Further notes to self on having no self

I was listening to a podcast on the weekend from the Tricycle podcast channel featuring a guy talking about the key Buddhist idea of "no self".   He mentioned Hume as having a very similar take on there being no core soul - instead humans are just a constant stream of sensations - but made no comment on whether Hume was influenced by Buddhism.

Given that I have never paid much attention to Hume's philosophy, I was a bit surprised to learn that it does indeed sound as if his philosophy may have been Buddhist inspired.  But it seems there is only speculation as to how he might have heard of Buddhist ideas, as discussed in this article.  Here's the abstract:

Philosophers and Buddhist scholars have noted the affinities between
David Hume’s empiricism and the Buddhist philosophical tradition. I show
that it was possible for Hume to have had contact with Buddhist philosophical
views. The link to Buddhism comes through the Jesuit scholars at the Royal
College of La Flèche. Charles François Dolu was a Jesuit missionary who lived
at the Royal College from 1723–1740, overlapping with Hume’s stay. He had
extensive knowledge both of other religions and cultures and of scientific
ideas. Dolu had had first-hand experience with Theravada Buddhism as part
of the second French embassy to Siam in 1687–1688. In 1727, Dolu also had
talked with Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit missionary who visited Tibet and made
an extensive study of Tibetan Buddhism from 1716–1721. It is at least possible
that Hume heard about Buddhist ideas through Dolu. 

As the article goes on to note:

...very little was known about Buddhism in the Europe of the 1730s, when Hume was writing A Treatise of Human Nature. Buddhism had died out in India, Japan was closed to the West, and European scholars in the Chinese court focused on the elite Confucian and Taoist traditions.2

The whole thing is worth reading.  It's always so interesting to note that Jesuits may have indirectly helped fuel enlightenment ideas due to the fact they were curious about everything.   

I liked this passage at the start of the article about the unclear way people can be influenced:

We know that psychologically, people can be influenced by ideas, even if they themselves forget the source of those ideas. In fact, this “source amnesia” is the rule rather than the exception. Information about sources is actually encoded in a different kind of memory, “autobiographical” or “episodic” memory, while ideas or facts themselves are stored in more robust “semantic memory.”4 We know that listeners can be influenced by ideas even when they are not advocated by the people who present them.5 Psychologically, arguing against a position, as well as arguing for it, can lead your interlocutor to encode and remember that position. And, psychologically and historically, even great philosophers
are not only influenced by other great philosophers (especially before they are great themselves!). They may pick up ideas from much more obscure figures who happen to be the people they find congenial or talk with on a regular basis—the equivalent of the guy in the next office.

And as for how Buddhist ideas are close to some of Hume's:

Three forms of this skeptical rejection are particularly relevant for early modern philosophy and for Hume. First, Buddhism rejects the idea of a metaphysically foundational God, though there may be particular gods. This is why writers like Desideri and La Loubere identified it as atheistic. Second, it rejects the idea that there is an independent substance that is the metaphysical foundation for our experience of the external world—the doctrine of “sunyata” or “emptiness.” Finally, and most radically, the tradition rejects the Cartesian idea that there is even a foundational self that is the locus of experience—the doctrine of “anatman” or “no-self.”

On the no-self position:

Within the general Buddhist tradition, Tsongkhapa argues for a particularly Humean “middle way” position. He argues that there is no foundational, ontological self, but that nevertheless the self-concept is psychologically real. “Thus there are two senses to the term ‘self’ a self conceived in terms of an intrinsic nature that exists by means of intrinsic being, and a self in the sense of the object of our simple natural thought ‘I am.’ Of these two the first is the object of negation by reasoning, while the second is not negated.” 93 Tsongkhapa’s “middle way” is reminiscent of the “turn” at the end of Book 1 of the Treatise where Hume claims that the skeptical arguments of the first part of the book need not undermine the pragmatics of everyday life (T 1.4.7; SBN 263–74) 

I should go finish listening to the podcast, because I thought he said that Hume - and someone else he referenced - allows for people being "persons", even though arguing that persons have no core self.   

Anyway, this all reminded me too of the whole lack of clarity within Buddhism of reincarnation if there is no self (something I think Western Buddhist academics who are into it for the meditation and calmness aspects like to ignore),  and also how Mahayana Buddhism is probably best understood as a reaction against the idea of Nirvana as extinction of the self.   Here was my post about that. 

All interesting, I reckon.... 

 

 

Nihilism, considered

David Brooks wrote a column last week which feels half wrong, and half right:  The Rise of Right-Wing Nihilism.

He starts with what most people in comments agree is an overblown apologia for the Right wing culture wars (and their never-ending claim to victimhood, while simultaneously claiming that it's Lefties who are all about their "feelings"):

Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian nationalism.

That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing. What would you do in such circumstances? Well, at least at first, you’d probably grit your teeth and take it while silently seething.

In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive messages. I watched the guys in the bar sort of hunch over, grim-faced, their body language saying: This is the crap we have to put up with to watch a football game. 

He also makes this somewhat surprising claim:

This progressive/conservative disconnect — which is also, frequently, an elite/non-elite disconnect — is a problem across the West. For reasons I don’t fully understand, educated elites are more socially progressive than non-elites. 

I haven't had time to look it up, but I am pretty sure the social progressiveness/higher education link has been well studied?

Anyway, am I complaining too much, because I have made it clear here that I agree that aspects of the gender and sexuality culture wars have been taken too far?   I don't think so, because the HUGE point skipped over by Brooks is the poisonous nature of Right wing media and information network aligning itself with evangelical Christianity to directly demonise one side of politics as being literally evil, and replacing trust in expertise with endless conspiracy crap just because they think any policy endorsed by "elites" (who are usually liberal) is out to control and hurt them.

But the part that does ring a bit true is the rising appeal of nihilism to right wing numbskulls:

Other people, of course, don’t just cope; they rebel. That rebellion comes in two forms. The first is what I’ll call Christopher Rufo-style dismantling. Rufo is the right-wing activist who seeks to dismantle D.E.I. and other culturally progressive programs. I’m 23 years older than Rufo. When I was emerging from college, we conservatives thought we were conserving something — a group of cultural, intellectual and political traditions — from the postmodern assault.

But decades later, with the postmodern takeover fully institutionalized, people like Rufo don’t seem to think there’s anything to conserve. They are radical deconstructors. In a 2024 dialogue between Rufo and the polemicist Curtis Yarvin, published by the magazine IM-1776, Rufo acknowledged, “I am neither conservative by temperament nor by political ambition: I want to destroy the status quo rather than preserve it.” This is a key difference between old-style conservatism and Trumpism.

But there’s another, even more radical reaction to progressive cultural dominance: nihilism. You start with the premise that progressive ideas are false and then conclude that all ideas are false. In the dialogue, Yarvin played the role of nihilist. He ridiculed Rufo for accomplishing very little and for aiming at very little with his efforts to purge this university president or that one.

“You are just pruning the forest,” Yarvin said dismissively. He countered that everything must be destroyed: In general, Yarvin is a monarchist, but in this dialogue he played a pure nihilist. One version of nihilism holds that the structures of civilization must be destroyed, even if we don’t have anything to replace them with. He argued that all of America has been a sham, that democracy and everything that has come with it are based on lies.

He goes on:

I was reminded of an essay the great University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter wrote last year for The Hedgehog Review. He, too, identified nihilism as the central feature of contemporary culture: “A nihilistic culture is defined by the drive to destroy, by the will to power. And that definition now describes the American nation.”

