The Trump madness

A few observations:

*   If Trump's staff are so readily disclosing embarrassing behaviour they have seen during the term of his presidency while they are still working for him, can you imagine what is going to come out when he has actually left the White House?   I'm pretty much expecting another 20 Omarosa  books with the theme "Of course I was lying that everything was great - I had a job to keep.  But let me tell you some stories."

*  The "soft coup" of an administration which simply sidesteps Trump because he's an idiot is an incredible situation.    Any normal person in the Oval Office faced with the deluge of savage, highly personally insulting, leaking against him would already have resigned - if you can't find staff that actually support you in private as well as public, it's humiliating.   But the GOP have decided it's best to keep Trump and his tribal, dumb, conspiracy believing base just ticking along, thinking he's actually doing a great job, so they can just work around him.  Or does this NYT piece signal a rebellion from within?   Because surely the author would know it would increase the paranoia in Trump's head - with any luck, sending him over some sort of edge.   David Frum's piece, This is a Constitutional Crisis, puts it well: 

If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.

 *  We actually know what will hasten the end of the Trump Presidency - Fox News turning on him.   But is it a case of Rupert doesn't know how to do that without shedding a huge slab of his brainwashed audience?  

Update:  sounds about right:

The problems on the Left

I watched that Jazz Twenlow segment from Tonightly about the self defeating Leftwing outrage machine and it is pretty good, but not perfect.   (Can't people like him admit that Hillary was correct in her judgment about half of Trump's base being pretty much deplorables, even if it was politically unwise to be honest about it at that time?  And never forget - who won popular vote convincingly despite that mistake?)

But more importantly, someone commenting on Twitter linked to this article in a magazine I have never heard of before:  No, Liberal Lefties are Not Right Wing, and it does seem a very good analysis of the Left's problem with what she calls the identitarian Left.   A sample:

To understand this, it is probably necessary to have a quick look at divisions on the left right now. While all lefties support economic policies which seek to redistribute wealth, reduce inequalities and support the most socially disadvantaged in society, the largest and longest split is between the socialists who advocate social ownership of the means of production—thereby putting control in the hands of the workers—and the social democrats who seek to redistribute wealth within a regulated capitalist system within a liberal democracy. These have loosely been understood as the “radical Left” and the “liberal Left” and this is also loosely connected to differing principles around social issues such as feminism (radical feminism vs liberal feminism).

There has been much animosity between these groups with the radicals accusing the liberals of being half-measure sell-outs and the liberals accusing the radicals of being delusional Utopians. Nevertheless, these have been straightforward disagreements on comprehensible issues and civil and reasonable conversation and compromise have also been possible because both groups believe that objective truth exists, that evidence and reason are the way to access it and that language is a tool for conveying these.

More recently, we have seen a rise of the identitarian lefties who hold very different ideas about objective truth, evidence, reason and language and who view society as structured by discourse (ways of talking about things) which perpetuates systems of power and privilege. As they often fit the definition of “radical” but have little in common with the older radical leftism and seldom address economics or class issues coherently, preferring to focus on identity groups like race, gender and sexuality, things have become much more messy, and communication and compromise much more difficult. These are the individuals who frequently insist that the liberal lefties are actually right-wing. As the liberal lefties make up the majority of lefties and as they are the most moderate and reasonable element of the left—and therefore the most likely to win the support of the political middle ground—this is an accusation we cannot allow to stand. We are the left and we cannot let the identitarians define us any longer.

 And further down:

These lefties share some core tenets of leftism in that they want to support the most vulnerable in society, but they tend to neglect the poorest people if they lack other identity characteristics associated with disadvantage—being female, of ethnic minority or LGBT. There is little support for white, working class men and they frequently deny that straight, white men can face any disadvantages at all or speak in ways which assume this. This has almost certainly assisted the present reactionary surge to the right.

Identitarian lefties also share the care/harm foundation of liberalism with this drive to end inequality and prioritize groups seen as marginalized, but this is accompanied by a rage at groups seen as privileged. The result is a highly illiberal practice of evaluating the worth of individuals by their gender, race or sexuality. Because of the belief that power in society is constructed by language, they are also prone to authoritarian censoriousness about what language can and cannot be used and which ideas may or may not be discussed.

This bent to control is in profound contrast to the traditionally liberal support of the “marketplace of ideas.”

