Harassment on ice

The news story this morning:

Australians sent to work in Antarctica have complained about a widespread and predatory culture of sexual harassment with unwelcome requests for sex, taunting, displays of offensive pornography and homophobia.

surprises me a little, because I would have assumed that the problem would have been recognised and dealt with by strong leadership (and psychological assessment) long before now.   I mean, I assume that all people go through a selection process that includes psych assessment, and I would also assume that part of that would include questions like "How do you think you will handle the isolation and the effect that it may have on your sex life?  Do you expect to find a sexual partner there?"

In fact, I have a recollection of reading somewhere, many years ago, a woman who had gone there who said something like "You just go there expecting to face some competitive sexual tension amongst the men until you chose one of them to sleep with.  Then it settles down."   It surprised me for its pragmatism, but I thought "well, it would seem there are some well know issues for women who go there."

Is it perhaps that women have simply decided they do not have to put up with that anymore - perhaps an ongoing effect of the MeToo  movement?

I prescribe a ban on Fox News

This from NPR:

This experience – of farmers grappling with suicide – is devastatingly common. Farmers and ranchers are nearly two times more likely to die by suicide in the U.S., compared to other occupations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

I wouldn't mind betting that, if it was allowed to be studied, a ban in rural regions from watching Fox News would lead to an improvement in suicide rates.  

Media poison

I continue to be gobsmacked that the Murdoch family exert no editorial control over Tucker Carlson and are happy to watch him destroy any hope of anything resembling national unity on any issue, and that there isn't more consternation about it amongst the US political class.    

The latest example:

Tucker Carlson Fuels Suspicion U.S. Behind Nord Stream Sabotage

What a pure propagandist for Putin.  All so that Fox News can continue to demonise Joe Biden and Democrats.  And Rupert and Lachlan (and Carlson) can make a dollar. 

I mean, go back 30 or 40 years, and if any high profile media figure were speculating nightly against US interests, you would have had politicians from both sides cautioning about how damaging (or at least "unhelpful") unfounded speculation is.  I mean, it might not have been out of the question that someone on TV could have questioned if the US might have secret operations underway, but we all know Carlson and his gullible audience doesn't work that way - suggest a conspiracy, and they will believe it.

Yet I can tell from the Australian Right wing nutoverse that Carlson is very influential here as well.    

All part of how the Right has gone nuts, as my blog heading says. 

 

A serious Samsung battery issue?

Why am I posting about this - I haven't had a Samsung phone for years.

I just thought it was interesting that a big Youtube phone/tech vlogger like this would bring this up - knowing that the company (which no doubt values the amount of publicity he gives them, and perhaps pays for some of it) would absolutely freak out over the damage to its reputation that this story could bring.

Yay for fantasy failures

As far as I can make out, the Tolkien Rings of Power series is being very widely derided and has very few viewers expressing enthusiasm for it on social media. (I noticed some left leaning some pushback on  the "it's Tolkien gone woke" rubbishing - which, to be honest, what most criticism is about - but I don't think the defenders have found much to be enthusiastic about as it has progressed.)

The Game of Thrones prequel seems to be pulling big numbers, but while I could be wrong, it still seems to be lacking the audience enthusiasm that the original series had.   Apparently, it jumps ahead suddenly by 10 years, involving recasting some key characters - a rather "brave" move. I see on Metacritic the audience rankings are unusually equally split between positive and negative.

This, for a person who does not rate fantasy as a genre at all highly, is a Good Thing.   Apart from The Witcher, I'm not sure that there is any other recent fantasy series viewed as a success.   (I don't care for it at all, either.)  I guess the audience numbers staying high might mean something for more Game of Thrones content, but didn't the audience stay with it even during the terrible last season?   I mean, audience enthusiasm has to count for something...

The lesson I hope studios take from this is "stop making fantasy series - they're expensive and risky."

Krugman on the British pound

I can gift you the whole article.  I will extract just this bit, though:

So why the sudden run on the pound? One answer I liked came from the City of London economist Dario Perkins, who declared that the problem with the budget wasn’t that it was inflationary but that it was “moronic,” and that an economy run by morons has to pay a risk premium.

