Immaturity is hard to get into proper perspective

So, I was reading Giles Fraser's Guardian Easter column about Christianity being "a religion for losers" (you know, the first shall be last, etc; a not very controversial point, I would have thought, but it did bring out the Guardian atheists in droves - surely there is no paper on the planet with a more devoted atheistic readership), which led me to look at his earlier piece contemplating virtual reality paedophelia, in which he shares this:

And I have blown away my fair share of baddies in Call of Duty (cathartic relaxation for a vicar sick of having to be professionally nice).

Amusing.  You have to wonder a bit about what "cathartic" experiences celibate Catholic priests find over the internet, but let's not go there today.*

Back to the story.  I then read this opinion piece about the death of "bromance" films - inspired by the Will Ferrell film "Get Hard," which does sound genuinely terrible and retrograde.   And that led me back to a long, long piece by movie critic AO Scott in the New York Times last year.  I think I started reading it then, but didn't finish it. 

Scott's piece, entitled The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,  covers a lot of territory, noting that the big hits of TV drama over the last decade (none of which I have watched at length, incidentally, but who can avoid reading about them?) - The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad - are about male competence coming undone - the death of patriarchy, really.  Seems a valid enough point.

The next paragraph is key:

 This slow unwinding has been the work of generations. For the most part, it has been understood — rightly in my view, and this is not really an argument I want to have right now — as a narrative of progress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer and more open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.

Now, this is where it gets tricky.  As Scott writes:

In my main line of work as a film critic, I have watched over the past 15 years as the studios committed their vast financial and imaginative resources to the cultivation of franchises (some of them based on those same Y.A. novels) that advance an essentially juvenile vision of the world. Comic-book movies, family-friendly animated adventures, tales of adolescent heroism and comedies of arrested development do not only make up the commercial center of 21st-century Hollywood. They are its artistic heart.

Meanwhile, television has made it very clear that we are at a frontier. Not only have shows like “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” heralded the end of male authority; we’ve also witnessed the erosion of traditional adulthood in any form, at least as it used to be portrayed in the formerly tried-and-true genres of the urban cop show, the living-room or workplace sitcom and the prime-time soap opera. Instead, we are now in the age of “Girls,” “Broad City,” “Masters of Sex” (a prehistory of the end of patriarchy)

Hmmm.  Let me start by noting that there can be both emotionally and intellectually quite mature "juvenile visions of the world", and terribly immature ones.   The suitability of a movie for a family audience says nothing about those qualities.  As for animation, the cultural example of Japan shows that there is nothing to be ashamed of in adults liking stories told in a graphic form, either on the page or animated.   And animation has reached levels of high art that pleases people of all ages.   Sure, you're not going to get too many adult angsty ones, but still, they represent a relatively small amount of movie output, and their general quality now is something to be celebrated, really.

The problem with the comic book superhero franchises, though, is the sameness of their themes, as well as the boring repetition of the computer generated action style which drains them of true thrills.  I'm also one of those people for whom their odd position between realism and  science fiction (what are they - sort of "fantasy science" science fiction?) usually makes them problematic at a plausibility level.   Still, there can be witty and engaging examples of the genre; but overall, yeah, they do have a "maturity" problem.

Surely the main example of the death of adulthood is the "arrested development" film, particularly the gross out ones with adult male protagonists.

To play devil's advocate, I suppose one could argue that Jerry Lewis built most of his career on the same theme 60 years ago; but his characters were usually  innocently naive of the ways of the world.   The modern version is, as the Guardian writers note, usually a promiscuous, slacker slob.

And while Scott notes the shows and movies about independent, sexually adventurous young women, he doesn't seem to quite mark them down as hard as he does the male equivalent,  even though he does acknowledge that they have their similarities:

The real issue, in any case, was never the ability of women to get a laugh but rather their right to be as honest as men.

And also to be as rebellious, as obnoxious and as childish. Why should boys be the only ones with the right to revolt? Not that the new girls are exactly Thelma and Louise. Just as the men passed through the stage of sincere rebellion to arrive at a stage of infantile refusal, so, too, have the women progressed by means of regression. After all, traditional adulthood was always the rawest deal for them.

But stepping back a bit, what is it that marks immaturity anyway?   It's clear that mere age is no guarantee of responsible adult behaviour in terms of sexual fidelity and child raising, at least.  Wisdom and respect for others can come with age, but it can be missing completely.

Scott does seem to approve of another writer's analysis that it often comes down to something that American literature tends to avoid: the adult theme of courtship and marriage.  And he then makes a point:

In the old, classic comedies of the studio era — the screwbally roller coasters of marriage and remarriage, with their dizzying verbiage and sly innuendo — adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and burdensome but also full of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt and spend money. The trick was to balance the fulfillment of your wants with the carrying out of your duties.

The desire of the modern comic protagonist, meanwhile, is to wallow in his own immaturity, plumbing its depths and reveling in its pleasures. 

 It seems to me to be a reasonable argument - but why has protracted adolescence become such a "thing" in the West, at least?

Given that the rich have been always been able to be afford to be lazy party boys or girls - hello, Prodigal Son - the general rise in societal wealth might have something to do with it.  Effective and easy to use contraception and safe abortion makes protracted relationships with low risk of  responsibility inducing pregnancy much more common.  The increase in life expectancy probably also encourages people to have little sense of urgency as to forming what the participants consider a permanent relationship.   (My mother, born in 1923, used to say that as a child, she thought she would have lived a long life if she reached 50, or 60, tops.  Getting married at 19 made sense if war or disease always meant a short life was on the cards.)

One should also remember that fulfilling the responsibility of being a spouse and parent is hardly a conclusive sign of general moral worth - the Goebbels had cute looking kids, but it didn't end well.  (Joseph was having a Hitler accommodated affair from 1938, too.)

And it's not as if societies haven't previously fretted about the psychic corruption of its young men.  The book I've been reading about Hitler's World War 1 experience makes it very clear that there was a widespread view that a good war was just what was needed to get the German soul back on track, so to speak.  A military doctor is quoted as explaining:

"[War is] the only means by which we, as a nation, can be saved from physical and psychological lethargy and emasculation which are relentlessly threatening." 

 Or as a historian wrote:

Intellectuals, artists, and students, most notably the rebellious sons of Germany's educated middle class, valorised war as the repudiation of a bourgeois society that they condemned as decadent and overly materialistic; thousands of young men eagerly enlisted and zealously rushed off to the front, romanticising the danger and "vitality" of combat.

We now know the country may have been better served if the young men had been too busy on, well, whatever the equivalent was of staying indoors all day on Playstation in their parents' lounge, to bother enlisting.  In today's terms, who couldn't wish that there were more Islamic youths engaged in  illicit love affairs, rather than getting over their ennui by blowing themselves up in Syria in  expectation of the sensual pleasures in the afterlife.

The other thing is that, although I don't go to them, I take it that there is some sense of improvement in the male slacker by the end of these movies.  Even so, presenting them as loveable clowns for the first two acts probably makes any moral quite missable.

Perhaps that is the whole problem - making so many comedies about people who are commitment shy in love and self indulgent in everything gives them a quasi-endorsement.   It doesn't matter if the writer says that it's not intended - it happens anyway.  Writers can always claim they are reflecting society, not creating it, but if we're honest we all know it's really a hall of mirrors with two way influence. 

Despite all the reservations I've indicated, the coarseness of modern comedy, and the frequent themes in it and drama of neutral engagement with people who, in previous decades, would  have been called very morally dislikeable characters, is a matter of regret.   But it is so hard to talk about this without sounding like you're pining for something like the Hays Code for movie content.

No, I think we'd just all like to see more movies with responsible and basically moral characters who take life, sex and relationships seriously, and are that way from the start.

  
* I have to interrupt this narrative to once again complain about the messy way the likes of The Guardian and Slate now organise themselves.   Whereas it used to be clear that regular, professional journalists wrote opinion pieces in the opinion section, and Comment is Free seemed to be for anyone who wanted an occasional go at opinion (and was often more interesting for it), the Guardian on line just seems to jumble everything up together, although I still sometimes find myself in a Comment is Free section without knowing how I got there.  Searching for that as a section does not seem to work.   Even finding an opinion piece once can be rather hard to find again the same day.  And did Slate have the same web designers?   I take it this is all to do with a squillion readers now using their mobile phones  who can only scroll down through large lists of stories, and hate having to do one or two extra clicks that allow for a proper, logical branching of sections.   But jeez it annoys me, even when I am using my 7 inch tablet. 

My pre-judging continues

The "honest trailer" for Interstellar makes it look even worse than I imagined.  I guess I have to watch it some day to confirm my intense dislike of it...

Why didn't I get into rat research?

I've said it before, but again I say - what fun it sounds to be a scientist coming up with experiments about what goes on in rat minds.  This one shows how careful one has to be with rat interior decorating:

Prior research has shown that both rats and mice display unique facial characteristics when undergoing pain—they flatten their face, squint their eyes, move their whiskers and puff out their cheeks and nose. Scientists have even created rodent pain charts that allow us humans to gauge the amount of pain a rodent is in, simply by looking at its face. In this new research, the team sought to learn whether the same is true for other rats.

To find out, the researchers took photographs of rats, both face and whole body shots while they were feeling neutral, and others while the rats were given an electric shock to the foot—they also photo-shopped some of the photos to cause blurring of different body parts. Then, they created a special cage for a group of test rats that had never been used for any kinds of experiments before. The cage had multiple "rooms" each decorated with the photographs they had taken. One room, for example, had photos of rats in pain, another had rats with neutral faces. The rooms were all interconnected so that the rats could choose where to spend their time. After dropping rats one by one into the cage and noting their behavior (timing how much time they spent where) the researchers found that the rats spent the least amount of time in the room with unblurred full face and body shots of rats in pain and spent the most time in the rooms with walls adored with neutral faced rats. This, the researchers claim, shows that the rats were able to recognize the pain in the faces of the other rats and avoided them.

There was another rat cognition study reported recently:

Even rats can imagine: A new study finds that rats have the ability to link cause and effect such that they can expect, or imagine, something happening even if it isn't. 

Luckily, they haven't worked out how to imagine the consequences of eating rat bait in my ceiling, yet.  It's a great pity they can't just stay away from there...

Not encouraging for California

California snowpack fades to shocking record low as water restrictions ordered - The Washington Post:

The mountain snows so crucial to California’s water supply failed to come yet again this winter and the normally white-capped high peaks are mostly barren. As of April 1, California snowpack is a scary-low 5 percent of normal....

Snowpack measurements have been kept in California since 1950 and nothing in the historic record comes close to this year’s severely depleted level. The previous record for the lowest snowpack level in California, 25 percent of normal, was set both in 1976-77 and last winter (2013-2014).

Always somewhat controversial

Yesterday morning, there was talk of a (fairly small) survey showing that teenage Australians are still, in significant number, not comfortable with having gay friends.  I'm not sure that this should be surprising, given the nature of adolescence, and I think the reporting of it as showing there is teenage "homophobia" rampant is PC exaggeration; but I have to admit, the Beyond Blue ad  aimed at teenagers against anti-gay bullying is pretty good, as far as these things go.   I still suspect that the media being so saturated with discussion of sexuality these days actually works to increase anxiety in teenagers to identify one way or the other, but what can you do about that?   A sudden increase in societal regard for privacy seems not exactly on the cards.

Then, there was this article about income comparison for gay and lesbian folk (gay men don't do so well, but lesbian women, working longer hours, do well compared to your average heterosexual woman), which made me notice another article at The Conversation which argues (not completely convincingly, I think) that "It turns out male sexuality is just as fluid as female sexuality."  The bit I don't find convincing is how it cites examples of men's ironic, often drunken, imitation of homosexual acts as evidence in favour of sexual fluidity.

But it does talk about something that sounds rather more interesting:  a 1994 book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 .  Looking back at how we got to where we are in terms of Western attitudes to homosexuality is always interesting, and here's a lengthy summary of the book's argument:

George Chauncey uncovers a previously hidden "gay male world" in New York City before World War II, a world that had been lost through the myths of "isolation, invisibility, and internalization." Instead, the world Chauncey describes is a vibrant and surprisingly visible gay culture between 1890-1940. In this world, the later homosexual/heterosexual binary was not yet in force, and men were defined on the basis of their masculinity or femininity rather than the sex of their sexual partners. In this way, working-class masculine men, particularly sailors and laborers, could have sex with effeminate "fairies" yet not be considered "gay" (provided they were the one doing the penetrating). In contrast, a growing middle class during the 1910s and 1920s turned to sexual preference to develop a heterosexual identity of masculinity in which "queers" (middle-class equivalents of "fairies") were defined by their attraction to men. Chauncey argued that this developed as an anxious response to working-class sexual practices (bottom-up influence on culture) and middle-class male anxieties over their own manhood.

In Part II, Chauncey describes how gay men produced the space of an urban "gay world." They turned to semi-public spaces as zones of security, such as local YMCAs, boarding houses, and cafeterias. Chauncey notes that, until the 1930s, authorities would often take a hands-off approach unless gay men's presence moved beyond the category of harmless spectacle. He also notes the tension between private and public, where gay men were often forced out of the public sphere to engage in activities and socializing in public areas (although places such as parks and streets were often dangerous). Chauncey links crackdowns on this public space to broader reformist crackdowns on the autonomy of working-class recreational spaces, such as Coney Island. Finally, he points to the development of two gay neighborhood enclaves: Greenwich Village in the 1910s (part of a larger bohemian culture) and Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s (which was much more visible and vibrant). Chauncey notes that until the 1930s, these spaces, in particular Harlem, became a space for highly visible spectacles of gay life - for example, massive drag queen balls in which thousands attended and were covered by the press. These undermine any notions of gay life being in deeply in the closet until the 1960s. Chauncey ends with a discussion of the decline of this gay world. He points to the end of Prohibition as a watershed, whose repeal was inspired in part by fears over criminality and sordidness that it inspired by driving behavior underground. With its repeal the state had broader surveillance and regulatory powers which they used to limit gay public space. This occurs most vividly with violent crackdowns on any bars that allowed gay men visibility (leading to the rise of exclusively gay bars). Chauncey's narrative ends with the gay world being driven largely underground during the 1930s. 

  

That last bit is a surprising argument:  that the removal of Prohibition actually worked to help drive gay men more underground.   Sounds plausible, I guess.  I wouldn't have picked Harlem as a centre of gay life for a time, either.

Given the book was talking about New York in a period when vaudeville was one of the main entertainments, I then Googled the topic of it and homosexuality, which led to links about a guy I had never heard of before - Julian Eltinge - who had for a time a spectacularly successful career as a cross dressing, mainly comedic, stage and film actor in the first half of the 20th century.  (He even travelled to Australia with his shows in the 1920's.)  His Wikipedia page provides the bones of his story, but this article is much more interesting. 

He never married, and lived with his mother, but apparently deliberately adopted a macho off stage persona and resented the never ending questioning of his sexuality.    Another book talks about how much time Eltinge, and the press, devoted to reassuring the public that he was a man's man.  For example:

Of course, this now sounds rather like too much overcompensating.  The guy lived long enough to see the (perfectly understandable!) decline of the popularity of his type of show, and seems to have died a lonely and overweight alcoholic.  

