Fruity news

*  Am I the only person who has noticed how cheap, big (and good quality) pineapples are at the moment?    I don't normally notice them, but this year they have caught my attention and we've bought a few since my daughter has decided they are just about her favourite fruit.   A $3 gigantic one does last a long time, cut up in the fridge.

* Radio National this morning was talking about some Queensland strawberry farmers going out of business because of the ridiculous oversupply which is seeing them sold for $1 a punnet (less than the cost of production.)    While farmers not having the business sense to see an oversupply coming is part of the problem, they did talk about the big supermarket contracts with set prices as being relevant too.  I guess it's sort of obvious that something goes wrong in situations like this, but is doing anything other than letting the market sort itself out worse than the disease?     I don't entirely trust the distorting power of the big supermarket contracts, though. 

Too soon

I thought Four Corners and Media Watch last night on the Liberal leadership changeover last week were both pretty dull with nothing interesting to add. I think the basic problem with the Four Corners show was that it was made too soon - you need more time before more politicians will talk about it in the detail necessary to give some new information we don't already know.

Media Watch seemed pretty bland and cautious on the question of media commentators involvement - particularly given this morning that Alan Jones was on 7.30 (apparently - I didn't see it) saying that he was ringing government members privately about the need to dump Turnbull.  And he says that it was to do with the energy policy, which is, at its heart, about emissions and climate change.   I continue to feel that the media is not emphasising enough the fact that this changeover was at its heart about climate change denialists in the media insisting that Turnbull be dumped because he wants to reduce emissions.

(It's true that Turnbull hurt his credibility by seeking to placate the denialists in his party,  but it was absurd hypocrisy that it was Abbott - a man with a kama sutra history of positions on climate change - who was the one criticising Malcolm for not being consistent on the matter.)

But the extracts that Media Watch played of Bolt, Jones, Credlin and Murray criticising Trunbull, do show how nasty and ridiculously over the top their criticism of a politician can be.  This Fox News-ification of right wing commentary in Australia is very unfortunate, and is destined to poison political discourse here just as it has in the US.  

Says it all

Pretty remarkable, isn't it?   Goes to show that at least previous leadership change plotters were right to think hat a new PM would be at least a bit more popular than the current one. 

Those involved in this one - nope, just wanted Turnbull gone because he had an energy policy that, despite being pretty useless, climate change denialism still couldn't accept. 

Back to physics and the universe

In all of the political intrigue of last week, I overlooked the news that Roger Penrose thinks he may have found some observational evidence for his pet cyclical universe alternative theory to the normal Big Bang with inflation.

Phys.org wrote about it, but then Sabine Hossenfelder expresses some mild to moderate skepticism of the whole theory at Backreaction.

The worst news I am likely to read all day

So, Kevin Rudd has a big spray on the political power of Rupert Murdoch today.

While what he says sounds very true, it would feel more appropriate if it wasn't coming from someone who had sucked up so much to the media - including News Corp - for his own political gain.

I had forgotten until I read the other piece in Fairfax about Kevin's piece that he was personally close to Chris Mitchell:

Mr Rudd courted News Corp editors during his time in politics and was the godfather to the son of Chris Mitchell, former editor-in-chief of The Australian.

I have my doubts they send each other Christmas cards any more.

But here's the worst thing about the Nick O'Malley piece:   I don't follow international media intrigues all that closely, but I had always assumed that the Murdoch kids were likely more liberal and had more morals than Rupert, who looks physically frail and can't be with us for too much longer, surely.  But it seems that may be wrong:

Political and News Corp sources have also told Fairfax Media that they believe that News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch has a particular dislike for Mr Turnbull. They also believe that over the years Lachlan Murdoch has become even more conservative in his world view than his father, and far more conservative than Mr Turnbull. They also confirmed that Lachlan is known to be close to both Ms Credlin and Mr Abbott.

Still, if the Packer family is any guide, things still won't be the same when the Dad dies and the rich kids get to make all decisions.

I'm getting a bit frustrated

While lots of commentators on the Liberal leadership mention climate change denial as a key factor in why Liberal conservatives could never tolerate Turnbull, I still feel that there is inadequate emphasis on this as the reason why the Liberals cannot continue to be an attempted coalition between climate change denialist/conspiracists and the moderates who believe science and the need for a policy to reduce emissions.