The final summation of the state of play:

We are now in a situation in which the three parts of the left—radical, liberal and identitarian—are locked in an unproductive deadlock. The radicals oppose the identitarians whom they see as bourgeois elitists rooted in the academy who have completely abandoned the working class and the meaning of leftism. They remain at odds with the liberals for their lack of support for socialism. The liberals oppose the identitarians whom they regard as profoundly illiberal and threatening to undo decades of progress towards individual freedom and equality of opportunity regardless of race, gender and sexuality. They find the radicals of little help in supporting liberalism. The identitarians largely ignore the radicals except in the form of radical feminist rejection of trans identity which they condemn as transmisogynistic hatred but pay some confused lip-service to anti-capitalism (which does not mollify the radicals). They reserve most of their ire for the liberals who are addressing the same social and ethical issues that they are.

If you think those paragraphs are convincing, go read it all.  

News best left unreported?

At the BBC, a story of a woman who poisoned her husband by putting eyedrops in his water.   Who knew this was a such a readily available poison?:

She was detained when a toxicology test discovered a chemical called tetrahydrozoline in his body.

The substance is found in over-the-counter eyedrops and nasal sprays that are available without a prescription....

Tetrahydrozoline can cause seizures, stop breathing and induce comas, according to the US National Library of Medicine.

Even a few drops of the drug, which is intended to reduce redness, can cause "serious adverse events".

Somewhat blackly amusing, though, is this part of the report:

Prosecutors say they are now reviewing a 2016 incident, in which she shot her husband in the head with a crossbow as he slept.

Police determined that that shooting was "accidental", according to a police report obtained by the Charlotte Observer.

Investigators found Mrs Clayton at home "crying and upset" after the crossbow incident, according to the report.

Update:   OK so, obviously, eyedrop poisoning has been a "thing" for some time - just that I have missed it.   From Wired in 2013:

Surprised? You shouldn't be. Eye-drop poisoning is more routine you might think. Remember the Ohio man arrested last year for sending his father to the hospital by putting two bottles of Visine into his milk? The Pennsylvania woman who'd been sneaking Visine into her boyfriend's drinking water for three years? (The poor man suffered all that time with nausea, breathing and blood pressure problems). Oh, and let's not forget the Wyoming teenager who was angry with her step-mother; the girl just pleaded no contest to aggravated assault charges this Friday.

Risky encounters with eyedrops have turned up on poison center roundups; the myth-busting website Snopes.com has tallied up even more. And those are lists of deliberate eye drop attacks. Let's not forget the hazards posed by accidental poisonings; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning to parents about leaving eye drops containers around where they might be found by children.

Snopes took up the question to debunk an apparent belief that sneaking eye drops into a drink would basically induce a hilarious case of diarrhea – a scenario portrayed in a prank scene in the 2005 movie Wedding Crashers. Did I mention that Snopes specializes in myth busting? The website labeled the diarrhea scenario false and more. It went on to issue this warning: "Ingestion of such a concoction is downright dangerous making this 'harmless' form of retaliation fraught with hazard."....

The record tells us that tetrahydrozoline while poisonous is not a top-of-line-lethal substance. According to the safety sheet, acute oral toxicity in lab mice stands at an LD50 of 345 mg/kg. (LD50 stands for lethal dose 50 percent, meaning the amount of a toxic substance that will kill half of a test population). For comparison, the LD50 of potassium cyanide in mice is 5 mg/kg. And that difference means that while people do end up the hospital, they tend to survive the stay. This is good news for victims and also for perpetrators, as so many of them end up arrested thanks in part to the very characteristic symptoms of eye drop poisoning.

That's weirdly irresponsible of Wedding Crashers, isn't it?  (I've never seen it.)

Back to Bannon

I agree with the tweet, and most of what is said supporting it in the thread:

I think there is a world of difference between a writer's festival disinviting Germaine Greer and Bob Carr, both somewhat eccentric but (for want of a better description) harmless professional thinkers willing to engage in genuine debate,  and one disinviting a person who was crucial to the rise of the most blantantly authoritarian President we are ever likely to see, still supports him, and seeking to get back into political influence by preaching hyper-nationalism and shallow populism.

If you don't support people who would refuse to attend a writers festival if Bannon is there, you don't appreciate the danger and obnoxiousness of the guy.   [Leigh Sales might be well served to read this article, for starters.]   And that's pretty shameful and dumb, especially for journalists.

Three propositions

1.  What you choose is what the Universe chooses.

2.  Therefore, choose carefully.

3.  "Grace" is a matter of being  aware of points 1 & 2.