But while I like the idea of a “moron” premium, there may also be a more concrete concern. I’ve been in correspondence with other City of London economists, and they have expressed doubts about whether the bank will actually be willing to tighten enough to offset the inflationary impact of Trussonomics.

Cuba and that social change

I meant to post about this the other day:

Cubans have approved gay marriage and adoption in a referendum backed by the government that also boosted rights for women, the national election commission has said. 

More than 3.9 million voters voted to ratify the code (66.9 per cent), while 1.95 million opposed ratification (33 per cent), Alina Balseiro Gutierrez, president of the commission, said on state-run television on Monday.

I guess it shouldn't be a surprise - given that nearly all of Latin America has moved pretty rapidly towards recognition of gay relationships, and gay marriage:

Over the past decade, Latin America has stood out for its recognition of LGBTQ+ rights. Outside of the Caribbean, the majority of countries in the region have decriminalized same-sex sexual acts between consenting adults. In Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Mexico, LGBTQ+ individuals are constitutionally protected from discrimination based upon sexual orientation. Elsewhere, many of the region’s constitutions now include broad non-discrimination clauses that offer some protection to LGBTQ+ citizens. Since 2010, eight countries have approved laws prohibiting discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

Latin America has also made impressive progress on marriage equality. In 2010, Argentina became the first country in the region to approve same-sex marriage; 20,000 same-sex Argentine couples have since married. In 2013, neighboring Brazil and Uruguay followed suit, and later Colombia (2016), Ecuador (2019) and Costa Rica (2020). In 2019, the Mexican Supreme Court declared bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. In Chile, President Sebastián Piñera vowed earlier this month to advance a marriage equality bill stalled in congress since 2017.

But I still don't quite understand what it is about Latin America culture that has apparently made it so amenable to the change, especially given that there is a range of (sometimes odd) politics in the region.   

If Noah doesn't like Singapore, I'll be very disappointed

This on Twitter:

 prompted many responses, including this one, which I can endorse (although I haven't been a film at the Projector):

I would still go for staying at Tanjong Pagar over Katong, just for ease of wandering down to Chinatown.  And add not only going to the Pinnacle (although finding the ticket office to get to the roof was not so easy, a few years ago), but up to the roof top garden at CapitaSpring, as per my previous post.

That specifically American thing

It would seem that Noah Smith shares the peculiar American aversion to hanging out washing to dry:

 

 

I would love to know how much America could save in power generation if people actually only used the dryer as a last resort.   (Which is, I think, still how most Australians - at least if they live in a house or townhouse - view clothesdryers.)   

I have posted about this before...

The question on many people's minds

 She would likely have a history of dogwhistle anti-Semitism, though, if she is one.  I haven't yet seen anyone point that out, but I haven't gone looking hard either.

Interesting, though, that I have noticed that mad-as-a-cut snake Cassie, the Jewish woman who accuses anyone who makes even the mildest criticism of Israel wrt to its treatment of Palestinians of being virulent anti-Semites, has not appeared on Currency Lad's blog posts to join in the conservative swoon over her election.   Just when I do want to know her opinion on something, she doesn't give it!

Update:   seems we have found the one Australian conservative-ish commentator has his concerns:

Update 2:   The Guardian ran an article about her and fascism some weeks ago:

But let’s be clear. Meloni is not a fascist. She will not command armies of black-shirted armed groups and she will not look to overturn liberal democracy. Beyond those basics, the signs are extremely worrying – for Italy, Europe and democracy. Meloni and Salvini are populists in the Viktor Orbán, Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen mould. They have built their success on promises of huge and regressive tax cuts, nationalist anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric (with elements of Great Replacement theories) and anti-EU and anti-euro narratives. Much of this has been played out on social media, where Meloni and Salvini are expert players, unlike Berlusconi, who has never moved beyond television as his favourite medium.

While Meloni officially, and angrily, denies any connection with fascism, the base of her party contains many activists and others often quaintly referred to as “nostalgic” for Mussolini’s regime. Examples of these links (slogans, statues, salutes) are common and often dismissed as “folklore” – not serious, or mere window dressing. Councillors for Meloni’s party have often been seen giving “Roman salutes”, praising Mussolini and indulging in open racism. The carefully produced moderate image Meloni has cultivated for years does not always seem to have been communicated to the base of the movement.

Moreover, Italy is a country where the memory wars have been raging for decades, often around moments linked to the Second World War and the upheavals of the 1970s. It is clear that the rehabilitation of that past, the idea that “Mussolini did a lot of good things”, will gain further credence with Meloni as prime minister. Salvini, however, is perhaps the more dangerous personality. His tenure as interior minister was marked by a chaotic migrant “policy” that involved illegally blocking refugee boats from docking in Italian ports. He is likely to have a major ministerial role in any new government.

Salvini and Meloni have both been rapidly backtracking on their past links with, and support for, Vladimir Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. Despite this, Italy’s foreign policy promises to be much softer on Moscow after the election. Berlusconi has continued, in the meantime, to be a mouthpiece for his old friend and ally throughout the Ukrainian crisis. It is easy to dismiss the former prime minister as a joke figure, but his influence remains powerful, not least within his huge media empire.

She's a loose cannon (to put it generously)

So, the Lidia Thorpe who was aggressively against commemorating the Queen's death:

At the intersection of Flinders and Swanston streets, Greens senator Lidia Thorpe, her hands covered in fake blood to highlight the impact of colonisation, addressed a seated crowd of about 500 people.

“You want to mourn the coloniser who brought the pain and the genocide and the murders here to our people. Shame,” Thorpe said. “The Crown’s boot is on our neck and we’re sick of it. And we are here to fight for our rights as the first people of these lands.”

was, only last year,  also so abusive to other aboriginal activists she doesn't agree with (on what, we don't know) that her Chief of Staff resigned:

Greens senator Lidia Thorpe’s former chief-of-staff says he was scared and appalled by her outburst in a meeting with two Indigenous community leaders at Parliament House last year, calling her behaviour among the most unprofessional conduct he has ever witnessed.

The claims by Thorpe’s ex-top adviser reinforce the account of the meeting by Aboriginal elder Aunty Geraldine Atkinson, aged in her 70s, who has previously alleged the tirade of abuse levelled at her by the senator distressed her so much she sought medical attention from the parliamentary nurse.

It's the fact that the party absorbs such immature, aggressive nutters that puts me off ever being able to support them, regardless of whether their policies have their heart in the right place, or not.

A comparison that might surprise

Because I'm kind, I will gift to my ever diminishing number of readers this opinion piece in the Washington Post that argues that, even with a new, pretty far Right leader in Italy, the country is probably going to be in better economic shape than England, with it's "let's try trickle down tax cuts - again!" nutty new leader:

Britain has replaced Italy as Europe’s problem economy 

 

Sabine in The Guardian now!

Sabine Hossenfelder continues on her quest to publicly annoy a huge slab of theoretical physicists in a piece in The Guardian today:

It has become common among physicists to invent new particles for which there is no evidence, publish papers about them, write more papers about these particles’ properties, and demand the hypothesis be experimentally tested. Many of these tests have actually been done, and more are being commissioned as we speak. It is wasting time and money.

Since the 1980s, physicists have invented an entire particle zoo, whose inhabitants carry names like preons, sfermions, dyons, magnetic monopoles, simps, wimps, wimpzillas, axions, flaxions, erebons, accelerons, cornucopions , giant magnons, maximons, macros, wisps, fips, branons, skyrmions, chameleons, cuscutons, planckons and sterile neutrinos, to mention just a few. We even had a (luckily short-lived) fad of “unparticles”.

All experiments looking for those particles have come back empty-handed, in particular those that have looked for particles that make up dark matter, a type of matter that supposedly fills the universe and makes itself noticeable by its gravitational pull. However, we do not know that dark matter is indeed made of particles; and even if it is, to explain astrophysical observations one does not need to know details of the particles’ behaviour. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) hasn’t seen any of those particles either, even though, before its launch, many theoretical physicists were confident it would see at least a few.

Talk to particle physicists in private, and many of them will admit they do not actually believe those particles exist. They justify their work by claiming that it is good practice, or that every once in a while one of them accidentally comes up with an idea that is useful for something else. An army of typewriting monkeys may also sometimes produce a useful sentence. But is this a good strategy?

