This Place

The world isn't simple.

It really isn't. At all. It's massively complex, or complicated, or whatever.

There aren't just two sides to every story, there's an infinite number of sides, and an infinite number of permutations of at least 7 different stories.

There aren't any right answers - we need to put that idea down right now - it's not like this country is right and the other is wrong, in, say, some conflict.

In fact, we don't even know what right and wrong might really mean, not just in that moral relativism way that different cultures have different value systems and that, but also because usually situations are so confused that idea of there being a right and wrong doesn't really make sense.

Beliefs simplify the complex - they reify 'right' and 'wrong', they demark actions into a specific contextual classes.

But even with such things place, stuff can still be really confusing.

Pretty much people agree that killing people is bad, except under certain conditions, when its not.

And that's with killing people, which is pretty black and white.

With climate change - hoo boy is that complex [or complicated, or whatever]

This Place 09 is a side project from a couple of nice plannery people in the UK.

They want to delegates at the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference that, while the issue is complex, people feel very strongly that something needs to be DONE, and that their voices should be heard.

So they are compiling tweets on the topic into a book for the delegates. People nominate places that are or will be effected by the changing climate, to remind the delegates that this is about real places, and real people.

The issue will remain complex, but the twitter format will at least keep things short.