About that Mattis statement

Here's Allahpundit at Hot Air talking about Mattis's statement:

What makes me nervous is the possibility that he felt he *had* to speak up because he’s worried about what Trump might try to do with the military at a moment of national crisis, amid excited chatter about using the Insurrection Act. Tom Cotton, who’s clearly angling for the GOP nomination in 2024 and possibly Mark Esper’s job right now, has an op-ed in the Times today entitled “Send in the Troops.” Tucker Carlson has all but called Trump a pussy on Fox News for not sending in soldiers to start cracking heads. The hardcore nationalists really want to see Strength, red in tooth and claw, applied to American citizens here. They’re egging him on.

If Mattis is piping up now, it makes me think he’s legit concerned that Trump will do it — and legit concerned about how the military will act. What he, and Mike Mullen, and James Stavridis, are doing by suddenly cranking out op-eds denouncing him are using their legitimacy as respected former military brass to offer a counterweight of authority to the troops with respect to whatever Trump might do. I didn’t think in my lifetime we’d have the president and former military figures at the highest levels playing tug-of-war over whether American soldiers should carry out operations against Americans, but here we are.

I like this part too:

Mattis knows a fascist display when he sees one and he knows what’ll happen if it isn’t deemed beyond the pale by authority figures. He understands and values the civic culture of his country. Trump doesn’t, which is one of the most persistently strange things about him. He’s in his 70s, born and raised in the United States, a sworn nationalist known to physically hug the flag at events, yet his approach to power is roughly what you’d expect if you took an Egyptian policeman under Mubarak and suddenly made him president. “How can I enrich myself?” “How can I look strong?” “Let’s send the police into a public square to remove the people so that I can wave my religious book around for the cameras.”  

And talking about Trump:

As Ross Douthat said in a column a few weeks ago, he seems to crave power less because he has some burning desire on how to use it (trade war excepted) than because it brings him attention.

How to take a hint that your political instincts may be wrong

I presume that the likes of Claire Lehmann, and the other Australian and American Right wing-ish commentators who are complaining about how there is not enough condemnation of the rioting, property damage, vandalism, deaths and injury going on around the Floyd protests are somewhat flummoxed by Trump's increasingly poor polling despite his attempts to claim the mantle of "law and order" President. 

I think it likely is explicable by these factors:

a. they have no perspective of how damaging* and deadly past racially charged riots have been in American history (for which they should have watched last night's Planet America for a summary); and

b. reflects their politics of how much they dislike the Left for culture war reasons; such that they can't understand why the public is reacting not in alignment with their own assessment.



* I am tempted to also wonder whether they look at historical riots that were at their worst within black neighbourhoods and think they were less important than riots and thieves who vandalise more up market streets in New York and Los Angeles - but maybe that is ungenerous...

Russia and America observed

This week's Foreign Correspondent was well worth watching, not so much for the main story (about a Russian female doctor critical of the lack of PPE supplied to Russian hospitals, and therefore targeted by the government), but for the image it gave of how Putin's rhetoric (and that of his supporting media) tracks so closely to that of the Trump supporting Right in America.    

There was a clip of Putin calling news that didn't suit him "fake news", and a right wing broadcaster looking and sounding all the world like a Limbaugh (or similar.)   And I think other Putin friendly media featured too.

It's like you could transplant a Trump supporter into Russia and they would be completely comfortable and familiar with Putin's language (including his desire to extend his leadership for years - in the same way Trump has taken to "joking" about how much longer he wants to be President.)

I think the average wingnut Trump supporter would also have no idea how ridiculous it is that they have come to this.  They actually want to live under a Trump dictatorship (as illustrated in my previous post today.)  

Jason goes Gray again

Gee Jason, why do you think Gray Connolly makes for a good analysis of the current state of the world?   He makes excuses for Trump all the time, and has a pat over-simplification line that is too much orientated towards the culture wars (as you have to be to excuse the blatant authoritarianism inherent in the Trump's performance since day one.)

What's the evidence for this, for example?:

The Right that emerges from this time will be more orientated to families & workers, not big business. 

Really?  Where's the sign of that in America?   Or is this just theorising on the never never?

Connolly makes a lot of Trump having won due to appeal to those that economic (and cultural?) liberalism has left behind - he ignores things like the substantial majority vote win by Clinton; the actual failure of Trump to reinvigorate industries he said he would; the long term uncertain effect of his populist trade wars; the uncertain effect of long term massive increase in government debt; the boosting the military while at the same time saying he will use it less.  

You and Connolly seem to want to make a boogeyman of "liberalism", yet don't get into the nitty gritty of economic policy (well, Connolly doesn't.)    Because, let's face it, economics is complicated and populism in only benefiting your own nation's population is not all that moral if the rest of the world is in poverty.   Globalisation is supported by the Catholic Church because of the wealth generation in poorer countries it can create, if done properly.   Conservative Catholics, like Connolly, seem to ignore that and want to welcome the retreat into isolationism that ultimately hurts everyone.

If you and Connolly want to make a useful contribution, start critiquing actual economic policies:  what should happen with tax rates;  how to deal with corporations gaming governments out of tax by their international and financing arrangements;  how to respond to the "gig" economy;  and how all policy needs to be geared towards averting disaster climate change affecting huge parts of the world within a couple of generations.


All this bleating about "woke capital", and how the Left is more interested in lattes than appealing to the (increasingly hard to define) working class, and getting upset because of college students being too politically correct, is just fiddling around the edges of what's important.

I've been saying this to you for years now, as you seem to retreat more and more into the weird world of conservatives who are more interested in criticising the Left for not being what you want it to be, while ignoring what the Right is actually doing.       

