How to defeat wild emus – lessons from history

COP a load of this

Feedback has been watching bemusedly from a distance as the latest round of international climate negotiations, COP29, struggled along in Azerbaijan. In a previous life, we covered a few COPs, and are still on most of the relevant mailing lists. Hence we know that on 18 November, when we were writing this, Climate Action Network’s Fossil of the Day was South Korea, because it was single-handedly blocking a deal that would end subsidies of oil and gas by high-income countries. Yep, that would do it.

Having a conference dedicated to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in a country like Azerbaijan, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuel exports, was always likely to backfire. Feedback thought diplomacy was about understanding others’ motivations, but apparently nobody twigged what the Azerbaijan government might want. On cue, President Ilham Aliyev described oil and gas as a “gift from God” in his opening speech, and the country’s chief negotiator was filmed apparently arranging a meeting to discuss fossil fuel deals.

Then the conference actually started – or rather it didn’t. On day one, the works became gummed up within the first hour, after several countries objected to the agenda for the rest of the conference. The first day was then spent renegotiating the agenda, while the delegates sat around with nothing to do. Still, it’s not like climate change is an urgent problem.

Feedback would like to think things can only go uphill from here, but the experience of the past decade suggests otherwise. Besides, we still twitch when we remember the last night of one COP we attended. It was well into the evening, so the agreement should have been signed and the party started. But then we saw a parade of junior diplomats carrying towering stacks of takeaway pizza boxes into the negotiating room – and we realised we were going to be there, even in a best-case scenario, until the early hours of the morning. Feedback doesn’t recommend this experience, or the accompanying case of caffeine poisoning.

Find your inner badass

Assistant news editor Alexandra Thompson draws our attention to a paper on the psychological research repository PsyArXiv, with the glorious title “What it means to be a true badass: An experimental investigation of the ordinary concept“. Its authors, Breanna Nguy˜ên and Michael Prinzing, set out to explicate what we mean when we say that someone is a badass. It isn’t obvious, they say, because both Genghis Khan and Malala Yousafzai could be described as badasses, but “these two people are about as different from each other as one could imagine”. Well, quite.

The researchers used a series of online surveys to clarify what sorts of people did and didn’t count as badasses. This revealed, they say, that “badass” is a concept with two layers. There is a superficial meaning, which relates to being physically strong or having a “formidable presence”. But there is also a deeper, inner meaning relating to “moral resilience and courage”.

According to the authors, Yousafzai exemplifies this inner badassness, while Khan is more about external badassery. Feedback isn’t so sure: we have read John Man’s biography of Khan and he displayed remarkable courage in tight spots. Still, the inner/outer badass distinction sounds plausible.

In our quieter moments, Feedback sometimes enjoys research like this that digs into the subtle meanings of everyday terms. The classic example is Harry Frankfurt’s book On Bullshit. Frankfurt was a philosopher who drew a distinction between lying – telling untruths for the purpose of explicitly misleading someone – and bullshitting, or telling untruths without regard for truth or falsehood in order to serve one’s own purpose.

On Bullshit is a useful thing to read because it takes something we all implicitly understand and makes it explicit. With the concept clarified, it becomes easier to spot examples, hence the June paper bluntly titled “ChatGPT is bullshit“. Also, it is nice to have a word that is both a precise piece of terminology and an enabler of prolific swearing. Frankfurt, we think, was a badass.

Emus in flight

On 15 November, CBS News reported that two “feral and not trained” emus (is there any other kind?) were on the run in South Carolina. They had apparently escaped three months earlier, but their flight hadn’t garnered any attention – until 43 monkeys escaped from a medical research facility in the same state. As of 18 November, six of the monkeys remained at large. Faced with a horde of marauding monkeys on the run, journalists started looking for similar stories and found (or rather, didn’t find) the rogue emus.

Feedback would never stoop so low as a local police department, which posted that they were “eNOT EMU-SED“. But we do want to echo the point made by Matthew Downhour on Bluesky: “Okay if they didn’t want them to run wild and be irresponsible why did they name them that“? It is a good question, because, you see, the emus are called Thelma and Louise.

If the US authorities are unable to recapture the birds, they could take notes from the Australians, who famously fought a short war against wild emus in 1932. True, the emus won the conflict decisively, but failure is the best teacher.

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