I know there's more to it, or there must be anyway. But the article really, really sounded to me like "they tried this new African technique where people are honest about what they want and negotiate in good faith."
There's one meme that goes around my facebook feed every now and then about a magical tribe in Africa where, when someone breaks a rule, they don't throw them in jail. Instead they put them in the middle of a circle and they all go around and say really nice things about the offender. They won't stop saying nice things until you forward it on to everyone you know. Maybe I'm misremembering.
Vox had an interesting article on what was different this time, compared to previous negotiations.
There's a radical idea at the heart of the big Paris climate accord that strikes many people as baffling. The deal is ... largely voluntary. That's right: None of the 195 countries that signed on are actually required to make emissions cuts.
...
It's a major gamble on the fate of the planet. The architects of this deal are essentially hoping that cooperation and peer pressure will encourage nations to ratchet up their plans and ambitions over time. With no guarantees.
But it's not a totally crazy idea, either. And to see why this might make sense, we have to take a trip through the history of global climate talks. For nearly 20 years, UN negotiators have been trying -- and failing -- to craft a legally binding global treaty that would require countries to make cuts. It was those depressing failures, and the insights that arose as a result, that ultimately led to the Paris deal. And that history is crucial for figuring out whether this new approach stands any chance of working.
3 sort of sounds like "and this time we just let them bloviate and make wildly happy-sounding campaign promises without worrying about anyone carrying them out!"
"You Won't Believe What Happens When Negotiators Try This One Neat Trick"
I always wince a little when people talk about things like peer pressure and so on for countries. It's like talking about incentives for corporations. Those things don't exist in a way that let's that happen! The incentives/pressure/etc. has to be on the people with power in those countries/corporations/whatever. To me five years sounds like a great time frame if one of the quiet unstated things on the minds of the people negotiating the deal was "well, at least I probably won't have to stand there and say we didn't do this".
OTOH I live in a country whose last three governments, bastardry ridden though they were and are, have all managed to stick with a totally voluntary 0.7% ODA target for about the last two decades or so.
Yeah, its not binding. But, back in the '80s, the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer didn't have any legally binding goals on emissions reduction either (in that case, CFCs). And yet, the Vienna Convention set up a framework for the Montreal Protocol a few years later, which did mandate reductions, is the reason we still have most of an ozone layer, and was called by Kofi Annan "perhaps the single most successful international agreement to date."
So, I think with Paris, we finally got to the first notch on the ratchet. And we have a framework such that, if we crank that ratchet some more, we ought to be able to make progress in the future. Maybe that progress will be fast enough, and maybe it won't, but the world community finally seems like its heading in the right direction.
7: Show-off.
Your country is not the same as some other countries I could mention..
This article is a very late entrant into the "inscrutable African native peoples are so much wiser than we are" genre.
Instead of repeating stated positions, each party is encouraged to speak personally and state their "red lines," which are thresholds that they don't want to cross.
Instead of repeating stated positions, each party is encouraged to repeat stated positions? Okay.
But while telling others their hard limits, they are also asked to provide solutions to find a common ground.
This technique is preferable to the first world style of mediation where parties are asked to provide additional obstacles rather than solutions.
4 and 6 remind me that studies show that politicians do, in fact, fulfill campaign promises* most of the time, but nobody believes it, because acting cynical is always cool. And 7 is an excellent rejoinder.
*or, you know, put in good faith efforts to do so
John Quiggin remains optimistic (which I find encouraging but not completely convincing).
As I've argued on my own blog, it seems likely that the global agreement on reached at COP21 in Paris will mark the turning point in efforts to stabilize the global climate. If so, it will mark the defeat of the right in one of the most bitterly contested arenas of their long-running culture war, and also one of the hardest to explain. There's no obvious reason, apart from tribal hostility to "enviros" why this should have been a culture war battleground at all.
The real breakthrough was when the bigger countries stopped making the little countries "cry it out," and decided to put them in convenient skin-to-skin wraps while going about their daily tasks.
8: probably Shaka. The Zulu Hitler, except people still put up statues of him.
I would like to see an indaba happening. We need all the facilitation/mediation techniques we can get. I can see it being pretty interesting and flushing out a lot of information quickly, especially if the participants are standing up.
This treaty gives me the same feeling as the planning work I do all day. My preference is to define the desired end state in, say, 2050 and use that to back out the work we have to do to get between that state in 2050 and where we are now. Then we lay out that work, and presto, there's the plan, no matter how stark.
