Saturday photo

Everyone likes the ornate design of this building, surely?  I like to imagine it has a hunchback living secretly in the roof space and spires, or the dark, creepy basement I am told exists too.  

The "I'm only being reasonable - and stop oppressing me" Right has a long, disreputable history

David Roberts tweeted praise for this article in the Washington Post, and it is really good.

The writer, Eve Fairbanks, points out that a great deal of recent conservative rhetoric which claims to the status of "only being reasonable" in reaction to an unreasonable and censoring Left reads exactly as did the pro-Confederacy, pro-slavery commentary before and during the Civil War.  For example:

They stressed the importance of logic, “facts,” “truth,” “science” and “nature” much more than Northern rhetoricians did. They chided their adversaries for being romantic idealists, ignoring the “experience of centuries.” Josiah Nott, a surgeon who laid out the purported science behind black inferiority, held that questions like slavery “should be left open to fair and honest investigation, and made to stand or fall according to the facts.” They claimed that they were the ones who truly had black people’s best interests at heart, thanks to their more realistic understanding of human biology. “No one would be willing to do more for the Negro race than I,” John Wilkes Booth wrote shortly before he assassinated Lincoln. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. The “constitutions” of black men, on the other hand, were “perfectly adapted.”

They loved hyperbole. Events were “the most extraordinary spectacles” that had “ever challenged the notice of the civilized world,” “too alarming” and threatened “to destroy all that is valuable and beautiful in the institutions of our country.” All over, they saw slippery slopes: Objecting to the extension of slavery into new territories, Lincoln’s longtime position, would lead inexorably to miscegenation.

The most important thing to know about them, they held, was that they were not the oppressors. They were the oppressed. They were driven to feelings of isolation and shame purely on the basis of freely held ideas, the right of every thinking man. Rep. Alexander Sims (D-S.C.) claimed that America’s real problem was the way Southerners were made to suffer under “the sneers and fanatic ebullitions of ignorant and wicked pretenders to philanthropy.” Booth’s complaint, before he shot Lincoln, wasn’t that he could no longer practice slavery, something he’d never done anyway. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.

Now, I think it is probably fair to note that realising this doesn't detract from some ideas of the Left being legitimately bad arguments that ignore the facts of nature - the most obvious modern ones surround the extremes of identity politics,  like the suggestion that sportswomen should not claim unfairness when transexual men start winning all events.   (I'm also sympathetic to the line that a certain basic form of capitalism - whereby people like to organise around, and profit from, things they can do well - is a natural tendency of human society, which explains why far Left attempts to suppress it completely are always doomed to fail.)

But it does tell us to be extremely cautions of the Right wing claims of persecution and to being tied to reason, when they are falling to act on dangers promoted by figures on their own side. 

The absolute worst thing about it is the way the conservative Right has decided  to give, at most, only occasional lip service to objection to the dangerous, authoritarian sympathising stupidity of Trump and his administration, and the global dire dangers of climate change, preferring instead to shrug their shoulders and concentrate on a culture war with the Left as if it was more important.

They only had to read Catallaxy to know this

From an article in The New Republic The Misogyny of Climate Deniers:

In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”

The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.

“There is a package of values and behaviors connected to a form of masculinity that I call ‘industrial breadwinner masculinity.’ They see the world as separated between humans and nature. They believe humans are obliged to use nature and its resources to make products out of them. And they have a risk perception that nature will tolerate all types of waste. It’s a risk perception that doesn’t think of nature as vulnerable and as something that is possible to be destroyed. For them, economic growth is more important than the environment” Hultman told Deutsche Welle last year.

 The corollary to this is that climate science, for skeptics, becomes feminized—or viewed as “oppositional to assumed entitlements of masculine primacy,” Hultman and fellow researcher Paul Pulé wrote in another paper.

The deep irony is that the other ideology that bulldozed over nature in the interests of economic growth is the communism that the wingnut Right spend the rest of their limited brain cells panicking about as secretly taking over the world under the guise of "cultural Marxism" and "socialism". 

Foreign Correspondent noted

Been meaning to say:  gee, this current season of ABC's Foreign Correspondent has been good. 

Fake meat in America; Taiwan and its worrying future with China; child surrogacy gone wrong in the Ukraine; and a look at Barcelona and the continuing vexed issue of Catalonian independence.

All well made, informative and engaging shows.

The enemies of the ABC need to exiled to some Survivor Island, and they can make documentaries of themselves getting sunburnt and stupider by the day by making reality TV.    

