Let me bore readers, as I do the people I live and work with, by once again extolling Singapore as a destination.
Last night, in one side street of Katong, I was taking a post late dinner* stroll down a side street which featured this house with its traditional (I assume Taoist) Chinese alter clearly visible along with photogenic cat):
Then perhaps 10 m further down the road is the back of a Hindu temple built in 1875, with some guys still in the hall where they serve food. Barely another 10 m was a house with a prominent Islamic symbol above the carport, and then just a little further was St Hilda's Anglican Church, a relative latecomer from 1934.
Earlier in the day, I used my unlimited travel pass to ride the MRT subway for an hour to the north of the island to visit a Buddhist monastery, just on a whim because its website had a fair bit of English and it sounded a bit missionary in intent. The building is not old, the decoration inside is a bit on the gaudy side, but there were two staff who said photos were fine, and one middle aged guy praying:
He finished, then approached me, and spent a good half hour chatting about the temple, the statues and Buddhism generally. One of the staff gave me a juice to drink. He was very surprised that I had come to this rather far flung (for Singapore) part of the island just to visit a temple that is not on the tourist trail. (When I was telling my daughter about it, she said something like "well, you're not exactly like a tourist anymore, you've been there so often." Ha ha.)
Anyway, the day made me fully realise something that I probably always knew at a subliminal level: as a person who started reading about comparative religions in my early 20s, and in recent years had interest revived by Religion for Breakfast on YouTube and a desire to better understand Buddhism and SE Asian religious syncretism generally, it's no wonder I have always been drawn to a small city state that has accommodated (like no other place in the world I can think of) such successful religious multiculturalism.
That is all...
* Dinner was Indian, which I had twice this visit in a small cafe with Indian/Sri Lankan staff who have both an Indian meal menu and a separate menu of Chinese cafe staples. I would normally avoid a place that has alternate cuisines, but their food was very good.
I'm guessing that the rise of AI and LLMs might have something to do with this.
I've long known that the statistics on Google Blogger give no accurate reading of how many people are visiting the blog, because I also have a Statcounter account that gives me more detailed and accurate information indicating that I have long had "unique views" in the hundreds, perhaps, in an average week?
Google will show massively higher numbers, but last week I happened to look at its stats and saw a new record for this:
A single day with half a million hits? On Statcounter, it shows 20 (yes, twenty!) unique hits on 21 September.
It's been known for a long time that the issue is that Google counts webcrawlers and bots hitting sites as if they are "real" hits. And I would guess that, given LLMs' voracious appetite for writing, it's not unreasonable to think that a 20 year old blog with a lot of posts may be a target of interest for them.
I don't really care if this is the explanation - in a way, it feels like my own modest contribution to the rise of the AGI that will replace human intelligence in the future!
Or, of course, I could be wrong and this is explained by something else...
Of course I watched the Jimmy Kimmel return, and then have been reading some of the MAGA reaction on Twitter. (Not spending a lot of time on it, I have better things to do. But still...)
Here's the thing about MAGA and its apologists: they are so often people who are some combination of dumb and/or argue in bad faith continually. This bad faith makes it impossible for reasoned engagement with them by someone like Kimmel - they invite polarised ridicule because they deserve it.
Hence we have most of them arguing that the Right wing "cancel culture victims" was as big a free speech issue as the head of the FCC (and the President himself!) warning companies that they should take off the air comedians who don't support Trump enough, or they may lose their licence. Then people like the Vice President have the gall to say "see, he wasn't cancelled after all. What's the problem here, people have been blowing this out of proportion."
MAGA types also conveniently ignore successful Right wing cancel culture campaigns. Anyone heard of Dylan Mulvaney much lately? Sure Roseanne Barr got cancelled - against ABC's financial interests - but MAGA memory holes the reason why.
Other examples of stupid arguments and memes: that only one hundred and something thousand people had been viewing Kimmel's show - when that figure was referring to just one particular demographic, and the simplest Google would show that the true number of viewers was well over a million a night, as well as having a Youtube audience of 20 million subscribers and some videos getting millions of views. But one MAGA person who "never found him funny" comes up with one dubious figure, and they all run with it. Even stupid Piers Morgan - man, he is obnoxious:
The lines they run are so often so easily rebutted, the fact they don't check before repeating them just shows a total lack of good faith and reasonableness.
No, the successful return of Kimmel is a glimmer of hope that enough Americans recognise the importance of constitutional free speech (even Ted Cruz, who Kimmel specifically thanked last night.)
And yeah, I do admire Kimmel for his passionate criticisms of a side of politics that deserves it.
Competition in China is often far more cutthroat than in the United States. America has a handful of carmakers; China has more than 100 electric vehicle makers struggling for market share. China has so many solar panel makers that they produce 50 percent more than global demand. About 100 Chinese lithium battery producers churn out 25 percent more batteries than anyone wants to buy.
This forces Chinese manufacturers to innovate, but it also leads to price wars, losses and bad debt — and that’s becoming a problem.
China is heading toward deflation, the often catastrophic downward spiral of prices that sank Japan in the 1990s. Its leaders are blaming a culprit they call “involution” (“neijuan” in Mandarin), a term that has come to mean reckless domestic competition. They want to rein it in by browbeating companies into keeping prices steady and instructing local governments to scale back subsidies.
