Elon Musk is in the news, promoting a Trumpist wingnut meme that Biden is so mentally deficient, he doesn't know what he's doing:
Musk, who said he has voted "overwhelmingly for Democrats," slammed
the Democratic Party and Biden in particular. He suggested that Biden is
something of an empty suit.
"The real president is whoever
controls the teleprompter," the Tesla CEO said. "The path to power is
the path to the teleprompter."
"I do feel like if somebody were to
accidentally lean on the teleprompter, it's going to be like
Anchorman," the CEO added, referencing the 2004 film in which Ron
Burgundy reads whatever is written on the teleprompter, even if it would
ruin his career.
"This administration doesn't seem to get a lot done," Musk said. "The
Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in
the administration who were effective at getting things done."
As with his naive view that "more free speech on Twitter will cure misinformation and propaganda" line, this just shows he is an intellectual lightweight of the dangerous rich libertarian kind. (Ultimately, only interested in his own pet projects, and willing to aid the return of dangerously authoritarian political leadership if it will indulge him.)
Update: About Musk and his honesty, a post at Hot Air discusses the Twitter purchase (and notes that Musk has announced he is voting for the party that's infected with Trumpist authoritarianism and denial of reality) -
Ed wrote earlier about Musk’s latest complaint, that Twitter supposedly hasn’t been forthcoming about the number of spam bots on the site. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine
makes a compelling case that that’s the purest of BS, beginning with
the fact that one of the reasons Musk gave when he announced his offer
for Twitter was that the site supposedly needed new leadership to …
clean up all the spam bots.
Levine thinks he’s trying to welsh on the deal. His offer price of
$54.20 per share seems too high now that various tech stocks, including
Twitter and Tesla, have tanked over the past month. Musk’s alleged
concern about bots reeks of a nonfinancial excuse to walk away now that
he’s overextended. And there are no good remedies for Twitter if he
does, Levine writes.
I reckon (just as many people say in the comments following) that this idea has a distinct air of "too good to be true" about its claimed cost and efficiency, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless:
One thing I am curious about:it is very reliant on components being surrounded by argon. How rare is argon? [Answer - not very - "Argon is the third-most abundant gas in the Earth's atmosphere, at 0.934% (9340 ppmv)"] I assume it's relatively cheap, then.
But what happens if the argon gas escapes and you get normal O2 around the super hot elements of this plant? At least there's no radioactivity involved, even if there is some kind of explosion.
Worth clearing your cookies to read it, if you have to.
Update: worth reading the Slate article on the Tucker Carlson attempt at deflection from blame for his promulgating the same racist theory that inspired the shooter (even allowing that the shooting never cites Carlson or Fox News as a source or inspiration):
Since taking over Bill O’Reilly’s old primetime slot in 2017, Carlson has come to embrace “Trumpism without Trump,” as the Times put it.
That ideology, in Carlson’s interpretation, means a steady diet of
paranoid nativism modulated by seething contempt for anyone who is not a
paranoid nativist. In the world of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the
terms “racist” and “racism” are almost only ever bestowed in bad faith
by leftists hoping to chill public discourse and cow conservatives out
of expressing and/or acting on their beliefs. And so it was both
depressing and predictable that during Monday night’s show—his first
show since the shootings in Buffalo—Carlson heaped scorn on those
pundits and observers who had dared to suggest that the mass murderer who openly announced his own racism was, first and foremost, a racist.
In his monologue, Carlson argued that the top-line takeaway about
Gendron should not be that he was racist, but that he was insane—and,
implicitly, that the unsung villains of the Buffalo attack were the
liberal pundits who had had the gall to connect two very obvious and
proximate dots.“The truth about Payton Gendron does
tell you a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political
leadership,” said Carlson. “Within minutes of Saturday’s shooting,
before all of the bodies of those 10 murdered Americans had even been
identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a
coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political
opponents. ‘They did it!’ they said, immediately. ‘Payton Gendron was
the heir to Donald Trump,’ they told us.”
A quick Google search for the term “Payton Gendron was the heir to
Donald Trump” indicates that no one other than Tucker Carlson himself is
actually saying those specific words or anything particularly like it.
