The dog that caught the car

I thought this Slate column on why the Republicans (and Australian Right wingnuts) have been fairly muted in their excitement over the Texas effective ban on abortion was pretty good.  Key parts:

Despite the Republican Party’s decades long crusade against Roe v. Wade, the vast majority of GOP politicians declined to celebrate, or even note, Roe’s functional demise. Why?

The most obvious answer is that Republicans are now the dog that caught the car, fearful of the political ramifications of their own victory. Indeed, it seems undeniable that Republicans did not anticipate this abrupt triumph over Roe, instead assuming that the Texas law would be blocked by the courts. After all, hundreds of similar laws were blocked by the courts for years. Their decision to downplay this victory should upend the conventional wisdom about Roe not just politically, but also from a constitutional perspective.

For years, conservative lawyers have argued that the Supreme Court should not uphold pro-choice precedent because it is unsettled, unstable, and unworkable. As evidence, they cite the fact that red states continue passing all manner of abortion restrictions to contest the legitimacy of Roe as settled precedent. But the GOP’s reaction to the Texas law suggests that this analysis has it backward. What if Republicans only continued to pass abortion restrictions because they knew the laws would get struck down? What if the passage of these laws proves that Roe is such a settled, stable, and workable precedent that legislators think they can pretend to defy it without worrying about the consequences?

The rest of it, talking about the history of Republican tactics, was interesting, too.

Feminism and pornography

There's an interesting review in The Atlantic of three feminist themed books on the current (Western) attitudes to sex, and there are some interesting passages:

Porn consumption is now such a fixture of modern life—there is no chance the American government will take your smut away—that space has opened up to question its effects without being dismissed as a wannabe censor. Which isn’t to say that admitting to reservations about current sexual trends is easy. For Clark-Flory’s 30-something generation (which is also my generation), being Cool About Sex is a mark of our impeccable social liberalism. If two or more adults consent to it, whatever it is, no one else is entitled to an opinion.

Yet here is the conundrum facing feminist writers: Our enlightened values—less stigma regarding unwed mothers, the acceptance of homosexuality, greater economic freedom for women, the availability of contraception, and the embrace of consent culture—haven’t translated into anything like a paradise of guilt-free fun. The sexual double standard still exists, and girls who say no are still “frigid” while those who say yes are still “sluts.” Some men still act with entitlement, while others feel that, no matter what they do, they are inescapably positioned as the “bad guys” by the new sexual rules. Half a century after the sexual revolution and the start of second-wave feminism, why are the politics of sex still so messy, fraught, and contested?

More specifically on pornography:

In The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan confesses her reluctance to cover second-wave criticisms of porn in the feminist-theory course she teaches at Oxford. She is Cool About Sex, after all, and assumed that her students would be bored by the question of whether porn oppresses women. She also assumed that the reputation of “anti-porn feminists,” such as Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had been fatally damaged by their alliance with the religious right to pass laws restricting access to pornography. What self-respecting member of Generation Z would want to line up alongside Jerry Falwell Sr. and Phyllis Schlafly, particularly when the other side is selling a fantasy of libertine pleasure?

Yet her class was “riveted,” she observes in “Talking to My Students About Porn,” the longest essay in her collection. Their enthusiasm was so great that it made her reconsider her own diffidence. The exchange is worth quoting at length:

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

It wasn’t just the women students talking; the men were saying yes as well, in some cases even more emphatically … My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex; one of them asked whether it was too utopian to imagine sex was loving and mutual and not about domination and submission.

Well, it's good to see such things being admitted;  I guess it's also something of a sign of the scale of the sexual revolution that you can have a class of (presumably) young adults in Oxford so keen to share with their teacher their views of their own sexual experiences.   Not exactly a scene you'd expect in CS Lewis and Tolkien's day!

There is also this aspect of pornography, which I guess I hadn't thought much about before:

But how much do culture and politics shape those wants? Porn-aggregator sites, to take one example, use algorithms, just like the rest of the internet. Pornhub pushes featured videos and recommendations, optimized to build user loyalty and increase revenue, which carry the implicit message that this is what everyone else finds arousing—that this is the norm. Compare porn with polarized journalism, or even fast food: How can we untangle what people “really want” from what they are offered, over and over, and from what everyone else is being offered too? No one’s sexual desires exist in a vacuum, immune to outside pressures driven by capitalism. (Call it the invisible hand job of the market.)

Ha ha.

I think it's good to see serious, non religious, discussion of the downside of ubiquitous easy access to pornography;  but it is difficult how you can ever see a solution without in some way being censorious.  Let's not shy away from that, I say:   people should feel OK with saying "I really think pornography that depicts practice X, Y or Z really ought not be available." 

 

Still not 100% sure

Another study indicating that the warming Arctic region is helping cause freak cold winter spells in North America, due to the polar vortex breaking down and causing cold air to spread south:

In their study, published this week in Science¹, Cohen and his colleagues compared 40 years of satellite observations of atmospheric conditions over the Arctic with experiments based on computational climate models. The models probed how a decline in Arctic sea ice and snow cover would affect airstreams in the region. Since ice and snow reflect a large fraction of incoming sunlight back into space, whereas the darker ocean and land surface absorb more radiation, this decline is known to drive Arctic warming.

The researchers found that episodes of polar-vortex stretching have markedly increased in the past few decades, and that their models reproduced this behaviour well when they included the effects of Arctic warming.

But some climate scientists are still not sure:

...the idea that Arctic warming might be responsible for cold spells in mid-latitude regions is still hotly debated among climate scientists. At first glance, it might seem obvious that winters will generally tend to get milder in a warming world. But climate models that are commonly used to study complex links between the different components of the climate system diverge on the issue of how strongly Arctic warming might influence mid-latitude winters, and state-of-the-art models do not accurately replicate observed trends in the behaviour of the polar vortex. It remains to be seen whether the models are missing something, or whether the observations of polar-vortex stretching merely reflect natural climate variability, says Daniela Matei, a climate modeller at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

I don't know:  seems a bit of an odd co-incidence for it to be "natural climate variability" at a time of clear and rapid Arctic warming...

A voter fraud conspiracy for every election

It seems that the Democrat concern that California's governor will lose the recall election is much reduced.    Hence this:

Tweets on life extension

Was waiting for a tweet like this...

...but Jason spotted it first:

Agreed.  I mean, the guy looks like he should be retired, too.
 

Update:  I posted that before I even watched the video.  Now that I have seen half of it - I definitely do not want this guy as my pilot.  Not only that, it sounds like he has been barely psychologically stable enough to be a pilot for much of his career - he recites a litany of personal problems he's experienced.  

Pilots can be nuts, too.

Libertarian follies at sea

He's talking about this long piece in The Guardian, in which I was surprised to learn that a P&O cruise  ship that used to operate out of Brisbane (and with a bit of a dubious reputation, I think) had been sold to cryptocurrency guys who thought it could be the start of some mini seasteading operation.  

It all failed.

How very Trumpy

France 24 reports:

Tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets in Brazil Tuesday in a show of support on independence day for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is locked in an all-out political battle with institutions including the Supreme Court.  

Anti-Bolsonaro protesters also gathered for huge demonstrations in cities across the country, making the annual national day festivities a high-risk event, with just over a year to go to elections that polls currently put the far-right president on track to lose.

Bolsonaro, whose popularity is at an all-time low, is seeking to fire up his base and flex his political muscle in the face of a flagging economy, soaring unemployment and inflation, and a series of investigations targeting him and his inner circle.

With hardline supporters urging a military intervention to give Bolsonaro unfettered power, there are fears the day's rallies could turn violent, with echoes of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in support of former president Donald Trump -- to whom Bolsonaro is often compared.

The main difference, and main worry, seems to be that he has the military on side.   Trump never did; at least at the higher level.   (Loose nuts like Flynn excepted, of course.)

 

Tough on COVID

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.

While on COVID:  there seems to be some online fighting going on about whether that Bangladesh study into the effect of mask wearing is really a well designed and statistically convincing one, or not.  I read this guy's take on the matter and I am inclined to think it is significant.   And yeah, even though the effect was only to reduce infections by 10%, in context:

While the effect may seem small, the results offer a glimpse of just how much masks matter, Mobarak said.

"A 30-percent increase in mask-wearing led to a 10 percent drop in Covid, so imagine if there was a 100-percent increase — if everybody wore a mask and we saw a 100-percent change," he said.

And:

The study’s authors — led by principal investigators Abaluck, Laura Kwong, Steve Luby, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak and Ashley Styczynski — a globe-spanning team that includes researchers from Yale, Stanford and the Bangladeshi nonprofit GreenVoice, emphasized that this did not mean masks were only 9.3 percent effective.

“I think a big error would be to read this study and to say, ‘Oh, masks can only prevent 10 percent of symptomatic infections,’ ” Abaluck said. The number would probably be several times higher if masking were universal, he said.

Yeah, seems to me to be good evidence for mandating mask wearing, at least in some scenarios.  (Schools, I would expect.)

HANOI--Vietnam jailed a man on Monday for five years for breaking strict COVID-19 quarantine rules and spreading the virus to others, state media reported.

