The weird crisis of the image and perception of masculinity - on the Right

There's a funny column by Marina Hyde at The Guardian that points to something pretty obvious:

Ruining a country near you soon: the beta males who think they’re alphas 

After a week in which paddle-less Britain has found itself once more caught in dangerous transatlantic currents, it’s clear that there are two kinds of political men. Strong men and weak men. Which one is our most likely next prime minister? I’m afraid Boris Johnson is the worst kind: he’s a weak man who thinks he’s a strong man. See also selective antiracist Jeremy Corbyn, whose unshakeable conviction that he hasn’t been wrong in several decades has left him stubbornly incapable of being the bigger person. See also gratefully submissive Donald Trump fanboy Nigel Farage, who has spent much of the past three years hanging wanly around Washington on the off-chance of a half-hour 6pm burger with the alpha male to his beta. And see also Donald Trump himself, the leader of the free world, who spent about 48 hours this week tweeting like some homicidal 11-year-old Justin Bieber fan about the leaked comments of the British ambassador. Who, apparently, we now let him pick. More on toxic insecurity’s poster boy shortly.

This whole talk of alpha males brings to mind the changing popular image of masculinity in my lifetime:   it is genuinely weird, is it not, that the progression of popular perception of strong masculinity went from, if Hollywood was a guide, the "gentle but strong" masculinity of characters played by Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Paul Newman and Robert Redford (most of whom were, I think, liberals in politics in real life) to the fathead, muscle bound, shoot-their-way-out-of -trouble image of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis and perhaps even Mel Gibson.   What exactly was going on in the 1980's into the 1990's?   A last hurrah for over-the-top masculinity that the ageing support base for Donald Trump still longs for now?   I felt it was weird at the time - how even toy manufacturers came out with muscled up versions of cartoon or movie characters (muscle bound Luke Skywalker, for God's sake.) 

And the funniest thing is how the wingnut Right's figureheads for a return to the good old days of generic national strength and masculinity are both overweight, buffoon haired, patently bad husbands that are nothing like what normal people used to associate with an image of confident masculinity.  

As for Boris Johnson, Marina writes:

Great leaders show, rather than tell, their skills. Yet Johnson never lets up with telling people that he is not “defeatist”, that he will “put some lead in the collective pencil”, that “energy” is needed, that what the EU really fears is a big strong man like him. Mm. I hear they talk of little else in the 27 European capitals. “O Fates, please spare us the dreaded ‘positive energy’ of a guy internationally ridiculed as the worst foreign secretary in memory; and the unplayable charm of a surprisingly indifferent orator who knows the Latin for ‘can we just take out the backstop?’”

 And Johnson does know Latin, as he never misses a chance to remind us. No one could accuse him of wearing his learning lightly – or, indeed, wearing any of it lightly. Witness his excruciating promise to reach out to something he pointedly referred to as “Oppidan Britain”. To which the increasingly despairing response has to be: YES YES! I KNOW WHAT SCHOOL YOU WENT TO! I KNOW WHAT HOUSE YOU WERE IN! I KNOW YOU GOT A SECOND CLASS CLASSICS DEGREE! I KNOW THIS SOMEHOW ENDS WITH YOU CONSIGNING OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY TO THE CATACOMBS THEN BEATING US TO DEATH WITH YOUR RELATIVELY MIDDLEBROW ACHIEVEMENTS! But mate: you are 55 – FIFTY-FIVE – years old. How, how can you possibly still be wanking on about any of this, in public, as though it was still the best thing you’ve ever done? Can it really be because it was? [Spoiler: yes.]...

...He may use longer words, but Johnson’s sledgehammer self-admiration does not differ materially from the US president’s diurnal reminders that he is a strong, good-looking and very stable genius.

Because I don't see as much of Boris Johnson, I don't have any clear idea of how insecure he comes across, but Marina makes a good argument that he is as bad as Trump.

Trump's insecurity, narcissism and lack of knowledge on so many issues is plain to see to everyone except (apparently) his base base.   Or, as might be more likely, it's a case that perhaps half of his base see it but nonetheless celebrate it.   Just as he embodies a poor person's caricature of what it would be like to live rich (gold toilet - cool), his Tweeting behaviour might be seen as ridiculous on one level, but they get a proxy thrill at seeing a jerk being able to say anything and no one can stop him.  You sense this celebratory attitude at Catallaxy all the time - along with their admissions that they comment there specifically in order to say things they cannot say in front of their spouses, or at work without getting into trouble (for being obnoxious).     

