Hindu nationalism

This does seem a really good explanation about how Hindu nationalism has evolved (and why Modi is a worry.)  It starts:

The city of Varanasi is the holiest site in the Hindu faith. It is also, not coincidentally, the parliamentary constituency of Modi, who has just won a second five-year term. He did it, in large measure, by emphasizing Hindutva, an ideology that seeks to reformulate Hinduism into something that most practitioners’ grandparents would barely understand.

And then the key paragraphs:

The term Hindutva can be (sort of) translated as “Hindu-ness,” and that gets (sort of) at what it’s all about: Hinduism not a theology, but an identity. The movement’s intellectual father, Veer Savarkar, wrote its foundational text (helpfully titled Hindutva) a century ago. At the time, the notion of a unified faith or doctrine, let alone a shared identity, would have left most Hindus simply confused: Identity was determined by a person’s family, village, caste. The very term Hindu is merely a loanword (most likely from Persian), referring to “the people who live across the Indus River.” Until the 20th century, most Hindus had never felt the need to describe themselves in any comprehensive way.

It was the colonial experience that created Hindutva: Why, Savarkar and his comrades wondered, had India been dominated for centuries by a relatively small number of Muslim Mughals and Christian British? Was monotheism simply better suited for ruling? If so, what did that mean for a faith with more deities than days in the year? During the founding decades of the Hindutva movement, much effort revolved around making Hinduism more like its rivals: building a single shared identity to unite everyone for whom India was, in Savarkar’s words, “his Fatherland as well as his Holy-land.” This definition conveniently roped in Sikhs (a disproportionate number of whom served in the army), Buddhists (whose spiritual cachet helped give the movement credibility), and Jains (who tended, then and now, to be quite rich).

What it pointedly did not do was dictate what this newly lumped-together group of people should believe. Indeed, very few of Hindutva’s leading lights have been holy men, or even particularly devout; Savarkar and K. B. Hedgewar (the founder of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS—the primary vehicle for Hindutva mobilization) are both described as having been atheists or agnostics. The point wasn’t doctrine, but branding.

So, it's identity politics that have taken over. 

The problems with mass migration to space

The Guardian has an opinion piece up expressing scepticism about the likes of Jeff Bezos's dreams of O'Neill style massive space colonies and colonisation of Mars.   It's not at all detailed, though, on the technical issues:  it more looks at the changing motivation for space colonisation, and notes that it is pretty much now advocated out of environmental concern.

I don't think the change in motivation makes much sense, though.

As I recall (and I am not going to bother searching for confirmation just at the moment), the issues that killed off O'Neill style colonies from popular consideration were:

a. more careful engineering consideration which indicated that the structural stresses on spinning such massive objects to get any decent form of artificial gravity were much higher than initially realised, and pretty much impractical using the initially assumed materials;

b. the number of rocket launches required to put so much equipment in orbit (even assuming using a slingshot on the moon to get raw materials into a processing facility) was going to put an awful lot of pollutants into the upper atmosphere, with possibly deleterioius atmospheric effects;

c. the new technology involved for orbital processing of lunar soil is completely untested and getting that alone to work is surely going to be a big enough task in itself.

As far as point b is concerned,  I seem to recall O'Neill addressed that himself when he was alive, and argued it wasn't that many launches.   But the Falcon Heavy rocket from Space X does use kerosene and liquid oxygen, and it will be putting a significant amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.  Not sure how much compared to other things, but it is ironic that in order to escape a greehouse Earth, some now propose adding to the problem on the way out.

I don't know if point a has been reconsidered - but I suspect that it is still a very real problem.  It might be able to be addressed by using strong materials you can make on Earth, but O'Neill colonies were supposed to be made from pretty basic materials and I find it hard to envisage making more than pretty basic metals in orbit from Moon dirt.  It's yet another technological hurtle that would be ridiculously hard to overcome without launching, in pieces, manufacturing equipment made on Earth.

I see that Bezos went to Princeton when O'Neill was there - hence he caught the O'Neill dream early on.

But really, I would have to hear how he thinks the problems I listed above are supposed to be addressed before I consider it as having any real credibility.

The thing is, the problem with greenhouse gases was barely a thing when O'Neill was writing his book in the mid-1970's.  More general concerns about industrial pollution were one of the motivations for talking about moving off planet.   But now that the AGW problem has been fully realised, dreams of a "let's just move into space" solution (apart from the possibility of microwave power from orbiting solar power satelittes) just seem a fanciful and wasteful idea compared to putting a lot of technological effort into clean energy on Earth.  