Stand up comedy is pretty weird

I rarely care for stand up comedy of any variety, but I will still read reviews of it to see what stuff that I wouldn't like is out there.

I note that Dave Chappelle has a Netflix special out which is getting praise from Tim Blair and some people at Catallaxy, and complaints from the likes of The Guardian and Slate.  The criticism from the Left - especially the one at Slate - sounds far, far more compelling a guide to my reaction, should I watch it.   Mind you, The Guardian's review is very similar, really.

There is something a bit weird about stand up, isn't there?, in the way audiences reaction precedes, and is independent from, thought.   Take this, for example, from The Guardian:

Chappelle speaks out against Michael Jackson’s accusers, stating in no uncertain terms that “I do not believe these motherf.......s” to whistles and cheers of approval from the audience. An assortment of his hotter takes plays like an exoneration wishlist: Kevin Hart’s a good guy, Louis CK never did anything wrong, and even if the King of Pop did prey on innocent children, “I mean, it’s Michael Jackson.”

I mean, really?   Surely it is only due to an expectation that the guy on stage is funny that people would find that crack about Jackson's accusers a laugh-out-loud thing?   It's not even a joke, as such.

Have psychologists studied this much?  

Feeling sorry for the Queen

I bet the Queen is hating the position she is in at the moment.

I see that Axios suggests the possible outcomes of tosspot Johnson's seeking of Brexit advantage by limiting Parliament are:

What's next? Parliament will return from recess to sit for a short session next week, during which lawmakers are expected to take steps to block a no-deal Brexit in the limited time they have.

• Option 1 is a legislative fix forcing the government to seek another extension from the EU, but there are no binding Brexit bills currently on the agenda.
• Option 2 is a vote of no-confidence, which would give MPs a window of 14 days to form a caretaker unity government with the express purpose of blocking no-deal.
• Option 3 is a general election, assuming anti-no-deal lawmakers can't gather enough support to form a government. But Downing Street officials have already said that Johnson would likely hold any snap election after Brexit has been completed on Oct. 31.

But if no-confidence passes, who gets to tell the Queen what to do?   Does Johnson tell her to just call an election, and one after 31 October?   Does a caretaker unity government enter after him and say "no, we are governing and we will just pass this Act delaying Brexit and then go to an election"?   Does Scotland knock at her door and say "we'll be leaving the kingdom, thanks very much.  And Balmoral is going to become an upmarket spa and holiday resort." 

I don't quite understand... 

Update:  The BBC provides some much needed explanation of the technicalities here.  I understand the options a bit better now.

Rain needed

Brisbane, and everywhere west of Brisbane, is very, very dry at the moment.  There is hope for a little rain today, but it sounds like barely enough to green the lawns.  When you drive down Milton Road from the city, and look up at Mt Cootha, there are patches of brown trees extending up the mountainside.  I am not sure if they are dying, but I don't recall ever seeing this before, and it doesn't feel very re-assuring.

Interestingly, I see that most water supply dams close to the coast are at relatively healthy levels.  Quite a few are virtually full, although Brisbane's Wivenhoe is down to 52.8%.   Somerset Dam, however, which feeds directly into it, is at 74.5%.  I

You don't have to go too much further inland, though, to see some dams effectively empty - which tends not to be a good thing in agricultural areas (he says with understatement.)

As in Queensland, I think virtually everywhere away from the coast in New South Wales has been on extended drought for a long time.  I know someone with family in Walgett.  Photos show it as a dustbowl.  Someone else I know who has relatives at Tamworth says trees are dying everywhere there.

I hope this isn't the start of another really prolonged, widespread drought like the one in the 2000's. 

More fasting research

At phys.org, a report on a dieting method that sounds a little hard to stick to:

In recent years there has been a surge in studies looking at the biologic effects of different kinds of fasting diets in both animal models and humans. These diets include continuous calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, and alternate-day fasting (ADF). Now the largest study of its kind to look at the effects of strict ADF in healthy people has shown a number of health benefits. The participants alternated 36 hours of zero-calorie intake with 12 hours of unlimited eating. The findings are reported August 27 in the journal Cell Metabolism. ...

"We found that on average, during the 12 hours when they could eat normally, the participants in the ADF group compensated for some of the calories lost from the fasting, but not all," says Harald Sourij, a professor at the Medical University of Graz. "Overall, they reached a mean calorie restriction of about 35% and lost an average of 3.5 kg [7.7 lb] during four weeks of ADF."

The article goes on to note the health benefit changes recorded in the study, and it does point this other simple advantage:

"The elegant thing about strict ADF is that it doesn't require participants to count their meals and calories: they just don't eat anything for one day."

Yeah, I must admit, I have found during bursts of 5:2 dieting that I start to spend too long in the supermarket reading calorie information on things I can try for a variation on how to get my 600 cal in a day.

I am due to start dieting again.  Not sure if will try this method.  3.5kg for four weeks of intermittent sounds a bit less that I might have expected, especially as it always seems to me that the first couple of kilos drop fast, but it gets slower as you go along.

Ngo-ing, Ngo-ing, Gone

So, Andy Ngo has left Quillette abruptly (or not, see next sentence) after evidence comes out of his lack of reporting when he sees right wing activists planning a confrontation at a bar.  Claire Lehmann says it's all a co-incidence (she says he actually had already left before this story came out) and he has gone onto "bigger projects".    (Sounds suspiciously like one of those standard cover statements when you don't want to go into detail - along the lines of "resigned to spend more time with his family".)

What's the bet that he might be getting a more permanent role with Fox News?  He'll fit right in.

Kids being different

There's a more-or-less reasonable piece up at The Atlantic about the issue of kids who grow up to identify as gay/bi/queer, which makes a point that I don't recall reading much about before:

Numerous studies have shown that children who eventually come out as gay, lesbian, or bisexual—scientists call them pre-homosexual, or pre-GLB kids—demonstrate more childhood gender nonconformity in their speech, body language, and choice of activity than their pre-straight contemporaries do. These reports have also produced evidence of a “dosage effect”: The more gender nonconformity someone shows in childhood, the more likely they will identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual as an adult.

“The link between childhood gender conformity/nonconformity and adult sexual orientation is one of the strongest relationships between a childhood trait and an adult ‘phenotype’ that’s been demonstrated in all of psychology,” Richard Lippa, a psychology professor at California State University at Fullerton, told me via email. While the link is not foolproof––not all tomboys will be lesbians; not all boys in dresses will be gay––Lippa says it is “quite strong.” (The scientific calculus for transgender people, he says, is “more complex.”)

Kids—especially pre-GLB kids—need room to explore their own identities. Yet because society presumes queerness to be inherently sexual, adults think that a preteen who plays up his gender nonconformity could not possibly be doing so voluntarily. Critics instead see adults in and aligned with the LGBTQ community as sexualizing children by exposing them to what a National Review writer calls a “deeply and perversely erotic subculture.” Conservative media have accused Wendy Napoles of endangering her son. After news reports indicated that Desmond’s performances had caught a convicted pedophile’s eye (as if it’s a young boy’s fault that pedophiles exist), some people called child protective services on her. But the people who have deemed drag too risqué for preteens have yet to support alternative ways in which queer kids like Desmond can publicly express themselves without fear.

I am not surprised at what the studies say - it fits in anecdotally with what a lot of parents and gay adults have said about recognizing they were "different" from a young age - but I didn't really know it had been studied much.

I think those paragraphs I quote help illustrate why sexuality/gender is a pretty confusing issue to understand for a lot of us:  it's not just a matter of which gender people might sexually respond to - it also brings up whole puzzle of why some gay/queer folk might be very gender conforming in most respects other than their sex life, and others aren't.   In particular, I find it hard to understand the drag queen thing - a combination of something like a transexual who is happy to stay in their male body, but likes to act not just female, but as a particular version of the opposite gender - the dramatic diva.  Not sure I will ever get my head around that.   And because I think a lot of adults have trouble understanding it in adult form, it feels strange seeing a pre-pubescent boy acting out that way too.

So sure, I don't want kids who feel different to suffer unduly if they don't want to follow "traditional" gender behaviour; but on the other hand, don't particularly feel that it is a good idea to encourage kids to do what feel likes attention seeking behaviour. 

I might write more later... 

Feeling Germanic

Careful readers - or at least Tim T - will recall that I was off to see a performance of (amongst other pieces) Richard Strauss's An Alpine Symphony on Saturday night.

What a blast that piece of music is - a 50 minute, single movement musical rendering of a hike through the Alps, with an afternoon thunderstorm and all.   The normal Youth Orchestra (playing at QPAC) was boosted by extra brass, the huge organ in the concert hall (which I had never heard played before), not one but two harps, and extra percussion stuff (cowbells, sheet of metal, rolling barrel thing for making wind sound) all crammed in onto a completely packed stage.  Not only that - at the end, a bunch of extra brass players came on stage to take a bow - I didn't know where they had been, but my daughter explained later that they had played off stage to create a certain effect (!).   It was, quite likely, the biggest assembled orchestra I have seen, in fact.    

So, there was certainly no lack of volume: it blasts away at times with something approaching rock band volume, which made for quite a different experience from the normally restrained volumes of most classical pieces at that venue.

Interestingly, though, I read in the program that the piece when first performed was not overly enthusiastically received, with some saying it was too "cinematic".   I get the impression that the less-than-completely-enthusiastic reception to certain works of famous composers is not an uncommon thing in classical music history - I assume Tim knows about that more reliably than me.   Anyway, more explanation about the symphony is set out in this neat piece at The Conversation, if anyone is interested.

So, after feeling entertained by this Germanic power classic, I was reminded that Wagner's Ring Cycle is coming to Brisbane next year, and I have found out that C reserve seats up in the balcony stratosphere are $380 for the entire cycle. 

Now, I have never been to an opera in my life, and it would be kind of ridiculous to start my experience of them with (as the QPAC website explains)  a 15 hour epic performed over 4 nights.   But hey, it's the very ridiculousness of the idea that is perversely tempting me to do it.  And when you divide the cost into the hourly rate,  it's quite the opera bargain!  (At least for the cheap seats - the premium ones are $2,200.   I trust that a glass of champagne before and during intervals might be included in that.)

I heard someone from (I think) Opera Australia spruiking it when it was announced, and he was saying that it sounds like a heavy experience, but it really isn't - he claimed that he has had so many people say to him at the end that they could happily go back and watch it all over again.  He called it a "life changing experience", which seems a bit of an opening to making a Hitler-ian joke about it making people want to invade neighbouring countries, but I am sure that is not what he meant.

Anyway, I have my doubts I will do it, but I am (at least a bit) tempted.

Update:   I should have guessed - there are lots of amusing takes on the net about what it is like to go through the Cycle.    I think ClassicFM's The 18 Stages of watching Wagner's Ring Cycle is pretty funny.   More encouraging, and still witty, is How Crazy Do You Have to Be to Sit Through 15 Hours of Opera.   On a more serious note, but still with the occasional funny line:

The director Achim Freyer once informed me that sleeping during Wagner simply means listening on a different level.

is this piece at the Washington Post.

Stranger Things 3 noted

Just finished Stranger Things 3.

I'm feeling a tad "over" the show.   If I recall correctly, my initial reaction to the first episodes of the first series was that it felt odd to have a show that was so transparent in the deliberate imitation of scenes from movies of the era.   Eventually, I was won over by the pretty charming characters, and the general good humour of the show.

The second series was continued harmless fun, I thought; but with the third series, the too obvious lifts from 1980's movies (and not just in passing:  the Terminator character was so important to the whole season) started to bother me again.   I was feeling too distracted by noticing which better movies they are copying.

The whole premise (and details) of this season was also pushing it too far into the ridiculous:  a secret underground Russian base is one thing, but the depth and extent of their lair was pretty silly.   And really - I know 1980's hair was bad, but honestly, the helmet hair of two of the guys really seems to be taking it to extremes that I do not recall.

That said, because I think the main characters are well acted, and still pretty charming, I would still watch the 4th series.  But if El gets her powers back, when will she start first putting a tissue up her nose to deal with the inevitable nosebleed?  

Something to keep in mind

Treatable disease often mistaken for Alzheimer's

Not sure I would want to visit the US right now...

Washington: A Jamaican national was detained for nearly three months in the United States after bringing in bottles of honey from the Caribbean island that customs agents mistakenly believed to be liquid methamphetamine.

Leon Haughton had visited family back in Jamaica every Christmas since taking up residence in Maryland about a decade ago, the Washington Post said Friday, retracing his Kafkaesque entanglement in US customs and immigration bureaucracy.

Haughton's long ordeal began December 29 at Baltimore-Washington International Airport when customs agents had a dog sniff his bags.

Inside they found three bottles duly labeled as honey that Haughton, a 45-year-old father of three, uses to sweeten his tea.

According to the charging document, the agents suspected him of transporting liquid methamphetamine, and placed him in detention.

Laboratory results from Maryland took more than two weeks to arrive: they were negative. Haughton thought that was the end of it. He was wrong.

The bottles were sent to a second laboratory in Georgia after the first was judged to be insufficiently equipped to analyze the liquids.

Although he had a green card granting him legal residence in the United States, Haughton's arrest set in motion a detention process with the US immigration service.

His lawyer had enormous difficulty contacting immigration authorities - and for good reason.

