Good one, Malaysia

Why would Mahatir be soft on this guy?  Makes little sense to me:

Zakir Naik is an Indian preacher of Islam who currently calls Malaysia home. Described by the Washington Post as a “rock star of tele-evangelism”, he is also a fugitive, having evaded law enforcement in his home country of India since July 2016, when he fled the country within hours of bombers from neighbouring Bangladesh allegedly citing ideological influence from his YouTube videos.

A proponent of austere Salafi Islam, Naik has a long history of provocative rhetoric, including claims that “every Muslim should be a terrorist” and that suicide bombings are a legitimate weapon in war. He has expressed support for the death penalty for apostasy and the belief that Muslim-majority countries shouldn’t allow other religions to build houses of worship.

His television channel, named “Peace TV”, has been banned in India, Bangladesh, and (soon after the 2019 Easter bombings) Sri Lanka. Zahran Hashim, the alleged mastermind of the Sri Lanka attacks, once posted a video for his YouTube followers asking Sri Lankan Muslims what they could do for the celebrity preacher. Naik’s so-called Islamic Research Foundation was banned in 2016 under India’s anti-terror laws for “extolling Osama Bin Laden’s views”. He was charged in absentia in May this year for money laundering, accused of acquiring US$28 million worth of criminal assets.

While many governments in Asia treat Naik with suspicion, Malaysia has given him the red-carpet treatment. Naik has been granted permanent residency status and has attracted crowds of tens of thousands on speaking tours around the Muslim-majority country.

During a sermon to a large audience in the ultraconservative state of Kelantan in early August, Naik questioned the loyalty of Malaysia’s ethnic and religious minorities. He referred to ethnic Chinese Malaysians – many of whose ancestors have lived in Malaya since the early 19th century and constitute around a quarter of the country’s population – as “guests”....

Asked about his opinion on Naik’s remarks, Mahathir claimed that the preacher faces being “killed” if returned to India. “So he is here today, but if any country wants to have him, they are welcome to do so,” the PM said....

 Many see the PM’s tacit support of Naik’s presence in Malaysia as undermining his “Pact of Hope” government’s commitment to progressive values and pluralism, upon which they were elected. It also provides a clear picture of the enduring strength of far-right political Islam and the Malay-dominated status quo – even in the renewed democracy of “new Malaysia”.
 

A dream recorded

Last night, I saw a photo of a tree full of flying foxes, which no doubt then contributed to a dream which involved one of these critters wanting to know what was written on a piece of paper I was carrying.  Yeah, it was talking to me, and flew down to the ground where it showed me a trick whereby it could hold its body in such a way that it resembled, kind of, a cat.  (It was a weird looking transformation.)  I was very surprised, but the flying fox said that they had always been able to do this.  I grabbed my phone to take photos, because I thought this had never been recorded before.  The conversation then moved onto the piece of paper, which had marks on it, but they weren't words.  It sort of petered out from there...

I think it amusing, or odd, that in such a dream it wasn't the animal talking that was the surprise, but what it could do to transform its body.   Dreams are weird...

Goose goes high

Well, I would never have thought this was possible:  

In 1953, a mountain climber reported seeing a bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) soar over the peak of Mount Everest. The nearly 9-kilometer feat—2 kilometers higher than any other animal has been known to fly—was thought physiologically impossible. Now, researchers who raised 19 of the geese—named for the black stripes on the backs of their heads—have shown the birds really do have what it takes to fly so high.

 What bothers me a bit about this is that even at a height just short of most cruising altitudes, aircraft engines could still accidentally suck in a goose...

The ongoing effects of Christianity

Tom Holland, writing in New Statesman:

Repeatedly, throughout Christian history, the communism practised by the earliest Church had given radicals their inspiration. Marx, when he dismissed questions of morality and justice as epiphenomena, was veiling the true germ of his revolt against capitalism behind jargon. The revulsion that Marx so patently felt at the miseries of artisans evicted on to the streets by their landlords to starve, of children aged before their years by toiling night and day in factories, of labourers worked to death in distant colonies so that the bourgeoisie might have sugar with their tea, made a mockery of his claims to have outgrown moral judgements. As with Marx, so with Corbyn: his interpretation of the world appears fuelled by certainties that have no obvious source in his model of economics. It rises instead from profounder depths. If it offers a liberation from Christianity, then it is one that seems eerily like a recalibration of it.

Let's see how the appeal goes

Don't think I ever commented on the Peter Ridd dismissal case.

I see that Anthony Watts and the IPA are all excited that he got a big damages award from Judge Vasta, who was the subject of an article "Could Salvatore Vasta be Australia's Worse Judge" in February this year, before the Ridd case.

Given Vasta's somewhat hyperbolic sounding words reported today...:

Outlining his final declarations and penalties, Judge Salvatore Vasta suggested the university's conduct bordered on "paranoia and hysteria fuelled by systemic vindictiveness" and Dr Ridd must have felt he was being persecuted. He found the academic's intellectual freedom had been undermined by the "myopic and unjustified actions of his lifelong employer"....

Judge Vasta ordered a payment of $1.09 million in damages and compensation for lost wages and superannuation. Another $125,000 is to be paid to Dr Ridd as a penalty to "deter both this university and any other employer from dismissing an employee for exercising basic workplace rights".

...I suspect that the IPA should not be popping the champagne until the appeal is finished.

Stupid Shapiro

Yes, Ben Shapiro is a twit.  I liked these tweet responses to his whiny Right wing complaint when a company makes a perfectly reasonable decision as to how it wants to run its business:

Some clean up

Two of the worst looking hurricane damage photos I have seen from the Bahamas (found at an Axios post):

Boris not so hot in Parliament

Before Boris Johnson got the top job, I was saying to his sympathisers here that it seemed to me that most observers long thought he was not a particularly good parliamentary performer.

Most journalists commenting on the situation now seem to agree that Corbyn has been sounding surprisingly good, and Johnson is continuing his underperformance.  

Good.

Feeling poorly

I'm never 100% sure how to tell whether a dripping nose with little else going on is hayfever or a head cold.

I'm going with hayfever this time.  

Seriously?

The Conversation occasionally throws up an article that reads close to "peak Guardian".  Like this example from a part of academia that needs to be sacked if this is all they have to think about:

Sex robots increase the potential for gender-based violence 

I've complained before:  why does this topic attract so much attention, as if every second man in future is going to have one in his cupboard?  Has Westworld been way, way too influential?

How can I take this latest article seriously when it claims:

 Over 40 per cent of men who participated in an online survey said they could imagine buying a sex robot in the next five years.

The link shows it was to a survey of 263 men, with no details of where the survey was conducted.  Viz magazine? 

And this: 

 The concern is that if human-robot relationships continue to play out in such a manner, there is a possibility that the way users view and practise consent in their human relationships could shift, with negative consequences for women.

Acts of violence towards sex robots have also been observed around the world over the past few years. These include incidents of decapitation, mutilation and molestation. For individuals who might be inclined to act in this way, the availability of a robot to violate could feed these behaviours.

And the final paragraph:

The way sex robots are currently programmed is obviously problematic. It encourages the porn-ification of women, devalues consent and does not punish violence and aggression. Providing intelligent and somewhat autonomous machines with a full set of rights is excessive, but finding ways to protect them from harm is a positive solution. This ethical approach could preclude harmful human behaviour and in turn protect us from ourselves.

 I really can't believe people make a living fretting about giving some sort of rights to masturbation devices.

Network

I've been at home today trying to get a workplace laptop to work through my home internet (it won't - or at least, not properly), and this has reminded me that the worst aspect of modern computing, which seems ridiculously immune to adequate simplification, is networking.  

With all the alleged brilliance of AI, when are we going to get to a situation where I can say to my laptop "you're at home now, there's a new wifi you need to connect to, and I need Outlook and my other software to work from here today", and it will do it?

They ought to scrap the way it works now and start again.

Fun and games in Britain

Just thinking out loud here, but if an election is called on 14 October and the pro-Brexit-at-any-cost parties win, couldn't they get Parliament going in time to get any pre-election legislation delaying Brexit revoked?  Does it really take that long to get the Queen to roll up at Parliament?   Couldn't they ask her to just read one statement:  "My government will now ensure Brexit proceeds, and do a lot of other good stuff.  See you next Parliament." 

Someone will know, somewhere...

As I suspected

Slate has an article about the "no shampoo" idea, which has a certain following in Australia, but of which I am rather sceptical.  One quote:

So zero shampoo is not the answer for me—or most people. The idea that your hair will naturally rebalance after a period of not washing is “an old wives’ tale,” noted Joshua Zeichner, the director of cosmetic and clinical research at Mount Sinai Hospital to me via email. Moreover, it’s not good for your scalp, which does need to be cleansed now and then to stay healthy. “This no-shampoo movement has been a problem,” dermatologist Rebecca Baxt told me. She’s seen an uptick of people coming in with dead skin built up on their scalps, which itches and flakes, and ironically looks kind of dry, which can further feed the no-washing cycle. From a doctor’s perspective, the scalp skin is what you’re really caring for when you wash your hair. 