As I have said before, this is actually a sign of frustration at being losers on issues they identify as part of a culture war - on matters of changing attitudes to sexuality, gender roles, masculinity and environmentalism.  Unfortunately, though, it is at the cost of good government and policy for everyone.

And before I go, some funny comments that followed that Guardian column:

The juxtaposition of Trump MAGA guys banging on about masculinity and Trump is so funny.

They spent eight years throwing a fit at Obama being effeminate because he drank a Cafe Latte, but Obama was probably a pretty good example of what an "alpha male" would look like, if such a thing existed.

Trump, meanwhile, is a guy who has the personality of a bitchy cheerleader from a dated romcom, tweeting all day about how Anna Wintour's party was soooooo lame since he wasn't invited, or bullying Rosie O'Donnell for being fat.

But you have all these men saying "oh yeah, so good to have a Real Man in charge doing Real Man stuff. Finally!", as their hero obsessively messages Robert Pattinson once more imploring him not to take back Kristen Stewart.

And this: 

Worth noting that every second one of these "alpha" guys is in hock to some "masculinity" guru like Peteron who is is selling their followers some sort of masculinity supplement, masculinity guide, special diet to make them more masculine or all of the above. This is what alpha males do, you see: buy books on how to be manly and take snake oil diet pills.

As women, we find it irrestistible when men are constantly whining about how they're disempowered by feminism, somehow. Even hotter is when they spend all day online and have obsessive faddy diets. So manly. Grrrr...

Funny because it's true - from Alex Jones to Ben Shapiro with the "diet supplements".

I'm surprised Sinclair Davidson hasn't endorsed his own range of supplements, now that I think of it. 

A handy list

Found via the Anomalist, a very basic web page that looks like it might be from the 1990's, but with interesting link content:

Every Insanely Mystifying Paradox in Physics: A Complete List 

(I have heard of Cliff Pickover, who made that page, before, and I see that he has a very active Twitter account too.  Worth following, I think.)

Growth down

Singapore certainly seems to be ahead of the "slow down" curve:

SINGAPORE: Singapore’s economy grew by a meagre 0.1 per cent year-on-year in the second quarter, the lowest in a decade, according to official estimates released on Friday (Jul 12).

That widely missed economists' forecasts of 1.1 per cent and was the lowest since the second quarter of 2009 when gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 1.2 per cent, according to Bloomberg data.

and this:

Retail sales in Singapore decreased 2.1 per cent in May 2019 as compared to a year ago, according to figures released by the Department of Statistics (Singstat) on Friday (Jul 12).

The estimated total retail sales value in May 2019 was about S$3.7 billion, with online retail sales making up about 5.3 per cent. 

Dear Graeme

Did you have trouble following the rules at school?

I've told you what the rules here are:

*  Any inane, slanderous comment to do with Jews - which is 99% of all comments you make which reference them - will be deleted.   No ifs, no buts.   Just deleted.

*  Swearing at me (or anyone else) will also cause deletion. 

And yet you continue to break them.

Re-activate your own blog if you want to slander Jews and publicise your nutball anti-Semitism and eccentric cosmology.

I also encourage you to start a GoFundMe page devoted to raising enough money to have Elon Musk shoot you towards Mars where you can take happy snaps of the ancient glass farms and prove us all wrong.   It would give me great relief if this was you in the spacesuit:

Update:   If I provide you with a link for a profound new idea, will that make you go away while you research it for a year or two?: 

Tall Aliens May Be Humans Altered By Living for a Time on Mars

"Not at all" says Barnaby Joyce

At the ABC:

With the long-term decline in fertility rates among western men, how worried are you about you or your partner's sperm?

Hence the title to the post.  Back to the article:

Up to now, getting sperm tested has involved going to a clinic and navigating embarrassing scenarios while avoiding eye contact with receptionists
.
The tech world claims it has the answer: A wave of startups are offering home-testing technology that's almost as easy as taking a photo of your semen and uploading the results.

Mail-order kits containing a clip-on phone microscope and transparent slides test both sperm count as well as motility - the wriggliness and vitality of the little fellas.

The results for some products have been tested as 97 per cent accurate.

But back to Barnaby.  Apart from crapping on in climate change denial, I see that he has been musing about other big picture things:

With both chambers in a fortnight’s recess, the ASX in blackout period and school holidays in full swing, the sultan of the non-sequitur declared that “if you want zero emissions but you don’t want nuclear power, you should shut up” and “if New York can live with two senators, why does Sydney get nine?”

