By the way, Morrison did turn up in Brisbane yesterday afternoon, and did an underwhelming TV appearance. I think everyone seeing it probably thought "you're only here because of Hawaii." Amusingly, I didn't see his visit even covered on the evening news, which I'm sure must have irritated his minders a lot.
I'm sick of having to constantly delete Graeme Bird's anti-Semitic conspiracy comments, which are at full blown fever level due to the situation in Ukraine.
So all comments are going into moderation for now.
I thought Helen Dale, self confessed Ukraine expert, would have some bad take related to the war there.
She didn't disappoint:
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Yeah, a real crisis of masculinity (and damning evidence that the entire US military is just emasculated weaklings now) on display there.
Why are libertarian types so obsessed with masculinity? Even queer ones like Dale?
Beyond the pathetic culture war take, she seems to also be in on the "let's have my cake and eat it too" camp - juggling "don't get into wars you can't win" with "the West is just so weak now" in her vacuous head.
How depraved is this, from supposed Catholic Currency Lad:
A revanchist pseudo-Czar only gets one Joe Biden in a lifetime and Vladimir Putin has had his. The two men are equals, morally, but Putin has an edge – only measurable by micrometer, granted – for sincerity. I don’t believe the United States can survive as a recognisable iteration of itself if Biden remains in office till January, 2024. Compare this situation to, say, 1982. Had Ronald Reagan become incapacitated in that year, George H.W. Bush was ready to step in.
In the next paragraph, he says that there is no point in committing Western troops to the battle, as there is no "serious prospect of success".
I'm not sure how many on the wingnut Right actually agree with the extremes of the Tucker Carlson line, which is to effectively advocate the West doing nothing at all - not even sanctions - against Russia and Putin. (He declared weeks ago he was "on Russia's side", and is telling his fans to be very, very upset when sanctions lead to more expensive petrol. A real American patriot.)
I mean, we all know many of them admire Putin for culture war reasons, but I still think the majority know it's not a good look to actually shrug your shoulders (or make clear your support) for unprovoked military excursions of this kind.
So I think the more common line is to not offer an endorsement of the invasion per se (Morrow, Connolly, the execrable Brendan O'Neill) but to nonetheless run the line "ha, the West is so weak, decadent and absorbed in identity politics it was like an invitation to Putin", while simultaneously being a supporter of Trump and his America First isolationism.
They want the West (or Europe alone, who knows?) to be both "strong" and sabre rattling, while simultaneously always complaining about how bad the neo cons were for getting involved in unnecessary wars that ultimately failed. Here's the motormouth Brendan O'Neill today, for example:
Weak Western leaders like Joe Biden pose as the saviours of the Ukrainian people while making it clear that they won’t take any firm action to actually defend Ukraine. Putin is picking up on this incoherence, and exploiting it, says Brendan O’Neill
Here he is in 2008:
Military interventionists, both of the "neocon" and "humanitarian" variety, never learn. Over the past 10 to 15 years, not a single one of their interventions has delivered democracy to a tyrant-hit hotspot, or liberated a people from bondage. Instead they have inflamed and intensified conflict and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. And yet, blinded by the narcissistic and deluded belief that they have the power to free people from tyranny, both left-leaning and rightwing interventionists continue to call for more "wars of liberation", for one more chance to prove that their bombs and bloodshed really can spread freedom around the globe.
This is what decades of culture warring does to the brain - it doesn't matter if your political "enemy" actually agrees with you on what to do to a present problem - you just shred consistency and strawman your way into "it's all your fault, always."
PS - another example that is irritating to watch - the praising of Trump for telling Merkel she shouldn't be dealing commercially with the Russians, while ignoring the fact that Trump spent years trying to get a hotel in Moscow, and lied about still actively trying to do so during his first Presidential campaign.
Fox News and the conservative set like Gray "there's always a way to blame liberals" Connolly (and gormless James Morrow) have excitedly been reminding people of the clip of Trump complaining at the NATO summit in 2018 that Germany shouldn't have gone with Nord Stream 2 because it would become too reliant on Russia, as if this shows some remarkable Trumpian prescience.
