When too much Game of Thrones is... too much Game of Thrones

Hey, Media:  did it ever occur to you that there are probably quite a lot of people who have never watched an episode of GOT, and have no interest in the show whatsoever?

You can stop talking about it now, OK?

Update:  that said, I did laugh at the recent GOT jokes (there's more than one) on a Colbert "Meanwhile" segment:

 

In Queensland legal news

A paranormal investigator who abused Virgin airline workers over the phone has avoided jail because of his excessive weight.

He sounds an absolute nutter from way back:

The court was told Jones, who refused to identify himself on the calls, threatened staff with legal action, made racial slurs and refused to believe he was talking to someone based in Brisbane.

“Ma’am, don’t tell me in that Filipino lingo of yours, the thing is, let me tell you what the thing is, I’ve got my legal team here, I’ve got the police on the way,” Jones told customer service staff, the court heard.

“So you may need to get off that little Filipino backside of yours and you may want to get onto your Australian head office.

“And they want to go into crash control because voice recordings of you and your Filipino staff abusing me and swearing at me are about to be handed to the Australian Federal Police.”

The court was told Jones had already been placed on a watch list with the airline, which banned him from flying with them in 2010 after he made a number of calls to the company.

Jones also had been convicted of similar offences on three other occasions dating back to 1998.

During those incidents he told public servants they were “going to hell” and threatened to “break kneecaps”.
In his sentencing submissions, Jones’s barrister Rob Glenday said prison would be too difficult for his client due to his complicated obesity.

 Good to know the world of paranormal investigation attracts such well adjusted people!

Yet more "humans live in the stupidest places"

I was pretty blown away by watching World From Above on SBS on the weekend - the one about Algeria.  Some of the desert scenery was very spectacular:  reminded me a lot of some of surreal imagery of sand dunes in The English Patient which can look like a special effect, until you realise they're not.

I didn't realise how large, intricately built (and isolated, of course) some of the oasis based towns in the middle of the desert could be.   There was also this astonishing city, which I have noted before. 

But, as usual, I am always saying to myself - why the heck did anyone ever decide these were good enough places to stay put in?  Why not move out of the desert and closer to the coast?

It's on SBS on Demand, if you live in Australia.

Wealth and (un)happiness

1.  Is this a recent photo of James Packer?:

It might just be the angle, but it makes him look (with that thick neck) a tad Neanderthal.

OK, I'm being mean and don't really know what his character is like - and he has had an unhappy love life and a bit of a difficult upbringing with a high pressure Dad. [Update:  I may be understating with "a bit".   I had also forgotten treatment for depression last year, quite likely continuing, I would guess.  Do anti-depressants cause weight gain? - yes in about 25% of people taking them, the Web tells me.]    He sure does not look like a happy man, and you suspect if he could have chosen a different, quieter path through life, he would have.

2.   I didn't get to read all of the NYT recent feature length look at Rupert Murdoch and his family, but did reach the point where the dysfunctional family had counselling sessions:

As friends of the Murdochs liked to say, Murdoch didn’t raise children; he raised future media moguls. It had made for fraught family dynamics, with competing ambitions and ever-shifting alliances. Murdoch was largely responsible for this state of affairs: He had long avoided naming one of his children as his successor, deferring an announcement that might create still more friction within his family, not to mention bringing into focus his own mortality. Instead, Murdoch tried to manage the tensions, arranging for group therapy with his children and their spouses with a counselor in London who specialized in working with dynastic families.

I'm waiting for the movie "A Very Murdoch Thanksgiving".  

Quick answers to headlines

*  Can a President be Too Old, asks the Washington Post.

Answer:   Yes, obviously.  Like, duh.  For God's sake Democrats, pick someone under 60.

*  Queerbaiting - exploitation or a sign of progress?  asks the BBC.

Answer:  Neither:  it's a sign of the stupid modern obsessive interest in labelling sexuality as part of identity politics.  Go write about something worthwhile.

* I’m an attractive, heterosexual woman who wants no-strings-attached sex. Where do I find non-creeps for that? (From Slate's routinely awful sex and relationship advice column.)

Answer:  No where.  You've already worked it out, why are you bothering asking?

*  Who does homework work for?   (A letter to The Atlantic).

Answer:  what?  Obviously, the person who came up with that headline needed to do more of it.  (Homework, of course.) 

Lovely people

Latest in the "you do know you are admitting to being an unpleasant, uncivil jerk, don't you?", Cassie of Sydney who comments at Catallaxy:

I actually DO stuff. I have confronted ALP hacks in the street…..to the point where the most recent ALP candidate for Wentworth in September and October would run a mile when he saw me walking on Oxford Street. What an effing scaredy cat. I verbally confronted that slag Phelps at the polling booth about her support from GetUp and the fact that she was the biggest phoney around…..she didn’t take too kindly to that confrontation and I could see the colour fade from her face. I do my bit! I am NOT some little pussy cat who tiptoes around people or issues. 

Thanks, Sinclair, for providing a safe place for uncivil jerks of the Right to out themselves.   It's a real public service you provide.

Now, be a good Professor and out your own clear views on climate change in light of recent year's temperatures, and what government policy should be?  

Update:  today, the perfectly stable Cassie has come down feeling ill:

Zapping your way to a youthful working memory

From Phys.org:

Zapping the brains of people over 60 with a mild electrical current improved a form of memory enough that they performed like people in their 20s, a new study found.

Someday, people might visit clinics to boost that ability, which declines both in normal aging and in dementias like Alzheimer's disease, said researcher Robert Reinhart of Boston University.

The treatment is aimed at "working memory," the ability to hold information in mind for a matter of seconds as you perform a task, such as doing math in your head. Sometimes called the workbench or scratchpad of the mind, it's crucial for things like taking medications, paying bills, buying groceries or planning, Reinhart said.

"It's where your consciousness lives ... where you're working on information," he said.

The new study is not the first to show that stimulating the brain can boost working memory. But Reinhart, who reported the work Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, said it's notable for showing success in older people and because the memory boost persisted for nearly an hour minimum after the brain stimulation ended.

Only worked for an hour after the stimulation?   It's going to take a lot of repeat zapping if it's going to last all day, then.  Maybe older folk (like me, sooner than I want) can just wear an electro stimulating hat all day.

Merton and the post War religious surge

Harper's Magazine has an article looking back at the life of Thomas Merton, the catholic convert who became a monk and wrote lots of books and was quite a Catholic star back in the 50's and 60's.  I've never read him, actually.  Turns out his private life was not as monk-like as one might like of the devout.  More on that below.

But what initially caught my eye is this section near the start of the article, because I hadn't really thought of the post WW2 period in quite this way:

It [the success of Merton's autobiography published in 1948] was in fact one of many signs of a feverish religiosity following World War II—a time of religious conversions, bulging seminaries, national revivals, and interfaith goodwill increasing among what Will Herberg called “the three great faiths” in his book Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955).

Polls in 1947 indicated that the most-respected leaders in America were ministers, priests, and rabbis. In 1954, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, and in 1956 “In God We Trust” became the national motto. Billy Graham became “pastor to the presidents,” and Monsignor Fulton Sheen became a television star. Religious conversions—whether to Protestantism (channeled by Graham) or to Catholicism (channeled by Sheen)—were everywhere. Even Dwight Eisenhower heard the call and was baptized by a Presbyterian minister in 1953, his first year as president. That same year, the Presidential Prayer Breakfast (later the National Prayer Breakfast) was instituted. Around this time, the term Judeo-Christian became a common description of America’s traditions.

In this period of heated piety, Catholics seemed the most successfully devout. Norman Podhoretz, with his interest in who was “making it,” said that Catholics were having their moment, and Lenny Bruce called Catholicism “the only the church.” In what was called “the Catholic Renaissance,” many Catholic intellectuals turned from modern commercialism toward eternity, or to the thirteenth century as a plausible substitute for eternity. They took up Gregorian chant, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the work of French Catholic literary stars—Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Pierre Teilhard du Chardin, Henri de Lubac, Georges Bernanos, Henri Ghéon, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, Simone Weil. Many of these authors were translated into En­glish for the publishing house of the Catholic Renaissance, Sheed and Ward.

I guess you can also throw in the ascendency of the Kennedys to political power too as a positive Catholic story, given that the public did not know of  JFK's appallingly incontinent sex life at the time.

So yeah, the diminishing cultural influence of Catholicism now perhaps needs to be considered in the light of an unusual "high tide" of influence of the post War period.

As for Merton himself, he started resenting the attention his fame brought to his abbey:

After Merton published The Seven Storey Mountain, and people started showing up at his abbey as postulants to become monks or as “seculars” making weekend retreats, Merton’s books began to earn real money for Gethsemani, funds needed to handle the flood of applicants and visitors he had inspired. His output now had to match this influx. His otherworldly superiors, meanwhile, suddenly had a crass stake in his popularity—it brought the abbey fame, recruits, and money. In time he would begin to resent this, saying the publicity made him feel “cheap”: “I am sickened . . . by being treated as an article for sale, as a commodity.”

He became depressed and sour about what was happening to the abbey. It was staging itself, in a kind of “liturgical vaudeville,” which heightened the flow of people he was bringing in—“all those guys, some solid, mostly half-wits I think, who are nevertheless good, well-meaning people and honest in their way, and many of whom are here on account of me.”

The abbey tried to make Merton more than an ornament of its establishment, giving him responsible roles such as the novice master. But he preferred to devote himself to his writing, and he let his fellow monks know in an open letter that he would not serve as the abbot, should that office come open, not wanting to spend the rest of his life “arguing about trifles with 125 confused and anxiety-ridden monks.” The brothers could not publicly express discontent with that insult. He was their source of the world’s respect.

As he distanced himself from the monks, he was amassing an adoring fan club, corresponding feverishly with peace and civil-rights activists who looked to him for moral confirmation of their cause.

This engagement with civil rights causes got him into trouble with his order, being told at one point to stop writing about the nuclear threat.  Surprisingly (for me), Merton was really into the pop protest culture of the day:

He was reading James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X, and listening to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, and Joan Baez. He worked through two contacts to get a visit from Baez, and they commiserated with Dylan in a stressful time for the singer. 

 The article goes on to explain that by 1966, he was seeing a psychiatrist for depression, and fell in love with a student nurse.   It was more than spiritual love, too:

Later Merton wrote: “I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day at Wygal’s, and it haunts me.” In his poems to her, he would write of their “worshiping hands” and how “I cling to the round hull / Of your hips.” She was twenty-five; he was fifty-one.

He used trips to the airport for meeting literary friends as excuses for seeing her. She also met him in a woods by the abbey, bringing a picnic basket and a bottle of sauterne, where, he wrote, “[we] drank our wine and read poems and talked of ourselves and mostly made love and love and love.” 

The affair only lasted 6 months, and the article does not explain what happened in his life after that.

Oh.  Wikipedia explains that only a couple of years later (1968) he died in somewhat odd circumstances in Thailand::

On December 10, 1968, Merton was at a Red Cross retreat center named Sawang Kaniwat in the town of Samutprakarn near Bangkok, Thailand, attending a monastic conference.^[35] After giving a talk at the morning session, he was found dead later in the afternoon in the room of his cottage, wearing only shorts, lying on his back with a short-circuited Hitachi floor fan lying across his body.^[36] His associate, Jean Leclercq, states: "In all probability the death of Thomas Merton was due in part to heart failure, in part to an electric shock."^[37] Since there was no autopsy, there was no suitable explanation for the wound in the back of Merton's head, "which had bled considerably." ^[38] Arriving from the cottage next to Merton's, the Primate of the Benedictine Order and presiding officer of the conference, Rembert Weakland, anointed Merton.^[39]
 
In 2016, theologian Matthew Fox claimed that Merton had been assassinated by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency. James W. Douglass made a similar claim in 1997. In 2018, Hugh Turley and David Martin published The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, questioning the claim of accidental electrocution.[

Matthew Fox is, I think, a bit of a nut.  But still, it does seem a curious and abrupt end to a complicated life.

Socrates got around

An essay at Aeon notes that there is reason to suspect that Socrates had a much more complicated love life than Plato let on (or knew about?):

The enduring image of Socrates that comes from Plato is of a man of humble background, little education, few means and unappealing looks, who became a brilliant and disputatious philosopher married to an argumentative woman called Xanthippe.  Both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates’ other principal biographer, were born c424 BCE, so they knew Socrates (born c469 BCE) only as an old man. Keen to defend his reputation from the charges of ‘introducing new kinds of gods’ and ‘corrupting young men’ on which he was eventually brought to trial and executed, they painted a picture of Socrates in late middle age as a pious teacher and unremitting ethical thinker, a man committed to shunning bodily pleasures for higher educational purposes. ....

Plato’s pupil Aristotle and other Ancient writers provide us with correctives to the Platonic Socrates. For instance, Aristotle’s followers Aristoxenus and Clearchus of Soli preserve biographical snippets that they might have known from their teacher. From them we learn that Socrates in his teens was intimate with a distinguished older philosopher, Archelaus; that he married more than once, the first time to an aristocratic woman called Myrto, with whom he had two sons; and that he had an affair with Aspasia of Miletus, the clever and influential woman who was later to become the partner of Pericles, a leading citizen of Athens.

The man child President, continued

Lots of reporting about how Trump and his Homeland Security boss fell out over the matter of whether the government agency has to follow the law.  (Guess which one thought it could be ignored.)

Now, his Secret Service head is going too.  Vox notes (emphasis on the last paragraph):

The Secret Service said in a statement after the incident that it was Mar-a-Lago, not them, who decides who and who does not get into the property. Trump just last week said that he “could not be happier” with the Secret Service, which has “done a fantastic job from day one.”

CNN reports that Alles’s ouster is not related to the Mar-a-Lago incident, and an official told NBC News that it “was not based on any single event.” The Times, however, reports that Trump sought Alles’s resignation “in part” because of the incident.

The Times also reported Trump had “soured on” Alles and that the director had been told about 10 days ago to come up with an exit plan for himself and devise a timeline. According to the report, Trump made fun of Alles’s appearance and called him “Dumbo” because of his ears.

Terrible politics noted

The Coalition, which by rights should come out of the forthcoming federal election with a mere handful of seats and be rebuilt from the ground up, knows how to run a dishonest populist scare campaign and is out and running with one early.

Labor needs to be countering this ASAP - sad to say, but populist lies of this type lodge in brains early and can be near impossible to displace.   Here are some amusing tweets about it today:

Seekers remembered

Australian Story last night gave a quick history of The Seekers.  I had forgotten how relatively briefly they had been together.   Also how young Judith Durham was when they started (she was 19 when they left for England.) 

Their heyday was when I was in primary school, but you know, I never cared for them.  There is something folk melancholic about their sound which infects all of their songs, even the ones which are meant to be more upbeat. 

They seem to be nice enough people, though.

Things that are getting way out of hand

1.   Vegans.   Yeah sure:  holding up city commuters, and running onto farms you don't like is really going to convince meat eaters that they ought to stop.   And I say that as someone who has been musing about animal welfare lately.   Really, their behaviour is just that of anti-social jerks, and serves no educative or persuasive role at all.  

2.   Reality TV, particularly Married at First Sight.   Lots of people seem very perturbed about this show and its puzzling popularity.   (Michael Rowland of ABC breakfast starting a lot of complaints.)  Should just be banned as entirely unethical.

3.   Nationalist leaders blowing up satellites to show how modern macho strong their nation is, and thereby pointlessly increasing the dangerous cloud of orbital debris that risks the safety of all spaceflight in future.  It's such a stupid thing to do.

Just how smart is Keith Windshuttle?

I see from a scan of Catallaxy that Keith Windshuttle from Quadrant has taken the extraordinary step of claiming that the George Pell accuser fabricated his complaint by copying one from the US.   I won't link to the Windshuttle claims.

This seems extraordinarily foolhardy when the matter is undergoing an appeal which could, quite possibly, decline to set aside the conviction.   Windshuttle thinks the stories are so similar that it is self evident that the latter is copying the former - I would bet that many people (even one at Catallaxy has said so!) do not see it as so clear cut at all. 

Furthermore, Windshuttle acknowledges we have not read the full testimony of the complainant - making him attempting a comparison an unwise exercise in the extreme.

Maybe I am missing something here, but why wouldn't the Windshuttle story be a case of defamation if the appeal upholds the conviction?   Is he simply relying on the complainant not wanting to go through the public exposure of a defamation action?   Again, seems a very, very unwise thing for Windshuttle to assume. 

Drugs, culture and meaning

I've been seeing quite a bit about the US opioid drug problem lately:   a recent Foreign Correspondent episode, mainly based in San Francisco, I think - showed the level of homelessness and filth in that city caused by the epidemic;  a bit of a Louis Theroux show from 2017 on Huntington, Virginia (called "Dark States - Heroin Town"), where he was talking to some high guy living in a tent by a river; a post at Reddit with a photo showing one young guy injecting another in an alley behind someone's suburban house (with commenters quickly guessing - correctly - that it would be in Ohio.  Some other commenter said he lived in San Francisco and would be lucky to only see 4 people a day shooting up.)

I have always trouble getting my head around how people get into addiction of this kind.  Sure, there has been a large element of "accidental" addiction via the over prescription of opioids in the US, but how people with no medical need for an opioid choose to try such a notoriously addictive drug and risk addiction - and not recognise the warning signs of a serious addiction problem early in its use - seems to cry out for an explanation even while another part of my brain says "no, you will never be satisfied that anything about this makes sense."

There is the strong temptation to look at meta social/culture explanations, and the best recent example of the genre is Andrew Sullivan's lengthy piece in New Yorker Magazine that's a year old now.   I've only just read it in full, though.

It's a good very piece, I think, giving a lot of background history both of the recent American experience, and some of the history of opiate use in both England and the US as well.

And he does indeed go all meta-cultural and meta-economic at the end:

It’s been several decades since Daniel Bell wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but his insights have proven prescient. Ever-more-powerful market forces actually undermine the foundations of social stability, wreaking havoc on tradition, religion, and robust civil associations, destroying what conservatives value the most. They create a less human world. They make us less happy. They generate pain.

This was always a worry about the American experiment in capitalist liberal democracy. The pace of change, the ethos of individualism, the relentless dehumanization that capitalism abets, the constant moving and disruption, combined with a relatively small government and the absence of official religion, risked the construction of an overly atomized society, where everyone has to create his or her own meaning, and everyone feels alone. The American project always left an empty center of collective meaning, but for a long time Americans filled it with their own extraordinary work ethic, an unprecedented web of associations and clubs and communal or ethnic ties far surpassing Europe’s, and such a plethora of religious options that almost no one was left without a purpose or some kind of easily available meaning to their lives. Tocqueville marveled at this American exceptionalism as the key to democratic success, but he worried that it might not endure forever.

And it hasn’t. What has happened in the past few decades is an accelerated waning of all these traditional American supports for a meaningful, collective life, and their replacement with various forms of cheap distraction. Addiction — to work, to food, to phones, to TV, to video games, to porn, to news, and to drugs — is all around us. The core habit of bourgeois life — deferred gratification — has lost its grip on the American soul. We seek the instant, easy highs, and it’s hard not to see this as the broader context for the opioid wave. This was not originally a conscious choice for most of those caught up in it: Most were introduced to the poppy’s joys by their own family members and friends, the last link in a chain that included the medical establishment and began with the pharmaceutical companies. It may be best to think of this wave therefore not as a function of miserable people turning to drugs en masse but of people who didn’t realize how miserable they were until they found out what life without misery could be. To return to their previous lives became unthinkable. For so many, it still is.

If Marx posited that religion is the opiate of the people, then we have reached a new, more clarifying moment in the history of the West: Opiates are now the religion of the people.

That sounds pretty convincing - but it also sets up a sort of hopelessness towards the issue if no one knows how you go about recovering the type of communitarian values, support and sense of meaning the loss of which this theory argues is the reason why so many turn to drugs. 

I also tend a bit towards scepticism when thinking about how addiction to alcohol, if not opiates, has been a serious problem in the past in societies where, on the face of it, adherence to religious practice was still important.

I have to think about this some more.  And read some more.

Update:  Good grief, Sigmund.   From this rather interesting article "Historical and cultural aspects of man's relationship with addictive drugs", I get this quote:

Sigmund Freud, a contemporary of Kraepelin, laid the ground for the psychological approach to addiction. Freud wrote in a letter to Fliess in 1897: “...it has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ”primal“ addiction and that it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the other addictions - for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc - come into existence.”²⁰