The big smash

Puzzle of Moon’s origin resolved : Nature News & Comment

Would have been something to see - a Mars size planet smashing into the early Earth.  If time travel is invented, that event should be high on the list of "to do's".

The tax race to the bottom

Countries slow race to bottom on tax competition - FT.com

With the Senate asking questions about how the multinationals shift money around to minimise tax, the whole question of whether international tax competition is an ultimately harmful "race to the bottom" that countries ought to stop is of greater interest than ever.

The article above (which you may have to answer a question to get to) seems a decent summary of the controversy regarding the matter.   (Of course, seeing libertarians are of the view that tax competition is fine and dandy, I think its a very reasonable conclusion that of course tax competition has become harmful, and that it can all be fixed by war being declared on Ireland, Bermuda, Singapore and any other country that is getting rich by enabling companies to impoverish the rest of the world.)

In other tax musings, I see that many are talking about the advantages of increasing land tax for revenue, and reducing stamp duty and other taxes.

While Jessica Irvine did a good job the other day explaining the advantages, transitioning to such a system would surely be complicated, and the idea that people having attained the "Australian dream" of home ownership with no mortgage now having to pay for the privilege is surely a hard, hard sell politically.

How much easier from a fairness point of view is it to say that companies have to pay local tax in the country where they generate the profit?   Of course, achieving that result with international co-operation is the trick.  I think my warfare plan, as well as rounding up the libertarians as enemies of the State to be interned until the cessation of hostilities, might have trouble being endorsed by politicians:  although I may be in with a chance with the Greens.

The Muslim conspiracy issue - again

'Iraq Is Finished' — The Atlantic

I've asked this before on this blog, probably quite a few times over the years:  why is it that out of all the peoples in the world, Middle East Muslims seem to be the most extraordinarily prone to believing in persecutory conspiracy theories?   Take this, from the rather good article linked above about the situation in Iraq:

 The conversation soon turned to Daesh (known as ISIS in the West), and how the group had formed. A common view I’ve heard in the region, propagated by Sunni and Shiite alike, is that Daesh is the creation of the United States. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq or
Islamic State before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Therefore, so the twisted reasoning goes, the United States must have deliberately created the group in order to make Sunnis and Shiites fight each other, thereby allowing the U.S to continue dominating the region. Local media had reported on alleged U.S. airdrops to Daesh. Some outlets even referred to Daesh's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as an Israeli-trained Mossad agent.

Anyhow, the article in total is well worth reading.

Update:  well, to state the obvious, isn't Google great?   Here's an article from New Statesman last year asking the very same question, and mentions some other "greatest hits" of Muslim nonsense, which the writer notes, extends far beyond the Middle East:

A Pew poll in 2011, a decade after 9/11, found that a majority of respondents in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to believe that the attacks were carried out by Arab members of al-Qaeda. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks,” the Pew researchers noted.

This blindness isn’t peculiar to the Arab world or the Middle East. Consider Pakistan, home to many of the world’s weirdest and wackiest conspiracy theories. Some Pakistanis say the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is a CIA agent. Others think that the heavy floods of 2010, which killed 2,000 Pakistanis, were caused by secret US military technology. And two out of three don’t believe Osama Bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals on Pakistani soil on 2 May 2011.

Consider also Nigeria, where there was a polio outbreak in 2003 after local people boycotted the vaccine, claiming it was a western plot to infect Muslims with HIV. Then there is Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, where leading politicians and journalists blamed the 2002 Bali bombings on US agents.

Why are so many of my fellow Muslims so gullible and so quick to believe bonkers conspiracy theories? How have the pedlars of paranoia amassed such influence within Muslim communities?

The explanations are limited:

I once asked the Pakistani politician Imran Khan why his fellow citizens were so keen on conspiracy theories. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he replied. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time . . . everything becomes a conspiracy.”

The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness. As the former Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has admitted, “the contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories” is a convenient way of “explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader”.