The Mattis statement

While this is welcome, I do question the judgement of the guy for thinking he could successfully work with a President who was already sounding like a wannabe authoritarian dictator during the campaign:

James Mattis condemns Trump as a threat to the Constitution

Perhaps the best paragraph:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

Would be good if he would throw in some attack on the Right wing media which has created a cult around Trump, though. 

Update:   Ha!  Australian wingnut reacts calmly, not realising he's proving Mattis' point:

Update 2:   after being told that that there is no oath of loyalty to the President (and besides, he no longer works for him), our Maj expresses disappointment:

Makes it clear how this kind of populist Trump supporter actually wants him as an old style king, not as President.

Funny

And this classic happy look:

Claire is confused

Claire Lehmann is confused:

Err, maybe because it is that most of the protests are peaceful (and those that are not are sometimes clearly provoked by excessive use of police force) that public sympathy is actually pretty high with the protesters?:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A majority of Americans sympathize with nationwide protests over the death of an unarmed black man in police custody and disapprove of President Donald Trump’s response to the unrest, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

The demonstrations, some of which have turned violent, began last week after a Minneapolis police officer was videotaped kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes, even after Floyd appeared to lose consciousness. The officer has been charged with murder.

The survey conducted on Monday and Tuesday found 64% of American adults were “sympathetic to people who are out protesting right now,” while 27% said they were not and 9% were unsure.

She also seem terribly uninterested in the politics of this - how the Republicans are blithely letting their 200 word vocabulary President (and his media ra-rah team) play partisan politics with this - which is exactly the last thing you want to do if you want to de-escalate matters.      

In fact, really, I reckon this is what Lehmann is doing here herself disingenuously:   playing politics while pretending not to.

Comments driven into moderation

My unwanted commenter Graeme Bird has been sent over the edge again by current events in America, which to his conspiracy addled brain is part of his ever expanding grand conspiracy theory (involving you-know-who from the Middle East) from which he seems to derive his life's meaning. 

As he continually adds anti-Semitic conspiracy rubbish in comments, and I have no ability to ban him on the Blogger platform, I am getting tired of his comments appearing on here - sometimes for some hours - before I can delete them.

All comments are therefore going into moderation for the time being.

Please feel welcome to comment - if they are not from Bird, I will clear them soon enough.

Not hurting Biden, so far

Damaged people watch

Sinclair Davidson likes to host a blog which allows free rein to nuts likes this:

First: it's a worry that such nutjobs are reproducing and helping pass their attitudes to younger males.

Second:  for the thousandth time - great hate site you got going there, Sinclair.  Congratulations.  You must be proud of things like how you banned the word "chink" then your commenters used "chunk" instead.    Or how they can be triggered by something like the above and use "faggot" as a routine insult.

Update:  on a more serious note than a couple of Australian rednecks freaking out because a teacher wants to do a foot tap:

Yeah, great hate site you got going there, Sinclair.  

How about a few common sense suggestions to help defuse riots

*   I find it hard to believe that it is procedurally risky to arrest the other 3 police officers who watched their buddy knee the life out of George Floyd for some charge immediately.  Can't the charges be later modified if needed?   Civil order across the entire nation requires people being able to see justice at least being started promptly - especially when everyone knows what happened from their TV. 

*  How much freaking common sense does it take for heads of police, governors (or even the President himself) to come out and say that restraint methods involving interference with air or blood flow through the neck are banned - never to be used?   That all police forces will ensure that all restraint instruction will emphasise the need to not do things obviously dangerous to the life of the arrested?

*  How much common sense does it take for heads of police or governors (or even the President himself) to come out and say that police who hide their identifying badge numbers are committing at least an administrative offence and will be punished for seeking to protect any of their own unjustified violence?   The riots are about lack of confidence in the police - they need to show why they can be trusted, and hiding identity shows they can't be.   And what about the convenient turning off of body cams?  Some places are acting:

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer fired the city's chief of police Steve Conrad after it was discovered that police officers had not activated their body cameras during the shooting of David McAtee, a local black business owner who was killed during protests early Monday morning.

Why it matters: Mandatory body camera policies have proven to be important in efforts to hold police officers accountable for excessive force against civilians and other misconduct. Those policies are under even greater scrutiny as the nation has erupted in protest over the killing of black people at the hands of police.

but again, I say there needs to be serious, immediate action against all police who deliberately turn off their body cam.

Uhuh

1.  Andrew Bolt, slavishly following Fox News evening line up and the American Right:

2.  A tweet from America:

The black people were released after a few minutes, apparently, but it still is a remarkable example of policing in modern America.

I think there is too little emphasis in the reporting on the riots on the role that Fox News and the American wingnut Right (joined in by our home grown bunch of race commentary Murdoch morons) are playing in pushing a reactionary line which is escalating the problem rather than defusing it.    

Sounds interesting

A book noted at Nature:

Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World

Philip Matyszak Thames & Hudson (2020)

Western ideas on antiquity are dominated by Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, with other cultures often reduced to stereotypes. Historian Philip Matyszak asks: were the Philistines philistines and the Vandals vandals? His stimulating encyclopaedia of 40 “forgotten peoples” begins with the Akkadians around 2330 bc and ends with the Hephthalites (‘White Huns’) in the fifth century ad. Illustrations include a Roman-style Vandal mosaic; far from vilifying Roman culture, the Vandals respected it, say current historians.