You see, this is typical of what Trump loving, alternative reality so-called Australian conservatives believe about climate change and energy policy:

We've all read the continual stream of climate change denialism from Bolt, Blair, Ackerman, lots of guest writers in the Australian, and in the posts and comments at Catallaxy for more than a decade, and one thing is clear:   nothing  will change their minds.    They are convinced by ageing fools who will never concede error, and argue in various combinations of bad faith, ideological blindness, and self interest.   

It has become a core belief aligned with nearly all social conservatives (and with most libertarians) that climate change is not real and/or is nothing to worry about.

Here's the thing:  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE NEGOTIATIONS IN MUTUAL GOOD FAITH ON ENERGY POLICY WITH A SIDE WHICH DENIES THERE IS ANY NEED TO REDUCE EMISSIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE.  


It's that simple.


Remember in 2012 that show on the ABC where a young global warming advocate travelled around with Nick Minchin trying to convince him that his climate change "skepticism" was wrong?  I posted about it at the time.   At the end, there was a fake resolution in which Minchin said he would agree that it wasn't a bad thing to encourage renewables because fossil fuels were not going to last forever.

This was a disingenuous attempt to come up with some sort of "we can work this out" happy ending, but which didn't make sense for a denialist or realist - Australia could easily burn coal for hundreds of years if it kept it to itself and had no concerns about emissions.   And no climate change denying "conservatives" has ever agreed with Minchin, then or now.

So, yeah - as I say, it is that simple.

The Liberals are never going to be come up with an energy policy which will keep a significant chunk of their Federal members (and I do mean "members") or their apparently increasingly right wing "base" happy.

The party will be stuck in internal conflict about this forever, or at least - I would guess - another 10 to 20 years, while we wait for Rupert Murdoch and all of the handful of ageing contrarian scientists who keep the denialism alive to literally die off.

It needs to split, or it is going to be hobbled by that internal conflict for that long

Update:  On Insiders this morning, I saw an extract from Malcolm Turnbull's farewell press conference in which he said word to the effect that it seemed that for the Liberals there were some with ideological reasons preventing agreement on energy policy.

True, but it is not enough to just mildly say that on the way out.  They need to be called out as  simply wrong in their climate change denial and they need to get out of the party!

Quantum computer sighted

It occurred to me this afternoon that I had no idea what a quantum computer physically looked like.

So I Google it, and found this photo from an Engadget article earlier this year, showing the innards of an IBM 50 qubit quantum computer:

Cool.

Actually, it does literally need to be very cool - but the article does a very poor job of explaining how exactly it is cooled down to liquid helium temperatures.   Does the whole thing sit in a liquid helium bath?  

Doubting the choice

I had forgotten how much I disliked Scott Morrison as Immigration minister under Abbott until I searched back through posts here.   He has, deliberately, softened his image since then; and to be honest, I think I did feel more kindly towards him after he appeared with Annabel Crabb on her one-on-one in the kitchen show.

But, he really does strike me as a blustering flim flam man at heart in interviews.  

In a way, I think he shares a bit of the same (in)sincerity problem that Shorten suffers from.   Something about both of their deliveries in interviews and debates often hits notes of blustery insincerity.  

But Labor does not have at its heart a corrosive internal culture war/climate change denial fight going on for its soul.  And, genuinely, they have been doing decent policy work on at least tax.

Labor will deserve to win the next election, and I would be very surprised if Morrison can help the Liberals avoid a significant defeat.

Lulz, as they say (and by the way - just split, Liberals)

Morrison and Frydenberg.  They're not really to be trusted on climate change, but nor are they rabidly into denying it, and so are already being declared a major disappointment for the right wing/conservative denialists in the party.   (Catallaxy commenters are appalled.)  

The decades old, fundamental problem in the party is still unresolved.

Just get out of the way and let Labor govern for a while.

Public butchery not a good idea

I see that The Sun has run an article showing graphic pictures of the animal sacrifices taking place, often on roads or other public places, for Eid in Muslim countries.   (A few posts back, however, I noted how at least one big city - Cairo - was trying to stamp out the practice on public health and hygiene grounds.)

