Jason goes Gray again

Gee Jason, why do you think Gray Connolly makes for a good analysis of the current state of the world?   He makes excuses for Trump all the time, and has a pat over-simplification line that is too much orientated towards the culture wars (as you have to be to excuse the blatant authoritarianism inherent in the Trump's performance since day one.)

What's the evidence for this, for example?:

The Right that emerges from this time will be more orientated to families & workers, not big business. 

Really?  Where's the sign of that in America?   Or is this just theorising on the never never?

Connolly makes a lot of Trump having won due to appeal to those that economic (and cultural?) liberalism has left behind - he ignores things like the substantial majority vote win by Clinton; the actual failure of Trump to reinvigorate industries he said he would; the long term uncertain effect of his populist trade wars; the uncertain effect of long term massive increase in government debt; the boosting the military while at the same time saying he will use it less.  

You and Connolly seem to want to make a boogeyman of "liberalism", yet don't get into the nitty gritty of economic policy (well, Connolly doesn't.)    Because, let's face it, economics is complicated and populism in only benefiting your own nation's population is not all that moral if the rest of the world is in poverty.   Globalisation is supported by the Catholic Church because of the wealth generation in poorer countries it can create, if done properly.   Conservative Catholics, like Connolly, seem to ignore that and want to welcome the retreat into isolationism that ultimately hurts everyone.

If you and Connolly want to make a useful contribution, start critiquing actual economic policies:  what should happen with tax rates;  how to deal with corporations gaming governments out of tax by their international and financing arrangements;  how to respond to the "gig" economy;  and how all policy needs to be geared towards averting disaster climate change affecting huge parts of the world within a couple of generations.


All this bleating about "woke capital", and how the Left is more interested in lattes than appealing to the (increasingly hard to define) working class, and getting upset because of college students being too politically correct, is just fiddling around the edges of what's important.

I've been saying this to you for years now, as you seem to retreat more and more into the weird world of conservatives who are more interested in criticising the Left for not being what you want it to be, while ignoring what the Right is actually doing.       

The Mattis statement

While this is welcome, I do question the judgement of the guy for thinking he could successfully work with a President who was already sounding like a wannabe authoritarian dictator during the campaign:

James Mattis condemns Trump as a threat to the Constitution

Perhaps the best paragraph:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

Would be good if he would throw in some attack on the Right wing media which has created a cult around Trump, though. 

Update:   Ha!  Australian wingnut reacts calmly, not realising he's proving Mattis' point:

Update 2:   after being told that that there is no oath of loyalty to the President (and besides, he no longer works for him), our Maj expresses disappointment:

Makes it clear how this kind of populist Trump supporter actually wants him as an old style king, not as President.

Funny

And this classic happy look:

Claire is confused

Claire Lehmann is confused:

Err, maybe because it is that most of the protests are peaceful (and those that are not are sometimes clearly provoked by excessive use of police force) that public sympathy is actually pretty high with the protesters?:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A majority of Americans sympathize with nationwide protests over the death of an unarmed black man in police custody and disapprove of President Donald Trump’s response to the unrest, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

The demonstrations, some of which have turned violent, began last week after a Minneapolis police officer was videotaped kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes, even after Floyd appeared to lose consciousness. The officer has been charged with murder.

The survey conducted on Monday and Tuesday found 64% of American adults were “sympathetic to people who are out protesting right now,” while 27% said they were not and 9% were unsure.

She also seem terribly uninterested in the politics of this - how the Republicans are blithely letting their 200 word vocabulary President (and his media ra-rah team) play partisan politics with this - which is exactly the last thing you want to do if you want to de-escalate matters.      

In fact, really, I reckon this is what Lehmann is doing here herself disingenuously:   playing politics while pretending not to.

Comments driven into moderation

My unwanted commenter Graeme Bird has been sent over the edge again by current events in America, which to his conspiracy addled brain is part of his ever expanding grand conspiracy theory (involving you-know-who from the Middle East) from which he seems to derive his life's meaning. 

As he continually adds anti-Semitic conspiracy rubbish in comments, and I have no ability to ban him on the Blogger platform, I am getting tired of his comments appearing on here - sometimes for some hours - before I can delete them.

All comments are therefore going into moderation for the time being.

Please feel welcome to comment - if they are not from Bird, I will clear them soon enough.

Not hurting Biden, so far

Damaged people watch

Sinclair Davidson likes to host a blog which allows free rein to nuts likes this:

First: it's a worry that such nutjobs are reproducing and helping pass their attitudes to younger males.

Second:  for the thousandth time - great hate site you got going there, Sinclair.  Congratulations.  You must be proud of things like how you banned the word "chink" then your commenters used "chunk" instead.    Or how they can be triggered by something like the above and use "faggot" as a routine insult.

Update:  on a more serious note than a couple of Australian rednecks freaking out because a teacher wants to do a foot tap:

Yeah, great hate site you got going there, Sinclair.  

How about a few common sense suggestions to help defuse riots

*   I find it hard to believe that it is procedurally risky to arrest the other 3 police officers who watched their buddy knee the life out of George Floyd for some charge immediately.  Can't the charges be later modified if needed?   Civil order across the entire nation requires people being able to see justice at least being started promptly - especially when everyone knows what happened from their TV. 

*  How much freaking common sense does it take for heads of police, governors (or even the President himself) to come out and say that restraint methods involving interference with air or blood flow through the neck are banned - never to be used?   That all police forces will ensure that all restraint instruction will emphasise the need to not do things obviously dangerous to the life of the arrested?

*  How much common sense does it take for heads of police or governors (or even the President himself) to come out and say that police who hide their identifying badge numbers are committing at least an administrative offence and will be punished for seeking to protect any of their own unjustified violence?   The riots are about lack of confidence in the police - they need to show why they can be trusted, and hiding identity shows they can't be.   And what about the convenient turning off of body cams?  Some places are acting:

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer fired the city's chief of police Steve Conrad after it was discovered that police officers had not activated their body cameras during the shooting of David McAtee, a local black business owner who was killed during protests early Monday morning.

Why it matters: Mandatory body camera policies have proven to be important in efforts to hold police officers accountable for excessive force against civilians and other misconduct. Those policies are under even greater scrutiny as the nation has erupted in protest over the killing of black people at the hands of police.

but again, I say there needs to be serious, immediate action against all police who deliberately turn off their body cam.

Uhuh

1.  Andrew Bolt, slavishly following Fox News evening line up and the American Right:

2.  A tweet from America:

The black people were released after a few minutes, apparently, but it still is a remarkable example of policing in modern America.

I think there is too little emphasis in the reporting on the riots on the role that Fox News and the American wingnut Right (joined in by our home grown bunch of race commentary Murdoch morons) are playing in pushing a reactionary line which is escalating the problem rather than defusing it.    

Sounds interesting

A book noted at Nature:

Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World

Philip Matyszak Thames & Hudson (2020)

Western ideas on antiquity are dominated by Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, with other cultures often reduced to stereotypes. Historian Philip Matyszak asks: were the Philistines philistines and the Vandals vandals? His stimulating encyclopaedia of 40 “forgotten peoples” begins with the Akkadians around 2330 bc and ends with the Hephthalites (‘White Huns’) in the fifth century ad. Illustrations include a Roman-style Vandal mosaic; far from vilifying Roman culture, the Vandals respected it, say current historians.

On a sort of related topic:  following a recent post I wrote about how India sent Buddhist monks West before the time of Christ, it did make me think about how we all carry images in our minds of what Greek, Roman, Babylonian and Egyptian civilisation looked like around that time, but for Indian civilisation we (OK, maybe just me) just don't have much mental image.   Is it that the archaeological sites there just aren't all that well preserved?  Or that it has been glossed over in Western education due to a type of educational bias.  (God knows I have no sympathy for the current Right wing Hindu nationalism, but I guess I do feel they have the right to feel their ancient history is overlooked.)

Update:  for example, have a look at this video of the Buddhist Stupa and surroundings at Sanchi in the middle of India, from around 300 BC.  The whole landscape is also a little surprising because it looks vast and pretty empty.   Not exactly the mental image I have of India - I kind of imagine a village every few kilometres or so:



 Update 2:  this guy's explanation of the Southern Indian Vijayanagar empire is interesting too, and the ruins are impressive - but the place only dates from 14th century CE - even though I would have guessed much older:

  

Sweden noted

Gee, when even a conservative site like Hot Air runs a story headed this:

 you would think Adam Creighton might want to reconsider his pig headed "lockdown has been a dis-aster!" take on Covid-19.

The Hot Air story is actually pretty nuanced and good.   Unlike Creighton. 

The weird optics of this Presidency (Part 1 million)

 

Yes, it's an irrelevant gesture to the current issue, clearly only designed to have partisan appeal to his dimwitted base.        

Claire pokes her head up

I had been wondering if Claire Lehmann was ever going to mention her former Quilette contributor  Andy Ngo's role in promoting to the Right the idea of Antifa as a well funded and organised mob of violent thugs just waiting to destroy American society, now that she can see his influence has gone all the way to Trump.

I thought she might have kept her silence, given that Ngo stopped working for her unusually abruptly, after his disingenuous role in covering for Right wing violence planning activists was getting attention.

But no, she has put her head up, and of all things, to defend an article she ran which was really indefensible:

I think she's like Adam Creighton on COVID 19 - they get a position in their head and then are willing to die in a ditch for it rather than re-consider whether they made a bad call.

Update:

Itchy trigger fingers - of the nutjob Right

Noted in Politico:

Anarchist and militia extremists could try to exploit the recent nationwide protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, the Department of Homeland Security warned in an intelligence note sent to law enforcement officials around the country.

Floyd, a black man who pleaded that he couldn't breathe while a police officer held him down and pressed his knee into his neck for nearly 9 minutes, was killed in Minnesota on May 25. The officer responsible has been charged with murder and manslaughter. 

The memo, dated May 29 and marked unclassified/law enforcement sensitive, cites “previous incidents of domestic terrorists exploiting First Amendment-protected events” as one reason for DHS’ concern of additional targeted violence by “domestic terrorist actors.” 

It also reveals, citing the FBI, that on May 27, two days after Floyd’s death, “a white supremacist extremist Telegram channel incited followers to engage in violence and start the ‘boogaloo’—a term used by some violent extremists to refer to the start of a second Civil War—by shooting in a crowd.” One Telegram message encouraged potential shooters to “frame the crowd around you” for the violence, the document said. 

And on May 29, “suspected anarchist extremists and militia extremists allegedly planned to storm and burn the Minnesota State Capitol,” the memo reads, citing FBI information.

Noted on Twitter:

Now for something more trivial

Let's do a quick review of the Netflix action movie Extraction:

As nearly everyone else has said - some very technically and thrillingly accomplished action (if rather bloody in a way I normally object to) in a merely serviceable story, but quite satisfying overall.   

Some different things about the film:

*  it was odd and a little amusing to hear Chris Hemsworth using full-on Aussie accent and vernacular, rather than the more mid-Pacific accent he usually uses in American movies;

* I can understand why Banglasdesh doesn't like the film - it makes Dhaka look like an absolute 3rd world, dangerous, corrupt, dump of a city, yet I think it was nearly all filmed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad.  (Knowing this may make viewers scratch that Indian city off any "places to visit" list too, since it looks so polluted and dirty.)  

* the camera work and action is just so impressive, though.  And not in an overly editted way which is my main complaint about modern action directors.   (It could hardly be accused of that when it has one widely praised no-cut car chase that goes on for about 11 minutes.  It is really terrific.)

One thing I can justify even though my son complained and complained about it:

*  why, he whined, will I watch this and say it's pretty thrilling, but refuse to watch John Wick movies?  Well, I have watched about 15 to 20 minutes of John Wick movies - the beginning of the first one, and some action sequence from (I think?)  the second one.   I abandoned the first movie because I was finding the dialogue and acting was terrible - I don't remember much about any action in that.    But the second time I was watching a fight in train, and it was all very stabby- stabby and arm breaky (perhaps close up pistol shot to the head as well?) from recollection.

Here's the thing - I found that the John Wick violence was deliberately more "up close and personal" and quasi-sadist in tone than that in Extraction.   Sure, both movies feature baddies getting what they deserve, and lots of blood;  but I thought Extraction did much faster cutaways from things like throat cuttings, stabbings and even gunshots to the head shots than Wick.  It also didn't much feature the sound of bones breaking (I bet that's in Wick) or close ups of stabbings.   And most of the death in Hemsworth's movie was gun fire, which usually (but not always) featured a spray of blood but not much else.

The fights are heavily choreographed in both, of course, and both feature the same methods of killing.    But my reaction to movie violence depends a lot on how much the movie emphasises its effects - hence I really get sick of the modern Netflix speciality of shots to the head and brains blown out the back as a routine thing.   I think Extraction did an acceptable level of moving on fast from the violent act, whereas Wick seemed to want to dwell on them.  I would have to watch all of a Wick film to confirm this, perhaps with a stopwatch in hand, but I reckon I can justify this scientifically.

Anyway, that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Update:  forgot to mention, I think the deliberate ambiguity of the ending is actually pretty clever.