Likewise, no one credible is saying that anyone other than Gendron is
directly responsible for the attack. Carlson surely knows this, just as
he surely knows that his viewers do not particularly care whether or not
the things he says are fair, accurate, or logical. What his viewers
want is to be made to feel like they are the true victims of every real or imaginary outrage that makes the news.
On Fox News, and especially on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the
scariest attacks are always those being systemically waged by liberals
on conservative values. Even in the immediate wake of a definitional
racist massacre, committed by a person whose stated ideology was not
entirely dissimilar from ideas that are routinely voiced on its own
airwaves, Carlson could not help implying that the real victims here
are, perhaps, the conservatives whose speech might be trammeled by
liberals hoping to capitalize on the shooting for their own political
end
“So, what is hate speech? Well, it’s speech that our leaders hate,”
Carlson said on Monday night. “So because a mentally ill teenager
murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political
views out loud. That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve
wanted to tell you for a long time.” Implicit in this response is the
argument that while Gendron’s views and Carlson’s views share a lot of
overlap, it would be unfair to criticize Carlson for holding and
professing those viewpoints, because, in this construction, the racist
opinions and the racist violence are not directly linked. (This sidestep
ignores that white supremacist ideology is inherently violent.) While
the host, in part, was deflecting, the deflection was also a force of
habit. The meta stories that Fox News has always liked to tell when the
actual news is inconvenient or unpleasant for the right have, over time,
become virtually the only stories that the network is able to tell in an era when the Republican Party is at its moral nadir.
It ends:
In a humane and functional polity, our top political leaders and
opinion-makers would want to promote a responsible, fact-based
discourse; would see nothing controversial in acknowledging hard truths
about American history and in condemning racism in the past, present,
and future; and would generally try to avoid voicing and normalizing the
sorts of spurious cultural grievances that might ever motivate
some crackpot to go shoot up a supermarket. This is not the polity we
have today. Instead, we’ve got one where spurious cultural grievances
are the only grievances worth nurturing, a world where the only people
worth directly condemning are those who dare to call racism by its name.
The dead, like the truth, are merely collateral damage.
With his motto “Free indeed!” — an excerpt from scripture that says
freedom from sin is found in Jesus — Mastriano is a hero to some in this
swing state whosay they are fed up with church leaders as well
as political parties they perceive as weak-willed, and with debates
about religious liberty and the advantages of a diverse democracy.
Fueled by a generation of religious leaders arguing that Christianity is
persecuted in America, the new movement wants to see a more explicit,
constitutionally approved dominance of “Christianity” — which to them
means conservative politically, theologically and socially. They see
themselves in a spiritual battle with Satan.
“The forces of darkness are hitting us really hard right now,” Mastriano
told a few hundred people last month at a church parking lot rally in
Pennsburg. “We’re going to bring the state back to righteousness, this
is our day, our hour to take our state back and renew the blessings of
America.”
His wife, Rebbie, then told the crowd that her husband’s opponentsare
not just challenging another candidate but God. “When you’re against
God’s plan, there is nothing that will stop it, and they are very
worried right now that there is nothing that’s going to stop this.”
Other
speakers emphasized to the crowd, which included a man in a Minuteman
costume holding a flag, that this Christian vision is what the Founders
intended. “The Constitution prevents the government from imposing on the
church. It doesn’t say anything about religion imposing itself on the
state,” Rick Crump, a Christian branding expert and community organizer,
told the rally.
This
ethos is very different from earlier iterations of the Religious Right
who were looking to engage with — even win at — mainstream politics,
some experts say.
I think called it "Christian Nationalism" is too soft - calling it Christofascism gives a more accurate name.
Yes, I'm enjoying the threat being made that if people "punish" the LNP for never dealing with its climate change denying, culture warring, "conservative" wing (which I would still guess accounts for about 30% of the government - a large enough slab that is impossible to ignore), it will only cause the Party to go further in that direction.
That would be a good thing, according to gormless Mitchell:
By the way, do you have to be at least 70 to write opinion at that paper?
It's been a long time since I ate at Grill'd, but I'm pretty sure they used to sell the Beyond Burger as their imitation burger.
On the weekend, I was there again, and see they now sell the Impossible burger, which I have never tried before. (I see from Googling that this is a relatively recent change.)
So I tried it in the basic burger version, and it was very, very good. They've really nailed that texture element, which I used to say was the main thing that you could tell was different from real beef. And the taste seemed indistinguishable to me.