The US government had been partially shut down as a result of a budget impasse between President Donald Trump and Democrats over his demand for funding to build a wall on the border with Mexico.

Here's a link to the story at Gulf News.

Excessive recipe excessively funny

The recipe video at this tweet has just about the funniest comments thread that I can ever recall on Twitter.  

I liked the hamburger with pickles clip in the comments thread too...

Channel News Asia, for good and not quite so good

As I have explained before, I really like watching the weekly highlights from Channel News Asia, in part for its stories about the rest of Asia, but also because of the upbeat, optimistic tone of stories about Singapore.

I'm not cynical about how, it being government owned, it's not as if the positive spin is coming from a completely independent viewpoint.  For example, I like the way it continually runs stories that encourages the multicultural tolerance that the nation island depends on.  In propaganda terms, I've realised it's like the polar opposite of Fox News:  a news and current affairs service devoted to national unity and optimism - the type of channel a benevolent dictator might desire - rather than the cynical, money grubbing operation of an ageing husk of a media billionaire designed to enrich him further by sowing division and rabid partisanship.

That said, I was a little taken about by a recent story which seemed to display a much more cynical line.   While I have seen sympathetic stories about migrant workers there before, this one about a Bangladeshi guy who got some fame for a book of poetry, and then (pretty much) let it go to his head, seems to be designed to carry the message "migrant workers - you are here to do hard labour, and don't forget it".

(Mind you, the guy does come across as having a somewhat overinflated view of his artist talents.  I have my doubts that he would have known the spin the CNA story would take, though, when he was co-operating with them.  And the comments that follow the video on Youtube show that I am not the only one who thought this video was unusually mean-spirited and seemed like a warning to migrant workers.)

The only other thing I don't like about CNA is that I can't embed their Youtube videos.

Update:  I was wrong - I can embed their videos, just my old computer at home (Vista powered) won't let me.  Here's the story I was talking about:

A devil of a Sunday

An interesting story at the Catholic Herald, about the head Jesuit upsetting Catholic exorcists:

An international organization of Catholic exorcists said Thursday that the existence of Satan as a real and personal being is a truth of Christin doctrine.

“The real existence of the devil, as a personal subject who thinks and acts and has made the choice of rebellion against God, is a truth of faith that has always been part of Christian doctrine,” the International Association of Exorcists said in an August 22 press release.

The organization’s release came in response to recent remarks on the devil from Jesuit superior general Fr. Arturo Sosa, SJ, which the organization called “grave and confusing.”

The exorcists said they released their statement to provide “doctrinal clarification.”

Sosa made headlines earlier this week when he told Italian magazine Tempi that “the devil exists as a symbolic reality, not as a personal reality.”

The devil “exists as the personification of evil in different structures, but not in persons, because is not a person, is a way of acting evil. He is not a person like a human person. It is a way of evil to be present in human life,” Sosa said.

Citing a long history of Church teaching on the nature of Satan, including several citations from Pope Francis and his recent predecessors, the exorcists’ organization said that Catholics are bound to believe that Satan is a real and personal being, a fallen angel.

The beginning of the end?

Allahpundit's take on Trump's "hereby order" tweets (and continuing trade war, as well as his attacks on his own appiontees) seems pretty accurate to me.  For example:

Like a Twitter pal said, imagine throwing a fit because Denmark refused to sell Greenland to you and touting the fact that an ally said Israelis love you like you’re the second coming and having those things *not* be your most alarming statements of the week....

He’s never going to accept that the Fed is independent from partisan politics by design, but he could at least restrain his scapegoating of Powell by not comparing him unfavorably to communist China’s supremo, a guy who operates actual concentration camps. Trump’s willingness to speak warmly about the world’s worst bad guys while excoriating domestic politicians in the most acidic ways has lost most of its power to shock after his bromances with Putin and Kim Jong Un, but not all of it.

But wait. He was saving the Big Crazy for his response to China’s new retaliatory tariffs on American imports

“Our great American companies are hereby ordered.” Every day brings new material for a game of “What if Obama said it?” but purporting to order U.S. companies not to do business with China is championship-round stuff. I wonder which White House advisor got stuck explaining to him that he doesn’t actually have the power to do that. Just like I wonder when we’re going to start hearing about sanctions on China, which would be like dropping an atomic bomb on the economy....

This past week is going to get its own chapter in all of the self-serving post-Trump “I never really liked him” memoirs written by his cronies eager to rehabilitate their image once he’s gone. 