Update:   Gee, I had a really nice curry for dinner last night, and it seems to have turned me into Jordan Peterson.   (Actually, I was thinking about free will and determinism and Tipler and spacetime and Burt Bacharach and whether he was really onto something with that awful song from Lost Horizon, etc.)

Bannon out

Even allowing for the fact that literary writing or "ideas" festivals seem to have increasingly become an insular haven for the political Left and (in the last few years at least) the worst of identity politics,  I still think that the great majority of people who watched Steve Bannon's 40 minute interview on Four Corners last night would see no point in him appearing at something like the New Yorker festival.  (He has been disinvited after public outcry.)

He motormouthed his way through the interview, and doesn't address correction or criticism so much as dismiss them as simply being typical liberal media takes on the matter, and therefore obviously wrong.

He shows no sophistication or nuance in his understanding of trade, economics and corporate behaviour;  everything is perceived simply through his populist, nationalist, "clash of cultures" worldview, with his apparent love of capitalism mixed up with his somewhat contradictory distrust of corporate elites for making too much money.   (The Catholic influence is pretty clear - but only in so far as identifying a problem with capitalist excess.  There's not much sign that accepts the simple proposition that is also Catholic:  that it is an appropriate role of government to directly intervene in those excesses for the greater good.   Instead, he just seems to think that if all globalism stops, all companies will naturally behave better.)

In short, as lots of people have been saying about the New Yorker decision - it's ridiculous to think we don't know enough about his views and politics already, or that he is ever amenable to genuine, detailed debate.  He has his views; he makes his living by being a polemicist; and he dog whistles for support from the obnoxious and racist alt.right continually.

There is no point in his coming to a Left leaning festival, other than to invite an unedifying shouting match.

Update:

I've gone back over some of my past posts about Bannon. 

Even if I do say so myself, I nailed it pretty good in this one. 

And from another post, look at the way he was the source of the Trump quasi-fascist "fake news" meme that has killed hope of rational debate with Trump cultists:

But it's clear that a huge part of the problem is the people around him - particularly the unhealthy looking Stephen Bannon, who is obviously either behind, or completely supportive of, Trump's paranoia with how the media presents him.  Here he is, quoted by the NYT:

“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”

“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.)

“That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” 

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Yes, just what you want.  An unstable, vindictive culture warrior who won't accept that the Trump victory was, in fact, very narrow, advising a vain, insecure man-child who stumbled into a presidency he didn't really expect.

The guy has ideas, sure:  but they are obnoxious and merely asserted - it is not as if they are well researched or ever justified with details you can argue about.

As such, no matter how much you don't care for Lefties not challenging themselves at literary love ins (or however you want to put it), to invite Bannon to a serious "ideas festival" is too much like the false equivalence of  claiming you must have a climate change fake "skeptic" at a science festival or a serious TV discussion in order to say it has given the topic proper coverage.

No, he has shown he does not deserve a mainstream platform to bluster his views again, or to attempt to rehabilitate himself as some sort of misunderstood Mr Reasonable.

Update:   amusingly, I see that some of the old characters at Catallaxy thought Bannon did great in that interview.   Their reactions are so predictable:   if any right wing guy talks over a woman interviewer (especially one from a public broadcaster), they'll think he's fantastic.

Transgender research wars, continued...

I've mentioned the 4thwavenow website before [it's subtitled "A community of parents & others concerned about the medicalization of gender-atypical youth and rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)"], and how transgender activists hate it.  Now Science reports on a researcher who did surveys with parents from that and similar sites, only to be condemned for, you know, investigating what a lot of concerned parents were claiming:

Controversy is exploding around a paper published earlier this month in PLOS ONE by a public health expert at Brown University describing reports by parents that their children suddenly experienced unease with the gender they were assigned at birth; the paper calls the condition “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). The paper, by physician-scientist Lisa Littman, is drawing fierce criticism from transgender advocates, who call it antitransgender because it suggests that some cases of gender dysphoria may be “socially contagious.” They say the paper has serious methodological flaws, noting that Littman interviewed only parents, not the young people themselves, and recruited from websites frequented by parents who were concerned about their children’s apparently sudden gender transitions. Meanwhile, the reactions of Brown and the journal are being assailed by critics who accuse them of caving to political pressure.