My great grand-boss is an incrementalist and is satisfied with planning that improves in the short-term on what we're doing. He is happy to keep muddling through and nudging people along, primarily because he thinks that is politically attainable.
I ask him, what if it isn't enough? What if the sum of the muddling and nudging doesn't get us to the desired state in 2050? He says, we're seeing changes, let's keep doing this. Then I badger him some more until he finally pulls rank on me.
flushing out a lot of information quickly, especially if the participants are standing up
Hey now, the old guys who run the world have feelings too.
I would like for each of the candidates to be asked if they will affirm the accord or will they make the us the first country to break
What if they want to not affirm, but only actually break it after somebody else breaks first?
17.1: This article about the CEO who raised all salaries at his company to $70,000 mentions that employees at the company have to plank during meetings so they have an incentive to speak quickly. (The article also suggests that the CEO may have raised the salaries as a distraction because his brother was suing him for paying himself too much in compensation.)
The trick to getting through an over-complicated negotiation comes from the Zulu and Xhosa people of southern Africa. It's called an "indaba" (pronounced IN-DAR-BAH), and is used to simplify discussions between many parties.
Do they really mean IN-DAR-BAH for Americans? Or is this like the Sadé liner notes that told me her name was pronounced Shar-day and confused me in middle school?
I was wondering that too. Surely the latter.
indaba is pronounced nn daa ba The 'i' is not pronounced (or barely pronounced) and the middle 'a' is long, the final 'a' short. There is no hint of an 'r' anywhere. "Not my indaba" is one of my favorite phrases, though it encountered competition recently from "not my monkeys, not my circus."
Yes, I think so. (But the Sadé thing was scarring.)
There's no obvious reason, apart from tribal hostility to "enviros" why this should have been a culture war battleground at all.
Talk about missing the big thing for the other thing! This is a culture war battleground because it is a collective action problem, and collective action problems are of the devil. They are back doors into socialism. To a Randian there is no such thing as a collective action problem, and Rand has become the Jesus of economic and social policy on the right. Jesus is relegated to telling us what to do with our genitals.
22,23,25: That was truly bizarre. I also remember books about foreign cultures, defining new words for the reader and saying that words that are neither spelled nor pronounced with an R, by anyone, are pronounced with an R. Do British people actually think they are pronouncing these inaudible Rs?
"Shawka" - rhymes with "Parker" - sure, whatever
ITIMTHBB "Myanmar" apparently has the r at the end as guidance on the kind of vowel intended, assuming British English, rather than at all consonantal.
There's no obvious reason, apart from tribal hostility to "enviros" why this should have been a culture war battleground at all.
To be fair, the enviros do want everybody to drive a prissy little car, if not take public transportation. That's an affront.
Regarding this issue, I haven't seen a single person on Facebook mention the Paris agreement. Nobody excited and optimistic. None of the "LOL, as if China and India will ever change" cynical people. None of the "LOL, climate change what a scam" Republican people. Nothing at all. I guess that makes sense.
You're right. I just checked. I did learn that Benedict Anderson had died.
I've seen several references to it, with varying attitudes. Maybe you guys just need better friends.
All of my friends who've mentioned Benedict Anderson have adoped respectful attitudes. Maybe you're the one who needs better friends, teo.
I don't think I've seen any Benedict Anderson references, but then maybe I missed them because I had never heard of him until this thread.
What about the phrase "imagined community"?
the indaba process was attempted in 2008 to avert a schism over homosexuality among Anglican churches. 500 or so bishops from all around the world indaba-ed. It was said to work there, but this was because the 240 bishops who knew all the gays were going to hell and a good thing too stayed away from the meeting altogether.
22,23,25: That was truly bizarre. I also remember books about foreign cultures, defining new words for the reader and saying that words that are neither spelled nor pronounced with an R, by anyone, are pronounced with an R. Do British people actually think they are pronouncing these inaudible Rs?
Do we really have to explain non-rhoticity? It's not that these words are pronounced with an 'r'. It's that words with an 'r' are pronounced without it. Therefore, the way to distinguish a long vowel from a short one becomes spelling it with an r.
It doesn't help transatlantic understanding of transliteration that most of the US has the cot/caught merger and the lot/palm merger.
Seems like 80% of the political shit I see on Facebook these days is people spreading memes about guns. Its stuff that I agree with, sure, but people need to give it a rest.
I've seen a little bit about Paris. Not a whole lot.
