I watched a Wheezy Waiter video in which he tried a new tactic to increase the amount of reading he was doing.
It was to go to a library and pick 5 fiction books completely at random, without so much as looking at the cover.
It kind of worked, but mainly didn't, in that he did start each reading each book and gave them a fair go, but only really got into one of them enough to keep going. (I think - in retrospect, I can't recall if he said he actually got to the end of the one that he did consider engaging.) So he did spend more time reading - but if it was mostly on books he abandoned, it does seem a tad wasted effort.
Anyway, the point of this post is twofold:
* I think at least 3, maybe 4, of the 5 books were murder mysteries, and part of a series. As with Wheezy, this would have been a fail for me, as I have never been into murder mystery books. I don't know why, as I used to watch Columbo and other old "murder of the week"shows as much as the average viewer in the 70's and 80's. But I've never been interested in that sort of story in book form. Publishers obviously like publishing them, though. And presumably it's because the few people left reading books are into them too. Why, I don't really understand...
* Wheezy also disclosed that he is reading The Count of Monte Cristo on his phone at the moment, and is enjoying it. This is after I noted recently that there just seem to be lots of people in the limited social media I consume recommending it at the moment, and again, I don't know why. (OK, I mean, I presume it must be pretty good - but I don't know why so many are talking about it right now.)
In January, a nationalistic Beijing think
tank affiliated with Renmin University published a triumphant report
about Mr. Trump’s first year back in office. The report argued that his
tariffs, attacks on allies, anti-immigration policies and assaults on
the American political establishment had inadvertently strengthened
China while weakening the United States. Its title: “Thank Trump.”
The
report called Mr. Trump an “accelerator of American political decay,”
with the United States sliding toward polarization, institutional
dysfunction and even “Latin American-style instability.” His hostility
toward China, the authors argued, was a “reverse booster” that unified
the country and helped bring about its strategic self-reliance.
“At
this turning point in history,” the authors wrote, “what we hear is the
heavy and haunting toll of an empire’s evening bell.”
Such language, once confined largely to nationalist corners of the
Chinese internet, has increasingly entered mainstream political
discourse.
Evidence of this shift is measurable: The use of terms related to
“American decline” in official Chinese sources nearly doubled in 2025,
according to a study by two Brookings Institution researchers.
I don't really understand how this happened - but online content strongly gives the impression that Indians have, in the last year or two, become very much the main target of populist anti-immigration sentiment in in quite a few places - almost replacing Muslim immigration in the role, it seems.
I have even noticed that CNA, the Singaporean government news network, seems to have an online editor who has been posting "look at this weird thing that happened in India" videos to Facebook lately. One last week featured a guy standing in an Indian hospital nonchalantly looking at his phone while having a machete planted into his skull, and people just walking around him like it's nothing unusual. (Apparently, he was not brain injured by the blade stuck in bone.) And the week before it was a clip of a worker having the wall of the ditch he was working in collapse on him and pushing him under water - he did die, apparently, and I thought it unusual for CNA to publish such a video.
OK, so let's subcontract the question to Claude.ai. Although I didn't specify the US situation, that is what it has concentrated on:
Why Indians rather than Muslims now?
This is the most interesting part of your question. It's not really a replacement — anti-Muslim sentiment hasn't disappeared — but a redirection driven by specifics: Indians are highly visible in the skilled white-collar sectors (tech, medicine, finance) that the populist right fears most in an era of AI and automation. The racialized backlash against minorities is anchored in anxieties about the demographic transformation of Western nations by non-white immigrants, often manifesting in populist conspiracies like the Great Replacement Theory. But the economic anxiety angle is different: where anti-Muslim sentiment was largely about cultural and security fears, anti-Indian sentiment is more nakedly about economic competition and professional displacement — the fear that your career, not your neighbourhood, is being taken. Csohate
Much of the hostility has been directed specifically at Indian professionals in tech and trucking, with critics accusing them of "dominating" industries and sidelining American workers. That makes it distinctive as a form of populist grievance — it's targeting a group perceived as too successful rather than one perceived as dangerous or culturally alien.
The short version: Indian immigration became the new populist target because the MAGA movement needed an enemy that fit anxieties about the economy and automation (not just culture and security), Indians are the largest and most visible group in the high-skilled visa pipeline, and the US political atmosphere after 2024 normalised that particular grievance and exported it globally through social media.
Sounds plausible!