On Monday, PLOS ONE announced it is conducting a postpublication investigation of the study’s methodology and analysis. “This is not about suppressing academic freedom or scientific research. This is about the scientific content itself—whether there is anything that needs to be looked into or corrected,” PLOS ONE Editor-in-Chief Joerg Heber in San Francisco, California, told ScienceInsider in an interview yesterday.

Also on Monday, Brown officials removed the university’s press release highlighting the paper from its website. On Tuesday, Bess Marcus, dean of Brown’s School of Public Health, wrote in an open statement that the university acted “in light of questions raised about research design and data collection related to the study.” She added that people in the Brown community have raised concerns that the study’s conclusions “could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”

 Another researcher says there is no denying the upswing in sudden onset transexuals, though:

But Ray Blanchard, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in Canada who worked for 15 years in a gender identity clinic that screened candidates for sex reassignment surgery, says the paper points to a clear phenomenon: a new subgroup of adolescents, mainly women, with gender dysphoria and no behavioral signs of such dysphoria during childhood.

“Many clinicians in North America and elsewhere have been seeing such patients,” Blanchard, who worked with adults, wrote in an email, “and it has been speculated that this subgroup is one reason for the predominance of adolescent females now being seen in North America and elsewhere (Aitken et al., 2015). No one can deny the clinical reality,” he wrote, that the documented increase in adolescent girls being referred to clinics for gender dysphoria is being augmented by those with no history of the condition in childhood.

In the study, Littman acknowledged its limitations, describing it as a starting point. “Like all first descriptive studies, additional studies will be needed to replicate the findings,” she wrote. She told ScienceInsider that in upcoming research she plans to recruit parent-teen pairs in cases where the teenager experienced ROGD that later resolved.

About that Productivity Commission report on inequality

I wrote about Adam Creighton's biased take on it last week, and I see that Peter Whiteford has written on the topic, showing that my complaint was well justified. 

I don't really know how he manages to always be so polite.

A modern Gothic well worth watching

First off:  I think Gore Verbinski is pretty underrated as a director and visual stylist.   I'm a strong defender of all three initial instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean, even as the pace lagged in number 3: they all show real directorial and visual flare.    I then enjoyed Rango, his eccentric animated Western, as well as The Lone Ranger - not a perfect film by any means, but again, always watchable, great to look at, and amusing enough to keep me watching.    [I've never seen his version of The Ring, as it happens:  perhaps soon.]

This is by way of explaining why I was interested to see his last movie - A Cure for Wellness.   I caught up with it on Saturday via Google Play.

I knew that it had received mixed reviews - 47% on Metacritic - so I was expecting flaws.  And while I knew (before double checking) that it had been been a box office flop - I didn't realise it was a spectacular commercial failure - $8 million in the US, and only $26 million worldwide!

But it turns out to be one of those movies in which lowered expectations are well exceeded.

Best reason to watch it - looks absolutely fantastic, with great directorial flair.   Honestly, it's worth watching for that alone.

As for the story - I think it's best described as modern Gothic, and a pretty weird one at that.   In many respects, it reminded me of The Shining:  it's often ambiguous as to whether we are seeing reality or full or partial hallucination.   As such, it could in theory make for a lot of interesting on-line analysis (like Kubrick's move), except for the fact that no one saw it!  Also like Kubrick, the characters are not overly sympathetic or deeply drawn, but it doesn't matter much in this case.  And it does have a touch of redemption at the end.

I thought it was also interesting how unsympathetically Europeans are generally portrayed:  the village outside of the Alpine sanatorium looks like a dump full of punks with no jobs, and as for the  German speaking workers back in the spa - none of them are to be trusted.   I see that Verbinski was born in the US but had Polish grandparents.  He is also credited as co-story writer for this film.   I wonder if he intended that it have a "never trust a German" subtext, even though set in Switzerland?

It is obviously not going to be everyone's taste:  there are two scenes in particular that are somewhat over the top (one a torture scene that was short but so intense I had to look away.  That's not so common for me, although that's perhaps because I don't watch awful torture themed movies - like the Saw series - anyway.)   There is too much ambiguity in terms of where reality ends and hallucination begins.   And really, do movies with plots involving incest ever do all that well?   (OK, excepting Chinatown - which, incidentally, I consider over-praised.) 

But overall, I would strongly recommend that folk with a taste for dreamlike Gothic horror, and who want to see a stunningly good looking film made by a director who really knows what to do with a camera, go watch it.

Finally, here's an article that talks about where they filmed it - part of it was in a military hospital where Hitler was once treated!  Interesting.