Obviously, she thinks it isn't.  I like this (semi- serious?) explanation, too:

I believe the biggest contributor to this trend is a misunderstanding of Karl Popper’s philosophy of science, which, to make a long story short, demands that a good scientific idea has to be falsifiable. Particle physicists seem to have misconstrued this to mean that any falsifiable idea is also good science. 

 

Famous astronomer death noted

Oh, I missed that Frank Drake, of SETI and Drake equation fame, has died:

Often called the father of SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — Frank Drake made the first attempt to detect radio transmissions from life beyond Earth in 1960. He spent decades advancing SETI’s technology and philosophy. Drake was collaborative and helped others to pursue a high-risk, fringe topic whose fruits he might not live to see. He helped to legitimize SETI and pushed humans to address the ultimate question: are we alone?

In 1961, Drake, who has died aged 92, led the first scientific workshop on the search for alien civilizations. To prompt discussion, he wrote on a blackboard several factors — such as the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planets and the chance that those planets harboured life. Multiplied together, these yield an estimated number of communicative, technological civilizations. Six decades later, this calculation — the Drake Equation — remains a scaffold for discussions in the field.

 

Countries with cursed politics

I had to stop following Adam Creighton on Twitter because he is just too intensely annoying.  Of course, he may also just be an attention seeking troll much of the time - something we all like to see in allegedly serious economic/political commentators for allegedly important papers [sarc] - or is it that we can fairly imagine Adam if he had lived in the 1930's would have been telling us that Hitler and Mussolini should be given a fair chance, even though they're a little Right of centre?:

Mind you, as explained in this article in The Conversation, strongly Right wing politics in Italy have not exactly ever disappeared, and this woman has the problem of trying to work in a coalition of fellow Right wingers which may not be sustainable.  I didn't even realise this until now:

Enter Berlusconi. He was pushed to resign in 2011 during the sovereign debt crisis in favour of technocrat Mario Monti and was convicted on a number of charges related to prostitution and tax fraud.

He completed community service and was banned from Parliament, but this ban was lifted by a judge in 2018. 

He may be poised to be the kingmaker of the coalition. Running as a more responsible, pro-EU statesman and centrist than his partners, he could have a large say in the direction of governance and policy if the election results are tight, and could threaten to remove his support at a moment’s notice.

Given that there has been relatively recent interest in the USA politics as to the moderating political effects of voting systems other than First Past the Post, I wondered if this had something to do with Italy's terrible politics.  I'm not the only one:

But, the situation is very complicated there.  As AP notes:

FEWER LAWMAKERS

Many lawmakers won’t be reelected — regardless of their legislative record — simply due to math. Since the last election, a reform has been passed aimed at streamlining Parliament and make its operation less costly to taxpayers. In the upper chamber, the number of senators drops from 315 to 200, while the lower Chamber of Deputies will number 400 instead of 630.

PINBALL POLITICS

Just about everyone agrees Italy’s electoral law is complicated, including lawmakers who created it. Of the total seats, 36% are determined by a first-past-the post system — whoever gets the most votes for a particular district wins. The remaining 64% of the seats get divvied up proportionally, based on candidate lists determined by parties and their alliances.

Lawmakers have likened the proportional part of the electoral system to a game of pinball, particularly in the Chamber of Deputies. Under the “pinball effect,” a candidate who, say, came in first in a specific district could see another candidate who finished second elsewhere suddenly shifted to her or his district, knocking the first-place candidate out of a seat.

Confused? So are many voters. Except for in the first-past-the-post contests, many Italians are essentially voting for alliances and parties, not candidates, and don’t have a direct say in determining their specific representative in the legislature.

What an awful system!  

The other countries that I keep thinking about their cursed politics are the United Kingdom and Malaysia.   I mean, in the UK, FFP seems largely to blame, but how unlucky was the entire country to have such a strange and dubious character as Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Labour while Brexit was being debated.   (He's now an ineffective "having it both ways" weirdo on Ukraine too, I see.)  

As for Malaysia - one day I will get around to trying to understand why its politics is so cursed, too, but not today...