He pointed to our culture’s pervasive demonization and fearmongering, with leaders feeling no need to negotiate with the other side, just decimate it. Nihilists, he continued, often suffer from wounded attachments — to people, community, the truth. They can’t give up their own sense of marginalization and woundedness because it would mean giving up their very identity. The only way to feel halfway decent is to smash things or at least talk about smashing them. They long for chaos.

Apparently, the F.B.I. now has a new category of terrorist — the “nihilistic violent extremist.” This is the person who doesn’t commit violence to advance any cause, just to destroy. Last year, Derek Thompson wrote an article for The Atlantic about online conspiracists who didn’t spread conspiracy theories only to hurt their political opponents. They spread them in all directions just to foment chaos. 

Brooks then reminds us that this isn't the first time nihilism has been on the rise, even though I don't think we are ever reminded of this in schooling:

Nihilism is a cultural river that leads nowhere good. Russian writers like Turgenev and Dostoyevsky wrote about rising nihilism in the 19th century, a trend that eventually contributed to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. The scholar Erich Heller wrote a book called “The Disinherited Mind” about the rise in nihilism that plagued Germany and Central Europe after World War I. We saw what that led to.

It’s hard to turn this trend around. It’s hard enough to get people to believe something, but it’s really hard to get people to believe in belief — to persuade a nihilist that some things are true, beautiful and good. 

Yeah, I didn't now that about that Heller book, and am not familiar with the problem with the inter-war period being described as an attack of nihilism before.  I should look it up.

Brooks' column then swings into the dubious again, by noting this:

One spot of good news is the fact that more young people, and especially young men, are returning to church. I’ve been skeptical of this trend, but the evidence is building. Among Gen Z, more young men now go to church than young women. In Britain, according to one study, only 4 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds went to church in 2018, but by 2024 it was 16 percent. From the anecdotes I keep hearing, young people seem to be going to the most countercultural churches — traditionalist Catholic and Eastern Orthodox. 

First, those figures sound very dubious.  And secondly, it's not like the most conservative Churches are helping with the dire rise of Trumpian authoritarianism in the US or some Eastern Eurpoean countries.  To the contrary, they are prone to hyping the culture wars and forgiving anything as long as they get their way with their pet obsessions (such as abortion and gay marriage).

As you might imagine, lots and lots of comments criticise the column along the lines I have indicated.  For example:

Brooks parachutes into a red area, puts together a couple of disparate groups, forms an opinion and jets away. I am a full throated, unapologetic liberal, well educated Democrat who lives in a VERY red part of Northern Michigan. What Brooks does not realize, or ignores, is how right wing media has indoctrinated rural communities for decades. I walk  into a car parts store where the radio is blaring Mark Levan or some such fool while attempting to buy a car battery. At a gas station after the 2020 election two nut jobs were commiserating over how the Dems stole the election and that they had proof! These are not isolated incidents. Sinclair, Fox, Murdoch and the Kochs, dominate the airwaves up here, laughing at the rubes  they influence and prey on, whereby they have effectively brainwashed a huge swath of the American public by turning lies into “facts”. Brooks, an educated elite himself, seems to imply that education is the problem! I know several well educated people that voted Trump and generally it centered around tax breaks, or their deep hatred of equal rights. Even education can’t always eliminate racial ignorance. The GOP is now a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of our democratic institutions, full stop. And Brooks shallow dive into socialization has way too many blind spots as regards indoctrination, which he ignores,  to take him seriously. Study Nazi Germany for a relevant comparison. 

 And:

A disappointing read in a few ways, David. First, as a contemporary of yours (ok, a few years older) who attended two of the most so-called liberal schools, I can tell a diversity of thoughts are taught and shared (see what I did using that divisive word "diversity"). Sadly, the conservatism of our past, articulated thoughtfully by George Will, William Buckley, and Bill Kristol (to name a few) is gone. Since the 90s it has been replaced by the blatant lies, hate and ignorance of Rush Limbaugh (was there ever a less deserving recipient of the Medal of Freedom? he should have buried with the Stone of Shame) and Hannity, Carlson, and Watters.   
Second, you did not articulate what the progressives have taught that has the conservatives wanting to destroy everything. Complain? Empathy? Come on. Those are great values that those young kids that you are so happy are now going to church are, sadly, likely not learning.

 There was a comment I saw earlier on that made reference to the problems all starting with the enlightenment in 1650 (or around then!), but I am having trouble finding it now.  It reminded me that I should really try to essay ideas that have been bumping around my head about the unfinished effects of a slow burn enlightenment that we are still not finished with, but there is always something else to do.    

So sad

This well written piece that was in the New York Times about parents whose daughter committed suicide, and they later got to read her "conversations" with ChatGPT in which she was discussing her feelings, was very sad to read.   

Fortunately, the chatbot's responses were not terrible, but the mother still feels it didn't "push back" as hard as a human therapist would.  

Seems to deserve more attention?

I'm surprised how little attention this has drawn:

For months, Israeli officials have spoken in increasingly strident tones about wanting Palestinians to leave Gaza en masse. Now, a potential destination being discussed is the impoverished, war-torn African nation of South Sudan, part of the broader Israeli push for wholesale emigration from the devastated enclave.

Unable so far to find countries willing to accept large numbers of Gazan refugees from the nearly two-year Israeli campaign against Hamas, Israel has held talks with South Sudan on taking them, according to officials and people briefed on the discussions.

Critics argue that forcibly and permanently removing Gazans from the enclave would amount to ethnic cleansing and a war crime. Noting some Israeli leaders’ hope to conquer Gaza and build Jewish settlements there, they have questioned whether Israel’s long-term vision is merely resettlement or expulsion.

Israeli officials have labeled their policy “voluntary migration,” framing it as a humanitarian move to allow Palestinians who wish to depart to freely do so. Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was not “pushing out” Gazans, but did not say whether they would be allowed to return after the war with Hamas.

I mean, I'm as pessimistic as the next distant observer about the long term prospects for Gaza because it seems virtually ungovernable without radicalisation (and as such, hardly worth the billions and billions of dollars to rebuild).  But this mooted destination seems pretty crazy.

I did mention Indonesian islands for Palestinians in comments recently - but the problem is, where ever they move to, if the land is taken over by Right wing Israelis, it reeks too much of exactly the same type of territorial conquest we don't want Russia doing.   

Again (and I'm just engaging in a bit of Bond movie level fantasy here), the ideal solution might be for Gaza to be irradiated by a mad billionaire with a nuclear bomb so no one can inhabit it.  (And the Gazans get a nice fertile piece of land somewhere under Muslim rule to start again.)

 

On GDP per capita

Who is this woman, and why does she seem to make so much sense:

  

 

(I feel like those are impliedly sexist questions - but this video has been very popular and I have never heard of her before. Seems she's an American living in Germany now, and her channel is mainly about less than flattering takes on America in light of her European experience?)

I wonder if Putin had tears in his eyes while telling him...

 This next bit has even more " 'Sir', he said with tears in his eyes 'Sir I have to tell you ...' " energy:

 

When conservatives go mouldy

Jordan Peterson makes the news again over his peculiar health issues:

Controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson is expected to take time off from “everything” after being exposed to a “particularly moldy environment,” his daughter says.

Mikhaila Peterson took to X on Wednesday afternoon to reveal the 63-year-old influencer-academic has been forced to postpone his podcasts and move his European tour after a “severe” flare-up of symptoms she said is connected with chronic inflammatory response syndrome.

The elder Peterson has openly discussed his experience with CIRS, a condition allegedly linked to mold exposure and immune system dysfunction, and claimed he was diagnosed in 2018. It is not an officially recognized medical diagnosis or considered a distinct disease by any significant public health agency.  

I read the daughter's tweet about it, where she went on about the carnivore diet even not being enough to defeat the mould!

I guess its not impossible for some people to have serious reactions to mould:  its probably next to impossible to tell which are really suffering from it, and which are psychosomatic.   

I also saw a brief bit of Jordan going off on Joe Rogan's show about climate change being a grand Leftist conspiracy to control all people who are Right and Good in the world.   It was this (pretty great!) video, which proves that Rogan is a dangerously ignorant influencer who is so dumb he can't be bothered reading an article to understand a graph it contains.  He is truly awful.  

 

As someone in comments says: 

I'm so tired of the dumbest people on earth having the most popular shows 

 

When conservatives go hippy

Another interesting NYT piece - this time about 75 year Republican Rick Perry going all in for a new hallucinogenic I hadn't even heard of before.   

As usual, I remain deeply skeptical that the positive experiences of the few who become evangelical is a sound guide to its more widespread use.  (And this one sounds particularly dangerous, not to mention unpleasant):

     Objects flew past him. Some of them appeared to resemble Maya hieroglyphics. He saw an arm     reaching out for him, and attached to it was a figure with horns. “Satan, get behind me,” he heard himself say. The figure instantly disappeared.

Mr. Perry’s hallucinations, induced by the powerful psychotropic drug ibogaine he had taken about 45 minutes before putting on his eye mask, continued for more than 12 hours. The experience was an ordeal. He vomited intermittently and lost much of his body coordination. It took all of Wednesday to recover.

But on Thursday morning, Mr. Perry recalled in describing his experience publicly for the first time, “I woke up very clearheaded, with this very warm feeling in my body. I was as calm and as happy as I’d been in memory.”......

But the powerful drug, which is illegal in the United States, comes with risks. Because ibogaine lengthens the time between heartbeats, a user who gets the wrong dosage, is taking other drugs, or whose heart rate is not being monitored during treatment, can go into cardiac arrest. Even under the most scrupulous of circumstances, ibogaine therapy is a long and grueling inward journey that Ms. Sinema described as “the opposite of a pleasant experience.”

It is because of the drug’s potency that Mr. Perry, Ms. Sinema and other ibogaine advocates have adopted a baby-steps approach. Rather than promote wholesale decriminalization, or even widespread availability, they are seeking public funding for the development of an ibogaine compound in the United States, with the initial aim of treating military veterans. 

Probably because it is a conservative promoting it, there are a large number of skeptical comments after it:

To have credibility with me, this  article should explain the actual mechanisms( even if not completely known), the actual treatment process (does the dose of the substance magically transform specific memories in one sitting or is there a therapeutic conversation with a real therapist , or 12 weeks of therapy or just exactly what) and how is improvement measured, validated, followed up . How long does the identified benefit last? And how is that defined and measured— hours of improved sleep, fewer arrests or car accidents , less domestic abuse phone calls or more steady employment, less drug and alcohol and other self medication abuse. Only  quoting some people who say they are better is as meaningless as if they were describing the therapeutic benefits of shopping, ice cream or racing fast cars, what about all the people who have not had a positive effect- they will never be assessed in an anecdotal narrative. Show me the facts , the mechanisms, the double blinded assessments—not just because Kirsten Syenema  says so. 

Also, funny how its often the military veterans lining up for something to cure their mental ills and PTSD.

A simpler solution might be:  stop putting your military into pointless conflicts with no real moral justification.  Maybe then the relived horror of the killing they have implemented will not happen in the first place. 

Asking for trouble

A New York Times background piece on "stablecoins" is well worth reading.

Sounds like a whole lot of trouble brewing, if you ask me:

Stablecoins work like a digital i.o.u. Their value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which have no such constraint and thus can swing wildly in price.

Here’s how they would work at scale: A bank customer places his or her cash with the bank and gets a stash of stablecoins in return. The consumer can then use these coins, for instance, to send money overseas or make international payments less expensively than wiring money.

The funds that a customer exchanges in return for stablecoins is, to the bank, the equivalent of a guaranteed profit.

That’s because a federal law passed this summer with bipartisan support requires banks to take the money they receive for stablecoins and invest it in government bonds and other virtually risk-free assets. Those bonds generate interest, which the bank keeps. Unlike traditional bank accounts, these savings don’t earn even nominal interest for depositors.

Another big change: Stablecoins eschew the century-old practice of automatic federal deposit insurance. If they fail, there is no guarantee of a government backstop.

Bankers say stablecoins, if widely adopted, could bring a radical change to the nuts and bolts of their industry, and they have the potential to upend a century of accepted banking practices.

One reason is that the money that a customer places with a bank in exchange for a stablecoin cannot be lent out in the same way that money placed in a traditional checking and savings account can be.

Any dollar that goes into a stablecoin and not a consumer’s traditional bank account essentially shrinks the size of a bank’s lending book and the bank’s deposit base overall. This means banks could have fewer deposits to make home or business loans with, which the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City last week warned could carry unintended consequences for the economy.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” said Mike Cagney, a former chief executive of SoFi and now the head of the digital lender Figure. He predicted that the rise of stablecoins would come at the expense of bank deposits. “You don’t need a lot of deposit flight to really buckle the banks,” Mr. Cagney said. 

Trump, of course, would understand none of this.  He just seems crypto bros throwing him money, and he's all in. 

 

Singapore and tigers

I was reminded this morning that Singapore's name allegedly comes from an apparent misidentification of a tiger as lion.   (See Wikipedia for a full explanation.)

Now, while lions were never native to Singapore or neighbouring regions, tigers certainly were.   Which led me to think "when was the last wild tiger seen in Singapore?"   I knew of the story of a tiger being shot in Raffles Hotel, but now that I check it, it wasn't a wild one, and it was in 1902.

This website tells the real story of how big a problem wild tigers were in the 19th century:

The earliest newspaper report about the existence of tigers was published on 8 September 1831 in the Singapore Chronicle. It was reported that a male Chinese national had been killed by a tiger, and that the same tiger probably had also killed a local shortly after.⁵ In 1835, colonial architect G. D. Coleman and some convict labourers were attacked while they were laying a new road through a swamp in the jungle near town, but no one was killed.⁶ In May 1839, The Singapore Free Press reported that two Chinese had been carried off by tigers near a newly built road called Rangong Road (today’s Serangoon Road).⁷ 

When the cultivation of gambier and pepper took off in Singapore in the 1840s, plantations extended beyond town and encroached on jungle areas. By the late 1840s, the number of plantations had peaked at 600.⁸ Chinese plantation coolies became easy targets for tigers. Reports of encounters with tigers increased in the 1830s and 1840s.⁹

Tiger attacks grew so intense that, by the middle of the 19th century, tigers were rumoured to claim one life every day.¹⁰ Governor of the Straits Settlements William Butterworth, upon being questioned in the House of Commons about the tiger problem, stated that the figure was probably 200 deaths a year due to tiger killings – which was nonetheless alarming in a population of 50,000 people.¹¹ In 1859, one village near Bukit Timah was abandoned due to overwhelming tiger attacks.¹²

It was believed that tigers in Singapore killed 300 humans in 1857, but only seven deaths were reported to the police. The actual figure could be higher as many tiger attacks were unreported. Plantation bosses often did not report the deaths as they did not want to scare away potential workers.¹³ During the 1860s, more than 350 lives were lost because of tigers.¹⁴  

They would swim across from peninsula, apparently.  I wonder how big a problem they were over there (the Malay peninsula).   Presumably, pretty big!