Update:   I suppose I should have checked Reddit, but there is a fair bit of discussion there trying to get to the bottom of the story.   I would love to know whether there is a deliberate hidden explanation waiting to be found in it, or whether Gore deliberately kept things so ambiguous so as to make that a talking point.  (Same could be speculated about Kubrick and The Shining, too.)  

Saturday photos

You've all been waiting for an update on the wood and glass office building in King Street, haven't you? :

On the same street, a long awaited fancy deli and food shop is supposed to open soon.  I will be interested to see if the main entry ends up really looking like the faked up door:

King Street used to be part of the RNA showgrounds, which is now open to public access all year round.  I still can't quite get over how strange it feels to be able to walk into the empty old grandstands.  One imagines that if this was an American city, it would be full of the homeless camping out in them.  But this is Brisbane, and there is no sign it happens here:

Finally, a photo from late yesterday, showing how, for only the second in the 15 odd years I've lived in my current house, a kangaroo has been hopping up and down the street:

Sorry, I didn't have time to walk up closer...

The lab grown meat challenge

Vox has an article about regulatory issues with lab grown meat, about which I am very sceptical as ever being a large scale and economical substitute for real meat, and it contains a handy explanation of the challenges:

Depending on the type of cells and the medium ingredients, you can grow different kinds of tissue. Muscle cells grow more muscle cells, fat cells grow more fat cells; both are in meat as we know it. Stem cells can be coaxed into growing different kinds of tissue. 

There’s one more element beyond cells and soup: scaffolding. The cells need something to grow on. If the scaffolding is going to be part of the eventual product (as it would if you’re growing a whole muscle meat like a steak or a chicken breast), then it obviously has to be edible. If the meat gets removed from the scaffold, as it would if the product was more like ground meat, then it just has to be safe. 

That’s the simplified version of a process that, in practice, is complex and tightly controlled. It all takes place in what’s called a bioreactor — a tank where you can control the temperature, pH, oxygen levels, and a host of other factors. Right now, Santo is working with 2-liter tanks, and one of the big questions of clean meat is how scalable the process is. 

According to Ben Wurgaft, a historian working on a book about lab-grown meat, there are some significant challenges involved. First is sourcing the proteins, vitamins, sugars, and hormones that go into that medium without using serum from the blood of those actual animals, which would at least partially defeat the purpose of lab-grown meat and would certainly be cost-prohibitive. Second is creating bioreactors that are “vascularized,” or have the infrastructure to deliver serum to cells at the center of a piece of meat, as blood vessels do to animal cells. Without that, you can’t grow the thick tissue necessary for steak or chicken breast (although you can still grow the equivalent of ground meats).

“If those don’t turn out to be easier nuts to crack than they seem to be so far, we will not see cultured meat emerging at the time scale of companies and venture capitalists,” Wurgaft says — which is to say, soon.

 I say again:  all the money being poured into this would be better off put into research for making vegetable or fungal or microbial protein more similar in taste and texture to real meat.   

The Producers: Chinese version

For something more lightweight:  the BBC explains that some Chinese producers and investment companies have worked out that if they fake box office success for a movie they've invested in, the rise in the company's stock value can make just as much (or more?) money for them as a genuinely popular movie:

So a film might be on in the cinema and one of the companies which paid for it might buy out entire late night screenings. These will register as full houses when they are, in reality, entirely empty theatres.

Regulators have been catching onto this so producers have allegedly started just buying all the bad seats across many hours of screenings.

Yet the authorities have now worked out that if a showing is somewhat empty in the middle and for some reason all the seats around the walls have been purchased something must be amiss.

It's not exactly the same as The Producers, but not million miles away either...

Tim Blair - immature, dumb disgrace

As I have noted previously, Tim Blair makes jokes about real life suicides and then tries to justify it by arguing you stop suicide contagion by laughing at it.    

The latest - he responds to an ABC report, citing concerns by health professionals who have worked extensively on Nauru regarding depressed, self harming kids on the island, and tries to make a joke about it.

I guess the authorities on Nauru should be sending over copies of his post because of the public good it will do in preventing those kids from working out ways to try to kill themselves?

Or, more truthfully, Tim Blair should realise he's an immature disgrace who should give up his day job and do something useful for a change.  

Real life effects of "enemy of the people"

Eric Wemple at WAPO details how Trump's fascist friendly language affected a nutter.

Trump is a dangerous disgrace.

Sounds about right