But, for once, Trump's concern wasn't some completely new (and crackpot) idea. (Although it may well have had more pure commercial self interest at heart than he predecessors had.) Here's the start of an opinion piece in Foreign Policy in 2018 defending the pipeline:
“A number of other EU states are getting pretty vocal about the fact that the implications are much bigger than just Russia-Germany,” John B. Emerson, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, told POLITICO in Berlin, stressing political divisions on the project both within Germany and the broader European Union. “We continue to push our concerns about Nord Stream both at the EU level and with Germany.”
The Obama administration’s attempt to influence the debate seems to annoy Berlin.
“Some things the Europeans need to decide for themselves,” Peter Wittig, the German ambassador to the U.S., told reporters last month in Washington, noting that the Americans have “taken up some of the fears of other European countries.”
So congratulations, Conservatives, your orange oaf had one legitimate concern that wasn't entirely a fantasy of his own - but it was still irresponsible to threaten to walk away from NATO over it. (Which, if I recall correctly, he did in private, if not in public.) That threat in fact clearly shows why Putin wanted him as President. The Trump election and American culture war is still paying dividends for Putin, if national unity and resolve matter in foreign relations.
I mean, honest to God, we have never seen anything like this in my lifetime - the poisonous stream of continuous propaganda of a major American "news" operation so determined to blame and vilify at every opportunity a sitting US President and his party that it will blame and undermine him for the patently unwarranted military aggression of a nasty dictator like Putin.
While you can never expect complete political unity in terms of American use of military power, this isn't even a case of it being used, or threatened!
I'm just flabbergasted that it seems to be of no concern to those who own Fox News that their top rated "star" is literally repeated on Russian TV as a propagandist on Putin's side.
Now, you might say that it doesn't matter what Russian citizens think, it's not as if they have influence on Putin anyway. But it surely encourages Putin himself - he knows there is an American company so willing to make money by pandering to his side of the culture war that it will propagandise for him and for the return of the President who literally wanted to walk out of NATO completely.
In short, Fox News works against the security interests of America and Europe and deserves to be shut down. An internment camp is the minimum they should endure. Either that or permanent residence in Russia.
Update: add this Christofascist to the permanent holiday in Russia list as well.
The Canadian government began lifting a freeze on more than 200 bank accounts linked to recent protests in the country, officials said on Tuesday.
As many as 210 accounts holding nearly $8 million collectively were frozen under authorization from the nation's Emergencies Act, which was invoked in an effort to quell protests against COVID-19 restrictions, Canadian Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance Isabelle Jacques told a parliamentary committee, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported...
Some conservative members of Parliament have said constituents reported that holds were placed on their accounts after they donated to the protests, according to the CBC.
But the RCMP said it only provided banks with the names of convoy organizers and the owners of trucks who had remained in the protest zone in Canada's capital city of Ottawa, the CBC reported.
According to the CBC, Jacques told the parliamentary committee that the financial measures in the Emergency Act were designed to put financial pressure on protesters to go home. She said it was unlikely people who donated small amounts to the protests would be captured in the freezing of bank accounts, but not impossible.
"It's not impossible in view of the order, but in view of the exchange of information and the focused approach that was taken to stop the illegal funding of these activities, it would appear to be unlikely that this occurred, but not impossible," she told the committee, the CBC reported
As far as I know, there was one claim by a conservative politician that a "single mom" had her account frozen over a $50 donation - but no actual proof that this was true. The politician refused to supply her name, and (as far as I can tell) offered no proof.
It would not be at all surprising if it was a lie from a wingnut.
Update:
All use of the Emergency Law is over:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is revoking the use of the Emergencies Act, the powerful legislative tool that was deployed in response to protests and blockades that erupted in Ottawa and at border crossings over recent weeks.
"The situation is no longer an emergency," Trudeau told a news conference.
"We are confident that existing laws and bylaws are now sufficient to keep people safe."
The Governor General signed off on the revocation on Wednesday afternoon, which formally ended the state of emergency.
Wingnuts will have to find something else to hyperventilate about.
I'm talking about the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial, and imagining the sort of discussions that might be being had between his barristers and him during breaks.
Because, really, it's impossible to believe they would not be wanting to say to any other normal client "this is a disaster, you need to cut your losses now". Instead, what are they saying?
It's pretty hilarious, really.
Pro-Trumpy conservatives: of course Putin wouldn't have tried this under Trump; he wouldn't have dared.
Trump: Hey, brilliant move on behalf of Putin. Really smart, a lot to be admired there.
(Of course Trump then claims Putin wouldn't have done it if he was President - that is just his basic incoherence and lack of self awareness kicking in.)
As noted on Twitter:
True.
I note in the Australian Christofascist Right, the shell of a former conservative who years ago could write well and cohesively confirms his descent into wingnut madness. Currency Lad and his admirers cannot be debated or reasoned with, because facts stopped mattering to them years ago* - and when democracy gives effect to cultural changes they don't like, the problem they perceive is with democracy itself. Hence he's decided the whole of Western Europe is "not my friend". I get the distinct impression he thinks Putin rolling in on tanks over the entire continent would be only mildly regrettable, and overall a good thing for their culture war objectives: after all, like them, he doesn't like the gays, is not keen on abortion, promotes conservative Christianity, doesn't think vaccination in any sector should be compulsory; and and is highly motivated to burn every last bit of fossil fuel.
The only amusing thing about this is that their extremism means they are left without any political party to follow - everyone has failed them - and they can't see that the problem is that they're the ones who have created the problem by moving into a their own fantasy world.
* the list of false or risible factual claims in that post is just so long - and it doesn't matter to any of his admirers.
James Morrow, being pathetic, again:
And here's a longer article about Trump trying to reduce the effect of congressional sanctions on Russia. Here's one from 2017. And this article indicates the number of Russian sanctions went down under Trump.
It is of no surprise to me that Dover Beach, the pro-Christofascist who runs the nuthouse support group New Catallaxy, is into excuse making for Putin:
[I will add further that this is an example of the classic, morally empty, "whataboutism" that is so beloved of the Australia pro-fascist conservative Catholic bloggers.]
I don't follow the intricacies of international politics as closely as some do, but I reckon I follow it enough to know that anyone who takes the line that Biden is the cause of the current situation is an absolute clown. The strawman-ing of the USA (or its media) wanting war is also ludicrous. As is the "under Trump this wouldn't have happened, he kept Russia in its place".
Yes, I must admit I am a little curious to see the Carlson spin on this. How awful will it be?
Update: This, on the other hand, I can agree with:
Here's the story about the "like it or not" quote.
Update: Hugh Hewitt, uber Trump apologist, will end up with 2,500 tweets telling him why he's wrong. And an idiot.
As for Tucker Carlson: every bit as bad as you would expect -
And hahahaha, Tulsi Gabbard joins in the wingnut "let's defend Putin" line:
Yes, this Ross Douthat analysis of the Ottawa blockade as a new kind of "class warfare" is really bad. He starts:
A great and mostly unknown prophet of our time is Michael Young, whose book “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” published way back in 1958, both coined the term in its title and predicted, in its fictional vision of the 21st century, meritocracy’s unhappy destination: not the serene rule of the deserving and talented, but a society where a ruling class selected for intelligence but defined by arrogance and insularity faces a roiling populism whose grievances shift but whose anger at the new class order is a constant.
This year it’s Canada’s turn to live inside Young’s somewhat dystopian scenario, set in the 2030s but here ahead of schedule....
And throws in:
This last division was not precisely anticipated in Young’s book, writing as he did before the true rise of the computer, but it has ended up being a key expression of the meritocracy-populist divide. To quote the pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons, the trucker protests have sharpened a division between “Virtuals” and “Practicals” — meaning the people whose professional lives are lived increasingly in the realm of the “digital and the abstract,” and the people who work in the “mundane physical reality” upon which the virtual society still depends.This completely ignores the role of the digital in promoting conspiracy and crank science amongst the "Practicals" - which is surely the key dynamic driving the anti-mandate motives.
He finally does get around to acknowledging this in the second last paragraph....
And the conflicts are also more complex, inevitably, than any binary can capture: The resilience of reality creates fissures inside the meritocracy (as lately between parents and educational bureaucrats, say), while the populist side has its own virtual dream palaces (the world of QAnon and related conspiracies is not exactly a practical dimension).
...but I reckon with inadequate acknowledgement that this makes a mockery of his whole earlier analysis.
