Some cultural education for you

I should know more than the average Australian about what (some) Japanese don't like about their own culture, but this list by a young Japanese guy (who I think went to college in America) has some amusing surprises in it:  

Wishing him ill

Forgot to mention on the weekend, but this Vox piece:

Is it immoral if you feel schadenfreude about Trump’s Covid-19? 

is really good.  After considering what some famous philosophers have said on the topic, it ends on this consideration:

That said, what if someone wishes for Trump to die, not out of pure punitiveness, but out of a desire for Americans to get a new president who that person believes would save many lives?

 Whether you think this is ethically acceptable depends a lot on your preexisting moral commitments. Specifically, you’ll answer differently depending on which school of ethics you gravitate toward: utilitarianism, deontology, or virtue ethics. Here’s a brief (and admittedly oversimplified) breakdown.

If you’re a utilitarian, you might argue this is a perfectly acceptable wish because something is moral if it produces good consequences — and having a president who doesn’t bungle a national pandemic response would prevent a lot of death, which is clearly a good consequence.

But if you’re a deontologist (also known as a Kantian), then you’d argue this is an unacceptable wish because something is moral if it’s fulfilling your duty to others and immoral if it’s not. Immanuel Kant famously said we have a duty always to treat human beings as ends in themselves, not means to our ends. Wishing death upon someone — even if it’s to save many more people from death — is treating that someone as a means.

A virtue ethicist would likely agree with the deontologist that wishing death on someone is unacceptable, but for a somewhat different reason: By doing so, you’re cultivating in yourself a negative trait, rather than a virtuous trait like empathy. Even if it doesn’t actually harm anybody else (wishes are different from actions, after all), it harms you as a moral being, potentially chipping away at your capacity for empathy in the long term.

The virtue ethicist would probably want to remind us that it is perfectly possible to wish for the alleviation of suffering in a human being who has tested positive for a lethal pathogen, even if we happen to deeply dislike that human being. It is possible to wish for that human being’s recovery even if we feel a simultaneous sense of superiority, of vulnerability, of desperation to see justice in our world — and even if we think the world would be better off if that person didn’t recover.

If we examine what’s under the hood of our schadenfreude and don’t like what we see, it’s worth remembering that we have this option at our disposal.

Despite my general sympathy towards Kantian and virtue ethics, I'm leaning towards utilitarianism on this one.

Just stop it, Patricia

Patricia Karvelas is quite OK as a broadcaster on the ABC, even though her evening slot means I don't hear all that much of her show.   But I have to say, her recent daily tweeting of her radio studio dancing really strikes me as gratingly undignified and more becoming of a "look at me" teenager on social media than a mature adult.   [This is today's example.]  I wish she would stop it.

 

Netflix movie review time

Last weekend - saw the recent Netflix Tom Holland/Robert Pattinson vehicle The Devil All the Time.

First:  how does Tom Holland manage to act American so convincingly?  He's the best thing about the movie, by far.

But secondly and more importantly:  what a strange story, and not in a good way.  Basically, it's a multi-generational tale of psycho/socio-pathic preachers (as well as one or two nutty ordinary believers) which plays like a Southern Gothic written by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins on a drunken weekend tag team effort to come up with the most evil and hypocritical evangelicals they could imagine.   The result is too patently over the top, and lacks an overall narrative credibility, even if on a scene by scene basis, the acting is fine and it is nicely directed.   

A very odd effort.

 

 

 

Kevin has a point

You all know I had no time for Rudd as a politician, but he really has a point here:

 

Typical of Trump supporters

They support an idiot, and they also claim victim status for supporting an idiot.  

Now, I don't know for sure that this anti-masker is a Trump supporter, but what are the chances?:

 

As I mentioned yesterday: Trump supporters are the dumbest people on the planet

And this:

And this:

And this:

That Lahren person is a Fox News host, apparently.   I find it absolutely hilarious when blond conservative women act as if they find Don Trump's version of masculinity attractive, and even funnier when misogynistic men make it clear they admire Trump for having had sex with lots of women, while sympathising with his whiny "everyone is mean to me in the Fake News and Deep State" act.   

In little noticed climate change news...

A rather unlikely allegation

Sinclair Davidson seems very excited by the prospect that a claim by an Italian newspaper that a (now) ex-Cardinal transferred more than a million dollars to Australia for the purposes of paying off witnesses (or just one witness?) to give evidence against his internal enemy Pell might be true.

Yet even some of his culture war brainwashed and dumbed down by "conservative" media followers are wondering how it would be done, exactly.  

Because, yeah - bribing witnesses from afar is more than likely going to involve quite a few people in a chain, with all of them aware of how sensationally corrupt and damaging to them and the Church such a bribe would be.  And we're not talking, say, life-long mafia members who have always lived off corruption, either.  There would, it would be virtually guaranteed, be people involved who were formerly at no risk of ever being convicted of a crime who would have to have decided that it was worth the risk because they really, really dislike Pell.  (Or who were willing to take a piece of the money along the way - but again, if you're not routinely corrupt, you don't usually turn corrupt overnight.)

I therefore strongly suspect the allegation will come to nothing (or nothing serious.)   As I have said before, Sinclair's excitability factor over dubious claims means any barrister should always reject him during jury selection.   

PS:  it is true that a Cardinal getting sacked is a rare event; but there has been suspicion of financial corruption around this one for years, it seems.

Just your average personality based death cult

You know what I'm talking about:

There is much speculation that this (and his series of ALL CAPITALS tweets yesterday) are due to a steroid high - but of course, there is no way Trump will ever admit that, even if true.

The other obvious things out of this whole episode:

*   how do so many dishonest, dubious quality doctors find their way into being his personal physician, or in important roles?   Do they find him, or he find them, so to speak?

*   there is a strong and not unreasonable suspicion that Trump may have had a positive test before the debate [update:  perhaps more likely, was already infected and contagious, even if he didn't have a positive test].  Surely the exact timing of his testing regime last week will leak soon if it is indeed true.

*   Trump's reaction is readily explained by chronic narcissistic personality disorder:   because he might be over the worst, and because he had it, he thinks he is now the most knowledgeable person around on the topic, and that if he can beat it, people shouldn't fear it.    Watching such poisonous and policy dangerous narcissism should, by any normal person's standards, be stomach churning.  But American is suffering from an evidence free personality cult by the dumbest cult leader who has ever ended up heading a cult.   So there is no reasoning with his base.

* It is tempting every day to just do post after post with the title 

TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE THE DUMBEST PEOPLE ON THE PLANET

because the evidence for it is just so overwhelming.

The secret service will enjoy dragging him out of the White House

This is, of course, in reference to his pathetic decision to get his daily narcissism fix by making his guardians drive him past his cult tragics.

Update:

Ha! 

That's some delay

Googling Steven Spielberg news:

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, fans will have to wait to see Steven Spielberg's new West Side Story film. Originally scheduled to hit theaters on December 18, Variety reports that the movie musical will now be released on December 10, 2021.

This is my least anticipated Spielberg film for many a year.  I'll still see it, though.

Trump and theology

My daughter made the claim the other day that Donald Trump's failure to come down with COVID strikes her as proof that God can't exist.  With news like this, her case is getting stronger, I'm afraid:

 Update:  as God says:

Update 2:   The plausibility of God is re-established with news that the Orange One has it.   But if he is one of these politicians that suffers barely a sniffle, God's credibility will take another hit.   

Meanwhile, in Australian alternative reality land...

As I said yesterday, and has been further cemented in commentary from a string of Trump sympathetic, gormless, Australian Sky News personalities overnight, no one thinks Trump "debated" well yesterday, and all agree that the interruptions were self defeating.   (It's also unquestioned that Trump interrupted more than Biden by a wide margin,)   

But what do the ageing "it's all a socialist plot!" brainiacs at Catallaxy think, especially the embarrassingly cultic Steve Kates?   Obviously, this:

 

 

Honestly, there is not a wingnut trope that Kates will not swallow when it comes to Trump;  he is truly, obliviously, brainwashed by the Right wing information bubble world of Fox News, Breitbart, and the other propaganda outlets of the GOP.   Has he always been this embarrassing, I wonder?  

 

Facebook is a disgrace

As noted in Mother Jones:

“Report: Joe Biden Has Been Given Tonight’s Debate Questions In Advance” reads a headline on arch-paranoiac Alex Jones’ site, Infowars, a notorious peddler of right-wing disinformation. The “report” Infowars cited was from former Fox host Todd Starnes, who was just citing Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy theorist with a history of spreading outright lies. Corsi offered no proof that Biden had been given the questions, but Starnes’ story on the baseless allegation reached over 1 million followers on Facebook and another million on Twitter, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool owned by Facebook.

Infowars published its story around noon. By later that afternoon, more Biden disinformation was hurtling out of control on Facebook. A New York Post story with a single anonymous source from the Trump campaign claimed Biden had agreed to be inspected for an earpiece before the debate, which the Biden campaign denied. Regardless the story spread across Facebook, amplified by right-wing sites and posters.

NBC’s Ben Collins noticed that the claim predated the New York Post story; it had been floating around online for weeks before the online poster at the center of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a user claiming to be Q, posted the theory on 8kun, the successor website to the 8chan forum.

Breitbart‘s story on the claim reached 5 million accounts on Facebook and 3 million on Twitter.

The massive spread of disinformation about Biden came just hours after Facebook essentially blew off Biden’s concerns about disinformation being spread about him.

On Monday, the Biden campaign sent a letter to Facebook calling it “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process,” and saying that “Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression,” according to a copy of the letter published by Axios.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded vaguely, saying that the company has received criticism from both Republicans and Democrats and added that “we have rules in place to protect the integrity of the election and free expression, and we will continue to apply them impartially.”