Theatre critic time

Went to see Alladin last night at QPAC.

I reckon plenty of adults not normally attracted to Disney "princess" stories saw the movie in the 1980's because of Robin Williams as the genie; but to be honest, it was probably the start of my assessment that his shtick was overrated.   I was underwhelmed.

As a stage show, however, mounted on a large scale with additional songs, it's impossible to actively dislike.   It's very enjoyable, in fact. 

Struggling to find something to analyse, I would say, however, that the resolution at the end seems rushed.   But, now that I think of it, My Fair Lady (the last musical I saw) suffered the same issue.   I guess there is something about the structure of a Broadway musical that is unavoidable - the expectation that the first half will contain the killer highlight, then the second half has to have another peak well ahead of the ending which, at most, contains a short reprieve of the main songs.  

Something of an exception, perhaps, now that I think of it, is the musical version of Hairspray (which I have only seen as a movie.)   The protracted set piece at the end really is the highlight of the movie, which, however, is too long overall.  

Anyway, one thing I will never see is the stage version of Frozen, which has just started in New York.   That girl power material that plays, let's face it, as a warning to young girls to not only never trust men, but also encourages using passive males for advantage,  remains (to my mind), only capable of great endorsement by girls and gay men, both of whom suffer from a peculiar fondness for schmaltzy power ballads.  

Fake meat fun

Yeah, while I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with it, I do share this guy's interest is seeking out fake meat products that are satisfyingly meat-like:

I’m obsessed with mock meat and I’m not even a vegetarian

And the best products do tend to involve fungi - particularly shiitake mushrooms, which can be made with the firmer "bite" that a lot of fake meat products lack.   (Quorn is too soft, and expensive, in my opinion.) 

Sounds premature

This article seems to involve a little too much self-promotion, but if true, it's good news:

A Vancouver-based research team led by Canada's most cited neuroscientist, Dr. Patrick McGeer, has successfully carried out studies suggesting that, if started early enough, a daily regimen of the non-prescription NSAID (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug) ibuprofen can prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease. This means that by taking an over-the-counter medication, people can ward off a disease that, according to Alzheimer's Disease International's World Alzheimer Report 2016, affects an estimated 47 million people worldwide, costs health care systems worldwide more than US$818 billion per year and is the fifth leading cause of death in those aged 65 or older.

It actually goes on to talk more about testing saliva to see if people are likely to develop Alzheimer's, rather than the protective effects of ibuprofen.  Seems very PR department written, if you ask me...

Things never cooked

Inspired by seeing a can of ghee for sale in my local Coles, I started mentally listing things I've never cooked/cooked with:

Ghee
celeriac
jerusalem artichokes
real saffron
livers from any creature
kidneys from any creature

My Mum used to cook lamb's fry (liver) in a pressure cooker when I was a kid, and I didn't mind it in small quantities.  I seem to recall it make for a particularly delicious gravy.  She also did steak and kidney stew, and again, kidneys in small amounts were OK.   But can't say I have had much inclination to try eating them again (pate excepted.)

I haven't been paying close attention to My Kitchen Rules this season - I agree with some critic somewhere who said that the "drama" element of the show has been pumped up more and more every season, and it's now more the point than the cooking.   From some advertisement I half watched last night, it looks like the show will soon feature a disaster of some kind - was that a contestant or two  lying on the yard with an ambulance in attendance?   Come on, this is getting very silly.

Anyway, I did see part of it recently where, once again, the cooks were served bone marrow as an entry.

Don't know why, but I find the idea of eating the jelly like, fatty substance by itself just really off-putting.  Even though, when cooking ossu bucco, it is probably the melted marrow which makes the surrounding stew so good.   Some cooks love it, though.

Must mean something to someone

An abstract at arXiv:

The ability to control multidimensional quantum systems is key for the investigation of fundamental science and for the development of advanced quantum technologies. Here we demonstrate a multidimensional integrated quantum photonic platform able to robustly generate, control and analyze high-dimensional entanglement. We realize a programmable bipartite entangled system with dimension up to 15×15 on a large-scale silicon-photonics quantum circuit. The device integrates more than 550 photonic components on a single chip, including 16 identical photon-pair sources. We verify the high precision, generality and controllability of our multidimensional technology, and further exploit these abilities to demonstrate key quantum applications experimentally unexplored before, such as quantum randomness expansion and self-testing on multidimensional states. Our work provides a prominent experimental platform for the development of multidimensional quantum technologies. 

Facebook and your call history

Look, privacy concerns don't rank very highly with me, given that I work on the theory that anyone who uses the incredible useful Google products should just assume that the company knows everything about everyone and hope that the flood of information is what inadvertently protects your privacy.  (And besides, most people's private life is not that interesting anyway.)

But  even I can see how this is pretty outrageous:

Facebook logs texts and calls, users find as they delete accounts

I've never held Facebook in high regard, and I imagine that it is a much easier hacked source of private info than Google accounts.   I hope the company gets hurt out of this.

Update:   have a look at this Twitter thread for some more details on the amazing amount of data retained by Facebook and Google.

Jumper song

I've been enjoying Moone Boy on Netflix (before it disappears on 30 March), and thought I should look up the origin of the short theme song.  Wikipedia told me it's part of a song that was well known in Ireland.

Here it is - the very silly "Where's Me Jumper":

Hardly surprising

I see that Newspoll shows only 33% support for Labor's new "no more cash rebate if you pay no tax" policy re dividend imputation, and 50% opposed and 17% undecided.  (Sorry, no good link for that.)

This is hardly surprising, when the Right has been continually claiming it's going back to "double taxation", and Labor (and journalists) have been slow to call them out.  See Gerard Henderson on Insiders yesterday as an example.

While it's clear that there are ways of seeking to defend the current policy (all bad, and many disingenuous, I reckon), the accusation of "double taxation" is not one of them - because it isn't, simple as that.

In any event, Labor is still not looking bad in the polls, with primary vote up to 39%.  I think the old rule of thumb still applies - a major party has to aim be at 40% of primary to be feeling reasonably confident of a two party preferred win, but with Liberals on 37%, I would rather be in Labor's shoes.

But at the end of the day, it will probably still be a pretty close election though, I suspect.

And now for something completely different - a link to a Breitbart article

I was only over there to see any update on their desperate and bizarrely nonsensical "ignore those anti-gun rallies - there were being political" line when I saw a link to an article attacking Bill Maher for attacking the late Andrew Breitbart.  Fortunately, all the article does is explain Maher's attack, and it is pretty funny.

(To summarise - both Breitbart and Bannon tried to break into Hollywood, and as a result of their rejection, decided to go on all out attack on liberals.)   Some parts:

He also said that the same thing happened to Andrew Breitbart, “who admits he came to Hollywood, ‘with the hope that I’d eventually become a comedy writer.’ And to his successor there, Steve Bannon, also a showbiz reject, who didn’t have the talent to cut it here, and so, spent the rest of life hating, Hollywood, and by extension, all liberals.”

Maher further stated, “In his memoir, Breitbart mentions Reagan 6 times, and me 34 times.” Maher also stated that Andrew Breitbart’s criticism of cocktail parties on the Westside is “funny, because, you know, for years, you know who I’d always see at cocktail parties on the Westside? Andrew Breitbart. Oh, he hated Hollywood, hated it, hated it, hated it, mostly from his home in America’s heartland, Brentwood.”

Maher’s monologue continued, “As for Bannon, George Clooney remembers him as ‘a schmuck who literally tried everything he could to sell scripts‘ including, this is true, a rap musical of Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus.’ … But trust me, if Bannon could’ve sold a screenplay or Breitbart a sitcom, they wouldn’t have ended up ranting and raving about cocktail parties on the Westside, they’d be attending them. And in Bannon’s case, finishing the drinks people left on the table, including the ones with a cigarette in them.”

Nuttier than I thought

It took a bit of Googling, but I finally turned up an accessible copy of Helen Dale's opinion piece in the Weekend Australian, about the #MeToo movement.    (I was alerted to its existence by Sinclair Davidson posting about it with approval - with Dale, it's always with his approval - at Catallaxy.)   I'm not sure if it will work for you, but here's the link that got me to it.

The piece starts with a bit of lightweight autobiography (let's assume it's true, even though many have questioned some other autobiographical claims) which seems largely irrelevant to the #MeToo movement:   it's about her regret that workplaces have "lost something" by virtue of not being able to feature female nudey pics on the wall any more.  She says that when she was nearly 15 she was working at a place where her "first boss" had, amongst other sexually explicit things on the wall, a Pirelli calendar.   Years later when she visited again these were gone because it was by then "illegal" to have then in the workplace.

This, Dale regretted (and apparently still does?) because, well, she didn't mind them and, presumably, the rest of (not queer) young women who might work there should just suck it up.   Bizarrely, she doesn't seem to make allowance for the fact that her own open queer status meant that she would be an unlikely workplace male target for sexual favours, and as such could afford to take a more carefree attitude to a sexualised workplace where males could feel free to drool and joke about the naked women on the wall.    And let's not pretend the Pirelli calendars were subtle - here's one from 1986, which should match the year she says she was working at this place.  No pubic hair allowed, but apart from that, of course they should not be a on workplace wall.    On the wall in some wannabe Hugh Hefner's den, sure.  The workplace - no.

Then we get to the core nonsense of her criticism of the #MeToo movement:  it's got a large element of slut-shaming, apparently!:

I have a similar sense about the recent #MeToo movement, much of which seems to be so very high school: all the pretty girls from good families are congratulating each other for “bravely speaking out” about the advances they refused, while the women who made a calculation and opted to get their knees dirty are wisely keeping quiet.

There’s a smugly slut-shaming flip side to the solidarity: wearing black to the Golden Globes, telling stories about who touched whose knee, applauding Oprah Winfrey’s speech.  ...

....Women who accede to male entreaties — those who get their knees dirty — can be written off as sluts (something women do to other women far more frequently than men do to women), which burnishes the refusers’ reputations.

This, it seems to me until I see some evidence to the contrary, is entirely a matter from Dale's imagination.   She also seems to suffer from silly overuse of "get their knees dirty".

And to illustrate the degree to which she's wrong, one of the key controversial pieces in the #MeToo movement was that essay published by a young woman about a date that went wrong with Aziz Anzari.   The complainant had dinner, went back to his apartment, partook in some foreplay, but found his insistent manner that they now proceed to intercourse off putting, and she left and wrote a column about it.   Aziz later said he thought everything had been consensual - she apparently thought he could read her mind that she didn't like some of his "moves".   You can read here a piece critical of this woman's attitude.

There was much debate over this essay, and I do not recall any of it from the feminist, #MeToo supporting side involving  "slut shaming".  Sure, from the conservative side, some men in particular might have said "jeez, this was just a first date hook up that you decided to back out off after happily starting with sex.  Boo hoo."  But a #MeToo supporter who called her a slut for doing that?  Not that I've seen.

I don't recall anything in #MeToo involving women "slut shaming" other women - in fact, if you discount (as everyone does) nutty Dworkin style "all intercourse is rape" theorising, it's just not something feminism does.

If Dale has got some examples of women saying "so, actress Y says she slept with director X to get a role - shame on actress Y!"  I'd like to see them.

This is all not to say that the #MeToo movement is beyond criticism - just that Dale's criticism seems to me more fantasy than reality.  For one thing, if all women who (gawd) "got their knees dirty" are "wisely keeping quiet", how does Dale even know what they think about their decision?   

The piece is, perhaps, just Dale's attempt to get more publicity for her novel, which, as far as I can tell, has hardly set the literary world alight with attention or sales.   But does she have to mount such a silly argument to do so?

Update:  I haven't even addressed the bit in her article which upset the Catallaxy crowd - where she notes that a mutual willingness to "slut shame" helps account for a claimed "now-common alliance between feminists and religious conservatives — including, bewilderingly, Islamic conservatives",  but it is just as silly as the rest of her article.  Yes, some feminists make excuses for elements of Islamic practice which separate women as being empowering to the women who want to be separated.  (It's not a million miles from the idea that women joining a nunnery in centuries past was empowering compared to being a husband's chattel.) But feminists supporting Islam because they think Western women are slutty sex addicts - come on, show us the examples, Helen.  

But they're being political!

It looks like the anti gun marches across the US have been a huge (at least numerical) success.

The pathetic American Right, which keeps stumping me with its stupidity, can only react with:   "Don't pay them any attention - they're being political!  This was supposed to be about safety - but instead they're being political!"   

Look at this, for example, at Breitbart (I won't bother linking):

The thousands of people who took part in the March for Our Lives protest along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, on Saturday carried signs revealing their anti-gun, anti-Trump, and pro-left wing agenda.

Well, duh.

Even at Hot Air, we get this as a subheading to a Jazz Shaw post:

So much for school safety. This was about politics

And in his post: 

Wait a minute. I thought this was a rally to end gun violence in schools? Or at least a more generic call to “action.” When did the focus of the entire thing become “gun control?” Ah, well. Nevermind, I guess. This is CNN.

Well, double duh.

I mean, honestly.  While Democrats are not all pure of heart on gun control, as if the main legislative blockage to serious reform isn't Republicans.    

European towns can be ridiculously pretty

Found this on Reddit this morning:

It's Colmar, France, near the German border, and I've never even heard of the place.

Look who's alienated now

This essay at Aeon is a bit of a hard slog in the middle, but I think the basic argument sounds right.

It's about how the concept of "alienation" as an explanation or description of modern psychic malaise rose and then fell away over the course of the 20th century.

I think the argument can be summarised roughly as this:  the concept inherently put value, or assumed that people put value in, cultural unity and personal fulfilment through meaningful and creative work, which modern capitalism broke down.   However, in recent decades the Left (perhaps partly enabled by the wealth increasing success of capitalism) moved away from thinking that uniformity in community has inherent value - in other words, the rise of identity politics has meant that many people now (in a sense) seek or value "alienation".   Therefore, contrary to (say) the 1960's when people would say someone complaining of alienation was a Leftist hippy, those who feel alienated now are on the Right.

Here are the concluding paragraphs:

...For all its potential to sow division, identity politics might still reflect a justifiable search for roots and community. But it’s also true that many now celebrate the freedom to alter identities rather than meekly accept them, and that post-identitarian multiplicity is enjoying a renewal. Such discourses repudiate or at least complicate a simple denunciation of alienation from wholeness.

This change is most clearly registered in political terms. In the heyday of Marxist Humanism, alienation could be understood in terms of the capitalist mode of production, which thwarted the possibility of unalienated labour. But eventually the Left came to de-emphasise class, for better or worse, and substitute questions of culture for those of production. When Leftist politics embraced tolerance of difference, it grew wary of stigmatising the alien – including the alien within. Rather than yearning for ‘well-rounded wholeness’ or a comforting immersion in the warm bath of communal uniformity, this political shift meant recognising the virtues of protean personal identities and diasporic dispersion.

Hostility to the alien ‘other’, both without and within, has now migrated to the populist Right. Those who most loudly broadcast their alienation today, infusing it with rage and resentment, are likely to be from once-comfortable and hegemonic segments of the population. They feel threatened by the growing erosion of their status in a society that they remember – or at least claim to remember – as homogeneous, integrated and settled. Religious, ethnic, national and gender identities become more rigidly defended against perceived erosion. Many people panic when faced with fluid selves that embrace rather than bemoan the ‘alien’ within – expressed, for example, in their passionate resistance to transgender identity. And they are even more unnerved by the literal arrival of non-citizen ‘aliens’, legal as well as illegal, who threaten their alleged ethnic purity and cultural unity. For them, ‘hybridisation’ is really ‘mongrelisation’. Attempting to restore past ‘greatness’ or fend off ‘pollution’, they agitate for walls to keep dangerous others out, fearing that every newcomer is inherently a threatening intruder.

In short, alienation in the second decade of the 21st century has not actually faded away as a descriptor of human distress. Rather, it has become most visible in the anxiety of those who bemoan the transformation of a beloved homeland into an unrecognisable nation of aliens.

I think the argument, concentrating as it does on Marxist and other arty philosophers influenced society, does overlook the role of science from 1850 in changing cultural self understanding, at least in the West.

But it's still an interesting essay.

OK, so the American Right is stupider than I thought..

Two defences of appointing Bolton as National Security Adviser have appeared overnight - one from Hugh Hewitt, who I think is a lightweight twit, but another from David French at National Review, which I find a bit more surprising.   I guess I didn't realise the extent to which Bolton kept contacts with Right wing punditry.

Both articles contain some pretty inane comments.  Hewitt in particular has to go back to 2007 to find one line which he latches onto as evidence of Bolton's reasonableness:

Critics charge that Bolton likes war — a ridiculous assertion. As he told me in one especially memorable two-hour interview back in 2007: “Nobody should want a war on the Korean Peninsula.” Chew on that, critics.

It's like he's writing for his high school paper.

At least David French tackles head on Bolton's recent musings:

Even one of the pieces that the New York Times cites to justify its alarm — Bolton’s 2017 Wall Street Journal article analyzing military options in North Korea — contains this key sentence: “The U.S. should obviously seek South Korea’s agreement (and Japan’s) before using force, but no foreign government, even a close ally, can veto an action to protect Americans from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons.”

This is a sensible statement, indicating both the desire for agreement with key allies and the necessity of national self-defense...

A sensible statement?   Given that it implies Bolton thinks that a pre-emptive strike on North Korea is something the US could consider, and do so even if South Korea says "what, are you out of your mind?  We're the ones who are going to suffer the consequences in tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties":  no, it's not a "sensible" thing to say.

If you want an article detailing the time - a little over a decade ago - when Republicans could see the danger and problem with Bolton's dishonesty and behaviour in government, have a read of this column at the New York Times.

The answer is "Yes"

At the Atlantic:

Can Electrically Stimulating Your Brain Make You Too Happy?

Uh oh

NPR puts it this way:

Trump National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster To Resign, Be Replaced By John Bolton

....But if Trump liked that vision, he apparently grew to dislike McMaster.

According to inside accounts, the two men clashed when McMaster's cerebral briefings crashed into Trump's more freewheeling style.

Places in the world where much of the population's general anxiety just bumped up a few notches:

South Korea
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Japan
Taiwan
USA

I think only the wingnuttiest of wingnuts will be pleased with this.   I will be curious which right wing sites positively support it. 

Autism and transgender

Slate has an article discussing something I didn't know:

“We have enough evidence, across multiple studies internationally, to say that autism is more common in gender-diverse youth than in the general population,” said John Strang, a neuropsychologist and founder of the Gender and Autism Program at Children’s National Health System in Washington. Strang authored a 2014 analysis that found that more than 5 percent of autistic youth sampled for his study also displayed some level of desire to be the other gender, according to parental reports. (He cautioned that it’s too soon to say what the exact percentage in the overall population may be.) Another widely referenced study found that 7.8 percent of young people being treated for gender dysphoria at a clinic in Amsterdam had a confirmed diagnosis of ASD.

I wonder if this has anything to do with some rather nerdy professions - IT and engineering, for example - perhaps being disproportionately over-represented in transgender numbers?  (I'm not 100% sure that they are, but I have a vague feeling that I have read something indicating that.)

Brexit analysis

This ex-politician's analysis of several authors' take on Brexit is pretty good, and witty as well.  Roger Scruton is described as "a kind of mystical Brexiteer";  Corbyn gets mentioned this way:

Following the thinking of Jeremy Corbyn is also difficult, owing to its apparent absence, but from the leader himself down to militant Guardian columnists the anti-migration sentiments of voters are denied, played down, or avoided.

As for "brains for Brexit":

The “brains for Brexit” camp voiced little or no concern over immigration, a silence that impugned the judgement of the voting masses. Playing the populist defender while being sniffy about popular thinking is an inglorious intellectual posture.

Go read it all.

The unknown China

Quite a remarkable article at Foreign Policy about the extraordinary difficulty (or impossibility, perhaps?) of knowing what's really going on inside China on any issue at all.

How cheap can film making get?

I'm surprised to read that Steven Soderbergh's latest film was shot completely on an iPhone (!).   This article says it makes for some "harsh and uncompromising" visuals, but it suits the story.