Is the nuthouse Right that claims Biden is demented paying attention to how their culture war hero is looking?

I don't know about Stross's musing, but yeah, the continual gripping of the table, and general posture, looked bad.

The fine print (on the Disney wars)

I see this in the Washington Post report on the DeSantis dummy spit over Disney not supporting his moral panic "don't say gay" legislation: 

DeSantis started feuding with the Walt Disney Company nearly a month ago, when chief executive Bob Chapek issued a statement criticizing a parental rights law that prohibits discussions of gender issues in public school classes up to third grade and potentially through high school. Since then, DeSantis has lambasted what he described as a “woke ideology” at the company.

Earlier this week, the governor issued a proclamation calling for the repeal of a 1967 deal that allowed the company to become its own local government on the 40-square-mile property that Walt Disney bought earlier that decade. The Reedy Creek Improvement District allows Disney to bypass local building ordinances and some other rules, and also made it responsible for public services such as fire and rescue, sewage treatment, and road maintenance.

The bill to unravel the special district would not take effect until June 2023, giving Disney and lawmakers an off-ramp. “This is a repealable bill,” Roach said. “It doesn’t take more than the stroke of a pen to undo it. We’ll see what happens next.”

Disney has not commented on the legislation. The company, which has donated millions of dollars to politicians in Florida, mostly Republicans, paused donations in the state after the parental rights bill passed.

I doubt the bill will ever go into effect, and that DeSantis will come out the loser.  

Update:  of bigger interest to democracy, and the crazy way the American system lets it be undermined, is this:

After months of back and forth, lawmakers in Florida have passed Gov. Ron DeSantis' controversial congressional district voting map — and have pushed forward his last-minute plan to scrap Disney World's special regulatory status in the state...

The map will give Republicans a 20-8 seat advantage in a state where registered Democratic and Republican voters are nearly equal in number. It will also eliminate two congressional districts held by African American Democrats: Rep. Al Lawson of Tallahassee and Rep. Val Demings of Orlando.

And we're supposed to believe he told Putin he'd be nuked if he made a move on Ukraine?

 

A worry

An interesting observation

 

Rich man with dubious taste (or perhaps, no sense of smell)

 The responses following are often very funny.  Here are some:

Damn bacteria

In research of interest to all men of my age:

Scientists have discovered bacteria linked to aggressive prostate cancer in work hailed as a potential revolution for the prevention and treatment of the most deadly form of the disease.

Researchers led by the University of East Anglia performed sophisticated genetic analyses on the urine and prostate tissue of more than 600 men with and without prostate cancer and found five species of bacteria linked to rapid progression of the disease.

The study does not prove that the bacteria drive or exacerbate prostate cancer, but if work now under way confirms their role, researchers can develop tests to identify men most at risk and potentially find antibiotics to prevent the cancer from claiming thousands of lives each year.

Transgender in sports discussed

I ended up watching last night's episode of Insight on SBS, about the topic of transgender people in sport.

I was, of course, expecting a heavily pro-transgender slant; and certainly, there were a few transgender folk participating, but they were looking pained during most of the show because, to my surprise, it was really completely dominated by experts and (female) sports people who said yes, there is a real issue with fairness if you let transgender women who grew up as men dominate women's sport.   It was all very rationally discussed, and no shouting match about "transphobia" broke out at all.  It probably helped that it had two transgender women who were on the side of "yes, this is a problem."

I don't support unnecessarily inflammatory language on the transgender issue, but at the same time, those on the pro-transgender side of this debate are not going to win on this in the culture wars.

Long weekend report (including a chermoula chicken recipe - it's great!)

I did very little, actually.  Good Friday, in particular, is always like the laziest public holiday on the calendar.   

It may not be a very seasonally appropriate thing, but I did finally finish reading Karen Armstrong's "biography" of Buddha.   I didn't realise that there was a (sort of) Judas figure in the story, getting upset about leadership succession plans, although this guy was more into direct action, trying to kill Buddha with a boulder and a drunk, aggressive elephant. (Road Runner cartoons came to mind when I read this.)  Anyway, the Wiki version of the longer story goes like this:

Shortly thereafter, Devadatta asked the Buddha to retire and let him take over the running of the Sangha. The Buddha retorted that he did not even let his trusted disciples Sāriputta or Moggallāna run the Sangha, much less one like him, who should be vomited like spittle, and he gave a special act of publicity about him, warning the monks that he had changed for the worse.^[10]

Seeing the danger in this, Devadatta approached Prince Ajātasattu and encouraged him to kill his Father, the good King Bimbisāra, and meanwhile he would kill the Buddha. The King found out about his plan and gave over the Kingdom into the Prince's control.

Ajātasattu then gave mercenaries to Devadatta who ordered them to kill the Buddha, and in an elaborate plan to cover his tracks he ordered other men to kill the killers, and more to kill them and so on, but when they approached the Buddha they were unable to carry out their orders, and were converted instead.

Devadatta then tried to kill the Buddha himself by throwing a rock at him from on high, while the Buddha was walking on the slopes of a mountain. As this also failed he decided to have the elephant Nāḷāgiri intoxicated and let him loose on the Buddha while he was on almsround. However, the power of the Buddha's loving-kindness overcame the elephant.

Devadatta then decided to create a schism in the order, and collected a few monk friends and demanded that the Buddha accede to the following rules for the monks: they should dwell all their lives in the forest, live entirely on alms obtained by begging, wear only robes made of discarded rags, dwell at the foot of a tree and abstain completely from fish and flesh.

The Buddha refused to make any of these compulsory, however, and Devadatta went round blaming him, saying that he was living in abundance and luxury. Devadatta then decided to create a schism and recite the training rules (pātimokkha) apart from the Buddha and his followers, with 500 newly ordained monks.

The Buddha sent his two Chief Disciples Sāriputta and Moggallāna to bring back the erring young monks. Devadatta thought they had come to join his Sangha and, asking Sāriputta to give a talk, fell asleep. Then the Chief Disciples persuaded the young monks to return to the Buddha.^[11]

The Buddha did not show any hatred or deceive, even after what Devadatta had done. Soon after, Devadatta got sick and realized that what he had done was wrong. He tried to go to the Buddha's place to apologize for what he did, but it was too late. On the way to see the Buddha, the earth sucked him into the Niraya Hell for his deeds.

 Huh.

In new recipe news:   I tried a chermoula chicken recipe pretty successfully.   Followed a version from a guy on Youtube but can't find it now.  From memory:  the marinade is about 15 g of parsley and corriander finely chopped, the flesh of a couple of small preserved lemons, four cloves of garlic minced, a couple of tablespoons (or maybe a bit more) of harissa paste, some olive oil, a teaspoon of ground cumin and ground ginger, supposed to be some saffron liquid but didn't have any, just a bit of water instead, a teaspoon or so of salt and some pepper.  Marinate the chicken.   Finely chop a coupe of onion and start cooking them in the tagine, with a bit more ginger powder.   Chicken and all marinade goes on top and cook for maybe 45 or 50 mins on low.  Add a handful of olives and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.  Cook covered for another 10 min, then take lid off and let the liquid reduce to a sauce.  Very nice.

There is also movement domestically, but I will post about that separately.

 

Philosophically amusing

This tweet, the humour of which you have to be old enough to be familiar with Columbo to get

OK, I have to expand the pics I guess:

Some in comments are disputing Kant made a mistake:

And more:

This is annoying

 

The Left and common sense, generally speaking

Allahpundit at Hot Air posts about Bill Maher and Josh Rogan (ugh) agreeing that Democrats have a "common sense" problem.   The things Maher cites are:   too much spending on the pandemic; "defund the police"; pregnant "men"; and looting is "not illegal".   

On the other hand, pro-Left people I like a lot on Twitter, like David Roberts, are continually complaining about how terrible the "two-sides" takes of mainstream media are, and yesterday he criticised the Republicans for being the ones who are obsessing about taking action to stop the tiny number of top trans sports competitors from competing.   Also, I have noticed Twitter commentary about how low Biden's approval rating is with young (under 35) Democrats, with people arguing on the one side that this proves the party needs to move Left and away from what oldies in the Party want, and others pointing out that the young don't vote much anyway, so what's the point of that.

Unfortunately, I think both sides have a point, but I do wish that the American Left could just acknowledge a few things as common sense, or "centrist" positions:

a.    allowing homeless people to camp on streets is bad for them, bad for other citizens, and should not be allowed.   Laws (and court decisions) saying otherwise and preventing them being moved on and streets cleaned, need to be changed.

b.    all theft is bad and needs to be prosecuted.

c.    the police do not need "defunding".  They need proper training.

d.    a guy with a penis and a man's build and man's voice who went through puberty and built a man's body before deciding he was really a woman, and then wants to compete and wipe the floor against all women in the sport they've been training at for years, is being a jerk.   He can call himself a woman, but if he had any decency, he wouldn't compete against them.   [And as for complaints that this happens in a tiny, tiny number of cases - yeah, that might be an argument against wasting legislative time on it, but it's not an argument against the basic breach of fairness that these cases entail.  It's like the significance of one fake tear at the end of Broadcast News - Holly Hunter was right to find that it mattered.]

I'll probably think of more things as the day progresses.

And, the usual rider:  I get annoyed with things that I think the Left are nutty about, but they pale into insignificance in comparison to the utterly globally dangerous anti-democratic and anti-science nonsense the American Right currently is unwilling to rid itself of.    This is why people like Rogan and Maher annoy me - if they had any sense of perspective, they would say something like "culture war  issues about racism and gender and sexuality and policing shouldn't be as important to voters as they are - I mean, let's face the reality, there is a large anti-democratic movement afoot in this country, dominated by conspiracy nonsense promoted by a poisonous circle jerk between Right wing media and Right wing politicians, and they're using culture war issues to their ends.   People shouldn't let them get away with that."

But no, their line is to give succour to the Christofascists by essentially arguing "well, those Lefties, they deserve to lose." 

 Update:   Actually, I thought Ross Douthat's lengthy column "How to Make Sense of the New LGBTQ Culture War" is pretty good.  Here is one section:

The concerns of some same-sex marriage advocates, meanwhile, are lucidly expressed by Jonathan Rauch in a recent essay for The American Purpose. Rauch argues that the push for gay marriage represented a triumph of moderation over radicalism within the gay community itself and worries that today’s transgender-rights activists are taking a different path.

Where the gay rights movement emphasized biological realities (“born this way,” etc.) and bourgeois aspirations (to monogamy and marriage), today’s gender-identity advocates promote “wild claims” about the social-constructedness of sex differences and dismiss any contravening evidence as “violence.” This risks backlash, it endangers all the accommodations to transgender rights that America is ready to offer — and it also arguably hurts many gay and lesbian young people, Rauch writes, since a system that encourages “tomboyish girls or effeminate boys” to “identify as the opposite sex” ends up confirming “all the hoary gender stereotypes that made generations of gay and lesbian people (and many straight people) miserable.”

And Rauch’s anxiety about gay youth here connects to the feminist concerns as well — specifically, the worry that normal anxieties of puberty, the particular challenges of girls’ mental health, are being addressed by the new theories not through a reconciliation with one’s body and biology but through an alienation from femaleness itself.

And, of course, I would put myself in the second category of possible reactions he describes to those surveys that show young people are enthusiastically now prepared to put themselves into the LGBTQ categories (although, mostly, the bi category):

The second interpretation: We shouldn’t read too much into it. This trend is probably mostly just young people being young people, exploring and experimenting and differentiating themselves from their elders. Most of the Generation Zers identifying as L.G.B.T. are calling themselves bisexual and will probably end up in straight relationships, if they aren’t in them already. Some of the young adults describing themselves as transgender or nonbinary may drift back to cisgender identities as they grow older.

So we shouldn’t freak out over their self-identification — but neither should we treat it as a definitive revelation about human nature or try to build new curriculums or impose certain rules atop a fluid and uncertain situation. Tolerance is essential; ideological enthusiasm is unnecessary.

Update 2:   I forgot to criticise Maher's criticism of the government reaction to Covid - I have argued from the start that the complexity of that event (and the ambiguity of conflicting medical evidence) should mean a great deal of charity is given to the range of government responses, within reason.  

More trans cautionary content

Just noticed this at Hot Air:

Today the LA Times published a story about transgender clinical psychologist Erica Anderson. Anderson is not only trans herself, she’s helped hundreds of teens who wanted to transition but now she’s publicly questioned whether or not some of the surge of teens announcing they are trans is in fact the result of influence by other teens.

She sounds quite sensible in her commentary.

As millions of teenagers across the U.S. went into quarantine in 2020, Anderson found herself meeting more and more parents who were startled when their children came out as trans. The UC San Francisco adolescent gender center where she worked saw a total of 373 new patients last year — up from 162 in 2019.

The teens tended to tell similar stories: They were in online school, had a lot of time on their hands and were spending more time on social media. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, and even video games, allowed teens to craft virtual identities that they could then try out in the real world.

Online, a stream of transgender influencers and activists told teens that if they felt uncomfortable with their bodies, or didn’t fit in, maybe they were trans. Some coached kids on how to bind their breasts, how to change their name and pronouns at school, how to push their parents for testosterone.

“To flatly say there couldn’t be any social influence in formation of gender identity flies in the face of reality,” Anderson said. “Teenagers influence each other.”

The big question of the day

The New York Times asks:

Is Nose Hair Essential to Fighting Off Colds and Other Viral Illnesses?

Expert advice on whether trimming or waxing your nose hairs might increase the risk of respiratory infections.

Short answer:  no one knows.   

A better take than that held by conservative Catholics

 

George's comment translates to "will she return the money now", as I gather she has been seen as very Putin friendly before.

Yet it's still tragic to see more moral clarity from this dubious character than that coming from the likes of Dover Beach and his New Catallaxy blog.   The common theme there is akin to the "leave Britney alone" meme:  his version is "But won't anyone think of poor Russia?".

He's an utter disgrace.   Monty used to think he could be reasoned with.