One thing that seems to have worked was putting the French foreign ministry in charge. If you want something easy to operationalise, a big deal seems to have been insisting that everyone respected the timetable and that the process only ever moved forward. Towards the end it overran and went all-night, but that's when you want to get the pressure on. The point was to get to the last 48 hours like civilised people and then crank it up.
But not all of the UK is non-rhotic! (And not all of the US is rhotic, for that matter -- "SHAR-DAY" would have been an a-ok way to teach my father, for example, how to say SHAH-DAY.) It seems like "AH" would work in all cases, though.
The worst one of these is the use of "gh" to indicate a guttural, which is how you get people thinking that the capital of Iraq is pronounced "Bag-dad", when in Arabic it's more like "Bal-dad" where the L is a sort of gargling sound.
Wait. People pronounce "lot" and "palm" the same?
The vowel sound, yes, in many US dialects.
It seems like "AH" would work in all cases, though.
For 'a' sure. Doesn't work for, eg, the caught vowel in non-merged dialects.
One thing that seems to have worked was putting the French foreign ministry in charge.
There you go, Megan. Advice you can use.
re: 44
True, although the rhotic bits of the UK are rhotic in a different way. We don't do the rhotacized vowel thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel
FWIW, I also found that transliteration confusing, although I could work it out easily enough by assuming it was written for an RP speaking audience.
So is there a term distinguishing accents where all r's are rolled or tapped (David Tennant, natively) from those where they're liquid (USians, but also Karen Gillan)?
re: 50
If there is, I haven't heard it. I use all three, for what it's worth, I think, depending on context. Tapped, trilled, and approximant.
45 - the particular sound is pretty closely related to "g" (and nowhere near an "l", which is pronounced near the front of the mouth where the gh is towards the back of the throat). Representing a language where there are at least five or six sounds that don't exist in English/other western languages is pretty tough.
From what I have on good authority, 43 is absolutely right. The French did a fantastic job and should get tons of credit. Plus the US and China deciding in advance that there would be a deal.
52: sounds fairly close to a gargled sort of "l" to me, so back of the throat, as I say. But it's definitely different from "g". I think they were trying for something that was to "g" as "ch" or "kh" is to "c" or "k" but it got misread.
40.2 (.3?)*: nor outside of Philly, the Barry/berry/bury & Mary/marry/merry mergers.
*Someday I'll master this local convention. Until then, please bear/bare with me. I just learned recently, from a 2nd grader, that a mathematician is "someone who doesn't have to count on his hands." By that definition, I would pass as a mathematician, but I haven't yet figured out whether the italicized portion of 40 is 40.0 or 40.1.
55.1: My only goal as a parent is to ensure that my kids don't pick up these merges from my wife. I periodically quiz them.
I make fun of people who don't have enough vowels, and explain to the children that they're superior because they were born near the shores of the Atlantic. This can't go wrong, right?
46: It's the vowel of the "a" in "father". Not how I say "palm" but it doesn't sound too far off to me.
I feel bad for those who have cot/caught, but then again I have Mary/marry/merry. I do not have Barry/berry/bury, which I hav never heard before--they're entirely distinct to me.
Speaking of insufficient vowels, +e.
45, 52, 54 Arabic "ghayn" "gh" is close to a French "r". It's a voiced velar fricative so not far from the unvoiced velar fricative of Scottish "loch". I've been so used to Romanizing it as gh for so long that I don't see the issue here.
61 is correct. It's the voiced form of "kh". How can you have a problem with "gh" and not "kh"?
I think ajay's hearing it as colored by the following [d] in "Baghdad," which is making it sound less like [g] and more like [l] to him in that specific context. An object lesson in the difference between phonetics and phonology!
63 Would that affect how ajay hears it as opposed to how I hear it or how a native speaker hears it? It sounds like an ordinary Arabic ghayn to me.
I'm actually hearing it as close to the Welsh "ll". But I freely admit that I may have heard it only from people with weird accents.
Far more pressing is how do you hear Dritri's latest comments in that old thread because I can't make any sense of them at all, except maybe LIVE SKOR.
Looks like either Malay or Bahasa (not much to choose between them).
It IS pretty close to the Welsh "ll", but the Welsh "ll" sounds nothing like the honest Anglo-Saxon "l" to me.
Several languages have a back-of-the throat L, including the broad L of Irish (Gaelic). I imagine (Scottish) Gaelic probably has one too, and I don't know about Scots or English as spoken in Scotland but I wouldn't be surprised if eg the L in "loch" was produced this way.
I think it's represented by LL as in "An Teallach"...