Potato I have

The Economist has an article that illustrates the complicated state of affairs in environmentalism: Texas rancher John Cain Carter is

the driving force behind Aliança da Terra, a new NGO that aims to be a “bridge” between producers and environmentalists, promoting standards of good practice that both sides can live with”

That NGO’s partners “are betting that as Brazilian agriculture becomes more corporate and internationally oriented it can be made to behave more responsibly.”

“What is novel about Mr Carter is that he sees things from the point of view of the producers, and is rooted in ranching—a bigger threat to the Amazon even than soya [or the logging industry].”

Things are bad and not yet getting any better:

In the year to August 2004, according to data released this month, 26,130 square kilometres (10,000 square miles) of Amazon rainforest were destroyed in Brazil, mostly by ranchers, farmers or speculators who cleared land in anticipation of ranchers and farmers coming. That is the second-highest level of destruction on record.

There is a fine photo of Mr Carter, and this is worth a chuckle: “[Carter] indulges in a bit of Texas swagger, as if George Bush had not made it the world’s least fashionable sub-culture.” Heros sometimes come from very curious quarters, maybe this Carter is another of them.

Roger Ebert and Daniel Woodburn have a fruitful conversation about the words for little people. Like Ebert, I had No Idea about “midget,” and would have thought “little people” derogatory. There is an added bonus: some subculture-related cockney rhyming slang towards the bottom.

Being an American living in Europe, I’m sometimes jokingly reminded by others of how “extreme” political correctness is in the US. Maybe so (that wiki entry and especially its talk pages remind me just how broad and controversial that topic is), but what I often find lacking in the easy PC dismissals I hear is any awareness or even interest in how the so-labeled feel about the term. The Ebert/Woodburn correspondence is an especially nice counterpoint.

(via rebecca’s pocket)

I took this survey a few years ago, but don’t find my score at the moment (it was pre-blog). Taking it again I don’t think there is much of a change from that one, but I sure wish I had scores from my teens/20s/30s.

Today it is:

• Economic Left/Right: -4.88
• Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33

There are a graph and a rough “scatter table” of bloggers’ links on this Tim Lambert page, from late 2003; there is heavy clustering in the same lower-left quadrant where I find myself, but who knows what that means, the sample is anything but random. There is also some discussion of whether the survey is accurate/useful/etc.

Here is a self-described “better political compass;” those scores are not directly comparable, though I was much more centrist here (numbers in parenthesis are -1/1 normalized):

• left/right: -2.8628 (-0.1723)
• idealism/pragmatism: +0.8226 (+0.0495)

Both of these surveys were like almost every survey I take, in that I get caught up in trying to understand what the question is “really” asking, everything seems to depend on some definition or other, and I wonder how the heck these things can really account for all my mental jumping around. Though strangely, page six on the first survey was very black-and-white for me: I clicked right through those without hesitation, thankful for something simple.