While you can still find tweets and the occasional headline like this:
Trump shows he still doesn't grasp who bears the brunt of tariffs
it's pretty incredible that we are watching a US President re-engaging in a trade war while making it abundantly clear that he still doesn't understand what he is doing (in that he doesn't understand tariffs, at all.)
How can any economist of any credibility defend a President so dumb as to not be able to absorb correction on this matter?
The media (and much of the public) has become pretty much numb to the absurdity of the situation.
Thursday, May 09, 2019
Time for out and proud atheists
This one's sure to appeal to Jason.
Lots of good points made in Max Boot's Washington Post column about America's weirdly distrustful attitude towards atheist politicians, when disbelief (or agnosticism, at least) is actually rapidly climbing in the nation, and much of American religiosity has permanently tainted itself by supporting Trump:
It’s time for us to have an unapologetic atheist in the Oval Office
Boot indicates that even Democrat Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is not an atheist. And he's right: Wikipedia says he attends a small Protestant denomination:
Lots of good points made in Max Boot's Washington Post column about America's weirdly distrustful attitude towards atheist politicians, when disbelief (or agnosticism, at least) is actually rapidly climbing in the nation, and much of American religiosity has permanently tainted itself by supporting Trump:
It’s time for us to have an unapologetic atheist in the Oval Office
Boot indicates that even Democrat Presidential candidate Andrew Yang is not an atheist. And he's right: Wikipedia says he attends a small Protestant denomination:
Yang attends the Reformed Church of New Paltz with his family and has identified Mark E. Mast as their pastor.[40][41]Update: well, I feel it a bit embarrassing to admit I didn't know this about Winston Churchill (I have never read a biography of him), but Boot points out he was a disbeliever with only the most nominal attachment to the Anglican Church. A detailed article about his (lack of) religious belief can be found here.
Shorten did fine
If anything, I wish he had been more sarcastic and ridiculing of Morrison's laughable line that the Coalition accepted climate change and the need to take action on it. He should have mentioned Morrison's lump of coal in Parliament, although I suppose that would have led to questions about Adani that Shorten would prefer not raised.
Overall, though, people who hated Shorten before the debate will still hate him; people like me who think Morrison is an inch deep failed advertising executive who has accidentally found himself as Prime Minister will still view him the same.
Shorten's summary of the Coalition was spot on, though: they want you to believe that everything is fine, when most suspect we are just skating on thin ice with the global economy changing in ways no one completely understands, and the feeling of an ever present risk of another financial meltdown of some sort or another. I like that Labor has made itself a "big target" in terms of tax reform and climate change - that's how politics should work.
Overall, though, people who hated Shorten before the debate will still hate him; people like me who think Morrison is an inch deep failed advertising executive who has accidentally found himself as Prime Minister will still view him the same.
Shorten's summary of the Coalition was spot on, though: they want you to believe that everything is fine, when most suspect we are just skating on thin ice with the global economy changing in ways no one completely understands, and the feeling of an ever present risk of another financial meltdown of some sort or another. I like that Labor has made itself a "big target" in terms of tax reform and climate change - that's how politics should work.
Wednesday, May 08, 2019
Mum's the word
What an interesting day in Murdoch land.
The Daily Telegraph took a pretty bizarre decision to run as front page news that Bill Shorten didn't include in his Q&A explanation about his Mum (that she wanted to be a lawyer but to support her kids she became a teacher) enough detail about how she later did go on to study and practice law, although only for 6 years as a barrister. Unsurprisingly, Shorten had publicly discussed his Mum's late career in law before - it's not as if it is a secret.
So it was a ridiculous decision to try to make a mountain out of a molehill. In fact, I'm not even sure that it's a molehill - there's nothing to show Shorten was being deceptive given his mother's career was already a matter on the public record.
Yet the Tele's opinion editor, James Morrow, who I recently noted has always seemed to want to live up closely to the first part of his "Prick with a fork" nom de plume, turned up on twitter promoting the story. Tim Blair also noted it on his blog with approval, and hopeless partisan hack and enriched canine admirer Chris Kenny defended the story too.