I heard the comedian Dave Hughes on his radio show some time ago say that he doesn't use shampoo very often, and once he got in the shower and was surprised to find that his hair was bubbling under the shower, when he hadn't put anything on it.  Turned out his wife had told one of his kids to secretly drop some shampoo into his hair while playing with him, so that he would finally wash his hair properly. 

Since then, when I have seen him on TV, I have thought "yeah, this guy's hair does look kind of stiff and as if it needs a good wash."  I wonder how many other people who follow this idea I could detect as having not-so-nice looking hair.

David's keeping count

David Neiwert writes on Right wing violence in the USA, and someone re-tweeted this from 2018, in which he lists some prominent Right wing murders (and acknowledges two cases of Left wing motivated killing.)   It is easy to forget these incidents, even if you don't have a political motivation for doing so.

And as it says at the start: 

For some reason, folks on the right have extremely short memories when it comes to acts of right-wing political violence. This is especially the case when they are in the middle of a propaganda campaign to make "the left" look violent. A long thread with lots of pix follows.

Well, made me laugh

In America, it's time to drop the kids off to their college dorm for the first time, I gather.   I thought this was a funny first tweet in response:

Give me some good news

A lot of "downer" news at the moment, no?

Families being thrown out of Australia when there appears to be no real need to; a severe hurricane mashing up the Bahamas; mass shootings in the US with responses in Twitter including a fair swathe of "don't worry, when we get even more guns into the hands of citizens, and they get the right training, things will come good"; (as already noted) a Conservative minister muttering about how governments don't have to follow Parliament, when push comes to shove; and Hong Kong in considerable turmoil.

Cheer me up, someone...

Bad news story from Vietnam

The ABC has a story up about the problem of family breakdown, runaway boys, and their exploitation by sex tourists in Vietnam (it talks about Hanoi in particular.)

I've been wanting to holiday in Vietnam, thinking that there would not be much of the obvious problems of poverty to be seen, particularly in the big cities.   But sounds like there sort of is.

Not a worry at all

Yeah, so Australian pro-Brexit readers (I think I have three):  are you not the teensy weeniest embarrassed that you now have a Conservative Minister saying that the government may not abide by laws passed by Parliament?

I can't see that Helen Dale has tweeted about that remarkable interview, either.


And to pre-empt a response of "but giving the country Brexit is following the democratic will of the people from the referendum" - the referendum was not binding, and it was up to the government to work out how to do it.  Regardless of laws passed previously to get the ball rolling, of course Parliaments can change previous legislation.    

Sorry, but democracy and rule of law is more important that your feelz about how important Brexit is.

What are the chances...

...that I would intensely dislike that Joker film?  

It's just about the safest bet in the world, given that I don't respond to comic book universes that purport to be serious, and have never gone out of my way to view movies in the "lonely, emotionally fragile man goes berserk" genre.  (Yeah, call me a film history philistine, but I still haven't got around to seeing Taxi Driver, King of Comedy, or Falling Down.  Dark themes of that kind have never held much appeal to me - so sue me.) 

What's more, Joker, while getting some ecstatic reviews, has received some pretty solid negative ones too,  most notably from Time's Stephanie Zacharek.   Given the strange world of comic book fandom, what's the bet that she has already received some disturbing threats over the net?  (Which would be kind of ironic, I guess.)

Anyway, the negative reviews have already primed me for the reasons I would dislike it.   Yet my son, being of the age where darker themes appeal, badly wants to see it.  

Perhaps I should deliberately hate view this one, and let out many sighs and mutterings throughout to annoy him?   Don't think I will, as maybe I would get into too much trouble from others in the cinema, too.

Do not wander towards this movie

I tried watching the Chinese science fiction blockbuster (at least in China) The Wandering Earth last night.

It's spectacularly bad - like the worst Michael Bay (or Roland Emmerich)  movie times 10, with even less character development, terrible opaque-to-understanding action editing, very 2001 derivative in one plot element, underwhelming special effects, and an awful,  clunky script.  About the only slightly interesting thing was that there was a light relief character (who didn't have much to do, actually) who was meant to have one parent from China, and one from Melbourne.  I think there was sort of a suggestion that his Australian genes had dumbed him down, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, I put up with its awfulness for about half the way, before speeding up to the end to see what happened.   Yeah, heroic male sacrifice featured, as might be expected.  Chinese audiences must be absolutely desperate for special effects heavy science fiction movies to have seen this one in large numbers, is all I can say.

I see that on Rottentomatoes that there are OK reviews from some American critics in the "just a bit of escapist, science fiction disaster movie fun " variety.  They are wrong.