This latter remark informs his wish to reconstitute the Australian Senate into 38 constituencies, from its existing eight. “Instead of having 12 senators per state, you have two senators per region. By its very nature … it will most definitely represent Aborigina­l people in a better way.” Marvel as, in one utterance, Joyce whitesplains Indigenous constitutional recognition and appropriates it for agrarian socialism.

The plan, like its author, is predictably daft and self-serving. Subdividing the Senate further into geographical zones would be to duplicate the House. 118 years and 46 parliaments in, how has that representative premise served Australia’s first peoples?

The Beetrooter’s semblance of reconciliation imperative evaporates in his real gripe: that “the Senate was supposed to represent the geographic diversity of Australia but all it’s really done is re-entrenched the power of the capital cities, where overwhelmingly all the senators live”. But if nine of 12 senators elected to represent New South Wales live in Greater Sydney that’s probably because 5.2 million of their 7.9 million constituents live there, too. And if you want your inland rail but don’t like the system funding it, you should shut up, right?

The poor fallen hero thinks he’s cooped up on Elba, scribbling riding orders and smuggling them by pigeon to the front line. Funny, 'cos his ideas do emanate that syphilitic whiff of madness.

Joe Aston in the Fin Review wrote that.  He really does not care for Barnaby.

Sort of like the prisons in TV Batman

As a child, I wasn't the biggest fan of TV's Batman, and I still don't care for anything related to the character.   [I've thought of a new way to explain why he does nothing for me - it's the equivalent of the uncanny valley in animation.  By being a purportedly more realistic superhero who just relies on strength and technology, yet still dressing stupidly and with villains that are also costumed up, it perversely feels less realistic to me than the semi mythical or silly physics superheroes like Thor, Aquaman or Superman, where I find suspension of disbelief comes easier.]

Anyway, one thing I do recall from TV Batman was the occasional dig they had at allegedly super liberal rehabilitation prisons:  you know, a super villain being allowed to live with his entourage almost exactly the same as if he were free.  It was a fairly sophisticated joke for a show with a large children's following, really.

So it's remarkable to read of the genuinely super-liberal sounding approach to prisons in Norway that seems to work:

It could be a yoga class at any holistic health retreat anywhere in the world but the participants here at Norway's maximum security Halden Prison are rather far removed from the usual yummy mummy spa clientele. Barefoot murderers, rapists and drug smugglers practise downward-facing dog and the lotus position alongside their prison officers, each participant fully concentrating on the clear instructions from the teacher.

"It calms them," says prison governor Are Hoidal approvingly, as we watch from the sidelines. "We don't want anger and violence in this place. We want calm and peaceful inmates."

Tranquillity does not come cheaply. A place at Halden Prison costs about £98,000 per year. The average annual cost of a prison place in England in Wales is now about £40,000, or £59,000 in a Category A prison.

A uniformed prison officer on a silver micro-scooter greets us cheerily as he wheels past. Two
prisoners jogging dutifully by his side, keep pace.

Hoidal laughs at my nonplussed face.

"It's called dynamic security!" he grins. "Guards and prisoners are together in activities all the time. They eat together, play volleyball together, do leisure activities together and that allows us to really interact with prisoners, to talk to them and to motivate them."

Having had a prison guard once living in the rental house next to mine, who was loud, often drunk, and offered to have his daughter's ex boyfriend's legs broken, I think we might have to scrap all of ours and start afresh if we wanted to follow this approach.

Anyway, back to the big Norwegian turn around:

When Are Hoidal first began his career in the Norwegian Correctional service in the early 1980s, the prison experience here was altogether different.

"It was completely hard," he remembers. "It was a masculine, macho culture with a focus on guarding and security. And the recidivism rate was around 60-70%, like in the US."

But in the early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms "revenge" and much more on rehabilitation. Prisoners, who had previously spent most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled.

"Not 'guards'," admonishes Hoidal gently, when I use the term. "We are prison 'officers' and of course we make sure an inmate serves his sentence but we also help that person become a better person. We are role models, coaches and mentors. And since our big reforms, recidivism in Norway has fallen to only 20% after two years and about 25% after five years. So this works!"

In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50% after just one year.

Even the architecture is chic:

The architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents' sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in harmony with the surrounding nature - in fact the prison, which cost £138m to build, has won several design awards for its minimalist chic. Set in beautiful blueberry woods and peppered with majestic silver birch and pine trees, the two-storey accommodation blocks and wooden chalet-style buildings give the place an air of a trendy university campus rather than a jail.

Here's a cell:

 There is a lot more of great interest in the article at the BBC.

A French peculiarity

Is France the only country where homoeopathy has a genuinely large popular following?   For a country that is pretty modern and capable of high tech stuff, this feature of the place is very peculiar:

In a country where nearly 60% of the population uses homeopathic remedies, the French ministry of health’s decision to slash reimbursements for the alternative remedies has sparked outrage among users of alternative medicine.

For the 38 million people in France who depend on homeopathic remedies to cure insomnia, backaches and other medical conditions, getting a good night’s sleep just became a little more difficult. 

“Homeopathic medicines do not provide sufficient public health benefits to justify their reimbursement by the federal government,”the ministry of health announced in a statement released on Wednesday.

Time to talk turbulence

I've never experienced really severe turbulence in an aircraft, but incidents like this one sound really frightening.   

Last year, there was considerable publicity to a study that said global warming will make turbulence over the Atlantic routes, at least, worse by mid century. 

Today's story made me think - do we know whether turbulence is getting worse already?  Major incidents certainly seem to come up in the news more often, but this must be a very tricky topic due to several complicating factors:

*  the increase in global aviation generally
*  whether the increase is happening on routes more, or less, naturally prone to turbulence
*  the active steps airlines, and airline manufacturers, may be taking to avoid the risk of running into it (for example, I presume that modern aircraft radars might be better at detecting danger areas ahead).

It seems there is some research indicating it has already increased:

There is evidence that clear-air turbulence (CAT) has already risen by 40-90% over Europe and North America since 1958 and studies by researchers from the universities of Reading and East Anglia in the UK have shown that as a consequence of climate change, the frequency of turbulence on flights between Europe and North America could double by 2050 and the intensity increase by 10-40%. The same researchers have since extended their previous work by analysing eight geographic regions, two flight levels, five turbulence strength categories and four seasons, and found large increases in CAT.

Not sure if I have posted about this before or not.

Still, an interesting topic, and a somewhat worrying one for the future for the slightly nervous flyer.

Hurricanes getting wetter

Seeing that increased flooding under global warming is a theme here this week, I was interested to read this NYT article:  

As Climate Changes, Hurricanes Get Wetter

In recent years, researchers have found that hurricanes have lingered longer, as Barry is expected to do, and dumped more rainfall — a sign of climate change, said Christina Patricola, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a co-author of a study that found that climate change is making tropical cyclones wetter. (Tropical cyclones include both hurricanes and tropical storms, which are hurricanes’ less speedier kin.)

Researchers have been studying the effects of climate change on tropical cyclones because those sorts of storms are driven by warm water. Water in the gulf is 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer, according to Dr. Prein, who said: “This is really increasing the likelihood of a hurricane to form in this basin. And it will increase the intensity of the hurricane as well.”....

The researchers used climate models to simulate how tropical cyclone intensity, or wind speed, and rainfall would change if hurricanes like Katrina, Irma and Maria had occurred absent climate change and under future climate scenarios. They found that for all three storms, climate change increased rainfall by up to 9 percent.

This study is not the first to find that climate change is causing tropical cyclones to have more rainfall. Studies on Hurricane Harvey found that climate change contributed as much as 38 percent, or 19 inches, of the more than 50 inches of rain that fell in some places. Dr. Patricola’s study broadens the research by using global climate models and analyzing a large number of storms.

 My stupid reader JC will say "don't talk to me about models", probably while New Orleans goes under.   Again.

Own your own crime scene

I see via Washington Post that Michael Jackson's former home, Neverland Ranch, is for sale for $31 million.  (Used to be on the market for $100 million.)

It's..kinda ugly in parts:

And doesn't do much for me in others (that ceiling looks so heavy and oppressive):

But, it is on a pretty nice looking piece of land:

You would think that if it wasn't for the icky associations, it could be made into some high class accommodation.  But good luck with that, buyers.

The jokes write themselves

From Dezeen, the jokes one can make from this are just too easy:

Pratt Institute graduate Garrett Benisch has proposed using biosolids, the organic matter derived from treated sewage, to produce a compostable ballpoint pen and its ink.

Benisch, who just graduated from New York's Pratt Institute with a degree in industrial design, created the Sum Waste pen for his thesis project.

The curvy, translucent writing instrument made from biosolids was featured in the university's year-end design show and won first place in a national competition organised by research group Healthy Materials Lab.

Populist governments and their disregard for expertise

Just as the Trump government has a solid reputation for disdain of expert advice on topics ranging from environmental issues to trade and international treaties, it seems that the populist government in India likes to tell its followers what it wants to hear.  See this (pretty angry) article at Foreign Policy, mainly about India's terrible air pollution, but also other topics:

Speaking from the headquarters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on May 9, the cabinet member Nitin Gadkari promised a rapid elimination of air pollution. “Delhi will be free of air and water pollution in the next three years,” he said. Gadkari is now the minister of road transport and highways now, but in the years before Modi first became prime minister in 2014, Gadkari was president of the BJP. He said he expected that the air would clear because of the achievements of his political party, which “has done 100 percent corruption-free, transparent, time-bound, result-oriented, and quality work.”

Bringing air pollution down to acceptable levels—not just in New Delhi, but also throughout north India—would indeed be a tremendous accomplishment. But promising to do so within three years is absurd. China, for example, has successfully directed policymaking efforts toward reducing particle pollution, after decades of catastrophic pollution in the north and public pressure once air quality data became easily available online To do so has taken China several years (more than three), has certainly not eliminated pollution altogether, and has required facing unpleasant facts. Central Chinese officials held local governments to account for improving pollution—and moved to address the problem when statistical analysis showed that local bureaucrats were manipulating the numbers. But Gadkari’s unbelievable numbers are coming from the top.

Such absurdities have become commonplace. Gadkari’s promise echoes Modi’s claim the government could eliminate open defecation from rural India by 2019. (Open defecation rates improved, but it remains dangerously common, as independent demographic data shows.) Both numerical deadlines combine wild ambition and a good cause with needless quantitative precession and the absence of any plan that could achieve the result. 

And more about the general attitude of "we know better than experts":

 Unfortunately, the pattern extends beyond the environment. Increasingly, many of India’s leading economists and statisticians have spoken out about the dismantling of India’s systems of official statistics and expertise. Respected statisticians—including an economist whom I know personally from my time at the Delhi School of Economics—resigned from the National Statistical Commission in January, in protest of the government’s refusal to release credible unemployment data.

The government’s top economic advisors and policymakers report being as surprised as everyone else when in 2016 the prime minister, in a move remembered as “demonetization,” suddenly declared that a large fraction of India’s notes no longer counted as currency. In my own field of child health, the Economist reported that UNICEF suppressed data on child stunting because the prime minister’s home state scored poorly. I do not think any of my colleagues in sanitation research seriously believe the government’s response to a December 2018 parliamentary question, which was to insist that sanitation coverage in rural Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh is 100 percent.

Nice of them...

Searching that Samuel Gregg who Helen Dale re-tweeted (he's one of those irritating conservative Catholics who like small government because God wants people to suffer - see how easy it is to argue like him!) led me to a conservative Catholic site which had this news item of some interest:

The Russian Orthodox Church is debating an end to the practice of blessing large scale weapons, including nuclear missiles.
 
Last month, a committee on ecclesial law met in Moscow and recommended ending the practice of blessing missiles and warheads, and suggested that priests should instead bless only individual soldiers and their personal weapons.

According to a report by Religion News Service, Bishop Savva Tutunov of the Moscow Patriarchate said that it would be more appropriate to bless only the warrior who is defending their country, and their own personal weapon–instead of bombs.

“One can talk about the blessing of a warrior on military duty in defense of the fatherland,” said Tutunov.

“At the end of the corresponding ritual, the personal weapon is also blessed — precisely because it is connected to the individual person who is receiving the blessing. By the same reasoning, weapons of mass destruction should not be sanctified,” he said.

The proposal to end the blessings for larger weapons has yet to be approved by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Weapons systems, including Topol-class intercontinental ballistic missiles, are frequently blessed by members of the Russian Orthodox clergy during military parades and other events. These blessings are seen as a way of spiritually protecting the country.

The ridiculous technique

What's the name for this type of bad faith, nonsensical style of argument, whereby your opponent says X and you claim that this must mean they want Y, while surely knowing Y is a wild exaggeration and caricature of their point?  

Ironically, those on the Right rally against SJW's for using it when talking about gender and sexuality (for example), but they deploy it themselves when it suits.

Drives me nuts, whoever uses it.

Gives me mixed feelings

I mean, who wouldn't want to see the IPA staff, membership, 98% of commenters at Catallaxy, and all hosts on Sky News at Night rounded up and forced into re-education schools in which they are all taught to dance, paint and give up all radical ideas (as defined by me.)  Of course, it would have to be conducted in what would look more like an aged care facility than a young person's school, but still, it's a pleasant dream: