Where is the common sense middle on the video game debate?

Once again I find myself getting annoyed with the problems of both sides of an argument - this time on the matter of video games and connection with real life violence.

On the conservative American Right:  of course the claim about the connection of violent video games to shootings is not an argument put in good faith - it is (along with general bleating about mental health) primarily a diversionary excuse for not doing anything very serious about gun control.

On the Left (and libertarian) side:  the point about the low international rates of violence despite the popularity of violent games everywhere is overly simplistic - isn't that obvious?  If people who might be triggered to live out a gaming fantasy in real life are prevented doing so by the sensible gun restricting laws of most countries, that tells us nothing reliable about the possible connection between games and shooting in the USA.   Do those game defenders think that those who worry about a connection are making an argument so unsubtle that it along the lines of "violent games make players want to kill in any manner possible - knives, bombs, cars - any way"?  

Part of the problem here is probably the whole question of "causation" in this context.  I have had my say on the dubious relevance of psychological studies on the effect of video games before - see my posts "Useless Violence Studies" and  "Video Violence and Empathy" - I think they stand up well.

I get the impression that studies on video violence are in a similar position as was research on marijuana use and mental illness about 40 years ago - when there was a great deal of expert doubt that there could be any connection, versus the more common sense reasoning of parents who hadn't seen a psychotic episode in their child until they were smoking cannabis.   Finally, the expert opinion swung around to "well, yeah, it can cause serious problems particularly with young smokers in a real, causative sense - although it's still tangled up with pre-existing susceptibility to mental illness as well."

The problem is that video violence is even harder to study than cannabis, given that it's not as if there are plenty of mass murders to study, and identifying those who are having thoughts of mass murder before they commit it is never going to be easy.

There is also the question of the degree to which one contemplates interference with an entertainment business just because it may implant a bad idea in the mind of some viewer.   This guy, in the Conversation, makes this point - there have moral panics over movie violence which seem quaint today.   But as I have argued before, there is something about the repetitive nature, and the involvement in directing the action, of video games which common sense ought to suggest may have different and more worrying effects than watching a movie on screen violence.    Although of course, I have great concerns about the morally numbing effect of movie violence as well.

It would, in my opinion, be a healthier society if violence in games and movies was decreased from its current excesses.  I am annoyed that there are few mainstream cultural commentators who put that line forward - I am stuck with pointing to a string of recent Popes who haven't liked violence in video games.   On this matter, as with many other social issues (as long at they are not to do with sex and reproduction!) the Catholic Church does maintain pretty sensible views. 

While on the topic of free speech

This Will Wilkinson take seems spot on:

And this comment about how American got there sound right too:

Dear Reader/s

Due to Graeme Bird's insistence on polluting my comments section with complete and utter conspiracy nonsense (as I have said before, just like Alex Jones, but with the added offensiveness of anti-Semitism), I have put the comments onto moderation.    [I have tried deleting his comments, but he just re-posts them over and over again in a game that is tiresome and pretty childish on his part.]

Some may argue that I shouldn't worry - people know he's a nut and will just ignore his rambling theories, even finding them funny sometimes - but really, I don't want to host a forum that spreads such offensive, fact free material.   I have spent years criticising Catallaxy (and Sinclair Davidson in particular) for hosting offensive religious bigotry (about Islam in its case; a religion not above criticism here, of course) and sexist, homophobic, racist and defamatory content in comments in the name of free speech, so it's not as if I can continue hosting  it here without being inconsistent.  

I've never done it before, and I'm not even sure how it works yet. 

He's been told to just revive his dead blog is he wants to rabbit on as he does, but it seems he prefers annoying others instead.

I will see how this goes. 

PS:  can someone try to comment so I see how I get to moderate it?

Bret Stephens gets it right

A lot of Lefties were annoyed with the New York Times taking on Bret Stephens as a regular contributor, but we should all be praising his column today which scorches Conservatives' "whataboutism" in relation to the Dayton shooting (agreeing with my point made earlier today in the context of the same exercise by Andy Ngo), and attacking Trump for his role.   Some highlights:

Connor Betts, the alleged Dayton shooter, had left-wing political views, believed in socialism, supported Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, and regularly inveighed on Twitter against various personages on the right (including, it turns out, me). This has some conservatives fuming that liberal media is conveniently ignoring the progressive ideology of one shooter while obsessing over the far-right ideology of another — Patrick Crusius, who posted an anti-immigrant manifesto shortly before police say he murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso.

Sorry, but the comparison doesn’t wash. It’s idiotic.

The Dayton victims did not fit any political or ethnic profile: They were black and white, male and female, an immigrant from Eritrea and Betts’s own sister. Crusius’s victims, overwhelmingly Hispanic, did: They were the objects of his expressly stated political rage.

What happened in Ohio was a mass shooting in the mold of the Las Vegas massacre: victims at random, motives unknown. What happened in Texas was racist terrorism in the mold of Oslo, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Christchurch and Poway.

The former attack vaguely implicates the “dark psychic force” that Marianne Williamson spoke of in last week’s Democratic debates. The latter directly implicates the immigrant-bashing xenophobic right led by Donald Trump.

This needs to be said not because it isn’t obvious, but because too many conservatives have tried to deny the obvious. It’s not about ideology, they say: It’s a mental-health issue. But that’s precisely the kind of evasive reasoning many of those conservatives mocked in 2016, when the mental state and sexual orientation of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was raised by some media voices to suggest that his attack had not really been an act of Islamist terrorism. 

Alternatively, conservatives have cited the decline of civil society, the effects of the de-institutionalization of the mentally ill, the paucity of prayer and the ubiquity of violent video games — in sum, the breakdown of “the culture” — as explanations for mass shootings. This is the right-wing equivalent of the left’s idea that poverty and climate change are at the root of terrorism: causes so general that they explain everything, hence nothing. Why not also blame Friedrich Nietzsche and the death of God?

Get real: The right’s attempt to downplay the specifically ideological context of the El Paso massacre is a transparently self-serving effort to absolve the president of moral responsibility for his demagogic rhetoric. This, too, shouldn’t wash. The president is guilty, in a broad sense, of a form of incitement.

As for his reaction to Trump's use of "infestation" when decrying illegal immigration:

In today’s America, the dissemination of the idea, via the bully pulpit of the presidency, that we are not merely being strained or challenged by illegal immigrants, but invaded and infested, predicated the slaughter in El Paso.

It’s worth noting that the Walmart massacre is, as far as I know, the first large scale anti-Hispanic terrorist attack in the United States in living memory. On current trend, it will surely not be the last or the worst. The language of infestation inevitably suggests the “solution” of extermination. As for the cliché that sensible people are supposed to take Trump seriously but not literally, it looks like Patrick Crusius didn’t get that memo.

The main task for Democrats over the next 15 months won’t be to convince America that they need yet another health care re-invention, or that the economy is a mess, or that the system is rigged, or that the right response to Trump’s immigration demagoguery is an open border. It’s that the president is a disgrace to his office, an insult to our dignity, a threat to our Union, and a danger to our safety.

Quite right.

So far from normal as to be virtually inexplicable

Of the many photos of bizarrely inappropriate smiling and thumbs up from Trump and his equally strange wife during the hospital visits this week, this one just takes the cake:

How can we be sure that those two are not aliens wearing human skin suits, as in Men in Black?   It strikes me as just about the only plausible explanation.

As for the reaction on Twitter, Mediaite explains it well:

Twitter Recoils at White House Photo Op of Trump and First Lady Smiling With Baby Orphaned in El Paso Massacre: ‘Act Like a Human Being’

 The baby was brought back to the hospital for this photo op at White House request.

Killed for the avocado trade??

In The Guardian's report of a gruesome scene in a Mexican city:

The merciless dogfight between Mexican drug cartels has produced its latest macabre spectacle with the discovery of 19 mutilated corpses – nine of them hung semi-naked from a bridge – in a city to the west of the capital.

it goes on to note that the cartels fight is not just over drugs, but more importantly, over avocados (!):

Falko Ernst, an International Crisis Group researcher who studies Mexico’s cartels, said this week’s slaughter was clearly intended to intimidate rival criminal groups, the families of their members, as well as Mexican authorities.

Ernst said the bloodbath was partly about the struggle for control of Uruapan’s local drug trade. But a more important motivation was the fight for the region’s billion-dollar avocado industry. “The big magnet here is avocados,” he said.
 

What a sad, strange country - which I would like to visit if only it didn't have such appalling problems.

Fear of invading cultural supremacy

William Saletan writes at Slate that he has read three of the recent white supremacist killers' "manifestos" and finds that all of them actually indicate fear of the cultural supremacy of the "invaders" that they go on to kill.  

Which is kind of odd - it's a bit like self hatred of their own group leads to rationalisations for attacking the other.    Interesting, as Saletan usually is.   Here are his last paragraphs:

These reflections on the assets of immigrant communities—spiritual strength, cultural strength, economic and educational ambition—have led some white nationalists to recalculate their propaganda. Breivik, for instance, rejected “supremacist arguments” and portrayed white Europeans instead as an oppressed native tribe, like “Aborigines in Australia and Native Americans in the US.” “Rhetoric related to ‘indigenous rights’ is an untapped goldmine,” he wrote. “Playing the victim card is the most potent strategy of our times.” He concluded with this message: “Preserving your tribe, cultural and demographical, is a basic human right and has nothing to do with ‘white supremacy.’ ” 

Tarrant offered a similar pitch, based on the idea of “diversity.” His massacre of Muslims, he argued, “was not an attack on diversity, but an attack in the name of diversity.” How? According to his manifesto, the goal was “to ensure diverse peoples remain diverse, separate, unique, undiluted.” “A rainbow is only beautiful due to its variety of colours,” he wrote. “Mix the colours together and you destroy them all.” 

What’s happening among these extremists, in short, is a shift from white supremacy to white nationalism. That’s no consolation to the hundreds of people they’ve killed or wounded, or to the millions they’ve terrified. But it does undercut a core premise of their ideology. Even racist mass murderers are being forced to admit, in their own manifestos, that whites are losing their economic and cultural dominance based on merit. The dogma of white supremacy is collapsing.

Quality editing

I get the feeling that quality control at Quillette is not much of a thing, as long as the politics are "right":  it looks like an essay that immediately sounded fake to many readers has been pulled after a short appearance on the site.   Tweets about it here.

Quillette's Andy Ngo, meanwhile, has been busy tweeting support for the the proposition that the Dayton killer is the "first antifa mass killer".   (The guy had apparently even turned up at an antifa rally - in support of them - with his rifle.)

The problem for Ngo and his New York Post ilk is that the actual target of the killings has no connection with antifa rhetoric:   I haven't noticed them spending time whipping up criticism of people who go out to an entertainment district on a Saturday night.  (And it would also seem, given his sibling was one killed, that he may have had family issues that led to the spree.)

There's no doubt that young male killers with emotional and social issues can follow either side of politics:  the problem comes when you can see a clear connection between the targets of the killings and the political rhetoric they endorse and follow.   

Is that too much for Andy to grasp?      

He has no idea

Have you seen the nauseating video the White House put out of Trump's hospital visit to Dayton, Ohio?  See it at this Tweet, which puts it context:

It is genuinely bizarre - a pure PR exercise by Trump that looks exactly like a campaign commercial.

(And a sign that celebrity culture has completely corrupted the way people think they should act around anyone famous - regardless of how appropriate it really is that smiley, happy images should be appearing around a tragic event.)

The comments reactions on Twitter are good. For example:

Now for something really important - more thoughts on fast food

I'm sick of being appalled at Fox News and its terrible, terrible propaganda pandering to the Trump base (and Trump himself).   That Tucker Carlson clip where he says "white nationalism?  it's a problem about as real as Russian interference" just makes me sick for its reality denial. 

So instead of dwelling on that, let's deal with a burning issue closer to home:   what's going on at Dominos pizza?

*  I am deeply suspicious that the Dom Pizza Checker - the alleged scanner that is supposed to check the quality of each pizza - does anything useful (or perhaps, anything at all?)  Maybe it's there to take a pic of each pizza so as to help the shop owner defend any claim of contamination?    Has any employee spilled the beans as to its true point and utility yet? 

*  We noticed recently that the regular pizza size has become smaller - and now there is a large size that is below the ridiculous "New York Pizza" size.  The New York Pizzas are a pathetic range in their toppings, by the way.

*  Something was different about the taste of the pizza last night.   A sourer taste that was not inedible, but different.  I think it was in the taste of the tomato sauce, but I might be wrong.   Was it a temporary aberration, or have they change their sauce supplier?  (I wouldn't be surprised if its from some far flung corner of the world as a cost savings measure.)

My main point is - why does fast food keep changing so much?   They seem to never get to a point where things can stay more or less the same for more than 12 months.   The same with McDonalds - they used to have much more stable menu with just one special menu item that might come and go in a month.   Now (although I really don't go there much anymore), it just seems that the entire menu is in a state of constant flux.  

I don't really understand this - I get the benefit of having some menu variation (the burger or pizza of the month, for example) to keep customers coming back to try something new, but surely too much variation starts to annoy customers, like me?

I get the feeling that the fast food industry has succumbed to something equivalent to the managerial wankerism of the 1980s, where "experts" with MBAs thought the most important thing was for organisations to spent a month of meetings on drafting a mission statement.  Are there fast food business consultants having a similar rein over the fast food industry at the moment?

How they do politics in Uganda

A Ugandan court on Tuesday charged pop star turned leading opposition figure Bobi Wine with "annoying" President Yoweri Museveni, his lawyer told AFP.

Here is a link.

Signs of a lobby group having passed through Canberra recently?

What's behind the sudden talk of small, modular nuclear power for Australia?   Angus Taylor on Radio National Breakfast one morning, talking them up; then Ziggy Switkowski the next - both speculating that this type of nuclear could be a good way to go.  See this article at the ABC website about it.

Given that the concept of this type of nuclear power being deployed has been around for a long time now, yet still appears to be no where near actually being sold as a commercial product, there is something more than a bit suspicious about why it is on the minds of Coalition politicians suddenly.   I would guess some lobbying from some industry group from the US?

John Quiggin explained back in 2014 why this nuclear option was dubious at best - and re-reading that post, it seems little has happened to change his assessment.  Indeed, JQ has posted recently that it is really an "entire exercise...founded in fantasy".

I used to think there was promise in small, modular nuclear - but the fact that it has languished in development suggests that it just doesn't add up.   (One thing I have always had my doubts about was the oft repeated idea that they could just be buried on site - which might be a good containment idea as far as the atmosphere is concerned if one blows up, but isn't such a great idea for the water table.)

If making small nuclear work would take a lot of government directed research and investment, then it now appears to me it may well be more beneficial to put the effort into new, large scale storage instead.   There are some ideas there which seem to warrant support.

No, not deplorable at all [sarc]

I don't remember seeing this video during the Trump campaign, but someone recently put it up on a  Reddit thread in light of the discussion of racism after the recent mass shootings.   It gives a good idea of the kind of stuff that goes on in a Trump rally audience:



I think it would be an extremely useful thing if this type of video was put up with respect to his recent rallies.  People need to know what his base really thinks.

Where is the spending?

Last Saturday I had a couple of hours to spare and went for a walk around Fortitude Valley, the inner city area which has had a lot of urban development in the last 10 to 20 years.  It was a beautiful Brisbane late winter's day for being outside.

I went down to the Emporium shopping and restaurant area, which is surrounded by new to new-ish apartments, a pretty upmarket hotel, and used to be very popular for mid range restaurants:  

 

 This is what one of the large, outdoor eating areas look like now:

It also used to have an upmarket deli (many years ago, when it first opened.)  That has been replaced by a Chemists Warehouse.

The place still has one upmarket restaurant (an Italian one which we ate at last year - it was OK, but I didn't think particularly good value for money).   But the other eating places left are decidedly more downmarket - a Guzman & Gomez, a Grill'd hamburger joint (and a second burger joint), as well as (I think) a teppanyaki place that is somehow still surviving.

I then walked further down the road to a shopping centre that contains a Harvey Norman and a furniture store.  They were extremely quiet in terms of the number of shoppers.

This area has had huge development in the last 20 years - Teneriffe is a very nice, riverside suburb within walking distance of these shopping and eating areas, too, that has had many large highrise apartments blocks opening continuously in recent years - but it seems that the increase in residential living in this part of Brisbane just has not been enough to sustain the commercial centres opening within it.

And don't get me started on the nearby Chinatown mall - it was attempted to be revived by a re-design about 10 years ago too, and it is nearly completely dead.  A mere handful of restaurants left now, it seems.

This obvious lack of spending in an area of town that used to looked to be doing well only a few years ago seems a very bad sign to me as to what is going on economically in Australia.

It certainly gives a sense that discretionary spending is way, way down, and that funds that have invested in commercial retail developments must be doing much, much worse than they ever expected only 5 years ago.

I do not think there is much confidence in most aspects of the economy.

Update:  I forgot to mention, across the road from Emporium there was a yum cha restaurant that opened a couple of years ago in a pretty new building.  It was large, seemed busy on the couple of times we ate there, and had parking beneath the building.   I liked it.   It has closed, and the landlord is trying to lease it again as a retail/display space - not even as restaurant or food outlet.   (What must have been a pretty extensive kitchen has been completely removed - I could see inside the building.)  

The de facto police state the Right desires

Trump adviser Sean Hannity is being rightly ridiculed for his solution to mass shootings in the US:

I'd like to see the perimeter of every school in America surrounded, secured by retired police -- which you are -- retired Secret Service -- which you are -- military, and I want guys to donate 15 hours. I think we could cover every school, every hour, every day.

Add a metal detector, and I think we're going to have safer schools. Have one armed guard on every floor of every school, all over every mall, the perimeter, and inside every hall of every mall. Now, that gives us an instant response opportunity that we normally wouldn't have.

 I can't see Trump buying it.  I get the impression that Trump is a purely politically opportunistic pro-gun figure - he doesn't have any private history of enthusiasm for gun ownership or hunting, does he?  Certainly not for using one on the battlefield!   And he did support the bump stock ban.  

But his need for approval means he won't cross guns rights activists too far.

Cultural issues

On Gulf News:

Dubai: Sometimes words fail to express human compassion towards a mother who has lost her child. Saudi Arabia's Minister of Islamic Affairs Sheikh Abdul Latif Al Asheikh, was seen on video embracing and kissing the forehead of a woman, who was grieving the loss of her son. He was killed in the New Zealand Christchurch mosque shooting.

The footage, which is currently circulating on social media, shows the Saudi minister trying to calm the woman pilgrim crying in Makkah.....

Sheikh Abdul Latif said on Sunday that bringing the Christchurch pilgrims over to Makkah, was part of the Kingdoms efforts to “confront and defeat terrorism.”

Generally the laws of Islam prevent females and males from embracing, if they are not direct family members, especially when they are performing Haj. Many took to Twitter to criticize Sheikh Abdul Latif for coming into contact with the woman.

Twitter user @AlodidanSalwa tweeted that the Minister owes the public an apology for his behaviour.

“The minister owes an apology to the public for his behavior, even if it was spontaneous and in the moment. What is considered haram is forbidden. He embraced a non-muharam woman. We are waiting for his apology.”

"Is this the Minister of Islamic Affairs of the Unification State?! How has he legalised something for himself that is prohibited in Islam. To hug a woman, when she is someone who should not be hugged by him?" tweeted @1s2s3n4h

While another user, @Jawahir61 tweeted “You can express your feelings without the use of arms to hug.”

"It is not permissible to even look at a women, let alone touch her. God counted on you, God showed us the correct way," tweeted @ar_coffee1.

Others praised and supported Sheikh Abdul Latif for being kind and warm to a crying grieving woman.

What an over prescriptive religious/cultural tradition, based on antiquated ideas about the meaning of physical contact. 

A very Guardian article

‘I don’t smell!’ Meet the people who have stopped washing

Many years ago, there was a dermatologist on The Science Show who argued that soap was being overused and caused dry skin conditions.  He personally showered using just neutral stuff (like plain sorbolene, I think) to provide some sort of dirt lifting effect if he felt it was needed on part of his body.

I remember the forever host Robyn Williams (the ABC seems to think his talking head will need to be pickled to allow the show to continue after his body gives up, such is their reluctance to tell him to retire and bring new blood onto the show) saying that his guest didn't smell, despite the soapless washing.

So, it is an idea that has been around for a while, but given that even using the wrong brand of deodorant causes me to regret it when ironing a washed shirt the next time, those of use who know we can smell strong are reluctant to give up something that works and has not caused us to turn into a shrivelled crisp.

And yes, some people are lucky that they have never developed the skin microbiome that causes body odour (my father was one of them, and reader Jason has often shared on line that he is one too), but I am not prepared to go the period of stinking to see if I can adjust my skin bacteria that way.

Counter productive

I have never seen the point of commuter disrupting protests, ever since they were taking place in the days of Joh Bjelke Petersen.  I mean, people have to get to work, come home, go to hospital, do other good and normal things that make the world run, and there is a high chance that a significant percent of them stuck in their cars already agree with the protesters in principle.

So what is the freaking point of disrupting those who agree with you, and setting those who don't agree more vigorously against you?  

This post brought to you in light of news of more "Extinction Rebellion" traffic disrupting protests in Brisbane this morning.

Their cause is not silly in the broad sense (against the Adani mine and pro climate change action), but their tactics are just stupid.

We're dealing with paranoid idiots

What a cast of idiots on the American Right:

*  Glenn Reynolds, annoyed that Cloudflare is withdrawing services from 8Chan, the online community of choice for white supremacist killers to post their plans and justifications for mass murder, and to high five each other after they happen.  Why?  Because maybe "woke" folk will convince the company to stop protecting other sites that he likes.  Oh boo hoo.   This is all part of the Right's paranoia about tech companies not being supportive enough of the Right promoting their (frequently stupid and dangerous) ideas on the net - and getting upset when their own free speech enterprises don't take off.

You stupid culture war losers - before the Right went nuts, it would have been calling for the actual banning of hate sites for inciting violence, even if constitutionally difficult to do so.  Now that your priority is winning a culture war, deaths don't matter.

And here is Reynolds again, apparently thinking that Trump has already done enough and suggesting the answer to blind hatred against immigrants is for "institutions" to promote more patriotism (!):

GOOD: Trump offers condolences in wake of dual mass shootings: ‘Hate has no place in our country.’
As he said in his inaugural address, when your heart is filled with patriotism, there’s no room for hate. Which is why we should demand that our institutions promote patriotism. Basically, if they don’t, people will die.

Yeah, good one.  I would have thought that an inflated, paranoid version of patriotism is pretty much at the heart of this sort of killing.   You know, of the kind Trump has drummed up.

*  American Thinker (ha!) notes that it will have none of this "blame game" against Trump (and guns) because:

What's also obnoxious is their claim that Trump, who condemned the maniac and sent comfort to the victims, was somehow responsible. Trump has never advocated mass shooting or justified anyone who has. That won't stop the left.

Yeah, I see.  The same justification used by some nutters about Hitler and the Holocaust, spruced up for the orange one  - "he never said publicly that they were to be killed - just moved out of the country." 

And look at the readership of that site - here is a comment following the article:

*  For a non-idiotic discussion of the "white replacement theory", this article at The Guardian seems a good place to start.

Throwing eco fascism into the mix

Huffington Post, of all places, notes that the El Paso shooter's manifesto includes references to eco terrorism - the need to reduce humans for the sake of the planet.   It goes on to point out that this is not the first time it has appeared in white supremacist material. (And also, I did not know, in some of the European nationalist parties.)

This will, no doubt, be used by the Wingnut Right, which has convinced itself that Nazis were purely a Left wing phenomena and nothing to do with their side of the political spectrum (which is pure of heart, not like the evil, human-hating, Socialists which everything to the Left of them is now labelled), to deny that it has anything to do with why young men keep shooting up blacks, Hispanics and Jews.

It's not going to wash.  

 

Like that would come across as sincere

I see that Claire Lehmann, whose Quillette site has made a speciality of encouraging Right wing panic over antifa (current death count:  0), has re-tweeted the Washington Examiner's call for Trump to clearly and unequivocally denounce white nationalist terrorism.

Even in doing so, the Examiner can't help but attack part of the Left:

Plenty in the media and in politics blame Trump for the rise of white nationalism. Many of them are the same folks who have always argued that conservatism — whether tax cuts, defense of the unborn, or belief in free enterprise — is just thinly veiled racism, and on these grounds alone they don't deserve to be taken seriously. Even so, a president has to be above the blame game played by his critics. The single best way to prove them wrong would be for Trump to crusade actively against white nationalism.  

Well, that's big of them.

It's also a bit of a joke.   As someone writes in comments following Lehmann's tweet:

Yes:  how on earth could Trump possibly come across as sincere when he built his election campaign on fear of Hispanic and other immigration, and has continually re-stoked the fear at unnecessary rallies (done only to boost his ego) since holding office.

As for Lehmann:  I haven't spent a lot of time at Quillette, but my impression is that some of the essays there are OK - the ones which aren't so overtly political mainly - but I still get a strong impression that she is at heart a professional concern troll.   Her pre-Quillette video about the connection between feminism and obesity gave off a strong vibe of insincere "but I'm just being reasonable here".    Given that her site now is one of the prime ones giving diversionary cover to Republicans on the issue of white nationalism (but look - antifa!),  and her antifa star Andy Ngo apparently tweeted a 2016 video of car damage around the time of the El Paso shooting, I find her internet activity on this topic, at the very least, unhelpful.

I should also mention her attitude to publishing the "look, some journalists follow antifa on Twitter" article, which some of the journalists believe led to death threats from white nationalists, was pretty much inexcusable.  

Of course, none of this is to say that antifa should be ignored, and that questions around the policing of rallies should not be raised.  But until Lehmann lets her site show some more perspective on where the more serious problem in the USA lies, I don't give her credit for claiming to be Ms Reasonable.



.

Bad drought, bad flood

*Cough* climate change *cough*:

THE ongoing drought through the Murray Darling Basin is now the worst on record according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

Speaking during a Bureau of Meteorology seminar on climate, BOM climatologist David Jones said the drought had now exceeded the Federation Drought, the WWII drought and the Millennium drought in terms of its severity through the Murray Darling Basin.

"Our records only go back 120 years but in terms of the rainfall records it is the most severe," Dr Jones said.

Hydrologist and water sector engagement lead with BOM Matthew Coulton said this had also translated into markedly lower run-off into the system.

Dr Jones added temperatures were as high as they have been during the human era, saying the nearest equivalent according to paleo-climatic data (analysing historical weather trends) was a hot period encountered 2-3 million years ago.

"We are still below that threshold of a couple of million years ago but we are starting to approach it," Dr Jones said.

And the BOM panel had tough news for those hoping for a swift resolution to the big dry.

"Our climate forecasts for the next three months show well below average chances of exceeding median rainfall through most of the MDB, especially in the north," Dr Jones said.

 On the other side of the world:

Hundreds of homes were evacuated in a Derbyshire town on Thursday when a dam threatened to burst after being damaged during extreme rainfall.

Around 1,400 people in 400 houses in Whaley Bridge were told to leave their properties with just minutes’ notice due to “an unprecedented, fast-moving, emergency situation” caused by heavy downpours.

Actually, the rainfall that has been around that dam is not being claimed as "record", as far as I can see - but climate change makes for more extreme rainfall events so it's an example of what climate change is bringing anyway.

Boris as usual

Noted in this Washington Post report on Boris Johnson tour of bits of the kingdom that aren't very united behind him:

Nichola Mallon, a leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, said she had a “very blunt meeting” with Johnson and observed that he did not have a full grasp of the “complexities” of Northern Ireland. 

She said she told Johnson that he “must avoid a hard Brexit at all costs.” 

Mallon said she reminded the prime minister that he had responsibilities under the Good Friday Agreement, which ended 30 years of sectarian violence, and that he “must live up to them.”

Mallon said, “We pressed him time and time again and just got stock responses.”

Quantum Darwinism discussed

Peter Woit (of the Not Even Wrong blog) says this: 

Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests 

is a good article, so it probably is.

Haven't the time to read it all right now, though. 

So she's an influencer?

A "reality star" has been criticised for promoting use of a diet product while pregnant.  What a surprise that such a heavily and garishly tattooed women might not be the most sensible person to pay attention to:

The slug gambit

A catering war in Victoria possibly involves slug sabotage:

A former health inspector at the City of Greater Dandenong says council managers seemed intent on shutting down a family catering business that was competing with another catering company part-owned by the council.

The owner of the shuttered business, I Cook Foods, even claims a council inspector planted a slug on its premises, which was then used as evidence the company had breached food safety regulations.....

The council has since charged I Cook Food's owner, Ian Cook, with 48 breaches of the Food Act, including one charge relating to the slug allegedly found in the kitchen the day before it was closed.

But Mr Cook claims the inspector — who did not use the normal body-worn camera during the inspection — planted the slug as evidence against the company.

The company's CCTV cameras were operating during the inspection, but did not capture the discovery of the slug, which was outside the camera's field of vision.

Heat death noted

It's summer and hot and humid in Japan.   This is a very unfortunate way to die, and I have to say, I did not realise that the Japanese did not really know how to avoid heatstroke in such high numbers:

A 28-year old man in a mascot costume who was training for a dance performance died of heatstroke Monday at Hirakata Park, a theme park in Osaka Prefecture. As of 5 p.m. the same day, the Tokyo Fire Department said 63 people had been hospitalized for heatstroke in the capital, with two people in their 70s and 80s in serious condition.

Last Saturday, a 91-year-old woman died of heatstroke in Saitama Prefecture after she was found lying in her garden at around noon. According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, about 95,000 people were taken to hospitals for heatstroke during the May-September period last year, exceeding the previous high of 58,000 logged in 2013.

Not a fascist: just a proto-fascist. Great.

I refer to this article, at The Guardian:   Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes

Get it while it lasts

The new Chrome will apparently get around the way lots of paywalls currently work.  Yay, for a while, even though I don't like to overdo the freeloading.

(I don't like Chrome much as a Windows browser, though.  Long time Firefox user here, although some versions have developed memory hogging issues.   Chrome is fine on Android, although I recently just started trying Brave as an alternative, and it seems very fast and quite good.  Not entirely sure what it is wanting me to do sometimes, but I ignore that.)

Making your own fake meat

I ate the left over vegetarian chilli con carne last night - yeah, the flavour was good (most spiced dishes taste better as leftovers, don't they?), but thinking about the texture of the vege mince, it did remind me again that it had a bit of a stickiness to it, unfortunately reminding me of what you get if you chew paper. 

This whole texture of fake meat issue is very important to me, and watching Youtubes where they try to make vegan analogues of real meat, it's obviously a prime concern of others too.

Last night, I watched this one and was interested to see it used pea protein isolate, which I think is the main ingredient in the Beyond Burger.   Given that I don't hang out in health food stores, I didn't realise that this product was a powder readily available.  

So here's this guy, trying to make imitation chicken using it and one main other ingredient as a binder:



I think I have worked out why this topic appeals to me - it's a bit like watching a science experiment, and now that my kids are well past doing science experiments at home, I need a substitute.

Fake meat experimentation in my kitchen might be it.

The old invisible ink trick

Spotted this at Gulf News:

Dubai: A customer service employee was sentenced to 10 years in jail for stealing Dh1 million from a customer’s account, a Dubai Court of First Instance heard.

The Egyptian defendant, 42, who is still at large, conned the customer by using magic ink when the latter wrote his name on the cheque to deposit the money in his account. When the name disappeared because of the ink, the defendant put his name on the cheque, cashed the money and escaped.

That lasted a long time

MIT Technology review notes that Facebucks might never happen: 

The company has warned investors that the currency, which it wants to launch next year, may not ever get off the ground.

The news: In its quarterly report, Facebook reminded investors that the proposed currency, called Libra, is “based on new and unproven technology," adding that the legal environment surrounding digital currencies is “uncertain and evolving.” That could cause Libra to be delayed or even blocked, it said.

The backstory: Facebook revealed its ambitions for Libra a month and a half ago. Since then, it has faced skepticism and backlash from government bankers and politicians, who have criticized Facebook’s track record on privacy and warned that its plan to launch a private currency to billions of people could be risky.

Onward: During Facebook’s quarterly earnings call CEO Mark Zuckerberg struck an optimistic tone, affirming that the company will spend “however long it takes” to earn regulators’ approval before launching.

Living under the Moon

From Space.com: 

Living Underground on the Moon: How Lava Tubes Could Aid Lunar Colonization

Finding a lava tube that has lots of ice inside would be fantastic site for a base, I would think. 

And the doctor is always in

Psychoanalyse yourself:

A new study shows that conversation with oneself embodied as Dr. Sigmund Freud works better to improve people's mood, compared to just talking about your problems in a virtual conversation with pre-scripted comments. Researchers claimed that the method could be used by clinicians to help people dealing with minor personal problems.

The explanation as to why this should be is given at the link as follows:

People are often much better at giving useful advice to a friend in trouble than they are in dealing with their own problems. Although we typically have continuous internal dialogue, we are trapped inside our own way of thinking with our own history and point of view, and find it difficult to take an external perspective regarding our own problems. However, with friends, especially someone we know well, it is much easier to understand the bigger picture, and help them find a way through their problems.

A research team of the University of Barcelona (UB), IDIBAPS and Virtual BodyWorks, a spin-off of both institutions and ICREA, has used immersive virtual reality to observe the effects of talking to themselves as if they were another person, using virtual reality.

The technique is complicated, though:

For this technique to work out,researchers scanned the person to obtain an 'avatar' which is a 3D-likeness of the person. In virtual reality, when they look at themselves, at their body parts, or in a mirror, they will see a representation of themselves. When they move their real body, their virtual body will move in the same way and at the same time. Seated across the table is another virtual human, in the case of this experiment, a representation of Dr Sigmund Freud.

The participant can explain their personal problem to Dr Freud, and then switch to being embodied as Freud. Now, embodied as Freud, when they look down towards themselves, or in a mirror, they will see Freud's body rather than their own, and also this body will move in synchrony with their own movements. "They will see and hear their own likeness explaining the problem, and they see their virtual self as if this were another person. Now they themselves have become the 'friend' who is listening and trying to help," said Mel Slater.

 Working in psychology research sounds fun, no? 

A flicker of hope

From Axios:

Carbon emissions from China could peak as soon as 2021, which is nine years before the voluntary deadline in their Paris agreement pledge, a new peer-reviewed study finds.

Why it matters: China is by far the world's largest carbon emitter. The trajectory of its emissions affect whether the world has any chance of meeting the Paris temperature goals — or, more likely, how much they're overshot.

• It adds to separate analyses suggesting China could see a peak well before 2030 if things break right.

Meat substitute scepticism

Someone from the CSIRO casts a deeply sceptical eye over how much potential growth there really is in the "fake meat" industry that excites high market valuations for the companies making these new fake burgers.   He notes the growth in demand for meat as nations get richer as being a major factor offsetting any reductions in livestock that an increasing market for meat substitute products would involve.

You should read the comments too, where the author expands his scepticism about lab grown meat - a topic of which I have been sceptical from day one.

In these discussions about future food, it annoys that I have not been able to track down a person who I once heard on the ABC arguing that lab grown protein derived from microbial sources could readily and cheaply feed the world.   I don't think he was talking about fungus derived protein either - from which we get Quorn.   But who this was, and which exact source for the protein he was talking about, I have not worked out.  I think he had written a book on the topic of future food, but there are a lot of books on that topic around.

One other point:   because I looked at a couple of vegan recipe videos, I keep getting this topic coming up on my Youtube feed now.  It is very clear that the matter of vegans trying to make plant based food look and taste like the meat equivalent is very "hot" at the moment.  There are no end of videos about how to make tofu look and taste (allegedly!) like chicken, fish, or whatever.  And a guy who tried various ways to come up with something that resembles bacon - he ended up recommending strips of daikon, dried out a bit, soaked in his mix of soy and stuff, and fried.   I am not at all convinced it would taste anything like bacon.

So yeah, it seems to me that a lot of people are convinced that getting people to eat more vegetarian or vegan is a matter of making the food at least look like what they like in meat.   I am pretty sure that this must be annoying some more purist vegan types...

When Dick doesn't work

I've been watching The Man in the High Castle, the alternative history series on Prime based on Phillip K Dick's novel of the same name and which (I think) got pretty favourable reviews when it first started.

I've seen 4 (maybe 5?) episodes now, and while I initially enjoyed the novelty of the scenario, I am prepared to abandon it. 

Looking at an imagined Nazi New York and Japanese California (and the desolate bit of the country in the middle) is cool for a while, but the plotting has slowed down and I'm not finding much of a reason to keep following the story.

The main problem is that it's too much of a bleak monotone, and none of the main characters seem particularly charming, or interesting, really.   I did once start reading the novel and couldn't get into it, either:  maybe I was just distracted with other stuff at the time, since I have read and enjoyed quite a bit of Dick's other work, and the novel won many awards, so you would think I would like it.

But, sorry - not finding it engaging enough.

Might be a bit of a pattern here...

About that teenager who shot up the garlic festival in California:

Legan posted two photos on Instagram not long before the attack.

One photo depicted Smokey the Bear in front of a "fire danger" sign, with a caption that said to read the 19th century book "Might is Right," a work that claims race determines behavior and is popular among white nationalists and far-right extremist groups.

About one of the teenage fugitives from the Canadian killings:

For Schmegelsky a dark but depressingly familiar picture began to form—a young man with a tense home life who found solace in online activities and had connections to the far-right. The two have been connected a YouTube account featuring a Nazi insignia, online game accounts using the banner of the Azov battalion (a Ukrainian far-right militia) and had photographs of a Nazi armband and a Hitler Youth knife. Schmegelsky's father, while adamant his son was not a neo-Nazi, did admit to having to drag him out of an army surplus store eight months ago after his son got too excited over the Nazi memorabilia. VICE also viewed photos of Schmegelsky with a gun barrel in his mouth.

An article at Business Insider in January:


All of the extremist killings in the US in 2018 had links to right-wing extremism, according to new report 

And over at Quillette:    but look what happened to Andy Ngo, the poor guy got punched, and some Lefties said he had been provocative.  The Left is appallingly violent!

Update:  also, count me as pretty amused about the long, boring, pointless Quillette piece "Why isn’t Jordan Peterson on This List of the World’s Top Fifty Intellectuals".  Not even worth a link, that one.

The ridiculous Ninja show

So is this three seasons now that the Australian version of Ninja Warrior has had a final in which no one got through the final course in order to have a go at the final climb?  

I saw some of the first season; none of the second; and bits of the third including last night's final, in which Channel 9 had been putting out hints that someone finally completed the whole thing to "win".

Instead, we got contestants who all found the "swinging doors" impossible - not even able to move past the first one in a row of 4 or 5.   This seems to me, and surely many viewers, pretty ridiculous.  As someone on Twitter said, the show might have more credibility if they showed that the obstacle was actually do-able, as they (apparently) have people who test the different segments of the course.

But these swinging doors looked ridiculous - a smooth metal edge giving no grip to two hands, let alone the one hand that would have to remain while trying to grab on to the other.

Do the international versions have this issue as well? - going several seasons before anyone can even try the final?

Planet of the Rats

Japan is going to do some human stem cell in animal experiments that sound a little confusing:

A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year.

Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi's ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people....

Nakauchi says he plans to proceed slowly, and will not attempt to bring any hybrid embryos to term for some time. Initially, he plans to grow hybrid mouse embryos until 14.5 days, when the animal’s organs are mostly formed and it is almost to term. He will do the same experiments in rats, growing the hybrids to near term, about 15.5 days. Later, Nakauchi plans to apply for government approval to grow hybrid embryos in pigs for up to 70 days.

The reason why some people worry about these experiments:

Some bioethicists are concerned about the possibility that human cells might stray beyond development of the targeted organ, travel to the developing animal’s brain and potentially affect its cognition.

Oh.

Woman with stupid idea has daughter with dubious ideas

NPR reports on the woman who allegedly invented or popularised the very stupid idea of gender reveal parties now saying that she regrets it.  In part, due to have a very "woke" daughter:

"Plot twist! The baby from the original gender reveal party is a girl who wears suits," Karvunidis says. "She says 'she' and 'her' and all of that, but you know she really goes outside gender norms."

The post went viral. Karvunidis says her views on sex and gender have changed, especially when she's talking to her daughter.

"She's telling me 'Mom, there are many genders. Mom, there's many different sexualities and all different types,' and I take her lead on that," Karvunidis says.

She says she does have some regrets and understands these parties aren't beneficial to everyone.

The daughter is about 10 or 11, given that Karvunidis' gender reveal party for her was in 2008.

Singapore and fake news

I just read a good article about Singapore trying to deal with the problem of fake news via legislation and its usual "soft authoritarian" style whereby politicians can order the correction or removal of fake news.

I have great sympathy to the goal, if not the exact means of execution.  

The throbbing sphere of education

So, it's university open day season in Brisbane, and given that I have a daughter approaching the end of high school, we once again went out to a university to listen to a couple of talks and view the facilities.

Yesterday, it was QUT, but we went to the Kelvin Grove campus, which does education and creative industries.  The education building is pretty new, and as with most new university buildings these days, is pretty flash.  Of some particular amusement, though, is the huge feature of a glowing central sphere in the centre of the building, the exact point of which was not made clear.  Some of the changes it undergoes in the projected pattern look vaguely like neurons firing; at other times the convolutions look a bit too much like intestines.  (I assume the former association is intentional; the latter, not so much.)   Here it is in action:



There was mention that people doing something on the interactive screen on the wall would influence what the Sphere of Educational Destiny, or whatever it's called, shows.

Anyway, it's certainly eye catching, and seems ready made to be used in a science fiction film; but I do wonder if it has much point.

As for the open day itself:  as usual, it was full of optimism about the courses; how students can do some of it overseas; and how easily they will find getting a job.   (The teachers course in particular put up a figure of 97% employment for graduates soon after completing the course - I guess they didn't say that all of the jobs were as teachers, but I assume that would be case.)  

They told us that there is a shortage of teachers not only in Australia, but world wide, and that Australian teachers are well regarded internationally.   Apparently, if you stick it living out in a remote community, you can make principal barely a couple of years from graduation.

All very positive vibes, as they usually are at these open days, and modern universities are such nice built environments, I really enjoy the open days.  More than my children do...

Someone needs to invent cooking meat smell

To atone for the eating of a few mouthfuls of raw dead animal a week ago, this last Saturday I was inspired to try cooking with one of the new-ish products that is purely vegetarian but trying to look like meat/mince.  

This one is soy protein based - which is a meat substitute source of protein that has fallen out of favour, it seems.  Remember the days when Textured Vegetable Protein was about the only fake meat in town?   I didn't mind it, really, especially the chunky version for things like chilli.

So, I tried chilli con carne with this product.

I don't know if it was really necessary, but I tried frying it off with onion, and that was the main problem.  I thought it had a most peculiar smell while frying.  Not really food like at all.   My son came into the kitchen and said "I can tell that's not meat you're cooking", and he had good reason to so comment.

I tasted some of it after it was "cooked" (the mince alone, I mean) and it was a pretty underwhelming flavour.  I think the Beyond Burger had inherently more flavour, and a somewhat meat one at that.

The end result chilli was quite OK - this product certain holds a mince meat-like texture quite well, and sufficient chilli and spices means that it is not as if the bland taste of the "meat" is all that noticeable.   I doubt it would taste great as a burger, though.

And they really need to do something about that odd cooking smell.

Some welcome pushback on the Mueller "optics"

I'm happy to see that there has been some pushback against all media's assessment of Mueller's congressional appearance as a disaster.   There's been quite a bit on Twitter by journalists and writers I follow, such as:

And now there is an article at The Atlantic along similar lines: Robert Mueller and the Tyranny of ‘Optics’:

“DAZED AND CONFUSED” was the Drudge Report’s blaring headline. But the Twitter verdict of NBC’s sober-sided Chuck Todd was almost as severe: “On substance, Democrats got what they wanted,” Todd wrote. “But on optics, this was a disaster.”

Optics—the kryptonite of the modern media age, the glimmering, crystalline material that can subsume substance at every treacherous turn. Or as the former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett rejoined to Todd on Twitter: “When you say ‘on optics, this was a disaster’ it is you saying so that helps make it true. The disaster of the optics is the elevation of optics and the claim by pundits that it was a disaster.”

 

I am not alone

Well, the odd things you sometimes find via Twitter.

Turns out that Hannah Gadsby does get negative reviews, even from high minded reviewers who seem to have approached her work wanting to like it, after all.   This one, about her latest show, is in the New Yorker, and it's pretty strong:

Gadsby, in her work, espouses a kind of puritan-minded radicalism in which someone else is always to blame for how messed up she feels. But isn’t that messed-up feeling life? And what about other lives? What about the millions who have it worse, who are fighting to survive? On Gadsby’s stage, solipsism masquerades as art.

Then there is this review of the ridiculously over-praised Nanette, which is ever fiercer:

Nanette is awful, and it’s time we gave ourselves permission to think and say that out loud. Its few patches of genuine comedy eventually lead to giant yawning holes of intellectual chicanery masquerading as Deep and Profound Thought. Nanette assures viewers, especially straight ones, that queers and women can and must be understood and assimilated by first understanding us as uniquely and literally broken and bashed in. It isn’t comedy that is broken in Nanette, but queer life and feminism. Worse, the breaking of queerness comes about via Gadsby offering straight people in particular the assurance that this is a globally universal experience. Gadsby offers Nanette as a mirror to herself, and her self becomes a stand in for queers and women everywhere. If she had simply discussed her own story, Nanette would simply be an account of one woman’s trauma, but Gadsby takes it much, much further. She frames her story in a very particular, prescriptive, and retrograde vision of sexuality (“homosexuality is not a choice”) and in a denunciation of art that looks like a massive feminist takedown of male artists but is in fact embedded in a vision of the self that allows no place for the fragmented and fragmentary nature of experience and life itself.

Of course, the view of this queer reviewer that "homosexuality is not a choice" is a retrograde vision of sexuality may be controversial, but I'll still go with any review that points out the comedy empress has no clothes.   (So to speak.  No body size joke intended.  Well, not much.)

A problem noted

To say I am no fan of Tarantino is an understatement - and I suspect his legacy is already starting to degrade - so I won't be seeing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.   But I will still read reviews of it, especially if I can find support for my disdain for him and his oeuvre.  Hence, I was interested to read this in the Slate review:

A revelation about Pitt’s character’s past midway through the movie might change how you respond to the culminating orgy of violence, which, as is often the case in Tarantino films, seems at once like a critique of the vision of masculinity that’s imposed on us by TV and the movies and like a celebration of it. (In fact, a character in the movie—to reveal which one would be to say too much—at one point advances a theory about our culture’s dependence on mediatized mayhem.)

Well, if you ask me, such ambiguity is a problem, not a feature.  You don't critique something by celebrating it.   Back to the rest of the review, confirming that it's not just me that wonders how shallow his motivations seem to be:

In choosing to set a movie on Cielo Drive in the summer of 1969, Tarantino took on a historical event that not only changed how Americans thought about fame, violence, and the counterculture but also ended five innocent lives (seven if you count Tate’s next-door neighbors the LaBiancas, who died in a separate Manson-incited incident the following night). It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements—the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees—were just so cool.

Modern America, noted

OXFORD, Miss. — Three University of Mississippi students have been suspended from their fraternity house and face possible investigation by the Department of Justice after posing with guns in front of a bullet-riddled sign honoring slain civil rights icon Emmett Till.

One of the students posted a photo to his private Instagram account in March showing the trio in front of a roadside plaque commemorating the site where Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River. The 14-year-old black youth was tortured and murdered in August 1955. An all-white, all-male jury acquitted two white men accused of the slaying.

The South remains a worry.

Here's the story.

Hot in Paris

Météo-France said the mercury at its Paris-Montsouris station in the French capital surpassed the previous high of 40.4C, set in July 1947, soon after 1pm and continued to climb, reaching 42.6C soon after 4pm.

“And it could climb even higher,” the service said, noting that 43C in the shade “is the average maximum temperature in Baghdad, Iraq in July”. David Salas y Mélia, a climatologist, said the heatwave was one “of quite exceptional intensity”.

That's hot, anywhere; but especially in a city that has not been well fitted out with airconditioning.  (And adding lots of airconditioning can make a city hotter too.)

When are the decrepit dopes of Catallaxy going to admit they are wrong, JC?  Needs to start at the top - with Sinclair Davidson's apology to society.  

Indian woes

France 24, of all places, has an article about the continuing problem of sex selecting abortion in India.  It's startling how entrenched it is, despite successive governments trying to stop it:

Over the past three months, not a single girl was born in 132 villages in the northern Indian state of Uttrakhand, according to local authorities. An investigation was launched over the weekend after official data revealed that of the 216 children born in 132 villages in the Uttarkashi district, not one was female, according to Asian News International (ANI). In 16 of the 132 villages, now marked as a “red zone”, no female births were recorded over the past six months.

Quantifying India’s skewered gender ratio is a depressing business and it keeps getting worse. The 2011 Census found the world’s largest democracy had 919 female children for every 1,000 male children, down from 927 in 2001. 

The country’s preference for boys results in fewer female births due to sex selective abortions as well as excessive female deaths due to neglect or maltreatment. Together, they account for what statisticians call women “missing” from national populations. In 2017-2018, the Indian economic survey found 63 million Indian women were “missing” and an additional 21 million were “unwanted", resulting in lower nutritional and education levels. 

They've tried to ban dowries, but everyone ignores it, it seems:

While wedding costs in India are customarily borne by the bride’s family, rising consumerism has sparked increasingly lavish, long-drawn-out ceremonies. Media coverage of extravagant ceremonies hosted by a growing section of “super-rich” adds aspirational pressure on bridal families struggling to cope with wedding costs. 

The economics of traditional Indian marriages then are brutally simple: the family of the bride enriches the family of the groom. In low income and caste groups this means the family of the groom can impoverish the bride’s family. And that, experts say, accounts for India’s entrenched preference for sons and declining value of women.

“The dowry that must be paid to marry off a daughter encourages parents to prefer sons, because in this case, they do not pay for the weddings and instead receive dowries and gifts,” explained Bénédicte Manier, a journalist and author of “Made in India”. “These dowry-related transactions are worth billions of rupees each year in India, it’s an economy by itself, growing with a new middle class. Not surprisingly, this social category, which has high dowry rates, also has the highest birth sex selection rates.”

I also would not have guessed that the arranged marriage rate was still so high:

Arranged marriages account for an estimated 90 percent of Indian marriages, almost all of them within societally prescribed caste and community groups. The lack of choice is largely unquestioned and enthusiastically promoted in popular culture such as films and TV series.

The sex ratio leads to some horrible situations for adult women too:

A skewered sex ratio, far from increasing the value of a woman’s life, puts her at graver risk, say experts. Manier explains that it sparks a “strong disruption of the marriage market” resulting in “many men struggling to find women of their age”. This, she warns, results in high celibacy rates in some areas. “In the long term, some 30 million men will remain without a wife. This situation also leads to trafficking of young women from poor families. Some are even bought by several men who "share" or sell them several times in a row.”

In some of the worst affected northern Indian states, the practice of buying and selling wives is so prevalent that vulnerable women are resigned to the fact that they will be sold on to a next husband after delivering a son.

What a society...

Another in the series: very late movie reviews

I've always meant to catch the 1994 New Zealand film Once Were Warriors, and finally did last night.

First:  did Auckland really have bits as ugly as that in 1994?   Did Maori gangs really look exactly like escapees from the Mad Max movies?  Do they still look like that?   What about that trashy bar, and the amount of beer typically being drunk?   (Actually, I read in an article afterwards that it was not a Maori pub at all in real life.  Huh.)

Anyway, apart from it looking much uglier than I expected, and the acting sometimes in my opinion feeling a bit more theatrical than cinematic, I could see why the film had impact.   Unexpectedly, almost, I found myself quite upset by the pivotal death and the funeral scenes.

I was surprised that it did not get more criticism, or at least questioning, from other countries about its race politics at the time, though.  I see that the author of the book was a right wing figure, and although the movie changed the book's perspective a lot (focusing on the mother - and its hard to see how you could do it otherwise), the deeply bleak picture it painted of urban Maori behaviour was still controversial in New Zealand.  But not, it seems, in other nations' reactions.

I suspect it would face a strong attack on PC lines everywhere if being released today.

Update:  Vice asked recently why a prominent NZ bike gang, the Mongrel Mob, uses Nazi symbols.  Seems it wasn't started by Maori, but is now dominated by them.  But on the upside, membership is ageing and not being replaced by younger.   This article shows artsy photos of the gang members, whose heavy face tattooing is, shall we say, a tad on the extreme side. 

A fast food confession

This may well be considered controversial.

I prefer KFC mashed potato and gravy over their chips.

That is all.

Climate change and compound events

A new paper at Nature:

Floods, wildfires, heatwaves and droughts often result from a combination of interacting physical processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. The combination of processes (climate drivers and hazards) leading to a significant impact is referred to as a ‘compound event’. Traditional risk assessment methods typically only consider one driver and/or hazard at a time, potentially leading to underestimation of risk, as the processes that cause extreme events often interact and are spatially and/or temporally dependent. Here we show how a better understanding of compound events may improve projections of potential high-impact events, and can provide a bridge between climate scientists, engineers, social scientists, impact modellers and decision-makers, who need to work closely together to understand these complex events.

Another case of murder by social media

What an appalling story, again illustrating the harm of social media:

Eight people have been killed in vigilante lynchings in Bangladesh sparked by rumours on social media of children being kidnapped and sacrificed as offerings for the construction of a bridge, police have confirmed.

The victims, which include two women, were targeted by angry mobs over the rumours, spread mostly on Facebook, that said human heads were required for the massive $3 billion project ($4.3 billion), police chief Javed Patwary said.

"We have analysed every single case of these eight killings," Mr Patwary told reporters in Dhaka.

More than 30 other people have been attacked in connection with the rumours.

Mr Patwary said police stations across the country had been ordered to crack down on rumours, and at least 25 YouTube channels, 60 Facebook pages and 10 websites have been shut down.

AFP has identified several posts still on Facebook that share the rumour, however.

Mob lynchings are common in Bangladesh, but the latest incidents are particularly brutal.

Do these countries where rumours that lead to lynchings spread like wildfire on social media try to educate the public that they cannot believe everything they read?

How hard is it for Facebook to have a local office that gets notice of a dangerous rumour and shuts down the account immediately?  Is part of the problem that you can't easily search Facebook content?  Does Facebook itself have the ability to immediately search posts across all accounts? 

Many questions I have.

Sammy Davis Jnr considered

There's a not so old documentary about Sammy Davis Jnr that has been on TV before, but I only saw it last night.  (Most of it, anyway.)

It fits in with something that has become a bit of theme here - as you get older, history feels closer than it used to.   As a child, something that happened 50 years before your birth feels like ancient history; but once you get into your 50's, you start thinking "hey, the 1960's doesn't feel so long ago", because you can remember bits of it directly, and lots of older people don't feel mentally much older than their perceived peak at (say) 30-ish.  Hence, anything that happened within any one lifetime doesn't now seem, in the big picture, all that long ago; and the timing of radical changes to our understanding of humanity (evolution, the "deep time" of the age of the Earth, the vast scale of the universe, etc) which are all still within roughly 150 years ago from today need to be considered in the perspective.    The intellectual and social reverberations of those discoveries have not had all that long to work themselves through.


Hence, watching the story of the rabid controversy in America that Davis Jnr's relationships with white women caused in the late 50's, but well into the 60's as well, is really eye opening.    Or things like the way blacks, at least in the 50's, had to drive way out of town to find somewhere to stay if working at Las Vegas.  (It wasn't entirely clear when that started to change.)  And the story of a motel operator being asked to drain the pool by a white person who saw Davis Jnr swimming in it, and they did (!).

This was all going on when I was a child, which isn't long ago.  It all puts nostalgia for the 1950's and 60's into perspective, and just because legislative action against discrimination happened,  no one should be surprised that lingering effects should take a long time to work themselves out.