Nor is this about ignorance or illiteracy. Those who promulgate a paranoid, conspiratorial world-view within Muslim communities include the highly educated and highly qualified, the rulers as well as the ruled. A recent conspiracy theory blaming the rise of Islamic State on the US government, based on fabricated quotes from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, was publicly endorsed by Lebanon’s foreign minister and Egypt’s culture minister.

It's all rather depressing.

And what about the irony of how in the United States, the biggest long term dangerous conspiracy going around (climate change is a hoax) is held by those on the Right who are most rabidly anti-Muslim?  Just thought I would throw that in for good measure.

Arnie doesn't like what bodybuilding has become

Has gay panic ruined bodybuilding?

Well, Arnie's not a complete meat head, then.   But gosh he looks old and so far past his prime in those real estate ads showing on Australian TV.

When defence technology doesn't work

The Pentagon's $10-billion bet gone bad - Los Angeles Times

A great, eye catching photo starts this article on the Pentagon spending billions on technology that doesn't live up to its promise.

The LA Times also has a story today about the Cold War era games of Putin:

U.S. F-22 fighter jets scrambled about 10 times last year — twice as often as in 2013 — to monitor and photograph Russian Tu-95 "Bear" bombers and MiG-31 fighter jets that flew over the Bering Sea without communicating with U.S. air controllers or turning on radio
transponders, which emit identifying signals.

The Russian flights are in international airspace, and it's unclear whether they are testing
U.S. defenses, patrolling the area or simply projecting a newly assertive Moscow's global power.

"They're obviously messaging us," said Flores, a former Olympic swimmer who is in charge of Tin City and 14 other radar stations scattered along the vast Alaskan coast. "We
still don't know their intent."

U.S. officials view the bombers — which have been detected as far south as 50 miles off  California's northern coast — as deliberately provocative.

 

Speaking as I was about immaturity

Back in 2011, when David Leyonhjelm was only hoping that a party name confusing to the politically naive voter and a lucky ballot paper draw could inject him Federal Parliament (because his nutty gun loving, pet marsupial ideas certainly couldn't), he decided to drop into a dubious Catallaxy post to make an old, old sexist jape about how funny it could be if a man fooled a woman into having a grope of her breasts.

Hardly anyone at Catallaxy commented on the post, or the comment, and I suspected at the time because they realised that it was pretty immature and embarrassing.

But now that a couple of media outlets have highlighted it, the Catallaxy throng are out in defence of the Senator, and Sinclair Davidson has taken the utterly ridiculous defensive line that Lefties are attacking some valid contribution Leyonhjelm was making to breast cancer awareness.

Seriously. 

These twits can't just fess up to Leyonhjelm repeating an old fashioned, sexist, immature joke he first heard (as I probably did) 30 or so years ago?   Wasn't funny then, nor is it now.    

To Mars

Given that I have been ridiculing the Mars One project lately, I was amused to see in last night's Big Bang Theory that Sheldon was an applicant.  (Actually, I only saw half of the show, so I am not sure if Mars One was mentioned by name, but it's clearly what it was referring to.)

Anyhow, Sheldon's application video really did make me laugh:

Beefy success in Japan

Full plate for Meat & Livestock Australia ‹ Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion

Lots of interesting facts and figures here about the success of Australian beef in Japan.

In other meat news - on Sunday, I tried braising a rolled lamb shoulder in wine and stock, with onion, garlic, carrot, parsnip and celery in the mix, and lots of rosemary.  This smells fantastic while its cooking, and after 2 hours,  the meat is falling apart tender.  But the meat flavour tends to be a bit weakened by being cooked in liquid, in a way roast lamb isn't.  Sure, the stock mix tasted nice, although as usual with herbs, if you cook them too long their taste starts to disappear.   The liquid also had a fair bit of fat in it, and it tended  to run off the meat and so didn't work so well as a seasoning.  I suppose one could cook this one day, and refrigerate the liquid so as to remove the fat, and then boil it down a bit to reduce it to a thicker consistency.   But this is starting to reduce the benefit of braising - put it in the oven and just come back in two hours.

I still thought it a moderate success, but the family outvoted me from trying again.  Such is life.

(Actually, I think these problems can be dealt with by using the very, very slow baking method instead.   That's what I'll try next...)

The Victorian roller craze

The BBC has quite a charming magazine article about Victorian England and its (short lived) craze for roller skating.   It let the young men and ladies mingle in quite a novel fashion, apparently:

By the mid-1870s, a craze for indoor rollerskating had come to Britain, with 50 rinks in place in London at one point. The press dubbed the phenomenon "rinkomania", but the healthy exercise that Plimpton had boasted of was not all that attracted the young "rinkers".

"The skating rink is the neutral ground on which the sexes may meet," reported Australia's Port Macquarie News of goings-on in London and elsewhere, "without all the pomp and circumstances of society. The rink knows no Mother Grundy, with her eagle eye and sharp tongue, for Mother Grundy dare not trust herself on skates, and so the rinker is happier than the horseman of whom Horace sang."

Holding hands and whispering sweet nothings became easier without Mother Grundy - a contemporary term for a stern matriarch - and her ilk tagging along. Prolonged eye contact with one's intended replaced stolen glances...

But rollerskating became less popular by the 1890s, with many rinks, built in a hurry at the height of the craze, going out of business. 

There's probably a cable TV series to be made out of that, somehow.  Especially if there was ever arson and crime involved.

Update: just googling around, it seems that the Suffragette movement used to meet at some roller skating venues, and famously (well, except for me) stayed out all night at one in 1911 to avoid the census.   All good fodder for a TV series...

Worthy movies noted

Seeing I was complaining about un-worthy Hollywood movies, maybe I should I mention two decent ones watched over this weekend:

*  Defiance, the 2008 film with Daniel Craig in the lead was shown on one of the free to air stations Friday night.  I vaguely remember a review of it on the Movie Show, and I don't think it made much money at the box office, but I thought it was very good.   Telling the true-ish story of a few brothers who helped hundreds of East Polish Jews hide out from the Nazis in  the forest was engaging and very interesting.  I felt sorry for Daniel Craig, whose make up requirements for most of the movie seemed to involve being sprayed with fake dirt and grime, but he gave a solid performance.

I see that Ed Zwick directed it.  He also made the under-seen American Civil War movie Glory, and I must catch up with that one again.

*  The Maze Runner:  my son had read the books and wanted to see the movie, so we got it out on DVD.   Sure, it's Young Adult territory here, and, somewhat improbably, the group of young men who have been experimented on in some mysterious fashion have set up an ordered, polite, functioning mini society that is like the exact  opposite of  Lord of the Flies.   (It was also never explained how they managed good hairstyling after three years - at the very least, the elevator supplies should have been shown as including hair wax.)

But I'm nitpicking.   It's actually (for the most part) well acted and crafted, and is rather good for its genre.   Certainly, the setting truly shows how these days, if you can imagine a physical setting, digital effects can easily make it seem convincingly real.  

The movie is set for a sequel, and I hope it at least makes the improbable set up for creating the Maze more convincing...

This doesn't seem very Easter-y

Is 10% of the population really gay? | Society | The Guardian

This seems a bit of a ramble through a complicated topic, but one novel thing I noted in it is about how  the survey evidence does suggest a very large increase in female same sex experimentation in recent decades.   Odd, that...

Update:  took me a long time to find it, but here is my 2013 post which linked to other studies that looked at the same question.  

America tax breaks and social spending considered

The False Hope of a Limited Government, Built on Tax Breaks - NYTimes.com

Tax and social spending issues are rather complicated, no?

I'm not sure if all points in this article are valid, but it certainly seems to make a good case that many of the tax breaks in the US should be reviewed.

Good luck with that...

Easter sugarfest

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.