On the other side of the Murdoch fence, though, the Herald in Melbourne decided not to run it, and Andrew Bolt has defended that decision.
The overwhelming take on the matter on Twitter that this is a real misfire and is much more likely to help Shorten than hurt him.
Here's my take: I wouldn't have thought it's likely to be any sort of key turning point of the campaign - it didn't exactly attack his Mum, even though the headline was ambiguous - but gee it shows what ridiculous editorial judgement pervades the Daily Telegraph. (And the Courier Mail too, apparently.)
As a semi-gotcha, it might at most have been worth appearing as a small part of some opinion hack's mid section column - and it is the sort of useless rubbish that Tim Blair now excels at in his blog.
But when even Andrew Bolt can see that putting it as the front page lead story is wrong - well, as I say, it's a weird day in Murdoch land.
Update: I see that Shorten has elaborated on his Mum's legal career, indicating that the late start did affect it:
It just makes the Daily Telegraph's story, and all who defend it, look pretty idiotic.
Update 3: jeez, I was right the first time - I thought I was reading transcript of the Q&A show when it was an interview or talk he gave somewhere else. Now that I'm sure I have read the right transcript, I see that he didn't go on to say on Q&A that his Mum had gone on to study and try being a barrister in her 50's - after a career in teaching that had not been her first preference.
The Daily Telegraph took a pretty bizarre decision to run as front page news that Bill Shorten didn't include in his Q&A explanation about his Mum (that she wanted to be a lawyer but to support her kids she became a teacher) enough detail about how she later did go on to study and practice law, although only for 6 years as a barrister. Unsurprisingly, Shorten had publicly discussed his Mum's late career in law before - it's not as if it is a secret.
So it was a ridiculous decision to try to make a mountain out of a molehill. In fact, I'm not even sure that it's a molehill - there's nothing to show Shorten was being deceptive given his mother's career was already a matter on the public record.
Yet the Tele's opinion editor, James Morrow, who I recently noted has always seemed to want to live up closely to the first part of his "Prick with a fork" nom de plume, turned up on twitter promoting the story. Tim Blair also noted it on his blog with approval, and hopeless partisan hack and enriched canine admirer Chris Kenny defended the story too.
On the other side of the Murdoch fence, though, the Herald in Melbourne decided not to run it, and Andrew Bolt has defended that decision.
The overwhelming take on the matter on Twitter that this is a real misfire and is much more likely to help Shorten than hurt him.
Here's my take: I wouldn't have thought it's likely to be any sort of key turning point of the campaign - it didn't exactly attack his Mum, even though the headline was ambiguous - but gee it shows what ridiculous editorial judgement pervades the Daily Telegraph. (And the Courier Mail too, apparently.)
As a semi-gotcha, it might at most have been worth appearing as a small part of some opinion hack's mid section column - and it is the sort of useless rubbish that Tim Blair now excels at in his blog.
But when even Andrew Bolt can see that putting it as the front page lead story is wrong - well, as I say, it's a weird day in Murdoch land.
Update: I see that Shorten has elaborated on his Mum's legal career, indicating that the late start did affect it:
Mr Shorten elaborated that while his mother had eventually studied law, she was a victim of age discrimination - despite her academic record, no law firm hired her to complete her articles and when she did join the bar, she only received about nine briefs.
"It was actually a bit dispiriting," he said.Update 2: since I first wrote the post, I have re-read what Shorten said on Q&A, and realised he had made it very clear she did study and practice law. (When I first posted, I was going by memory of part of what he had said.) I have therefore amended the post.
It just makes the Daily Telegraph's story, and all who defend it, look pretty idiotic.
Update 3: jeez, I was right the first time - I thought I was reading transcript of the Q&A show when it was an interview or talk he gave somewhere else. Now that I'm sure I have read the right transcript, I see that he didn't go on to say on Q&A that his Mum had gone on to study and try being a barrister in her 50's - after a career in teaching that had not been her first preference.
Awful
What a heartbreaking visual summation of the full effects on school kids of another school shooting in the US:
It's from a Politico story on today's Denver shooting, which seems to have involved injury only, not death, by some good fortune. But you can imagine the ongoing psychological effects...
Update: yeah, one kid did die, by putting himself in harm's way. And another kid turned up on TV talking about he had hid and was prepared to have a go at the shooter too:
It's from a Politico story on today's Denver shooting, which seems to have involved injury only, not death, by some good fortune. But you can imagine the ongoing psychological effects...
Update: yeah, one kid did die, by putting himself in harm's way. And another kid turned up on TV talking about he had hid and was prepared to have a go at the shooter too:
12-year-old Nate Holley tells CNN's Brooke Baldwin that he hid in a closet during the violence at STEM School Highlands Ranch and had been prepared to fight off the shooter with a baseball batAs Daily Kos says:
"I was going to go down fighting, if I was going to go down."
Young children like Nate Holley should not be thinking about how they can sacrifice themselves to save their classmates in the face of another mass shooting. This is insanity. In fact, it was another student at STEM School Highlands Ranch who rushed one of the shooters. Kendrick Castillo was supposed to graduate high school this week and now his parents are planning a funeral instead of a graduation party.
Quantum physics and time
I read this paper at arXiv recently, and despite the abstract, it was in large part relatively readable:
It's also been a couple of weeks since I read it, but if I recall correctly, at the end of the day I thought it seemed to be perhaps just a very complicated way of arguing that if you view time as something we are embedded in, rather than something we pass through, it solves a lot of what seems like quantum mystery.
The view of time they promote would also seem to raise questions of free will and determination - about which there is more here, although I have not read it thoroughly.
Interesting. You can download the paper here.
We discuss the implications for the determinateness and intersubjective consistency of conscious experience in two gedanken experiments from quantum mechanics (QM). In particular, we discuss Wigner's friend and the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment with a twist. These are both cases (experiments) where quantum phenomena, or at least allegedly possible quantum phenomena/experiments, and the content/efficacy of conscious experience seem to bear on one another. We discuss why these two cases raise concerns for the determinateness and intersubjective consistency of conscious experience. We outline a 4D-global constraint-based approach to explanation in general and for QM in particular that resolves any such concerns without having to invoke metaphysical quietism (as with pragmatic accounts of QM), objective collapse mechanisms or subjective collapse. In short, we provide an account of QM free from any concerns associated with either the standard formalism or relative-state formalism, an account that yields a single 4D block universe with determinate and intersubjectively consistent conscious experience for all conscious agents. Essentially, the mystery in both experiments is caused by a dynamical/causal view of QM, e.g., time-evolved states in Hilbert space, and as we show this mystery can be avoided by a spatiotemporal, constraint-based view of QM, e.g., path integral calculation of probability amplitudes using future boundary conditions. What will become clear is that rather than furiously seeking some way to make dubious deep connections between quantum physics and conscious experience, the kinds of 4D adynamical global constraints that are fundamental to both classical and quantum physics and the relationship between them, also constrain conscious experience. That is, physics properly understood, already is psychology.That last line is, however, more or less clickbait in my opinion.
It's also been a couple of weeks since I read it, but if I recall correctly, at the end of the day I thought it seemed to be perhaps just a very complicated way of arguing that if you view time as something we are embedded in, rather than something we pass through, it solves a lot of what seems like quantum mystery.
The view of time they promote would also seem to raise questions of free will and determination - about which there is more here, although I have not read it thoroughly.
Interesting. You can download the paper here.
Why now?
Doesn't it seem very odd that no one seems to know why exactly the US is sabre rattling Iran? As the BBC says:
Mr Pompeo cancelled a trip to Berlin to meet with Iraqi leaders during a four-hour stop in the capital Baghdad.Does anyone sensible trust Bolton's judgement in such matters?
The visit came days after a US aircraft carrier was deployed to the region, which officials said was in response to threats to US forces and its allies from Iran.
On Tuesday it was revealed the US was sending B-52 bombers to the region.
The US has given little information about the exact nature of the reported threat, which Iran has dismissed as nonsense.
John Bolton, the US national security adviser, said only that the US was acting "in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings" on announcing the deployment of the USS Abraham Lincoln on Sunday.
Things that I wish weren't going on right now
In the context of an election campaign where the polling is closer than it should be, I do wish that we weren't seeing:
* eggs being thrown at any Coalition politician,
* animal rights activists invading farms (although it hasn't happened for a few weeks), or
* the fight over Folau.
All of these issues are capable of motivating culture war sympathy to the Coalition side by undecideds, who are (in some cases), so stupid as to be considering voting for the ridiculously politically vacuous parties of Hanson and Palmer, despite their clear, terrible, history of just being in politics as self indulgent careerists and attracting nutters as candidates.
I am surprised at the ability of Palmer advertising to make unengaged people forget what a true flake he is. Disgustingly, Morrison and the Coalition should be blasting Palmer for his corporate behaviour with both barrels, but for their political advantage, they aren't.
* eggs being thrown at any Coalition politician,
* animal rights activists invading farms (although it hasn't happened for a few weeks), or
* the fight over Folau.
All of these issues are capable of motivating culture war sympathy to the Coalition side by undecideds, who are (in some cases), so stupid as to be considering voting for the ridiculously politically vacuous parties of Hanson and Palmer, despite their clear, terrible, history of just being in politics as self indulgent careerists and attracting nutters as candidates.
I am surprised at the ability of Palmer advertising to make unengaged people forget what a true flake he is. Disgustingly, Morrison and the Coalition should be blasting Palmer for his corporate behaviour with both barrels, but for their political advantage, they aren't.
John Quiggin on the cost of carbon emissions reduction
A very clear and readable explanation by John Quiggin on the matter of modelling the cost of carbon emissions reduction.
Tuesday, May 07, 2019
Maximum sentence please
As a class of crime, there's something particularly vicious and nasty about road rage assaults, especially when they come after pursuing someone for kilometres. Nine times out of ten they suggest an assailant either completely off his face on some drug or other, or full of obnoxious male entitlement, or both.
This guy completely deserves a maximum sentence - and governments need to be publicising road rage punishments at cinema or where ever stupid young men might see them.
This guy completely deserves a maximum sentence - and governments need to be publicising road rage punishments at cinema or where ever stupid young men might see them.
Fantasy land, and the Labor launch
Ha! What a bunch of cowards. After months/years of "the Liberals must be destroyed" because the party won't go Trump enough for them, various Catallaxy commenters are falling back into line with "with reluctance, I will be voting Liberal because a Shorten Labor government will destroy the country." Some, I admit, are holding out, but at the end of the day most will fall into line.
And they live in a fantasy land that, if only the Coalition would go wingnut Right on climate change, the whole issue will go away. Here's lizzie, the Facebook-iest of commenters there:
On another point: I didn't see much of the Labor launch in Brisbane, but it was a triumph of - something - that they managed to get Rudd and Gillard entering together and showing that Kevin can can even bear to make eye contact and rub shoulders with her now. Was he drugged, or is there some other explanation?
Anyway, it was pretty heartening, really, in the interests of seeing Labor win:
And they live in a fantasy land that, if only the Coalition would go wingnut Right on climate change, the whole issue will go away. Here's lizzie, the Facebook-iest of commenters there:
If the Libs win I hope there is enough sense in the result for them to drop the RET like a hot brick and start building some coal-fired power stations. Also drop exploding batteries, including the big one called Snowy 11. Then a Royal Commission into Climate Science would be useful to get some realism into the lives of crying (and acting) children.Yes, sure. After rejecting the need for Royal Commissions on useful things, they want a totally pointless one on climate change, as if the ageing contrarians, if they live long enough, will front up and repeat arguments discredited a decade or more ago and convince the Commission that everyone else has been wrong for all this time.
On another point: I didn't see much of the Labor launch in Brisbane, but it was a triumph of - something - that they managed to get Rudd and Gillard entering together and showing that Kevin can can even bear to make eye contact and rub shoulders with her now. Was he drugged, or is there some other explanation?
Anyway, it was pretty heartening, really, in the interests of seeing Labor win:
Rupert's reasons
Given the rabid pro-Coalition coverage in the Murdoch press, it's interesting to remember this reported from last year:
* Rupert has had second thoughts about how he could make money under Shorten;
* Rupert wants to see his "king maker" judgement vindicated at the polls;
* Rupert really got his nose out of joint when Shorten refused to meet with him (which is something Shorten really has not received enough credit for.)
According to reports in the ABC and The Australian Financial Review that differ in detail rather than substance, days before Turnbull was forced to walk the plank on August 31, Murdoch told fellow billionaire Kerry Stokes, the Perth-based chairman of Seven West, “Malcolm has to go.”I can only assume that one or more of the following factors are currently rattling around Rupert's decrepit looking head:
Stokes apparently disagreed."That means we get Bill Shorten and the CFMEU,” he told Murdoch in a version of the story reported by the AFR.
Not to worry, says Murdoch, according to the ABC report, "They'll only be in for three years – it won't be so bad. I did alright under Labor and the Painters and Dockers; I can make money under Shorten and the CFMEU."
* Rupert has had second thoughts about how he could make money under Shorten;
* Rupert wants to see his "king maker" judgement vindicated at the polls;
* Rupert really got his nose out of joint when Shorten refused to meet with him (which is something Shorten really has not received enough credit for.)
What was I saying about Poland? (Part 2, I think)
At The Guardian:
A woman has been arrested on suspicion of offending religious sentiment, after posters bearing an image of the Virgin Mary with her halo painted in the colours of the rainbow flag appeared in the city of Płock in central Poland.Update: can someone point Andrew Bolt to this article, because I see he gets really upset with religious interference in art. Well, sometimes, anyway:
The Polish interior minister, Joachim Brudziński, announced on Twitter on Monday that a person had been arrested for “carrying out a profanation of the Virgin Mary of Częstochowa”.
A Płock police spokeswoman confirmed a 51-year-old woman had been arrested over the alleged offence. The woman had been abroad, but upon her return, the police entered and searched her home, where they found several dozen images of the Virgin Mary with the rainbow-coloured halo.
The “Black Madonna of Częstochowa” is a revered Byzantine icon that resides in the monastery of Jasna Góra, a UN world heritage site and Poland’s holiest Catholic shrine.
Offending religious feeling is a crime under the Polish penal code. If convicted, the woman could face a prison sentence of up to two years.
Permafrost worry
That commentary piece that has appeared in Nature on the great uncertainties in the amount of greenhouse gas likely to come from melting permafrost is indeed a worry. The basic message is that things are going faster in the North than anyone expected:
Current models of greenhouse-gas release and climate assume that permafrost thaws gradually from the surface downwards. Deeper layers of organic matter are exposed over decades or even centuries, and some models are beginning to track these slow changes.There current guesstimate as to how much worse it could be than that in current models:
But models are ignoring an even more troubling problem. Frozen soil doesn’t just lock up carbon — it physically holds the landscape together. Across the Arctic and Boreal regions, permafrost is collapsing suddenly as pockets of ice within it melt. Instead of a few centimetres of soil thawing each year, several metres of soil can become destabilized within days or weeks. The land can sink and be inundated by swelling lakes and wetlands.
Abrupt thawing of permafrost is dramatic to watch. Returning to field sites in Alaska, for example, we often find that lands that were forested a year ago are now covered with lakes2. Rivers that once ran clear are thick with sediment. Hillsides can liquefy, sometimes taking sensitive scientific equipment with them.
This type of thawing is a serious problem for communities living around the Arctic (see ‘Arctic permafrost’). Roads buckle, houses become unstable. Access to traditional foods is changing, because it is becoming dangerous to travel across the land to hunt. Families cannot reach lines of game traps that have supported them for generations.
In short, permafrost is thawing much more quickly than models have predicted, with unknown consequences for greenhouse-gas release. Researchers urgently need to learn more about it. Here we outline how.
We estimate that abrupt permafrost thawing in lowland lakes and wetlands, together with that in upland hills, could release between 60 billion and 100 billion tonnes of carbon by 2300. This is in addition to the 200 billion tonnes of carbon expected to be released in other regions that will thaw gradually. Although abrupt permafrost thawing will occur in less than 20% of frozen land, it increases permafrost carbon release projections by about 50%. Gradual thawing affects the surface of frozen ground and slowly penetrates downwards. Sudden collapse releases more carbon per square metre because it disrupts stockpiles deep in frozen layers.
Furthermore, because abrupt thawing releases more methane than gradual thawing does, the climate impacts of the two processes will be similar7. So, together, the impacts of thawing permafrost on Earth’s climate could be twice that expected from current models.
The rarity of a TV show that ends well
I see via Twitter that the dying episodes of Game of Thrones are continuing to upset quite a lot of long time viewers. So someone asked "what TV series ended for you in a satisfying way", and people are nominating things I don't agree with (the ending of MASH left me cold, but I had stopped caring much about the show long before the final season) or shows I haven't seen at all (The Shield).
And it's true, so few lengthy TV series do end in a satisfactory way. Most people were underwhelmed with Seinfeld's final episode; even worse, it seems The X Files make a final series which everyone simply ignored after the poor quality of the penultimate come back series. Most sitcoms go on for about 3 seasons too long, and I stop watching them long before the end anyway.
I continue an old devotion to the Mary Tyler Moore show, and I've probably mentioned before that I did think the ending of that show was funny - new management at the TV station recognise that ratings are bad, and decide that the problem isn't the ridiculous newsreader Ted, but the rest of the newsroom which promptly gets the sack.
I'm struggling to remember another show that I did watch to the very end, and found satisfying in the last episode.
And it's true, so few lengthy TV series do end in a satisfactory way. Most people were underwhelmed with Seinfeld's final episode; even worse, it seems The X Files make a final series which everyone simply ignored after the poor quality of the penultimate come back series. Most sitcoms go on for about 3 seasons too long, and I stop watching them long before the end anyway.
I continue an old devotion to the Mary Tyler Moore show, and I've probably mentioned before that I did think the ending of that show was funny - new management at the TV station recognise that ratings are bad, and decide that the problem isn't the ridiculous newsreader Ted, but the rest of the newsroom which promptly gets the sack.
I'm struggling to remember another show that I did watch to the very end, and found satisfying in the last episode.
Monday, May 06, 2019
A culinary note
I'm still in long weekend mode, ok?
The culinary note: I really like the distinctive flavour of washed rind cheeses. They should be more popular than they seem to be.
I'm eating one from Italy as I write. This makes me feeler wealthier than I am, and if it got here via airplane it's probably a climate change sin, but I am trying to support the fancy deli/cafe/restaurant in King Street, which seems to have so many experienced staff I fear that Brisbane isn't sophisticated enough for it.
The Australian sparkling wine I am having with it is quite pleasing too, and carries no guilt.
The culinary note: I really like the distinctive flavour of washed rind cheeses. They should be more popular than they seem to be.
I'm eating one from Italy as I write. This makes me feeler wealthier than I am, and if it got here via airplane it's probably a climate change sin, but I am trying to support the fancy deli/cafe/restaurant in King Street, which seems to have so many experienced staff I fear that Brisbane isn't sophisticated enough for it.
The Australian sparkling wine I am having with it is quite pleasing too, and carries no guilt.
The passion post
It's the Labour Day holiday in Brisbane. Beautiful clear blue sky and 24 degrees. May to September is just great weather here...pity the daylight hours get short.
Anyway, a boring post about this plant:
We have a yellow passionfruit vine growing out of a not very big pot, over an arch that' only about 1.5 m wide. It is about 2 years old and has produced fruit before, but at the moment, it has gone berserk. I reckon there are about 35 fruit coming on this rather small area vine which we basically ignore, apart from watering in dry weather.
I have no idea what will happen if I actually fertilize it. Or should I just let a happy plant be?
Anyway, a boring post about this plant:
We have a yellow passionfruit vine growing out of a not very big pot, over an arch that' only about 1.5 m wide. It is about 2 years old and has produced fruit before, but at the moment, it has gone berserk. I reckon there are about 35 fruit coming on this rather small area vine which we basically ignore, apart from watering in dry weather.
I have no idea what will happen if I actually fertilize it. Or should I just let a happy plant be?
Sunday, May 05, 2019
Election on track (I think)
So I've been reading Twitter and some other commentary, and watched Insiders.
Two weeks out from the election I think the view has firmed up that Labor is not in danger of losing the election after all. Apparently, the betting market has turned in Labor's favour again; people think the social media campaign being run by the Liberals looks desperate and run by people without a clue (the Star Wars themed tweets, for example); and Josh Frydenberg looked and sounded far from confident on Insiders today, which also brought the delightful news that Tony Abbot really is looking likely to loss his seat.
The best thing that can come from a Labor win would be that it involves not just Abbott but other conservatives losing seats and sparking the internal confrontation that the Coalition has to have in order to rid itself of climate change denialism. It would be a real disaster if the Liberals scraped home and avoided that fate.
On a side note, I see from a peruse of the Catallaxy threads that an old commenter DD (Daddy Dave, I think) has turned back up after what would be years of absence. He used to be one of few moderate Righties on the site, and nearly always maintained a polite disposition. I think he used to occasionally look in here too, but commented that he thought it a boring and would never have a big readership because it didn't really attempt to engage with readers, or some such. C'est la vie.
I find it to believe he will continue commenting at Catallaxy for long, given the ludicrous Down Under American Right Culture War site that it has become. But we will see...
Two weeks out from the election I think the view has firmed up that Labor is not in danger of losing the election after all. Apparently, the betting market has turned in Labor's favour again; people think the social media campaign being run by the Liberals looks desperate and run by people without a clue (the Star Wars themed tweets, for example); and Josh Frydenberg looked and sounded far from confident on Insiders today, which also brought the delightful news that Tony Abbot really is looking likely to loss his seat.
The best thing that can come from a Labor win would be that it involves not just Abbott but other conservatives losing seats and sparking the internal confrontation that the Coalition has to have in order to rid itself of climate change denialism. It would be a real disaster if the Liberals scraped home and avoided that fate.
On a side note, I see from a peruse of the Catallaxy threads that an old commenter DD (Daddy Dave, I think) has turned back up after what would be years of absence. He used to be one of few moderate Righties on the site, and nearly always maintained a polite disposition. I think he used to occasionally look in here too, but commented that he thought it a boring and would never have a big readership because it didn't really attempt to engage with readers, or some such. C'est la vie.
I find it to believe he will continue commenting at Catallaxy for long, given the ludicrous Down Under American Right Culture War site that it has become. But we will see...
Friday, May 03, 2019
An unromantic lead
A review of Long Shot begins:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least in cinematic comedies of the past decade or so, that just about every woman on-screen must be in want of Seth Rogen. From Knocked Up to Zack and Miri Make a Porno to Neighbors, Hollywood has continually presented the star as a romantic lead while marveling at the supposed ludicrousness of the concept, to the extent that his new vehicle is a rom-com called Long Shot. The premise? That Rogen, playing to type as an avuncular, bearded fellow who’s no stranger to sweatpants, gets entangled in a relationship with an impressive and a spectacularly beautiful politician played by Charlize Theron.I could be mistaken, but isn't the defining aspect of a Seth Rogan film that they have quite a lot of pretty crude sexual humour? As such, I have never seen one of his films, and would guess that he and his ilk are behind the death of decent romantic comedies we have witnessed over about the last 10 - 15 years.
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