On a sort of related topic:  following a recent post I wrote about how India sent Buddhist monks West before the time of Christ, it did make me think about how we all carry images in our minds of what Greek, Roman, Babylonian and Egyptian civilisation looked like around that time, but for Indian civilisation we (OK, maybe just me) just don't have much mental image.   Is it that the archaeological sites there just aren't all that well preserved?  Or that it has been glossed over in Western education due to a type of educational bias.  (God knows I have no sympathy for the current Right wing Hindu nationalism, but I guess I do feel they have the right to feel their ancient history is overlooked.)

Update:  for example, have a look at this video of the Buddhist Stupa and surroundings at Sanchi in the middle of India, from around 300 BC.  The whole landscape is also a little surprising because it looks vast and pretty empty.   Not exactly the mental image I have of India - I kind of imagine a village every few kilometres or so:



 Update 2:  this guy's explanation of the Southern Indian Vijayanagar empire is interesting too, and the ruins are impressive - but the place only dates from 14th century CE - even though I would have guessed much older:

  

Sweden noted

Gee, when even a conservative site like Hot Air runs a story headed this:

 you would think Adam Creighton might want to reconsider his pig headed "lockdown has been a dis-aster!" take on Covid-19.

The Hot Air story is actually pretty nuanced and good.   Unlike Creighton. 

The weird optics of this Presidency (Part 1 million)

 

Yes, it's an irrelevant gesture to the current issue, clearly only designed to have partisan appeal to his dimwitted base.        

Claire pokes her head up

I had been wondering if Claire Lehmann was ever going to mention her former Quilette contributor  Andy Ngo's role in promoting to the Right the idea of Antifa as a well funded and organised mob of violent thugs just waiting to destroy American society, now that she can see his influence has gone all the way to Trump.

I thought she might have kept her silence, given that Ngo stopped working for her unusually abruptly, after his disingenuous role in covering for Right wing violence planning activists was getting attention.

But no, she has put her head up, and of all things, to defend an article she ran which was really indefensible:

I think she's like Adam Creighton on COVID 19 - they get a position in their head and then are willing to die in a ditch for it rather than re-consider whether they made a bad call.

Update:

Itchy trigger fingers - of the nutjob Right

Noted in Politico:

Anarchist and militia extremists could try to exploit the recent nationwide protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, the Department of Homeland Security warned in an intelligence note sent to law enforcement officials around the country.

Floyd, a black man who pleaded that he couldn't breathe while a police officer held him down and pressed his knee into his neck for nearly 9 minutes, was killed in Minnesota on May 25. The officer responsible has been charged with murder and manslaughter. 

The memo, dated May 29 and marked unclassified/law enforcement sensitive, cites “previous incidents of domestic terrorists exploiting First Amendment-protected events” as one reason for DHS’ concern of additional targeted violence by “domestic terrorist actors.” 

It also reveals, citing the FBI, that on May 27, two days after Floyd’s death, “a white supremacist extremist Telegram channel incited followers to engage in violence and start the ‘boogaloo’—a term used by some violent extremists to refer to the start of a second Civil War—by shooting in a crowd.” One Telegram message encouraged potential shooters to “frame the crowd around you” for the violence, the document said. 

And on May 29, “suspected anarchist extremists and militia extremists allegedly planned to storm and burn the Minnesota State Capitol,” the memo reads, citing FBI information.

Noted on Twitter:

Now for something more trivial

Let's do a quick review of the Netflix action movie Extraction:

As nearly everyone else has said - some very technically and thrillingly accomplished action (if rather bloody in a way I normally object to) in a merely serviceable story, but quite satisfying overall.   

Some different things about the film:

*  it was odd and a little amusing to hear Chris Hemsworth using full-on Aussie accent and vernacular, rather than the more mid-Pacific accent he usually uses in American movies;

* I can understand why Banglasdesh doesn't like the film - it makes Dhaka look like an absolute 3rd world, dangerous, corrupt, dump of a city, yet I think it was nearly all filmed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad.  (Knowing this may make viewers scratch that Indian city off any "places to visit" list too, since it looks so polluted and dirty.)  

* the camera work and action is just so impressive, though.  And not in an overly editted way which is my main complaint about modern action directors.   (It could hardly be accused of that when it has one widely praised no-cut car chase that goes on for about 11 minutes.  It is really terrific.)

One thing I can justify even though my son complained and complained about it:

*  why, he whined, will I watch this and say it's pretty thrilling, but refuse to watch John Wick movies?  Well, I have watched about 15 to 20 minutes of John Wick movies - the beginning of the first one, and some action sequence from (I think?)  the second one.   I abandoned the first movie because I was finding the dialogue and acting was terrible - I don't remember much about any action in that.    But the second time I was watching a fight in train, and it was all very stabby- stabby and arm breaky (perhaps close up pistol shot to the head as well?) from recollection.

Here's the thing - I found that the John Wick violence was deliberately more "up close and personal" and quasi-sadist in tone than that in Extraction.   Sure, both movies feature baddies getting what they deserve, and lots of blood;  but I thought Extraction did much faster cutaways from things like throat cuttings, stabbings and even gunshots to the head shots than Wick.  It also didn't much feature the sound of bones breaking (I bet that's in Wick) or close ups of stabbings.   And most of the death in Hemsworth's movie was gun fire, which usually (but not always) featured a spray of blood but not much else.

The fights are heavily choreographed in both, of course, and both feature the same methods of killing.    But my reaction to movie violence depends a lot on how much the movie emphasises its effects - hence I really get sick of the modern Netflix speciality of shots to the head and brains blown out the back as a routine thing.   I think Extraction did an acceptable level of moving on fast from the violent act, whereas Wick seemed to want to dwell on them.  I would have to watch all of a Wick film to confirm this, perhaps with a stopwatch in hand, but I reckon I can justify this scientifically.

Anyway, that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Update:  forgot to mention, I think the deliberate ambiguity of the ending is actually pretty clever.  

Police state Trump

I hadn't really thought much before about how GOP friendly the average American police officer would be, but I see that the Financial Times had a story in 2018 noting how police unions backed Trump:

Donald Trump assiduously courted the law-and-order vote in 2016, earning an endorsement from the national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). At a time when police shootings and viral videos of cops behaving badly were sparking rolling, racially charged protests — most recently in Sacramento following the death of Stephon Clark — Trump channeled the emotions of a group that felt under threat. New research shows that Trump swung tens of thousands of votes and flipped at least one state on the backs of cops alone....

Harvard researcher Michael Zoorob found that police officer political engagement jumped from 2012 to 2016 on volunteering for a campaign, displaying a political sign and donating money, while the general public was less engaged. His research analyzed the Trump law-enforcement phenomenon in a paper he has submitted for publication. Zoorob found that places where police unions are strongest had the biggest shift from Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, to Trump. Critically, his analysis found the police mobilization effect accounted for more than 13,000 votes in Michigan — greater than Trump’s narrow margin of victory over Clinton — and more than 27,000 votes in Pennsylvania.

Zoorob, a graduate student in the school of government, attributes this to the way Trump talked about the police. “Those peddling the narrative of cops as a racist force in our society — a narrative supported with a nod by my opponent — share directly in the responsibility for the unrest in Milwaukee, and many other places within our country,” Trump said in an August 2016 speech in a mostly white Wisconsin suburb, shortly after a police shooting in nearby Milwaukee. “They have fostered the dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.”

A month later, the FOP, the nation’s largest police union, endorsed Trump. The union did not endorse in 2012, freezing out Romney for supporting an Ohio bill that would have sapped power from public employee unions. In office, Trump has continued his pro-police rhetoric — notably encouraging law enforcement officers to be “rough” on suspects in a speech in Long Island last year — and delivered a policy win by giving them more access to military surplus equipment, which the Obama administration had restricted in the wake of the shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson.

I know there are some commentators fearing that the riots may help Trump win again as the "law and order" President,  but I find that hard to believe, mainly because his response has emphasised his immaturity yet again:

Honestly, it's like having an 8 year old boy (one who barely passes his English class) as President.

Bolsonaro: the man Trump cultists think Trump is

There's been a bit of an (accurate) meme going around this year that it's weird how Trumpists view him as some sort of hyper-masculine antithesis to limp-wristed Left wing males, when in fact so many of his characteristics are well outside the traditional view of what's "manly":

As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”

Not to mention the aura of physical cowardice he radiates, going back to the bone spurs days as a young man.   The only thing you can reliably say is old fashioned "masculine" about him is his sexist treatment of women over his lifetime and preparedness to brag about sexual conquests.

But when you read about nutso Bolsonaro in Brazil, well he's like everything terrible about Trump but with actual macho characteristics.   This is how he was dealing with coronavirus over the weekend, for example:  

President Jair Bolsonaro, who opposes coronavirus lockdown measures imposed by Brazilian cities and states, rallied with his supporters Sunday, as Washington said it had sent two million doses of a controversial unproven COVID-19 drug.

Brazil is Latin America's hotspot for the deadly pandemic, with nearly 500,000 confirmed cases and a death toll of nearly 28,000, the world's fourth highest.

But Bolsonaro met a tightly packed throng of supporters outside the government palace in the capital Brasilia. The crowd chanted "myth! myth! myth!" -- echoing the president's dismissal of the virus pandemic.

Protected by bodyguards, he approached the crowd without touching them, although he did pick up two children and put them on his shoulders, and briefly mounted a police horse, to the crowd's delight.

I presume this photo is from the same event:

And what about his past?  From Wikipedia:

He graduated from the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in 1977 and served in the Brazilian Army's field artillery and parachutist units. He became known to the public in 1986, when he wrote an article for Veja magazine criticizing low wages for military officers, after which he was arrested and detained for fifteen days. One year later, he was accused by the same magazine of planning to plant bombs in military units, which he denied. After a first degree conviction, he was acquitted by the Brazilian Supreme Military Court in 1988.^[2]

Of course I'm not saying that there is anything to admire about Bolsonaro:  he's more dangerous than Trump because he leads by even worse example that does his American counterpart.   (Not just declining to wear a face mask, but doing it on the back of a horse amidst a crowd!)   I just think it's funny how Trump cultists imagine Trump as if he had Bolsonaro's characteristics, when he clearly doesn't.

A good comparison

As Axios explains about the Trump tweet saying that "Antifa" will be designated a terrorist organisation:  

Mark Bray, author of "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," wrote of Trump's tweet: "To explain a little: it's like calling bird-watching an organization. Yes, there are bird-watching organizations as there are Antifa organizations but neither bird-watching nor antifa is an organization."

It seems that some in the White House see the pointlessness of the idea, but populists Right wingers thought that it was a good idea:

As recently as Saturday night, senior administration officials told me that the designation of a violent cohort of far-left activists, antifa, as a terrorist organization was not being seriously discussed at the White House. But that was Saturday.

Behind the scenes: The situation changed dramatically a few hours later, after prominent conservative allies of the president, such as his friend media commentator Dan Bongino, publicly urged a tough response against people associated with antifa (short for "anti-fascist").

It's just throwing red meat to Trump's ignorant base - I see Australia's stupid Trumpists are putting up Red State posts theorising about how effective such a declaration could be.   

Historians on American riots

Two American historians have had good Twitter threads looking at the history of American race riots (especially with comparisons to 1968).   They are collected in this Threadreader posts:

Kevin Kruse

Tom Sugrue

Not a great weekend

*  I have little to contribute on the riots in the US.   Although - I did notice a couple of days ago (after the first riots) saying that 3 of Fox News evening "hosts" had spent time blaming Obama for increasing racial tension in America.   Pathetic.  Also - it seems both sides are claiming nefarious infiltrators at the riots - Antifa on one side (no doubt Fox News is running with that, and I won't bother looking) and far Right agitators on the other.   Wouldn't be completely surprised if there is some element of truth in both claims.   [Oh - here's a post at Hot Air on this topic - pointing out that America's worst Attorney General in living memory is saying "it's Antifa". Of course.]

* Disturbingly, stupidity seems to be getting younger.  Still pretty white, though:

Australian anti-vaxxers label Covid-19 a 'scam' and break distancing rules at anti-5G protests

This was the photo of protest in Brisbane:

Hard to tell from that one, but the backs of heads look pretty young.

The Daily Mail got the heading more accurate:

COVID-19 is a scam, no mandatory vaccines and 5G equals communism: Inside Australia's WEIRDEST protest ever 

And they have a bunch of photos from demos around the country showing that the anti-vaxxer movement does skew young.   (Probably because people in their 50's and up remember how, as kids, our parents talked about how much they valued the success of the polio vaccination.)  Here's a photo from the Daily Mail:

I haven't read about how this was organised - I wouldn't mind betting that a Facebook page played a large role.

Update:   a couple of other things about the character of the anti-vaxxers movement.   I think it used to be pretty accurate to characterise most anti-vaxxers as people on the Green/Left side of politics, and probably also dominated by women (even if the bogus "science" supporting it came from men.)   But something seems to have happened to move a substantial number to the Right - is it just that they saw the Right was cornering the market in obsessive conspiracy belief, and the anti-vaxxers are joiners?

Also, with this move, as the photos indicate, it looks more male dominated than before.    Look at loony loon Pete Evans, who having been sacked from Channel 7, has come out more strongly than ever with anti-vax and crank medicine as well as Qanon conspiracy tweets.  

I find this rather odd - but I presume some journalist somewhere is looking into this. 

About Wodehouse

You know, I don't think I could have told you a thing about the private life of PG Wodehouse until I  read this article just now in the New Yorker.   (I have never tried his books, or even watched the TV adaptations either.   Perhaps I should read something by him, and I presume Scribd, which I have been using for a couple of months, would have some.)

Anyway, somewhat interesting.

PS:  I make a prediction that Tim T has read something by him.  Tim?

I have a problem with this so-called trolley problem problem

David Roberts, one of the best people to follow on Twitter, says he hates the trolley problem (for reasons he doesn't explain) and tweets with approval this AEON essay which criticises "thought experiments" in ethics.

Curiously, I don't think the article actually goes on to explain much about the issue the author has with the actual trolley problem.  Instead, he gives examples of other thought experiments which have, I think, some obvious problems.

And at the end of the article he says:

Overall, ethical thought experiments are, at best, fallible ways of constructing simplified models that map rather imperfectly onto the world as we experience it, and can distort as much as they illuminate. So should we give up on them as sources of ethical insight?

and answers that with (in my paraphrase) "no, we just have to be careful how we use them."

Well, that's kind of obvious, isn't it?   

A question about the executive order

I haven't seen much about Trump's attempt to scare Twitter into not fact checking him, but I don't understand this:   if Trump wants social media companies to be at risk of being sued for content as a publisher, doesn't that make it more likely that said companies should delete his tweets due to things like the defamatory rubbish about Joe Scarborough?   Otherwise they are at risk of being joined into any defamation action that the defamed may take.

And anyone honest can see that it's the American Right that is living in a bigger conspiracy fantasy world than the Left, by far, and so many of the conspiracy claims are potentially defamatory.   Any change in the law is therefore more likely to hurt the Right than the Left.

Am I wrong in my understanding of this?  I will have to wait for more on line commentary to be able to tell.

Update:   I see that, no, I wasn't wrong about this.   Someone writing at National Review (found via one S Davidson*, posting something useful for a change) writes:

Stripping Twitter and other social media of liability protections is likely to make them more inclined to censor speech, not permit it. Either these companies will have to pass a “neutrality” test imposed by the government, or they’ll simply take down as much controversial content as possible. 

I mean, isn't this obvious??  Yet you have "must make my boss happy no matter the logic" AG Barr standing next to Trump pretending giving effect to the Order would have the opposite effect.

I also recommend reading Allahpundit's lengthy and hot take down of the executive order.  He really hates Trump, and it would seem from comments at Hot Air that 95% of its readership hates him for hating Trump:

.... this is a glimpse at an ugly authoritarian soul fantasizing openly about using government power to censor a critic. Not even a critic, as Twitter’s let him run wild on their platform for a decade. All they did to piss him off was append a note to two of his tweets that slightly complicated his scheme to scapegoat voting-by-mail for his possible defeat in November. Two days later we have the president ranting in the Oval Office next to the Attorney General about closing down a prominent media company that’s used by millions to communicate.  

The post notes that there are some within the White House strongly opposed to Trump's and Barr's little revenge fantasy.   Chances are, nothing concrete will come of it.  But making futile executive orders makes you look weak and impotent, no matter how much cultists will think the order is still the best thing since poisonous kool-aid. 

Update:  yeah, here's Jennifier Rubin at the WAPO arguing that it would be good for Twitter to not have legal protection for content published:

Well, the argument goes, how would Twitter decide which of Trump’s tweets to block or which user to banish? Let’s not overthink this. Let Twitter operate by the same rules as traditional media. No more protection from lawsuits. Let Twitter figure out which tweets it wants to be legally responsible for and which will leave it open to legal attack.

