A stupid "scare word" tactic used for over 70 years

 

Maths and abstraction

There's a book review at Nature that is somewhat interesting - Axiomatics: Mathematical Thought and High Modernism, which apparently argues this:

The work of mathematicians from centuries or even millennia ago speaks to their living peers in ways that practitioners of other disciplines must find baffling. Euclid’s proof that the list of prime numbers never ends is just as elegant and clear now as it was in around 300 bc, when it appeared in his book Elements.

Yet mathematics has undergone tremendous changes, especially during the twentieth century, when it pushed ever deeper into the realm of abstraction. This upheaval even involved a redefinition of the definition itself, as Alma Steingart explains in Axiomatics.

A historian of science, Steingart sees this revolution as central to the modernist movements that dominated the mid-twentieth century in the arts and social sciences, particularly in the United States. Mathematicians’ push for abstraction was mirrored by — and often directly triggered — parallel trends in economics, sociology, psychology and political science. Steingart quotes some scientists who saw their liberation from merely explaining the natural world as analogous to how abstract expressionism freed painting from the shackles of reality.

Further down it notes this:

To the mathematical-theory builder, abstraction is not a destination, but a journey. As Steingart puts it, ‘abstract’ is not an adjective but a verb: ‘to abstract’. In the 1930s, owing largely to the influence of German mathematician Emmy Noether, mathematicians began to construct axiomatic systems that were increasingly abstract and general. This revealed familiar objects such as numbers, card shuffles and geometrical symmetries to be special cases of the same concept.

The trend towards abstraction and generalization is often associated with a school of mathematics that blossomed in France after the Second World War. But, as Steingart shows, it took root in the 1930s in the United States and came to define the country’s mid-century mathematical culture. Steingart exemplifies the trend with the story of Foundations of Algebraic Topology, a 1952 book by US mathematicians Samuel Eilenberg and Norman Steenrod. It dealt with various calculation techniques to distinguish between geometric shapes, but the authors introduced the subject backwards, claiming that students should first familiarize themselves with highly technical algebraic tools and only later learn their relevance to shapes, or why the tools existed in the first place.

This reminds me of the argument Paul Johnson made in Modern Times (his history of most of the 20th century) - that the relativism in Einstein's physics introduced (or helped spread) moral relativism to the masses.   (I know many dispute that, but I think technology and science probably does have subtle, not always recognised, effects on the psychology of the masses.)   

The classic graph (updated to 2022)

 

This amused me

So while Twitter staggers on (everyone agrees that it isn't as good as it used to be, it's just that the alternatives aren't really there yet) I'm still looking at it and finding myself amused by the odd thread:

Red state crime

Seems not to be well known:

 

Speaking of crime, Noah Smith seems to have actually found something to praise Australia about:  the way we give lengthy training to police (compared to the trivial amount given in the US.)   From his free to read Substack post about this:

Compared to the number of deaths at the hands of police:

One of the reasons for obvious policing problems in the US which I think Noah could have touched upon, but didn't, is the way they have an absolute myriad of different police type forces at all different levels of government.   Now, with 50 states, and a big federal government, I would have said that there was always going to be at least (say) 70 or 90 different "policing" organisations across the nation.  But the true figure, according to Wikipedia, is astounding:

Policing in the United States is conducted by "around 18,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, all with their own rules". Every state has its own nomenclature for agencies, and their powers, responsibilities and funding vary from state to state.^[3] 2008 census data from the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)^[4] revealed that this constitutes:

• 73 federal agencies
• 50 primary state law enforcement agencies
• 638 other state agencies
• 1,733 special jurisdiction agencies
• 3,063 sheriff's offices
• 12,501 municipal, county, tribal, and regional police departments

Well, that's crazy...

 

As expected, record rainfall causes disasters

The rainfall in Auckland that caused last weekend's flooding really was remarkable:

This marks an unprecedented rainfall event for Auckland and its surrounding areas, with some places getting a season's worth of rain in one day.

• Auckland has recorded more than 769% of its normal January monthly rainfall and over 38% of its "entire ANNUAL rainfall" as of Monday morning local time, according to New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).
• Auckland Airport halted flights until Saturday after almost 11 inches of rain fell, flooding parts of the terminal and stranding hundreds of people over Friday night.

By the numbers: Kumeu, a suburb north of Auckland, observed 79% of its normal summer rainfall in just 15 hours, with more than 6.5 inches of rain, per NIWA.

When you see pictures not just of floods, but the landslides that follow, and you note that this is what is happening under just 1.1 degrees of temperature rise, you really have to wonder how climate change lukewarmers (the "it's real, but not as big a deal as they make out" types) can still get that to make sense in their heads.   

"Let's just wait and see how cities and town cope with the level on increased rainfall intensity at 2 degrees" just isn't a credible option.   (Not that it ever was.)   

As expected, conspiracy self destructs

This really was very funny to watch - some idiot on Fox News being shown up, live, when he attempts to keep a Paul Pelosi conspiracy going:

 

As far as I can tell, the only significant figure who has offered a (brief, and hardly adequate) apology about helping spread a ridiculous conspiracy is Elon Musk.    The Independent calls it a "half hearted" apology, and notes that it was in response to a tweet by a woman mostly famous for claiming Bill Clinton raped her (hence, it seems, he still gets to stir up anti Democrat support at the same time.)

I still think it's kind of ridiculous that the Californian justice system didn't push back harder on swirling, politically influential, rumours, when it had the evidence to dispel them sitting on a shelf all this time.

How soon before we have a black Pope?

This article at Crux comes up with some surprising figures showing that the Catholic Church not only has had big growth in Africa, but in terms of participation in it, the numbers really blow away some of the "traditional"  Catholic nations of the world:

In Nigeria, a reported 94 percent of Catholics say they attend Mass at least weekly, followed by Kenya at 73 percent. Lebanon clocks in at a robust 69 percent and the Philippines at 56. By way of contrast, the highest percentage anywhere in Europe is in Poland, at 52 percent, and in western Europe, the best performer is Italy at 34 percent.

The WVS study also asks people to say whether they consider themselves “religious,” independent of how often they attend religious services, and the CARA blog note the two things do not always correlate – large percentages of Lebanese say they go to Mass, for example, but the share of Catholics considering themselves “religious” is no more than in the UK.

A better correlation, according to the CARA analysis, is between both Mass attendance and religiosity on the one hand, and per capita GDP on the other. With a couple of striking exceptions, the poorer a country is, the more vibrantly religious it’s likely to be.

(Those exceptions include Brazil, where Mass attendance is lower than what one would expect given per capita GDP, and in Italy, where it’s higher.)

Now for the numbers:

The two largest Catholic countries in the world are Brazil and Mexico, with Catholic populations of 123 million and 97 million respectively. Yet Mexico has a Mass attendance rate of 47 percent and Brazil just 8, which means that together, they see about 55.4 million Catholics showing up for church every Sunday.

Nigeria and Congo together, meanwhile, generate 68 million weekly Mass-goers. In other words, Africa’s two largest Catholic nations outperform the two biggest in Latin America by about 20 percent.

Drilling down, the gap would only grow. Colombia, with Latin America’s highest Mass attendance rate at 54 percent, has 36 million Catholics, meaning 19.4 million are regularly practicing. Uganda, with a similar Catholic population of 34 million, would produce 28.4 million weekly Mass-goers, or 38 percent more.

While Catholicism officially numbers around 1.3 billion adherents worldwide, a good share of that total is fairly nominal. In terms of setting the tone within the church, those who are more active generally punch far above their weight – generating a greater share of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, for instance, as well as various lay roles.

This is likely to be a very substantial issue for the cultural evolution of the Church.   

Yeah, but no, to Nope

I watched the recent science fiction (UFO themed) film Nope last night.  

It didn't give me much reason to revise my opinion of writer/director Jordan Peele.   He makes movies which are very competently made - I mean, they look good and are well acted, and always have some meancing foreboding - but I am never satisfied with the resolution/explanation of what's been going on.

That said, I would say I enjoyed this one more than his first two movies, because I basically like the UFO trope in nearly any form.   But really, this movie reaches a point where it doesn't make psychological sense for the characters to do what they do.    And perhaps I can say that about all of his films - things happen without real logic, as they do in dreams or nightmares.   As for the explanation as to what has been going on - it's a bit of a silly idea, and this might sound an odd complaint if you haven't seem the film, but I could have gone with it more if there was different design work on the mystery thing.  But the way it  carried on at the end, it just wasn't convincing.  

I repeat my earlier complaint:  can he please stop writing his own stories, and at least work with a story collaborator?

   

A Chinese philosopher of note

Although I had watched a video or two about Daoism recently, it's not a philosophical approach of that great an interest to me (although recognising it as influencing the ill defined Force in Star Wars was is always neat.) 

Having said that, I was interested in this recent The Conversation article on Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (also known as Zhuang Zhou or Master Zhuang), a Daoist figure, but not with a simple approach.  

As the article says:

What is known as the Golden Age of Chinese Philosophy lasted from the sixth to the third century BCE in the period of the Zhou dynasty. The flourishing of different philosophical views during that time is known as the Hundred Schools of Thought.

Intellectual society existed to guide society and its rulers towards the Way (also known as the Tao) – the central concept and practical feature of Taoism.

The two dominant schools of the Hundred Schools of Thought were Confucianism and Mohism. Broadly speaking, Confucianism centralises ritual propriety and familial piety as just some of the necessary virtues of the “gentleman” – that is, the upstanding and model citizen or ruler. 

The Mohists were critical of the Confucians. They advocated a calculated impartiality in our distribution of care – a view in many ways reminiscent of what the West would later term “utilitarianism”.  

A common critique of Confucianism is that it places too much emphasis on social order through rituals and hierarchies. One could argue, with respect to the Mohists, that too much emphasis is placed on establishing a universal moral principle in a way that risks overlooking the complex features of our individual moral lives.

Zhuangzi opposed the full spectrum of such views, supposing instead that being persuaded by the Confucians or the Mohists, for example, depended largely on one’s individual perspective. Traditions and schools of thought set transcendental ideals, which risk drawing our souls out of us in their quest for righteousness and truth.

For Zhuangzi, what really matters is that we maintain a sensible, sceptical distance from conventional distinctions and resist committing to any one specific worldview.

 This paragraph reminded me a bit of Wittgenstein:

We should not be overly sceptical, however. “Words are not just blowing wind.” We must simply remember that words “have something to say” and that language is only a repository for meanings, not meaning itself. 

And indeed, now that I look at the (very detailed entry) on Zhuangzi at the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Wittgenstein gets a mention:

Indeed, much of the Zhuangzi’s philosophical appeal may stem from its seemingly deliberate open-ended texture, the interpretive malleability of its dialogues which invites, even perhaps requires, us to join the author(s) in their philosophical reflection.

This appeal stems only partly from the quality and sophistication of his episodes; each illuminated a patch of philosophical territory ending with a question for further pondering—rather like Nietzsche or the Later Wittgenstein. Each exchange presents or illustrates shards of insight with open-textured conclusions—all laced with Zhuangzi’s obvious joy in exploring paradox—particularly linguistic ones of the sort that appeal to analytic Western thinkers. 

I get the feeling I should read more about him.

This amused me

Hairy post

At the Washington Post, this curious story:

Humans still have the genes for a full coat of body hair.  Research reveals these genes are not gone but muted... 

There is also this bit of info, which I am not sure if I had read before, or not:

Despite very different appearances and behaviors, humans share much of their DNA with other mammals: 99 percent with chimpanzees, 85 percent with mice and 80 percent with cows.

Would I have guessed we are significantly genetically closer to mice than cows?   Don't think so.  But I do like rats and rodents generally, so I don't mind.

Indigenous academia talk

Let me continue my complaint about the way so much indigenous advocacy seems so deeply based in vague academic sociology language that is full of waffle and light on practicalities.  

The Brisbane academic Chelsea Watego has a lengthy Wikipedia page detailing her qualifications (and some recent controversy in her private life).  She's going to be giving a lecture in Melbourne, and this is what it will be about:

Indigenist health humanities is an emerging field of research that foregrounds Indigenous intellectual sovereignty and survival, locally and globally. It seeks to mobilise intellectual collectives through the shared values expressed in the Inala Manifesto which extend our investments in health beyond the prevailing biomedical frame and attends more explicitly to the socio-political conditions in which racialized health inequalities are produced. Here, Watego considers the applicability of such values in the context of calls to decolonise health and community care – the premise, the promise and the pitfalls.

And some more explanation of the talk:

Watego appears at the Wheeler Centre to deliver a lecture exploring one of the nation’s most pressing topics: can we decolonise health and community care?

Following her lecture, Watego will be joined by PhD students and emerging First Nations experts in the Health Humanities field, Petah Atkinson and Beau Jayde Cubillo. They’ll discuss challenging settler-colonialism through Indigenist health humanities, foregrounding Indigenous intellectual sovereignty in research, and the role of Health Humanities as a new field committed to the survival and the autonomy of Indigenous peoples locally and globally.

She got sympathetic treatment in Nature in October 2022 in a story about her complaint that the University of Queensland didn't give her a good enough workspace:

Then, in 2020, Watego won an even larger ARC grant, worth nearly Aus$1.8 million, to establish a new field — Indigenist health humanities. She and her team moved to an old building that leaked, into an office up three flights of stairs. Her space was still nowhere near the school or the faculty to which she belonged. When a woman of colour in a neighbouring office revealed that she had previously filed a discrimination case against the university, it clarified Watego’s views on the accommodation. The university, she says, was sending her a message: “There’s no space for us in these institutions.”

Watego says that she detailed the poor working conditions in a 2019 race- and sex-discrimination complaint against the University of Queensland, which centred on her recruitment to a leadership position. The university told Nature that it would not comment on individual staff matters....

Last year, Watego says she dropped the case against the University of Queensland ahead of it going to court. She says that was mostly because of a lack — in her opinion — of legal support from her union. The National Tertiary Education Union did not respond to specific questions about the case, but, in a public statement last year, it said that it disagreed with Watego’s characterization and that it had given her “considered and professional advice” on her claim. Watego says she eventually quit the University of Queensland and joined Queensland University of Technology (QUT), also in Brisbane, where she feels included.

Uhuh.  The next bit, though:

But by tackling racism head on, Watego says her work seems to pose a threat to the institutions that house it. And, she says, her research must address race as an intellectual project. “I have a responsibility to my own people,” Watego says. Singh says that the backlash faced by researchers who “take the fight to their oppressors” can be fierce, exerting a serious toll on their physical and mental health, and can even lead to burnout.

Watego has faced strong resistance, and devising strategies around that is exhausting, she says. She is sometimes seen as a ‘radical’ researcher or a ‘difficult’ and ‘antagonistic’ person, and at the University of Queensland, she says she was excluded from regular staff meetings and Indigenous events, such as sashing ceremonies for graduating students. She describes several instances in which she was invited to write articles for a journal, but after peer review and legal scrutiny, the works were not published, and she had to find new venues for them.

In her writing, Watego often describes how her experience of racism in academia wore her down. “I bought into the idea of academic excellence offering some protection from racial violence in the workplace. And I would come to learn that that was not the case,” she says. “That’s what broke me.”

The stress manifested in many ways — in weight gain, high blood pressure and a tendency to grind her teeth at night, to the point that one fell out. It has also cost her her marriage, and the separation from her husband took a toll on her five children. But, she says, those experiencing racial violence outside academic institutions have it much harder. And now, at QUT, Watego finally feels her work is valued, especially by the Indigenous leadership.

You can also read the Tribunal's decision about her attempt to have police who arrested her outside a nightclub in 2020 done for racial discrimination.   

She makes useful contributions on Twitter like this:

And as for her field of Indigenist health humanities, you can read a 2021 paper about it here:   it's so full of waffle, like this:

Indigenist Health Humanities seeks to bridge the knowledge gap of Indigenous health
by broadening the intellectual investment: inviting humanities and social science per-
spectives about the social world that Indigenous people occupy to better understand its
role in the production of health, illness, and inequality. This is particularly salient given
the increasing recognition of the social and cultural determinants of health, both locally
and globally [15 ,16 ]. The assertion of an ‘Indigenist’ health humanities, as opposed to
the emerging fields of medical and health humanities, is an important demarcation that
recognises the violence of the humanities upon Indigenous peoples. Indigenist Health
Humanities makes explicit the criticality of critical Indigenous studies and, particularly,
Rigney’s Indigenist research principles of resistance, political integrity, and privileging
of Indigenous voices [14 ]. Indigenist Health Humanities insists upon a foregrounding

of Indigenous intellectual sovereignty to resist and remedy the prevailing racist research
paradigms found across both health and humanities. Similarly, Indigenist Health Hu-
manities is not a field whose parameters are defined by the Indigeneity of researchers or
research subjects; rather, it is a field that regards Indigenous knowledges as foundational
for knowing not just an ancient past, but a possible future. In being Indigenist, rather than
Indigenous, neither the knowers or known must be Indigenous; however, the principles of
Indigenist research, as expressed by Rigney, provide the parameters by which knowledge
is produced.

 
Indigenist Health Humanities as a field of research harnesses a holistic and reparative
methodology in the context of Australian health research. It represents a new Indigenous
health research paradigm that can revitalise efforts to improve health beyond an Indigenous
Australian context.

Etcetera, etcetera.

 

About that indigenous Voice referendum

This is how I currently see it:

1.   It is correct to believe that the publicity given to the high crime rate in the Northern Territory, and elsewhere (including the recent high profile murder in Brisbane), from indigenous offenders is not going to help with the referendum to give a constitutional voice to aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.  Voting "yes" will be seen by some as akin to rewarding anti-social behaviour and a political grouping that has no control over its lawless members. 

2.  I understand the irony in this - the indigenous advocacy world will insist that because they haven't had the type of input needed to government, the social situation has deteriorated, and the Voice is what is needed, in the long run, to help address entrenched disadvantage, etc.  

3.   But the problem is - let's be honest here - what really is the basis for believing that this means of giving input into government decisions has any prospect of achieving better results on the ground than that of past and current input?   I mean, the final report of the Indigenous Voice Co-design Process makes it 100% clear that there is already a lot of effort to gain local input, even after ATSIC was wound up, and the Voice seems to be just more of the same.   This example of the (awful) bureaucratic writing style of the report explains:

I can't help but feel that the whole Voice idea is just an attempt at creating some sort of supercharged resurrected version of ATSIC - have a look at this article about it worked while it existed - which is very much about bureaucratic empire building that doesn't address the fundamental problem of internal conflict within the world of indigenous advocacy, which is my next point.       

 4.   Isn't the problem that indigenous politics is fraught with internal dissent, particularly over the extent to which government (or local communities) can be "paternalistic" in trying to address issues such as alcohol and drug use, domestic violence, and how people can spend their money?    There are always elements within indigenous advocacy - often within the same community - which will welcome strict controls as the only way to make a dysfunctional community safer, and other elements which will decry such steps as being against freedom, self control and self determination.     

How is the Voice going to help with that fundamental problem?   

 5.   Unfortunately, I think there is some truth to the conservative criticism that aboriginal advocacy has become dominated by urban academia (with, for whatever reason, a very heavy slant towards women) for whom university jobs and consultation to government are a solid way to earn a living, without having to experience the worst of lived realities.  There is also an increasing radicalism to a lot of  indigenous advocacy (especially from the young) - and it's as wildly impractical as the communists of the 50's and 60's thinking that if only capitalism could be overthrown and we all start again, every problem could be fixed.    Even someone like Noel Pearson, who still will sometimes sound conservative-ish on matters such as the importance of education to enable young people to grow up and engage in the "real" economy, is now prone to hyperbole if he doesn't get his way, with this unhelpful contribution:

Pearson reduced the issue to the simple question: “Are we going to vote ‘yes’ for reconciliation through constitutional recognition?”

“This year is the most important year in the past 235 […] and this referendum is the most important question concerning Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians since the first fleet.

"What is at stake is the chance for reconciliation. And if this referendum is kiboshed through game playing and a spoiling game by the opposition, we will lose the opportunity I think forever,” Pearson told the ABC.

If the referendum were lost, “then I can’t see how the future will be anything other than protest. The Indigenous presence in this country will forever be associated with protest”, rather than reconciliation being achieved.

6.  The increased radicalism in rhetoric is not going to help - continually encouraging economically disadvantaged people to believe that their problems are always someone else's fault is not a winning strategy, at least when you are numerically a small percentage of the entire population.   At a time when there is genuine (and justified) concern over increased lawlessness amongst indigenous youth, it is positively counter-productive.  

7.   Here is how I saw the swings in political views on indigenous matters in a post in 2014:

Look at aboriginal issues - Labor was embarrassed by being gullible on Hindmarsh Island, and Bob Hawke weeping over claimed aboriginal sites; by the end of the Howard government, they were supporting the intervention in the Northern Territory and had a tougher approach to limiting alcohol than the current Liberal government.  (In truth, both parties have moved somewhat to the centre.  The Coalition's panic about native title is now seen as greatly exaggerated, and most in the party were fairly gracious about the Rudd apology.)

Now, if we really were still "centrist", the Liberals would not be playing political games on the Voice as Dutton clearly is.   But in a way, the Labor approach to this referendum was pretty much an open invitation to the Coalition parties to play politics.   If it fails, I think (contra Pearson) it will be the chosen tactics of the pro-Voice camp which will have caused it - almost a case of snatching defect from the jaws of victory.

8.   I therefore am feeling uncomfortable about the whole process - I don't have a problem with constitutional recognition, but in the bigger picture, the exercise feels like its an expensive and pretty pointless reinvention of ATSIC. 

This is going to make me sound uncomfortably close to Andrew Bolt and the Sky News set - but the trajectory of indigenous advocacy and rhetoric here seems now to be largely leading in the wrong direction, and I don't see any hopeful signs of a correction.   There's Jacinta Price, whose rare conservative voice is blunt and seems to align with my concerns, but she also seems very isolated within the world of indigenous advocacy.   Noel Pearson used to be somewhere in the ballpark of a straight talking advocate for indigenous self improvement, but as I say, he seems to have a mixed record and is now more Lefty mainstream.  I think Warren Mundine is just a bit of a goose, and I don't see him helping one way or another.  

I think there is a risk of the referendum failing, and increased protest from the advocates leading to worse outcomes - a hardening of mainstream sentiment against indigenous politics.   

We'll see.  

Update:    Further to my point about increased radicalism, often coming from women (when it used to be young men with the reputation for calling for revolution), and who we are supposed to listen to:

Buddhism and psychotherapy

Thinking about Buddhism, I don't think I have mentioned before that it seems to me it ought to have something of interest to say about the current hot button issue of trangenderism.  Don't Buddhist ideas of what it is to be a person (I'm thinking in particular of the "five aggregates" which is discussed in detail in this Wikipedia entry on Skandha) suggest that it's right to be skeptical of the idea there's a gender essentialism in the mind that must be accommodated by altering the body to match it?   (And, while I'm at it, it does seem to me that this aspect of Buddhist thought is one which most aligns with a lot of current theorising on the nature of mind and consciousness:  a large part of why there can be a popular book from 2017 Why Buddhism is True.)

Well, I would have thought so, but just as the American version of the religion has a reputation for being all non-judgemental on sex generally (when in fact the original Buddha is supposed to have scolded a monk who had sex with his wife by saying "worthless man, it would be better that your penis be stuck into the mouth of a poisonous snake than into a woman’s vagina"), it would seem that American practitioners are also happy to bend over backwards to accommodate transgender individuals as needing to do whatever makes them happy:

Each of us has genitals, but they do not determine gender. Our gender—male, female, or intersexual—includes such disparate forces as genetics, family, and culture. The source of transgender identity is mysterious because we don’t understand how all these forces work together. But the incongruence you feel is not that uncommon. I would advise only that this felt identity is not your “true self.” The Buddhist true self is much more than our phenomenal existence. That self is not dependent on the physical body, intellect, spiritual practice, or relationship; it cannot be obstructed by anything phenomenal.

What you describe is what I think of as the “authentic self,” the urge to live in this world in the most whole way possible. For some of us, it might mean braces or a different haircut; for others, it may mean monastic robes and a shaved head. For a certain number of people, it will require gender-reassignment surgery. So yes, embrace your authentic self completely. If that means you need to make some practical adjustments, you will have plenty of company.

Colour me skeptical that this is really consistent with most of Buddhist teaching.

A more interesting take on Buddhism and transgender is to be found in this paper, which looks at the Thai "third gender" cultural belief and the contradictory response to it in Buddhism.  I didn't know that old Thai Buddhism thought that both transgender and homosexual impulses were a sign of bad karma - a punishment for bad sexual conduct in a previous life: 

Thailand in particular is well known for its population of transgendered people. Although they are a minority they are still recognized. A person of this minority is known as a kathoey, the Thai word for transgender. There has been a lack of official concern religiously and legally against homosexuality (Sinnott 2002). This allows the transgender population freedom to continue to grow and implies that transgenderism is seen throughout Thai history. Folklore of Thailand has been seen to involve three genders, as well as transgender shamanists (Winter, 2002). Here it is evident that transgenderism has always played a role in Thai culture, that it is not something new and depending on the role of the transgender in stories it is nothing to be ashamed of either. Thus, it is evident that transgender tales extend beyond the medical and religious realms into historical folklore that helps shape Thai culture.

Not all historical tales of transgenderism are so positive in Thai society, for the third gender is seen as a karmic consequence. Traditional accounts of Thai Buddhism propose that homosexuality and transgenderism are to be viewed as a result of a negative previous life full of acts of sexual misconduct (Jackson 1993). The karmic build-up from the previous life has resulted in the punishment of being a social outcast as a transgender in a new life, but there are implications suggesting that we may all have been a kathoey at one point. No one knows for sure because no one knows all their past and future lives, only that if they are still living they are stuck in the cycle of samsara. Despite being a kathoey as a result of bad karma, some kathoey’s use the Buddhist teachings of karma to explain their identity and so it allows them to lead a life  where wanting to change sexes is not seen as sinful nor does it affect their future lives (Winter 2002). Therefore, if being a kathoey is not seen as sinful and a result of bad karma and it is possible that everyone has been a kathoey in their past life; it brings forth the chance for kathoey’s to become accepted by religious laws and shape future history.

The acceptance of kathoey’s in society by non-homosexuals teaches a lesson of compassion. The kathoey may not be able to change their fate but for Buddhists to act compassionate to the kathoey is to recognize them as a fellow human trapped in the cycle of rebirth. Due to mixed understandings of transgendered beings in Buddhist traditions it is difficult to understand how to act towards them. For instance, the Vinaya does not contain explicit rules or understandings of a third gendered being, nor are Theravada Buddhist scriptures consistent in their judgements of the third gendered being within the sangha (Jackson 1993).

Anyway, more generally, there is the question of what Buddhist influenced psychotherapy would be like.   I presume it has had some influence on the field, and Googling the topic, I see that indeed it has, although it would seem it's not all that well researched an area.  

But, by happy coincidence, there is a recent New York Times review of a book which is right on this topic - The Zen of Therapy by Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein.  The review is headed:  What Unites Buddhism and Psychotherapy? One Therapist Has the Answer.  (It's a gift link so you can read the whole thing.)

It starts:

Despite often being lumped together these days in what gratingly gets called the “wellness sector,” psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation might be seen as almost opposite approaches to the search for peace of mind. Show up on the couch of a traditional American shrink, and you’ll be encouraged to delve deep into your personal history and emotional life — to ask how your parents’ anxieties imprinted themselves on your childhood, say, or why the way your spouse loads the dishwasher makes you so disproportionately angry. Show up at a meditation center, by contrast, and you’ll be encouraged to see all those thoughts and emotions as mere passing emotional weather, and the self to which they’re happening as an illusion.

These differences also help explain the characteristic ways in which each approach goes wrong — as in the case of the lifelong therapy patient who’s fascinated by his own problems, yet still as neurotic as ever; or the moony meditator engaged in what’s been termed “spiritual bypassing,” attempting to transcend all earthly concerns so that she needn’t look too closely at her own pain.

Sounds about right.

(Epstein, by the way, looks pretty much as you would expect if David Byrne were a psychotherapist).  

Anyway, Epstein seems to endorse a feeling I always have about religion that involves abandoning family:

Epstein, whose earlier books on related themes include “Advice Not Given” and “Thoughts Without a Thinker,” is adamant that psychotherapy is right to emphasize the importance of our personal stories — the history and texture of what it feels like to be, uniquely, ourselves — as against the meditator’s tendency to disdain the realm of emotions, seeing them “as indulgent at best and as an impediment at worst.” It’s clear from early in the book that Epstein won’t be romanticizing the ascetic life when he describes a pivotal moment in the story of the historical Buddha, in which he walked out on his wife and child to seek spiritual enlightenment, not as an act of courage, but as a rather obvious case of emotional avoidance.

OK.  And the key idea is in these two paragraphs:

Buddhism’s critical insight, though, is that those personal stories are just stories, as opposed to nonnegotiable, objective reality; that the selves to which they occur are much less substantial than we tend to assume — and that freedom lies ultimately not in understanding what happened to us, but in loosening our grip on it all, so that “things that feel fixed, set, permanent and unchanging” can start to shift. The goal, in a refreshing counterpoint to the excesses of a certain way of thinking about therapy, isn’t to reach the state of feeling glowingly positive about yourself and your life. It’s to become less entangled with that whole question, so that you get to spend your time on more meaningful things instead....

The mantra of the Buddhism-inclined therapist, he writes, is to “find the clinging” — to detect where a patient is holding tightly to certain stories or feelings on which they’ve come to believe their happiness depends (or, alternatively, those they seek at all costs to keep at bay — since aversion, for a Buddhist, is just an inverted kind of clinging). The point isn’t to stop feeling or thinking them, but to change one’s relationship to them. The “ultimate Buddhist therapeutic maneuver,” he explains, is “not to ignore the emotion but to leave it alone, allowing it to appear in its own way, appreciating it for what it seems to be without getting taken in by it.” Talking with one patient, a stepmother bitter about her stepchildren’s lack of appreciation, he makes the fine distinction that her expectations are “valid” but “not realistic.” It’s perfectly OK to have expectations; just don’t make your happiness dependent on their ever being fulfilled.

Going back to the original point:   it seems to me that Buddhist inspired psychotherapy should lean towards helping people let go of clinging to the idea that body modification is key to their happiness.   Perhaps some will say "so, are you going to argue they should also tell people to just ignore same sex attraction?"  But I don't think the comparison is the same.  Sex and the intimacy it brings is something nearly everyone desires, and some find they can only achieve it by being with a same sex partner.  Body dysmorphia - which is at the heart of transgenderism - is different, and being able to overcome it doesn't mean that there should be any effect on fulfilment in terms of sexual enjoyment and personal intimacy.

That how it seems to me, anyway... 

 

Kohler on the Liberals

I see nothing significant to disagree with here in Alan Kohler's article:   The Liberal Party is a retirement village for male baby boomers.  

(He pins their lack of appeal to Millennials and younger voters to their obvious internal divisions on climate change, and anger about housing becoming so expensive.)

Today's Buddhist trivia

So, I've been reading up a bit on Pure Land Buddhism, and the origin of Amitabha Buddha, which it centres around.

According to the (pretty well written) Wikipedia entry, the story comes from 3 sutras thought to have been written in what's now the Pakistan area in the first and second centuries (CE), and were translated into Chinese as early as the second and third centuries.    (It's curious that this was happening at the same time, pretty much, as the compilation of the New Testament was happening in the Christian churches.)    

Anyway, the trivia bit comes from Wikipedia too:  the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra (or Infinite Life  Sutra) has a passage that is inscribed on the Peace Bell at Hiroshima, with the English translation given as:

The lord of vast light, incomparable and infinite, has illuminated all Buddha countries in all the quarters, he has quieted passions, all sins and errors, he has quieted the fire in the walk of hell. 

That does seem a good line for such a memorial.

Anyway, it seems that no one seriously argues that Amitabha was a historical figure, unlike Siddhartha Gautama, the "original" Buddha, about whom it seems (mostly) agreed that he really existed as a founder of a new religion.   (An interesting article on whether the historicity of his story is actually important or not can be found at Tricycle.)

The problems (and contradictions) of Japan

This article at the BCC by its long time correspondent in Japan gives a very convincing summary of the situation with the county.   You've probably read the matters noted in other places, but this just puts it together very well.

Doesn't this seem a charge destined for acquittal from the start?

Alex Baldwin being charged with involuntary manslaughter, I mean.   As noted in the NYT:

The criminal charges Mr. Baldwin faces came as a surprise to many in the film industry and were strongly disputed by his legal team. A lawyer for Mr. Baldwin, Luke Nikas, said the prosecutors’ decision “distorts Halyna Hutchins’s tragic death and represents a terrible miscarriage of justice.”

“Mr. Baldwin had no reason to believe there was a live bullet in the gun — or anywhere on the movie set,” Mr. Nikas said in a statement on Thursday. “He relied on the professionals with whom he worked, who assured him the gun did not have live rounds. We will fight these charges, and we will win.”

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing film, television and radio workers, said in a statement that the death of Ms. Hutchins was a “preventable” tragedy but that it was “not a failure of duty or a criminal act on the part of any performer.”

“The prosecutor’s contention that an actor has a duty to ensure the functional and mechanical operation of a firearm on a production set is wrong and uninformed,” the union said. “An actor’s job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert.”

 I just can't see that a jury (I assume it's a jury trial) wouldn't see it this way.  

Gotta pierce my eye, again

I didn't realise it was so long ago, but it was apparently in January 2018 that I had a cataract operation on my right eye.  The left had a much milder cataract but it has worsened:  interestingly, it seems they can get to a point where the suddenly get significantly worse in a short timeframe, and that's where I've been at for the last 6 months.

So, it's time to get the left eye done, this afternoon, and hopefully stop my brain from being confused about why it should ignore the looking-through-yellow-tinted-frosted-glass style of vision from one eye. 

See you later...clearer, too. 

Update: Success.   Seems I may be able to revert to reading and computer use without glasses, too.

Can I mention something that I often think: undergoing light anaesthesia is cool.  It's close to experiencing magic, I reckon.  Awake, awake, there's the slight tingle or warmth in that arm, I guess it will work: bam, awake in a different room.

The King of Buddhas, noted

Sometimes I watch low quality Buddhist videos for fun, but this one does show how simple the Pure Land style of Buddhism can be, with the "King of Buddhas" (a term I hadn't heard before) Amitabha Buddha having vowed to bring all who chant his name into the Pure Land upon death, which is almost the same as Heaven:

 

Perhaps I have written this before, but this simple formula does remind me very much of the "born again" strain of Protestantism which places a lot of emphasis on acknowledging Christ as your Lord and Saviour as the key thing to get right, and the importance of good works after that are given short shrift. 

So in that respect, it is unlike Catholicism.   But on the other hand, the countless number of Buddhas,  and bodhisattvas, and the way they are in a hierarchy and doing stuff to help people, not to mention the Pure Land itself as pretty much an Eastern decorated version of Heaven, does resemble the colour and flavour of Catholicism with its communion of saints, and its interest in angels and the hierarchy of Heavenly beings.  

It's this odd meld of two strains of Christianity that makes it interesting.

     

  

Why is the ABC trying so hard with this person?

I really don't understand why the ABC seems to be trying so hard to give high profile to drag figure Courtney Star, who I don't find particularly talented or engaging as an interviewer, presenter, or singer.  (OK, I have to admit, I haven't even seen the singing part of it: I'm making an assumption there.)  Yet he/she has been everywhere over the ABC for the last 12 months.  Like this video, one in a big series in which matters are discussed between his drag and non drag persona.

I don't know the preferred pronouns either, but it's like he/she/they has got incriminating photos of Ita Buttrose, or something...

Bugs we share

From Nature:

People living in the same household share more than just a roof (and pints of milk). Be they family or flatmate, housemates tend to have the same microbes colonizing their bodies, and the longer the cohabitation, the more similar these microbiomes become.

The conclusion — based on an 18 January study in Nature of the gut and mouth microbiomes of thousands of people from around the world¹ — raises the possibility that diseases linked to microbiome dysfunction, including cancer, diabetes and obesity, could be partly transmissible.

“This study is the most comprehensive look to date at when and why microbes transmit into the gut and oral microbiomes,” says Katherine Xue, a microbiome researcher at Stanford University in California. “New microbes can continue to reshape our microbiomes throughout our lives.”...

The analysis confirmed the strong link between the microbiomes of mothers and those of their children, particularly early in life. During an infant’s first year of life, half of the microbial strains in their guts were shared with their mothers. The extent of overlap decreased as children aged — but did not vanish. Older people, aged 50–85, still had gut microbe strains in common with their mothers.

Other family members were also an important source of gut microbes. After the age of 4, children shared similar numbers of microbe strains with their father as with their mother. And twins who moved away from each other shared fewer gut microbes the longer they had lived apart. Sharing occurred even between households in several of the rural-living groups: people from separate households in the same village tended to have more overlap in gut microbes than did people from different villages.

And this is a bit surprising:

The researchers also found that the extent of household sharing was no less in people from Westernized cultures than it was elsewhere. Ilana Brito, a microbiome researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, was surprised by that insight. She expected that microbiome transmission would be harder to detect in Western populations because of factors, such as better public-health infrastructure, that might impede spread.

Counting again

Further to my previous posts about the various attempts that have been made to count the number of gay (and generically queer) people in different countries, this recent news out of England about its 2021 census seems to have attracted little attention:

• The census question on sexual orientation was a voluntary question asked of those aged 16 years and over.
• In total, 44.9 million people (92.5% of the population aged 16 years and over) answered the question.
• Around 43.4 million people (89.4%) identified as straight or heterosexual.
• Around 1.5 million people (3.2%) identified with an LGB+ orientation (“Gay or Lesbian”, “Bisexual” or “Other sexual orientation”).
• The remaining 3.6 million people (7.5%) did not answer the question.

 A lot of the 3.2% million did put themselves down as bisexual or other, and I think we can safely assume (based on other surveys in Western countries) that this would include more women than men:

• 748,000 (1.5%), described themselves as gay or lesbian

• 624,000 (1.3%) described themselves as bisexual

• 165,000 (0.3%) selected “Other sexual orientation”

Apparently, they will be releasing more information about the gender of the respondents later this month.

Anyhoo, given that 7.5% didn't answer the question, it would seem plausible to add a significant number from that group into one of the "queer" categories, so I would still stick by my guesstimate from 2013 that the "true" figure in the Western countries that have done this research is that around 4 to 5% fall within the broad "queer" category, although it seems to have become clearer over the years that a lot of that is actually bisexuality which might not (or might, who knows?) play a significant role over a lifetime. 

But perhaps the biggest surprise is that in a country where gay celebrities seem so prominent (especially in their media and entertainment industry), the number of "pure" gay or lesbian willing to disclose it is under 2%.  They do seem to be disproportionately visible because of the sort of work they like to do.  (Same can be said about all Western countries, really.) 

Speaking of economics...what has happened to Jason Soon?

He hardly seems to have any online presence anywhere anymore...

Economics Explained seems OK...

I think I have not watched Google recommended videos from the Economics Explained Youtube channel before now because I assumed it might be something like that god awful PragerU channel.   But I finally watched a couple of the videos, and thought they were pretty mainstream and good.  For example, this one about capitalism and economics generally:

 

 And this one about Sri Lanka's problems in particular:

 

The latter doesn't spend much time on the issue they say they will discuss, about the inevitable inequality between nations, in terms of their ability to grow into wealthy modern economies, but maybe they will come back to that. But overall, I didn't find much to criticise or be suspicious about.

Get a grip

In my never ending quest to find the laziest way I can remain fit, there's this:

Want to know how well you’re aging? Check your grip strength.

A recent study of 1,275 men and women found that those with relatively feeble handgrip strength, a reliable marker of overall muscle quality and strength, showed signs of accelerated aging of their DNA. Their genes appeared to be growing old faster than those of people with greater strength.

The study, although preliminary, raises the possibility that visiting the gym or doing a few push-ups in our living rooms might help turn back the clock and make our cells and selves more biologically youthful, whatever our current age.

Strength also can be an augury of how long we’ll live. In a 2015 study of almost 140,000 adults in high-, middle- and low-income nations, reduced handgrip strength was closely linked to mortality in people of all incomes, predicting risks for early death better than blood pressure, which is often considered one of the best indicators of life span.

I think my grip is not bad, but I have never measured it properly...

 

Fairly unimpressed, or just getting old?

I tried watching the much praised first episode of The Last of Us on Binge last night.

I was deeply unimpressed.  OK, the first 5 minutes was pretty well done, but as I said to my son, the next 20 minutes of "the world is suddenly turning zombie and collapsing overnight" is stuff we've seen many times before and there was nothing novel or particularly interesting in how it happened in this story.

The rest of the show was heavy on dialogue, which I didn't think was particularly well written, and the main male and female character don't display much at all in the way of likeability.   I get that the developing dynamic between them is at the heart of the show, but I already don't care for them.

It just feels a very well trodden path of familiar tropes.

This is not a view widely shared amongst critics, although here is one exception.  On Twitter, it seems that many gamers are just ecstatic that the show follows the game so closely, with comparisons of the cut scenes from the game apparently looking at times exactly the same as the scene in the TV show.   Am I supposed to impressed about that?  Why? 

So, I wonder if this is a fair reaction, or a sign that I'm getting old(er)-age cynical of what anyone 30 years or more younger than me likes?    I'm not entirely sure...

 

Noel Coward's advice remembered

So, Renee Geyer has died.  I thought I might have posted briefly before about an autobiography (of sorts) that came out about her, but I see now that it predates this blog, so I probably didn't. 

It certainly confirmed her "bad girl" reputation, but as this review/interview with her explains, it was (somewhat refreshingly) not done in the often cloying "I was lost but am now redeemed" style of American celebrity autobiography.  

But I have a suspicion that the conservatives over at the ageing Australian reactionaries blog have forgotten about the extent of her unapologetically (shall we say) dissolute life:

So there are the stripped-bare stories of three near-fatal drug overdoses, six abortions and a collection of short-lived relationships.

"I've died three times," she writes. "Overdosed ... heart stopped beating ... blue in the face for 20 minutes ... had to be revived. That kind of dead."

Of the abortions, she says she was unlucky, with three of the pregnancies happening while she was using contraception.

Oddly, Googling her has also turned up that she sang the campaign song for the Liberals in the 1975 election (!)*, and got charged with threatening a  hotel receptionist (in racist terms) in 2015.  Had forgotten about that.  As well as the car crashes. 

She was an odd character, I think it is fair to say.

And the Noel Coward advice, of course, refers to this:

Regarding yours, dear Mrs. Worthington,
Of Wednesday the 23rd,
Although your baby
May be
Keen on a stage career,
How can I make it clear
That this is not a good idea? 

At least I suspect a quieter life out of the public eye could have been a happier one.  Although you never know, I guess.

* This site says that she later distanced herself from the Liberals and politics generally, saying she only did it for the money. 

Toilet talk

Well, it's really poop talk, but I didn't want that to be in the heading.

An article in the Washington Post "Ask a Doctor:  Are my bowel movements normal?" (gift link)  contains some enlightening information, such as:

A general rule of thumb is that anywhere from three bowel movements per day to three per week is within the range of “normal.” If we look at the numbers closely, stool frequency varies by geographic region, age, sex and cultural habits. In the United States, the majority of people who consider themselves to have normal bowel habits report having between 3-7 bowel movements per week. In eastern India, however, where more people are vegetarian and the typical diet is much higher in fiber, people have a median of 14 stools per week. In Italy, meanwhile, people tend to defecate once per day.

Women and older people tend to have less frequent stools.

Hmmm...that last point doesn't seem to apply to me, but I will spare you the details here.  Anyway, I do fit within the normal range.  I like the coy words here: 

Once-a-day bowel movement is great for many people. But the key to a healthy stool frequency is that however often it happens, it should be comfortable and occur in a socially appropriate context.

If you consistently have a bowel movement once a day, but to do so, you have to strain significantly, take four laxatives in the morning, and never feel like you’ve quite … evacuated … everything, then I’d say there is a problem...

Maybe you’re someone who has three bowel movements each day, but they’re soft and never feel so urgent as to disrupt important work meetings or stymie your agenda at happy hour. I’d say to leave it alone and consider yourself “normal.” But when the urge to poop occurs at frequent and inconvenient times, making you afraid to socialize for fear of an embarrassing call of nature, it’s worth talking to a physician about potential ways to address it.

So if you find that your bathroom habits are comfortable and don’t hold you back socially, then poop in peace, even if it’s not always precisely once per day.

As for the question of colour, this is the commentary:

Green: Don’t sweat it.

Yellow: No big deal.

Orange: Not worried.

Dark brown: Still not worried. If it’s not black like the hue of your TV screen and sticky, it’s probably not because of bleeding....

White: You have my attention. Bilirubin, the waste product found in bile, is what gives your poop its characteristic brown color. Without it, stools are pale. White or clay-colored poop could suggest a blockage, such as from a gallstone that is preventing bile from reaching your intestine. This should be discussed as soon as possible with your physician.

Silver: Do tell. There was a vivid case report about the stool of a patient with simultaneous gastrointestinal bleeding and bile duct blockage, leading to shiny silvery stool. But this would be exceedingly rare.

She doesn't mention something that caught my attention recently:  following Eric Idle's publicity tour where he talked about surviving pancreatic cancer (he was very lucky that it was caught very very early), I watched some English video about the warning signs, and a woman survivor said that, in retrospect, one of the first signs for her had been changes in her poop,  as explained at this website:

If your pancreatic duct blocks, you might develop a symptom called steatorrhoea. This means fatty stools. You may pass frequent, large bowel motions that are pale coloured and smelly, and are difficult to flush away. These bowel changes can mean that you are not absorbing your food properly. This can also cause weight loss.

Diarrhoea and constipation are also other possible bowel changes you can have.

I hadn't realised that could be a sign of pancreatic cancer before.  Now I'm happy when it doesn't float.