I got home and told my fake meat skeptic son that, along with my "reverse Pol Pot" plan (de-populate regional areas so to stop the spread of Right wing ideas), my next law as Benevolent Dictator would have to be to ban beef burgers. There simply is no need for them any more.
Chicken nuggets will probably be next in the firing line, since I've seen a few videos of people tasting plant based ones which they say are indistinguishable.
The online world, and especially the crypto community, is lambasting Madonna upon the release ofher
and Beeple's new collection of sexually graphic NFTs, which include
explicit footage of the singer giving birth to trees, butterflies, and
robotic centipedes. The video clips include close-up shots of the
singer’s genitalia created using scans of Madonna’s body.
That extract is from Fortune, which at least has the good taste not to link to the site where you can watch the tree grow. (Yes, I looked at it, and it is so, so stupid and creepy looking: a good comedian could probably do at least a 30 minute stand up set about it.) Can't she just take up knitting, or something?
Yes, Glenn Greenwald actually says that people who make on line death threats are not the people the target of the threat should worry about - because people who really want to kill you don't tell you ahead of time. It's just an outlet for their anger that, if you take it away, is actually more dangerous. (!)
That Tucker Carlson actually laughs in agreement, when he is one of the biggest pretenders that "Leftists" are threatening his safety, is just ludicrous.
My wife is home with a cough and sore throat, and I have been having (admittedly mild) passing symptoms of a cold too. Both of us did a RAT yesterday that showed a strong negative...
Update: Speaking of Republicans/Conservatives always wanting to be the victim, have a read of the ridiculous lines Ted Cruz was mouthing on Hannity, as shown in this Philip Bump column at the Washington Post.
Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from young mice can improve memory function in older mice, researchers report today in Nature.
A direct brain infusion of young CSF probably improves the conductivity
of the neurons in ageing mice, which improves the process of making and
recalling memories. The team also suggests that the improvements are
largely due to a specific protein in the fluid.
“This is super
exciting from the perspective of basic science, but also looking towards
therapeutic applications,” says Maria Lehtinen, a neurobiologist at
Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts.
(I initially thought the tweets saying that judge's neighbours were supporting the protesters were probably too "good" to be true, but it seems right.)
Yes, I understand the point that no one in a gun happy nation welcomes a group of protesters outside their door. Still, if there is one side that has made a deliberate point of protest with the potential of deadly violence from a gun, it's the wingnut Right, not the Left.
Also, there is no doubt the Right is especially hypocritical in the case of the abortion issue:
That graphic doesn't tell half the story, given the amount of daily harassment abortion clinics - or even suspected abortion clinics - have endured.
I would assume it's because if voters don't see abortion affecting them personally, they won't change their vote regardless of what they think about its legal status.
I would guess that it may take some high profile case (or cases) of women dying due to inability to get an abortion under new State laws to change this.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) on Sunday refused to rule out the
possibility that his state would ban certain forms of contraception,
sidestepping questions about what would happen next if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
I'm starting to think that even the pro-mining voters of Queensland and NSW can't stop a Labor victory:
Speaking of the pro-miners, there was a 30 minute show on ABC News on the weekend about this - with the usual vibe of "we have to listen to the concerns of the mining towns."
Quite frankly, I don't know why we have to.
As was shown, people already know of small towns that have died after the local mine closed. If you live in a town that expands under mining projects, you should accept that the mining money is not going to last forever, and that governments therefore have every reason to be careful as to how much they invest in infrastructure (hospitals, etc) to support a place that they can confidently know is going to face a dramatic population downturn as soon as its key economic reason reason for existing goes away.
And yeah, climate change means less coal mining. Live with it.
I'm thoroughly sick of the pussy footing around the sensitivities of people on this issue. Sure, they can make their money while the going's good, but don't expect that it's going to last forever.
Quite a good essay at Aeon here about an idea popularised by Marx that has been influential. Here's a part near the start:
...the most peculiar project born from Marx’s notes was released a year after his death. Engels titled it The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. I’ll call it The Origin, for short.