It won’t work. At best, those are temporary fixes for China’s more fundamental problem. Its economy relies so heavily on investment for growth, rather than consumer spending, that it produces enormous surpluses that wreck profits at home and provoke trade wars abroad.
As to where the term even comes from:
China’s infatuation with the term “involution” dates to the 1960s and the work of an American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who argued that Indonesia wasn’t able to feed itself because population growth had outpaced improvements in agricultural productivity. Geertz used “involution” — an anthropological term for a culture that fails to adapt and grow — to describe this doom loop. His analysis resonated in a China that at the time was struggling to feed its people, the world’s largest population.
The article goes on to explain that China is trying to address the problem, but the writer says the current interventions are unlikely to be the solution. The long term problem is this:
What China needs, more than political campaigns, is more domestic spending, which in turn would gobble up more of the excess supply. Western officials and some Chinese economists have made this recommendation for years, but China has resisted. Private consumption accounts for about 40 percent of China’s gross domestic product, compared to about 69 percent in the United States and 53 percent in manufacturing-heavy Germany. That’s in part because Chinese households save heavily to compensate for a skimpy social safety net.
... the charging document suggests a relatively straightforward political profile and motive, especially when compared with the cryptic messages the shooter engraved on his shell casings, which were frantically mined for meaning in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Those inscriptions, the shooter told his lover after the killing, “were mostly a big meme.” He said that if he saw one of his scatological jokes mentioned on Fox News, “I might have a stroke.”
Perhaps it’s true that the opaque messages were a joke, from which his true intentions can be clearly distinguished. But when it comes to a person like this — that is to say, a young man who reportedly spent a great deal of time holed up in his apartment playing video games and using niche social media programs — I confess I have my doubts. I wonder if a legible political motive can neatly emerge from the fragmented, self-parodying, endlessly reflexive world of perpetually online discourse.
It is easy enough to imagine that this young man was radicalized. But it is also possible to see his radicalization, if that is the right word, as something post-political, a simulacrum of motive in a fantasy world...
He then goes through the meme-y messages left by the killer, and notes:
These inscriptions are the quintessential stuff of online gamer-style discourse: fragments without context, seemingly private jokes, missives designed not to persuade or even to be broadly intelligible but simply to circulate. In insular internet worlds, this style of communication is the point. And it produces an epistemic fog that can obscure the meaning of even the most intentional of gestures. ...
This is why it seems to me premature, at best, to speak of Mr. Kirk’s killer as if he were a left-wing militant. Say what you will about the members of the Weather Underground — their theories of revolution were facile, their moral compasses obviously malfunctioning — but at least their relationship to public life had a recognizable shape. A few middle-class college graduates wanted to become Marxist revolutionaries, and so they did.
Here's a key paragraph:
In the online world in which Mr. Kirk’s killer was steeped, heedlessness is rewarded. Half-thoughts are quickly replicated. It would not surprise me, in this context, if for some troubled individual, killing were to seem indistinguishable from posting — the ultimate trashpost, meant to be endlessly circulated, reinterpreted, willfully misunderstood, joked about, heartlessly recontextualized.
Bear that paragraph in mind when watching the excellent commentary by Matt Bevan in his podcast when he talks about the young guy who tried to kill Trump.
Here's the whole thing, and it's great:
Bevan spends a lot of time noting the way the Right has reacted each time by endlessly repeating that "they" want "us dead"; a self serving rallying call that only serves to further polarisation and division. (It is, of course, all in line with Trump's quintessentially authoritarian political tactic of continually claiming that those who oppose him are "bad", "evil" and deserve jail.)
Finally, while I certainly do not like Bill Maher as a personality, I still occasionally look at his takes on the current situation to see what line he is taking. In this clip, he gives a useful summary of the general nutty, all-over-the-shop politics of several recent killers or assailants of political targets. They rarely are coherent, and he decries the time wasted on trying to pin them onto one side or the other:
While I think he makes a good case, there is no doubt that some shootings can legitimately be labelled as motivated by extremism of the Left or (more likely, as the FBI and researchers have been saying for years) the Right. This is especially the case when the target is a group - a government building, a black church, or a gay bar, for example. But when the targets are individual politicians, that is when it seems more common than not that the killer is a mental mess of one kind or another, and the motivation is often never clear or well rationalised.
Update: Since writing this post, I have learnt that even Karl Rove (!) has written an opinion piece attacking the Right's use of the blanket "they". I assume I can't read it all at the WSJ, but here are some extracts from The Independent:
Longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove slammed those looking to politicize the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, stating that using it to justify retaliation against political rivals is “wrong and dangerous.”
Conservatives have been pointing fingers at liberals ever since Kirk, 31, was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University last week. Authorities have charged 22-year-old Tyler Robinson with the killing, without indicating anyone else was involved.
President Donald Trump has also placed the blame on liberals, claiming, without evidence, that “most of the violence” is on the left. While the charging document against Robison says he “intentionally” shot the right-wing influencer due to a “belief or perception regarding Charlie Kirk’s political expression,” prosectors stopped short or providing a specific motive.
Despite this, right-wingers have followed suit with their blame game,
claiming that an unspecified “they” is responsible for Kirk’s death –
something Rove referred to as “a disturbing and growing undercurrent in
our national conversation.”
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rove noted that there is a a “pronounced emphasis on ‘they’ and ‘them.’”
“Charlie would be alive but for ‘them.’ ‘They’ killed him. ‘They’ are responsible for his death. ‘They’ must pay,” he noted.
“No. Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed by ‘them.’ ‘They’ didn’t pull the
trigger. One person did, apparently a young man driven by impulse and
terrible hate,” Rove continued.
“If there were a ‘they’ involved,
law enforcement would find ‘them’ and the justice system would hold
‘them’ accountable. But ‘he’ and ‘him’ are the correct pronouns for this
horrendous act,” wrote Rove, who was a senior adviser and deputy chief
of staff to President George W. Bush.
Rove later notes, “We aren’t helpless automatons whose actions are dictated by others.”
“Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it,” he wrote, adding, “It is also an insult to his memory.”
Rove concluded: “Above all, it needs to be repeated. Violence has no role in our country’s politics. Now or ever. Reasoned discourse is essential to our democracy. Charlie Kirk understood that. Let’s hope it’s a message his eulogists honor.”
After a lone gunman shot Trump in the ear last summer, Kirk uploaded a YouTube video titled: “They tried to kill Trump.”
I can't say that (unlike my late mother) I was ever a huge fan of Robert Redford as an actor. If you ask me, there was something that felt a bit "surface" about his acting - perhaps being too traditionally handsome is a hindrance to feeling fully convinced by an actor. Now that I think about it, this may be the same reason I have never warmed much to Brad Pitt, too. But as for one more "classically handsome" star who I did like routinely - Cary Grant - I think that the lightness and charm of his persona in nearly all roles was what made it irrelevant that he was, as they say, always Cary Grant in his movies.
Anyway, regardless of not being one who was particularly keen to see him act, I have to say that being reminded of the kind of movies he was in (or made) makes me miss the general milieu of "serious, well made and well-intentioned American drama" which seems to have disappeared from Hollywood in the last decade or so. And of his lighter content, it reminds me of how Hollywood seems to have lost the ability to make engaging romances, too.
Of the films he directed, I would have to say that my clear favourite was 1994's Quiz Show. I remember being so impressed by it at the time it came out, but it seems not to have lingered in the collective memory to the extent it deserves. Maybe I will re-watch again soon to see if my initial reaction stands up.
The first few minutes of President Trump’s Oval Office address after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week followed the conventional presidential playbook. He praised the victim, asked God to watch over his family and talked mournfully of “a dark moment for America.”
Then he tossed the playbook aside, angrily blaming the murder on the American left and vowing revenge.
That was stark even for some viewers who might normally be sympathetic. When Mr. Trump appeared later on Fox News, a host noted that there were “radicals on the right,” just as there were “radicals on the left,” and asked, “How do we come back together?” The president rejected the premise. Radicals on the right were justified by anger over crime, he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he added. “And they’re vicious. And they’re horrible.”
Mr. Trump has long made clear that coming together is not the mission of his presidency. In an era of deep polarization in American society, he rarely talks about healing. While other presidents have typically tried to lower the temperature in moments of national crisis, Mr. Trump turns up the flames. He does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all the people. He acts as president of red America and the people who agree with him, while those who do not are portrayed as enemies and traitors deserving payback.
Will Saletan has a video out making the same point, but with some additional Trump material:
The particularly interesting thing about that Trump on Fox News clip is that he prefaced his excuse making for Right Wing radicals (and emphasis on the real problem being the Left, who are evil and awful in every conceivable way) by saying he would "probably get into trouble for saying this". He may be an idiot, but is not such an idiot that he doesn't know that he should be telling both sides to walk away from violence, but he chooses not to.
This from a man who made a "wink wink" comment in 2016 about his guns rights base and Clinton:
In North Carolina on Tuesday, Trump said that if Clinton were elected she would “essentially abolish” the Second Amendment.
He continued: “By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
People in the audience laughed - they knew what it meant.
The same President who make actual "jokes" about Nancy Pelosi's husband getting his head bashed in (and all of his supporters had no problem with that.)
Not to mention inciting a riot on the same fraudulent grounds that Charlie Kirk promoted and then excusing all of those convicted for participating.
This President actually encourages, or makes light of, or legally excuses, political violence when it suits his side. His ranking amongst "worst presidents" deserves to be at the very bottom.
Seems to be something about my birthday that attracts momentous news - not that (hopefully!) Charlie Kirk's assassination is going to be quite a big as this, but it was late night on my birthday 24 years ago that I watched live as the World Trade Centre and thousands of its occupants were destroyed in a world changing event.
Truth be told, I never followed Kirk very closely, but the thing about his death is that, of course, before anything is known about the mental health or motivations of the shooter, his followers are leaping on it to further confirm the problem that I have been saying for years is at the heart of American political polarisation - that the Right has chosen to label the Left as literally evil, and believe it in a fully fledged religious reality sense. Hence, Musk's toilet (as I chose to call X) is brimming with comments like this on the Right:
(I have no idea who Goddek is - and he may not even be particularly religious, as he says he's a libertarian - it's just an example of the thousands immediately labelling the Left as evil.)
Of course, all political violence of this kind is wrong and immoral. And there are going to be those online on the Left who inappropriately make light of the killing. You know, a bit like how Charlie first made light of Nancy Pelosi's husband being smashed in the head with a hammer by a nutter claiming he was after Nancy:
“Why has he not been bailed out?” Kirk said Monday on his podcast of the man who allegedly beat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s husband Paul with a hammer last Friday. “By the way, if some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out, I bet his bail’s like thirty or forty thousand bucks.” With a smirk, he added: “Bail him out and then go ask him some questions.”
(He was playing up to the completely unfounded rumour that the attacker was a gay lover of Pelosi.)
Here, by contrast, is Nancy Pelosi:
"The horrific shooting today at Utah Valley University is reprehensible. Political violence has absolutely no place in our nation," wrote former house speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Kirk was also adamantly pro-gun rights and thought that gun deaths were just something you had to put up with because he valued an armed citizenry.
Perplexity also helped me find that he defended the blowing up of a Venezuelan boat in international waters because it was suspected of carrying drugs. No proof, just support Trump all the way in extra judicial killings in international waters.
In short, Kirk supported policies that endorsed, engaged in joking excuse of, or helped enable, violence in his country when it suited his political views.
Which is not to say that shooting him was the answer. But his followers should have a serious look at themselves when wondering how a violent society is established. (It won't happen, I know.)
On a final note: it's a "lucky" thing that it happened in conservative Utah. Can you imagine how Trump would have reacted if it was Chicago? The place would be under National Guard occupation for a year or more, irregardless of legalities.
Update: This is right. But will the Murdoch's do anything to tell his network to cool it? Probably not, if there's money to be made.
Tomorrow's my birthday, and it feels like I've got to mentally travel back to the 1970's to feel the same level of unease, war, disruption and uncertainty for the globe as we have now. (That said, I was a teenager for most of the 70's and distracted by high school, a still interesting space program and enjoyable science fiction, and as such still felt somewhat optimistic for the future. But I was aware of the level of global unhappiness - much of it still coming from the exact same places as now!)
I mean, Israel attacking buildings in Qatar (even making the Trump administration uneasy!); deaths in anti-government rioting in Indonesia and Nepal (with the later partly being put down to proposed social media bans!); I haven't checked what armed conflicts are "hot" in Africa at the moment, but there are bound to be some; Trump and his coterie of idiot advisers who think a global trade war and trashing decades of international relationship building is a good idea; Elon Musk using his social media outlet to encourage a race war (and openly expressing regrets about white people not reproducing enough to keep up with the non whites - yes, he is an awful man); American going down a anti-science path not only on climate change, but the previously non-controversial issue of vaccines; Britain still suffering from its self inflicted populist wounds and stupid use of police in culture wars over gender and sexuality; illegal immigration from badly run countries causing social unrest everywhere; Russia carrying on a pointless war because Putin refuses to do the right thing and die. All we need is an abrupt stockmarket crash and for China to make its move on Taiwan, and it would round off a "perfect storm" of things that could go wrong.
I often think of the Robert Heinlein's Future History with it's "crazy years" and how appropriate a label that appears to this current unfortunate era - and oddly, it seems figures both on the Left (science fiction author David Brin - well, I assume he's mainly Lefty) and the Right (blogger Glenn Reynolds) have both written years ago - around the rise of Trump - about how Heinlein was prescient! Obviously, each thinks the other side is the one causing the "craziness": perhaps I should just read that as confirming the craziness is deep and not going away anytime soon.
Of course, one should remind oneself that there are respects in which the world is still in a much better place than in the 1970's: treating people as people, regardless of location and colour (hello, Elon), the decline of poverty in China and India is a positive. Ignoring the dire risks of global warming for a moment, there's no doubt that environmental issues are otherwise taken seriously now in a way they weren't in the 70's. (Of course, Trump is doing his best to undo that...because he's an idiot.)
Anyway, there must be other "global positives" that I need to think about. Help me, anyone?
It's just hard to believe how pessimistic we can now feel, with quite a bit of justification...
David Brooks never seems to be able to get through a whole column without saying something dubious. His latest is interesting, though: Why I am not a Liberal.
I am somewhat sympathetic to the main line of argument, as it happens:
Last May a study came out suggesting that merely giving people money doesn’t do much to lift them out of poverty. Families with at least one child received $333 a month. They had more money to spend, which is a good thing, but the children fared no better than similar children who didn’t get the cash. They were no more likely to develop language skills or demonstrate cognitive development. They were no more likely to avoid behavioral problems or developmental delays.
These results shouldn’t have been a big surprise. As Kelsey Piper noted in an essay for The Argument, a different study published last year gave families $500 a month for two years and found no big effects on the adult recipients’ psychological well-being and financial security. A study that gave $1,000 a month did not produce better health, career, education or sleep outcomes or even more time with their children....
Further down, he points to this study, too:
Many years ago, I came across a study that neatly illustrated the power of culture. The researcher Nima Sanandaji calculated the poverty rate of Americans with Swedish ancestry. It was 6.7 percent. They also looked at the poverty rate in Sweden, using the American standard of poverty, and it was also 6.7 percent. Different political systems, same outcome.
(Presumably, one can also point to the cultural aspects of Jewish upbringing that has lead to their prominence in business and professions, too.)
And here is he key contention:
This is consistent with something I’ve
noticed all my life — the materialist bent of progressive thought: the
assumption that material conditions drive history, not cultural or moral
ones. A couple of decades ago, Thomas Frank published “What’s the
Matter With Kansas?” based on befuddlement that Kansans were apparently
voting against their economic self-interest. Doesn’t economics drive
voting behavior? Progressives have often argued that improving schools
is mostly about spending more money, that crime is mostly the product of
material deprivation.
Conservatism,
as you know, is a complete mess in America right now. But reading
conservative authors like Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Gertrude Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson does give you an
adequate appreciation for the power of nonmaterial forces — culture,
moral norms, traditions, religious ideals, personal responsibility and
community cohesion. That body of work teaches you, as Burke wrote, that
manners and morals are more important than laws. You should have limited
expectations about politics because not everything can be solved with a
policy....
Progressives, by contrast, are quick to talk about money but slow to talk about the values side of the equation. That’s in part for the best of reasons. They don’t want to blame the victims or contribute to the canard that people are poor because they are lazy.
But there’s something deeper. Progressivism emerges from a different lineage. Karl Marx influenced many people who are not Marxist, and he saw the world through a material-determinism lens — people’s consciousnesses are shaped by their material conditions.
The thing I have some issue with, however, is that he doesn't address the fact that the allegedly conservative Right can (and does) use this way of thinking to justify economic policy that is clearly in the interests of the rich (using poor justification that isn't backed by evidence - such as trickle down economics); and Progressive concern over not leaving behind the poor economically is more consistent with the "community cohesion" and "conservative values" that Brooks yearns for.
That said, I can't not agree with the suggestion that Left social ideas can lead to a fragmented society in terms of ideas about how a good life is lived; and at the moment, the more communitarian social structure of Asia nations (or perhaps, East Asia in particular) seems to be very appealing compared to the "freedom to live anyway you want" of the West. And what's going on in Indonesia at the moment doesn't really support Brooks, either!
I do therefore agree that Democrats (and Left parties of all countries) do best when they encourage shared values and unity, over emphasising the rights of individualism in terms of culture (such as promoting identity politics.) We seem to be lacking that in Left wing leadership at the moment.
Anyway, one day I will have time to work out more to say about this. Work is so busy at the moment...
Update: Thinking a bit more about it, perhaps my issue with Brooks' column is that he is saying that values are more important than mere economic fairness of a society, whereas I would have thought the argument should be that both are important?
Graham Lineham being arrested when getting off a flight for being mean to some trans activist types on Twitter is all over the British media, apparently. While it's clear that he has become unhealthily obsessed with the issue (and has drifted into believing Right wing nonsense on other issues as part and parcel of being on that side of a culture war), the controversy over the arrest is well deserved.
As I posted back in 2023, it's been clear for many, many years that Britain has an almost uniquely stupid way of involving police and arrest in matters of alleged "hate crime" when they should, at most, be left to civil actions or tribunals, like in nearly all other countries. It's hard to believe that police think this is good use of their time; yet you never seem to read of any internal unhappiness with their role, which is a tad surprising. (It's hard to believe that courts don't think they have better things to worry about, too.)
If this arrest finally gets the government to actually change laws and processes into something less patently heavy handed and authoritarian-light, it may be worthwhile.
Not holding my breath, though; as I don't understand how it been left the way it is for so long already...
As you see, I was sitting up close and personal with the QPAC concert hall's pipe organ on Sunday, as it was the 40th anniversary of the venue and they put on a bunch of free stuff, including a 45 minute organ recital, which was pretty great.
Clearly, though, when QPAC gives away free tickets (you still had to "book" and get your assigned seat), a lot of people who take tickets then don't bother showing up:
It didn't fill up much more than that, despite the booking site that very morning indicating that there were only seats available in numbers up the back in the last 4 or five rows. Even the side chorus seats, were I was sitting, was supposed to be nearly full, but there were heaps of seats left.
Anyhoo, I'll stop whining about lazy people who don't turn up, to note that the concert inspired me to re-listen to Saint-Saëns finale to his Organ Symphany, which I had seen performed at the same venue in 2019, as mentioned here. (There's another post about the composer's personal life here. )
Listening to it again really blew me away: it's both beautiful and thrilling. Someone in comments following a nicely produced British performance said it's like the music you would hear on entering Heaven, and I completely get it.
This also led me down a Youtube path to a channel by an American guy called "The Ultimate Classical Music Guide" who has put out about 5,000 (!) videos up reviewing recordings of classical music (as well as other stuff - such as the most essential piece of famous composers.) He reckons Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No 5 (known as the Egyptian concerto) is fantastic, and so I must listen to it soon too.
He (Dave Hurwitz) also recommended an old stereo recording of the Organ Symphony as the best, and listening to it on Spotify, I can see that it seems to have the bass-iest of organ sounds that you don't even notice on some other recordings.
(My gosh - Dave has been prolific. Just searching Saint-Saëns comes up with scores of commentary videos. And yet he only has 65,000 subscribers, which is not a huge amount by Youtube standards.)
Anyway, I figure its good to be discovering more classical stuff of interest as I get older. Should contribute to helping stop eventual retirement from being boring!
I watched last year's update of Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers, on Netflix over the weekend.
It looks absolutely fantastic - the atmospheric cinematography, the sets, and even the elaborate wardrobe (especially of the female leads); as well a noticeably "painterly" framing of scenes that reminded me quite a bit of Barry Lyndon. It is definitely worth watching for these features.
I guess I do have to say, though, that it continues the Eggers oeuvre of putting a huge amount of effort into atmosphere and unique creepy environments, but not so much into story resolution.
I wondered, too, with the appearance of plague rats with the arrival of the Count, whether a better story could be made by the whole story being shown to be a fever dream of someone dying of said disease, so that the vampire becomes just an imagined metaphor for it. (I see that the movie is true to the old silent film of the same name, which I haven't seen. Also, Dracula in Bram Stoker's book is apparently more of a generic plague metaphor.)
Anyhow, I enjoyed well enough and would recommend viewing. Unless you're emotionally attached to pigeons. :)
I don't know anything about the guy who wrote this opinion piece in the Washington Post, but here is his take on why Chinese mythical stories are rather unusual to American tastes (or perhaps, to Western tastes generically.) It's prompted by the lacklustre box office of the dubbed version of the animated Chinese movie Ne Zha 2. Here are the key paragraphs, which seem to make valid points:
Enormous casts, with key characters introduced suddenly in the middle of stories and others dying or disappearing just as suddenly? Check. Plotlines that are so intricate they require spreadsheets to track, with villains and heroes constantly betraying one another, embracing like brothers and then betraying one another again? Check. Gods and demons switching allegiances between good and evil so rapidly that the terms “god” and “demon” lose any kind of relevance? Check, check, check.
And yes, these epics often feature the tonal whiplash of slapstick comedy and juvenile toilet humor paired with high-minded musings about the nature of morality and the purpose of humanity.....
But the biggest difference is a fundamental expectation of what a full story with a beginning, middle and end looks like. Western stories are rooted in a hero’s journey formula in which an individual protagonist is plucked out of nowhere, achieves greatness through luck or talent, defeats monstrous evil, and subsequently receives their reward of a kingdom, true love or happiness ever after. They tend to be linear, goal-oriented and focused on progress.
They focus on collectives that have fallen out of harmony — sometimes because of bad choices, sometimes because of outside threats, sometimes for no reason other than the passage of time and the turning of cosmic cycles — and that must go through a seemingly endless series of shifts and adaptations to reach a new balance. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t heroes. It does mean that there often isn’t a singular hero or one correct — and “good” — point of view.
In that way, they reflect China itself, which has more than a billion people and a history that stretches back millennia. Americans are used to thinking of their history as a continuous ascent toward greatness (occasionally interrupted, which makes necessary a “return” to that path of greatness). China is more culturally resigned to the notion that everything is temporary, good and bad are relative (and frequently switch places), and instead of “happily ever after,” humans should settle for “peaceful … for now.”
* Why the hell does anyone care about a old timey restaurant chain changing its logo???? Sure, masked employees of the government are snatching people off the street and locking up the innocent for weeks at a time, and threatening to send people to God forsaken foreign country prison, but a logo change is the crisis.
* Elon Musk starts sucking up to Trump again, when it suits him; joining the Mad Right's neverending conspiracy theorising about Soros:
* Elon is also real excited that his latest Starship test launch didn't blow up. But, seriously, doesn't this photo (posted by Musk himself) show that his spaceship has a lot of work to do on its heat shield:
* Man with brain worm history and a voice like a frog can diagnose kids' medical issues just by walking past them:
As gleaned from my very recent internet consumption:
* LLMs and AI, and AGI, have all been massively overhyped. The impetus for the sudden spread of this view seems to be the poorly received ChatGPT5, and a couple of papers saying that LLMs are not a way to get to AGI anyway.
* A stockmarket massive correction, if not crash, is definitely on its way. The impetus for this one: an irrational looking continuing rise in markets despite the nuttiness of the Trump tariffs regime and the objective reality, demonstrated daily, that the USA is led by someone who understands nothing but is persuaded by whoever praises him most. (Man, those cabinet meetings where the first hour or two is spent in praising Dear Leader are so bizarre, it's hard to credit.)
* KPop Demon Hunters is really good. (Actually, I watched it a couple of weekends ago, even before my 22 year old daughter watched it, and it is enjoyable. It's quite funny and has a very authentic and upbeat Korean cultural vibe about it - no doubt because it was made by a bunch of American Korean people, I think.)
I was listening to a podcast on the weekend from the Tricycle podcast channel featuring a guy talking about the key Buddhist idea of "no self". He mentioned Hume as having a very similar take on there being no core soul - instead humans are just a constant stream of sensations - but made no comment on whether Hume was influenced by Buddhism.
Given that I have never paid much attention to Hume's philosophy, I was a bit surprised to learn that it does indeed sound as if his philosophy may have been Buddhist inspired. But it seems there is only speculation as to how he might have heard of Buddhist ideas, as discussed in this article. Here's the abstract:
Philosophers and Buddhist scholars have noted the affinities between David Hume’s empiricism and the Buddhist philosophical tradition. I show that it was possible for Hume to have had contact with Buddhist philosophical views. The link to Buddhism comes through the Jesuit scholars at the Royal College of La Flèche. Charles François Dolu was a Jesuit missionary who lived at the Royal College from 1723–1740, overlapping with Hume’s stay. He had extensive knowledge both of other religions and cultures and of scientific ideas. Dolu had had first-hand experience with Theravada Buddhism as part of the second French embassy to Siam in 1687–1688. In 1727, Dolu also had talked with Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit missionary who visited Tibet and made an extensive study of Tibetan Buddhism from 1716–1721. It is at least possible that Hume heard about Buddhist ideas through Dolu.
As the article goes on to note:
...very little was known about Buddhism in the Europe of the 1730s, when Hume was writing A Treatise of Human Nature. Buddhism had died out in India, Japan was closed to the West, and European scholars in the Chinese court focused on the elite Confucian and Taoist traditions.2
The whole thing is worth reading. It's always so interesting to note that Jesuits may have indirectly helped fuel enlightenment ideas due to the fact they were curious about everything.
I liked this passage at the start of the article about the unclear way people can be influenced:
We know that psychologically, people can be influenced by ideas, even if they themselves forget the source of those ideas. In fact, this “source amnesia” is the rule rather than the exception. Information about sources is actually encoded in a different kind of memory, “autobiographical” or “episodic” memory, while ideas or facts themselves are stored in more robust “semantic memory.”4 We know that listeners can be influenced by ideas even when they are not advocated by the people who present them.5 Psychologically, arguing against a position, as well as arguing for it, can lead your interlocutor to encode and remember that position. And, psychologically and historically, even great philosophers are not only influenced by other great philosophers (especially before they are great themselves!). They may pick up ideas from much more obscure figures who happen to be the people they find congenial or talk with on a regular basis—the equivalent of the guy in the next office.
And as for how Buddhist ideas are close to some of Hume's:
Three forms of this skeptical rejection are particularly relevant for early modern philosophy and for Hume. First, Buddhism rejects the idea of a metaphysically foundational God, though there may be particular gods. This is why writers like Desideri and La Loubere identified it as atheistic. Second, it rejects the idea that there is an independent substance that is the metaphysical foundation for our experience of the external world—the doctrine of “sunyata” or “emptiness.” Finally, and most radically, the tradition rejects the Cartesian idea that there is even a foundational self that is the locus of experience—the doctrine of “anatman” or “no-self.”
On the no-self position:
Within the general Buddhist tradition, Tsongkhapa argues for a particularly Humean “middle way” position. He argues that there is no foundational, ontological self, but that nevertheless the self-concept is psychologically real. “Thus there are two senses to the term ‘self’ a self conceived in terms of an intrinsic nature that exists by means of intrinsic being, and a self in the sense of the object of our simple natural thought ‘I am.’ Of these two the first is the object of negation by reasoning, while the second is not negated.” 93 Tsongkhapa’s “middle way” is reminiscent of the “turn” at the end of Book 1 of the Treatise where Hume claims that the skeptical arguments of the first part of the book need not undermine the pragmatics of everyday life (T 1.4.7; SBN 263–74)
I should go finish listening to the podcast, because I thought he said that Hume - and someone else he referenced - allows for people being "persons", even though arguing that persons have no core self.
Anyway, this all reminded me too of the whole lack of clarity within Buddhism of reincarnation if there is no self (something I think Western Buddhist academics who are into it for the meditation and calmness aspects like to ignore), and also how Mahayana Buddhism is probably best understood as a reaction against the idea of Nirvana as extinction of the self. Here was my post about that.
He starts with what most people in comments agree is an overblown apologia for the Right wing culture wars (and their never-ending claim to victimhood, while simultaneously claiming that it's Lefties who are all about their "feelings"):
Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.
That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it while silently seething.
In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive messages. I watched the guys in the bar sort of hunch over, grim-faced, their body language saying: This is the crap we have to put up with to watch a football game.
He also makes this somewhat surprising claim:
This progressive/conservative disconnect — which is also, frequently, an elite/non-elite disconnect — is a problem across the West. For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites.
I haven't had time to look it up, but I am pretty sure the social progressiveness/higher education link has been well studied?
Anyway, am I complaining too much, because I have made it clear here that I agree that aspects of the gender and sexuality culture wars have been taken too far? I don't think so, because the HUGE point skipped over by Brooks is the poisonous nature of Right wing media and information network aligning itself with evangelical Christianity to directly demonise one side of politics as being literally evil, and replacing trust in expertise with endless conspiracy crap just because they think any policy endorsed by "elites" (who are usually liberal) is out to control and hurt them.
But the part that does ring a bit true is the rising appeal of nihilism to right wing numbskulls:
Other people, of course, don’t just cope;
they rebel. That rebellion comes in two forms. The first is what I’ll
call Christopher Rufo-style dismantling. Rufo is the right-wing activist
who seeks to dismantle D.E.I. and other culturally progressive
programs. I’m 23 years older than Rufo. When I was emerging from
college, we conservatives thought we were conserving something — a group
of cultural, intellectual and political traditions — from the
postmodern assault.
But decades later,
with the postmodern takeover fully institutionalized, people like Rufo
don’t seem to think there’s anything to conserve. They are radical
deconstructors. In a 2024 dialogue
between Rufo and the polemicist Curtis Yarvin, published by the
magazine IM-1776, Rufo acknowledged, “I am neither conservative by
temperament nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo
rather than preserve it.” This is a key difference between old-style
conservatism and Trumpism.
But
there’s another, even more radical reaction to progressive cultural
dominance: nihilism. You start with the premise that progressive ideas
are false and then conclude that all ideas are false. In the dialogue,
Yarvin played the role of nihilist. He ridiculed Rufo for accomplishing
very little and for aiming at very little with his efforts to purge this
university president or that one.
“You
are just pruning the forest,” Yarvin said dismissively. He countered
that everything must be destroyed: In general, Yarvin is a monarchist,
but in this dialogue he played a pure nihilist. One version of nihilism
holds that the structures of civilization must be destroyed, even if we
don’t have anything to replace them with. He argued that all of America
has been a sham, that democracy and everything that has come with it are
based on lies.
He goes on:
I was reminded of an essay the great University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote last year for The Hedgehog Review. He, too, identified nihilism as the central feature of contemporary culture: “A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.”
He pointed to our culture’s pervasive demonization and fearmongering, with leaders feeling no need to negotiate with the other side, just decimate it. Nihilists, he continued, often suffer from wounded attachments — to people, community, the truth. They can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.
Apparently, the F.B.I. now has a new category of terrorist — the “nihilistic violent extremist.” This is the person who doesn’t commit violence to advance any cause, just to destroy. Last year, Derek Thompson wrote an article for The Atlantic about online conspiracists who didn’t spread conspiracy theories only to hurt their political opponents. They spread them in all directions just to foment chaos.
Brooks then reminds us that this isn't the first time nihilism has been on the rise, even though I don't think we are ever reminded of this in schooling:
Nihilism is a cultural river that leads nowhere good. Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky wrote about rising nihilism in the 19th century, a trend that eventually contributed to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The scholar Erich Heller wrote a book called “The Disinherited Mind” about the rise in nihilism that plagued Germany and Central Europe after World War I. We saw what that led to.
It’s hard to turn this trend around. It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good.
Yeah, I didn't now that about that Heller book, and am not familiar with the problem with the inter-war period being described as an attack of nihilism before. I should look it up.
Brooks' column then swings into the dubious again, by noting this:
One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church. I’ve been skeptical of this trend, but the evidence is building. Among Gen Z, more young men now go to church than young women. In Britain, according to one study, only 4 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds went to church in 2018, but by 2024 it was 16 percent. From the anecdotes I keep hearing, young people seem to be going to the most countercultural churches — traditionalist Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.
First, those figures sound very dubious. And secondly, it's not like the most conservative Churches are helping with the dire rise of Trumpian authoritarianism in the US or some Eastern Eurpoean countries. To the contrary, they are prone to hyping the culture wars and forgiving anything as long as they get their way with their pet obsessions (such as abortion and gay marriage).
As you might imagine, lots and lots of comments criticise the column along the lines I have indicated. For example:
Brooks parachutes into a red area, puts together a couple of disparate groups, forms an opinion and jets away. I am a full throated, unapologetic liberal, well educated Democrat who lives in a VERY red part of Northern Michigan. What Brooks does not realize, or ignores, is how right wing media has indoctrinated rural communities for decades. I walk into a car parts store where the radio is blaring Mark Levan or some such fool while attempting to buy a car battery. At a gas station after the 2020 election two nut jobs were commiserating over how the Dems stole the election and that they had proof! These are not isolated incidents. Sinclair, Fox, Murdoch and the Kochs, dominate the airwaves up here, laughing at the rubes they influence and prey on, whereby they have effectively brainwashed a huge swath of the American public by turning lies into “facts”. Brooks, an educated elite himself, seems to imply that education is the problem! I know several well educated people that voted Trump and generally it centered around tax breaks, or their deep hatred of equal rights. Even education can’t always eliminate racial ignorance. The GOP is now a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of our democratic institutions, full stop. And Brooks shallow dive into socialization has way too many blind spots as regards indoctrination, which he ignores, to take him seriously. Study Nazi Germany for a relevant comparison.
And:
A disappointing read in a few ways, David. First, as a contemporary of yours (ok, a few years older) who attended two of the most so-called liberal schools, I can tell a diversity of thoughts are taught and shared (see what I did using that divisive word "diversity"). Sadly, the conservatism of our past, articulated thoughtfully by George Will, William Buckley, and Bill Kristol (to name a few) is gone. Since the 90s it has been replaced by the blatant lies, hate and ignorance of Rush Limbaugh (was there ever a less deserving recipient of the Medal of Freedom? he should have buried with the Stone of Shame) and Hannity, Carlson, and Watters. Second, you did not articulate what the progressives have taught that has the conservatives wanting to destroy everything. Complain? Empathy? Come on. Those are great values that those young kids that you are so happy are now going to church are, sadly, likely not learning.
There was a comment I saw earlier on that made reference to the problems all starting with the enlightenment in 1650 (or around then!), but I am having trouble finding it now. It reminded me that I should really try to essay ideas that have been bumping around my head about the unfinished effects of a slow burn enlightenment that we are still not finished with, but there is always something else to do.
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