STEM students don't care for gun control, apparently

Slate has a report of an event that I'm guessing with thrill the American Right:  apparently, a "vigil" for the student killed in the school shooting this week turned out all strange when lots of students attending didn't like that it was a "political stunt" to talk about gun control.   (The report says they apparently weren't aware of it having been organised by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.)  

“I thought this was about us, not about politics,” one student said, according to the Washington Post. Another student argued that they were “not a statistic” and shouldn’t be cited to justify gun control: “We are people, not a statement.” 

The students held their phones’ flashlights into the air and chanted, “mental health, mental health.” They also confronted journalists, whom the Brady Center had invited to cover the event, calling them derogatory names, according to the Denver Post, and asking to see what photos they had taken.

Colorado is a swing state, apparently, and it seems Denver is more Democrat than other parts.   That makes this sort of reaction surprising, but I wonder if STEM students swing more Right wing than your average student.

Oh well, they will presumably get more shootings in future, if that's their attitude.   

She keeps the best company

I see that Helen Dale has turned up on a Youtube with Carl Benjamin, better known (apparently) as Sargon of Akkad, discussing Brexit.   The discussion, which went on far too long to keep my interest, was intelligent enough, but I was more interested in the "meta" aspects.


First, she is sounding very British these days (although that happens if you live in a country); but more oddly, if I understood her correctly, she is now in the Conservative Party and said something like she was "conservative from birth".   Which sounds a tad odd:  did I read somewhere in one of the many articles/interviews about her that she once said she helped (when very young, and perhaps with her father?) on a Greens campaign?  But she has also said her father was a con man and made many disparaging remarks about him at other times.   

In any event, I have a suspicion that we are witnessing another re-invention of herself.

More significantly, this Benjamin character is a controversial figure, who I have managed to avoid knowing anything about until now.   He's running for the pro-Brexit, anti immigration UKIP, and The Guardian notes that he was a big figure in the Gamergate controversy in 2014 (and not in a good way.)   He's also in trouble for some "joke" he made about how he wouldn't rape a certain politician, and he's not apologising for it.   He puts on an air of reasonableness in some of his material, but Buzzfeed notes his online presence is closely associated with an alt.right fanbase. 

I seriously doubt he is someone who (shall we say) reasonable people should be associating with.

Dale has also done an interview with James Delingpole - the climate change denying twit and general right wing gadfly.   Apparently, he was all gushing about her take on Roman society.   For a person who thinks libertarians should stop denying climate change, she sure doesn't mind helping the profile of one of the most prominent climate change denying writers of the last decade.

At the risk of being accused of jealousy or undue obsession with her, I say again that there has always been something about her manner in talks, interviews or writing which strikes me as a facade of intellectualism more than anything substantial.  But she wins over many on the "classic liberal" or libertarian right,  who do not perceive her this way.   

She's pretty fascinating, because I perceive her as very strange, and rather Zelig-like in many ways. 

Should I ride?

I have been curious to try a Lime scooter:  they look sort of fun, but my inherently conservative view towards my safety might mean I not go anywhere near their top speed (23kph).

However, I see a man in Brisbane, not too far off my age, has died after riding one down some stairs (unintentionally, I assume.) 

I had a look at the cost of buying one of these things - if you lived in a city with a good enough bicycle path network (I think they are allowed on them?), I thought they might be pretty appealing to youngsters as a cheap commuting device.   Not much fun in rain or storms, but on a lot of days in Brisbane in winter, I can imagine them being a pretty pleasant way to get to university, for example.

I see that Segway sells a reasonably flash looking one for about $850, with a 20km range (but a 3.5 hour charge time.)   Other companies sell much more expensive ones.

I think if I lived within 10 km of a university I was  attending, I would be tempted to buy one.

The de-evolution of Mark Latham

Mark Latham's descendent into creepy old man Right wing culture war whinger was on full display in his maiden speech to the New South Wales Parliament, where some high(?)lights included:

"Like a scene from Orwell's Animal Farm, the Green-Labor-Left has become the thing it originally opposed: elitist, would-be dictators taking away from the working-class communities the things these battlers value."

He also attacked political correctness and the "confected outrage" of the "elites".

Quoting Monty Python actor John Cleese, Mr Latham argued that telling a joke about someone does not mean you hate them.

"We love the people we joke about — the Irish, the blondes, the gays, everyone — as they've helped to bring humour and joy into our lives."

Yeah, tremendous jokes and commentary such as he gave on Sky News recently:

Discussing the new "Respect Victoria: Call It Out" advertisement in which a man leers at a woman on a train – eyes running down and up her, persisting despite her visible discomfort and distress – Latham dismissed the man’s behaviour as normal.

“If you don’t have a good look at a beautiful person of the opposite sex there’s something wrong with you,” the One Nation NSW leader said on Sky News last week.

“Was he thinking … did I used to root her at uni?”

 The rest of the summary of his speech:

The One Nation MP spoke for more than 47 minutes, calling for limits on immigration, an end to identity politics, an overhaul of the state's education system and the introduction of nuclear power and greater investment in coal-fired power.

If you want to read how much he has devolved, have a look at this 2014 piece with its moderate,  thoughtful and regretful analysis of why climate change denialism had been so successful amongst large parts of the public.

Now he belongs to a climate change denying party.  (One Nation's policy position on this looks like it was written by nutter Malcolm Roberts.)  

His culture war whinging has won him many admirers at Catallaxy - fellow man-stuck-in-the-social- zeitgeist of the 1950's, CL claims this:

It’s really disappointing to me that Latham cannot be prime minister.
He is the outstanding man in Australia’s polity right now.

It all again shows that Right wing opposition to climate change action is simply based on culture war resentment and has nothing to do with a serious consideration of science or economics.

One final question:   doesn't Latham's wife find this change of persona worrying?   It must be like living with a different man from the one she married.   And don't his sons, who must at least be teenage now, find him cringeworthy and "old before his time" as well?
 

Numb to the absurdity

While you can still find tweets and the occasional headline like this:

Trump shows he still doesn't grasp who bears the brunt of tariffs 

it's pretty incredible that we are watching a US President re-engaging in a trade war while making it abundantly clear that he still doesn't understand what he is doing (in that he doesn't understand tariffs, at all.)

How can any economist of any credibility defend a President so dumb as to not be able to absorb correction on this matter?  

The media (and much of the public) has become pretty much numb to the absurdity of the situation.

Time for out and proud atheists

This one's sure to appeal to Jason. 

Lots of good points made in Max Boot's Washington Post column about America's weirdly distrustful attitude towards atheist politicians, when disbelief (or agnosticism, at least) is actually rapidly climbing in the nation, and much of American religiosity has permanently tainted itself by supporting Trump:

It’s time for us to have an unapologetic atheist in the Oval Office

Boot indicates that even Democrat Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is not an atheist.   And he's right:  Wikipedia says he attends a small Protestant denomination:

Yang attends the Reformed Church of New Paltz with his family and has identified Mark E. Mast as their pastor.^[40][41]

Update:  well, I feel it a bit embarrassing to admit I didn't know this about Winston Churchill (I have never read a biography of him), but Boot points out he was a disbeliever with only the most nominal attachment to the Anglican Church.   A detailed article about his (lack of) religious belief can be found here.   

Shorten did fine

If anything, I wish he had been more sarcastic and ridiculing of Morrison's laughable line that the Coalition accepted climate change and the need to take action on it.  He should have mentioned Morrison's lump of coal in Parliament, although I suppose that would have led to questions about Adani that Shorten would prefer not raised.

Overall, though, people who hated Shorten before the debate will still hate him;  people like me who think Morrison is an inch deep failed advertising executive who has accidentally found himself as Prime Minister will still view him the same.