Anyway, the government set a bounty on hunting tigers, and their numbers diminished.

The last one was apparently in 1930.  Here's how the Straits Times reported it: 

 

Well, they got a beer named after them.  So not completely forgotten...

We need better tech billionaires (part 2) - and a point I haven't seen made elsewhere

Apart from the egregious open corruption that was Tim Cook's suck up visit at the White House, one thing I noted from the video:

 

 

was that I reckon there is no way the "24 carat" gold base is solid gold - it does not have the weight in Cook's hands that a lump of gold that size should, I reckon.   (Even the weight of the box with it inside looks light.)

In theory, as I understand it, you can gold plate in 24 carat, but it's soft and not often done because of that.   But I reckon Cook wanted to give the impression Trump was getting a lump of gold, when he wasn't.  Which would be a little amusing to know, if I am right...

NDP 2025

Singapore's National Day Parade was (as acknowledged by most Singaporeans on Reddit too) really good this year.  As I said to my son who (rather dutifully, but I appreciate it) watched the whole thing with me, Brisbane ought to just subcontract the Olympics opening ceremony to Singaporean creatives - they do these stadium style shows fantastically well.   

I wonder if I can convince anyone reading to watch the whole 3 hours!    

 

 OK, well if you don't want to watch the military parade and flyovers , the entertainment show starts at 1 hour 53 min.

But you should watch the military bits, because it shows how absolutely pathetic Trump's little Army anniversary march was!   

And if you don't have the time to watch this, I was even impressed with the "pre parade" segment - singing, dancing, some jokes, and cameo appearance by their Prime Minister.   

 

All so good...

Pure, unadultered, gaslighting

 I also saw Scott Bessant - the person who people thought might talk sense to Trump, given his past background, but who immediately turned into a pro tariff lackey, no matter how nonsensical their calculation - being interviewed and trying as hard as possible to avoid saying that tariffs are paid by Americans.   (He finally said it, in a way that he probably thought some MAGA types wouldn't understand was an admission.   What a disgraceful performance.)

What? Google is still working on Blogger?

Much to my surprise, I see that Blogger has greeted me this morning with a new beta feature, which will add links to terms in a post that it thinks might be useful for readers who want to dig deeper, so to speak.

Given that people have been saying for years that they would not be surprised if Google suddenly said it was going to stop supporting this free blogging platform, it's surprising to see they are actually still making changes to it.

How useful this one is, though, remains to be seen!   I'll hit the button and see what it does with this post.  Any links will be put in by some AI in a dessert somewhere, presumably! 

Oh, it seems to not want to insert any links now.  It did before, but I deleted the text and now it's not reappearing.   Odd.   

 

Nationalism as done in Singapore

If I wasn't so busy at work lately, and the plane seats were a bit more certain, I would have headed off to Singapore to be there on its 60th anniversary National Day this Saturday.   

Instead, I will just watch the National Day Parade live on CNA via Youtube - and I would encourage anyone with a curiosity about the way nationalism and social unity can be "done right" to do the same.   I mean, I am generally leery of patriotism; but in the case of Singapore, it had to make a big effort from the start to ensure the multicultural society would work, and tying it to a patriotic appeal to take pride in making a poor tiny country rich, secure and safe has really worked.  

So, the National Day Parade (which I have watched in previous years) has elements of pure self soothing propaganda, about which I sometimes have a bit of a cringe laugh because it can be so unsubtle.  But mostly, I find myself deeply impressed, and quite often somewhat touched, by the intensity of the effort towards promoting unity, especially in the slickly produced songs and dance, which can feature a multicultural cast of scores of people, if not hundreds.  Perhaps you have to watch to understand.  Technically, my almost sentimental admiration for the country can't be because I was a Singaporean in a past live - I was here before it existed! 

The day ends with a very "you will be patriotic!" kind of thing:

SINGAPORE - The public warning system will sound at 8.19pm on Aug 9, as a signal for Singaporeans to recite the pledge and sing the National Anthem, wherever they may be on National Day.

The “all clear” signal will sound for 10 seconds, said the Singapore Civil Defence Force on Aug 6.

This marks the Majulah Moment at the end of the National Day Parade,which will take place at the Padang and Marina Bay 

Again, I find that a little bit funny, and a little bit impressive.

Such a shame I won't make it... 

 

     

News site decide events from 200 odd years ago are the headline

It was at the very top of The Guardians website this morning, but has since moved down the page.  It's still given a very large space, though:

When you read the main article, about a company started in 1824, it's not even coming up with anything new - it notes stories about atrocities that have appeared in a newspaper in 1922, about events about a hundred years before that!  

It ends with these examples of grievance mongering:

James Fitzgerald, a legal consultant for the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, said companies had an obligation to confront the “evils of the past”.

“Just creeping along as though nothing happened is moral cowardice, particularly when it’s an enterprise that’s making money off dispossession,” he said.

“The more a company’s wealth is built on that sort of dispossession, I would have thought, the greater its obligation to take account of that as a decent corporate citizen in 2025.”....

The AACo spokesperson said the company had built “trusted relationships” with many traditional custodians across the properties managed. “We recognise their culture and deep connection to Country and work with them to ensure we engage respectfully,” they said....

Fitzgerald said the 1992 Mabo verdict, which recognised Indigenous peoples’ rights to their land, raised complex questions for Australian companies that had built their wealth on land taken from and cleared of Aboriginal people.

“If you keep pulling at the thread long enough, it implicates the entire basis of our sovereign state and economy,” he said. “We are all the beneficiaries of these actions in one way or another, whether as real property owners, shareholders or super fund members.”

 So, let's see - the company hasn't hidden anything, is respectful of the current "cultural custodians", and there are some academics and lawyer types making a living out of keeping the grievance alive...

As I have complained recently, such intense concentration on victim status in aboriginal advocacy is not a good way to move forward - and it irks me that The Guardian spends so much time promoting it.    

     

Hiroshima anniversary

It's fascinating, and makes me feel somewhat emotional, to read the first hand accounts of what it was like being on the Enola Gay when it bombed Hiroshima, 80 years ago.     The Washington Post provides a good service by publishing this.

Jobs figures explained

I'm sure I have mentioned this before, but the short explainer videos that the Wall Street Journal puts out now, often as a corrective to Trump and MAGA views, are actually pretty good (and non-partisan).   The latest one is about how it is an utter nonsense to blame the head of the bureau for jobs numbers that Trump didn't like: 

Something else to think about

 An interesting idea here:  check if there is any correlation between pre-space age "transients" caught on astronomical sky survey plates from Palomar observatory (in the period from 1949 to 1957), and nuclear tests and/or UFO sightings.

Seems there is, although I don't understand the statistical significance bits of the paper.   (Really, it would be good if researchers always explained that aspect in a clearer way for those of us who never studied statistics.) 

An article summarising the paper is here. 

I note that the transients are star like points of light; not streaks like satellites in low Earth orbit would make. 

I also note that other research thinks the transients are just faults in the emulsion.   But a secret government  organisation that doesn't want us to know the truth would tell us that, wouldn't they...!

It seems that the people who wrote the current paper have been out to prove something is odd about the transients for quite a while.    Mick West is very skeptical.   

I am too.   I have a dim memory from a UFO book - probably one of Hynek's - about a 50's or 60's sighting which started as apparently two star like satellites moving together, but then doing a very un-satelitte thing of starting to spin around each other.    I've always been curious if there were more sightings like that which went unrecorded...

More "about Gaza"

From the New York Times:

Hamas has consistently rejected Israel’s terms for ending the war throughout the negotiations. On Saturday, the group said in a statement that it would not disarm unless a Palestinian state was established, despite a call from Arab states last week for the group to do so.

The Israeli government opposes Palestinian statehood. On Sunday, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Israeli national security minister, visited the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, which Jews revere as the Temple Mount, long a tinderbox for Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Arab leaders denounced Mr. Ben-Gvir’s ascent to the site — during which he openly prayed — as a provocation.

“It’s important to convey from this place that we should immediately conquer Gaza, exercise our sovereignty there, and eliminate every last Hamas member,” Mr. Ben-Gvir said from the site, in a video shared by his office.

Doesn't the Hamas position on disarmament show that (well intentioned) Western nations calling for a recognition of the Palestinian state at this time are not helping?   While I understand the impulse to think that it helps show Israel does not have endorsement to do what it wants, it's hard to see the optics from Hamas's view as being other than "at last, the tide is turning in our favour, and we must hold out longer." 

A late Spielberg review

I finally got around to watching Steven Spielberg's last film - the critically well received semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans. 

I thought it was really good, and deserved a wider audience.   Clearly, it was intended a respectful take on the influence he came under from two very different parents, each with their own flaws.   (Both of them had died before this movie was made.)  

I had known enough about him to know before seeing it that most of the key parts of the film were true to life - he grew up mostly in Arizona, and was a precociously gifted child/teenage film maker, encouraged by both parents, but with the more artistic urges (by far!) coming from his eccentric mother, who is really the key character in the film.  I thought Michelle Williams was really outstanding in the role - playing it as pixie-ish but vulnerable and very flawed.   

I presume, though, that the film makes a case for Spielberg getting technical prowess, and perhaps stamina, in moviemaking from his intelligent father, who apparently was a bit of a workaholic.   

The danger with such a film is that the Spielberg character could have been portrayed in too self serving a fashion - but I think it manages to avoid that.   Sure, he's likeable throughout the film, but it didn't feel fake or "too good to be true" in any respect.   

This article is a good one for showing how true to life most of the film is - including the obvious care Spielberg took to make the actors look like the real-life counterparts.    

There was one funny part of the film (his first teenage girlfriend, with a sub-sexual infatuation with the image of Jesus) that I thought seemed so eccentric that it must be true.  But unfortunately, this is one aspect that has not been confirmed as such.   

Anyway, as a family drama that is not too heavy going, well acted, well made and overall very likeable, I do recommend it. 

 

Numbers, considered

 

You know, I have had a bit of a look around the MAGA infected parts of the internet, and seen very  little attempt to defend his immediate reaction to sack the woman in charge of the department providing the jobs numbers, because he saw conspiracy to hurt him simply because she was appointed under Biden.   

I actually think that this reaction is so much like that of a tin pot dictator that even many of his diehard supporters working in Right wing media think it's not a good look.   (Although, of course, there are no doubt thousands of conspiracy addled MAGA brains who will jump on any and all explanations given by their cult leader.)

 

 

About Gaza

Seems to me that two things can be true about Gaza:

*  there is genuine starvation happening on a widespread scale, as is evidenced by the hordes shown scrambling over each other on our TVs each night to get hold of food aid, and the reports of gangs hijacking some trucks and killing to control food.  (I was interested to hear an ABC journalist saying that Israel has admitted supporting some of the food raiding gangs, as they are seen as a competitor to Hamas.  I hadn't heard of that before, and truly it shows what an agent of chaos Israel has become.)   It just seems wildly improbable, and contrary to what all aid organisations are saying, for Israel's claim (that there is plenty of food, it's just not being distributed right by Hamas) to be true.

 * some of the evidence promulgated from within Gaza as proof of children starving to death is misleading.   Israel is complaining about this, but even before we heard from them, some of the images I had seen made me think "that degree of emaciation looks more like some other horrible form of illness, and why would a non starving looking adult standing next to the child not create the question 'what, have you not been passing on some of your food to that kid for the last 3 months or something?' " 

Hence, I think any sensible person should not get carried away with indignation about the cases of misleading photos - stuff like that is going to happen in PR wars, and it in no way counteracts the scenes of utter despair on a broader scale.   Have a look at this awful photo, for example:

 

It wouldn't look out of place in one of the climatic battles from the Lord of the Rings.  

The photo, by the way, is at the top of an opinion piece at the Washington Post which argues for something radical, but I think is the kind of radical thinking sorely needed:  that Egypt be effectively put in charge of reconstructing and controlling Gaza.

I mean, the wannabe state looks so utterly devastated, and the cost of rebuilding must be so horrendous, that I really can't see any point in reconstruction unless there is iron clad guarantee that it won't end up being destroyed again, ever, by the stupid terrorist adventurism of the likes of Hamas that led to the extreme punishment by Israel.   If no other Muslim countries are going to offer an alternative home to Palestinians (and, you know, sometimes I have wondered if Indonesia couldn't gift them a nice tropical island - they have thousands of them - that might end up twice as fertile as the unpleasant looking landscape of Gaza), then I don't see any point in anyone bearing the cost of rebuilding if it is not going to be permanent.

Here are extracts from the WAPO piece:

The only viable path to saving Gazans and stabilizing the Israeli-Palestinian arena is handing Egypt trusteeship over the Gaza Strip.

This is both a moral and a strategic necessity. Egypt is the only actor with the legitimacy, proximity and capacity to rescue Gaza from its current spiral and offer its people a life outside siege, war and despair. It is also the only party trusted enough by both Israel and large segments of the Palestinian population to serve as a custodial power.

Two parallel agreements could create the foundation for such an arrangement: one among Egypt, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and another between Egypt and Israel. These would secure the release of all hostages and establish a permanent ceasefire.

The Egyptian-Palestinian agreement would grant Egypt full administrative and security control over Gaza. Hamas would hand over its weapons to the Egyptian army and register all of its members with Egyptian security services. Egypt, in turn, would build a new Palestinian administration for Gaza, with a civil service and police force under Egyptian command. The Egyptian army would deploy throughout the territory to ensure security, end lawlessness and prevent the reconstitution of militant groups.

Simultaneously, a bilateral agreement between Egypt and Israel would formalize Israeli withdrawal and establish appropriate security arrangements, including a border coordination mechanism modeled on the existing Egyptian-Israeli arrangements in Sinai. The blockade would be lifted as security cooperation took shape and stability returned.

This framework would offer all parties a chance to win much while conceding little. It would enable Israel to restore security and eliminate the military threat posed by Hamas. Though transferring control of Gaza to Egypt might run counter to the ambitions of Israel’s most extreme factions, the majority of Israelis have no interest in Gaza beyond ensuring their own security. Egypt’s nearly five decades of security cooperation with Israel should provide sufficient reassurance for them.

For Hamas, this arrangement would allow disarmament without surrender. By handing its weapons to Egypt and not to its enemy, Hamas could claim it liberated Gaza from Israeli occupation, accepting a face-saving exit from its self-destructive cycle of resistance and reprisal. 

Sound fairly convincing to me... 

 

  

We need better tech billionaires

You know, I would have a bit more confidence in his predictions if it wasn't actually all about the money supposedly to be made by him:

Meta has spent billions of dollars to revamp its artificial intelligence strategy in recent months, including on a new team of researchers dedicated to creating a “superintelligent” A.I.

On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors why the team would be worth its return on investment.

Superintelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg defined as an A.I. model more powerful than the human brain, will improve “nearly every aspect of what we do,” he said on a call with investors. The A.I. will help Meta’s advertising business by improving its social media feed to keep users on its apps longer, which is already happening, he said. A.I. will also serve as a personal tool for users to create “a new era of individual empowerment,” he added.

The main way people will interact with superintelligence will be through Meta’s smart glasses, which have cameras and software that can shoot and process videos, Mr. Zuckerberg said. 

It's a little weird, isn't it, that we have one arm of AI researchers and advocates warning everyone that a disaster is coming;  and another arm (the one that stands to make lots and lots of money from it) telling us that it's going to mean we can all retire to the Bahamas (or Mars), or something, while superintelligent AI runs the world for us.

Isn't it hilarious that the Zuck also makes this claim:

“I think that if history is a guide, then an even more important role will be how superintelligence empowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other, and lead more fulfilling lives,” he said. 

Is he just rehashing what he wrote for the Metaverse investors meeting all of (what?) 5 or 6 years ago? 

 

The stupidest waste of money

I had posted before about speculation that Trump's vanity project of accepting an ornate plane from Qatar to use as Air Force One would cost "billions" to retrofit to the required standards.

Now there is suspicion that the first round of funding for it is pushing one billion dollars:

Officially, and conveniently, the price tag has been classified. But even by Washington standards, where “black budgets” are often used as an excuse to avoid revealing the cost of outdated spy satellites and lavish end-of-year parties, the techniques being used to hide the cost of Mr. Trump’s pet project are inventive.

Which may explain why no one wants to discuss a mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds from one of the Pentagon’s most over-budget, out-of-control projects — the modernization of America’s aging, ground-based nuclear missiles.

In recent weeks, congressional budget sleuths have come to think that amount, slipped into an obscure Pentagon document sent to Capitol Hill as a “transfer” to an unnamed classified project, almost certainly includes the renovation of the new, gold-adorned Air Force One that Mr. Trump desperately wants in the air before his term is over. (It is not clear if the entire transfer will be devoted to stripping the new Air Force One back to its airframe, but Air Force officials privately acknowledge dipping into nuclear modernization funds for the complex project.)

Qatar’s defense minister and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed the final memorandum of understanding a few weeks ago, paving the way for the renovation to begin soon at a Texas facility known for secret technology projects. The document was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

Mr. Trump’s plane probably won’t fly for long: It will take a year or two to get the work done, and then the Qatari gift — improved with the latest communications and in-flight protective technology — will be transferred to the yet-to-be-created Trump presidential library after he leaves office in 2029, the president has said. 

With the way anything being done by the Pentagon and defence contractors runs over budget and time, I would happily bet money that it will never be used as Air Force One, and it will count as pure wasted money for a yellow wannabe emperor with no clothes.

 

 

The last veterans

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times featuring a half dozen (I think) Japanese veterans of World War 2 who still have their marbles and appear to have active lives.  (As they could join the military as 15 or perhaps even 14 year olds, there are still about 790 veterans still around even though the 80 year anniversary of the end of the war is coming up.  And given Japanese longevity, I guess we might still have another 10 years or so before the last one dies.)   

It ends on a bit of a sad note:

While Mr. Kiyozumi once corresponded with a survivor of the American warship, he feels forgotten and alone. His wife died three decades ago; his best friend on the I-58 died in 2020. No one in his town asks about the war.

“Young people don’t know what we went through,” he said. “They are more interested in their smartphones.”

Nonetheless, as is usual with articles like these, one gets the impression that there's never a Japanese veteran who has been willing to defend the war as a worthwhile exercise.  The cultural turnaround from support for militaristic expansion overrunning neighbours viscously, to Asian peaceniks needing poking to being open to potentially getting involved in conflicts that are not directly self defence, is really remarkable.    

The correct headline would be "Our President is a lying, innumerate fantasist/BS artist"; but Republicans would cry bias, even though they know it is true.

In the Washington Post:

Trump’s imaginary numbers, from $1.99 gas to 1,500 percent price cuts

The president likes to cite specific numbers to bolster his claims. They are often wildly improbable — or just impossible.

President Donald Trump made a promise at a reception last week for Republican lawmakers that was as impossible as it was specific: He would drive down drug prices by as much as 1,500 percent — “numbers that are not even thought to be achievable,” he said.

A price cannot drop by more than 100 percent, but Trump went on to make several other precise but clearly false numerical claims. The cost of gasoline had fallen to $1.99 a gallon in five states, he said; according to AAA, it was over $3 in every state. Businesses had invested $16 trillion in America in the past four months, he added; the entire U.S. economy last year was worth less than $30 trillion.

Trump even congratulated Veterans Affairs Secretary Douglas A. Collins for having an approval rating of 92 percent. In this polarized moment, it is unlikely any U.S. political figure enjoys a figure close to that, and the White House provided no source for the claim.

An unfortunate production of a good show

Having not heard anything about it, and not recognising any names who star in it, I wasn't interested in seeing the current staging of Jesus Christ Superstar at QPAC.  But then I got offered free tickets, so not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, off I went with my wife on Friday night.

It turned out that it was remarkable - for being what I consider the worst theatrical production I have ever seen at QPAC.   

It is, firstly, a curious hybrid of not quite a concert version of a show, and not quite a normal stage show.    So what that means is you get one set, with one (slightly) moving element, and hence it is up to the singers and dancers give a vague idea of where each scene is meant to be set, but in a very haphazard way.  And it also becomes unclear in this hybrid as to whether there is really meant to be acting as part of it, or not.   Essentially, it feels unacted, but they sometimes move around the stage interacting with people as if there is meant to be acting.  It's the worst of both worlds.  I would prefer it be one thing or the other - if all the songs are sung into stand up microphones, they could presumably deliver better performances.

Secondly, from the opening bars of heavy metal guitar, this is a very hard rock, rock performance - with most of the music coming from a couple of hard working synth players, by the looks.   Not my style of performance at all.   Sure, it's going to be hard to fit an orchestra in any stage show just for the ultimate song (as per the original album soundtrack), but going this way just made for loud with little nuance or enjoyment.

Thirdly, the singing is, often, very rock screechy.  And even the slower songs by Mary M had (I thought) annoying and odd phrasing like "I don't know how to [pause] love him".  She's Jimmy Barnes' daughter, apparently.  Don't care, didn't enjoy her singing.  Sometimes I thought the males singers were a little behind the tempo too.   But they get screechy loud at times, and some in the audience thought that was great.  (See below.)

And lastly, what I consider the biggest sin, for a musical that is just as notable for its clever  and sometimes witty lyrics as it is for the music, was that the loud rock style sound mix often obscured hearing the words clearly.  Almost anything sung in chorus was utterly indecipherable,  and even the lead males singers often (in the faster and louder songs) were not so clear.

And yet, at the end, half of the audience gave a standing ovation.   (It was an odd audience - mostly older people and few younger in the mix.   Must be some sort of thirst in them to again hear metal guitar with quasi Jimmy Barnes' singing since there were last in a pub in the 70's or early 80's.)

Fortunately, I see that I am not the only person who had big problems with the show.  From Reddit:

I am a huge Jesus Christ Superstar fan (this was my fourth time seeing it at different venues including West End in London) and I was incredibly disappointed! I felt that this production had one purpose only - to showcase the singers rather than the singing. It was so loud (screeching is the word I would use!) that it was hard to hear the vocals and I found Jesus a particularly high-pitched squealer. It was like he was trying to show how strong his voice was rather than have us enjoy the music. I thought Mahlia Barnes was just there as a token singer as there was no acting which was disappointing - to the extend that at one point she stood in front of the stage singing to a microphone - it may as well have been a Mahlia Barnes concert rather than a play. She definitely tried to "make it her own" by changing how it is usually sung, holding notes at places that are usually not held etc (i.e. show off her vocals rather than being authentic to the play and it's music). The costumes were like brown rags (they are usually really "rockstar" and fun) and with only one set the whole show was a disappointment. I left half way through (as did many people). I will definitely not be recommending this to anyone!

I do agree!   

It makes it very unfortunate given that I hadn't heard the soundtrack for decades, and forgotten some of the songs and much of the lyrics, which (as I say) are unusually good.   Made me feel like seeing a good production, or perhaps watching the very 70's era movie (which I saw in the cinema with my father.  Surprisingly, as a conservative Catholic, he took it quite well.)

It also reminded me how, in a Christian group I used to go to in the early years of high school, they once used the show's title song as an intro to talking seriously about "what the Bible says Jesus really said about himself."   It was taken as a quite serious minded speculation - the Gospel according to Judas, as perhaps Lloyd Webber and Rice said themselves?   And I think that remains a valid take.   

The Guardian busy promoting victimhood

While I like the Guardian generally for its political reporting, there's no doubt at all that it likes to run indigenous victimhood stories, sometimes where the racial element is completely unproved.

Hence I find its current series "into the maternal health and infant removal crisis facing First Nations women in Australia" very annoying and actual harmful.

Today's instalment:  an aboriginal mother lost her baby to poorly handled pre-eclampsia, and reading the account, I find it a bit hard to judge if her GP or the local (small) hospital was mainly at fault.  

But here's the kicker:

Grace says she is unable to say if her Aboriginal heritage was a factor but strongly believes her concern that something was wrong was dismissed by both local doctors and the hospital. She sued NSW Health over the incident and the department settled without prejudice and with no admissions of liability.

Her lawyer, Linda Crawford, a former midwife who now works for Catherine Henry Lawyers, claims Grace was let down by the medical system.

So, let's just run with a hunch that it was because she was aboriginal?   

I have become increasingly worried over the last decade or so that aboriginal advocacy has become completely overrun with promoting within its own community a victimhood mentality - and in the long run, putting too much emphasis in that direction is not helpful.  (That's not to say that advocacy is never going to be talking about needs - obviously that's why it exists at all.   But I think the older group of advocates were not as victimhood focused as the new, younger - and often purely urban and academic - advocacy voices.)      

Will he, or won't he (be hurt by acting like he definitely has something to hide)

There are already plenty of Trump cultists lining up to re-affirm their undying allegiance to their yellow cult leader.   Truth be told, I reckon ageing single men in the Trump cult like (ugh) Catturd would probably say in private (but not openly) "what adult man hasn't looked at some hot 16 year girl and wished he could bed her?  So sure, if he did that he was just being a red blooded man."   

Someone writing in the New York Times today (from a "Catholic literary journal" - presumably with a small readership!) argues that the Epstein story will go away soon enough, arguing (I think) about the endless malleability of conspiracy stories;  but I am not so sure.

I think that the Trump turnaround (and betrayal of his conspiracy base) is a serious personal dent to their credibility that is hard to come back from.

Of course, the MAGA cult being what it is, there has been a crazy diversionary attempt, swallowed whole and immediately with the zero comprehension that it typical of a cult, from nutcase Tulsi Gabbard (who has such low self regard she won't resign even when her boss tells everyone she's wrong and - impliedly - gullible for believing her own advisers) that PROVES Obama committed TREASON (when the very documents she cites show nothing of the sort.)   

There is really no reasoning with a conspiracy cult on matters like that - but I think it can hurt their faith in their leader when he's the one telling them that one of their core conspiracies, which he encouraged for years, was always a nothingburger and they've been wasting their time thinking about it.  

 

 

Monkish behaviour

Good to see it's not only Christian clergy who get into trouble, I guess!:

The disappearance of a respected monk from his Buddhist temple in central Bangkok has revealed a sex scandal that has rocked Thailand, with allegations of blackmail, lavish gifts and a string of dismissals raising questions about the money and power enjoyed by the country’s orange-robed clergy.

Investigations into the whereabouts of senior monk Phra Thep Wachirapamok unexpectedly led police to a woman who the police suspect conducted intimate relationships with several senior monks, and then blackmailed them to keep the liaisons quiet.

When police searched her home this month they found mobile phones that reportedly contained tens of thousands of compromising photos and videos of the missing monk, and several other senior Buddhist figures. Police also tracked her finances, which they said showed links to temples.

“We checked her financial trail and found that it involves many temples,”
Jaroonkiat Pankaew, from the Thai police’s central investigation bureau told a press briefing on Tuesday. “After we seized her mobile, we checked and found that there are several monks involved, and several [video] clips and Line chats,” he added, referring to the popular messaging app.

Phra Thep Wachirapamok has not been seen since he left the temple and no charges have been laid over his disappearance. But the woman, Wilawan Emsawat, was arrested on Tuesday, and has been charged with extortion, money laundering and receiving stolen goods.

The amount of money involved is really significant:

...in an interview with Thai media aired on Wednesday, she admitted to having relationships with two monks and a religious professor. Wilawan also said she received extravagant gifts, including a Mercedes-Benz SLK200 and “millions” of baht, in the form of bank transfers and a personal bank card. She expressed guilt over the relationships, saying she had fallen in love.

Police said that about 385 million baht ($11.9m) had been deposited into Wilawan’s bank accounts in the past three years. In a separate interview, she said she had given money to another monk she was dating.

Given that (I assume) the monks always dress like monks, I wonder how and where they find the privacy for such love affairs.   I mean, having a night in a motel and having a woman come to the door is going to be kind of obvious?   

Anyway, scandalous behaviour of monks in that country seem to have been prominent for many a decade now:

Newspapers in the 1990s were filled with stories of monastic scandals. There were countless reports of sexual misconduct, drinking, gambling, stealing from temple bank accounts, using and selling drugs, and even murder. Now, in the age of social media, these scandals are even more widely publicized. Each time another scandal goes public, Thai lay Buddhists question the role of monks in society as monks themselves consider their own relationship to the sangha.

Parallels to the mistrust of the Catholic priesthood in the United States are instructive. The widely reported pedophile priest scandal has resulted in fewer ordinations and more “priestless parishes.” The current birth rate in Thailand is 1.51 children per mother, even lower than China. Each year there will be fewer and fewer boys who will reach the age of ordination. Parents must decide if they want their son, and it is usually their only son, to pursue the monastic path. These scandals and their amplification through social media mean that having one’s son ordained as a monk is not as prestigious, or as safe, as it once was. Parents may hesitate to entrust the care of their sons to monks whose reputation may not be exemplary. 

Sounds a very bad idea

From The Guardian, the go to paper if you want sympathetic treatment for stories of illicit drug use, especially if it's got a new-agey indigenous connection:

Is it safe to use magic mushrooms while pregnant? One woman’s quest raises questions 

It's obvious, isn't it, that you're not going to know the effect of the children for (perhaps) decades; and unreliable records on the dose taken by the mother is going to further confound proper research.

Big of him...

A really bad idea

The Guardian has run an article or two before about the rise of choking as a more-or-less part of sexual play, and with this latest one, it really does seem to be a thing worth publicising for how stupid an idea it is:

‘There is no safe way to do it’: the rapid rise and horrifying risks of choking during sex

Now thought to be the second most common cause of stroke in women under 40, it can also lead to difficulty swallowing, incontinence, seizures, memory problems, depression, anxiety and miscarriage. How has this extreme practice been normalised? 