(Having said that, I still think having a smallish, permanent base on the moon to act as a "lifeboat" for Earth is a good idea.   And it is so much simpler to get stuff there and back than from Mars.  Once you learn how to run a viable colony there, then you might think about going to Mars.)

A handy reproduction chart

I don't think I can copy and paste it here, but Axios has a nice interactive graph showing the national reproduction rates around the world. 

Basically, poor African nations are still having babies at a very high rate - but China, the rest of East Asia, the US and Europe are not having enough to replace population.  India's rate is not so high now either.

In which I quantify just how dumb Queenslanders are

I see (warning: link to a post by Steve Kates at Catallaxy - your brain will hurt if you stay there too long) that Right wing gnome-like commentator Terry McCrann has realised that, if you excluded all Queensland electorates, Labor would have won the election 61 to 55.   This is cause for dismay for him and Kates, because they think the rightful result should have been Labor 0, nationwide.

Perhaps I can seek comfort in my fellow Queenslanders not being as dumb as this election indicates by going back to the State election results of 2017.  Wikipedia shows that result:

I suppose that is a relatively comforting 45.43% of primary votes to Labor/Green.

LNP and One Nation jointly get 47.42% though.   (Although, yes, I know, some One Nation preferences go back to Labor.)

The Federal election seems to have One Nation in Queensland on 8.8%, but I reckon almost certainly Clive Palmer's vote would have stolen a lot from One Nation, and his vote was 3.5%.   Add it back in with One Nation and you would get 12.3% - close to the One Nation state vote in 2017 of 13.73%.

And remember, the country wide vote at the federal election for those parties combined was 6.4%

As voting for One Nation or Palmer was one of the dumbest things anyone could do, I think the conclusion is clear:  Queensland is at least twice as dumb as the rest of Australia.

Tech observations

*  Does anyone really like the clutterwall that is a key part of Windows 10?

*  On the other hand, I have recently upgraded from Office 2010 to Office 2019, and I do like the way it smooths out the typing (it sort of flows continuously and was not something I expected.)   It somehow makes me feel as I am typing faster, when I clearly am not.

*  I feel sorry for Huawei, and have a suspicion that the potential for Chinese interference using that company's technology is way overstated.  I could be wrong, but it's just a hunch.

Here's a report from Reuters saying that it was Australia that led the way in warning about security issues with the company:

The operatives – agents of the Australian Signals Directorate, the nation’s top-secret eavesdropping agency – had been given a challenge. With all the offensive cyber tools at their disposal, what harm could they inflict if they had access to equipment installed in the 5G network, the next-generation mobile communications technology, of a target nation?

What the team found, say current and former government officials, was sobering for Australian security and political leaders: The offensive potential of 5G was so great that if Australia were on the receiving end of such attacks, the country could be seriously exposed. The understanding of how 5G could be exploited for spying and to sabotage critical infrastructure changed everything for the Australians, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

Mike Burgess, the head of the signals directorate, recently explained why the security of fifth generation, or 5G, technology was so important: It will be integral to the communications at the heart of a country’s critical infrastructure - everything from electric power to water supplies to sewage, he said in a March speech at a Sydney research institute.

A few questions:  what does it mean "to have access to equipment installed in the 5G network, exactly?

Why is any country going to have to have to have key infrastructure tied up to a 5G network anyway?  What's wrong with the way we do things now?  What does 5G allow you to do with a power grid that current arrangements do not?

And here's a piece from the Lawfare blog which argues that the complexity of code means it's impossible to know if Huawei has included a "backdoor" at Chinese government insistence, but then goes onto to argue that G5 is being way overhyped anyway, and nations could just avoid the issue with Huawei by improving their 4G network.

If that's all true, then what sense does it make to try to destroy Huawei and its inroads into the 4G mobile phone market?  

I think my suspicions might be right.

More odd election analysis

This is a peculiar thing about the Nationals (and I don't just mean Barnaby Joyce - I give New Englander's honorary dumbass Queensland status for their support of him):   the ABC has a piece up pointing out that the Nationals, while feeling very happy with their election outcome in most of Australia, now do exceedingly poorly in Western Australia.

There's one other thing I have been meaning to say:  there is still a lot of doubt around that the Adani mine is actually economically viable (see John Quiggin's long held view again expressed in early May, and this separate piece that appeared in Bloomberg a couple of days ago, as well as the news that a nearby proposed coal mine for the Chinese is on hold).    Wouldn't it be deeply annoying to Labor (and me!) if the project is granted all government approvals only to go on permanent hold for economic reasons anyway?

Get Occupied

I must have mentioned it once before, but I've nearly finished season 1 of the Norwegian/Euro TV series Occupied (on Netflix) and I have an urge to again commend it to readers. 

The thing that keeps coming to mind is that the scale of the production (for a political drama involving a more-or-less by stealth takeover of Norway by Russia) is relatively small - it doesn't look cheap but it still has a limited budget feel, meaning it doesn't have the largest cast and government meetings all look smaller than what you expect in reality, even in a small country - and that makes comparison with Australian TV  drama pretty easy.

But it is so much better than any similar attempt at a political intrigue show made here.

OK - it's not as if I am being all that fair, because I don't even attempt to watch Australian drama anymore.  (I had a look at half an hour of Harrow last Sunday - interested only because it is set in Brisbane and is in a second series, so someone must be watching it - and it was incredibly awful.)   But the cringe factor and amateurish nature of nearly all Australian TV drama writing (who is to blame for this?  Where do Australian drama writers learn their craft?) gives me an assured feeling that all Australian recent attempts at political intrigue shows are as bad as ever.

Anyway, the other good thing about Occupied is that it should appeal to a wide variety of biases -

POSSIBLE TOO MUCH SPOILER FOLLOWS, READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION

the story is basically that a well meaning Green-ish Prime Minister with dubious actual political ability leads the country into a situation where it is virtually abandoned by the rest of Europe and America.   So you can hate the Greens and blame him, or blame the Russians for their duplicity, or the European Union for being more interested in gas than national sovereignty over gas and oil fields, or the Americans for suddenly becoming more interested in non-intervention and not stepping on Russian toes too much (shades of a Trump influence there).   Any viewer can watch it and find someone to blame in alignment with their pre-existing political biases.   How many shows about political intrigue manage to do that?   

It's well acted and well plotted - it has never really crossed any line into unbelievability.  (Now that I think back, the first episode is perhaps not as strong as later ones - it really does get better the more you watch it.)

And there is a second series (and a third coming it seems).

Not sure why it is not better known....

But is it a nicer city for it?

I didn't know that Alberta in Canada, by a combination of geography and some very active eradication programs, considers itself virtually Norway brown rat free.  

Truth in headlines

A Guardian bit of post election analysis starts:

It's easy to dismiss Queenslanders as coal-addicted bogans...

I'm still not yet in the mood to respond other than with "Because it's true".

The rest of the headline:

...but it's more complex than that 

 I reluctantly agree that the writer (who works in promotion of renewable energy) makes some nice conciliatory points, although I do have a residual feeling that for too long the Australian rural experience has been people moving out to areas to make a living in places which are only good for what they want to do for, on average, (maybe) every second or third year, and then whinging about how bad they have it.   As with agriculture, so it is with mining - both go through boom and bust cycles.

I've long speculated that there is no likely way to solve social problems in remote aboriginal settlements because if a place can't generate enough local economic activity to support itself, people do not have enough to do and are better off not living there.   I don't see why I should have a different view for people living in parts of Queensland who had hoped coal mining was their future.   Move and find work elsewhere.

The problems with economists

I meant to post Robert Samuelson's recent column on economists:   Economists often don't know what they're talking about.     Sounds accurate.

I read another critique of economics a couple of days ago, but I forget where.

No matter:  here's the BBC weighing in with What Have Economists Been Getting Wrong.   I would say it's pretty balanced and fair.

The problem with dust

Wired has a really long article up about moondust, and the very real problem that any future lunar inhabitants are likely to have in dealing with it.   (I had read about this many times before, but not in quite as much detail as here.)

Into the twilight

I've had quite a few procedures now involving twilight anaesthesia - the one where they don't have to put you deeply under.

Yesterday, I had it again, and while waiting I said to the anaesthetist that I like the seemingly instantaneous way it works - a bit of different feeling going up the hand after its injected, and you think "I'm not sleepy yet.. will I feel sleepy in a second?", and next thing you wake up outside in the recovery area as if only almost no time has passed.  I'm not sure that it looks like that to an outsider, because part of the way it works (so I believe) is to induce amnesia of things done to while under it.  So maybe I do blink a little before falling asleep?  Do they talk to me when they are repositioning me on the way out to recovery and do I respond?  I don't know.  

