A serious ecological consequence of global warming

Ocean acidification as a result of increasing CO2 doesn't get mentioned often lately, although it presumably continues to increase.   (There was, no doubt, some sloppily done lab based experimentation on this with fish and other creatures which I think has perhaps harmed its reputation amongst science journalists.  But the problem is still real.)  

The other big problem in the oceans from global warming is the increase in lack of oxygen as the water warms, and I have mention it from time to time over the years.  (You can search "ocean oxygen" in the search bar at the side, if you like.)

There was an article about it in Science recently, and yeah, maybe it will be a race between it and acidification as to which will cause the most serious ecological collapse within the next few decades.  Some extracts:

Climate change is leaching oxygen from the ocean by warming surface waters. Two other climate-related threats to the seas—ocean acidification and marine heat waves—get more attention from scientists and the public. But some researchers believe deoxygenation could ultimately pose a more significant threat, making vast swaths of ocean less hospitable to sea life, altering ecosystems, and pushing valuable fisheries into unfamiliar waters. As global warming continues, the problem is sure to get worse, with disturbing forecasts that by 2100 ocean oxygen could decline by as much as 20%. Sharks—fast-moving fish that burn lots of oxygen, sit at the top of food chains and crisscross huge ocean expanses—should be sensitive indicators of the effects....

SCIENTISTS FOR YEARS have documented oxygen-starved dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea. There, pollution from nutrients running off the land, such as synthetic fertilizer, sparks algae blooms. Microbes feast on the rotting vegetation, consuming oxygen. A surge of low-oxygen water can flood an area so quickly that crabs, sea stars, and even fish suffocate before they escape. Low-oxygen zones also form naturally along the western edges of the Americas and Africa, where oxygen-depleted water that hasn’t seen daylight for decades wells up.

In the open ocean, currents and storms churn the water, keeping oxygen levels higher. Yet since the 1990s climate models have foretold that a warming climate would deplete oxygen there, too. Surface water warmed by rising air temperatures holds less oxygen, and the growing temperature contrast between surface layers and colder, deeper water slows the mixing that transports oxygen into the depths. At higher latitudes, melting ice can flood surface layers with fresh, low-density meltwater, strengthening the layering and reducing mixing.

In 2008, a paper in Science sounded the alarm. German and U.S. scientists found that the low-oxygen zones off Africa and the Americas were growing deeper and losing still more oxygen. Since the 1960s these areas had expanded by about 4.5 million square kilometers, close to the area of the European Union. In the waters frequented by Sims’s sharks off Africa’s northwest coast, the low-oxygen layer had nearly doubled in thickness over 5 decades, from 370 meters to 690 meters. By 2008 its top had risen to less than 150 meters below the surface. The global trend, the scientists warned, “may have dramatic consequences for ecosystems and coastal economies.”

In 2017, scientists delivered more troubling news in Nature. Overall, the world’s oceans had already lost some 2% of their oxygen since 1960, roughly double what climate models predicted.

For Andreas Oschlies, a biogeochemist at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and a leading expert on modeling oxygen in the ocean, the implications were staggering. If the trend continues, it could mean a potential loss of 20% by 2100, he says. That’s equal to going from sea level to more than 2000 meters elevation on land. “I thought ‘Wow!’” Oschlies recalls. “That’s the biggest change and maybe the most worrying change that we see in the ocean. Immediately I thought of (past) major extinction events.” For example, at the end of the Permian period 256 million years ago, rising ocean temperatures and an 80% plunge in oxygen levels helped drive the largest extinction in Earth’s history. Up to 96% of all marine species disappeared.

By comparison, the 2% drop in oxygen levels seen so far might not sound like much. But global averages can be misleading, warns Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who has studied the effects of low oxygen on ocean ecosystems for more than 30 years. “There are places in the ocean where there’s been much bigger declines,” Levin says. “These changes are probably very important.”

 

 

 

Biden the (not) demented

I didn't watch all of the State of the Union address, but did catch the widely circulated few minutes where he was going back and forth with booing, stupid Republicans.  As Axios notes:

President Biden previewed an optimistic re-election platform in his State of the Union speech Tuesday — but veered off script to take on rowdy Republicans in a series of confrontations that captured America's political chasm.

Why it matters: Biden used much of his speech to emphasize what Americans can do when they work together — while also baiting Republicans to agree with his push to protect Medicare and Social Security as Congress weighs budget cuts.

• Biden seemed to anticipate — and relish — the jeers from some Republicans when he questioned their commitment to Medicare and Social Security during upcoming budget talks.
• He dared them to "contact my office” for proof that some Republicans had discussed cutting the safety-net programs — and that if everyone agreed they shouldn't be cut, they should "stand up for seniors." House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his fellow Republicans then joined Democrats in doing just that.
• "I enjoy conversion," Biden joked.

Everyone sensible I follow agreed that the "baiting" worked well.

But the thing that struck me most is, once again, how utterly stupid the Right wing commentariat looks for their years of claiming Biden is virtually a demented nursing home candidate, all based on brief video edits of no consequence.

As I have complained many times, anyone who has first hand experience of actual dementia decline in a parent, if they are honest, knows that someone with serious issues cannot handle themselves in public speaking in the manner that Biden does. 

But the mainstream media has let the nutjob Right repeat it to itself a million times, and rarely comments how this is pure, offensive, propaganda that, by rights, should remove all credibility on every issue.

A pretty remarkable man

To my mind, he's looking like a cool character from a Marvel movie now:

Hard to imagine the difficult life he has unnecessarily had to endure.

Big physics thoughts

I don't know who the creator is behind the channel this video comes from is, but as far as I can tell, the science content is accurate.   Today I watched this one, which starts an explanation of what it means to say that mass is energy (as in the famous Einstein equation): 

 

It gets into the matter of quarks and how they contribute to a proton's mass, and what mass means in a very "meta" sense. It's not simple, of course.  

And that aspect - the complexity of what it was explaining - got me thinking that this is a reason that the simulation hypothesis for the universe seems very improbable to me: why would you simulate to such level of tiny complexity?

I mean, when you think about the old particle/wave duality question, the simulation hypothesis  has some appeal, because it is easy to imagine the universe as being the equivalent of a computer game which only bothers rendering the part of the game's internal universe you're looking at or interacting with. But when you get to the vastly complicated question of quarks (or other really odd aspects of particle physics - like neutrinos that change as they travel along and zip through matter like it's not there), the whole idea that a simulation would go (or need to go?) to that level of complexity just seems very improbable. 

Oh, and speaking of neutrinos, I mention them because I recently re-watched this video, which I don't think I have posted before, about how it seems quite likely that every now and then, a human at night might notice a flash of blue light that is actually a neutrino hitting an atom in your eyeball.    Cool:

The potential for electric cars for domestic power storage

There's a detailed article here at the Washington Post (gift link) about how close we may be to electric cars becoming routinely part of domestic renewable energy storage.   

It's pretty impressive sounding, and it's easy to imagine it happening to a large scale in large parts of Australia, where the sun shines a lot.

Should we be surprised, or not...?

One of the oddest aspects of the "Chinese spy balloons over America" saga is this:

The top military commander overseeing North American airspace said Monday that some previous incursions by Chinese spy balloons during the Trump administration were not detected in real time, and the Pentagon learned of them only later.

“I will tell you that we did not detect those threats, and that’s a domain awareness gap,” said Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command.

One explanation, multiple U.S. officials said, is that some previous incursions were initially classified as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” Pentagon speak for U.F.O.s. As the Pentagon and intelligence agencies stepped up efforts over the past two years to find explanations for many of those incidents, officials reclassified some events as Chinese spy balloons.

I mean, I would have thought that something as big as that balloon and its payload, moving with the wind, would make for a big radar target that would be readily identified (as a balloon at least, if not the country of origin.)   

But I would remind my feeble number of readers that there are some remarkable oddities about US airspace awareness where they can't identify a big aircraft even when they are visually identified by other pilots.   I think I have posted about this incident before:  a 2017 case where airliners saw another aircraft flying high over Oregon, it had no transponder turned on, and despite some F 15s being scrambled, it seems no one knows where it ended up.   (You can read even more detail about it in this follow up post.  I mean, it seems it was not a small aircraft, but was something like airliner size.  How can they lose track of that over the West coast?   Of course, if it really was a UFO, that could explain it!   But it apparently looked like a large, white aircraft, and was flying fast, but at airliner type speed.)

So, it would seem US identification of what's going on in its airspace is not as foolproof as you would expect.     

 

I've been cooking again...

Yes I know, ideally I would become a vegetarian, but beef does taste so, so good. And my daughter used to have low iron, so it's healthy, right?   (Any excuse is a good excuse.)

Anyway, beef brisket was on special yesterday and I've never cooked with it before. My wife has, but not me.  Decided to go with a recipe from Taste.com, Cantonese beef brisket noodle soup, and it really was a success. My bowl:

I worry about link rot, so I had better reproduce most of the recipe here:

So, trim the brisket of fat (the only painful exercise in this recipe), cut into big chunks and boil for 5 mins.  Skim the top, and take out the meat and fry in oil in a frying pan to brown the outside, then add the liquid (soy sauces, fish sauce, rice wine and the sugar) and just get it combined, then put it back in with the stock.

The spices - recipe says to put the cardamon, star anise and peppercorns in a muslin tie up and bash them a bit.  Instead, I crushed them a bit in a mortar and pestle then put then in a metal tea infuser - worked fine.

All of the other ingredients go in and simmer for 90 minutes.   Boil egg noodles and put in bowl and put soup on top (and the boiled vegetable.)   I guess anyone could guess the last bit.

Things that surprised me:  the two bits of orange peel really make a strong, fragrant contribution.  And the seasoning level with these ingredients was just right.

 

Free love, and assassination, 19th century style

It's funny, in a way, how 21st century Right wing Americans think that most of the West is on the highway to Hell due to sexual licentiousness and violence, when in fact there was some really weird stuff going down in their own country in the 19th century.

I'm pretty sure I have read something about it before, but I don't seem to have posted previously about the Oneida Community, which comes to my attention this morning due to a book review at the Washington Post.   It's about the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881, and how the assassin was a former member of the (sex) utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York.

The review doesn't give many details, but puts it this way:

From the outside, the Oneida Community looked idyllic. Led by the preacher John Humphrey Noyes, it was the most successful utopian colony of the period, spanning more than 30 years. At its height, tourists flocked to what Wels describes as the “wild woodland” in Upstate New York, with orchards, livestock, “whizzing mills” and women with “queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts.” But behind the facade, Oneida’s free-love philosophies descended into pedophilia, incest and experiments in eugenics.

So, let's trip over to Wikipedia:

 The Oneida Community was a perfectionist religious communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be perfect and free of sin in this world, not just in Heaven (a belief called perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), group marriage, male sexual continence, and mutual criticism. 

The male sexual continence thing seems a hard sell, if you ask me:

Complex marriage meant that everyone in the community was married to everyone else. All men and women were expected to have sexual relations and did. The basis for complex marriage was the Pauline passage about there being no marriage in heaven meant that there should be no marriage on earth, but that no marriage did not mean no sex. But sex meant children ; not only could the community not afford children in the early years, the women were not enthusiastic about a regime that would have kept them pregnant most of the time. They developed a distinction between amative and propagative love. Propagative love was sex for the purpose of having children; amative love was sex for the purpose of expressing love. The difference was what Noyes called "male continence" , in which the male partner avoided ejaculation. Noyes argued that this practice not only kept them from producing unwanted children but also taught the male considerable self-control.

A different website explains:

You see, rather than using the withdrawal method, coitus interruptus, which was one of the most effective birth control methods historically, and is surprisingly just as effective as condoms at preventing pregnancy, even in real world practice, the community instead practiced coitus reservatus as their main method of birth control- where the man was not to orgasm at all. The idea was that this would simultaneously prevent pregnancy, ensure the man maintained his vitality (the belief at the time was that the loss of semen negatively impacted a man’s health), and made sure the woman was optimally pleasured for maximal spiritual benefit.

As to the question of the age of sexual partners, it gets creepier still;

Women over the age of 40 were to act as sexual "mentors" to adolescent boys, because these relationships had a minimal chance of conceiving. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his own judgment in determining the partnerships that would form, and he would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community, in the hope that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the attitudes of the non-devout.

Then there is the system for self improvement, which is like group therapy turned on its head into something like group psychological lynching:

Every member of the community was subject to criticism by committee or the community as a whole, during a general meeting.^[15] The goal was to eliminate undesirable character traits.

It's notable that the community was still going strong at the time of the Civil war - I can't see anything about whether any male members went off to fight, but I have my doubts that they would.  Hence, 100 years before free love hippies of the Vietnam era were having sex instead of going to war, free love (alleged) Christians were doing the same.

As utopian communities, free love or not, inevitably do, it all fell apart when leadership was attempted to be handed over, and oddly enough, most of us probably have seen the word "Oneida" because of this:

The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company. This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited.

Anyway, back to the assassination of Garfield, this is really a remarkable coincidence:

...Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was at the train station and saw Garfield’s shooting. It was the second presidential assassination he witnessed, having been at his father’s side as he died in 1865.

And as this website explains, he arrived in Buffalo years later on the same day President McKinley was shot! 

Presidential assassinations seemed to follow him around.   He did live to 83 though, so I guess he wasn't as unlucky as he could have been.   (He also attended the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 - there's a photo of that at the last link.)

The main prominent free love community I know of in  my lifetime is the Rajneesh movement - which of course all fell into a heap when the leader aged, too.   

Anyway, always good to remember that radical ideas about sexual utopianism have been around for a long time.

   

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.