have food to put on the table they tend to care less about green living, clean energy, etc.
Gael Giraud, a french economist and professor, says that ecology cannot live with private property. He gives the example that if someone discovers oil, nothing prevents that person from exploiting it, because private property can be found in most constitutions, including human rights.
It's a difficult subject, but it is going to be difficult to realize that capitalism and the culture of individualism are real obstacle to climate reform.
History will show that capitalism won against the soviet union, but I think that climate change is the limit of capitalism.
Technology will not save us, only sobriety will truly help. Hard to know how you can convince an entire population to not eat meat, use bikes and public transport, without passing laws.
The next 30 years are going quite a depressingly entertaining spectacle.
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