Anyway, the anaesthetist said "yeah, it is very strange, isn't it";  which was a nice response indicating she still has a bit of a sense of wonder about how it all works.

I see from Wikipedia that there are 4 different levels of  twilight anaesthesia, and I don't know what type I have had at different times.    It does take a little while to fully come out of its effects, but I had a good sleep in the afternoon and then again overnight, when lately I have been having some sleep disruption.  

Have they tried treating insomniacs with it, I wonder?   Does it help reset the sleep clock?  

Just wondering...

True, I reckon

Mescaline in proper perspective

I've mentioned before, I read Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception as a teenager and thought it pretty exciting (or at least, intriguing).   I could understand how it was so influential in the 60's counterculture.

However, I gather from this review in Nature of a new book Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, that Huxley was way over-selling the drug's positives.

For one thing, I didn't realise (or perhaps had forgotten?) that (like ayahuasca in South America) it makes the average user pretty sick at first:

The powers of endurance needed to take the drug became more widely known: it induces hours of nausea and often vomiting before the hallucinations begin. (In contrast to alcohol, Jay notes, mescaline gives you the hangover first.)

But more importantly, while I seem to recall that Huxley gave the impression that the use of mescaline (outside of Native American culture) and exploring its effects was something pretty new, the book tells a story of experimentation with it going back much further:

In traditional ceremonial use, the hallucination phase has been reported as consistently transporting. But outside these cultures, those eager to experiment have had disconcertingly unpredictable experiences. In 1887, Texan physician John Raleigh Briggs was the first to describe in a medical journal his own, rather violent, symptoms — including a racing heart and difficulties breathing — after eating a small part of a ‘button’, or dried crown, of a peyote cactus. The pharmaceutical company Parke–Davis in Detroit, Michigan, which had been investigating botanical sources of potential drugs from South America and elsewhere, took note. The company was seeking an alternative to cocaine, whose addictive properties had become apparent; it began offering peyote tincture as a respiratory stimulant and heart tonic in 1893. 

A flurry of scientific trials began. There was scant regard for ethics and safety — for the scientists, who frequently tested the mescaline themselves, or for test subjects. In 1895, two reports demonstrating the drug’s unpredictability came out of what is now the George Washington University in Washington DC. In one, a young, unnamed chemist chewed peyote buttons and then noted down his symptoms: nausea followed by pleasant visions over which he had some control, then depression and insomnia for 18 hours. In the other, two scientists observed the drug’s effects on a 24-year-old man, who became deluded and paranoid.

In New York City, pharmacologists Alwyn Knauer and William Maloney carried out a more extensive trial, including 23 people, in 1913. They hoped that mescaline, as a hallucinogen, might provide insight into the psychotic phenomena associated with schizophrenia. It didn’t. The pair diligently recorded participants’ running commentaries on their hallucinations, but found no common characteristics. (In later studies, people with schizophrenia could easily tell the difference between their own hallucinations and those induced by the drug.)

 The pace of trials picked up after synthetic mescaline became available. Chemist Ernst Späth at the University of Vienna was first to synthesize it, in 1919, and the German pharmaceutical company Merck marketed it the following year. Yet trial outcomes did not become more reliable or illuminating. Over the next couple of decades, theories that mescaline might reveal the biological basis of schizophrenia or help to cure other psychological disorders were serially dashed.

This really puts Huxley's praise of the drug in a different light, doesn't it?  Again, I am going by memory here, but I think he gave the impression that his personal investigation of the effects of the drug were somewhat  ground breaking, but it had been very well investigated before and known to be very unreliable in effect.  (I recall he did acknowledge once having a trip which at least verged towards turning into a hellish one.  Perhaps his book was influential in promoting the dangerous idea that, if you start out in the right frame of mind, you can be pretty sure your trip will  be good.)

It's another lesson in not taking pretty sensationalist claims all that seriously until you know more of the background of the topic.   

Even the Washington Post disses San Francisco

Everyone, even the Washington Post, agrees that San Francisco has become a ridiculous, wildly over-priced city with serious problems.   According to WAPO, it's that being the hub of Tech and new money has caused hyper-gentrification and a white/asian, virtually childless, mono-culture, which nonetheless hasn't worked out how to deal with the homeless.

What's interesting, I think, is that this is a liberal take on the problems in the city;  Republicans hate it for completely different reasons, thinking it an example of how liberal loving voters just can't run a city properly.

But, apart from a likely valid point that a city deserves better regulation of poor street behaviour, don't Republicans ever think that the city sets an example of how (contrary to general Right wing expectations) money fixes everything?

Russian influence?

Given what's happened in (according to his site) 27 countries since 2004 where Russia has sought to influence elections in favour of Right wing parties, has anyone asked the question yet whether Russian disinformation interference happened in the Australian election? 

Just asking....

Looks completely normal

Even The Australian, it would seem, can't resist choosing a photo of Malcolm which makes him look  a tad less than sane:

Speaking of Twitter, this made me laugh:

But back to the Senate:  I'm not sure the headline is all that accurate - the article says it's likely the government will need the support of 5 out of 6 "conservative" Senator.  Not sure who counts in that group (Malcolm Roberts, and Cory Bernardi, sure) but it still sounds rubbery to me.

What a tosser

Mark Latham's feeling all culture war invigorated by the Morrison (narrow) win:

What exactly is he complaining about?  The performance of Sabra Lane at the debate drew no complaints from anyone - I don't think I even saw one at Catallaxy!   I similarly thought any interviews by Leigh Sales were quite OK.  Does he think the ABC shouldn't have shown footage of his Dear Leader's obnoxious party hacks promising the NRA that in exchange for financial support, they could change our voting system?   (I think that's what Dickson said in the meeting?)

The thing is, Morrison running a one man show where policies were pretty much limited to "don't trust Shorten, he'll tax you, I won't:  and how good is [insert location X]?" did not set up any mandate for the big culture war fight that is Latham's sole obsession these days.

What a sad, bitter, bag of bile he has become.

Something for the pro-nuclear techno optimists to read

I'm sure he's written a similar piece before (or maybe it was a review of his book on the topic?)  but I don't think I have posted about it.  

Gregory Jaczko headed the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for 5 years under Obama, and now considers nuclear power is too dangerous to be deployed against climate change.

His views were changed, it seems, by a combination of witnessing the Fukushima nuclear accident and the extent of the problems it caused, together with fights with nuclear companies that resisted revision to nuclear safety.

True, he now works in clean energy, but he certainly show that smart, well qualified people with very direct knowledge of the nuclear industry can form the view that it is simply not practical from an economic and safety point of view to deal with climate change via expansion of nuclear power.

Go easy on the Lefty urban elites

A lot of Right wing commentators are ridiculing the catastrophism and "Australians are dumb and nasty and I am ashamed of them" style Tweets coming from some high profile Lefty commentators (like Philip Adams, Jane Caro, etc.)

I say this in response:

a.   I agree that dogged ideological Left wingers have always tended to complain this way, and it used to bother me a lot that it showed ill will and intellectual snobbery to those who do not share their views.

b.  However, let's be honest about what has happened to the Right over the last few decades - a significant section has itself become more ideological and abandoned evidence on matters both economic and scientific.  This has led to pretty much exactly the same condescension by many of the prominent commenters of the Right towards those who do not agree with them - you only have to read the bitchiness of Judith Sloan towards other economists; the "any company director who believes in climate change is an idiot" commentary of Maurice Newman and Andrew Bolt; and (at a lower level) the catastrophism of someone like Steve Kates, who sees a "the public just doesn't understand" global catastrophe to Western Civilisation around every corner; as well as the rest of those who comment in threads at Catallaxy with their extreme views about what a disaster it would be if Labor won, as well as their disdain of Labor or Green voters.   

c.  The short point:  ideological driven political catastrophism (and "the other side are two dumb to understand" finger pointing) has pretty much spread just as much into what passes for mainstream Right wing commentary (if you can call The Australian that!) as it exists (and has always existed) on the Left wing. 

d. For this reason, it's more than a tad hypocritical of Right wingers to be finger pointing at the Left and ignoring the same thing that happens on their side.

e.  Besides, come on:  you have to be a culture war, ideological twit to think populism is always right.   No - it's a reaction to perceptions, and perceptions are more easily led astray by deliberate mischief and misinformation campaigns when you have less education.    

Update:  or, as Jason Wilson puts it: