I enjoyed this recent video from Religion for Breakfast that attempts to explain Daoism:
For one thing: I didn't realise (or had forgotten) it had its own trinity of Gods. There is a motherly God figure too, if I recall correctly.
Religions tend to have a hard time keeping to unique ideas, it seems...
I've been puzzling about Buddhism again recently, and this article refers to the key thing that I think is very messy about it as a religion/philosophy:
Understanding Morality and No-Self in the context of Western and Buddhist Themes
I will try to follow a couple of the links within it, to see if they help make it make any more sense....
Sometimes I fear my choice in what I post might be making it seem like I'm a little bit too sympathetic to China. I'm more puzzled by why it's gone the way it has in the last 4 or 5 years. Noah Smith has a theory:
There's an American guy who has lived in China for 12 years, and he has a video out in which he reflects - carefully! - on what has improved and what has gotten worse about the country since he has been there. It seemed reasonably balanced to me, even if he does complain about Western media bias giving false impression:
Mind you, maybe Western media coverage would be better if journalists weren't treated like they are always out to harm the country and have to be tracked and monitored like they are all spies and enemies of the State.So, that Indian Netflix movie RRR has attracted a lot of positive reviews in the USA and elsewhere, and I thought I would give it a go, given my general fondness for good foreign content.
I knew it was not going to be realistic; I knew it was going to be over-the-top and rather silly in a Bollywood way at times. And I thought for the first 30 minutes or so that maybe I would enjoy it.
But it wore me down and I gave up at the half way mark. I wasn't expecting the intense cartoonishness of so much of it; the extremities of anti-colonialism in the English characters' acting and dialogue that made the cringe aspects of the Titanic screenplay sound like Shakespeare; or the unexplained motivations of the lead character, who I presume redeems himself by the end, but in the giant action sequence in the middle (the one where scores of CGI animals are running rampant in the colonial mansion) is prepared to beat his former friend to a pulp in order to gain a promotion. Another thing that continually bothered me was how the locations felt so inauthentic - it looked far too much like it was mostly filmed in a giant studio set, and now that I check, a lot of it was actually filmed in bits of Europe.
So no, it didn't get my seal of approval, and I am a bit puzzled as to why so many people do like it. If you are into film for OTT action, I think any good kung fu film has more "authentic" feeling.
Oh, Science has a good balanced article on the difficult question of whether young people should continue getting COVID boosters, over the issue of possible heart damage from mRNA vaccines. The basic problem is the great difficulty in getting accurate risk/benefit analysis for a problem that may or may not cause symptoms in both the vaccinated and people who get COVID.
Now, I know I criticised that Florida Surgeon General for this last week - and a case could be made from this article that maybe his conclusion was correct - or at least one that has a lot more support than I knew. But nonetheless, he obviously approached the problem from a highly politicised, grandstanding, point of view, and with evidence that was not properly detailed. This was damaging the interests of public health in the long run.
So there is a fair amount of talk about Joe Biden taking an aggressive approach to stopping China getting ahead with its technology, particularly chip manufacturing:
U.S. officials pushed to choke off China’s access to critical semiconductor technology after internal debates and tough negotiations with allies.Noah Smith also has a long post about it, and even the (far too Right wing) guy who has taken over from Allahpundit at Hot Air finds he has to reluctantly praise Biden for this.
I guess my feeling is not that this is a mistake - just that it's a great pity that at a time you really want the globe to be working together towards significant goals, it's instead being set up now for time-and-resource-wasting duplication of technological effort for a decade or two until there is some new realignment of mutual Western and Chinese interests.
I noticed when shopping for a tablet in Singapore recently that Huawei still seemingly has (or is trying to maintain) a significant market there, with tablets, phones and (I think) small laptop-ish things (like Microsoft Surface.) They all had brilliant screens, I know that much. But no Google apps - the special Huawei ecosystem instead. (Interestingly, recent surprise survey results indicated that Singapore has weirdly - for a very capitalist country - positive feelings towards China and Xi. I wonder if that makes them particularly inclined to give Huawei products a go, more so than everywhere else. I do have lingering doubts, just based on a hunch, really, that the Huawei 5G ban was not well justified.)
As far as I can tell, China has done well with high speed trains; they are (with very little attention from the West) building a smallish but significant space station. (According to this article, it's about 20% as massive as the ISS, and is expected to be used for at least a decade.) They are perhaps catching up somewhat in aviation, with their first significant home grown passenger jet just getting off the ground now.
So overall, they do some pretty remarkable stuff with some pretty sophisticated technology, and it seems such a pity that instead of a global market for all technology, we seem destined to a prolonged period of two global hubs of competing technology, with little cross over.
I guess it means industrial espionage is going to be bigger than ever before, too. At least that provides some drama and good movie plots, though. (Trying to find the upside here. Well, apart from the obvious one that it should presumably make their weaponry less effective? But I want the other good stuff they can do, too.)
There's an article at Slate talking about the new biography, somewhat controversial for its "warts and all" approach, of the late Anthony Bourdain. This section sounds to me like an accurate take on his appeal:
It reads as if it were written in 1999, the year that Bourdain’s life changed as a result of the publication of “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” the sensational New Yorker article that became the basis for his bestselling book, 2000’s Kitchen Confidential.
Leerhsen likes to hover over this turning point, a time when Bourdain, 43, was living with his first wife, Nancy, in a shabby Manhattan apartment where they once left a Christmas tree lying on its side for nine months. Bourdain worked as a middling chef at a middling restaurant, and Nancy spent most of her time watching Court TV. The pair were recognizable New York types, stunned remnants of the bohemian heyday of the East Village, former junkies clinging to the fringes of a city that was rapidly shedding its grit. The haut-bourgeois exaltation of chefs and restaurants was both a symptom of this transformation and the condition that made Bourdain’s midlife success possible. He was a funny, earthy iconoclast, dishing the dirt on what went on behind the scenes at the eateries that were increasingly central to New York’s culture. Most gifted chefs are meticulous and imperious, not qualities that make for charismatic personalities. Bourdain, however, was more like a musician, specifically the kind of downtown rock ’n’ roller who once played CBGB. He wanted to become “the culinary equivalent of the Ramones.”
Bourdain’s old-timey hipness is a primary source of fascination for Leerhsen, who compares him to Frank Sinatra in an extended passage in the book’s prelude: Each is “the epitome of cool, a sad-smiling Jersey boy who combined supremely high standards with the under-appreciated art of not giving a shit in ways that seemed to excite both sexes. You wanted either to be him or to do him, especially if you’d heard the gossip about his gargantuan member.” (OK, that last line is pretty lurid, but the subject never comes up again!) Leerhsen’s Bourdain was a swashbuckling “renegade” drawn to the piratical culture of restaurant kitchens and sworn to a code of authenticity that, despite his age, seems quintessentially Gen X. His drinking and smoking and his past history of drug use were badges of this street cred. “When traveling for his show,” Leerhsen writes, Bourdain “never dealt with official tourist agencies because he disdained the authorized version of things; he balked at the word ‘brand.’ ” As a kid, Bourdain rebelled against what he once described as “the smothering chokehold of love and normalcy in my house,” which, along with the bland comforts of his suburban upbringing, irked him simply because they were bland and suburban and therefore phony.
I'm joking, of course: I wouldn't want the staff, nearly all of whom would be nicer people from the Philippines, to suffer.
Anyway, this is a despatch from long time Catallaxy character:
Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare says:
There are a lot of Republicans on this cruise, not surprising due to the demographic of older and spending it, and when we start talking to people the anger at what is happening in the US is palpable.
One woman today said to me she didn’t like Donald Trump ‘as a person’ but she sure as hell developed a liking now for ‘his polices and the way he got things done’. She and her husband both thought the 2020 election was rigged. However that’s just one demographic, and people express plenty of concern for the hand-out mentality of many younger Americans now. There’s a terrible sadness in these older generations about it and the decline of their country.
Rather as many of us in Australia also feel, we told them.
Discussion started with this woman and her husband when Hairy mentioned we’d had two years in Australia with no immigrants. We can give you a few, the woman dourly commented.
I used to toy with the idea of going on cruise for the experience, and I have watched a lot of Youtube videos from people who now make a living by reviewing their cruises. But thinking about the politics of most of the people on board, at least on a US passenger heavy cruise, is kind of off putting.
I have commented to friends before: if there was a cruise line which specialised in catering to men (OK, OK - people - but let's be honest, it's going to be many more nerdy men than women who would like this) with a technical interest in how the massive operations are run, I would be all in on that. Like, being able to wander up to the bridge anytime you want, and get explanations of their navigation systems, or guided tours of the engine room, kitchens, and all other "hidden" workspaces - that would be interesting.
But just stuffing yourself full of food and drink all the time with the occasional brief shore excursion - not sure anymore how much fun I would get out of it.
Megan McArdle, who I count as a far from reliable commentator, writes in the Washington Post (I'll gift the link) about why she thinks attacks on Trump tend to (somewhat counter-intuitively) only boost his support in his base.
I mean, one might say something like "that's how cults work", and "hey, Megan, perhaps you should consider the effect of nightly brainwashing sessions by Fox News", but she writes this:
It’s such a fascinating moment, and not just because it so neatly encapsulates the evolution of Republican politics in the Trump era. It also suggests a reason for why that politics is so effective — and why mainstream Washington’s frantic attempts to anathematize the Trumpian style might paradoxically have increased its appeal.
I was part of those mainstream efforts; I spent years arguing that Trump’s impulsivity and his savage attacks on everyone from Gold Star parents to those with physical disabilities ought to have disqualified him from high office. Like most of my colleagues in the media, I was astonished to find that this only made his voters love him more. Many observers concluded that this must be because Trump’s voters were simply awful bigots who loved meanness for its own sake. (“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer wrote in 2018 for the Atlantic.)
Presumably, they’re right in some cases; there are bad apples in any large political movement. But as I’ve watched Trumpy candidates and spoken to Trumpy voters, I’ve begun to wonder whether there isn’t another point that we’ve been missing.
Trump voters are famously convinced that establishment Republicans sold them out — and there is a grain of truth to their belief. As political consultant David Shor noted in March, the median voter is center-left on entitlements but right-wing on immigration, yet for years an “ideological cartel” of educated journalists and political professionals kept that combination off the table for either party.
Trump got elected by promising to break up the cartel. But many politicians make such promises — almost all of them, in fact. Then they get to Washington and turn into boringly normal politicians.
There are structural reasons for that — Washington is too big and complicated for any one person to reform, so delivering for your voters inevitably means accommodating yourself to dysfunctional bureaucracy and uninspiring compromise. But to the voters, it looked as though their fiery outsiders had been seduced into betraying their promises by the infamous lure of the Georgetown cocktail-party circuit.
Though Trump voters had grown cynical about such promises, they trusted Trump to follow through. In part that’s because he was a billionaire, which meant, they thought, that he didn’t need to sell out for a plush lobbying job. But looking back, it seems that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric was also serving as a kind of insurance policy for those voters: Having made himself a pariah with the establishment, Trump couldn’t sell out even if he had wanted to.
Trump’s norm violations functioned as what game theorists call a “credible commitment,” enabling voters to trust him even if he wasn’t particularly trustworthy. And ironically, the establishment boosted that signal by proving that we considered him utterly anathema, absolutely beyond the pale. We thought we were helping to minimize the threats Trump posed to the system, but the very vehemence of our rejection might actually have increased his power.
The problem with this type of analysis is that it takes us further down the "normalisation of anti-democractic fascism" path. And it avoids what is really the heart of the problem - the cowardice and lust for power of pathetic Republican leadership who have let Trump walk all over them, and will not tell the truth to the voters who they know believe any old BS that comes out of Trump's mouth.
It's like Meagan is insisting "you just can't tell the truth to these people. You just have to live with that".
It's surprising to see the racial voting divide set out so clearly, from a piece in Wapo:
A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.
Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers. It is very likely that White Americans will be more than 80 percent of those who back Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.
The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.
He's 82:
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I don't think this got the amount of ridicule it deserved:
I mean, of course stories about AI development are interesting, but this was a silly stunt.
In a groundbreaking hearing, a robot “gave evidence” to a House of Lords committee on Tuesday – where it read typos from its pre-written script, struggled to hear questions, and needed to be rebooted halfway through the session.
“Ai-Da”, described by its creator, Aiden Meller, as “the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist”, appeared in front of the Lords communications and digital committee as part of its inquiry into the future of the creative industries in the UK.
The chair of the committee, Tina Stowell, emphasised at the outset that it was “a serious inquiry”, before explaining to Meller that “the robot is providing evidence but it is not a witness in its own right, and it does not occupy the same status as a human. You as its creator are ultimately responsible for its statements”.
This was in Science last month:
Unless they’re belching up stars or rippling spacetime in a partnered dance, light-trapping black holes are notoriously difficult to spot. But a new proposed discovery of a dormant black hole may help unveil a population lurking in the darkness, New Scientist reports. Because the object emits no light, astronomers detected it by studying the warped orbit and spectrum of a nearby Sun-like star using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope and multiple ground-based observatories. The black hole candidate (artist’s impression of a different black hole, above), dubbed Gaia BH1, is 10 times the mass of the Sun and a mere 1500 light-years away—three times closer to Earth than the next known neighbor, researchers report on the arXiv preprint server last week. The long orbital period and proximity make this black hole a prime target to study the physics of these invisible enigmas, which could help scientists identify many more examples in the two remaining data releases from Gaia.Update: Oh, just a minute. In 2020 I posted about a black hole that might only be 1000 light years away.
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