Look, the Trump cultists are never going to abandon him - you can see that on Twitter and comments rubbishing Allahpundit's take - but there is surely a substantial number of GOP congress people who can be pushed past their support of convenience for him into actually starting to talk about a replacement less obviously profoundly ignorant and flighty (I'm being very restrained with my descriptions) with someone like Pence, perhaps?

About conspiracy theories

The TLS looks at the rise of modern conspiracy theory belief:

Much of the work of modernity involved escaping the conspiracy of history itself, in which people are damned and doomed from the start. What they strove to become, instead, were people with a future; persons, bearers of rights, of sovereignty, with control over their destinies; citizens in secular nation states. They also understood themselves as objects and organisms, subject to natural laws. Nineteenth-century intellectuals offered all manner of secular explanations for misfortune in the realm of the physical and biological sciences, from the modelling of the weather to the germ theory of disease, and in the realm of the emerging social sciences, from economics to eugenics. This change coincided with rising rates of literacy and the growth of public schooling: the democratization of knowledge. By 1881, when Guiteau shot Garfield, rules of evidence – ideas about the relationship between facts and arguments, ideas once confined to courts of law and chemical laboratories – had spilled out to the new profession of journalism and the new popular genre of detective fiction. Suddenly, everyone had a theory, about almost everything. The misery of humanity became a crime everyone could solve.

The most popular scapegoat, it turns out, is other people. Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, a period during which emerging nation states sorted the world’s peoples into “nationalities”, most conspiracy theories in the US and Western Europe involved threats to the nation by people who weren’t so easily sorted. The most notorious of these theories concerned an alleged international conspiracy of Jews, people with ties across national borders. “Pulling the strings behind the scenes, dominating the new system of modernity, the Jew becomes the cause of every catastrophe”, claimed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which first appeared in Russia in 1903, was distributed throughout the US by Henry Ford in the 1920s, and assigned as a textbook in German schools from 1933. Much the same claim appeared in The Jewish Peril, a pamphlet issued by the British government in 1920 and written, in part, by Nesta Webster, who tied the Jewish conspiracy to the Bavarian Illuminati of the eighteenth century.

Arguably, there is just this one conspiracy theory, an endlessly recycled version of antisemitism, as the political scientist Thomas Milan Konda suggests in Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How delusions have overrun America. The Jewish conspiracy theory served as the template for nearly all that followed, from anti-communist and anti-homosexual panics and purges to race-based nationalism and xenophobia of every stripe, down to Islamophobia, the demonization of refugees, and the detention of immigrants. In the 1930s, the American fascist and disciple of Nesta Webster, Elizabeth Dilling – the founder of the Patriotic Research Bureau and author of the Red Network (which branded even the YMCA a communist front) – delighted audiences with her fake Yiddish accent, at a time when critics of FDR denounced the New Deal as the “Jew Deal”. By way of a mysterious “hidden hand”, the theory alleges, Illuminati or Jews or Bolsheviks or communists or gay people, or whoever, secretly run most national governments and aspire to world domination. “There are 200,000 Communist Jews at the Mexican border waiting to get into this country”, the housewife and America Firster Agnes Waters announced in 1942. “If they are admitted they will rape every woman that is left unprotected.”

 I have comments moderation on, and its wildly unlikely that any of Graeme's ones will get through.

Everyone liked Tim, except...

Tim Fischer was a genuinely likeable politician, as all the kind words from everyone following his death show.

I was amused to read at Catallaxy how the only regular left wing participant there, the Vietnamese war conscript veteran often referred to as "Numbers", noted how veterans suffered more blood cancer than  the rest of their population cohort, only to have others in thread pooh-pooh the suggestion.  Then on TV I saw that Tim himself said he had been told by a specialist that exposure to war time chemicals had probably stuffed up his immune system.   So much for the collective smarts of Catallaxy.

And I also was reminded, by clown rodeo leader Sinclair Davidson himself, that he considered Fischer an anti-Semite, no doubt for his criticisms of Israel's treatment of Palestine, and his general friendliness with Arab countries in the region.  

Just add that to the list of SD's views which are so eccentric that mainstream commentators just go "uhuh" and move on.  It probably doesn't top his all time "seriously?" comment re Adam Goodes:

But is it racist? Many individuals are having a go at me on twitter for questioning whether calling an Indigenous man an “ape” is actually racist and not just rude. For many people it seems self-evident that is is racist. But nobody can say how or why. The “best” story I’ve heard is that Social Darwinism ranks “people of colour” below animals.

but comes pretty close.