And then this pathetic last paragraph:
Still, once you recognize the divisions that Young prophesied, you see them in some form all over, as a novel class war that constantly raises the old question: Which side are you on?I guess it's too much for Douthat to just come out on the side of those who live in scientific reality and don't see everything through the Right wing culture war perspective.
Many laughs being had on the 'net at the rank desperation of James Morrow today:
Given Rupert's usual personal interest in who should be the next PM, the only question is whether this is in anticipation of the boss wanting Morrison to return, or actual telegraphing from afar that this is the desired outcome? Because, to be honest, unless he's got the start of dementia, it's hard to imagine Murdoch thinking Morrison has performed well; and as such, it would not be entirely surprising to see News Corp tabloids editorially wind back support for him.
I see that Gallup has come out with it's annual "who's identifying as what" sexuality survey (for Americans).
Here's my post last year about the last update.
This year, the headline news is that LGBT identification is up to 7.1%, but (as might be expected from watching pop culture), the growth is mostly from younger people - especially women - identifying as bisexual. Here's the two key tables from 2020, and last year:
So "transgender" is pretty steady, and only slow growth in "gay". But "bisexual" is up a whole percentage point (nearly). As for the gender break up between men and women, this table shows the details:
Isn't that split between men and women curious, summarised again in this line:
Women (6.0%) are much more likely than men (2.0%) to say they are bisexual. Men are more likely to identify as gay (2.5%) than as bisexual, while women are much more likely to identify as bisexual than as lesbian (1.9%).
One other thing of note is this:
In addition to the 7.1% of U.S. adults who consider themselves to be an LGBT identity, 86.3% say they are straight or heterosexual, and 6.6% do not offer an opinion.I would suspect that a higher than usual proportion of that group should be in one of the LGBT categories.
Anyway, the results still seem to back the guesstimate I made in my 2013 post that, at least amongst men, the gay and bisexual percentage is probably around 4 to 5%. The article also ends with this:
Given the large disparities in LGBT identification between younger and older generations of Americans, the proportion of all Americans who identify as LGBT can be expected to grow in the future as younger generations will constitute a larger share of the total U.S. adult population. With one in 10 millennials and one in five Gen Z members identifying as LGBT, the proportion of LGBT Americans should exceed 10% in the near future.However, a large number of bisexual claiming women behind that figure are going to end up in marriages with men, and overall, the growth in alternative sexual identities is not going to be reflected to the same degree in the number of gay marriages (or gay relationships).
Is Gray Connolly, who I consider an eccentric pompous windbag, re-tweeting this with approval?:
Pretty typical Trump-ian excuse making here: everything is supposed to be so bad in the West, who are we to complain about Putin? It's pathetic. Yet Connolly thinks everything was going fine under Trump:
And Gray ends up with this yearning for old world order:
He's really quite the nut, I think.
I see that violent fantacist Riccardo Bosi is getting paid more attention by mainstream media, Twitter and (hopefully) the Federal Police.
I forgot to mention in my comments on Insiders yesterday, that the Huw Parkinson contribution was very funny this week:
I finally got around to watching the 2006 Christopher Nolan movie The Prestige on the weekend - about warring stage magicians of Victorian England.
I found it quite entertaining, and would recommend it, but after reading a bit more about it, it's one of those movies where the plot definitely does not bear thinking about.
SPOILER ALERTS:
The main issue is the involvement of Tesla - as the initial reaction (certainly my son thought so) was that the Christian Bale character had taken advantage of Tesla's clone machine first. But no, apparently if you pay closer attention, he always had a twin brother, and the Tesla thing was just to send his rival off on a wild goose chase. Seems a little crazy, then, doesn't it, that Tesla should be able to whip up a clone machine in short order?
Wouldn't it have made more sense the Bale really had been cloned?
Secondly: there has been a fair bit written on the net about the vanishing bird cage trick. It would seem it was never done as portrayed in the movie, and although the trick was hazardous to the bird, it was not necessarily fatal. I guess I would count this as fictionalisation that is (more or less) justified.
In any event, here's a lengthy article that appeared in The Conversation last year about the history of magician-ship in Victorian England.
Liguria has been renowned for the production of Taggiasche olives for more than 600 years. Benedictine monks from the town of Taggia developed the species many centuries ago.
I've had posts before about the idea of toilets collecting urine separately so it can be turned into something useful. In Nature, this description of a scheme planned for a Swedish island is bound to be easy material for joke writers:
Starting in 2021, a team of researchers began collaborating with a local company that rents out portable toilets. The goal is to collect more than 70,000 litres of urine over 3 years from waterless urinals and specialized toilets at several locations during the booming summer tourist season. The team is from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, which has spun off a company called Sanitation360. Using a process that the researchers developed, they are drying the urine into concrete-like chunks that they hammer into a powder and press into fertilizer pellets that fit into standard farming equipment. A local farmer uses the fertilizer to grow barley that will go to a brewery to make ale — which, after consumption, could enter the cycle all over again.
The researchers aim to take urine reuse “beyond concept and into practice” on a large scale, says Prithvi Simha, a chemical-process engineer at the SLU and Sanitation360’s chief technology officer. The aim is to provide a model that regions around the world could follow. “The ambition is that everyone, everywhere, does this practice.”
An unusual mistreatment of wildlife story out of Thailand:
BANGKOK: Dozens of live monkeys tied up in small sacks have been found in an abandoned building in central Thailand, national media reported on Thursday (Feb 17), in what authorities believe was a failed operation by illicit wildlife traffickers.
Footage from broadcaster Nation TV showed police and wildlife protection officers in the building in Saraburi province inspecting plastic crates containing sealed blue mesh bags with monkeys in each of them.
The video shows some monkeys trying to scamper away while still inside bags that were secured with string and plastic zip ties.
Wirom Wanalee, a resident, told Nation TV she and neighbours heard the monkeys' cries and found nearly 100 of them in the building.....
Thailand and the wider Southeast Asia is home to some of the world's most diverse flora and fauna, but the region has suffered from rampant poaching and trafficking of wildlife.
The pandemic halted much of the lucrative trade, but it is now picking back up as countries lift border restrictions, according to the United Nations.
Who is wanting poached monkeys from Thailand??
We saw the same tactic deployed in the past on climate change: after actively promoting the mere handful of contrarians, you would see them pointing to polls and saying "but the public just isn't convinced enough that climate change is real or serious or deserves government action, it would be wrong for us to move on this now."
Now it's used by Republicans regarding the completely unjustified claims of widespread voter fraud in the Trump election, and pointing to polls as to the number of Republicans who believe it meaning that voter laws just have to be reformed.
While fighting off professional sanctions for her legal career, Powell noted in a filing, “Millions of Americans believe the central contentions of the complaint to be true.” Then the filing added — tellingly when it comes to Powell’s lack of actual proof — “and perhaps they are.”
The same filing also alludes to another arena in which this widespread belief has been used to justify certain actions. It states that “dozens of laws have been enacted by state legislatures in response to concerns similar to those raised in the complaint.”
And it’s right. GOP leaders in key swing states across the country have repeatedly cited the perception of fraud — rather than actual widespread fraud — as legitimizing their efforts to add new voting restrictions. One Iowa state senator went so far as to say, “The ultimate voter suppression is a very large swath of the electorate not having faith in our election systems.”....
It’s not difficult to see where this kind of justification can go awry. It incentivizes creating a pretext for something you already wanted to do, as long as you can find enough people to embrace it.
Powell wanted to overturn the election, so she cited all kinds of dodgy supposed evidence for that, and she earned credulous media coverage from others who wanted to believe (or at least allow other people to believe) the election had been stolen from their side. Likewise, Republicans writ large haven’t generally subscribed to Trump’s most far-reaching claims of fraud, but they’ve done virtually nothing to rebut them, allowing the situation to fester.
What results is a bunch of legislators and extreme actors in the effort to overturn the election citing the very perception they’ve fomented as somehow legitimizing their original argument — and justifying the particular bandage they had already wanted to apply to the perceived wound. If a lie makes its way into the mainstream, is it really a lie? Or just a difference of valid opinions? Who can know? And how can you impose sanctions on someone or block a voting restriction if both were predicated on a sincere belief held by so many people?
God's quite the stickler for precise words, it turns out:
Thousands of baptisms at a Catholic church in Arizona have been invalidated because a priest used the wrong words in performing the ceremony.
Father Andres Arango resigned from the St Gregory parish church in Phoenix earlier this month after diocese leaders discovered he had mistakenly used the phrase “we baptize you” instead of “I baptize you” for years.
His error means that countless baptisms – an irrevocable requirement for salvation in Catholic theology – will have to be performed again. And some churchgoers could find their marriages are not recognized....
The fount of knowledge on the matter is the Vatican’s 2020 congregation for the doctrine of the faith, which along with declaring Covid-19 vaccines “morally acceptable” also spelled out the correct words that needed to be used during baptisms.
The congregation “affirms that baptisms administered with modified formulas are invalid, including: ‘We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’,” the Vatican announced.
The declaration was deemed necessary following questions over whether such phrasing meant that three separate holy entities were involved in the baptisms, or only one.
“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Olmsted wrote in a message posted to the Diocese of Phoenix website.
I wonder if there is an Arizona lawyer looking at offering to sue for clerical negligence, citing emotional harm over concern that the client's deceased child didn't make it into heaven because of this?
I recently consumed a Kelloggs product for the first time in years, just because it was on special. It was - not great.
Why do Kelloggs products seem to so uniformly be so dull and overpriced? I wouldn't say "bad quality" as such; just really uninteresting and expensive for what they are. I've felt this about them for perhaps 40 now, and nothing changes. I presume this is not a assessment too widely shared, given the survival of the company, but I feel very certain of my opinion on this anyway.
PS: I've eaten a lot of breakfast cereal over those 40 years. I love a good breakfast cereal. Uncle Toby's or some Sanitarium have had much better cereals, although they didn't up their game when I was a child, and it probably was mostly Kelloggs I ate back then. Now, I'm into the cheaper toasted muesli style products (Heritage Mill, sold in Coles and made in Australia, goes ridiculously cheap on about a 4 or 5 week cycle and has been my favourite for a year or two. Just so you know.)
John Quiggin brought this to my attention:
Anyway, encouragingly, the comments following the article are mostly full of ridicule of his both-siderism. For example:
Excuse me.One party’s mob violently attacked the capital, beating police officers with flags, smearing feces everywhere and threatening to lynch a VP that wouldn’t bend to their will. Hint - it wasn’t the Democrats. A Republican Congressman said it was just another tourist group and the RNC declared that this was merely “legitimate political discourse”.Today’s GOP wants to ban books, censor teachers and overturn elections. They are far more dangerous than a party that says racism is bad, let’s address it.I am so weary of writers comparing “wokism” with the anti democracy scourge that is today’s GOP. No -Democrats are not perfect. But their excesses in no way compare to the disturbing trends in today’s GOP.
More succinctly:
How about we stop fascism from taking over America, and then we can address the stifling oppression of being nice to minorities on the internet?Sheesh, this isn’t rocket science.
And this:
I swear to God, it's the extremist centrists that are going to end this democracy by letting the GOP complete the coup they started last year.
From the Washington Post:
“People are not strong enough,” said Doug Moss, a retired airline pilot and instructor in the aviation safety and security program at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering.
That is because no human is a match for the tremendous pressure holding the door in place.
Airplane cabins are pressurized, which lets people breathe normally even when flying at about 35,000 feet in the air. At typical cruising altitude, Ask a Pilot writer Patrick Smith notes on his website, as much as eight pounds of pressure push against every square inch of the plane’s interior — or more than 1,100 pounds against each square foot of the door.
“Just by pure pressure alone, the force required to open the door would be astronomical,” said Bob Thomas, an assistant professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
That’s the door a Delta passenger tried to open during a flight from Salt Lake City to Portland, Ore., on Friday. The 32-year-old man allegedly removed the plastic covering over the handle of the emergency exit and pulled the handle; he later told police that he wanted to be recorded so he could share his thoughts about the coronavirus vaccine.Moss said the pressurization would have the same effect on any door on a plane, including the emergency exits, which are designed to be used in the event of an evacuation when the plane is no longer in the air.
I guess the caveat to this is that if a mad person leaps out of their seat (or is sitting right next to an over wing exit) and tries this immediately on take off, they might succeed?
I barely look at Discover magazine's site anymore, but I'm glad I did today because of this pretty easy to follow explanation of superdeterminism. (I reckon this idea is catching attention because the popular Sabine Hossenfelder likes it.)
Some Twitter threads by people who seem to know their subject well are really good to read.
I liked this one today that explains a lot about present day Russia, mainly from a geographic and population point of view. (It's more interesting than it sounds).
With the Right wing hysterical reaction to Trudeau's moderate and targeted use of emergency powers to rid Ottawa (and other cities) of useless and unjustifiable blockades (according to "my employer says no one should take me seriously" Tucker Carlson, it's martial law and the end of democracy), I am reminded once again how the tide has turned.
When I were a lad (well, at least into my 20's), Monty Python used to ridicule Left wing political hyperbole:
Man: (laughingly) Listen: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords
is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power
derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some... farcical
aquatic ceremony!
Arthur: (yelling) BE QUIET!
Man: You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some
watery tart threw a sword at you!!
Arthur: (coming forward and grabbing the man) Shut *UP*!
Man: I mean, if I went 'round, saying I was an emperor, just because some
moistened bink had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
Arthur: (throwing the man around) Shut up, will you, SHUT UP!
Man: Aha! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Arthur: SHUT UP!
Man: (yelling to all the other workers) Come and see the violence inherent
in the system! HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!
I think "what have the Romans ever done for us" could similarly be said to be mocking the Left for wanting victim status all the time.
And that was because political over the top hyperbole used to be a thing more of the Left than the Right.
Now, it's the speciality of the wingnut Right, and is amplified by its media that makes money out of spreading fear and misinformation.
Look at the highly sympathetic treatment Chris Uhlmann gives the Canberra protesters in today's piece in the Sydney Morning Herald: they're just like Trump's followers, mostly ordinary working class people who have faced hard times who are frustrated that they're not being heard: exactly the same analysis as given by JD Vance.
Uhlmann has always had crap judgement, and it would have to be at least an even odds bet that he will go increasingly wingnut, like Vance, once he leaves Channel 9 and (hopefully) gets out of media for good. Did he actually give media appearance advice to some of the protesters, as one of them claimed last week? Has he answered that claim?
I'm on the side of those who have no time for the sympathetic treatment of wingnuts - they are victims of malicious and greedy Right wing media, both institutional and social, and talked themselves into ridiculous, dangerous and often pro-fascist positions. They need to be told loudly and clearly that they are wrong and been conned on multiple issues and because they are too gullible.
I will be very glad to see the back of Uhlmann.
I thought I could tell by the writing style of an article by Vinad Prasad that Jason Soon finds convincing that this guy seemed unduly hyperbolic in his criticisms of the CDC.
Googling him, I see that he is indeed a ridiculous hot head, and I would not trust his assessments at all without looking at calm and detailed commentary by others:
Prasad, an oncologist and associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at UCSF, likes a good Twitter fight. He has incited brawls over FDA’s accelerated approval of cancer drugs, efficacy of checkpoint inhibitors, usefulness of next-gen sequencing, and—in recent months—the restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19.
In an Oct. 2 Substack blog post, Prasad argues that public health measures may have laid the groundwork for the onset of fascism in the U.S.
The comparison set off a deluge of Twitter controversy, including accusations of anti-Semitism and ignorance of the circumstances that led to the rise of German fascism.
In the blog post and an accompanying video titled “How Democracy Ends,” Prasad speculates that in the name of public health and safety, an unscrupulous U.S. government could turn dictatorial and fascist.
“When democratically elected systems transform into totalitarian regimes, the transition is subtle, stepwise, and involves a combination of pre-planned as well as serendipitous events,” Prasad wrote. “Indeed, this was the case with Germany in the years 1929-1939, where Hitler was given a chance at governing, the president subsequently died, a key general resigned after a scandal and the pathway to the Fuhrer was inevitable.”
Also on Oct. 2, Prasad posted a link to his blog post and video on Twitter, sharing it again the next day. The Twitterverse exploded, with Prasad’s detractors battling his defenders while Prasad stood by his original point. Prasad didn’t respond to questions from The Cancer Letter, and at this writing, the post is still up.
He's a goose.
He's all too willing to allege bad motives on the part of other researchers rather than just accept that on the very complicated matter of this pandemic there can be a range of justifiable policy recommendations, based on research that's imperfect but might nonetheless be somewhat indicative of appropriate policy.
I wasn't his biggest fan, but PJ O'Rourke could be amusing in his contrarianism, and I had wondered what he thought of Trump, as I hadn't noticed him writing much in recent years.
So, Googling it up now, I am pleased to see that he had anti-Trump and anti-Brexit views, meaning he was more sensible than most conservative/libertarians in his own country (and those in Australia, like Tim Blair). From an article in New Statesman in 2020:
O’Rourke sprang back into the national spotlight during the 2016 presidential election by announcing that he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump.
He puts the decision down to his natural conservatism. “Politics is a matter of least worst,” he told me when I recently stayed at his farm. “She was the devil I knew – she was going to be another eight years of Obama, which we had endured. Donald Trump? I knew people who knew him. Nobody liked him. I just thought he was unstable…dangerous. I still do.”...
he hasn’t changed his mind about Trump. “In fairness, his administration has not been as bad as I thought it might be,” he reflected. “But there have been moments when one has gone: ‘Whoah!’” What he described as Trump’s “group hug” with the North Koreans, and “stirring things up with Iran” are just two examples.
O’Rourke believes that the Founding Fathers made the presidency too powerful by giving it control of foreign policy – something he recently discovered Benjamin Franklin had opposed. “He thought it should have been a committee,” he said.
“Trump certainly is not a conservative in the sense of conserving the status quo. Arguably Clinton was more so. He is a radical, a populist one, and I don’t like populism anyway. Populism is, like, ‘The government should give me things I like or get rid of the things I don’t like’… The Nazis were populist, Mussolini was populist.”
For similar reasons, the perennial sceptic says he would have taken the Remain side in the 2016 referendum on EU membership. “I would have been against Brexit strictly on practical grounds – Britain and Europe had become too thoroughly integrated to do something as radical as Brexit.”
Though sympathetic to the Leave cause over European meddling, and happy to give Europe “a kick up the pants”, it was his conservatism that said “stay”.
First, the opinion piece (with its highly accurate summary of
Morrison) is by Bruce Haigh, who (AFAIK) hardly counts as the official spokesperson of the Chinese Communist Party.
Secondly: as many in tweets following have said, isn't it rather more "Awks" that the coalition signed off on the long term lease of the Darwin port to a Chinese company barely 7 years ago, and is now wringing its hands as to whether it was a good idea after all.?
Thirdly: I reckon the only way a hypocritical China scare campaign can "work" for Morrison, would be if there is an actual invasion of Taiwan before the election. So let's send out positive vibes to Xi to calm down and not even think about that until next year, at least.
I agree entirely with Max Boot's Washington Post column "Social media is destroying democracy". Some bits:
Freedom House reports that democracy has been on the decline around the world for the past 15 years — the same period that has seen the rise of social media. In her best-selling new book “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them,” political scientist Barbara F. Walter argues that this is no coincidence. Social media, she writes, has become “the vehicle that launches outsiders with autocratic impulses to power, riding a popular wave of support.” Examples include Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil — and, of course, Donald Trump.
All of these demagogues are masters of a medium whose algorithms are designed to give users the content they crave. “It turns out,” Walter notes, “that what people like the most is fear over calm, falsehood over truth, outrage over empathy.” That explains why Breitbart is more popular on Facebook than the New York Times and why Ben Shapiro’s the Daily Wire is more popular than the BBC.
That, in turn, explains, why so many Americans believe that the FBI masterminded the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, that Trump won the 2020 election and that coronavirus vaccines are unnecessary or even harmful. That explains, also, why last year a crowd of QAnon believers gathered in Dallas expecting John F. Kennedy Jr. to return from the dead. Social media is full of useful, accurate information, but what most users really respond to is fear, falsehood and flakiness.
This is a deeply destructive and profoundly anti-conservative position.It is not clear to me that democracy can survive so much disinformation, and yet Republicans are bashing Big Tech because they are so mad that Trump and a few other political arsonists have been banned from major social media sites. The GOP position seems to be that there should be no gatekeepers at all, aside from those algorithms that feed collective outrage.
Of course, the comments following are mostly "But who are the gatekeepers going to be, you wannabe communist". It's a good question, but refuse to solve the problem, and you're guaranteeing a worsening society.