Having a look at the photos - which I don't really recommend - it reminds of me of my theory as to why public attitudes towards gruesome executions have changed so much in the West.   (Even allowing for some people wanting to shock themselves by looking up real life beheadings and gruesome mangled bodies on the 'net, it's pretty much impossible to imagine anything other than public outrage in the West at the idea that public should want to watch any criminal beheaded, hung, or drawn and quartered, when such things did use to be a public spectacle in Christian countries.)

I think that that commonplace public butchery of animals is a possible reason why people used to be not shocked at seeing a "deserving" person butchered in public as well.  But when such animal butchery got hidden away from the market to the interior of a slaughterhouse, public sensitivity to seeing humans broken and cut increased over time too.

And you would have to say that it is Islamic nations (public beheading in Saudi Arabia) and Islamic terrorism that is the main source of such maltreatment of human bodies now. 

I know that you can argue that the public slaughter of animals is more "honest" about how those of us who enjoy meat get our food - many people say that a visit to a slaughterhouse is one of the best ways to be converted to vegetarianism - but being sensitised to the slaughter of animals by keeping it hidden has the added advantage of sensitising people to the slaughter of humans too.

And that is actually a good thing.

So yeah, I wish Muslim countries would stop the public slaughter of animals, for the sake of all of us.

PS:   a handy update on the matter of when and why Judaism stopped animal sacrifice.

PPS:   it is an interesting intellectual exercise to wonder what would happen to Islam if, in an equivalent to the Temple being destroyed in 70CE, its key sacred sites in and around Mecca were to be destroyed.  (Was it one of the three sites fake nuked in Mission Impossible 6?  I forget.)    I guess the immediate aftermath would depend on who caused the destruction.   An asteroid strike might raise particularly difficult questions as to how to interpret it! 

Imre surprises

I have never known much (or more accurately, anything really) about Imre Salusinszky beyond the fact that he was presumably pretty conservative since he and Tim Blair had a short lived stint on ABC radio in one of the early attempts to give a right wing balance, which was cut short and seems to have made Blair absolutely obsessed with wanting to destroy the organisation and all within it ever since. 

But on his twitter feed, he has been fully supporting Chris Uhlmann's attach on the Right wing media's direct and private intervention in cajoling Liberals to dump Turnbull.   He sees no equivalence with Left leaning journalists criticising, say, Abbott:

Well, good on him.

Does he talk to Tim Blair any more?   I can't see that Bolt would want to talk to him after this, either.

Come on Liberals, just split

I saw Amanda Vanstone on TV last night saying that she viewed the "broad church" of the Liberal Party as a positive thing.  She told the story of John Howard in the cabinet or party room siding with the policy of spending a billion dollars on the environment in (I think) 1996, because he said that although he agreed with the conservatives, he thought it was what the electorate wanted.

All very nice in theory, Amanda, but can't you admit that the conservatives, all due to their intransigence on the matter of climate change denial, have caused electoral turmoil over the last decade?

What's more, your pragmatic hero John Howard, once out of politics, went over to the dark side of encouraging the very climate change denialism that has stuffed up energy policy ever since.

Sorry Amanda, the "broad church" has broken down and just doesn't work anymore, and it's not because of moderates like you.

The party needs a proper split.   And the mainstream side needs to stop sending party operatives over to learn how to deny reality from Republicans; tell Murdoch to get stuffed - he and his media outfits are simply wrong about climate change; and similarly to tell the IPA that everyone knows they are just a mouthpiece for Gina Rinehart who's as self interested in her climate change denial as it is possible to get.

Ah, so it all makes sense now [sarc]

I mean, that's just amongst L/NP voters (which is arguably a better take on public sentiment, because it's not confounded by Labor voters who went for Dutton because they think he's hurt the Libs.)

Who the hell has told him he'll do great at the next election?    Has some cabal of Murdoch figures been gaslighting him about how the public will warm to him?

It's very bizarre.

Update:  I've just got around to watching Chris Uhlmann's spray against Sky News and 2GB for them apparently getting directly involved by privately ringing Liberal Party ministers and MPs.   I think he's pretty conservative himself, and no friend of green energy policy, so for him to be so upset with the likes of Alan Jones etc is a pleasant surprise.   

And it does seem to be the only plausible explanation - the climate change denying idiots of Sky and 2GB who have never liked Turnbull were freaked out over his energy policy sticking to Paris targets, and decided to take him down by encouraging the only dimwit able to be gaslit about his own popularity into challenging.     Still doesn't really explain why 35 MPs would go with it, but that's the parlous state of the party at the moment.

And now we cross to a live feed of Malcolm Turnbull in Canberra...

Update:  Or perhaps that should be Peter Dutton, not Turnbull.

I'll pay that...

Yes, quite the coincidence

A long history of demanding loyalty, and not returning it

Now that Trump has dumped Cohen like a hot potato (and tries to keep Manafort on side by praising him - man, he is so transparent), this article at Politico looks at the history of Trump giving no loyalty back as soon as it suits him.  He's really an incredible jerk.

The strange death of the Turnbull government

The bizarre thing is that it seems that no one other than half of the Liberal politicians in Canberra, and the LNP organisation in Queensland, thinks well of Peter Dutton.

I mean, can't they read preferred leader polls?   And lots of people say that for every seat in Queensland that Dutton may hypothetically save, there'll probably be a seat in Victoria or elsewhere that he'll lose.  As I noted yesterday, there's not even obvious support for him in the bitter, aged white male world of Catallaxy.  For many of them, he's not even conservative enough!

And then there's the doubt over whether he is entitled to be in Parliament at all.  What nutty challenger tries to take over leadership when there is that cloud over their head?

Finally, there's the matter of the Coalition polling actually having risen to 51/49 in the last couple of Newspolls.  I couldn't see why this had happened, and it worried me that it put Turnbull in range of another scrappy win at the next election.   So, obviously, what does the party do?  Tear itself apart.

My big hope, that this would cause a proper split in the Party to rid it of climate change denialism once and for all, is seemingly not going to happen.   Turnbull seems to love the top job too much to tell a chuck of his parliamentary supporters to leave the party - but there's no doubt that a new conservative party would form some sort of coalition with the Liberal/Nationals rather than support Labor, which is not going to give up support for higher reduced emissions targets.

Anyway, one of the best discussions I have read about this means for the future of the Liberals is from Ben Eltham, and appears in New Matilda.  A few key bits:

As Tim Colebatch noted this week in Inside Story, the struggle for the future of the party is existential, even ontological. Colebatch notes that “in most of Australia, the Liberals’ shrinking party branches increasingly comprise a narrow base of cultural protesters rather than the broad base of mainstream Australians they had when national development was the issue.”

As I pointed out in an article about the rise of Australian far right, modern conservative thinking has moved rapidly in recent years. Amongst the contemporary conservative base, the onrush of tribalism has resulted in the abandonment of enlightenment values like scientific knowledge, liberal pluralism, or academic expertise. 

As a result, movement conservatives quite literally live in a different reality to moderates and progressives, a world where conspiracy theories flourish, climate change is a myth, and western civilisation is under threat from immigrants, feminists and university lecturers. 

In the longer term, genuine questions must be asked about the future of the conservative project. Can the Liberal Party continue in its current form? Will conservatives succeed in taking over the party machinery and melding it into a much more muscular, far-right apparatus – just as movement conservatives have done in the United States? Or will the party split apart?

In mainstream Australia, the endless culture war has so far been going very badly, as the marriage plebiscite showed. But the culture war within the Liberal Party has been another matter altogether: in the party machinery, the far right is winning.

As out of touch as the conservatives are with mainstream Australia, they are extremely in touch with the active and increasingly radical right. Indeed, it could be argued that this weeks’ events represent the logical conclusion of the radicalisation of the Liberal right.

t’s no coincidence that energy policy proved the spark that ignited the current Liberal conflagration. The passage of virulent climate denialism from fringe right-wing conspiracy theory to the centre of current Liberal policy shows just how radicalised the right of the party has become. Similar trends are apparent on issues like immigration. Such is the drift that a section of the party is more than willing to sabotage a sitting Liberal prime minister in order to secure political and ideological hegemony. 
 