* his link was useful, his take on the matter pretty stupid.  He thinks Twitter made a big mistake by provoking Trump.   How does he figure that when he's quoting a guy saying that the whole idea behind the Order would backfire on Trump - not to mention my last point in this post that an ineffectual Order that doesn't go anywhere makes Trump look weak.

This is going to go over well

Trump, even by his own appallingly low standards, seems to gone into a tailspin in the last couple of weeks, so much so that even Andrew Bolt and a few of the old commenters at Catallaxy are calling him out over the Joe Scarborough murder tweets.   (Catallaxy remains the Australian home of the true Trump cultists, though.  I'm waiting for the Steve Kates "whataboutism" post which explains that everyone needs to forgive Trump for conspiracy based defamation because of how he is was so horribly victimised by the Russiagate media coverage.)

Anyway, with Trump saying that he'll do something about social media not treating him fairly, and then this news:

it looks like he hasn't bottomed out of the tailspin yet.

This is going to backfire massively.

Update:  human/alien hybrid Zuckerberg isn't going to risk Trump hurting his multi billion dollar business model, so he's out with the pre-emptive "suck up to the President my platform helped Russia elect" interview already:

Zuckerberg Says Twitter Is Wrong to Fact-Check Trump

Update 2:  this made me laugh:

Trailer theory confirmed

I see that the new Netflix series Space Force, for which a lot of people had high hopes due to the heavy involvement of Steve Carrell, amongst others, has received very lukewarm reviews.

This would seem to confirm what I've been saying lately about trailers for movies and series, as I had not been impressed by the one that came out for this show a few weeks ago:  if you can't make an appealing trailer out of an entire movie (or, even more so, series), it's a bad sign, given the amount of material they have to work with.  Even bad movies are usually capable of getting a decent enough trailer. 

To put this more succinctly:   a good trailer is not a guarantee of a good movie/TV show, but a dull trailer is a likely indicator of a dull or disappointing movie or show.  

The Church does things differently in Germany

I had no idea that Germany would have Catholic Churches funded this way.  From the Catholic Herald, in a story headed Record numbers leave Church in Munich archdiocese:

The Munich statistical office told CNA Deutsch, CNA’s German-language news partner, on May 26 that 10,744 Catholics formally withdrew from the Church in 2019. It noted that this was a fifth higher than in 2018, when 8,995 people left.

Statisticians said this was the first time that annual departures had surpassed the 10,000 mark since records began. Previously, the highest figure was 9,010, set in 1992.

In March, Bayerischer Rundfunk, Bavaria’s public-service broadcaster, reported that people gave a variety of reasons for leaving, including a desire to stop paying church tax, the clerical abuse scandal and the position of women within the Church.

The Church in Germany is largely funded through a tax collected by the government. If an individual is registered as a Catholic then 8-9% of their income tax goes to the Church. The only way they can stop paying the tax is to make an official declaration renouncing their membership of the Church. They are no longer allowed to receive the sacraments or a Catholic burial.

While the number of Catholics abandoning the faith has increased steadily since the 1960s, the Church’s income has risen. In 2018, the Church’s income rose to 6.64 billion euros, while 216,078 people left the Church, according to a report by the German bishops’ conference.

I find that all rather surprising...

The amoral President

Allahpundit at Hot Air makes a couple of good points about Trump continuing to vomit up "maybe he's a murderer?  Maybe not?" conspiracy smears against Joe Scarborough. 

First, on how Twitter should deal with it (as Allahpundit thinks they must, in some fashion):

Are they sure they don’t want to try to just ride this out? He’ll tweet something even more obnoxious soon enough, likely at a less sympathetic target than the Klausutis family, and we’ll forget all about this. The nice thing about showing that you’re unfit for office every day is that your critics never have time to dwell on yesterday’s evidence. All Twitter needs him to do is provide a new shiny object that’s not quite so uncomfortable to handle. Give him a few hours.

And secondly (and more importantly), he notes how Trumps further tweets about it show what a complete amoral asshat he is:

I’ll leave you with a point I saw made on Twitter that’s jarring but also eminently true: Trump would be just fine with the idea of Scarborough having killed an aide if “Morning Joe” was still in the pro-Trump camp. The president practically admitted it in his tweets today, claiming that he’d heard the smears against Scarborough for years and never ruled them out when they were on friendly terms — but went on being friendly with him anyway. And why not? Trump’s idea of morals is purely transactional: There’s no sin he won’t happily overlook so long as you’re on his side. You could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t lose his vote of confidence in you — until you start badmouthing him. That’s what offends Trump about Scarborough, not his non-murder of a former aide.

The lawyers have got to him

That's the most likely explanation for this:

Nothing would be more delightful than to see Fox News facing a mega class action for all the parents and grandparents who died prematurely.

Of course, we must now all watch out for the Trump reaction.

A scandal that it's only now a scandal

The ABC reports:

An Australian SAS operator is under investigation for killing an Afghan man his comrades say was an unarmed and intellectually disabled civilian, the ABC can reveal.

The 2012 shooting is known as "the village idiot killing" among the special forces.

The ABC can also reveal the SAS soldier under investigation for this killing is the same man shown shooting dead a different unarmed Afghan man in video footage aired by Four Corners earlier this year.

Known as "Soldier C", he was stood down after the program and is now under investigation by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for both of the killings. 

ABC Investigations has spoken to two SAS patrol members, witnesses to the newly uncovered killing, who say the disabled man was shot in the back of the head as he was trying to "limp" away.

"Choppers have landed, this guy's ran. Fair enough. We were pretty intimidating," said one patrol member.

"He was obviously intellectually disabled. [Soldier C's] shot this f***er through the back of the head. And I remember it so clearly because his brain literally hit the ground before he did. It was just so unnecessary."

Why isn't it more of a scandal than it seems to be that it has taken 8 YEARS for investigation into a serving SAS member who his fellow SAS members considered  a murderous war criminal??

The worst takes

As you might expect, the absolutely worst takes on a viral Twitter dispute between a woman and a black man would come from Catallaxy; the only question being which of these two favourite targets (for misogyny and racism respectively) they would end up favouring. 

The most remarkable comments, to me, come from one S Davidson, whose sentiments are all against the black man for being a "busy body".  

Seeing his view on victimhood doesn't seem to extend to a black man being the subject of a white woman saying  "I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life" when he 100% clearly isn't,  and then carrying out the threat in (eventually) hysterical voice, all I can say is that he should never be let anywhere near jury service, ever.   "Just too gormless" they should write against the name.  

What a threshold

Parts of India routinely get ridiculously hot.  The news today:

NEW DELHI: Heatwave conditions intensified in most of the northern states of India on Monday, with Churu in Rajasthan scorching at 47.5 degrees Celsius and the mercury breaching the 46-degree mark in parts of the national capital.

And look at the rather extraordinarily high threshold they seem to set there for calling it a heatwave:

In England, by comparison, you get the impression it's something like two days above 28 degrees.

I would still like to know what happens to the death rate in India during its heat waves.  I mean, surely it must increase substantially, but you never hear about this.  (Unlike when you have a heat wave in Europe or Russia.)

Update:  yes, there is research about this, and I think I might have even linked to this paper before.  But the numbers cited for increased deaths always sound too low to me.

Another nice sounding, almost vegan, recipe

I get so surprised when I see a vegan-ish recipe that I think would taste good, I like to record it here.  (I think the last one I noted was from the Washington Post too, and I still haven't cooked it).

Anyway, here it is - a curried chickpea salad.   It contains a lot of things I like.

Being a perpetually outraged loudmouth for a living means never having to be consistent

Moat swimming popular in Japan

A Japanese man was arrested in Tokyo on Monday after swimming across the Imperial Palace's moat to scale an outer wall, entering off-limits parts of the grounds, police said.

They said the man appeared to be in his 40s and was arrested mid-morning after emerging on palace grounds shortly before Emperor Naruhito was scheduled to conduct a rice planting ceremony elsewhere on the imperial property.

The report goes on to note the recent history of other men who have swum across the moat.    

In America, I suspect they would die in a hail of gun fire.

Don't tell your paranoid friend...

A paper that has recently appeared in Science Advances doesn't seem to yet have had the publicity in the media that I thought it might get:

Remote, brain region–specific control of choice behavior with ultrasonic waves

The abstract:

The ability to modulate neural activity in specific brain circuits remotely and systematically could revolutionize studies of brain function and treatments of brain disorders. Sound waves of high frequencies (ultrasound) have shown promise in this respect, combining the ability to modulate neuronal activity with sharp spatial focus. Here, we show that the approach can have potent effects on choice behavior. Brief, low-intensity ultrasound pulses delivered noninvasively into specific brain regions of macaque monkeys influenced their decisions regarding which target to choose. The effects were substantial, leading to around a 2:1 bias in choices compared to the default balanced proportion. The effect presence and polarity was controlled by the specific target region. These results represent a critical step towards the ability to influence choice behavior noninvasively, enabling systematic investigations and treatments of brain circuits underlying disorders of choice.

Brit Hume is a lost cause

I think he used to have a reputation as one of Fox News's moderates.  Now he's just a Trump defending moron:

Sinclair Davidson's moderation skills on display again

Sure, Clementine Ford is an annoying version of a feminist who thinks she can joke about men not dying fast enough while (presumably) being upset about men (like Alan Jones) making violence suggestive language about women. 

Personally, I have long thought she is best ignored, but it's fair enough that people complain about her getting grants to continue doing whatever she does. 

So, of course, the quality of Catallaxy comments about her is going to be great (that's sarcasm), and include argument over whether she is attractive or not.  Because that matters in a debate about what she said.  This comment struck me as particularly unpleasant, though:

Why has no journalist in the country ever challenged this academic for what he allows and doesn't allow at a blog he can moderate? 

Miranda Devine - expert on black America

What lulz.  Miranda Devine turns up in the New York Post, saying that Biden has lost blacks because of his "you ain't black" statement last week:

“Ain’t black” is Biden’s “deplorables” moment. Yet his supporters seem oblivious to the lethal blow it has delivered to his prospects, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t comprehend the catastrophe of her “basket of deplorables” insult to half of America in 2016.

Biden confirmed what Candace Owens’ “Blexit” movement is all about, the exit by black Americans from a Democratic Party that takes their vote for granted and traps them in a victim narrative.

Candace Owens!  The last time I clicked on something by her, a couple of weeks ago (via Twitter) she was arguing that people shouldn't get so hung up (pardon the pun) on the history of American lynchings.  There were "only" 3,500 blacks lynched over the entire American history, so yeah, it was bad, but let's not get carried away about its significance.  (I paraphrase ever so slightly.)

A sad story about the movie business

Of course, this would have happened thousands of time before, but it's still sad reading about how a guy who, at the age of 62, finally sold a script for a movie, but had the idea taken over by someone famous, who then made dubious claims about the lack of influence of the original work.

The quasi villain is Richard Curtis, who I personally would have liked to see retire from creative writing 30 years ago.  (I think that allows for his TV work, but kills off all of his movies - especially Love Actually.)

A close examination of COVID-19 spread

Interesting story at Science, about how a South African hospital was able to do a very careful trace of how COVID-19 spread through it:

On 9 March, a patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms of COVID-19 visited the emergency department of St Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff linked to the hospital had been infected, and 15 patients had died—fully half the death toll in KwaZulu-Natal province at that time.

Now, scientists at the University of KwaZulu-Natal have published a detailed reconstruction of how the virus spread from ward to ward and between patients, doctors, and nurses, based on floor maps of the hospital, analyses of staff and patient movements, and viral genomes. Their 37-page analysis, posted on the university’s website on 22 May, is the most extensive study of any hospital outbreak of COVID-19 so far. It suggests all of the cases originated from a single introduction, and that patients rarely infected other patients. Instead, the virus was mostly carried around the hospital by staff and on the surfaces of medical equipment.....

The report, which reads like a detective novel, tracks the virus’s spread through five hospital wards, including neurology, surgery, and intensive care units (ICUs), as well as to a nearby nursing home and dialysis center. Remarkably, no staff infections seem to have taken place in the hospital’s COVID-19 ICU, arguably the riskiest area of the hospital. That may be because patients are less infectious by the time they are admitted to intensive care, or because staff there are more diligent about preventing infection, the authors note.

The first patient, who sought help for coronavirus symptoms, only spent a few hours at the hospital, but likely transmitted the virus to an elderly patient admitted the same day for a stroke. The pair were in the hospital’s emergency department at the same time; the first patient was kept separate in a triage area, but that room was reached through the main resuscitation bay, where the stroke patient occupied a bed. (The emergency department was closed in April and opened again this month with an altered layout to improve infection control.) The two were also seen by the same medical officer.

The stroke patient, who developed a fever on 13 March, probably infected the first staff case, a nurse caring for her who developed symptoms on 17 March. A further four patients may have caught the virus from the stroke patient, including a 46-year-old woman admitted for severe asthma who had a bed opposite hers. Both she and the stroke patient died.

But on the whole, patients infected few other patients directly. Instead staff members spread the disease from patient to patient and from department to department—perhaps sometimes without becoming infected themselves. “We think in the main it’s likely to have been from [staff] hands and shared patient care items like thermometers, blood pressure cuffs, and stethoscopes,” says Richard Lessells, an infectious disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform and one of the study leaders. He and the other authors found no evidence that aerosol transmission contributed to the outbreak.

 There is more at the link above.

COVID-19 problems in India

I can't embed this, but there's a short video report on CNA about how the Right wing in India is using COVID-19 to spread ill will towards Muslims.   (Apparently, social media is being used to spread claims such as one that Muslims are spitting on food they sell so as to ensure the spread of the virus.) 

Once again, as example of the way social media can be a dangerous menace.

Word salad of the day

Stan Grant got to write a real word salady piece for The Conversation about the Uluru statement (regarding aboriginal representation in parliament or otherwise), and I am pleased to see that lots of comments are along the lines of this first one:

The problem I, and I believe many Australians have, with articles like this is that it is a word salad of vague concepts and ideas with precisely zero clear policy change proposals. As a normal working bloke who didn’t go to Uni I can honestly say I have no idea what a single part of this article means in the real world.

A voice to parliament? To say what? If you read this article out in parliament you’d put everyone to sleep.

Stan Grant is ponderous in a very Paul Kelly fashion.  So many words to so little effect.

Quick movie review - Jojo Rabbit

Watched it on Saturday.

It often made me laugh, but I can see why it had a limited box office take.  The tone changes are way, way too abrupt. There is one way I thought the film could go some way to redeem that - but it is sort of a spoiler so I will put it below in small print.*

Other than that, the film often looked a lot like a Wes Anderson one, and I see lots of critics noticed that in their reviews.  (I actually read little about this film before seeing it.)   That's not a bad thing, it's just an observation.

I think Taiki Waititi is very talented, and obviously likes to mix up humour with a bit of pathos or sentimentality (even What We Do in the Shadows had romance in it.)    But the broader the satire, the harder it is to pull that off satisfactorily, and a lot of this is pretty broad satire.  So the sudden switches to bleak seriousness are pretty disorientating.

Overall, nice try, well made and well acted.   But not a complete success.

PS:  I think the film shows how we often undervalue the great job that can be done by child actors.  The lead kid in this was really good, in a challenging role.  Yet we never seem to see kids seriously considered for acting awards.  I wonder why...


*  I thought it would have been a nice touch if the father had turned up at the end.  No such luck.

Fear of not social distancing

As I am sure others may have noticed, I get the impression that, at least as far as supermarkets are concerned, a lot of shoppers are no longer taking social distancing all that seriously.

I am finding that I now get the feeling, when people push past close to me with no obvious concern, that I am passing through the invisible cloud of their exhaled breath, containing God knows what.   The whole of a busy supermarket now feels like it could be an invisible viral soup.

Of course, what I should be doing is wearing a facemask to help counter this feeling of helplessness in the face of my fellow careless humans.  But I took a punt and didn't put one on today, and regretted it.

I wonder how many other people have developed this mild form of germophobia...

    

Obviously, yes

The Guardian, dealing with the important stories of the moment:

The Empire Strikes Back at 40: did the Star Wars saga peak too early?

The article notes what many seem to forget:  the movie did not open with uniformly great reviews.  But this helped boost the pleasure when I saw it, as it was one of those movies which I went into with no great expectations, and was delighted at how great it was.   (That also made The Return of the Jedi, which I seem to recall getting better reviews than it deserved, suffer a great deal in comparison.)