From pages 61 to 67 of this same book then goes on to talk about the scandal sheet interest in homosexuality in California (Sacramento and Long Beach are discussed in detail) pre World War 1.  The details are a tad too salacious for reprinting here,  but it both gives a sense of the "moral panic" about the issue, at least amongst some; and notes how some of the gay parties had a kind of modern air of decadence.  I find this particularly surprising for the pre World War 1 era - I had thought the relative decadence of the 20's and early 30's was a reaction to having survived the trauma of the War.

Some of the details are blackly funny - although men going to San Quentin for 25 years for sodomy isn't.    In fact, the interesting thing is how the "queers" thought they were being very modern and progressive with regard to one particular practice:

I wonder if this was somehow tied up with the cultural and intellectual shifts going on in the West following Darwin and the apparent rise of science and humanism?  I'm not sure that America had the same issue with the sort of upper class elitism of the gay set at Cambridge, but it's curious how (at least some?) of those partaking of the activity also saw themselves as riding a wave of modernity.

Anyhow, one thing I guess we can learn from such histories is that homosexual activity has been around a long, long time, as has uncertainty and unease it has caused in many societies.  We should give the teenagers of today a bit of a break.

Update:  you can read more about Eltinge and the popularity of female impersonator shows generally in a .pdf article here.  She notes that female impersonators in America evolved out of the minstrel shows of the mid 19th century.  (!)  

The uncertain promise of electro-braining

Adventures in Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation - The New Yorker

A pretty good summary here of the uncertain position science is at regarding mild direct current electrical stimulation of the brain.

I should look around for the "do it yourself" versions of the devices which are apparently on the 'net.

Things I have enjoyed on TV lately

*  Tony Robinson's "Walking Through History" series on SBS.  Just finished, I think.   He makes history very accessible, and is a charming guide.  I see that at least a few episodes are on Youtube.

*  Brian Cox's Human Universe:  OK, I'm late to the party on this one, as it finished at least a month ago.  It was a bit, I don't know, vaguely New Age mushy in parts, but it was a really stunning looking show that looked a million bucks, as they say.  And it did take us to some unusual places and was, for the most part, quite interesting.

*  Some other show on lately that I can't think of now - will come back later.

Oh, that's right:  the doco "Inside the Commons" about the British Parliament.  A fantastic, inside look at how their Parliament works.  

Something I haven't enjoyed on TV lately:

The new version of The Odd Couple.   Terrible acting in an old idea that makes all the participants look like embarrassing, incompetent imitators rather than actors.

Zero company tax?

I understand Peter Martin's argument about stopping dividend imputation and reducing company tax, but I don't get the last bit:

Gruen believes  a 19 per cent company tax would push up demand for Australian shares and push their prices high enough to compensate existing Australian shareholders for no longer having imputation. He says the government could use the extra tax it got from the investment surge to cut the company tax rate further, to 15 per cent.
Eventually we will have no choice but to cut it even further, ever closer to zero. As long as just one nation undercuts all the others with a low tax rate, businesses will choose to invest there over other countries. It's why Google will sell you its products in Australia but routes  your money through Ireland, where its profits are taxed at 12.5 per cent.
The man who designed the dividend imputation scheme for Keating can see a zero corporate tax rate beyond the horizon. "The evidence before the Henry review is that cutting the company tax rate is the most helpful thing we could do," said Greg Smith shortly after the Henry Tax Review was released.
Smith served on Keating's staff throughout the tax reforms of the 1980s and later served on the Henry Tax Review. "I have thought seriously about a 15 per cent company tax rate partly funded by the abolition of imputation," he said. "There is an intellectual case for a zero rate. That's the way the world is going, that's the direction in which our competitors are moving."

Why does a race to the bottom on company tax make "intellectual sense"?   Do that, and the next thing the "taxes are bad - very bad" crowd will be arguing  that alternative sources of revenue should be reduced too, no?

Trolleys, psychopaths, utilitarians (and Catholics to boot)

The Last Word On Nothing | The trolley and the psychopath

Here's a good post on the trolley problem and what it may, or may not, show about utilitarianism.

(The site it's on looks like quite a charming mix of science and well crafted writing, too.)

Update:  as it happens, I just found a short animation that talks about the trolley problem, via Open Culture, a website I have been meaning to add to my blogroll:



And have I mentioned my own use of a sacrificial dilemma to challenge some Catholics at Catallaxy a couple of years ago?  Let 's say a supercriminal with a predilection to setting up ethical dilemmas for pro-Lifers sets up a scenario where 5, or 10, or 200, frozen embryos are sitting on a balance far above the ground, with a young, healthy, randomly chosen and innocent woman on the other side.  The physical set up only allows one side to be saved - removing one will cause the other side to tip and plummet to the ground to certain destruction.   Surely peoples' reaction to who should be saved tells us something about the status we give to life in embryonic form, compared to that of a healthy adult. 

The Catallaxy Catholics did not like this challenge.  As far as I can recall, it was never properly addressed.

Cryptic message (nearly all readers may safely skip)

For the instructions to mix a Tom Collins, a cocktail of great simplicity, try looking somewhere other than this blog - I'm too busy writing on it.

New South Wales election result explained graphically

The loser:

The winner:

Saturday morning duty

My daughter may, or may not, be visible in this picture. OK, she is.  This is how I'm spending my Saturday mornings this year, taking her to orchestra practice.

It's pretty interesting, actually, watching a strings orchestra learning new pieces in (what seems to me, a musical ignoramus) remarkably little time.  

This takes place in the Old Queensland Museum, a charming building of decorative brickwork that barely survived the Bjelke-Petersen era of historic building destruction.  Now used by Queensland Youth Orchestra, and some other music or dance groups, it's a really good venue for them, although parts of the building are still in a state of decay.  I think the State government maintains it to the minimum they can get away with.

I don't usually stay for the whole practice, and so I am becoming quite familiar with how the area around the Brisbane showgrounds and parts of the Valley are developing.  

The Royal National Association, which owns the freehold of this large slab of close to inner city real estate, has embarked on a huge development project of the precinct, the first residential part of which will be finished later this year.  The apartment blocks are in their final stages, and I am a bit surprised at how many there are.  They look a bit crammed together, to be honest, with some apartments looking to have not so fantastic views into the next block.  But who knows, it may look a lot better when fully finished and landscaped.   It is being built by Lend Lease, who I think have a good record. 

I dropped into the on site sales office today and was told they are all sold (bar 2 which the buyers handed back), and two new large blocks which are not yet started are fully sold as well, at significantly higher price than the first bunch.   I think he said 400 units will be in the new blocks; there must be at least that number, probably more, in the blocks that are nearly finished.   It seems clear that buyers are expecting this new precinct is going to be a success. 

In fact, looking at the huge number of number of future apartment blocks the RNA thinks it can build around the showgrounds, it's hard to believe there will be enough showgrounds left for a decent Exhibition.  It's also hard to believe the RNA won't end up incredibly wealthy from the development process.  They'll probably be able to h byave the first agricultural show on the Moon.

But back to young teens and kids playing music.   When I work out the best way to upload it, I'll link to a track from the first evening concert my daughter was in a couple of weeks ago.   They're pretty good, to my untrained ear, at least.

A naive suggestion?

Do people who feel suicidal usually try to hide it when asked directly?  Googling around indicates it is generally thought that they don't.  For example, from the book Psych Notes: Clinical Pocket Guide, we get this:

Would it hurt to have this question on the pre-flight check list that all pilots ask each other? 

What they do now seems not to be direct enough:

The FAA expects pilots and airlines to take joint responsibility when considering if a pilot is fit for duty, including fatigue resulting from pre-duty activities such as commuting. At the beginning of each flight segment, a pilot is required to affirmatively state his or her fitness for duty. If a pilot reports he or she is fatigued and unfit for duty, the airline must remove that pilot from duty immediately.