Further down:

When it comes to prevalence, UK data is patchy. A survey by the Institute for Addressing Strangulation, established with Home Office funding in 2022, after strangulation became a standalone offence, found over a third of 16 to 34-year-olds had experienced this, compared with 16% of 35 to 54-year-olds and 3% of those 55 and above. “Larger academic studies of college students in the US and Australia put it at much higher,” says Meyrick. US research found that 64% of female college students had been choked during sex. In contrast, data on previous generations, collected between 2006 and 2015, found that most college students didn’t include choking when listing rough sexual behaviour (slapping, being pinned down or tied up were all cited) and, overall, choking/strangulation was reported as occurring infrequently. “It has become normalised practice among younger people and not viewed as problematic,” says Meyrick, “and most older people have no idea.” 

 And here's the thing:

It has become so standard among young people that one recent council-funded sex education presentation for Welsh secondary schoolchildren included “safe” choking advice such as: “It is never OK to start choking someone without asking them first …” and: “Consent should also happen every time sexual choking is an option, not just the first time.” When the presentation was made public, Fiona Mackenzie, the founder of campaigning group We Can’t Consent to This (WCCTT), was “absolutely furious but not at all surprised”....

The Domestic Abuse Act of 2021 clarified that a person cannot consent to being harmed for the purpose of sexual gratification and also made non-fatal strangulation a specific criminal offence. Before that, it fell under general offences such as battery, the mildest assault possible. “The major win for us is that [when women are] subjected to a non-fatal or a fatal assault during sex, there will be a much better response from the criminal justice system,” says Mackenzie. “There have been several cases since where the men have been prosecuted and convicted for murder by juries and given long sentences.”

On the second aspect, though – the normalisation of strangulation during sex – Mackenzie believes the situation has only worsened. “I’d hoped that lots of other charities and sex educators, the government and academics would get behind it, but instead what we’ve got is this completely mad idea that we can somehow help women to keep having violent sex but in a safer way. Maybe in a hi-vis jacket?”

 

Talk about your dubious religions!

The Washington Post has an article about an art exhibition called "The First Homosexuals" which apparently deals with (what might be called) the Foucault-ian question of when and how homosexuality came to be defined.   (I wrote about that topic, probably for the first time, way back in 2007.)

The article opens with (what I think is) a not completely convincing statement that people are recently not inclined towards seeing sexuality as an innate gay/straight divide:

Until fairly recently, a prevailing idea about homosexuality was that it was innate. If you were gay, went the thinking, you only needed to discover this deep biological truth about yourself (and somehow overcome deep societal prejudice) to live an authentic life.

But, vital as it proved in the fight for basic rights, the idea that you were “born this way,” as Lady Gaga’s anthem put it, had to be invented before it could be dissolved, as it has been lately among young people eager to embrace a more experimental and dynamic approach to sexual attraction and sexual self-fashioning.

I suppose that the surveys showing a dramatic rise in the number of young people - especially young women - prepared to self label as bisexual does support that?   But then again, what does it mean if its mainly young women who are putting their hand up as open to everything, but not young men?   I basically don't know that we should take such self-identification surveys all that seriously, given how social ideas float around and morph.    

But as my earlier musing from 2007 indicates, I have always thought that the Foucault view may have had something to it.   

The Post review's version of what happened is as follows:

The term “homosexual” was coined by the Hungarian German journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny, in an 1868 letter and a pamphlet the following year. Kertbeny believed “homosexual” wasn’t something that you were — it was an act, a taste, a proclivity and as such, it ran counter to the idea of fixed identities.

Kertbeny’s letter was written to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer and early advocate for the rights of people he called “urnings” (men sexually attracted to other men) and “urinden” (women attracted to other women). These he considered fixed identities, produced when the body of one sex contained, from birth, the soul of its opposite. Ulrichs’s terminology changed as German psychiatrists later adopted the term “homosexual,” but ironically, it was his vision of an innate sexual identity that won the day.

The show sets out to explore the ramifications of this historical turn, which marked “the dawn,” write the curators, “of our modern, binaristic conception of sexuality in exactly the terms its author [Kertbeny] detested.”

OK, all somewhat interesting, but the real reason for this post is down to this bit of information in the article which I had never heard of before:

A small but memorable section of the show is devoted to a “temple dedicated to queer art and spirituality.” The Sanctuary of Art Elisarion, as it was known, was founded in the 1920s by Elisàr von Kupffer, a German artist and writer, along with his lifelong partner Eduard von Mayer. The temple served a new religion, Klarismus (Clarism), built on the idea that the gender binary was a perversion of divine will and that everyone was inherently homosexual, since there was in fact only one sex. The figure of the androgynous adolescent became Clarism’s symbol for spiritual transcendence. 

Well, don't the Germans come up with some funny ideas.   Anyway, it seems that the art exhibition fills in more details: 

The aesthetic and spiritual ideals of artist Elisàr von Kupffer melded with the theories of his partner, philosopher Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960) to yield a unique form of fin de siècle utopianism. They invented a new religion they called Clarism and built a temple to encourage its spread. Clarism is best understood in the context of other turn of the century utopian movements, such as theosophy, but it possessed a particularly Germanic flavor in its evident fascination with the classical past. Germany at this period understood itself as the new Greece, and von Kupffer and von Mayer found their ideal—and the kernel of their religion— in the easy bisexuality of the classical era, in which relationships with men and relationships with women operated seemingly on different planes and were not therefore seen as mutually exclusive. They materialized this bisexuality in elevating an androgynous gender ideal, modeled after a nonbinary figure of Adonis they saw painted in fresco in Pompeii.

While these images of von Kupfer and other models may strike us as fundamentally homosexual, it was precisely that category that these images were intent on opposing. Homosexual and heterosexual were defined, after all, through difference from their opposite term, but for Clarism, this opposition was to be replaced by a synthesis. Their new gender ideal was embodied by rounded male buttocks, wide hips, a voluptuous fleshiness, a lack of body hair and the elevation of the adolescent form—adolescent because they saw adolescents as possessing characteristics of both sexes. Perhaps not surprisingly, these were also physical traits von Kupfer himself possessed. Such a nonbinary archetype spurred the formation of a new painterly ideal, for von Kupfer trained as an artist, even studying for a short with Ludwig von Hofmann, also in this exhibition. The nonbinary form favored by von Kupfer was also not merely an aesthetic innovation, for Clarism believed in the leveling of all gender differences, in both embodied and political terms.

In their temple, erected in Minusio, Switzerland, a semi-tropical locale bordering Italy, von Kupfer placed more than 140 paintings, including one that was an immense cyclorama now on view at Monte Verità. In fact, he likely built what came to be called the Elisarion in Minusio because of the presence of Monte Verità, for it was a utopian vegan (later vegetarian) nudist commune, and thus indicative of the social tolerance of the locals.

There you go - a utopian vegan nudist commune that featured the veneration of the adolescent (but male!) form as "non binary".   Except for, you know, the actual genitals, I guess?

I wonder how long it lasted.  Not very long, I suspect.  (I see that the "Temple" still exists, though, although is only open to the public by appointment.)

The co-founder von Kupfer, the Post goes on to explain, may have been a gay nudist into adolescents, but that didn't stop him loving Hitler!:

Von Kupffer is now remembered as a crank esoteric, an advocate, a bigot who wrote fawning letters to Hitler.  

Ah well, just one of those slightly amusing attempts at creating a new religion that was doomed to failure....