The Origin is like Yuval Noah Harari’s blockbuster Sapiens
(2014) but written by a 19th-century socialist: a sweeping take on the
dawn of property, patriarchy, monogamy and materialism. Like many of its
contemporaries, it arranged societies on an evolutionary ladder from
savagery to barbarism to civilisation. Although wrong in most ways, The Origin was described
by a recent historian as ‘among the more important and politically
applicable texts in the Marxist canon’, shaping everything from feminist
ideology to the divorce policies of Maoist China.
Of the text’s legacies, the most popular is primitive communism. The
idea goes like this. Once upon a time, private property was unknown.
Food went to those in need. Everyone was cared for. Then agriculture
arose and, with it, ownership over land, labour and wild resources. The
organic community splintered under the weight of competition. The story
predates Marx and Engels. The patron saint of capitalism, Adam Smith,
proposed something similar, as did the 19th-century American
anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Even ancient Buddhist texts described
a pre-state society free of property. But The Origin is the
idea’s most important codification. It argued for primitive communism,
circulated it widely, and welded it to Marxist principles.
The essay goes on to talk about evidence from modern anthropology that goes against the idea.
Mind you, the evidence from New Catallaxy is that Australian right wingers, who are extraordinarily gullible when it comes to American conspiracy theory about Trump, still find that Aussie-style Qanon garbage is just too much. Bosi will be lucky to receive a couple of hundred votes.
The New Catallaxy dumb ageing cranks are, however, swayed by "massive voter fraud at the Trump election" conspiracy, as evidenced by them linking to article about that D'Souza "documentary" 2,000 Mules.
As this article explains, the movie proves precisely nothing, and it's easy to see the misinterpretation (and lack of understanding) of information that has been manipulated by conspiracy theorists who make money by promoting it to the gullible.
It's once again, as always, a case of Trumpists seeing something they don't understand, saying "Hey, that looks suspicious to me!", and then thinking something has been proved.
Yes, yes: pragmatists will argue that this is what politicians do when campaigning - and look at the amount of sucking up Rudd did to News Corp and others to get and try and keep the job.
But, just as it did Rudd no good, what is the point of sucking up to such a has-been who surely can't keep "working" forever. Mind you, ancient Sydney based radio personalities seem to have found some magic elixir to stay alive enough to keep using a microphone, even if they don't enjoy the best of health. It's not just confined to Right wing figures either - look at Phillip Adams. And here's a photo of John Laws (86, but he could pass for older) from today:
Can anyone explain why such a rich man can't afford a decent haircut?
Denis Muller really puts the boot into the News Corp abandonment of journalism in its coverage of the Australian election. Good. [Don't know why I thought it was Michelle Grattan - I was posting in a hurry, of course. I was a bit surprised if it was Michelle, because I haven't been completely happy with her approach either, this election.]
I've been to a couple of Asian restaurants in the last few weeks, over in the heavily Chinese/Asian part of Brisbane (Sunnybank/Sunnybank Hills/Runcorn).
As I said to my family, there is something very pleasing about the liveliness of the way Asian family and friends gather in groups to eat. I mean, eating in Western food places just does not have the same communitarian/family vibe as going to Chinese restaurant where the tables have a dozen or more people eating together, often with kids of all ages, and a busy staff running all over the place.
And you get the impression this is a regular part of their life - good Asian restaurants in predominantly Asian parts of town are very busy.
My son thought I was ignoring things like bar-b-ques at home as a family/communitarian thing that Australians do - but really, we don't hold big ones very often, do we..
Over the weekend, I realised that two women who, if I had been asked, I would have guessed incorrectly had already died, came to mind: Imelda Marcos, and Shirley MacLaine.
I was thinking of Imedla for obvious reasons (her son is probably going to be the next president of her country), but why Shirley came to mind, I don't know.
How old is Sullivan? 58? He's old enough to know better.
I posted before about a Noah Smith substack post in which he countered the American Right wing myth that America has become some sort of dystopian social nightmare in recent years (all caused by Democrats and "Leftism", of course), which goes to show that a much younger man (with an eccentric fondness for rabbits) has a much better grasp on history than someone who has been making a living out of political commentary for decades.
Anyway - back to abortion in the US. I see that Sullivan has joined in with the Creighton "why are Leftists so scared of democracy dealing with abortion in the US?" line.
This is so naive, and so dismissive of the obvious problems with the current operation of democracy in the US, I almost can't be bothered dealing with it. OK, I will, anyway:
*of course if the courts have found a constitutional right that was left in place and re-affirmed over 50 years, and then (on what's obviously essentially religious grounds) remove it, the beneficiaries of that right are going to be unhappy;
* of course the country has enormous problems with how democracy is implemented there - from political interference with gerrymandering, the neverending and politically motivated fiddling with electoral laws, the effort that has to be put in to even get people enrolled and out to vote, to the dubious effect of the Electoral College;
* of course, it was via an ethically illegitimate exercise of democracy - the Republican stacking of the Supreme Court, and Republican judges willing to lie and dissemble about the importance they would give Roe as precedent - which is leading to the overthrown of Roe. It's already an example of the failure of democracy as implemented in the nation right now, writ large!
* of course there is a problem with trying to work out a democratic compromise with people who have built themselves into their own belief universe, not just on the question of "when does life begin" but on something as basic as "who won the last Presidential election".
* of course it's dismissive of women's interests to take the attitude "pro-abortionists will just have to wait for the inevitable Right wing over-reach" i.e. to wait for the high profile examples of women who have died - or are prosecuted for having an early abortion - rather than relying on the protection of a Court found right.
Roe may not have been perfect, but it was a compromise on an already vexed issue that could have been made to work. And the likes of Sullivan and Creighton turn a deliberate blind eye to the rise of Christian Nationalism (read "fascism") that has captured a large chunk of the American Right that makes dealing with many issues "democratically" so extremely difficult.
* David Koch this morning was extremely dismissive of the answers Peter Dutton was giving regarding the Solomon Islands situation. He did all but roll his eyes and say "yeah, you're wasting my time"; instead he just seemed to cut the live cross very abruptly.
* Shortly after that, there was a pretty clear defence of Albanese not being able to list the 6 NDIS policy points without looking at the printed list.
* On Twitter, there is a ongoing strong pushback on the "gotcha" style of questions - and although Twitter does not reflect the general public (especially as one tends to follow people already on your own side of politics), I suspect that there is a broad public sentiment that the media is doing a terrible job in this campaign, including with the "gotcha" attempts.
Greens candidate for Brisbane, Stephen Bates, has
taken out an advertisement on Grindr, “the world’s largest social
networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people”.
“You always come first with the Greens,” one reads, and another says: “Spice up Canberra with a third”.
Speaking
directly to a specific market – in this case, a younger, LGBTQ+ market –
could work, according to Dr Andrew Hughes, a political marketing
lecturer at the Australian National University who says for any other
party it might come across as “tokenistic”.
I do find this supports my feeling that while the Greens are in the right space on the environment and climate change, and (possibly) economics, they have a sort of air of immaturity about them (when they're not being overly earnest on "culture war" issues - which I also think is a kind of immaturity) on other issues that really puts me off voting for them.
Last month, police in India arrested a 46-year-old man who allegedly murdered his wife because his breakfast had too much salt.
"Nikesh
Ghag, a bank clerk in Thane, near the western city of Mumbai, strangled
his 40-year-old wife in a fit of rage because the sabudana [tapioca
pearls or sago] khichdi she served was very salty," police official
Milind Desai told the BBC.
The
couple's 12-year-old son, who witnessed the crime, told the police that
his father followed his mother, Nirmala, into the bedroom complaining
about salt and started beating her.
"He
kept crying and begging his father to stop," Mr Desai said, "but the
accused kept hitting his wife and strangled her with a rope."
Some other examples of death for food related matters are listed:
The murder of a woman by her husband, triggered by a quarrel over food, routinely makes headlines in India.
Take some recent cases:
In
January, a man was arrested in Noida, a suburb of the capital Delhi,
for allegedly murdering his wife for refusing to serve him dinner.
In June 2021, a man was arrested in Uttar Pradesh after he allegedly killed his wife for not serving salad with his meal.
Four months later, a man in Bangalore allegedly beat his wife to death for not cooking fried chicken properly.
More than 40% of women and 38% of men told government surveyors that it
was ok for a man to beat his wife if she disrespected her in-laws,
neglected her home or children, went out without telling him, refused
sex or didn't cook properly. In four states, more than 77% women
justified wife beating.
In
most states more women than men justified wife beating and in every
single state - the only exception being Karnataka - more women than men
thought it was okay for a man to beat his wife if she didn't cook
properly.
The
numbers have gone down from the previous survey five years ago - when
52% women and 42% men justified wife beating - but the attitudes haven't
changed, says Amita Pitre, who leads Oxfam India's gender justice
programme.
Roe vs. Wadewas
decided with a 7-2 vote, and not along partisan lines. Those who ruled
in favor were as follows, with the president who nominated them and the
party of that president indicated in parentheses:
With the news that it appears the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court is set to overrule Roe v Wade, it is of course worth remembering that members of said majority were quite willing to lie about their views:
As someone else pointed out in the thread following:
And:
Update: Gee, my 2019 post arguing that laws on abortion should be about compromise (of the type set up in Roe) still reads fine to me.
Shares in the Google parent fell more than 5 per cent in after-hours trading after Alphabet reported a 23 per cent increase in revenue in the three months to the end of March, to $68bn, slightly below forecasts for $68.1bn. A year prior, revenues had increased 34 per cent. Net profits fell 8 per cent from a year ago to $16.4bn.
I increasingly have the desire for politicians on the Left to tell people that they are simply being stupid if they think the energy status quo is not going to have to change quickly, even if there is a cost.
In short, people need to be told there has to be temporary sacrifice.
Basically, there's a part of my mind that always whispers to me that it's more dangerous to be flying at high altitude that it is to be going up or down from that altitude (with the exception of flying into storms, of course). I would guess that this is very much not true, with most accidents happening at below cruising height. I'll check later.
But still - I find it difficult to sleep on planes at all, and with seats as close as they are, it's hard to get comfortable. A flight of about 8 to 9 hours is fine, but more than double that?
So, overall, I would prefer to have one landing on the way to either London or New York, should be I be going to either. Yes, any more than one would be a pain, but one landing seems "right".
A crisis in fertilizer chains of supply might finally get some serious reconsideration going for how nations deal with their sewerage, given that scientists have been saying for ages that it's being wasted. [OK, yes I know, a lot of solids have been put to use as fertilizer in Western countries, but it's been controversial, and I think the separate management of urine has been something proposed and trialled on a small scale very often, but never widely implemented anywhere.]
I don't like linking to the New Catallaxy site, but just have a read of this post (and the comments following) to luxuriate in the "Conservatives for poor, misunderstood Russia" vibe oozing from the site. (I use "luxuriate" ironically, of course.)
I am also amused how over recent weeks the unctuous-for-Russia owner of the site, dover beach, now considers himself a military analysis expert.
As Noah Smith wrote in his post Putin's War and the Chaos Climbers, about how the worst of the Left and Right have united in Putin/Russia sympathy (oh no, they'll say, of course Putin has done the wrong thing - it's just that it's completely understandable why he did it and Ukraine and the West were asking for it), there are a few possible explanations to consider:
a.he (Putin) just appeals to authoritarians (and it is clear the American Right has moved to embracing authoritarian to get their way - look at the gerrymandering and enforcement of religious views on abortion by stacking the Supreme Court);
b. But there is also this:
Another, more subtle theory — which I’ve advanced myself — is something I
call Last Bastion Theory. This is the tendency of people in the U.S.
and Europe to view Russia as the distant protector of something they
hold dear. For traditionalists, Russia can be seen as the last protector
of Christianity, or of traditional gender roles. White supremacists might see Russia as the last White empire on the globe.
And for leftists who view America as the world’s imperialistic Great
Satan, Russia might seem like a bastion of resistance. Of course, the
Russian government goes out of its way to encourage
such perceptions. To all of these groups, the distant sphinx of the
Kremlin might have seemed like a power capable of offering support while
representing no threat.
c. Noah then expands upon any way of looking at it:
The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game
of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that
“Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime,
he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I
see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left
as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal
order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe
ideologies to advance their power.
This might sound wildly accusatory, but it’s not — it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.
It
was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement
and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq,
laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian
conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative
paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at
once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump —
sort of took over the party.
Yup.
So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to
want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO
loss. This doesn’t mean they’re ready to cheer for Putin openly, or even
to hope for his victory — the blazing moral clarity of the situation is
still too strong for that. But it does mean that they feel the need to
muddy the waters, to curb U.S. support for Ukraine and make the
establishment look irresolute, and to prepare narratives that would
allow them to take advantage of a Putin victory.
What these
people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to
the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible
systems of human organization.
Well, what a coincidence. Just when I start talking about Pure Land Buddhism and how it sounds (more or less) consistent with a Many Worlds multiverse (inspired, as I was, by Everything Everywhere All at Once), up on my Youtube recommendations pops up this:
Just in case you can't see it - the title is "Pure Land Buddhism: The Mahayana Multiverse". And it was only published this week, too.
In fact, the whole channel that this comes from (Religion for Breakfast) is new to me - but it's very good. The guy who runs it is has a doctorate (I presume in religious studies) and is currently in (of all places) Cairo, but he's very listen-able and crams a lot of information in a short space of time. I recommend, for example, his video on the development of the idea of the Anti-Christ.
Thank you, almighty Google for guiding me to it.
Anyway, I mentioned this "co-incidence" to my son, and mused again (I'm sure I've raised it before) the theory that Google is already so all knowing, and will continue to grow in knowledge, that it is likely the beginning of the God that will be fully formed by the end of the Universe (the Tipler-ian God). In fact, it might already be alive and at least God-like: how would we know?
He responded with something like "Geez, it's only cookies".
Oh yea of little Google faith.
Anyway, I also asked him if there already was a Church of Google - something I've probably Googled before, but I don't recall the results.
So I checked again today, and note that a site now called The Reformed Church of Google has been around for a long time, although it's just an inactive re-creation of a parody religion "Googlism" set up in 2009 by one Matt MacPherson but which he let lapse in 2016. Most of the content is pretty dated, but still gives me some amusement:
Anyhow, while we are on the topic of religion, another Youtube recommendation which amused me somewhat is this one, about the once (and by once, I mean around the time of Buddha) relatively popular (although it's hard to see why) Indian sect known as the Ajivikas:
The problems of time and change was one of the main interests of the
Ajivikas. Their views on this subject may have been influenced by Vedic
sources, such as the hymn to Kala (Time) in Atharvaveda.[48] Both Jaina and Buddhist texts state that Ājīvikas believed in absolute determinism, absence of free will, and called this niyati.[8][12]
Everything in human life and universe, according to Ajivikas, was
pre-determined, operating out of cosmic principles, and true choice did
not exist.[12][49] The Buddhist and Jaina sources describe them as strict fatalists, who did not believe in karma.[8][16]
The Ajivikas philosophy held that all things are preordained, and
therefore religious or ethical practice has no effect on one's future,
and people do things because cosmic principles make them do so, and all
that will happen or will exist in future is already predetermined to be
that way. No human effort could change this niyati and the karma ethical theory was a fallacy.[16]
James Lochtefeld summarizes this aspect of Ajivika belief as, "life and
the universe is like a ball of pre-wrapped up string, which unrolls
until it was done and then goes no further".[8]
Riepe states that the Ajivikas belief in predeterminism does not mean that they were pessimistic. Rather, just like Calvinists belief in predeterminism in Europe, the Ajivikas were optimists.[50]
The Ajivikas simply did not believe in the moral force of action, or in
merits or demerits, or in after-life to be affected because of what one
does or does not do. Actions had immediate effects in one's current
life but without any moral traces, and both the action and the effect
was predetermined, according to the Ajivikas.[50]
Like Jains, Ajiviks wore no clothes, and lived as ascetic monks in
organised groups. They were known to practice extremely severe
austerities, such as lying on nails, going through fire, exposing
themselves to extreme weather, and even spending time in large earthen
pots for penance! There was no caste discrimination and people from all
walks of life joined them.
Another Youtube video did explain, though, that they still believed that there was a soul that had to sort of evolve upwards before being released from the life and death cycle. So I guess that has something to do with their idea that there was a point in extreme asceticism?
Or maybe, just maybe, it's a religion that disappeared because as a philosophy it made no sense?
It's nice to read online people who have had the same type of feelings at times. (Although, I do wonder, can you divide people into two groups - those who sometimes feel on the edge of epiphany, and those who have never had that feeling? Because I feel pretty sure that there are some who just don't think enough to be epiphany adjacent. Or am I being elitist?)
%20_%20Twitter.png)
%20_%20Twitter.png)
%20_%20Twitter.png)
%20_%20Twitter.png)
%20_%20Twitter.png)
