Citizens’ Assembly

This topic is doomed to forever remain a stub for a more complete piece as it is continually added to by events.

Whatever we call it the Citizens’ / People’s Assembly (aka Standing Constitutional Convention) is an old idea whose time seems to have come.

Citizens’ Assembly is the term Rory Stewart is using in his latest high profile moves to highlight his credentials in bringing the country together as party leader (Tories that is, but it hardly matters.) He’s used it for both getting agreement on breaking the Brexit deadlock and to resolve resource priorities in Adult Social Care.

Previously any number of other topics have suggested the same idea: Lords Reform, Voting / PR reform, National & local devolution, Inter / Super-national federation, Lobbying rules, any number of constitutional changes. The point being with subjects that underlie our political processes, as opposed to the content of parliamentary business, it is easy to agree that something’s wrong and needs reform but almost always impossible to agree which solutions we should adopt. When the process is simply one of competing ideas criticising each other in a debating chamber until no single idea can “win” outright …. the status quo remains unchanged, and often the level of division, confusion and frustration has simply been increased.

We need a standing convention – and assembly that convenes on topics like these, but whose own constitution and make-up has been predefined independent of the particular topic. And it needs to be an assembly whose make-up is representative in ways different from partisan politics of Westminster and more importantly it delivers not legislation – that still the job of the legislature – but proposals framed as tractable motions to be put to the legislature. And whilst it would be a “parliament” – a talking shop – in a literal sense, it would not be a debating chamber. Debate is the too-limiting model that gives rise to deadlock in the meta-business underlying existing processes. It would be more like “committee” room business on a larger, publicly engaged scale. (Some have pointed out that set up this way the assembly itself would fulfill the original intended role of the second chamber and its own reform would be a natural outcome.)

The big risk in setting up the assembly is in getting its own constitution wrong too quickly and living to regret another broken piece of democracy. It must have limited immediate power and it must have values-based rules that permit their own evolution in specific mechanisms and procedures. Less is more when it comes to its constitutional definition.

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[And within minutes, …

The partisan debating gets further polarised by social media sound-bites and memes reducing arguments to slogans and …. nothing gets done. We need the combined “committee” approach whose job is to produce a balanced proposal BEFORE it gets to the legislature.]

 

Ain’t That Queer?

Queer Theory – A new one on me, something I know literally nothing about, but I’ve been following an interesting series of social media threads from @Glinner (Graham Linehan) doing battle with the more PC extremes of gender and sexuality “terminology” – particularly the “self-identifying trans” debate – and getting inundated in trolling and flak attacks for his efforts. He’s on the right side of this, but …

Things we need to recognise as binary-distinct for good reasons and the terminology or taboo / lack thereof that limits our ability to talk about them is pretty central to my epistemological – “how do we know?” – thesis. However, I do defend PC considerations in their place, using PoMo philosophers to support my arguments where appropriate. It’s the extremes that kill us, especially when bureaucratically (autistically) enforced. Rules are for guidance of the wise and the enslavement of fools – especially when it comes to language and terminology. (I call myself PoPoMo.) Language is useless without wisdom.

My ears pricked-up when @Glinner shared this short video of Derek Jensen with a class of students talking about “queer theory” and Foucault gets a mention (along with other founding proponents of its ideas) – basically using the theory to justify paedophilia (!)

[The clip is actually fascinating from the whole safe-spaces / trigger-warning perspective – on who’s allowed to say what in an educational environment – and how Jensen handles his jeering students. A exemplary lesson in teaching practice I’d say – but that would be to digress for now.]

Foucault is well known as one of the “foggy froggie” PoMo’s and controversially extreme on his rights, freedoms and equalities agenda in sex & gender and on society & crime – about which I know little beyond “controversial”.

He is however an interesting philosopher from a fundamental metaphysical perspective. Foucault is someone I’ve used explicitly.

Again it’s about the need to make distinctions – choose distinct words – whilst nevertheless understanding their proper dynamic relations. If we set the distinct items up as “objects” in their own right, we end up fighting battles over how definitive they are. This is necessarily polarising between extremes unless we apply PC rules that “ban” certain distinctions, limit meaning and flatten the dialogue. A choice between polarisation and meaninglessness. It’s “Identity Politics”, but we need distinctions to function. However distinctions need to have “good fences” because good fences make good neighbours and meaning is allowed to flow across them whilst we nevertheless respect their distinction.

For me this is another whole example of the populism problem when it comes to accentuating extremes. Explicitly here the idea that Foucault was controversial therefore to be condemned as entirely bad unless you’re agenda is to defend some specific political aim. Whereas like most human thinkers, good in parts but whacky, speculative, mischievous or plain wrong in others. Take care not to selectively misappropriate sound-bite quotes that can only ever make sense in some more nuanced context, and may not have been that good in the first place. The immediate preceding post was another example – whereby “pop-psychology” turned left-right brain considerations into caricatures too toxic for serious scientists to risk talking about.

The Divided Brain – a Director’s Cut

Iain McGilchrist’s film “The Divided Brain” was released last week.

The film one half of your brain doesn’t want you to see.

An hour and a quarter of anyone’s time well spent.

[Full disclosure: I have written positively about McGilchrist’s work before, and contributed to crowdfunding of the film project.]

“The halves of our brain have forgotten who’s in charge?” – neither. The right brain appreciates why it needs to collaborate with the left, but the left has forgotten why it needs the right. And this is a “western” mental illness.”

Also – Before you watch this film above, if you’ve not already read and appreciated McGilchrist’s “The Master and his Emissary”, it would be a good idea to watch this short animation summarising the underlying hemispheric hypothesis.

The story in the film itself is in two parts.

Firstly, the uncontroversial clinical-psychiatric and neurological-scientific fact that our brains have evolved in two distinct hemispheres to give us the ability to manipulate and integrate two distinct views of the world at any one time.

And, secondly, the more speculative but nevertheless convincing aspect that co-evolution of brain and culture has become skewed towards left-brain behaviour dominating to the detriment of our “western” society.

Given the plasticity of our brains, our minds and our culture, the hope and motive is that by better appreciating the latter we can learn to correct the problem. The film starts with some background on McGilchrist’s career in English Literature academia before retraining and practicing in medicine and clinical psychiatry.

Considering the second main theme first, there has been a wealth of literature on differences between western and eastern thought and how the west is in danger of missing a trick. Charles Freeman’s “Closing of the Western Mind” would be the 21st Century archetype (if not the best) and many will know the anti-western-technology beats and spiritual boom of the 2nd half of the 20th Century exemplified by Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila”. But Pirsig himself was reading Northrop, James and Kant and there is a long tradition in analysing the differences since the enlightenment and the rediscovery of eastern philosophies. The blurring of where differences experienced are psychologically subjective and/or objectively real has also infected much woolly thinking into popular understanding of post relativity and quantum theory in the new physics.

Linking the east-west thinking aspect to the left-right brain aspect is of course speculative and based on strong intuitions and much subjective evidence. But after pop-psychology and pop-science led to both halves of the story languishing as toxic topics for serious scientific study, the film pulls together proper research work on both. Early portions of the film address unpicking reality from popular culture.

The comparative Eastern and Western thinking scientific studies of Dr Li Jun Ji in Canada are very striking even though presented very briefly. Like Pirsig, McGilchrist also presents aboriginal-American / first-nation perspectives, in this case in dialogue with Dr Leroy Little Bear of the Blackfoot nation. And of course once we get into spiritual, holistic takes on the greater relational unity of humans in the environment, more science-minded viewers will feel uncomfortable. This is of course part of the point. Many of us have lost the ability to appreciate or find the language to incorporate such thinking into our everyday rationality.

The first premise – understanding the fact, and the reason why, brains have evolved hemispherically in animals and humans – will be much clearer to most of the sceptical scientific viewing audience. As I said, this aspect is scientifically uncontroversial.

Two of the neuro-scientists, Michael Gazzaniga and Onur Güntürkün and  neuro-clinician Jürg Kesselring provide a good deal of the evidence supporting the first premise and the fact that it really is uncontroversial even if new to the audience. Again there is an even greater body of work out there on split-brain and asymmetrically damaged brains in humans and animals in formal science and popular science writing. Full marks to McGilchrist and to the writing and editorial team for not including the ubiquitous Phineas Gage case, which has become a meme in its own right, but the likes of Ramchandran and Sacks are recommended reads for the curious who are not yet sure how non-contentious this material is. The former is in fact among the credits. There’s also a large section on the experience of Jill Bolte-Taylor whose TED Talk fame precedes the re-telling within  McGilchrist’s story.

An excellent editorial decision, given their scientific day-jobs, that Gazzaniga and Güntürkün are both given space to voice their doubts about the speculative relation between the uncontroversial science and wider human cultural ills. That heavy lifting is left to McGilchrist and his other witnesses. Great contributions on this from John Cleese, Rowan Williams and Jonathan Rowson to keep us connected to wider relevance beyond the drier science. Fascinating that economics is again the field where scientific modelling bumps into its awkward relationship with psychological reality.

A well conceived and executed film, cinematically as well as editorially. The pace works well and it is watchable as a standalone piece of work – even if, as I say, the more orthodox scientific types find themselves increasingly uncomfortable towards the end. Mission accomplished in that case.

And it seems hardly necessary to add that the subject matter content is very important. It may be uncontroversial that there really are left-right brain behaviour differences, but to appreciate that misunderstanding of our response to this could be leading humanity to extinction is as big as it gets.

An hour and a quarter of anyone’s time well spent.

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For more:

The earlier short-animation of the hemispheric hypothesis.

The Divided Brain film on-demand rental at Vimeo.

The Divided Brain film purchase at MatterOfFact Media.

The Divided Brain film project web-site.

The Divided Brain Twitter feed: @divided_brain.

McGilchrist’s “Master & Emissary” on Psybertron.

Species Extinction

A pet peeve of mine is “science” stories hand-wringing some new study statistics on how many species are going extinct in some time-frame.

Assuming 10-Gazillion species exist, I’d expect 2-Gazillion species to be recently evolved and looking for a foothold, 6-Gazillion species to be relatively stable populations going through normal eco-balancing cycles, and 2-Gazillion species to be on their way out.

(And you can compound up the Pareto analyses from 80/20 to 84/16, 95/5 98/2 and so on … as well as back to 68/32, 64/36 and 50/50, etc, etc, etc.)

And any one time half would always be the wrong side of normal / average.

How hard can it be? Numbers (size / scale) are irrelevant, it’s dependencies in the distribution tails that matter to us and the cosmos.

Sub specie aeternitatus.

“Cosmicity”

I’m coining a new word for the abstract noun “humanity” but with a definition simply broadened to the whole environment with humans as a part. Cosmicity – concern for and on behalf of the whole and every part of the whole.

Places humans in it in our rightful place but without any artificial privilege in the term. Satisfies the latest fashion in green politics for eco-sustainability (even though it has always been the point of human activity).

Could call it “god” in the sense of being that most sacred to us along with the humility that despite being natural, we have our necessarily limited perspective in understanding the whole. And could call it “religion” in the original sense that it can be the thing which binds us culturally. That doesn’t suggest anything supernatural. It needn’t suggest anything ideological according to any existing rules written in tablets of stone or non-secular in how we organise ourselves naturally. “Our” rules and arrangements evolve as does our understanding of natural laws beyond humans.

How hard can it be? I believe in cosmicity.

Thoughts prompted by Liz Oldfield thread re Martin Buber, itself as a response to thoughts prompted by Julian Baggini: [Thread]

“if you hallow this life you meet the living God”

If you hold the living cosmos sacred you’ve done all you can and in doing so you experience (meet) the subjective knowledge that you can never objectively know the whole – maybe.

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[Post Note: Having coined the term, I realise it may just be a restatement of Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatus ?]

Standing Constitutional Convention aka “People’s Assembly”

This is just a stub, a holding post, for something I promised to write.

Establishing a standing constitutional convention is THE PRIORITY OF OUR TIMES in a UK context if not wider globally. Everywhere from the urgency of anti-establishment, anti-global-capitalist, eco-sustainability SJW agendas, to issues of reform of day-to-day governance, we are led back to this missing piece of the UK jigsaw. With so much constitutional tradition and convention misunderstood and in danger of being thrown out with the anarchic revolutionary bathwater, we don’t so much need a (new) written constitution as a new vehicle for a continuous improvement process.

I first heard of the idea of a standing”Constitutional Convention” from xxxx back in 2015, but it stuck with me because it gave a name to something I had already been wrestling with for a couple of decades, about the direction of social evolution. Since the Brexit / Trump fiascos, every commentator seems to be gravitating to similar “people’s this / people’s that” ideas, including spokespeople for the so-called Extinction Rebellion movement. It’s so important long-term, that it could easily be set up along the wrong lines by those with specific narrower agendas than a better future for all. I fact, almost it’s most important feature is to be a self-bootstrapping process that is not limited by any one party’s values and aims.

I outlined what it should look like most recently in this Brexit-related post, and mentioned it in this series of three posts and related Twitter dialogue – on eco-sustainability – threads which continued beyond those tweets already captured in the blog.

I hesitated to follow-up on the promise immediately because Rupert Read voiced some (IMHO) dubious objectives of his own regarding a People’s Assembly and, wanting to keep the idea politically neutral, I didn’t want to start a  polarising political distraction in the proposal itself.

But – I am drafting the necessary proposal.

Ironically in the last Twitter exchanges with William Peltzer, we noted that the CA (CC / PA) idea was not only not new in recent 21st C times but, as described, it was fulfilling the originally intended role of the 2nd chamber check and balance on the direction of parliament. Ironic because one of the first “reforms” for the CA was to be the Lords itself. That kind of ironic and circular correlation is rarely entirely coincidental, even if causation is almost always infinitely more complex. I’ll be back.

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  • Values it proceeds by. Education of why and how it works. Understanding the bootstrapping.
  • Mechanisms for initial constitution and function. Agenda of currently foreseeable issues. Mechanisms for sustainable evolution.
  • Discussion and reasoning “why” distinct from “what and how” mechanisms and requirements.

Leaky Briefs – Trust In Confidence

The current story about the leak from the UK National Security Council (NSC) is important because it has nothing to do with Huawei (or Brexit, or Trump, or Climate change, or anything other than leaky security).

People are thoroughly used to participants briefing leaks from “internal” meetings – all sides do it to fly their political kites to their ultimate advantage. And journalists accept is as a standards source of staying ahead of the official announcement game. That the very idea of privacy has been trampled.

Transparency is simply another “freedom fetish” that seems to trump all other considerations – a kind of twisted whistle-blowing that no “institution” should be allowed to do business beyond the glare of public and media scrutiny. Ever. At all.

Secrecy – is absolutely essential to good faith dialogue, you need to be able to trust who you are working with as they need to be able to trust you. It’s why it’s called confidentiality. It doesn’t stop the Snowdens the Assanges and assorted SJWs from demanding access to anything and everything by any means.

Conscience driven whistle-blowing is a special case amongst the good-faith participants – but a hacker or a political leaker is not a whistle-blower, even if they turn out to be right in some moral sense. In the long run details are released and the record scrutinised. In the short-term there are very good reasons to maintain confidence. Meta-confidence amongst trusted commentators too, so the media know what is going on in terms of why certain things shouldn’t be “published” just now.

Of course critics and SJWs with decry any cosy closed relationships, but do I really have to spell out why trust and confidence (secrecy for the time-being) matter?

Beyond risk to innocent parties, in a world where everything is treated as objective, fact or not, there is no room for what ifs.

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[Post Note:

It’s become the issue that since the Huawei security concerns were valid public interest the dipstick that released the content from the NSC was justified in doing so. Hell no. The topic was already in public conversation before it became an NSC agenda item in fact and anyone specific (May) said anything specific (minded to go for it despite concerns) about it. NSC confidentiality is separate from public debate. Both can and should happen.]

And Another Thing …

“Hold that thought” quickie post only …

Autism – Greta Thunberg case adds to the list of scientism driven by autism. Previous example is Chris Packham, but it’s a general issue historically with scientism and autistic economics and politics. People who are proud of their autism – which is fine as individual differences and contributions are concerned – but which plays into the objective “evidence-based” fetish when it comes to being scientistic – scientific beyond science that is. All life’s decisions should be based on the best evidence available (at the time), but they are still human decisions – it is scientism to demand every decision affecting humanity meets entirely scientific standards.

Memetics of Mobs vs Individuals – Loudest voices of those with simplest (autistic / scientistic) position spread the clearest (wrongest) messages.

I’m no defender of Scruton’s philosophical views, and I prefer evolution to revolution, but I’ve not read Murray’s piece … on mobs and individuals, it seems. (More Scruton and backlash to the backlash following BBC R4 Today interview Friday morning …)

Objectivisation – The backlash on old white men [- like me;-) -] expressing any opinion contrary to GT, are painted as somehow attacking her, however carefully points are expressed. (I should dig out some Twitter examples?) It’s just another example of reducing any opinion to an us-and-them tribal battle. To turn GT into an “object” of debate. What’s needed is to recognise the relational issues. It’s about how GT – and her qualities – are being used by establishment media and politics and by anti-establishment SJW’s. The people doing the defending are probably more guilty of it than those trying to express constructive criticisms. Constructive criticism needs critical dialogue about the relationships between subjects and objects NOT about subjects and objects qua objects. This goes all the way down from politics to the fundaments of physical science in fact – and is one reason it is really just part of the autistic scientism. The mythical meme that, as objective knowledge, science is somehow the paragon of all human knowledge and understanding – it simply isn’t. This BBC story “fact-checking” GT’s claims for example, under the science banner – gimme strength! Climate change has its scientific content – good and bad – but the problems and their solutions are not themselves scientific.

They are about “governance” of human society.
(The original cybernetics / kybernetes)

EU MEP Elections 2019 – are badly conceived. Obvious now we have large minority voting for anti-EU candidates. If we ever get to May 2019 MEP elections it will be a disaster. Should be proper (con)federal arrangement – delegated upwards from UK parliament. (One already on the Constitutional Assembly work-list.)

As I said in the previous posts – fixing broken democracy – saving it from populism – based on the right “values” – is THE priority agenda item.

Right Analysis, Wrong Conclusion?

This is a further follow-up to my Extinction Rebellion piece from yesterday, (which was itself a follow-up from a couple of days before) and to which I had already added many post notes live yesterday from social media. Things are moving very fast when it comes to climate change 😉

Loads of tweeters and media commentators jumping on the older generation men criticising a youthful autistic girl and missing the real point. Getting side-tracked on spurious ageist and sexist (and ableist) issues. Everyone seems to prefer to pick fights with “others” than to solve problems. Situation normal in our days of warlike polarisation. Even rhetorical warfare has rules, but most ignore them.

Except one:

William Peltzer did actually read and understand what I had written rather than knee-jerk into the media storm.

To which I replied:

“Thanks for reading and responding. Our difference is your non-specific “however we can”. Fire-fighting (the planet) and fixing (the system) ARE the priorities (we agree?) …. More later”

… and here we are.

So to paraphrase where we are?

We gotta do something.
What we’re already doing with the “existing system” isn’t working (fast enough).
What’s really wrong is the existing system.
Let’s smash (or fix?) the system (“however we can”).

I have no problem with “shouting loudest” and “civil disobedience” as the protest tactic – the call to action, the breaking of eggs to make an omelette – a little creative destruction as Marx and Schumpeter might have said. This is not remotely new just increasingly urgent. (And it’s not remotely confined to questions of climate change – a much wider populist failure of democracy across many “social justice” issues …. as I’ve said …. but let’s stick to the current point.)

The problem with creative destruction (smash the system) as the (sole) action plan is – as I’ve already said many times – careful what you wish for, and beware throwing valuable babies out with the bathwater. If you reduce “the system” to some monolithic enemy; smash it, all or nothing, then we are simply trusting the future to the plans of those who shout loudest.

Quite explicitly in fact, says Pelzer above.

Let’s cut to the chase. The problem is the system. There are many institutions and individuals in public and economic service who (a) are doing their moral damnedest, and (b) are more competent and enlightened in terms of governance practicalities than the loudest XR voices. It doesn’t help to lump all public servants (individual humans) as the problem. Sure there are bad eggs and institutional blockages – it’s these we need to be breaking. The polarising “with us or against us populism” is what has most recently led us into this mess.

We can’t simply replace all existing flawed democratic institutions with a leaderless (and institutionless) “occupy” style anarchy – on national and international scales – the scale of climate change.

What we can do however is introduce a standing constitutional convention – aka a people’s assembly – between the electorate and the existing lobby / committee / house institutions. It’s an old idea just become fashionable since, like so many things, it was tagged “people’s”.