Update:  I heard some aviation expert or other on the TV saying that if the co-pilot really wanted to kill himself and passengers, he could almost certainly circumvent any procedural changes.   And I have heard Senator Leyonhjelm say, in relation to gun suicides, that people determined to suicide will find another way in any case. 

Apart from Leyonhjelm simply being statically wrong, this line of defeatism seems to me to pay no attention to the psychology of suicide.  If you can make impulsive acts harder to finish, you do reduce suicide. 

Protracted sarcasm can be pretty funny

Persistence! | …and Then There's Physics

The guy who writes And Then There's Physics has a post up about Richard Tol's never ending whinge about the John Cook's "97% consensus" paper, and it's a fun exercise in protracted sarcasm.

As Tol turns up in comments, it makes for some amusing reading.

Improbable alien artefacts

Physicists Describe New Class of Dyson Sphere | MIT Technology Review

In praise of sardines

I'm not sure why, but my wife has been accumulating cans of sardines from Aldi.  I have never seen her eating them, but a couple of days ago, while looking for some lunchtime eating, I found 6 cans, and decided I would try them.

Mashed sardines (with a bit of balsamic vinegar) on toast is not the most attractive looking lunch, but I had forgotten how nice they could be.  I don't think I had eaten canned sardines for at least a decade, possibly two.

As you were...

Let's not pretend, libertarians

David Leyonhjelm claims in the Fairfax press this morning:

"...the basis of contemporary marriage is love and affection." 

And then this:

"Support for marriage equality does not require, or indeed imply, approval of any particular marriage or marriage outcome. Nor does it open the door to bigamy, polyamory or any other dire outcomes that some people predict."

Of course it does.  The arguments have already started in America, and probably elsewhere, that multi partner marriages can have lots of love and affection, so why shouldn't the government recognise those as legal marriages, if we all agree that gay marriages should be allowed because marriage is about love and affection?   And in fact, I don't think polygamy is something to have a moral panic about; I don't think it is a good way to organize society, but there is a huge amount of cultural precedent for it around the world, contrary to same sex marriage.

Now, at the risk of being on the side of the nutty Catholic element of Catallaxy, what they argue about the libertarian claim that recognising gay marriage is about getting the government "out of the bedroom"  is correct.  That is, libertarians are being disingenuous:   if they truly wanted the government "out of the bedroom", they'd be arguing for it to recognise as few relationships as possible as marriages; not more. They would, I would have thought, be against the way de facto couples were brought completely within Family Law, despite the fact that they may have deliberately decided not to marry so as to avoid at least some of its legal consequences.  That it was done may be argued as a justified government intervention into regulating relationships for the social good, but it can hardly be argued as having increased liberty at the individual level.   Quite the opposite.

Government recognition of marriage confers benefits and (at least when it ends, if not before) imposes obligations.   Making marriage more open to diverse groups, including same sex and polygamous relationships (as the logic inevitably runs) means more government involvement in the regulation of private relationships across society; not less.

It's particularly ironic that libertarians are frequently non-traditionalists (as well as atheists or agnostics) who recognise no particular significance to marriage as a legal status in their own lives  - they take the Leyonhjelm line that you "don't need a marriage licence" to make a marriage "real".  Thus they seem to have both little regard for what legal marriage means personally, while insisting that government should take an expansionary view of it.   The reason?   Well, because it makes some (actually, a relatively small number of gay people) feel left out.  
  
Libertarians hate a welfare entitlement mentality in others, yet they are happy to endorse a "symbol entitlement" mentality, and have chosen to paint this argument as essentially a rights issue in the same way wet liberals and Lefty's do.   And libertarians are not normally all that taken by the idea of human rights, but they will make an exception for their gay friends, it seems.

As far as I'm concerned, there is very little that is intellectually consistent about the "libertarian" view on same sex marriage with the rest of their world views.   

I don't really care if they just argue "well, it's what people want"  (which, in much of the world, it is) and left it at that.   But don't try and argue it as being an issue particularly consistent with small government, libertarian instincts.

And while I am not going to lose any sleep over the possibility of same sex marriage arriving here soon, I suspect that long term it will be seen as an early 21st century faddish interest which relatively few gay couples will ever take up.   I would much prefer, though, that gay relationships be recognised as civil unions similar to, but without the exact same status, as heterosexual marriage, which has a long tradition in the West of being at its core about having kids.  And as a conservative on matters of biology - being against the use of surrogacy or IVF for anyone, let alone gay couples - the argument that gay couples have kids all the time now does not wash with me.  (And older couples who can marry even if they are not fertile - they get the "benefit of the doubt", so to speak.  Rules about marriage don't have to be entirely, 100%, logically consistent.) 

My view, in another irony, is arguably a truer "small government" view of marriage than that espoused by libertarians.  

Possum problem

Last night, around 11.30, a lot of noise of unusual character started coming from the roof.   Stepping out onto the balcony, you could hear it from outside, but could not see the part of the roof it was coming from.  It sounded like something hitting a tile on the roof.

It persisted, and was loud enough to stop sleep, so after midnight I was carrying the stepladder upstairs and poking my head through the access hole with a torch.   A furry movement was noted, and eventually a possum appeared clearly, walking nonchalantly from one part of the roof it appeared to be intend on attaching, to another corner of the roof space.  It seemed to me to be trying to make or enlarge an access point through tiles.  The sound resumed about 20 minutes later, but did stop.

While rats in our roof space are common (I have already had to bait it once this so-called autumn), and I always assumed it might be next to impossible to block all tile roof entry spaces to prevent rat entry, when you find you have a possum in the ceiling, it's time to call in the professionals. 

I have done so already, and will post the results.

Update:  the possum man identified a clear gap in some roof flashing where he was sure the possum had entered, and it was at the spot where the possum had been noisily doing something on Wednesday night.   He said that the way the roof flashing had been pushed/chewed open, it possibly was finding it hard to get back out.   This is consistent with what I had guessed.  (He said it is unusual to have a possum in the roof at that time, as they usually leave of an evening to eat, returning in the morning.   This would also likely explain the 'walking' sound that we had heard from the roof/ceiling, as it was generally heard at those times.)

Trap cages were left in the roof space last night to try to catch the possum if it was still inside.  None caught yet, though.  

Bad ocean acidification news

Shell-shocked: Ocean acidification likely hampers tiny shell builders in Southern Ocean

The coccolithophore E. huxleyi is important in the marine carbon cycle and is responsible for nearly half of all calcium carbonate production in the ocean, said lead study author Natalie Freeman, a doctoral student in the CU-Boulder'sDepartment of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (ATOC). The new study indicates there has been a 24 percent decline in the amount of calcium carbonate produced in large areas of the Southern Ocean over the past 17 years.

The researchers used satellite measurements and statistical methods to calculate the calcification rate - the amount of calcium carbonate these organisms produced per day in surface ocean waters. Across the entire Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, there was about a 4
percent reduction in calcification rate during the summer months from 1998 to 2014. In addition, the researchers found a 9 percent reduction in calcification during that period in large regions of the Pacific and Indian sectors of the Southern Ocean.

Not quite sure how those percentages add up to 24% - I suppose it has to do with the area over which the reductions happen.

Anyhow, sounds bad.

That big a surprise?

Widely used herbicide linked to cancer : Nature News & Comment

 I dunno - I tend to assume that chemicals that pretty rapidly cause living things to die are probably going to be cancer causing if you're exposed to too much of them.

The issue is more about the dose, really.

And having said that, I still rely on my common sense to tell me that the Monsanto tactic of making Roundup tolerant crops so you can spray heaps of chemicals  on them to control weeds is not that great an idea, certainly in the long term, but also quite possibly in the short term.

Update:  I probably linked to it before, but here's a short report from the Nature website that explains how herbicide tolerant weeds have developed despite Monsanto's improbable claim that they wouldn't.