Shorten's summary of the Coalition was spot on, though:  they want you to believe that everything is fine, when most suspect we are just skating on thin ice with the global economy changing in ways no one completely understands, and the feeling of an ever present risk of another financial meltdown of some sort or another.    I like that Labor has made itself a "big target" in terms of tax reform and climate change - that's how politics should work.

Mum's the word

What an interesting day in Murdoch land.

The Daily Telegraph took a pretty bizarre decision to run as front page news that Bill Shorten didn't include in his Q&A explanation about his Mum (that she wanted to be a lawyer but to support her kids she became a teacher) enough detail about how she later did go on to study and practice law, although only for 6 years as a barrister.   Unsurprisingly, Shorten had publicly discussed his Mum's late career in law before - it's not as if it is a secret.  

So it was a ridiculous decision to try to make a mountain out of a molehill.  In fact, I'm not even sure that it's a molehill - there's nothing to show Shorten was being deceptive given his mother's career was already a matter on the public record.  

Yet the Tele's opinion editor, James Morrow, who I recently noted has always seemed to want to live up closely to the first part of his "Prick with a fork" nom de plume, turned up on twitter promoting the story.   Tim Blair also noted it on his blog with approval, and hopeless partisan hack and enriched canine admirer Chris Kenny defended the story too. 

On the other side of the Murdoch fence, though, the Herald in Melbourne decided not to run it, and Andrew Bolt has defended that decision.

The overwhelming take on the matter on Twitter that this is a real misfire and is much more likely to help Shorten than hurt him.   

Here's my take:   I wouldn't have thought it's likely to be any sort of key turning point of the campaign - it didn't exactly attack his Mum, even though the headline was ambiguous - but gee it shows what ridiculous editorial judgement pervades the Daily Telegraph.  (And the Courier Mail too, apparently.)

As a semi-gotcha, it might at most have been worth appearing as a small part of some opinion hack's mid section column - and it is the sort of useless rubbish that Tim Blair now excels at in his blog.

But when even Andrew Bolt can see that putting it as the front page lead story is wrong - well, as I say, it's a weird day in Murdoch land.

Update:  I see that Shorten has elaborated on his Mum's legal career, indicating that the late start did affect it:

Mr Shorten elaborated that while his mother had eventually studied law, she was a victim of age discrimination - despite her academic record, no law firm hired her to complete her articles and when she did join the bar, she only received about nine briefs.

"It was actually a bit dispiriting," he said.

Update 2:   since I first wrote the post, I have re-read what Shorten said on Q&A, and realised he had made it very clear she did study and practice law.   (When I first posted, I was going by memory of part of what he had said.)   I have therefore amended the post.

It just makes the Daily Telegraph's story, and all who defend it, look pretty idiotic.

Update 3:  jeez, I was right the first time - I thought I was reading transcript of the Q&A show when it was an interview or talk he gave somewhere else.  Now that I'm sure I have read the right transcript, I see that he didn't go on to say on Q&A that his Mum had gone on to study and try being a barrister in her 50's - after a career in teaching that had not been her first preference.   

Awful

What a heartbreaking visual summation of the full effects on school kids of another school shooting in the US:

It's from a Politico story on today's Denver shooting, which seems to have involved injury only, not death, by some good fortune.  But you can imagine the ongoing psychological effects...

Update:  yeah, one kid did die, by putting himself in harm's way.   And another kid turned up on TV talking about he had hid and was prepared to have a go at the shooter too:

12-year-old Nate Holley tells CNN's Brooke Baldwin that he hid in a closet during the violence at STEM School Highlands Ranch and had been prepared to fight off the shooter with a baseball bat

"I was going to go down fighting, if I was going to go down."

 As Daily Kos says:

Young children like Nate Holley should not be thinking about how they can sacrifice themselves to save their classmates in the face of another mass shooting. This is insanity. In fact, it was another student at STEM School Highlands Ranch who rushed one of the shooters. Kendrick Castillo was supposed to graduate high school this week and now his parents are planning a funeral instead of a graduation party. 

