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!
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:
Holidaying in Buddhist countries certainly doesn't give one the impression of Buddhism being only 4% or so of the world's population!
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.
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.
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:
Muslims became a less useful scapegoat for economic issues (they're not disproportionately represented in high-wage sectors that trigger professional-class anxiety)
Indian online behavior is politically potent—as one analysis notes, Indians on the internet are "argumentative, sarcastic, fact-heavy, culturally fluent and often brutal in debate. They do not offer deference." This makes them engaging targets for culture-war conflict
The "Great Replacement" theory needed fresh villains as Muslim immigration numbers stabilized in some countries while Indian student and skilled-worker numbers surged.
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:
Canada: 227% rise in hate crimes against South Asians; "March for Australia"-style sentiment growing
Australia: Explicit targeting of Indian migrants at anti-immigration rallies; Indian students reporting harassment
UK: Paan-spitting controversies and "throw them out" rhetoric alongside anti-Muslim marches
New Zealand: Far-right protests against Sikh processions with banners reading "This is New Zealand, not India".
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.
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.
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....
This form of scam seems well worth publicising, especially as there are several people in comments saying it has happened to them too, and that Booking.com seems uninterested in investigating.
Update: I see now that this was the subject of a burst of media attention in April - when Booking.com sent out an email warning of a data hack affecting current bookings.
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?
The title: Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.
And the core argument:
What unites these disparate cultures,
policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is
young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too
uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes
theory of demographic decline.
The
future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a
time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have
contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen
for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is
built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly
volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the
governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The
rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino.
The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that
could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility.
The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the
psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale
catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the
Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes.
Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic,
now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even
prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly
devoted to chaos at home and abroad.
Even
declining fertility rates feed into the cycle: How will society
function if each generation is smaller than the last? The Gen X writer
Astra Taylor calls ours “the age of insecurity”; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described “the end of predictable progress.”
Gen Z-ers’ uncertainty about the future can’t be captured by the usual
metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor
in the global parenting free fall.
There are many decent points made, including the one that the conservatively religious probably maintain a higher birthrate because that version of religion does endorse certainty, of a kind.
Religion has long been associated with big families; groups such as the
Amish, Mormons, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Hutterites are known for
their higher than average fertility rates. In a 2024 book, “Hannah’s
Children,” the Catholic University of America economist Catherine
Pakaluk and a colleague interviewed 55 American women who had five or
more children. All were religious. Faith offers multiple levels of
assurance, teaching that humans are part of a cosmic chain, having
children is a moral virtue, and God will provide for them. On a
practical level, faith offers a ready-made community that affirms and
supports family life.
Makes sense, I guess.
Although, one would have thought things like World Wars would have been more uncertain periods of history. This is addressed too:
The world has seen uncertainty before, so why is this time different? One possibility is that we live in an era of “polycrisis” — a term coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe the interplay of many crises at once. For the particular question of having a family, among the many crises, the Great Recession may have been particularly consequential.
Today I learnt, via France 24 no less, that McDonalds second largest global market is actually France. Quelle horreur! The whole video is interesting, though, about the rise of fast food chicken there:
In other, more serious, culture war news: I didn't know until reading this essay in the New York Times that (in another imitation of American bad ideas I didn't see coming) there has been a media takeover in France by a Right wing (and Catholic) conservative:
The feeling Creffield is describing is called “anhedonia” — the inability to experience joy or pleasure. It’s one of the most common and dangerous symptoms of depression — but it’s often not one psychologists treat.
“We do a pretty good job of helping people feel less bad,” said Steven Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University who has studied depression and anxiety for decades. Hollon noted that psychotherapy and medication can be very effective at reducing negative emotions. What has been more elusive is getting people with depression or anxiety to actually feel good.
A study published recently in JAMA targeted anhedonia using a relatively new therapy called positive affect treatment. The researchers wondered what would happen if they tried to make people feel good, rather than just less bad.
According to Hollon, the results were striking. “They’re moving things I haven’t been able to move,”he said.
Positive affect treatment, or PAT, is designed to help people findmore joy, connection and meaning.
“This
is a paradigm shift from how therapies are usually designed,” said Anne
Haynos, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Virginia
Commonwealth University.
Haynos said that when a patient seeks out therapy or treatment, the goal of the clinician is usuallyto
solve the problem: to make them feel less depressed or help them
overcome a phobia or social anxiety. PAT targets the other end of the
emotional spectrum:During 15 weekly therapy sessions, patients
are taught a variety of skills that boost mood, such as introducing
positive activities into their lives and focusing on the enjoyment of
those experiences.
And further down:
In a series of three randomized clinical trials (the gold standard in scientific research), Meuret and her colleagues have shown evidence that positive affect treatment may be more effective than traditional therapy at helping people retrain their brains to feel more positive emotions — and less negative ones. That second part was a surprise.
Quite a few people in comments are noting that they have known about similar therapies promoted since the 1990's, and are surprised that this is talked about as something new.