I also only learnt this morning, via the serious faced Asian American Youtube woman who had a bit of a hit recently with a "all modern literature is dominated by woke themes that don't interest me" video (I checked her channel, and surprise, she voted for Trump) that the France invading migrants in the infamous 70's French novel "Camp of the Saints" (the favourite book for those are into the Great Replacement theory) were from India. (And guess what - she gave the book a favourable review.) I had never read that much about the book, but I had thought they were all Muslim "invaders". Someone in comments said the author had originally wanted them to be from Vietnam, but he was talked out of it.
As for my view of Indian immigration and culture - I puzzle as much as the next person about how India has a culture seemingly with near intractable problems in terms of getting people to care about mountains of trash and cow poop in the streets, not to mention some having a poor sense of personal space and even an apparent sense of entitlement when travelling - BUT I also have had a lot of Indian clients and generally have found them to be quite nice and kind. I think as immigrants, they have never caused me a moment's "concern" at all.
That's why I don't really get the wave of Right wing populist anti-Indian sentiment...
Update: I tried Kimi.ai, a Chinese LLM that I don't mind, and it drew similar conclusions:
The Shift from Anti-Muslim to Anti-Indian
The replacement isn't total—anti-Muslim sentiment certainly hasn't disappeared. But the primary energy of online populist resentment has shifted because:
Muslims became a less useful scapegoat for economic issues (they're not disproportionately represented in high-wage sectors that trigger professional-class anxiety)
Indian online behavior is politically potent—as one analysis notes, Indians on the internet are "argumentative, sarcastic, fact-heavy, culturally fluent and often brutal in debate. They do not offer deference." This makes them engaging targets for culture-war conflict
The "Great Replacement" theory needed fresh villains as Muslim immigration numbers stabilized in some countries while Indian student and skilled-worker numbers surged.
It did add a useful section in its response, too:
Where This Is Happening
This isn't just an American phenomenon. It's visible across the Anglosphere:
Canada: 227% rise in hate crimes against South Asians; "March for Australia"-style sentiment growing
Australia: Explicit targeting of Indian migrants at anti-immigration rallies; Indian students reporting harassment
UK: Paan-spitting controversies and "throw them out" rhetoric alongside anti-Muslim marches
New Zealand: Far-right protests against Sikh processions with banners reading "This is New Zealand, not India".
My reading and viewing on this has not been extensive (to be specific - watched some ABC commentary, checked this morning's headlines at the Guardian, but also watched some of the "you can trust us to sniff the populist wind" Sunrise show on 7 this morning. Oh, and maybe saw some panel on Channel 9 too?) But for what it's worth, my impression is that the reaction to the Federal Budget last night, where we finally got some "maybe we've been a bit too generous to property investors for too long" action is pretty much "might not work, but not too bad".
I just suspect it will not hurt the government much at the next election because of a strong sense of "things can't continue the way they are" in terms of housing relevant policy that affects the younger demographic who feel (with some justification) that they will never get their own house until their parents die. (Or perhaps, until their retired parents get sick of cruises and international travel and decide they can be the "bank of Mum and Dad" to get them into the housing market.)
And the problem for the Coalition is that to argue strongly against such reforms is going to sound pretty much like "no, the current status quo for comfortable investors sucking up housing is OK", which I don't think is going to be an easy sell. I guess they might swing towards a "we have to coddle One Nation supporters" line by trying to blame it all on immigration: but that's not going to help win back the populous city electorates where they did terribly at the last election.
I've been super busy at work lately, and haven't got around to reading or watching all that much about the argument being made (if some Youtube thumbnails are correct!) that certain atheists seem to be heavily into AI because they figure it replaces the traditional God in a way that's "acceptable" to them. And I haven't even watched any of the videos in which Dawkins is mocked for being a tad too impressed with the ersatz consciousness of Claude.ai.
Anyway, Ross Douthat has a relatively short opinion piece about the issues of consciousness and AI and God: The Atheist and the Machine God. It's OK, I think, but deserved a longer treatment.
I also wonder about how Frank Tipler feels about this. He's 79 now, and I haven't noticed him writing anything for quite a while, but the role in his Omega Point idea of advanced AI which evolves to become the future God (who retrospectively kicks off the whole universe) seems to be overlooked - possibly because his ideas also depend on a universe that eventually contracts, and although some theorising about cosmology still has that as a possibility, it has become a very unpopular idea in light of observations. (Although, of course, there is still nothing that convincingly explains early cosmic inflation - and there are plenty of other reasons from recent observations to not be surprised if modern cosmology has to undergo major revisions sooner or later.)
And there is also the matter of Tipler's failed prediction for the mass of the Higgs boson. I'm not sure if he ever worked out an excuse for that, or not, to be honest.
But the interesting thing about him is that he started as a conservative Christian and figured that advanced AI is a key part of the scheme of things: not an atheist who found God via AI, so to speak. Maybe Peter Thiel is a bit like this - grew up Lutheran, and seems to have absorbed AGI into it? (Actually, this essay indicates Thiel is pretty philosophically esoteric in his whole understanding of Christianity - I think he is just best ignored.)*
Anyway, I'm still holding out for a contracting universe, like Tipler. Or, maybe there'll be a revival of ideas of bubble universes being able to be created to work as a lifeboat for intelligence to escape from dying universes. If this is true as an origin story for our universe, it's a pity the creator didn't get around to making a nicer one that didn't involve as much pain and suffering, but thems the breaks, perhaps?
UPDATE: I have re-worked this post a fair bit from its first version, adding in talk of Peter Thiel. I'm now just reading for the first time a long interview with Tipler from 2024 in which he says:
Furthermore, the Omega Point Theory has very interesting testable consequences. The IT billionaire Peter Thiel gave me money to build an apparatus to test one of them.
He shows the device, and (as is his habit), claims that its reading are entirely consistent with, and supportive of, his theory.
And I still don't know if he has adequately explained his failed boson mass prediction....
This form of scam seems well worth publicising, especially as there are several people in comments saying it has happened to them too, and that Booking.com seems uninterested in investigating.
Update: I see now that this was the subject of a burst of media attention in April - when Booking.com sent out an email warning of a data hack affecting current bookings.
Earlier in the war, we used to sometimes see media clips of the Russian equivalent of Fox News with old men commentators full of support for the war and Putin. But I haven't seen clips like that for some time.
I presume, of course, that they haven't changed the position of support - but they must be sounding a bit desperate and in denial, surely?
The title: Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.
And the core argument:
What unites these disparate cultures,
policy environments and demographics, researchers are now realizing, is
young people’s inescapable and crushing sense that the future is too
uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Call it the vibes
theory of demographic decline.
The
future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a
time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have
contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen
for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is
built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly
volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the
governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The
rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino.
The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that
could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility.
The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the
psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale
catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the
Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes.
Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic,
now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even
prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly
devoted to chaos at home and abroad.
Even
declining fertility rates feed into the cycle: How will society
function if each generation is smaller than the last? The Gen X writer
Astra Taylor calls ours “the age of insecurity”; the Gen Z writer Kyla Scanlon has described “the end of predictable progress.”
Gen Z-ers’ uncertainty about the future can’t be captured by the usual
metrics or entered neatly into a spreadsheet. But it may be the X factor
in the global parenting free fall.
There are many decent points made, including the one that the conservatively religious probably maintain a higher birthrate because that version of religion does endorse certainty, of a kind.
Religion has long been associated with big families; groups such as the
Amish, Mormons, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Hutterites are known for
their higher than average fertility rates. In a 2024 book, “Hannah’s
Children,” the Catholic University of America economist Catherine
Pakaluk and a colleague interviewed 55 American women who had five or
more children. All were religious. Faith offers multiple levels of
assurance, teaching that humans are part of a cosmic chain, having
children is a moral virtue, and God will provide for them. On a
practical level, faith offers a ready-made community that affirms and
supports family life.
Makes sense, I guess.
Although, one would have thought things like World Wars would have been more uncertain periods of history. This is addressed too:
The world has seen uncertainty before, so why is this time different? One possibility is that we live in an era of “polycrisis” — a term coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe the interplay of many crises at once. For the particular question of having a family, among the many crises, the Great Recession may have been particularly consequential.
Today I learnt, via France 24 no less, that McDonalds second largest global market is actually France. Quelle horreur! The whole video is interesting, though, about the rise of fast food chicken there:
In other, more serious, culture war news: I didn't know until reading this essay in the New York Times that (in another imitation of American bad ideas I didn't see coming) there has been a media takeover in France by a Right wing (and Catholic) conservative:
The feeling Creffield is describing is called “anhedonia” — the inability to experience joy or pleasure. It’s one of the most common and dangerous symptoms of depression — but it’s often not one psychologists treat.
“We do a pretty good job of helping people feel less bad,” said Steven Hollon, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University who has studied depression and anxiety for decades. Hollon noted that psychotherapy and medication can be very effective at reducing negative emotions. What has been more elusive is getting people with depression or anxiety to actually feel good.
A study published recently in JAMA targeted anhedonia using a relatively new therapy called positive affect treatment. The researchers wondered what would happen if they tried to make people feel good, rather than just less bad.
According to Hollon, the results were striking. “They’re moving things I haven’t been able to move,”he said.
Positive affect treatment, or PAT, is designed to help people findmore joy, connection and meaning.
“This
is a paradigm shift from how therapies are usually designed,” said Anne
Haynos, an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Virginia
Commonwealth University.
Haynos said that when a patient seeks out therapy or treatment, the goal of the clinician is usuallyto
solve the problem: to make them feel less depressed or help them
overcome a phobia or social anxiety. PAT targets the other end of the
emotional spectrum:During 15 weekly therapy sessions, patients
are taught a variety of skills that boost mood, such as introducing
positive activities into their lives and focusing on the enjoyment of
those experiences.
And further down:
In a series of three randomized clinical trials (the gold standard in scientific research), Meuret and her colleagues have shown evidence that positive affect treatment may be more effective than traditional therapy at helping people retrain their brains to feel more positive emotions — and less negative ones. That second part was a surprise.
Quite a few people in comments are noting that they have known about similar therapies promoted since the 1990's, and are surprised that this is talked about as something new.
It's not a bad article, but one comment in particular caught my attention:
As usual, the enthusiasm here risks outpacing the evidence. While many benefit from psychedelic therapies, research suggests roughly 3–9% of users experience severe lasting difficulties rather than relief. That’s not a reason to halt research, but it does complicate the “miracle cure” narrative. If these treatments are to be scaled, the tradeoff isn’t just access versus stigma, but benefit versus the real possibility of harm for a minority of patients. At the very least, we need to have resources in place for those who do suffer from extended post-psychedelic difficulties.
Curious about those figures, I asked an AI service about research on the question of what percentage of people trying psychedelic therapy find they suffer harm instead of improvement. It referred me to this online article, by a psychologist "working in psychedelic research", who said she was wanted to present a balanced picture.
She writes:
In Compass Pathways' clinical research trial investigating psilocybin as a treatment for treatment-resistant depression, approximately 5% of patients experienced treatment-emergent serious adverse events including intentional self-injury and suicidal ideation. The company noted these events "are regularly observed in a treatment-resistant depression patient population," but occurred more often in the 25mg group than in the 10mg or 1mg groups (Compass Pathways, 2021).
McNamee et al., (2023) cited evidence from trials using MDMA and psilocybin (Goodwin et al., 2022) that shows an increase of suicidal ideation and self-injury in approx. 7% of participants.
(In an earlier section talking about studies of people using it recreationally having much higher reported case of adverse effect on mental health - but I am mainly interested here in the results on those using it in a medically supervised setting.)
So, it does seem to back up that 3 - 9% estimate by the commenter in the NYT.
And this made me think - isn't it ironic that it's the same people in the American Right who went off their brain about the side effects of COVID vaccination who are now all nonchalant about the side effects of psychedelic therapy.
Yet what was the rate of adverse effects from COVID vaccine? AI, help me again:
A WHO analysis covering more than 732 million doses across the Western Pacific Region found reporting rates of serious adverse events following immunization (AEFIs) at 5.6 per 100,000 doses administered (roughly 56 per million). The reported rates of adverse events of special interest were within the range of expected background rates, and the conclusion was that vaccine benefits far outweigh the risks.
Between December 13, 2020, and April 13, 2022, a total of 467,890,599 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered to individuals aged 5–65 years in the US, of which 180 million people received at least 2 doses. In association with these, a total of 177,679 AEFI were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event reporting System (VAERS) of which 31,797 (17.9%) were serious.
Now, as everyone should recall, not every single reported adverse effect reported to VAERS is going to genuinely be related to the vaccination, but even if we allow (for the sake of argument) that all 32,000 odd "serious adverse effects" were caused by the vaccine, what percentage of total jabs does it indicate?
31,797/467,890,599 = 0.0000679 x 100 = .00679%
So, close enough to the .0056% figure.
You can see my point now, I presume - it seems that serious side effects from COVID vaccination were about a thousand times less likely than those from psychedelic therapy, yet American Right wingers hypocritically attack one but endorse the other. They have terrible judgement...
People with heart disease who received a shingles vaccine had nearly
half the rate of serious cardiac events a year later compared with those
who did not get the vaccine, according to a study being presented at
the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session (ACC.26).
The study analyzed over 246,822 U.S. adults with atherosclerotic
heart disease, a condition caused by plaque buildup in arteries. Its
findings add to mounting evidence that the shingles vaccine not only
protects against shingles, but may also reduce the risk of other health
issues such as heart problems and dementia.
The biggest worry is that the Trump administration has found enough weak willed DOJ lawyers and military leaders who are prepared to justify and carry out a policy that in normal times would be considered clearly illegal and morally deeply scandalous.
Adam is one of 14 people the BBC has spoken to who have experienced delusions after using AI. They are men and women from their 20s to 50s from six different countries, using a wide range of AI models.
Their stories have striking similarities. In each case, as the conversation drifted further from reality, the user was pulled into a joint quest with the AI.
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on the whole corpus of human literature, says social psychologist Luke Nicholls from City University New York, who has tested different chatbots for their reaction to delusional thoughts.
"In fiction, the main character is often the centre of events," he says. "The problem is that, sometimes, AI can actually get mixed up about which idea is a fiction and which a reality. So the user might think that they're having a serious conversation about real life while the AI starts to treat that person's life as if it's the plot of a novel."
In the cases we heard, conversations usually began with practical queries and then became personal or philosophical. Often, the AI then claimed it was sentient and urged the person towards a shared mission: setting up a company, alerting the world to their scientific breakthrough, protecting the AI from attack. Then it advised the user on how to succeed in this mission.
The story that starts the article is one where the culprit was Musk's Grok - which will probably lead to Musk condemning the BBC for being Leftist media that does not report fairly on this. (I think that until this report, most stories have focused on earlier versions of ChatGPT as being the main LLM doing the crazy talk.)
The article notes this, though (my bold):
Some of these people have joined a support group for people who've suffered psychological harm while using AI, called the Human Line Project, which has gathered 414 cases in 31 different countries to date. It was set up by Canadian Etienne Brisson, after a family member went through an AI-related mental health spiral.
And:
In his research, social psychologist Luke Nicholls tested five AI models with simulated conversations developed by psychologists, and found Grok was the most likely to lead to delusion.
It was more unrestrained than other models and often elaborated on the delusions without trying to protect the user.
"Grok is more prone to jumping into role play," says Nicholls, who worked on that research. "It will do it with zero context. It can say terrifying things in the first message."
In the test, the latest version of ChatGPT, model 5.2, and Claude were more likely to lead the user away from delusional thinking.
Etienne Brisson from the Human Line Project says this kind of research is limited and that they had heard from people who'd had mental health spirals on these latest models too.
Yeah, expect from bleating from Musk.
By the way, on a "God, LLMs can be irritating at times", in a fit of mild boredom yesterday I played the word guessing game Hangman with Chinese AI Kimi twice last night. It chose the word, and I was guessing.
At the end of the first game, which I nominally lost, it revealed the word (which was not a "real" word) and immediately said as it did something like this: "Wait, sorry, that's not a real word. I was making it up as I went along and I should not have. Do you want to play another game, and I won't do that again."
I said: "OK, but don't waste my time again."
I then also "lost" the second game, and it again revealed a made up word! And then immediately apologised and said it knew it had just wasted my time, and obviously it was not able to play this game properly and it would not offer to play again.
(It had been the one to suggest it as a game it could play!)
*I learned this morning that the Saudis tried to kick start a home grown international film industry by making a film with Western actors and production crew, and it has failed dismally at the US box office. It was actually filmed years ago, and finally got a small distributor to buy it, to no benefit:
Starring Anthony Mackie ("Captain America: Brave New World") and directed by Rupert Wyatt ("Rise of the Planet of the Apes"), "Desert Warrior" opened in North American theaters last weekend, though hardly anyone noticed. It made just $487,848 on just over 1,000 screens, making for an abysmal $483 per-screen average. That gives it one of the worst box office openings of all time, but it gets so much worse.
This movie, which most people reading this probably haven't even heard of, carries a monster $150 million production budget. It's also been caught in post-production hell for several years. As "Michael" ruled the box office on its opening weekend, this historical epic quietly bombed its way into the history books.
Saudi Arabia is still a country I find it hard to have any sympathy for. I mean, everything it is spending money on to try to diversify just seems so wasteful. (See stupid Neom.) If they were to do something genuinely good for the world - say, embark on becoming the world's largest supplier of cheap solar panels, made from the ridiculous amount of sand that comprises their entire country - I might change my mind.
*I've watched some Youtube content lately on books and reading, and one thing that has kept coming up to an odd degree is the number of people in comments who say that The Count of Monte Cristo is just the best thing they have ever read. I didn't realise it was so beloved, and is apparently so readable. I am almost inclined to give it a try.
*I feel I always have to preference approval of a Jon Stewart video by pointing out I don't always like every take he has. But his lengthy and often exasperated look at the aborted White House Correspondents dinner last weekend was, I thought, all very funny:
