With the shocking case of two teenage (aboriginal, it would seem) past offenders, staying at a local "half way house", stabbing a couple of neighbours (and killing one) in what was probably a thwarted attempt to steal their car (or Christmas presents) on Boxing Day, some of the media has been giving space for prison reform advocates who have criticised the Premier's immediate promise to increase sentences, make bail harder to obtain, etc.
Their common cry is along the lines that research shows that incarcerating youth actually increases the chances of them re-offending. Instead of building youth prisons, more money should be put into "addressing the root cause" and early interventions before kids go completely off the rails. Research shows that actually works best.
I saw one such advocate, Mindy Sotiri, from a group called Justice Reform Initiative, interviewed on TV, and she at least acknowledged that this was a hard sell when the public legitimately had a concern for safety. She did acknowledge that reform of what was done within youth prisons was part of the picture - she wasn't just one of reflexive "never prison" so-called experts.
But look at the typically airy fairy response from a Greens politician, for example:
What an easy peasy bunch of issues to "address", hey Stephen?
And what about this contribution:
Maggie Munn, an Indigenous rights campaigner for Amnesty International Australia, said further penalties would disproportionately affect First Nations people.
“This is not what commitment to justice looks like; this is what failing our children looks like,” Munn told Guardian Australia.
“More than half of the kids in detention on remand are [from] First Nations and the government wants to fast-track their sentences.
Um, how about an acknowledgement that what happened a few days ago was something that happened when the offender was being diverted from remand prison into a suburban half way house???
What I find particularly galling is when someone like semi-high profile prison reform (more like prison abolish) advocate Debbie Kilroy not only fully supports criticism of prison for youth, but also is apparently against stern government intervention within the problematic, dysfunction families which most youth crime no doubt comes from. Here she is again, today:
Look, I am sure that when criminologist types talk about (some type of) prisons being good at making people criminals, I don't doubt that they have research that supports them.
But honestly, when the matter is swirling around the complicated social issue of aboriginal youth crime, if they have the compelling examples of the specific type of non-prison intervention schemes that have been deemed clear successes, then put them out for all of us to see, and to see how much it costs, whether it really scales up, and sell the case with full details, not just sentiment.
I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn of some programs in some locations that might have been successes. But what scale were they on? Were they dependent on the happenstance of a few aboriginal families in that locality that were particularly stable and willing to be involved in the reform of kids? (I certainly presume that such programs are heavily dependent on being run by aboriginal participants.) Did the families the kids came of get over their drug/alcohol/domestic violence issues that their children probably suffered under? How long have such diversion programs been tracked?
And seriously, don't advocates for prison reform as far as it concerns aboriginals ever think that promoting an intense sense of grievance over historical injustices is counterproductive if you want to stop property crime and the deaths that are incidental to it?
I have only slight memory of the Mary Poppins movie from my childhood - and no wonder, as I see that I must have been only 4 or 5 when I saw it (unless it had some return run when I was older?) My vague memory of it was that it was a tad melancholy in some of the songs and themes (Feed the Birds, in particular), and I wasn't exactly a sucker for fantasy as a kid, although a few years later I did enjoy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang quite a lot. (It was the techno excitement of a long distance trip in an open flying car that did it, I'm sure.)
So, I've never given the movie much thought as an adult, until now.
The reason - my wife got relatively cheap tickets to the stage version currently showing at QPAC in Brisbane. It's been playing around Australia for much of 2022.
My impression of the stage show (since confirmed on my reading this morning) was that it must have drawn more heavily on the book(s) than did the movie, as I was pretty sure there were features in it that didn't appear in the film at all. And it got me thinking about the peculiarity of the whole concept, and why it didn't grab me as a child. I think (rationalising with nearly 60 years of hindsight!) that I didn't like the lack of an origin story, or even origin hints, as to the magical title character.
The stage show, on the other hand, with its repeated featuring of Greek classical park statues come to life, and the kids being interested in Greek gods' relationships, gives a greater sense of the story having strong mythological undertones. I'm still a bit puzzled as to the nature of the relationship between Bert and her, though: I mean, if it followed Greek mythology too closely, there would probably be some weird carnal episode between them on every visit. But instead we get the notion that she appears to him out of the blue when she wants a bit of chaste fun, with a sort of hint of some important role she plays in maintaining his unusual cheerfulness over the years. A kind of a muse, perhaps? Maybe it is further explained in the books, but I am not that keen to look it up.
Anyway, I was thinking along these lines when I Googled up this morning a few articles about the author, PJ Travers. Yes, I already knew a little bit about how she was born in Queensland, had a cantankerous relationship with Disney and the studio, and didn't like the film. But I've never bothered watching Saving Mr Banks: my interest was not that high.
I am pleased to see from this 2018 article, though, that my guesses about the author's intentions and interest in mythology were spot on. This was written by a guy who met her, although in which decade seems unclear - he says she was in her 50's, but she was born in 1899, making that the 1950's. The context of the article suggests it was after the movie was made, hence the 1970's. Doesn't much matter:
I first met Pamela Travers 10 years later when she was in her 50s. This
was shortly after she had been a visiting writer at Radcliffe and Smith
colleges, but before she had taken up the great passion of her later
life — composing meditative essays for Parabola, a magazine “devoted to
the exploration of the quest for meaning as it is expressed in the
world’s myths, symbols, and religious traditions, with particular
emphasis on the relationship between this store of wisdom and our modern
life.” That mission statement also amounts to a description of
Travers’s life.
Travers was the wisest woman I’ve ever met. She was the second Western
woman to study Zen in Kyoto, part of the inner circle of the famous
mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and did yoga daily (an exotic practice in the
1970s). One afternoon in her Manhattan apartment, we had a conversation
that would later appear in Paris Review. She spoke about the meanings of
Humpty Dumpty, how her book “Friend Monkey” had been inspired by the
Hindu myth of Hanuman, the Zen expression “summoned not created,” the
sacredness of names in aboriginal cultures and a spiritual understanding
of the parable of the Prodigal Son. And as for linking “this store of
wisdom and our modern life,” she led me step by step through parallels
between the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the myth of Persephone. It
was one of the richest afternoons of my life.
As
she often did, Travers emphasized that she “never wrote for children”
but remained “immensely grateful that children have included my books in
their treasure trove.” She thought her books appealed to the young
because she had never forgotten her own childhood: “I can, as it were,
turn aside and consult it.”
Of
Irish descent, Travers grew up in the Australian Outback and moved as a
young woman to England in 1924 to pursue her dream of being a
journalist and poet. By great good luck, she was taken in and encouraged
by leading figures of the Celtic Twilight, including William Butler
Yeats.
Then, further down, this explanation:
But what is most important is that Mary Poppins comes from the world of
myth, where she is a magnificent and significant figure. In the world of
myth, she is the Great Goddess, but comically reincarnated as a nanny
who “pops in” to turn-of-the-century London. In the Disney version, her
mystic and mythic story becomes music-hall song-and-dance. As Travers
said in a letter to writer Brian Sibley, “It is as though they took a
sausage, threw away the contents but kept the skin, and filled the skin
with their own ideas, very far from the original substance.”
Take,
for instance, the heart of the movie, where the children step into a
sidewalk drawing and join Mary and Bert in a make-believe world, ride on
a merry-go-round and hear the song
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” The heart of the book, on the
other hand, is a scene where Jane and Michael Banks go with Mary to the
zoo — on the one night of the year when all of the animals dance
together — and a wise snake tells the children about the unity of all
life. That chapter reads like one of the animal fables from the ancient
Indian epic “The Panchatantra,” set in a modern era.
When
you read the original book, you enter a world of mythological thinking,
where scholars have found references to the Bible, Greek deities and
Sufi parables; and in commenting on Travers, critics have reached for
parallels in the works of William Blake, Zen Buddhism and beliefs about
the Hindu goddess Kali. Indeed, to the informed reader, “Mary Poppins”
is a modernized collection of ancient fables and teaching stories.
That’s what makes it an extraordinary children’s book.
Almost makes me want to check out the books, after all!
As for the stage show: regardless of what you think of the story, or some of the music, it's one of those productions where the staging and enthusiasm of the cast make it pretty much impossible to dislike. (The massive changing sets are nearly worth a ticket alone.) I also thought it unusual, for a stage musical, in that I think most shows end the first half on a production number high, but this one doesn't. The second half really does "wow" the audience more, in my opinion. The climax (I don't think I am giving anything away) featuring a high wire ascent back into the heavens over the audience is just, well, theatrically thrilling - and really makes you wonder how on earth the performers get used to doing it without being nervous wrecks.
As for who of my handful of regular readers might be interested in a post like this: Tim Train, I at least expect a comment from you!
For many years, I have used Japanese aftershave. There are a few common brands, often found in hotels (or in good onsen), and while I think they are mainly a thing for the older male (hey, that's me now!), it seems enough older males must use it for the product to be readily available in supermarkets, pharmacies, etc. (For the younger male, the skin care and hair care product range is much broader than it is in Australia, and there are some very mild versions of aftershave, not obviously alcohol based, for them, too.) The thing I like about that country's aftershave is that they are not overpowering - even the initially stronger smelling ones are definitely not lingering, but give the nice, bracing astringent sensation that leaves the skin feeling very clean, especially in summer. (In winter, I might moisturise instead - at least if the weather is super dry.)
But - I didn't realise until this Christmas just how comprehensively the "cheap-ish alcohol based aftershave" market has collapsed in Australia. This may sound odd, but I thought I would buy my son a bottle of some "classic", since he has never used after shave. (OK, I suppose I could gift one of my Japanese bottles - but that's already mine!)
As far as I can tell, after visiting Chemist Warehouse, a couple of supermarkets, and a couple of independent pharmacies, about the only "old school" brand of aftershave still more-or-less available is Blue Stratos. I'm not even sure how old it is - an internet search first indicated that an Australian company has been making it since 2002, but elsewhere someone says it was released in 1976. (It is, by the looks, made by different companies around the world.)
Now, sure, you can get at the supermarket a few brands of after shave "balms", but if you live in a humid climate, the alcohol based end to a shave is far more desirable. Whatever happened to plain old Old Spice, for example? It's not be found anywhere on the shelves. I see now that I can buy it online from Chemist Warehouse, but I am sure it wasn't on the shelf. I saw something of (ugh) Brut in a pharmacy, but it was always crassly overpowering, and I didn't even check if it was aftershave or something else.
Now, yes, I am aware that Chemist Warehouse has a substantial section of men's colognes, and amongst them there is one or two which are sold as aftershaves. But they are more expensive European brands, and anything in that entire section is always overpowering in the "hairy man who wants to be smelt from across the room" kind of way. I mean, what do they put in these colognes that make them impossible to remove even after a couple of washings with soap? This time, I thought that surely a company like Reebok wouldn't sell a cologne that was too strong, but I sprayed a tiny spray (from a tester bottle, of course) onto the back of my hand and then was still smelling it there 4 hours later after several hand washing attempts to remove it. Awful.
I would presume Australia is just following the lead of other Western nations, America in particular? Oddly, given the number of varieties of Lynx deodorant/body spray on the supermarket shelf, which I think is the local equivalent of the often joked about Axe body spray in the US, the problem seems not to be young men don't want to smell - it's more that they want to smell too much. At least after exercise, or something? But, I don't know, I still associate strong male cologne smells with men of my age (or older) - I don't really recall noticing such a smell from a 20 something guy. Then again, it's not that I am ever socialising with them. Maybe if I went to a nightclub I would learn.
But yeah, I used to use Old Spice, maybe not daily, but often, as a young man, and its attraction was the mildness of the smell. I really can't remember now when I stopped using it. Maybe about 23 years ago, when I first went to Japan?
By the way, there is probably a story to be told as to how men's aftershave came to be popular in Japan at all - given that I have noticed in other Asian countries (Singapore, Malaysia) that any form of male aftershave is virtually non-existant. One might think that the relatively less expansive amount of facial hair to be found on many Eastern Asian men would be the reason (as shaving might not be a daily necessity for all) - but of course, Japanese men can have the same feature. Was it the American post war occupation that set them on the path of aftershave? And what is the situation in Korea, I wonder? (Even more intense preoccupation with young men's skin and hair care than Japan, I presume, but what about aftershave?)
Anyway, I bought the (very cheap) Blue Stratos aftershave, and, as I recall, it's not a bad smell (although I don't think I ever used it myself; just smelt it in the past and thought it was OK.) He's used it and seems to thinks it's OK, but is wondering how it will affect his moisturising regime. Young men these days!
I see that Wikipedia has an interesting entry on the history of the Nativity in art, and that's where I get this early Roman example, from the 4th century, indicating that the gift giving part of the season has been key for a long time!
A recent philosophical article takes a view that I would have thought is obvious to those of most religious faith, but it probably bears repeating:
It is widely thought that we have good reason to try to be important.
Being important or doing significant things is supposed to add value to
our lives. In particular, it is supposed to make our lives exceptionally
meaningful. This essay develops an alternative view. After exploring
what importance is and how it might relate to meaning in life, a series
of cases are presented to validate the perspective that being important
adds no meaning to our lives. The meaningful life does need valuable
projects, activities, and relationships. But no added meaning is secured
by those projects, activities, and relationships being especially
significant. The extraordinary life has no more meaning than the
ordinary life.
As everyone knows, she was no anti-vaxxer when Covid started, and the first 7 pages of her submission are really spent justifying her warnings early on about the danger Covid (and long Covid) generally.
It's when she starts talking about the damage vaccination caused her and her wife that it starts sounding questionable. First, it's pretty surprising that both of them should have adverse effects. And secondly, despite her talking about all of the specialists who have confirmed a real problem with both of them, I would like to hear more directly from specialists than from her:
I have had CT pulmonary angiogram, ECG, blood tests, cardiac echogram, transthoracic cardiac stress echo, Holter monitor, blood pressure monitoring and autonomic testing. In my case the injury resulted in dysautonomia with intermittent fevers and cardiovascular implications including breathlessness, inappropriate sinus tachycardia and blood pressure fluctuations.
These reactions were reported to the TGA at the time, but never followed up.
I have spoken with other doctors who have themselves experienced a serious and persistent adverse event including cardiological, rheumatological, autoimmune reactions and neurological consequences. Patients and other members of the community have told me about their stories.
They have had to search for answers, find GPs and specialists who are interested and able to help them, spend large amounts of money on medical investigations, isolate from friends and family, reduce work hours, lose work if they are required to attend in person and avoid social and cultural events.
Look, this is really just my gut reaction, but there is a reliance on anecdote to bolster her argument (and from people who sound like they have a "no one will listen to me" sort of semi-conspiracy mindset) which feels like there are some psychological issues drawn into this.
On the other hand, it's true - I did find myself having some bursts of high blood pressure readings for the first time in my life during this year (they seem to have stopped or reduced now, and I suspected some work stress which has lessened now has helped with that.) I did wonder whether Covid vaccination had any connection with it, and I posted before that some studies indicated that there could be.
But I just get the feeling that with Phelps and her partner, it's more complicated than a direct vaccine side effect.
I've never seen this guy's content before, but the Almighty Algorithm of Google (in its Youtube incarnation) new that I would enjoy this, and I really did:
I have been curious to know more about how harvesting a bit of weed with your spinach could result is hallucinations and other ill health. I see there was a bit more commentary on this yesterday, and I get the feeling that even if the weed is clearly identified, the authorities doubt it is a good idea to publicise it:
Australians are being urged not to seek out
contaminated baby spinach products for a recreational high after more
than 130 people who ate a range of fresh food items suffered symptoms
including hallucinations and delirium.
Symptoms can be severe and include delirium or confusion,
hallucinations, dilated pupils, rapid heartbeat, flushed face, blurred
vision, dry mouth and skin, and fever....
“There are lots of plants that could do this – lots of weeds that are relatives to potato and tomato,” he said.
“This
is likely to be a nightshade. When young, they are just a few dark
green leaves which is probably not that much different to spinach.
You’re harvesting all these leafy greens now at a very young age,
sometimes it can be quite difficult [to identify].”
Summerell said farmers were facing the extra challenge of an explosion
of weeds right across the country after months of rain and floods....
Summerell warned people not to go searching for
the contaminated products or pick and eat weeds they could not identify
in search of a cheap high.
“People might be
tempted to go out picking weeds thinking that they’ll get some sort of
high [but] it’s really important to remember yes, there might be a
hallucinogenic side to this, but there’s a whole lot of really horrible
health issues,” he said.
Update: well, that took a while, but it has been named: thornapple. Never heard of it, and kind of surprising that this is the first time it has happened.
I don't know why this crossed my mind recently - oh yeah, I do remember now, but the story is too long to relate here - but I thought "Isn't it odd that generally speaking, it seems Muslims faith does not involve the idea of God ever 'talking' directly into the mind of the believer, it's more about listening to what God wants as teachings mediated via your Imam. Christians, on the other hand, and especially fundamentalist (and American) Christians, are all about thinking that God is causing them directly to think or feel something in their head. One would think that the latter might be potentially more dangerous for society, and the Christian Nationalism movement in the US is full of highly armed people who seem to want to fantasise about killing the evil for God; but on the other hand, Muslim terrorist attacks have obviously been a thing. It's a bit complicated..."
Sherif A. Elfass, Northern Nevada Muslim Community president
In
Islam, the means of communication that can take place between God and
human beings are described by God in the Quran: “And it is not for any
human being that Allah should speak to him except by revelation or from
behind a partition or that He sends a messenger to reveal, by His
permission, what He wills. Indeed, He is Most High and Wise.” (42:51).
Islam teaches us Allah (SWT) spoke directly to Prophets Adam, Moses and
Muhammad (PBUT) only without ever revealing Himself (from behind a
partition). Allah (SWT) spoke to some of the prophets, like Prophet
Ibrahim (PBUH), through revelation that came as dreams. However, the
most common method Allah (SWT) used to communicate to His prophets is
through angels sent as messengers. Since no prophets will come after
Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), the communication between Allah (SWT) and human
beings is limited to revelations through dreams.
As for one of the Christians represented in the column, he's a bit cautious:
Steve Bond, lead pastor, Summit Christian Church, Sparks
Yes
… God speaks directly to humans. Over 2,000 times in the Old Testament
there are phrases such as, "And God spoke to Moses" or "the word of the
Lord came to Jonah" or "God said." We see an example of this in
Jeremiah 1:9. "The LORD reached out his hand and touched my mouth and
said to me, 'Now I have put my words in your mouth.'" Jeremiah claims to
speak specific words God had put into his mouth.
During
the birth of Jesus, God spoke to Mary through an angel; he spoke to
Joseph through a dream; he spoke to the shepherds through an angel and
he spoke to the Magi through a dream. Yes, God speaks!
But now that the Scriptures are complete, any word from God must be
corroborated by the Bible. God’s Word is the plumb-line against which
all new revelation is measured.
In fact the Catholic representative sounds a bit more into affirming the direct line from God to the brain:
Monique Jacobs, director of faith formation, Roman Catholic Diocese of Reno
God
has a long history of speaking directly to humans. In Scripture — Old
and New Testaments — you will see God has made it a priority to
communicate directly with us over the centuries. If you love someone,
you find every opportunity to communicate — it’s no different for God.
Though you may not have experienced this (yet) God doesn’t reserve this
loving, intimate conversation for saints alone. There is a lot of
competition in our lives for the voice of God; the trick is to make time
for quiet: intervals of solitude, hiking or running without earphones,
sitting beside a candle trusting your presence is enough. Breathe. God
is patient, so must we be. We cannot make these encounters happen by
willpower; it is all God’s initiative — our part is the response. Our
heart should be open, expectant; don’t worry about “doing it” right or
imagining the whisper.
The Buddhist rep sounds a bit trippy:
Matthew T. Fisher, Reno Buddhist Center resident priest
Buddhism
is a non-theistic world view, so this is not a central question. But we
can ask if the Light of the universe can be heard? After the Buddha was
enlightened he described a vibrant scene — more beautiful than any he
had ever seen. He called this “being awake,” deeply hearing the world
around him. All sentient beings can reach this state, but we are limited
by biases and narrow habits of thought. This deep hearing of the light
is joyous appreciation of the wondrous gifts the universe offers. Does
the universe talk? Only if we listen.
Conversations do happen. Just after the Buddha was enlightened, the
highest of Hindu gods, Brahma, encouraged Buddha to go forth and teach.
Though Buddha was reluctant, he was swayed by Brahma’s request. And
sutras recount many gods listening with interest to the Buddha’s
important discourses like the Lotus Sutra.
Just wait until Elon Musk gets to put in brain implants: maybe that will increase the efficiency of communication...
Yes, it's from CGTN, so naturally it's going to be here only to show something positive about China, but I had never thought of the benefits of their type of written language before, so here we go:
I've never read much about GK Chesterton: I did start one of his Christian apologetics books once but gave up, finding the writing style too much hard work. (From memory, it was a bit like Joseph Conrad writing non-fiction.)
There's a long review of a book about him here which makes me glad I haven't bothered too much about his biographic details, as his life seems to have involved an awful lot of political intrigue which seems rather arcane from this distance in time. (By which I mean, you have to have a pretty detailed understanding of early 20th century British politics to follow it fully.)
Anyway, I did learn a few things which are odd and noteworthy:
Sex was not an obvious temptation either. Despite the restrictions she put on his wallet and on his waistline, G.K.
adored his sober, dutiful, unshowy Frances, and was content to be
mothered in his incompetence. But no children came, and Chesterton’s
sister-in-law, Ada – she married his younger brother, Cecil – later
claimed the wedding night had been so ghastly for Frances that their
marriage had remained sexless. This might not be true: Ada had long
nursed a grudge against Frances for taking G.K.
out of the sharp-witted, boastful and heavy-drinking coterie of Fleet
Street pals, where she had met the Chestertons, and off to sober
Beaconsfield.
[To be fair: I see from a paper written for the Australian Chesterton Society, that there is this apparent explanation for their childlessness:
The first eight years of their marriage they tried to conceive. Frances underwent an operation. Then a second. Then a third. There are no medical records as far as what exactly these operations were. After the third, the doctor sadly informed Gilbert and Frances that it was unlikely they would have any biological children.
The source for that is not given, however.]
He had a younger brother, Cecil, who apparently was a very unlikeable fellow:
Ada, writing in 1941, leaves this without comment,
as ungainsayable evidence that Cecil was ‘the most brilliant debater of
his time’. As a child, she adds, he kept pet cockroaches and stacks of
copybooks ‘containing juvenile novels and political theses and economic
systems – the outlines of a Cecilian form of government, which covered
every phase of national life’.
Unpopular at school, Cecil would
monopolise conversations with his ‘contradictory temperament and an
extraordinary belief in his own ability’, his fellow journalist Frank
Harris remembered. It could not have been easy being the little brother
of someone so famous and well-loved, but Cecil was convinced he’d been
overlooked: Leonard Woolf noted the streak of ‘fanatical intolerance’
nourished by a ‘grudge against the universe, the world and you in
particular’.
I didn't realise he only became a Catholic in 1922, at the age of 48. He died aged 62.
Also, and this is not from the book review, but Wikipedia: I knew he was rotund, but didn't realise he was also extremely tall: 6 foot 4.
a.creating an account is not hard, and I think it's a bit ridiculous that so many people are complaining that the basic way it operates is so confusing. Gee, how much does it take to Google up any number of various guides as to how it works?
b. I don't know why more journalists I follow are not already on there, and putting their mastodon address on their twitter profile. It is currently not necessarily easy to find people via search.
c. This, in my short, less than 24 hours, experience is the biggest problem with it as a Twitter substitute - the search function seems very wonky compared to that of the blue bird. Is it always going to be like that, because of the distributed server aspect of it?
But look, overall, it seems to me to have potential.
It just occurred to me that Elon Musk is now running Twitter pretty much like how Sinclair Davidson ran his (alleged) exercise in "free speech" (the old defunct Catallaxy blog): they both claim to defend it [free speech], but not to the extent that you can freely rubbish them or their special friends without knowing when the arbitrary hammer would strike to ban or restrict someone just for annoying them.
Musk's behaviour is increasingly erratic and petty: and by the way, if the richest man in the world can't afford a good security minder for him and his family, who can? It seems a significant number of people I like to follow have left Twitter now, as hanging around to be treated by the owner like you're a mere cat toy is degrading.
It has reached the stage that I have to investigate Mastodon. Not that I post tweets, but yes, there really needs to be a general strike against using the site.
I'm a bit surprised, but Sabine Hossenfelder seems to not want to give any encouragement to fusion power skepticism after the "net energy gain" breakthrough announcement from Lawrence Liverpool this week.
And look, I know that I criticise amateur "armchair experts" on matters like climate change and vaccines, so I feel I am at great risk of being called a hypocrite when I now put my own version of amateur assessment on this topic.
But, but: I reckon anyone just has to read a bit more widely to understand that the problem is not just getting fusion to work - it's getting it to ever work in a way that makes economic sense for power generation. I reckon that it's that aspect which no one is asking the pro-fusion researchers to properly discuss and justify. (Sure, the timeframe question comes up - more on that below - but I reckon there is plenty of reason to doubt that it will ever be economically viable.)
I mean (ugh, I know I shouldn't do this appeal to gut reaction, because it feels so much like the same tactics climate "skeptics" use) but look at this photo:
Does this look even vaguely like an easily deployable system for power generation? It's the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore where they made the breakthrough, and of course, it just an experimental set up and it was never meant to be something that would generate useful power. But still, a picture gives an idea of the complexity of this type of fusion set up, so I'm still running with it.
And when you read about the set up, it almost seems that the question should be "how come it took so long to even get to the net energy gain"?
‘Nif is the world’s largest, most energetic laser,’ she explains. ‘It’s 192 separate lasers, each one of which is close to the most energetic in the world. And it’s housed in a building that’s three American football fields wide and 10 storeys tall, which is needed for all the amplifying objects. In fact, it’s the world’s largest optical instrument.’ When it fires, the facility’s beams are amplified by 3070 sheets of phosphate glass doped with neodymium, each weighing 42kg and set at Brewster’s angle, which reduces reflective loss. ‘The idea is we take all of that energy, which comes to about 1.9 megajoules, and focus it down on a target the size of a small ball bearing, about 2mm in diameter.’
As for how long they have been trying to get it to make net energy (and only considering the laser power going in, not the energy needed to make the lasers) Science magazine explains:
So, $3.5 billion and 12 years to get a single event in which the energy of the reaction was about "the equivalent of about three sticks of dynamite." A small energy return on investment, if ever there were one.
The Science article does go on to explain a possible future direction for laser fusion (my bold):
The NIF scheme has another inefficiency, Betti says. It relies on “indirect drive,” in which the laser blasts the gold can to generate the x-rays that actually spark fusion. Only about 1% of the laser energy gets into the fuel, he says. He favors “direct drive,” an approach pursued by his lab, where laser beams fire directly onto a fuel capsule and deposit 5% of their energy. But DOE has never funded a program to develop inertial fusion for power generation. In 2020, the agency’s Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee recommended it should, in a report co-authored by Betti and White. “We need a new paradigm,” Betti says, but “there is no clear path how to do it.”
Now that NIF has cracked the nut, researchers hope laser fusion will gain credibility and more funding may flow.
[Betti, by the way, is from another research lab.]
About that funding - as everyone who has read anything about this knows, a lot more money is going into tokamak fusion research, in the form of the gigantic and hugely expensive ITER plant being built in France:
However, the leading tokamak device, the ITER reactor under construction
in France, is anything but simple. It is vastly over budget, long
overdue, and will not reach breakeven until the late 2030s at the
earliest. With NIF’s new success, proponents of such laser-based
“inertial fusion energy” will be pushing for funding to see whether they
can compete with the tokamaks.
All that money for possible breakeven by the late 2030's.
Also, the article I first linked to in this post is from Chemistry World, which explains one of the fundamental issues on the economic development of fusion power - the development of suitable materials needed around a fusion reactor:
The greatest problem faced in fusion isn’t achieving the incredible
temperatures required – it’s the materials science required to maintain
that environment long-term. It’s why Jet couldn’t go past a few seconds,
explains Rimini. ‘Jet is based on fairly old copper coils for the
magnetic fields, and the tokamak walls are not actively water-cooled, so
the high fusion period is only designed to run for 10–15 seconds at
most.’
UKAEA has built a new materials research facility at Culham Science
Centre to tackle such problems. One of the staff searching for solutions
is Greg Bailey, a computational nuclear physicist. ‘The copper magnets
get too hot,’ he says. ‘So, in the future, we’re using superconducting
magnets. And hopefully we’ll learn more.’ These material changes have
already happened in the past. ‘Jet actually changed the material of its
walls,’ Bailey says. ‘Initially we’d made the walls out of carbon,
because that made life easier for the experiments. It should have been
perfect, but, actually, it was terrible! We were getting a lot of
tritium retention – we were losing our fuel into the wall, the hydrogen
was drifting inside. So we had to change it.’
The design challenges discovered and solved by Jet are already being
fed into Iter, explains Bailey. ‘What does a material for a reactor need
to be? Resistant to damage [from radiation], it needs to be able to
take the temperatures and extreme environments, and maintain its
mechanical properties during its lifetime. So, in terms of a fusion
reactor, the vast majority is probably going to be steel. The really
interesting bits come inside the vacuum vessels, your housing, because
they’re going to be facing extremes. They need armour, obviously.’
This has resulted in plans for Iter to be covered by 440 ‘blanket’
modules, weighing up to 4.6 tonnes, which cover the steel of the
tokamak’s structure. Neutrons discharged during the reaction the enter
the blanket can be slowed, and their kinetic energy transferred to a
coolant system for another form of power. It’s hoped the blanket can
also be used to solve another issue for reactors: their feedstock.
‘There’s plenty of deuterium on Earth,’ Bailey says, ‘but deuterium
fusion produces much lower energy neutrons; it’s not really a viable
source to make a power plant. And tritium is not naturally occurring.’
To obtain their tritium, the team plans to use lithium with an enhanced
level of lithium-6, which can break apart under neutron irradiation to
produce tritium. Although this is naturally occurring, the problem is
that lithium is already in high demand for its use in lithium-ion
batteries. ‘Frankly, when lithium comes into our reactor, we’re going to
destroy it,’ Bailey says. ‘The fuel is not the problem; it’s how you
produce it.’
This is where the blanket could come in, explains Bailey. ‘A lot of
designs right now are mixing lithium with lead, or lithium with ceramic
and some beryllium in there. The idea is that you get deuterium and
tritium, the fusion reactor turns on, and neutrons produced in the
fusion reactions smash into the blanket and tritium breeding reactions
can occur. We can then extract that tritium to refuel the reactor. And,
obviously, the neutron radiation into the blanket will cause a huge
amount of heating.’ It’s still not perfected yet, but Bailey is
confident the experiments done at Culham will show the way, potentially
in collaboration with the private sector; fusion is already attracting
major investors, including Amazon’s multibillionaire founder Jeff Bezos.
‘If we want to do fusion on an industrial scale we need to start
building that supply chain now,’ says Rimini. ‘We need to start evolving
the industry.’
Obvious questions I have: how long will the "blanket" modules last? How long will a fusion power plant need to be down while they are replaced? At 4.6 tonnes each, and presumably all getting radioactive at the same rate - it's going to be a huge maintenance job, and it's something they are only now trying to work out.
There's a complicated 2017 paper here about the materials science challenges for testing and developing suitable materials:
This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of the materials challenges presented by the conceptual design [1] for a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF) to bridge the development gap between ITER and a demonstration power plant (DEMO). Here the FNSF specifically denotes the concept that has been studied in the recent Fusion Energy System Studies (FESS) supported by the US Department of Energy, also called the FESS–FNSF, which is examining a conventional aspect ratio tokamak. The FNSF is an experimental machine designed to establish the reliable performance of the critical fusion system technologies required in DEMO and power plants. The FNSF horizontal maintenance system [2] allows for periodic removal, examination, and replacement of full power core sectors.
As far as I can tell, this Facility does not exist yet, and won't for some time. This presentation from 2014 seems to indicate that it wouldn't really get going until ITER is up and running - in the 2030's - and the 2017 paper says this:
A minimum 20-year timeframe will be required to accommodate the development of the advanced materials to commercialization and code qualification, development of blanket fabrication technologies, evaluation in non-nuclear integrated test programs, and 14 MeV neutron testing in DONES/A-FNS/IFMIF to validate irradiation performance.
So piecing this together, we're getting the "best hope" for tokamak fusion not likely getting to break even until the late 2030's, during which decade a materials research stage which will take a minimum of 20 years will have started.
Does this sound like commercialisation of fusion power within 20 years? No it doesn't - sounds more like 40 to 50 - if it is possible at all. Because isn't this complicated materials science issue likely to be a key one in the question of whether fusion will ever be economically viable? And we won't even know the answer to that for another 20 to 30 years.
"So not 50 years away anymore, I would say probably 2 decades of concerted effort and it's plausible we have power plants in development"
To her credit, Patricia Karvelis, sounds skeptical "Wow - really - in 2 decades?"
And Ma says "I think so"
I'm sorry, but ever allowing for the qualifiers of "probably" and "plausible", I reckon that that answer is so practically unrealistic as to be deceptive.
I'll come back and add a bit more to this post later...
Update: I had a look at Youtube videos about it, and quickly found one in which a former Secretary of Energy (and nuclear physicist) makes an outlandish claim the he "think[s] we can demonstrate and maybe initially deploy some power plants on the grid within the next decade or so". [!]
Gee, if anyone invests money in the company he's on the board of, based on this type of spruiking, I reckon it would come close to fraud:
More realistically (much, much more realistically) we have an actual former fusion scientist who thinks it's worth pursuing, but he explains in this video from a year ago the huge engineering issues yet to be overcome. He says there is no way we will have fusion by 2040, and everything I have listed above indicates that is correct:
Finally, and I didn't see this coming or realise it until now, but I'm on the side of Elon Musk! Here's a short clip in which he says that sure, fusion will be achievable, but it's just not going to be economically viable as a power source, citing the tritium issue mainly. [I can't embed it, as it's a Youtube short.]
How embarrassing is that, given that he seems to have driven himself nuts by blowing many billions on Twitter? Quite - but hey, if the facts are actually on his side on this issue, so be it.
It was as quick as it was brutal —
captured in just a few seconds of grainy video from a police body
camera. Arriving at the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, two officers
find an intruder and Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, standing calmly, each
with a hand on a hammer that the police demand they drop. Just then, the
video shows, the intruder takes control, wields the weapon over his
head and slams it with full force.
“Mr.
Pelosi was face down on the ground, a pool of blood by his head,” said
Kyle Cagney, one of the two San Francisco police officers who were first
to arrive in the early hours of Oct. 28, during a court hearing on
Wednesday.
As for the mangled initial reporting that Pelosi knew the name of his attacker:
The hearing began with prosecutors
playing a recording of a call that Mr. Pelosi made to 911 shortly after
the intruder woke him up. During the call, Mr. Pelosi speaks calmly but
emphatically, seemingly trying to convey to the operator that he is in
danger but without alarming the intruder threatening his life.
Mr.
Pelosi said on the call that there was “a gentleman here waiting for my
wife to come back.” He told the operator who his wife was, and at one
point the intruder in the background could be heard saying, “The name is
David.”
I see nothing at all to disagree with in Jonathan Chait's column in New York Magazine, complaining about the progressives' debate tactics when it comes to the issue of transgender treatment of children/young adults.
And it's disappointing when someone like David Roberts, who is sensible on most things, joins in with a snide attack on the bona fides of Chait.
It would appear that the screen testing rumours for Indiana Jones 5 (people hated the ending) are probably true? John Williams said there is a new ending being filmed.
I'm not 100% sure, but I think some famous films (or at least a couple) have been "saved" by a late change to the ending?
And it still means that I get to hope this happens:
END INDIANA JONES BY SHOWING HIM GOING ON BOARD THE MOTHERSHIP AT THE END OF CLOSE ENCOUNTERS.
RMIT really seems to operate as a sheltered workshop for IPA types. I was amused to read this on Crikey a day or two ago, in an article about what some recent ex-politicians are doing now:
Tim Wilson
Following his loss in Goldstein
to Zoe Daniel, Wilson did the only appropriate thing for someone who
occupies his place in public life combining trendy finance and debatable
climate change action. He’s doing a PhD at RMIT University’s Blockchain
Innovation Hub, studying “alternative models for carbon markets through
tokenisation and the development of derivatives markets”. Well, indeed.
While it's still early days in knowing fully what happened in the ambush of police in (what I think I can call) outback Queensland, it does seem already established that the perpetrators were all Right wing, anti-government conspiracy believers, who (perhaps most bizarrely of all) had each worked in significant roles in the government education system, despite that workplace having (pretty fairly, I would say) a reputation as being the home of Left leaning staff. This was the type of murder that is more expected from the backwoods of rural America than Australia, but it does show the harm that the internet causes in easing the spread of conspiracy belief, and the reinforcement effect of people finding forums on line where others listen to them, and offer support (or at least, fail to condemn.)
I'm also feeling somewhat depressed about the state of Twitter, and in particular, damaged-manboy-who- just-wants-to-be-liked, it-doesn't-matter-by-who Elon Musk giving endorsement to Right wing conspiracy and extremism, and ruining people's lives. It is absolutely appalling, in my books, that Right wing commentary in the US and here ignores the matter of death threats that are guaranteed to be made on the basis of Right wing conspiracy - the election workers who get harassed for just doing their job; anyone caught up in the "maybe he's a pedo" moral panic which is deployed freely by Musk personally.
On the other side of politics, there is also an extremism that is bothering me, and even though it is not as patently dangerous as Right wing conspiracy, it is annoying me that it is not being called out. Take this as an example:
Kilroy is a bit of a lawyer celebrity: she did time in jail for drug dealing as a young woman, got herself educated, and went from social work to a law degree and finally got admitted as a lawyer in Queensland despite her troubled past. She is well known as an advocate for improving conditions for women in prison. She has featured on "Australian Story" on the ABC.
Yet this comment, which I suspect she was inspired to make because a Victorian commission into child protection has been full of claims that it's just obvious that too many aboriginal children are being removed from families, is just patently extreme and silly. It's of a class of the increasingly radical young aboriginal activist line that Australia just needs to be handed over to First Nations people and that will fix all of history's wrongs.
It seems to be, reading the Tweets of First Nations academia (which I have been doing via one particular person always coming to my attention there), that the women in that field (as it is mostly women) live in an intellectual space that allows them to repeat to each other statements of escalating extremism, and they simply have no incentive to talk each other down.
This is bad in its own way, and I wish that the mainstream of politics - and reporting - would stop letting this happen with no pushback.
If someone says something on line that is ridiculous and extreme, whether it is from the Left or Right, and they are being interviewed on the ABC or where ever, they should be challenged about it.
I don't see that any good comes from pretending that the extremism doesn't exist, on either side.
Update: another couple of recent tweets from Ms Kilroy:
Obviously, while she is getting quite well known, not enough people have seen Sabine Hosenfelder's video from last year about the huge amounts of energy that are needed to drive the systems needed to get "net energy gain" in experimental fusion. Here's a link to it again.
“If
it’s what we’re expecting, it’s like the Kitty Hawk moment for the
Wright brothers,” said Melanie Windridge, a plasma physicist and the CEO
of Fusion Energy Insights. “It’s like the plane taking off.”
Does this mean fusion energy is ready for prime time?
No.
Scientists refer to the current breakthrough as “scientific net energy
gain” — meaning that more energy has come out of the reaction than was
inputted by the laser. That’s a huge milestone that has never before
been achieved.
But
it’s only a net energy gain at the micro level. The lasers used at the
Livermore lab are only about 1 percent efficient, according to Troy
Carter, a plasma physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
That means that it takes about 100 times more energy to run the lasers
than they are ultimately able to deliver to the hydrogen atoms.
So
researchers will still have to reach “engineering net energy gain,” or
the point at which the entire process takes less energy than is
outputted by the reaction. They will also have to figure out how to turn
the outputted energy — currently in the form of kinetic energy from the
helium nucleus and the neutron — into a form that is usable for
electricity. They could do that by converting it to heat, then heating
steam to turn a turbine and run a generator. That process also has
efficiency limitations.
All
that means that the energy gain will probably need to be pushed much,
much higher for fusion to actually be commercially viable.
At
the moment, researchers can also only do the fusion reaction about once
a day. In between, they have to allow the lasers to cool down and
replace the fusion fuel target. A commercially viable plant would need
to be able to do it several times per second, says Dennis Whyte,
director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT. “Once you’ve
got scientific viability,” he said, “you’ve got to figure out
engineering viability.”
And yet the article still ends on a rather misleading note:
Current fusion experts argue that it’s not a matter of time, but a matter of will — if governments and private donors finance fusion aggressively, they say, a prototype fusion power plant could be available in the 2030s.
“The timeline is not really a question of time,” Carter said. “It’s a question of innovating and putting the effort in.”
The article didn't even mention the other well known problems of practical fusion power: how to deal with the physical container getting radioactive from neutrons (or at least, at a slow enough rate that it doesn't become prohibitively expensive), the supply of tritium issue, and other matters which are detailed at links in my post of 2019.
It just seems that people are having a hard time believing that scientists involved in this type of research are prone to exaggerated optimism. Why are there so few articles exploring this in depth in the mainstream media??
I'm wondering what happens if a very rich man with a Messiah complex gets a brain implant that allows external control by others, only to have the input to it hacked by his "woke" critics.
I can imagine some very operatic endings for Musk too - like jumping in a Starship before it's properly certified, and blowing himself up.
Speaking of the thrill that the conspiracy rattled brains of the planet are getting from Musk's continued descent into inanity:
There are increasing numbers of the liberal types which I follow on Twitter saying "that's it, if Elon Musk wants this to be a Right wing conspiracy nuthouse, full of abuse, he can have it" and saying they are leaving.
This is, I should add, fully deserved. His slimy "maybe he's a pedo" innuendo against his former employee, and ridiculous tweet on Fauci are more than enough reason. It seems he doesn't care if the platform becomes pretty much the same as its Right wing rivals; and he tweets with the obvious intention of getting attention from everyone, and the approval of the worst of the Right.
The problem is that the alternatives are still not ready. Maybe it's hard raising the money on the promise that a substantial chunk of Twitter users will flock to the liberal Twitter alternative?
I don't know what it is about Irish stew that I don't find appealing, but part of it may be that it is often made with lamb neck chops, and the fact that they make it a little too obvious that you're eating vertebrae chopped up is a bit unattractive. I don't mind osso bucco and the way it makes it clear you're eating a cross section of leg bone, but vertebrae and that bit of spinal cord in the middle - it's getting more "personal" or something!
Anyway, I still bought some neck chops on the weekend, as they were (relatively) cheap [for future historians reading this - $19.95 a kilo] and I decided that there must be a more interesting way to eat them than boring old Irish stew.
So I tried this recipe: Italian lamb neck chop stew, and the result was pretty pleasing. (I fiddled a bit with it - a chopped up fennel bulb went in too, and used chicken stock instead of vegetable, and a bit of red wine. I also used panko crumbs for the topping [fried with a little bit of
chilli flakes in the oil, then add lemon zest and minced garlic right at
the end so the garlic doesn't burn.] Worked well.) Technically, I'm not sure it's a stew, which I would have thought is normally done on a stove top. I would think it is more likely a braise, since it's done in the oven.
Somewhat mysteriously, although the recipe says to scoop off some of the oil at the top while its cooking, very little appeared, and it couldn't really be done. The chops did have a fair bit of unremoveable marbling in them, so I was expecting it to be heavy in the oil department, but somehow it wasn't. It was eaten with some thick sourdough toast, and microwaved asparagus.
I am somewhat amused by the earnestness of this report by Singapore's CNA about an automated urine testing system (for drug offenders who are monitored) which they say is a "world's first":
You just know that any other network on the planet would not have been able to resist a pun or some attempt at humour. But not CNA.
I think I have one book by Colin Wilson on my shelf - a pretty readable one from perhaps the 1980's about the paranormal, which was a topic that he spent a fair bit of time on in his later career.
I had read that he had hit fame early for writing an angsty British quasi-existential book as a young man - The Outsider. But I never really looked much into how controversial some of his views were (or had become).
I see from this essay in Aeon that his controversial status was well deserved. Here's some background:
Why was The Outsider such a critical hit? In the late 1950s,
Britain’s intelligentsia was worried about cultural decline and the lack
of postwar movements to rival modernism, or homegrown ideas to rival
French existentialism. Here was a 24-year-old working-class autodidact
bringing news of the New Thing. And the New Thing turned out to be…
recycled modernism. This was reassuring for modernist mandarins in
charge of book reviews. His fame was helped by being grouped together
with other provincial and working-class writers such as Kingsley Amis
and John Osborne, who were dubbed the Angry Young Men. As with
existentialism and punk, having a group of people doing more or less the
same thing made it easier to write about. Wilson, though a one-off, was
part of the zeitgeist.
In addition, Wilson was catnip for the popular press. He told one newspaper he’d written The Outsider
while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, and obligingly recreated the
scene for their photographer. He helped to model the image of the young
bohemian, in his polo neck and horn-rimmed glasses.
And then, just as suddenly, the London intelligentsia decided the
provincial outsider should stay outside, that his fame was a bubble,
that he was a ridiculous and even dangerous figure. His constant
declarations of his own genius didn’t help – he was ‘the most important
writer of the 20th century’, he said, a
‘turning point in culture’. Nor did his denigration of more established
writers – he said Shakespeare was ‘a thoroughly second-rate mind’.
And his worst views:
It’s true that Wilson was a big fan of Friedrich Nietzsche. He
believed that humans could ascend the evolutionary ladder and become
supermen through sheer will. In practice, only a tiny minority could do
this – the ‘dominant 5 per cent’ – and of them, only 0.05 per
cent actually would. Like Nietzsche, he had little time for everyone
else. Human beings, he wrote in his journal, ‘are pretty trivial insects
… No wonder most of them are so mediocre.’
Growing up surrounded by ‘morons’, Wilson felt different and better: ‘I would sit on a bus with the Bhagavad Gita
on my lap, and look at the other people, and think: my life is totally
different from yours … I know that man can become a superman or God if
he makes a hard enough effort.’ He wrote a short story when he was 18,
in which Jesus decides ‘these miserable idiots were really not worth
dying for, and it had been a mistake to be taken in by pity when they
needed a good kicking.’ Like Nietzsche, Wilson thought it would really
be a mercy if some of these lesser humans didn’t exist. He wrote in his
journal in 1961:
‘the little people’ have sunk so deep into pettiness that it
would be an agony for them to cure themselves; like invalids crouching
over a fire, the outside world makes them cringe. Without knowing it,
they want to die.
This sort of Nietzschean supercilious elitism is typical of modernism, one can find similar passages in H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, W B Yeats or D H Lawrence. The difference is, Wilson was coming out with it after the Second World War, in 1950s Britain, when spirituality was out of fashion and the cult of the Nietzschean superman even more so.
Wilson’s friend Hopkins, with whom he lived in Notting Hill Gate in
the late 1950s, confirmed critics’ fears that the Wilson clique embodied
what Allsop called ‘a new mystical absolutism of the extreme Right
wing’. Hopkins’s first novel, The Divine and the Decay (1957),
was about a fascist leader who murders an opponent. It was clear that
Hopkins admired his hero, and in 1958 he started his own far-Right
political movement called the Spartacans. They had only one meeting,
according to Holroyd, at which Wilson gave a speech insisting that
‘effective political power ought to be in the hands of the 5 per cent minority who were equipped to use it.’
To make matters worse, the British fascist and Nazi apologist Oswald
Mosley, seeking to rehabilitate his reputation after the war, wooed the
Wilson group, and wrote a glowing 15-page review of The Outsider in his magazine, The European.
Flattered, Wilson called him ‘far and away the most intelligent
politician I have ever met’ (he was the only politician he had ever
met). When Mosley attended the opening night of Holroyd’s first play at
the Royal Court, Left-wing critics stormed out, and Wilson was involved
in a fracas with them in the pub next door.
It's funny, but I don't recall detecting any problematic politics or philosophy in the book I read. But yeah, he was, generally speaking, a much more unreliable guide to life than I knew.
One of my recurring themes here is how I don't like stand up comedy much as an art form, even if it is by someone who I find funny and likeable in other formats.
So, I was not at all sure that I would like the Wil Anderson stage show on the ABC last night - Wilogical. I think I have seen bits of some of his previous shows and not liked it much.
But I actually sat through all of this one, and thought it was pretty good. The reason has a lot to do with the fact that a major theme was his adventures as a science believer living during Covid on the New South Wales North Coast in one of the nation's biggest anti-vaccination, alternative medicine regions.
His jokes were therefore often about people who "do their own research" and believing ridiculous things. This is a rich source of material on which I could feel I was definitely on his ideological side (not something that is all that common for me with stand up material, especially if it is "edgy".)
Not only that, though, but Anderson comes across as not spiteful in his humour - there was actually a genuine plea at the end that we need people who believe nonsense to come back into the fold of reason, not be cast out forever. Again, this is not the sort of theme you seem to get in stand up very often.
Please explain why so many young people now think that they are transexual
The issue of gender identity and transgenderism is complex and multifaceted, and there are many reasons why a person may identify as transgender. In recent years, there has been increased awareness and acceptance of transgender people, which may have led more young people to feel comfortable expressing their gender identity and coming out as transgender. Additionally, advances in medical technology have made it possible for transgender people to access hormone therapy and other treatments that can help them transition and live more authentically as their true gender.
Is there any scientific evidence that "true gender" is fixed by the brain?
There is some scientific evidence that suggests that a person's gender identity may be determined by the structure and function of their brain. Research has shown that there are differences in the brain structure and function of transgender individuals compared to cisgender individuals (people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth). For example, studies have found that the brain structures of transgender individuals are more similar to those of their gender identity than to those of their assigned gender at birth. However, it is important to note that this research is still in its early stages, and more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between brain structure and gender identity.
But how different are male and female brains?
The differences between male and female brains are not as great as many people think. While there are some structural and functional differences between the brains of men and women, the vast majority of these differences are very small and have little or no impact on an individual's behavior or abilities. In fact, research has shown that most people have a mix of "male" and "female" brain characteristics, and that there is a great deal of overlap between the brains of men and women. This means that it is not accurate to say that men and women have "different" brains, and that any attempt to make generalizations about the abilities or characteristics of men and women based on their brain structure is likely to be misguided.
Hey, doesn't this last answer you gave suggest that "true gender" is not fixed in the brain, after all?
The issue of gender identity and transgenderism is complex and multifaceted, and there is still much that we do not understand about the factors that influence a person's gender identity. While there is some scientific evidence that suggests that a person's gender identity may be influenced by the structure and function of their brain, it is important to note that this research is still in its early stages, and more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between brain structure and gender identity. Additionally, it is important to recognize that gender identity is a deeply personal and individual experience, and that each person's gender identity is unique to them. As such, it is not accurate to say that there is one "true" gender that is fixed in the brain, and that any attempt to make generalizations about gender identity based on limited scientific evidence is likely to be misguided.
Speaking of drag queens, and the ridiculous spectacle in the culture war riven USA of armed men turning up at libraries to dissuade drag queen story hours which, in turn, are pretty silly in that it seems a good bet that few 4 or 5 year olds have ever begged their parent to be taken to such a show: the question did occur to me yesterday - has any gay or trans adult ever claim to have been inspired to become gay due to seeing a drag performance? I mean, men in drag has been a Christmas pantomime thing in England for a long time, so the possibility is out there. But I can't say that I can ever recall any gay person claim that early viewing of a man as a caricature of a woman set them on the path of gay or trans identity. And if that's true as a general rule, what exactly do the armed men fear from a relatively few liberal parents' kids being dragged (ha) to a show?
But to be clear, I don't get the point of drag at all - so I Googled the topic yesterday, and found this paper from 2017 makes an argument about them from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Here's the abstract:
The drag queen cultural phenomenon has been described at length.
However, the depiction of outlandish and hyperbolic womanhood and
taunting and formidable behavior at the core of drag queens’ public
persona has still to be fully accounted for. We argue that these aspects
of the drag queen’s public appearance could best be understood in a
signaling framework. Publicly donning extravagant woman’s costumes
attracts harassment and brings financial, mating, and opportunity costs,
generating the conditions for the transmission of honest signals. By
successfully withstanding those odds, drag queen impersonators signal
strategic qualities to members of the gay community. Data collected
among gay and straight participants support a costly signaling reading
of the drag queen cultural phenomenon. Participants generally agree that
successful drag queens typically incur costs, while gaining specific
social benefits.
And a bit more in the introduction:
In a landmark publication on the life of drag queens, Newton (1972)
emphasized the conspicuous, confrontational, territorial, and
effeminate behavior of drag queens and the discrimination, harassment,
and stigmatization that impersonators regularly had to face from both
gay community members and outsiders. Most people, including the
impersonators themselves, seemed to view the drag queen attitude as
extreme and particular (Newton, 1972,
p. 6). Despite this stigmatization, participation in the drag
subculture appeared to have afforded jobless, young, and poor gays some
opportunity to distinguish themselves from lower status individuals such
as hustlers or “freaks,” and, for the most successful drag queens, a
chance to develop celebrity-like status and social might in the gay
community (Newton, 1972, p. 6).
Signaling theory has provided a theoretical framework for better explaining evolutionarily puzzling human behaviors (Bird, Smith, & Bird, 2001; Sosis & Bressler, 2003).
We propose to analyze the phenomenon of drag queen behavior in light of
signaling theory. Despite the costs involved in publicly endorsing a
drag queen persona, marginalized individuals might find it attractive,
given the benefits they stand to gain such as an enhanced reputation and
increased social capital (e.g., Newton, 1972; Hopkins, 2004).
The drag queen phenomenon provides an interesting case study where
particular behavioral signals enhance individuals’ reputation and
welfare, while being entirely decoupled from any reproductive payoff.
The phenomenon can be understood as the partial output of universal
cognitive mechanisms for status seeking and partner seeking. Typical
organizational features of the gay community also play a role in the
emergence of the drag queen cultural practice.
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