What a stretch

Hope for a more progressive future from the South East Asian Muslim countries fades further, with this surprising example:

An Indonesian court has sentenced a woman to two years in jail for posting a viral TikTok video where she said an Islamic phrase before eating pork.

Lina Lutfiawati, 33, was found guilty of "inciting hatred" against religious individuals and groups.

She also faces a $16,245 (£13,155) fine. Her jail term may be extended by three months if she does not pay up.

It is the latest in a series of cases involving controversial blasphemy laws in Muslim-majority Indonesia.

Lina Lutfiawati, who adopted the Indian name Lina Mukherjee due to her love of Bollywood movies, identifies as Muslim. The consumption of pork is strictly forbidden in Islam.

The lifestyle influencer, who has more than two million TikTok followers, also runs a business in India.

In March, she posted a video where she uttered "Bismillah" - an Arabic phrase that means "in the name of God" - before eating crispy pork skin.

At the time, she was travelling in Bali, a tourist hotspot in Indonesia that, unlike the rest of the country, has a majority Hindu population. Ms Lutfiawati said she tried pork out of curiosity.

The video got millions of views and was widely criticised, prompting another Indonesian to report her to the police for "knowingly eating pork skin as a Muslim".

Police charged Ms Lutfiawati in May for disseminating hateful information, saying it was an act of hostility over ethnicity, religion, and race.

How is it an "act of hostility", exactly? 

Similarly, this:

Indonesian police last year arrested six people after a bar promoted free alcohol - prohibited in Islam - for customers named Mohammed. 

 

A story somewhat short on solutions

Here, I'll gift link to an article at the New York Times looking at the economic problems of Ghana in particular, but it makes it clear that many African countries are in a similar boat. 

It's a bit concerning, though, that the article is pretty light on suggestions for change...

The sooner Musk leaves for Mars, the better

Have a read of this appalling story of Musk joining in on some completely unwarranted outrage farming on an old story, and how it affects the journalists involved.

What Musk doesn't seem to realise is that he isn't just some idiot in his basement tweeting away to no great effect; he's an idiot with an incredibly high profile and a nutty, semi-cultish following.   What's even more annoying, he doesn't make a living out of cult leadership and/or outrage farming, like Russell Brand or Musk's not-so-merry band of Tweeters such as Catturd or Cheong.   No, Musk does it just for free.

And no, I don't give any credit for the fact that he has allowed "Readers added context" following his tweet to explain (in mild terms) that this is a beat up.  It clearly didn't stop the harassment of the journalist and paper involved.

The practical problem for pro-trans activism

I think I only follow one anti-trans movement person on x/Twitter - Graham Linehan - and I have criticised him before for becoming obsessive on the topic.   It's also well known that Musk has anti-trans sentiment, given that he has fallen out with a daughter over it, so it may be that the algorithm actively promotes trans sceptic content.  So, I know that there is a reason I might be getting trans sceptic tweets pushed my way.

But still - I find it hard to believe that liberal, pro trans rights type people can use social media and not agree that there is some extremism and nuttiness on display in the community they never criticise.  

Without even going into the most extreme examples, such as the "transwomen" whose allegedly erotic selfies make it clear that they are that way because of autogynephilic transsexualism (something pro-trans hate, because conservatives can easily argue that those men are just acting on a fetish, and most people don't consider fetishes as warranting respect) - there is a lot of pretty intense level narcissism on display.  

I wonder sometimes if I am being unfair about this - it has become normalised that young people in particular will continuously post selfies in a way that I wouldn't say necessarily indicates narcissism - but I still find it hard not to conclude that anyone over 30 who feels the need to post selfies all the time has some serious insecurities.

And what about this?   He's running for the Greens in Scotland, apparently:

I can't believe that people would not think there is a deep level of attention seeking nuttiness on display here...

     

History is history, but you can dwell on it a little too much...

The ABC has a story up about the descendents of the Pinjarra massacre that happened in Western Australia in 1834:

In 1834, a band of soldiers, police and colonists led by Governor James Stirling, the leader of the Swan River Colony, attacked a group of Bindjareb Noongar people on the banks of the Murray River, killing many of them.

Estimates of the death toll vary, with official accounts showing the deaths of at least 15 Aboriginal people and one police officer.

However, Ms Martin, from the Bilya or "river tribe" of Bindjareb people, said her community had the number of Indigenous victims at more than double the official figure.

She said that was the type of truth-telling she wanted the Voice to facilitate.

Ms Martin said it was vital to put local leaders at the front of the process.

There is no context given, but there is a very lengthy Wikipedia entry that does (although the lack of citations for some claims is concerning).  Here's just a bit:

There had been numerous Aboriginal attacks on settlers in the preceding years. Notably, in February 1832, Private George Budge was ambushed by Bindjareb Nyungars, and speared to death near Peel’s garden. The following July, Sergeant Wood of the 63rd Regiment was speared and nearly killed.^[1] This was followed in July 1834 by the ambush and murder of Hugh Nesbitt, a servant of Thomas Peel and the wounding of Edward Barron.^[5] Following the Binjareb looting, by means of armed robbery, of the flour mill that provided rations to settlers and Noongars in the district, as well as the murder and mutilation of Nesbitt,^[5] Captain Frederick Irwin, the lieutenant governor in Stirling's absence, is said to have inflamed the situation by adopting a soldier's attitude to crush a warlike group of Aboriginals and reduce them to a state of subjection.^{[citation needed]}

I mean, there are many examples of such incidents around Australia, with Aboriginals disproportionately punished for their pushback against moves on their tribal lands.

But I have to wonder - in another decade, it'll be 200 years since this particular incident - if modern peoples can get over atrocities committed on a massive scale in the period 1939 to 1975 (<cough>, Germany, Japan, Americans in Vietnam), doesn't the call for "truth telling" for incidents 200 hundred years ago seem to be pushing that particular victim narrative a bit, um, unnecessarily hard?

It's a bit late to be prosecuting politicians and troopers from the time, too.

Anyway, interestingly, the report does give another example of indigenous folk who aren't convinced the Voice is a good idea, for practical reasons:

Opinions on the proposed Voice among other descendants of Pinjarra survivors are mixed.

Clarry Walley, who is a respected elder and figure in the Pinjarra community, said he was steadfast in his opposition to the Voice.

He said he was sceptical of the idea changes brought by the Voice would trickle down to smaller communities such as his own.

"I'll vote no," he said.

"It might make a difference for other people, but to some people, it's not going to make a difference. There's still going to be hardship and people are still going to be struggling, and it's not going to change that.

John Michael serves on the cultural advice committee for the Gnaala Karla Booja Aboriginal Corporation, which represents traditional custodians from a vast swathe of the state's south.

He said he was undecided about how he would vote in the Voice referendum.

He said he wanted more Aboriginal advice heard in the corridors of power, but like Mr Walley, wanted firm detail on what his community would get out of the Voice before he decided.

So, once again, a little to my surprise, the ABC provides the voices of local aboriginal elders who don't see the value in the exercise, which gives me "cover" to vote "no".   (Although, given the pretty gormless Warren Mundine's contradictory arguments, I would rather not vote at all.)

Update:  in terms of the total numbers of aborigines killed over time in reprisal killings, there is this estimate -

The research project, currently in its eighth year and led by University of Newcastle historian Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan, now estimates more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives were lost in more than 400 massacres, up from a previous estimate of 8,400 in 302 massacres. By contrast it is estimated that 168 non-Aboriginal people were killed in 13 frontier massacres.

The team developed a template to identify massacres and a process to corroborate disparate sources. They include settler diaries, newspaper reports, Aboriginal evidence, and archives from State and Federal repositories.

The project’s online map and database records the massacre site locations, details of the individual massacres and the sources corroborating evidence of the massacres.

Professor Ryan said new evidence, released today in Stage 4 of the project in partnership with The Guardian Australia, showed massacres intensified, particularly after 1860, a point in time when South Australia acquired the Northern Territory from NSW, Western Australia’s Kimberley region opened up and Queensland became a separate colony.

“More massacres happened in the period 1860 to 1930 than in the period 1788 to 1860,” Professor Ryan said.

“We find that the massacres are becoming better organised and there seems to be a more ruthless approach on the part of the perpetrators to the massacring of Aboriginal people.”

I don't know how good her work is, but the numbers are substantial, even if rubbery.   (

I will concede that any such killing that took place within the early 20th century is surprisingly recent - and carries with it the fact that they happened after Australia came into being.

Still, when it comes to terrible treatment of local people at the hands of colonists, I suspect the British in India would be hard to beat.  Even with the new nationalism in India, do the people really spend much time talking about apologies and reparations?

More "being super rich doesn't guarantee good judgement"

 

Quantum eraser confusion clarified - quantum retrocausality in trouble?

I had been wondering about this.

Towards the end of 2021, Sabine Hossenfelder had a video up in which she said that the claim that the (relatively famous) quantum eraser experiment showed retrocausality was mistaken.   Here's my post about that video.

I was a bit confused, though, as she has also sometimes referred favourably to the physics videos put up by Arvin Ash, and I knew he had long had one up following the line that the experiment did indeed show retrocausality.   So I wasn't sure which Youtube science content creator was right.  (Although, now that I check, I see that Arvin's background is more in engineering than physics.)

The question seems to have been resolved, though, by Arvin putting up a video in the last couple of days in which he agrees with Sabine, and concedes he was mistaken in his first video.   (Mind you, it's pretty understandable, given the claim in the first paper). 

Here's the video:

 

I tend to agree with many of the comments following:  it is a clearer explanation than that Sabine had given.    

Given that I have a soft spot for retrocausality as a concept, I'm a little disappointed.  But I don't think the idea is completely dead - probably just resting!

Colonisation: why is it so hard for the obvious to be stated?

So Jacinta Price is being criticised for this part of her speech yesterday (and I'm going by the way The Guardian has extracted it):

The senator’s speech criticised Indigenous bodies which she claimed sought to “demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement”.

Guardian Australia asked Nampijinpa Price to clarify whether she thought any Indigenous people were suffering negative impacts of colonisation, Price responded: “No.”

“A positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food,” she said.

“No, there is no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation.”

Well, I think that last line is clearly ridiculous - in fact, you would hard pressed to find any indigenous group from around the world who you could say is suffering no negative impacts of colonisation.  It's pretty remarkable when you look at their situation in very diverse countries how their communities typically share problems of alcohol and drug abuse, high suicide rates, and economic marginalisation.

On the other side, though, the first sentence quoted above is a pretty accurate critique of how the pro-indigenous advocacy has become intensely about never acknowledging any good to come out of joining modernity - medicine, reliable food sources, travel, more opportunity for different experiences, etc etc.

I may have written about this here before, but I still think it is very telling how an exchange in an episode of Northern Exposure way back in the 90's caught my attention for how, even then, it reflected something that I felt had already become politically incorrect to say in Australia.   The lead character (the New York Jew Dr Joel) asked his laconic, indigenous helper Marilyn what she thought of her ancestors' land being colonised.  And her answer was along the lines "It comes with some good things, and some bad." I'm sure medicine got mentioned in the "good" - but I can't remember what else.  And I think in the bad was the loss of some traditions, although again, I can't remember the detail.

But the thing was that the show, which obviously had a "liberal" bias in its stories and general attitude, did not attract controversy in American for having an indigenous character state the obvious - there are advantages to having entry into the modern world as a side effect of colonisation.   Which is not to deny that there have been better and worse ways in which colonisation has happened in history.   

As I complained in my last post about the Voice, "the vibe" in indigenous advocacy seems to have moved to a completely negative and grievance based approach over the last 30 years, and it's not hard to imagine that this is having a negative effect on the attitude of the young indigenous towards respect of laws and property.   And the higher rate of indigenous youth crime is, I  have no doubt at all, a reason why in many regional parts of Australia, the "Yes" vote would be seen as rewarding the "wrong" attitude.

To go back to the title of the post:   why is it so hard for the both the Yes side, and the No side, to move from the unrealistic extremes on a key question of the effect of colonisation.

The correct answer - it has had a mixed effect of positive and negatives - is obviously true, and it would give confidence that people can reach a common ground if both sides can stop pretending that it's not.

Update:   Well, I think I have found the conversation on a Northern Exposure fan site.  It's not exactly the same as my 30 year old memory, but the gist is close enough, I think!:

Marilyn: Death, like the white man, wasn't happy in his own land. He didn't think his kingdom was big enough. He wanted more. One night, when the good spirit was asleep, Death attacked the world. He killed a lot of people, and he took the Chief's prettiest daughter as his bride. She pretended to be a good wife, but one day she secretly fed him a pumpkin seed. The pumpkin grew and grew inside death. Finally, he exploded, and a million pumpkin seeds covered the earth.
Joel: I still don't get it.
Marilyn: A lot of people died, but a good thing came out of it, too.
Joel: What was that?
Marilyn:: It's the same with white people. They cleared the forest, they dug up the land, and they gave us the flu. But they also brought power tools and penicillin and Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

---

Revisiting, briefly, My Kitchen Rules

Back in the last decade, I used to post every now and then about the current season of My Kitchen Rules, before getting thoroughly sick of the formula and the clear decision of the producers to make it increasingly about contestant bitchiness and conflict than cooking.   And then the show got rested anyway, due to the shame felt by having given tanned nutjob Pete Evans a TV profile for a decade, presumably.

But I see that it's back, and I have to admit, I have dipped my toe into it again.   

Not much though - it was obvious from the first episode that the old, shameful formula is still there.

So I'm not going to bother with talking about it much, but I did want to note two of the "too obvious" drama tactics the show uses:

1.   This season features, once again, an apparently upper middle class couple who might dress well and live in a nice house (perhaps with a flash boat tied up to their canal jetty), but their taste in food is relatively unsophisticated and verges on bogan-ish.  (This year's couple, for example, made a jaw dropping claim - for contestants on a cooking show - that the duck they were being served was the first time they had ever eaten it.  This did make me laugh, actually, as I tried to imagine the number of other viewers around Australia gasping at their lack of culinary adventure.)

But what's worse (for me, as resident and defender of this fair city) is that these couples are from Brisbane, or further north in Queensland.   I am pretty sure, if I were an obsessive with time on my hands, that I could show that this is at least the third time that such a couple have - suspiciously - been Queenslanders.  I have little doubt that the producers are from the southern "foodie" cities, and actively look for contestant applicants from up North who seem to think they know about food, but really don't: all the better for the rest of the country to laugh at.   (Seriously, I would love to be a fly on the wall during production meetings, to hear drama tactics discussed.)

2.   I have mentioned this before, but it seems they just can't give it a rest:   the ridiculousness of the way at least half of the teams, on their first home restaurant night, cook something they've cooked a hundred times before as their speciality, only to stuff it up completely.   "Oh, I don't know what's gone wrong.  It just didn't set/freeze/cook like it usually does."

The fact that they are cooking for a larger number of people is no excuse.   If you have normally cooked for 6, and have to do it for double that number, you can still do a dry run for cooking for 12, surely??

It becomes particularly hard to believe when it's a case of the team who liked to talk up their abilities, and are too harsh on the others' efforts, only to get their comeuppance when they try to cook their No 1 dish.   My eyes can't roll back far enough for the number of times we have seen this scenario.

On a side note, re-reading my old posts on past seasons, reminded me that I used to enjoy the episode reviews of comedian/writer Ben Pobjie.  I haven't thought about him for some years:  in 2017, I noted  that he seemed to be trying to break into stand up comedy with little (or limited) success, and had also made it clear he has some serious mental health issues.  

So, I just looked on Twitter to see if he is still active there.  He is, although it seems with not much of a following.  And he's still a bit of a worry - his current post includes a bit of mocking of RU OK day, which seems a bit odd, given his past (current?) problems.      

Anyway, it's not like I don't wish him well - I thought his writing on MKR could be very amusing indeed.  Hope he finds another niche, eventually. 

 

Thanks, Elon

 Also:

 

Alien humour

Things not going completely well in Portugal?

DW news has a short story up about a bit of a backlash apparently developing over the openness of drug use in Porto, Portugal:

 

 Of course, it's only a 5 minute report, so I can't claim it's very "in depth". But it's interesting nonetheless, given the amount of international fanboying (much of it superficial and inaccurate, I've always said) that has gone on for years about their approach to drug use.

He has form, as a rich jerk

For the full context, in case you haven't seen the news or social media in the last 24 hours:

I see that he is also interested in living until at least 100, using biohacks: 

The 41-year-old Gurner, valued at $929 million in The Australian Financial Review’s 2022 Rich List – and who billionaire Harry Triguboff has described as “the future” – has $10 billion worth of apartments under way, including on several sites across Collingwood.

He has grand plans for his $150 million, high-end health, wellness and anti-ageing brand Saint Haven. Another site is planned around Melbourne’s South Yarra before the end of the year and a third in Melbourne’s CBD, before plans for others in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, north shore and Sydney CBD...

Gurner says his clubs will be social and for networking, but put health and wellness at their core. That’s when he says that he wants to live to 100. It turns out Gurner has become increasingly obsessed about staying young, especially after his dad died from cancer and he came close to financial ruin in 2016...

Gurner says he is one of the guinea pigs for the club’s $250,000 biohacking, anti-ageing packages that include an annual full-body MRI, brain scans and monthly blood testing,

“I get about 250 different tests of my bloods which will say, ‘this month you’re deficient in [vitamin] D, your testosterone is up or down’. Then the physios, dieticians, doctors on call set my regime,” he says. “I take about 50 or 60 tablets a day. It’s always very specific to my latest results.”

I'm sensing some intense Peter Thiel vibes...

 

Floods noted

If you are on (stupid) X, it is worth looking at this tweet thread, as it contains some remarkable and dramatic video clips of recent floods around the world:

 Yeah, climate change is not something you can deal with by installing more airconditioning. 

Four Corners on the Voice

While there's no doubt at all that the ABC takes a very sympathetic approach to all indigenous issues, last night's Four Corners, which involved discussions with both pro and anti Voice referendum voices, was pleasingly balanced.     

Most surprising was the time given to regional local aboriginal activists who indicated that they were either going to vote no, or were sceptical of the whole idea, out of concerns that the Canberra based Voice  was going to work against local communities getting what they wanted.  In other words, they were saying exactly what I've been muttering here - the entire concept seems to about creating a new attempt at a bureaucratic filter to advice to government, which the local community organisations will need to convince on needs and issues, rather than their current ability to directly deal with government.    

These "no" voters were not, it seemed, on the radical Left, who are against it for being insultingly inadequate.  (One such person did feature, but was not given much air time.)

If anything (and I suspect that many Lefty journalists might have been grinding their teeth about this), the program really seemed to legitimatise a "no" vote for those who don't like the conservative "no" campaign, but just have objections to whole proposal on pragmatic grounds.   Like me...