Thanks to Edger at Docudharma for posting about this. James Balog discusses TED, the Extreme Ice Survey, and why perception is the enemy in the fight to survive global warming. The following embedded video was "[r]ecorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, England."
Seeing is believing. This is why it was so important to pass meaningful climate legislation instead of the cap-and-trade scam, which appears to be stalled anyway. If we as a nation - indeed, if we as a species - are going to survive the coming catastrophes, we MUST do something NOW. Baby steps and fake reforms will kill us all, guaranteed.
The main thing I'd ask you to take from this is that conservativism and liberalism exist at a fundamental level of human brain function. They are facets of ingrained human psychology and not pure constructs of thought and rationality. You cannot discuss the roots of these two ideologies (separate from others IMO) without looking at human evolutionary psychology.
Have you heard about TED? The Technology Entertainment Design conference has been held annually since 1990. It's a kind of Bildeberg group for smart people. It was pretty secretive until 2006 when they began posting selected talks from their invitation-only no media intimate conferences on their web site (I certainly hadn't heard of it!).
They're up to over 200 talks posted online and the subject matter varies greatly but there it is a goldmine of new thinking and leading edge innovation in a variety of fields. There's no overt ideology to the place, but the defacto alliance of science, empiricism and rationality with liberalism makes it pretty friendly for the most part from a progressive perspective. I think part of building a governing progressive majority in America involves linking up with progressives worldwide. I may write about this in future, but conservatives got a leg up on us through globalizing commerce and goods and leaving out civil rights and labour mobility. The answer is not to go protectionist and put the shields back up, it's to globalize our issues too. I think we were beating them domestically so they took the fight globally. I think if we do the same, we'll beat them globally too.