Such actions do not augur well for a sensible and balanced politics in this country. In fact, they suggest precisely the opposite: the rise of a powerful and dangerous far right movement, well on the way to taking over one of the two major parties in Australia’s democracy.

 Actually, I don't agree with that last paragraph - I think the nutty Right of Australia is just having a temporary confidence boost by the Trump ascendancy, but that is going to crash in a screaming wreck very shortly.  Besides, my feeling is that wingnuttery is not as big in Australia as it is in the States, and is artificially boosted in prominence and influence by the Murdoch media.  

While we're on a theme...

I'm a bit amused to read about how, in times past, professional poets to Irish kings and chieftains had to give some pretty extreme, um, lip service to the boss:

The cult seems rooted in the notion of the poet’s relationship with his royal or chiefly patron being equivalent to a marriage, the two sharing the same bed. The following English translations from the original Irish may be cited. One poet tells his patron that it is no act of adultery towards his wife to “lie with me and my kind”, while another who has fallen out of favour seeks reconciliation by urging: “Let us not refrain any longer from lying on one couch, O fair one.” A 14th-century poet calls on his patron to “proffer your red lips to me, give me a fervent kiss . . .” The same states: “To him [the poet] is due loving favour, the primest [sic] liberality, precedence in counsel, the king’s counsel, the sharing of his bed . . .” Some of the language employed is even more extravagant. Thus, an elegy by Brian Ó Gnímh over the spiked head of Alasdair Mac Donald (1586) runs: “I love the still-unbleached red mouth/Head of silk complexion . . ./ . . . smooth delicate cheek/ . . . fine soft abundant curling tresses/ . . . gaze-holding green eyes . . ./ . . . perfect tresses”.

Whether this should be seen as really, truly gay or not seems to be a matter in dispute:

However, we are cautioned by Prof Pádraig Breatnach that “the guise of ‘spouse’ could be adopted by a poet towards several patrons at once”. The poet’s “full assumption of a feminine role” occurs within terms of an established literary “conceit”, and “we must be wary of drawing hasty conclusions as to his psychology...” A parallel study by Prof Katherine Simms draws attention to the contemporary “traditional role of the poet as in some sense his patron’s spouse or lover”. However, “the bard has no intention . . . of implying a homosexual relationship with his patron . . . Bed-sharing was a general mark of esteem and trust in this society, peculiarly appropriate between a king and his poet.” Both the foregoing base their observations in large part on the earlier work of Prof James Carney.

 The guy who wrote the article goes on to argue "yeah, nah", but who is right I don't know.

I do think it kind of funny though to imagine a 100% straight poet having to gush like that to keep his job.

Just when you thought Malaysia was making sudden improvements...

..The Guardian reports that:

The general election in May has been celebrated for ushering in a new era, but the new government’s first 100 days in power have been marked by increased discrimination, harassment and violent hate crime against the LGBT community.

Which is pretty odd, given the anointment of Anwar Ibrahim, alleged sodomite, by Mahathir as the next leader.   Anyway, some particular incidents behind the report:

In the early hours of Saturday, the police and government officials raided a small nightclub in Kuala Lumpur.

The venue, Blue Boy, was known to be popular with the LGBT community, but for years had been relatively left alone by the authorities. Until the weekend. Twenty men were detained and ordered into counselling for “illicit behaviour” by the Federal Territory Islamic Religious Department of Malaysia (JAKIM).

Government minister Khalid Samad later released a statement on the motivations behind the raid. “Hopefully this initiative can mitigate the LGBT culture from spreading into our society,” he said....

Just two days before the raid, a trans woman was brutally beaten on the street in Seremban while seven others watched. The attack left her with broken ribs, a broken backbone and a ruptured spleen.

In the same week, a sharia court ordered a lesbian couple to be caned after they were caught having sex in a car, the first time in years such a punishment had been handed out in Malaysia. The judge said it was “a lesson and reminder to not just the two of you, but the members of society”....

The minister for religious affairs, Mujahid Yusof Rawa, has said the government would “take proactive measures to curb the growing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender issues, and help them to return to the right path and lead a normal life”. The deputy minister for public affairs, Dr Lee Boon Chye, stated last week that LGBT people have an “organic disorder”.