Quantum physics and time

I read this paper at arXiv recently, and despite the abstract, it was in large part relatively readable:

We discuss the implications for the determinateness and intersubjective consistency of conscious experience in two gedanken experiments from quantum mechanics (QM). In particular, we discuss Wigner's friend and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment with a twist. These are both cases (experiments) where quantum phenomena, or at least allegedly possible quantum phenomena/experiments, and the content/efficacy of conscious experience seem to bear on one another. We discuss why these two cases raise concerns for the determinateness and intersubjective consistency of conscious experience. We outline a 4D-global constraint-based approach to explanation in general and for QM in particular that resolves any such concerns without having to invoke metaphysical quietism (as with pragmatic accounts of QM), objective collapse mechanisms or subjective collapse. In short, we provide an account of QM free from any concerns associated with either the standard formalism or relative-state formalism, an account that yields a single 4D block universe with determinate and intersubjectively consistent conscious experience for all conscious agents. Essentially, the mystery in both experiments is caused by a dynamical/causal view of QM, e.g., time-evolved states in Hilbert space, and as we show this mystery can be avoided by a spatiotemporal, constraint-based view of QM, e.g., path integral calculation of probability amplitudes using future boundary conditions. What will become clear is that rather than furiously seeking some way to make dubious deep connections between quantum physics and conscious experience, the kinds of 4D adynamical global constraints that are fundamental to both classical and quantum physics and the relationship between them, also constrain conscious experience. That is, physics properly understood, already is psychology.

 That last line is, however, more or less clickbait in my opinion.  

It's also been a couple of weeks since I read it, but if I recall correctly, at the end of the day I thought it seemed to be perhaps just a very complicated way of arguing that if you view time as something we are embedded in, rather than something we pass through, it solves a lot of what seems like quantum mystery.   

The view of time they promote would also seem to raise questions of free will and determination - about which there is more here, although I have not read it thoroughly.

Interesting.  You can download the paper here.

Why now?

Doesn't it seem very odd that no one seems to know why exactly the US is sabre rattling Iran?  As the BBC says:

Mr Pompeo cancelled a trip to Berlin to meet with Iraqi leaders during a four-hour stop in the capital Baghdad.

The visit came days after a US aircraft carrier was deployed to the region, which officials said was in response to threats to US forces and its allies from Iran.

On Tuesday it was revealed the US was sending B-52 bombers to the region.

The US has given little information about the exact nature of the reported threat, which Iran has dismissed as nonsense.

John Bolton, the US national security adviser, said only that the US was acting "in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings" on announcing the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln on Sunday.

Does anyone sensible trust Bolton's judgement in such matters?

Things that I wish weren't going on right now

In the context of an election campaign where the polling is closer than it should be, I do wish that we weren't seeing:

*  eggs being thrown at any Coalition politician,

*  animal rights activists invading farms (although it hasn't happened for a few weeks), or

*  the fight over Folau.

All of these issues are capable of motivating culture war sympathy to the Coalition side by undecideds, who are (in some cases), so stupid as to be considering voting for the ridiculously politically vacuous parties of Hanson and Palmer, despite their clear, terrible, history of just being in politics as self indulgent careerists and attracting nutters as candidates.

I am surprised at the ability of Palmer advertising to make unengaged people forget what a true flake he is.   Disgustingly, Morrison and the Coalition should be blasting Palmer for his corporate behaviour with both barrels, but for their political advantage, they aren't.   

John Quiggin on the cost of carbon emissions reduction

A very clear and readable explanation by John Quiggin on the matter of modelling the cost of carbon emissions reduction.

Maximum sentence please

As a class of crime, there's something particularly vicious and nasty about road rage assaults, especially when they come after pursuing someone for kilometres.  Nine times out of ten they suggest an assailant either completely off his face on some drug or other, or full of obnoxious male entitlement, or both.

This guy completely deserves a maximum sentence - and governments need to be publicising road rage punishments at cinema or where ever stupid young men might see them. 

Back to GoT

Heh:  Slate has a whole article on the coffee cup sighting.