Le Van Tri, 28, was convicted of “spreading dangerous infectious diseases” at a one-day trial at the People’s Court of the southern province of Ca Mau, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Vietnam has been one of the world’s coronavirus success stories, thanks to targeted mass testing, aggressive contact tracing, tight border restrictions and strict quarantine. But new clusters of infections since late April have tarnished that record.

“Tung traveled back to Ca Mau from Ho Chi Minh City... and breached the 21-day quarantine regulations,” the news agency said.

“Tung infected eight people, one of whom died due to the virus after one month of treatment,” it added.

Smart people can be nuts

I had noticed Trumpy Right wingers citing the opinion of the (now dead) inventor of the PCR test as proving that it's useless or misleading as a COVID test.  I never looked into it in detail:  obviously, culture warriors of the Right are gullible and cling to anything, no matter how stupid, that they think supports their "independent thinking"; and the actual medical authorities saying that PCR is really the test to use were just always likely to be right.

So yeah, I didn't really realise how nutty the inventor of PCR had gone, until I read this article.  Highlights include an encounter with a glowing talking raccoon (probably an alien using a screen memory), and having his life saved by an astral travelling woman he later met for a sexual hook up.    

All very, very plausible.

For those waiting for my last Ring review...

[...hi Tim, although I'm not even sure if you care.  :)]

 Anyway, this last weekend I only got through Act 1 of Götterdämmerung and didn't have time to finish.

The story has taken a turn I wasn't quite expecting - with the new love between Siegfried and Brunnhilde (literally, just one night old) the subject of interference by the very oddly named (even by Wagnerian standards) Gibichungs.   

I really liked the orchestral bit when Siegfried sets off on the Rhine -  it's back to the first theme in the first opera, of course, and elaborated at some length.   And, as people said in their commentary on watching the whole cycle, by this stage, you really start to enjoy recognising the prior themes popping up, even briefly, and being mixed up.   

I hope the end of the world in flames lives up to its hype...

The Chinese puzzle, continued

Noah's substack piece about what on Earth China thinks it is doing with its attack on its own successful tech industries was really good, a few weeks back.  I think I forgot to link to it?  Here it is...

Believe it when I see it

I smell a strong whiff of Murdoch-ian playing both sides of the fence for economic gain in this potentially (kinda, sorta, maybe) big news today reported in the SMH:

News Corp Australia, an influential player in Australia’s decade-long climate wars, will end its long-standing editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies and advocate for the world’s leading economies to hit net zero emissions by 2050.

The owner of some of the nation’s most-read newspapers, including the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and 24-hour news channel Sky News Australia will from mid-October begin a company-wide campaign promoting the benefits of a carbon-neutral economy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has faced growing international condemnation and pressure from advertisers over its editorial stance on climate change, which has long cast doubt over the science behind global warming and has since 2007 attacked various federal government efforts to reduce emissions....

From October 17, the company will run a two-week campaign that will advocate for a carbon net zero target to be reached by 2050, which is expected to focus heavily on jobs in a decarbonised economy, particularly blue-collar industries such as mining, resources and agriculture. The campaign, according to multiple sources familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they are confidential, said it will be fronted by news.com.au columnist and former Studio 10 host, Joe Hildebrand.

Several sources said Sky News will support the cause that will feature across the metropolitan tabloid mastheads. The Hildebrand-led campaign will not appear in the national masthead, The Australian, they said, but the newspaper will continue to temper its editorial stance on the issue.

The Australian wingnut Right already doesn't think Hildebrand isn't one of them - any campaign by him will be readily ignored. 

The far, far bigger issue is this:

A plan has been devised to limit – but not muzzle – dissenting voices among News Corp’s stable of conservative commentators, who will be expected to reframe their political arguments both in print and on its subscription news channel, which is now broadcast across regional Australia on free-to-air on WIN.

Well, it's impossible to imagine Bolt, Jones and the idiot show that is Outsiders "re-framing" their climate science denial in any meaningful way.   If the Murdochs successfully muzzle them on the issue, well and good.  But I can't see it happening.

 

Odd things seen last weekend

I accidentally ended up at a country athletics meet.  This was an unusual thing for me - to be at something involving sporting competition - so it warranted photographic proof:

(I was actually at the Mulgowie farmer's market.  The athletics meet on the same field was not something that had attracted me.   Fantastically good corn was purchased, by the way.  And a truck on the side of the road at Gatton - not so far away - was selling 20kg of potatoes for $20.  We passed it twice, but my wife wouldn't let me buy a sack.)  

 

The next day, it was fake Italy on the Gold Coast:

To be honest, I don't mind Disneyesque fake environments in terms of buildings, at least. I could do without the imitation art though, in the form of the nude dude.  That's pushing it too far.

Some interesting tweets on China and socialism