“What are your demands?”
“I don’t have any.”

Wow. The Norwegian terrorist posted a 1500 page manifesto/plan. You can get it from a variety of online sources.

He bitches about multiculturalism, globalism, Cultural Marxism, Radical Feminism, Political Correctness, Gramsci, Wilhelm Reich, Adorno, historical revisionism, any idea that isn’t monocultural, so long as that culture is white, patriarchal, Christian, right-wing, and nationalist. He looks back to the 1950s as a glorious time before “ideology”.

“Marxism/internationalism/globalism/multiculturalism is an ideology designed to deconstruct European traditions, cultures, identities and even nation states while nationalism is the anti-thesis. In order for the internationalists to succeed they have combined this political deconstruction with mass-Muslim immigration.”

On your photo shoot before martyrdom:
“Take a few hours in a solarium to look fresher. Visit a male salon if possible and apply light makeup. Yes, I know – this might sound repulsive to big badass warriors like us, but we must look our best for the shoot”

“I have been storing three bottles of Château Kirwan 1979 (French red wine) which I purchased at an auction 10 years ago with the intention of enjoying them at a very special occasion… My thought was to save the last flask for my last martyrdom celebration and enjoy it with the two high class model whores I intend to rent prior to the mission.”

“I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”

“Side note; imagine if law enforcement would visit me the next days. They would probably get the wrong idea and think I was a terrorist, lol :o)”

So how does that add up to shooting teenagers? How is this action possibly going to promote nationalism, create a conservative revolution, or rebuild Western civilisation? Clearly, it isn’t, and just like Timothy McVeigh’s impact on the US militia movement, it’s going to make clear the idiocy of the people who hold those beliefs.

So why do it? Because they can’t think of anything else to do. Because they have already lost. Because we are the global middle classes, because multiculturalism has already won, because no guns or bombs will stop us from being open-minded, tolerant, and accepting of other people’s human rights, including the right to post 1500 page rants onto the internet for us to laugh about.

We are reasonable people and no-one can make us otherwise.

For those of you who don’t know, my job involves providing evidence to government about policy. I want to provide the most relevant evidence, so I find myself thinking more and more about the theories behind policies.

Now, being and ex-rocket scientist, I’m used to having one theory that fits comfortably into one equation, the rocket equation. It’s all thoroughly testable and it turns out to be not just valid, but inescapable, universally applicable, and the only theory that you need.* Thus theory plays a unifying role in rocket science – you can have a conference of rocket scientists from across the world and they’ll all speak a common language and build rockets that work in the same way and look very similar indeed.

Sadly, however, in the policy game we’re rarely talking about physics. Instead, we’re talking about social sciences, where theory has a very different role. There’s a myriad of theories that can be applied to any particular problem and no good way of choosing between those theories. Whatever your political stance, you can probably find theories that support your ideology, hence the theory that gets used to formulate or justify any particular policy question often seems to be chosen for the purposes of convenience.

For example, there’s the lovely theory of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. It’s a curve that looks like this:

Danger! Empiricism!

Seriously glad to get this octopus out of the door:
Ecosystem services paper

“The natural economy provides us with many natural goods and services, but most are not considered in economic valuations, says a new paper released by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

In its Ecosystem Services paper the Royal Society describes how ecosystem services or processes benefit human wellbeing and the need to include these in economic decision-making. It says when these ecosystem services are not recognised in the marketplace, it leads to decision-making failures.

Examples of ecosystems services are forests reducing soil erosion, shellfish filtering water pollution, unfarmed areas improving natural pest control on nearby farmland, and ecosystems providing recreation and cultural value.”