Obviously it will be far from perfect first time out, and it will evolve in practice, but it needs to be constituted with the values we … value … collectively … democratically. Not just those who shout loudest.

Last time I recommended the standing constitutional assembly I was focussed on Brexit and Proper-PR as well as Eco-Sustainability – but it gives the briefest outline of what a CA might be (and do).

Democracy may be the worst form of governance except for all the others, but I’ll need a lot of convincing that they who shout loudest is the best form of governance even if it is the most effective for initiating change.

[End Part 1]

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[Part 2]

In the above I cut to the chase – what one thing could we agree to do for the best – (say) a Constitutional (people’s) Assembly.

But Pelzer does make some other good points, worth unpicking:

“Our society is staggeringly ignorant of the (broken democracy) issues”

It certainly has been. Apart from headline national government elections, populations have been remarkably apathetic about governance – locally, regionally, internationally, supra-nationally and globally – until quite recently. Now however the public are very much wound-up by issues of governance. Global business vs national governments, International concern with a dick-head making it to the white-house, the misrepresentation of the EU under the Brexit fiasco, post-truth / fake-news and populist polarisation across so many social issues, science and health, religion and conspiracy theories – all amplified recently by the the ubiquity and (apparent) transparency of social media. People care, even if a sizeable proportion may be misinformed or ignorant of detailed issues.

“media, politicians and businesses have no inclination to changing the status quo”

Sorry, no. These are all manned by real humans – the same as you and I. They are we. It is absolutely unacceptable to tar everyone with the one brush. As I said in Part 1 – there are many virtuous and competent individuals amongst us. It’s the system level functioning that is at fault.

“short term (interests and profits) [are] the only timescale which matters to politicians and public companies”

Short-termism is indeed a major problem – institutionalised at so many levels – from basic psychological gratification, to accounting practices to electoral cycles. Frankly this is a major aspect of introducing a “standing” (ie open-ended) constitutional assembly that evolves on timescales well beyond electoral and accounting cycles. There are of course many detailed practical issues within systems of governance that could also be addressed, to de-incentivise short-termism. That said Pelzer again her tars us all – public servants and company officers – with only caring for the short-term. More us and them bogey-men. This is not helpful for enlightened progress. The problem is systematic.

“your argument would likely have worked as little as 4 years ago”

Yes, the passing of time is making all considerations more urgent and more critical. It is no coincidence that “4 years” is the time associated with the rise in public concern with the populist & post-truth ills I cited above. But plus ca change, some fundamentals never change – there is very little new under the sun – apart from lost time.

“the current penchant for sensationalism and complete disdain for rational argument and factual debate on all sides it comes down to, he who shouts the loudest”

A generalisation again – many of us are resisting that urge – but obviously in this post-truth social-media-amplified world that is increasingly the nature of how messages gain attention. In fact XR campaigning has used every attention-grabbing trick in the direct action playbook. And in terms of grabbing the agenda it works and has worked. But it’s a symptom of the problem we’re trying to fix, not something we should aspire to being how we’d like things to work in future?

“Get the existential problems fixed first, however we can. Government policy and a clear commitment to policies which incentivise businesses and people, should naturally be the first step.”

As I responded initially “however we can” is the $64,000 question. But yes the point of the ship of Theseus analogy is that whilst we firefight we must introduce institutions that incentivise the behaviour and values we aspire to. “However we can” is more than a binary choice between business-as-usual and just-shout-louder. I’ve posited many ideas – too many to repeat here beyond the Constitutional Assembly as a start.

“However with this government and in this country you have no chance of getting a commitment from this government unless you can influence public opinion and drum up media coverage. Back to shouting loudest and protest.”

It’s the normal frustrated position – blame the current government, current and previous generations, damn the lot of ’em to hell. It’s cathartic but is it progressive or even constructive to keep shouting louder once you(we)’ve gained attention. Attention-grabbing, fine. Enlightened future action, no. For two reasons. Shouting is not the way to conduct dialogue with people you need to work with. But even more importantly, the words being shouted suffer as much as any -if not more – from being infected by post-truth propaganda. We still need to find the best – or merely better – ideas, quickly.