Given the state of the Middle East at the moment, I am genuinely surprised that a theatre company is going to start a run of Fiddler on the Roof in Australian capital cities soon.
It's not a bad musical (although I have only seen the movie version, as a child, and a bit of it again some years ago on TV. I do think it's a bit of a downer, overall, though.) But really, running a show full of sympathy for the plight of poor Jews seems to be a bit, um, tone deaf? at the moment.
I look at New Catallaxy perhaps a few times a week because, like checking X, it seems appropriate to know what Right wing brain washed people are saying and thinking on the topics on which they will never, ever, change their minds.
There remain a few provocateurs there who will dare post stuff critical of Trump (or Israel), but it's a thankless job because, well, these people are thoroughly brainwashed and incapable of engaging in genuine responses. (Yes, I know, it was like that forever under Sinclair's old Catallaxy too - but the Trump administration and the refusal of Right wing media to criticise it one iota has made the situation just ridiculous.)
For example - it is 100% obvious that Trump suing his own government's departments to try to get a payout for past alleged transgressions was absurdly corrupt - especially from a man who patently stacks leadership positions on the basis of loyalty to him. The $1.8 "slush fund" that can be used (it would seem) to reimburse rioters who injured police and damaged Congress is, again, absurdly open to corruption and we have seen nothing like it in the history of the country (as far as I know.)
And now the news that Trump, by shear co-incidence, I'm sure, will promote companies that his "blind trust" (run by his kids) have just bought stock in - is (again) just absurdly corrupt.
Yet if a person posts a extract from MSM about any of these, you know the first reaction of Trump's minions downunder:
LOL, NYT, FT, WaPo, you’ve hit the trifecta!
And even old JC tries to excuse it because Democrats have funded NGOs before. Yeah, sure, that's similar - not.
I do get annoyed at their obvious refusal to engage- to admit the plainly, 100% obvious - but they feel supported by Right wing media commentary which has found its market by never, ever, criticising Trump. If people on Sky News at Night or Fox News are not criticising the President, well, it's not unreasonable to agree with them.
Are they that stupid that they don't realise how they are played and conned by a branch of media that exists only to always support Trump?
And why not try honesty for a change?
I lost interest in the Star Wars universe long ago, and have only watched a few episodes of any of the TV spin offs and found they just weren't engaging for me.
So I was never interested in the new Mandalorian movie, except to see whether it could kill off the franchise entirely. With Rottentomatoes rating of 61%, I think there is a good chance it might.
The only problem is, of course, that presumably Disney just can't let the franchise die (or go into hibernation) completely, because they have invested too much into it. If this movie flops at the box office (as seems quite likely), I can imagine the company having crisis meetings for months as to what to do.
Some fictional franchises can make a good comeback after being rested for a decade or more (I'm thinking Doctor Who - another franchise which needs to lay fallow for at least 10 years.) I just can't see a way that Star Wars can rise to relevance again without a long, long rest.
I initially thought that reports of conservative Jewish acts of hostility towards obvious Christians in the streets of Jerusalem might be a tad exaggerated, especially when the PR wars over Israeli behaviour is very heated.
But after seeing this video report from an American network, interviewing a nun with a first hand account of it becoming virtually routine, I was obviously wrong to doubt it:
And a call out to my regular reader John: care to ask at New Catallaxy on my behald how they feel about this - especially mad old Cassie, who will blow a gasket with the impertinence of the question!
I don't think I had read about this before:
Buddhists are the world’s only major religious group whose population shrank between 2010 and 2020, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of religion in 201 countries and territories.
In 2010, an estimated 343 million people around the world identified as Buddhists. By 2020, that figure had fallen to 324 million. That’s a decline of roughly 5%.
During this period, the global population grew by 12%. The size of other religious groups we track at the global level also grew. As a result, Buddhists’ share of the global population dropped from 4.9% in 2010 to 4.1% in 2020.
And here's the graph:
I don't actually care much for true crime documentaries on Netflix, but The Perfect Neighbor (set in Florida) kept being at the top of watched and recommended stuff, so I gave in on Saturday and watched it.
I'm glad I did. For readers who don't know, it is unusual in that there is no narration and compromises police bodycam (and office cam) video stitched together to tell a story that took perhaps 2 to 3 years to unfold. (There is a very small amount of other context setting stuff.)
The basic story is that an older white woman living in a street of (what looks like) relatively low cost housing develops continual hatred of the neighbouring (most black) families, mainly because they (especially the kids) play a lot on a spare open bit of land next to her duplex residence. She at some point gets a gun, and hey, it's America and you can probably guess where it goes. (She is, inevitably, referred to as a "Karen" by some of the neighbours, hence my post title.)
There were two things that surprised me though, and in a rather pleasant way, given the setting:
* the police from the local sheriff's office who get called out to the street on many occasions to try to deal with the woman's complaints come across so well, and this is not an image we typically get from a lot of reports of American policing, especially when black people are part of the story. They are reasonable, empathetic, patient and pretty much impossible to fault. There doesn't appear to be a speck of racism in their dealing with the black families, either. And more than once you hear them say something like "I'm glad the kids are playing outside - better than sitting around stuck on a screen." It was very heartening to see.
* similarly, the image it gives of the black families was much more positive than we are used to from a lot of media and (at least crime) TV shows. I don't know whether its because they were from church going families, but the kids and parents were respectful of the police when they talked to them, the kids were amusingly careful of not swearing openly, and you get a sense that the whole street knew each other and looked out for each other. As I said, the design of the housing did look on the cheaper side - the street was tidy enough, but was devoid of trees or decoration. I guess what I am trying to say is that, by the look of the street, you might think that it maybe had its share of dysfunctional family life - but the impression you get from this documentary is that it was actually a pretty good street for kids to be raised in. Apart from the crazy woman across the road, of course.
So yeah, it feels a bit surprising to watch true crime and come out of it feeling a bit more optimistic for American society. Part of the problem is that reports of the worst suburban crimes - the mass shootings, the police interactions where black people come out injured or dead - do tend to hide that fact that for a lot of Americans, suburban life is pretty much like suburban life anywhere, and isn't always touched by gun or other crime. We used to get a sense of that from suburban sitcoms, but they are out of fashion now and there is little selling a positive image of ordinary life there. As I say, it's funny that a true crime documentary that did involve a shooting nonetheless partially remedies the continually bad impression one gets of American life.
The novel I recently read The Thing Itself features an episode of murderous madness happening at an Antarctic station, so I was interested to read this article about real life incidents down there:
An Antarctic expeditioner who allegedly threatened colleagues with a large, makeshift knife has been removed from a Korean research station in a rare mid-winter emergency evacuation.
The incident occurred at the Jang Bogo Station, 2,000 kilometres south-east of Australia's Casey Station, on April 13, according to Korean media.
CCTV footage broadcast on Korean media purportedly shows a man walking up a staircase carrying what appears to be a makeshift bladed weapon.
Other footage shows other expeditioners running away from the station's kitchen.
And:
It is not the first time threatening behaviour has occurred at isolated bases in Antarctica, where there are no police to deal with offences.
Hanne Nielsen, a senior lecturer in Antarctic law and governance at the University of Tasmania, said there have also been other high-profile criminal cases on the icy continent.
Last year, reports emerged of an incident at South Africa's SANAE IV that left fellow expeditioners fearing for their safety.
According to South African media, the alleged victim said the accused had threatened to kill someone, "creating an environment of fear and intimidation".
In one incident in 2018, a Russian scientist was accused of stabbing a colleague in the chest for spoiling the endings of books.
And back in 1959, a scientist at another Russian station allegedly murdered a colleague with an ice axe after losing a game of chess.
Dr Nielsen said issues in Antarctica sometimes rapidly escalate because of the challenges of living and working in confined and remote places for long periods.
That 2018 incident is pretty close in character to the dispute that led to the incident in The Thing Itself.
It's almost a surprise that it doesn't happen more often, I guess...
The unreasonably protracted Liberal governments starting with Tony Abbott gradually killed off nearly all likeability amongst Federal politicians, it seems. (I don't mind Albanese though - he's pleasantly on the verge of grumpy in demeanour in a similar way to John Howard, I think.) Hence it's a pleasure to watch these two, who genuinely seem to like each other, exchange witticisms and commentary on TV:
I watched a Wheezy Waiter video in which he tried a new tactic to increase the amount of reading he was doing.
It was to go to a library and pick 5 fiction books completely at random, without so much as looking at the cover.
It kind of worked, but mainly didn't, in that he did start each reading each book and gave them a fair go, but only really got into one of them enough to keep going. (I think - in retrospect, I can't recall if he said he actually got to the end of the one that he did consider engaging.) So he did spend more time reading - but if it was mostly on books he abandoned, it does seem a tad wasted effort.
Anyway, the point of this post is twofold:
* I think at least 3, maybe 4, of the 5 books were murder mysteries, and part of a series. As with Wheezy, this would have been a fail for me, as I have never been into murder mystery books. I don't know why, as I used to watch Columbo and other old "murder of the week"shows as much as the average viewer in the 70's and 80's. But I've never been interested in that sort of story in book form. Publishers obviously like publishing them, though. And presumably it's because the few people left reading books are into them too. Why, I don't really understand...
* Wheezy also disclosed that he is reading The Count of Monte Cristo on his phone at the moment, and is enjoying it. This is after I noted recently that there just seem to be lots of people in the limited social media I consume recommending it at the moment, and again, I don't know why. (OK, I mean, I presume it must be pretty good - but I don't know why so many are talking about it right now.)
In January, a nationalistic Beijing think tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”
The report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,” with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility toward China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that unified the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.
“At this turning point in history,” the authors wrote, “what we hear is the heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”
Such language, once confined largely to nationalist corners of the Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political discourse.
Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to “American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025, according to a study by two Brookings Institution researchers.
The rest of it is a pretty good read, too.
I don't really understand how this happened - but online content strongly gives the impression that Indians have, in the last year or two, become very much the main target of populist anti-immigration sentiment in in quite a few places - almost replacing Muslim immigration in the role, it seems.
I have even noticed that CNA, the Singaporean government news network, seems to have an online editor who has been posting "look at this weird thing that happened in India" videos to Facebook lately. One last week featured a guy standing in an Indian hospital nonchalantly looking at his phone while having a machete planted into his skull, and people just walking around him like it's nothing unusual. (Apparently, he was not brain injured by the blade stuck in bone.) And the week before it was a clip of a worker having the wall of the ditch he was working in collapse on him and pushing him under water - he did die, apparently, and I thought it unusual for CNA to publish such a video.
OK, so let's subcontract the question to Claude.ai. Although I didn't specify the US situation, that is what it has concentrated on:
Why Indians rather than Muslims now?
This is the most interesting part of your question. It's not really a replacement — anti-Muslim sentiment hasn't disappeared — but a redirection driven by specifics: Indians are highly visible in the skilled white-collar sectors (tech, medicine, finance) that the populist right fears most in an era of AI and automation. The racialized backlash against minorities is anchored in anxieties about the demographic transformation of Western nations by non-white immigrants, often manifesting in populist conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory. But the economic anxiety angle is different: where anti-Muslim sentiment was largely about cultural and security fears, anti-Indian sentiment is more nakedly about economic competition and professional displacement — the fear that your career, not your neighbourhood, is being taken. Csohate
Much of the hostility has been directed specifically at Indian professionals in tech and trucking, with critics accusing them of "dominating" industries and sidelining American workers. That makes it distinctive as a form of populist grievance — it's targeting a group perceived as too successful rather than one perceived as dangerous or culturally alien.
The short version: Indian immigration became the new populist target because the MAGA movement needed an enemy that fit anxieties about the economy and automation (not just culture and security), Indians are the largest and most visible group in the high-skilled visa pipeline, and the US political atmosphere after 2024 normalised that particular grievance and exported it globally through social media.
Sounds plausible!
I also only learnt this morning, via the serious faced Asian American Youtube woman who had a bit of a hit recently with a "all modern literature is dominated by woke themes that don't interest me" video (I checked her channel, and surprise, she voted for Trump) that the France invading migrants in the infamous 70's French novel "Camp of the Saints" (the favourite book for those are into the Great Replacement theory) were from India. (And guess what - she gave the book a favourable review.) I had never read that much about the book, but I had thought they were all Muslim "invaders". Someone in comments said the author had originally wanted them to be from Vietnam, but he was talked out of it.
As for my view of Indian immigration and culture - I puzzle as much as the next person about how India has a culture seemingly with near intractable problems in terms of getting people to care about mountains of trash and cow poop in the streets, not to mention some having a poor sense of personal space and even an apparent sense of entitlement when travelling - BUT I also have had a lot of Indian clients and generally have found them to be quite nice and kind. I think as immigrants, they have never caused me a moment's "concern" at all.
That's why I don't really get the wave of Right wing populist anti-Indian sentiment...
Update: I tried Kimi.ai, a Chinese LLM that I don't mind, and it drew similar conclusions:
The Shift from Anti-Muslim to Anti-Indian
The replacement isn't total—anti-Muslim sentiment certainly hasn't disappeared. But the primary energy of online populist resentment has shifted because:
It did add a useful section in its response, too:
Where This Is Happening
This isn't just an American phenomenon. It's visible across the Anglosphere:
My reading and viewing on this has not been extensive (to be specific - watched some ABC commentary, checked this morning's headlines at the Guardian, but also watched some of the "you can trust us to sniff the populist wind" Sunrise show on 7 this morning. Oh, and maybe saw some panel on Channel 9 too?) But for what it's worth, my impression is that the reaction to the Federal Budget last night, where we finally got some "maybe we've been a bit too generous to property investors for too long" action is pretty much "might not work, but not too bad".
I just suspect it will not hurt the government much at the next election because of a strong sense of "things can't continue the way they are" in terms of housing relevant policy that affects the younger demographic who feel (with some justification) that they will never get their own house until their parents die. (Or perhaps, until their retired parents get sick of cruises and international travel and decide they can be the "bank of Mum and Dad" to get them into the housing market.)
And the problem for the Coalition is that to argue strongly against such reforms is going to sound pretty much like "no, the current status quo for comfortable investors sucking up housing is OK", which I don't think is going to be an easy sell. I guess they might swing towards a "we have to coddle One Nation supporters" line by trying to blame it all on immigration: but that's not going to help win back the populous city electorates where they did terribly at the last election.
Anyway, let's see what happens.
I've been super busy at work lately, and haven't got around to reading or watching all that much about the argument being made (if some Youtube thumbnails are correct!) that certain atheists seem to be heavily into AI because they figure it replaces the traditional God in a way that's "acceptable" to them. And I haven't even watched any of the videos in which Dawkins is mocked for being a tad too impressed with the ersatz consciousness of Claude.ai.
(Hey, at the same time, I'm allowed to be impressed with how LLMs can "see" a photo and describe it very accurately, OK? That's different... )
Anyway, Ross Douthat has a relatively short opinion piece about the issues of consciousness and AI and God: The Atheist and the Machine God. It's OK, I think, but deserved a longer treatment.
I also wonder about how Frank Tipler feels about this. He's 79 now, and I haven't noticed him writing anything for quite a while, but the role in his Omega Point idea of advanced AI which evolves to become the future God (who retrospectively kicks off the whole universe) seems to be overlooked - possibly because his ideas also depend on a universe that eventually contracts, and although some theorising about cosmology still has that as a possibility, it has become a very unpopular idea in light of observations. (Although, of course, there is still nothing that convincingly explains early cosmic inflation - and there are plenty of other reasons from recent observations to not be surprised if modern cosmology has to undergo major revisions sooner or later.)
And there is also the matter of Tipler's failed prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson. I'm not sure if he ever worked out an excuse for that, or not, to be honest.
But the interesting thing about him is that he started as a conservative Christian and figured that advanced AI is a key part of the scheme of things: not an atheist who found God via AI, so to speak. Maybe Peter Thiel is a bit like this - grew up Lutheran, and seems to have absorbed AGI into it? (Actually, this essay indicates Thiel is pretty philosophically esoteric in his whole understanding of Christianity - I think he is just best ignored.)*
Anyway, I'm still holding out for a contracting universe, like Tipler. Or, maybe there'll be a revival of ideas of bubble universes being able to be created to work as a lifeboat for intelligence to escape from dying universes. If this is true as an origin story for our universe, it's a pity the creator didn't get around to making a nicer one that didn't involve as much pain and suffering, but thems the breaks, perhaps?
UPDATE: I have re-worked this post a fair bit from its first version, adding in talk of Peter Thiel. I'm now just reading for the first time a long interview with Tipler from 2024 in which he says:
Furthermore, the Omega Point Theory has very interesting testable consequences. The IT billionaire Peter Thiel gave me money to build an apparatus to test one of them.
He shows the device, and (as is his habit), claims that its reading are entirely consistent with, and supportive of, his theory.
And I still don't know if he has adequately explained his failed boson mass prediction....
Earlier in the war, we used to sometimes see media clips of the Russian equivalent of Fox News with old men commentators full of support for the war and Putin. But I haven't seen clips like that for some time.
I presume, of course, that they haven't changed the position of support - but they must be sounding a bit desperate and in denial, surely?
