Culture war warriors bouncing off the walls after Pell convictions overturned

I see that, reviewing my previous comments on Pell, I initially did not think it likely the High Court would readily overturn the conviction after a jury and three judges thought it could stand.   (I'm including the trial judge, who could in theory have directed the jury that the evidence was so weak that they must acquit.)

I've always been ambivalent about the likelihood of the allegation, and thought it wise that no one, on the either side of the culture wars, should be expressing certainty about the case.  I specifically said that David Marr should not have spoken as if he had complete vindication after the initial conviction - it was a bit of grandstanding.

But today I award my "nonsense Culture War reaction of the day" to - guess who - Sinclair Davidson, reverting to his "physically unimpressive man who compensates by talking like Conan the Barbarian when it comes to politics" mode with this silly claim:

CRUSHING DEFEAT FOR THE LEFT, THE ABC, THE VICTORIAN POLICE, THE VICTORIAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM.

Yeah - because every single person on the Left had exactly the same view of the matter, and this "defeat" will change the mind of every person who believes Pell was undoubtedly guilty.  

As it happens, I have talked to people who would never vote Labor (and are not, I think, especially big viewers of the ABC) who thought Pell was guilty after his initial conviction.    I have also spoken to people of Leftist persuasion who didn't know what to think.   There is also the possibility of ongoing civil action involving Pell - although how much there may be to gain from that, I don't know.

In a way, the process has given something that could be seen to "please" both sides:  those who were unduly certain of his guilt see that he still served a fair bit of time in jail; those who were convinced that this is the greatest injustice ever* get to jump around with the warpaint on a few days, although they'll soon enough be fuming again if civil actions proceed.

But what is 100% clear is that the final outcome will do nothing to remove the incredible loss of reputation of the Church over child abuse, or resolve its slow moving, painful internal conflict over its loss of credibility on all matters sexual, which really started with its disastrous 1960's decision on contraception. 

Good luck with the bigger picture, culture war warriors of the Right...

* It pales into insignificance compared to the Chamberlain case

The problem for other, poorer, countries

The BBC has a story about COVID 19 infections starting in a slum area in Mumbai. 

Just so hard to believe that efforts to contain it will be successful in that environment.

And in another "how can they possibly cope" story, I see that Jakarta Post is still reporting low total numbers in Indonesia, but a lot of doctors dying:

At least 18 doctors across Indonesia have died in the fight against COVID-19, the Indonesian Doctors Association (IDI) said on Sunday.

One of the 18 doctors died from exhaustion while fighting the pandemic while the others had tested positive or were under surveillance for COVID-19.

Wahyu Hidayat and Heru Sutantyo were the latest doctors confirmed to have died of COVID-19, the association announced on Sunday.

Wahyu, an otolaryngologist, died at Pelni General Hospital in Bekasi, while Heru, a doctor from Diponegoro State University, died at Pertamina Central Hospital.

Also, looks like the Philippines is claiming similar numbers as Indonesia (3,660 cases, less than Australia!), but again it's hard to believe.  

Hot contender for the most nonsensical comparison of the century

What a failure of a "gotcha"

Roger Franklin thinks that Sarah Ferguson should be embarrassed that she didn't do the research to see that one man who was on the show and speaking about his time as a child at a Ballarat orphanage, Peter Clarke, has once said that "it was great fun" growing up there.  On Revelation, about which I posted, his attitude was more nuanced, in that he said some nuns were good, some not; and that there was "no love" there, except that between the children.  He seemed to remember some mates there fondly enough.

So what?   The earlier comment and the present one are not necessarily inconsistent at all.

And if Roger thought it was a case that Ferguson was out to give an overall bad impression of the orphanage - she actually had the main guy who claimed he was the subject of some highly dubious attention and actions by Pell say that he was really happy living there!  He literally said he "loved it". 

The show, if anything, gave a very balanced picture of the place, just as you might expect from talking to a bunch of former residents:  Bernard (the main focus of the story) was clearly generally happy there; but some others said they didn't like the intense religiosity of daily life; some thought some of the nuns too strict; I think all acknowledged some nuns were fine and there was some fun to be had; and Clarke himself said he thought it a case that the nuns just weren't trained about how to deal with really troubled kids.   That observation would be undoubtedly true, for the era.

Franklin is just out to try to make any "gotcha" he thinks he can.     He instead just shows himself up as the stupid old duffer that he is. 

Trump Vs the doctors

Gee, I wish someone on a podium with Trump would just lose it during a press conference and yell at him "Mr President, you are simply wrong.  Shut up and listen to experts in the field.":

A strong piece on Trump and COVID19

Have a read of Fintan O'Toole's really great bit of analysis of Trump and his weird, contradictory impulses as to how to react to COVID-19.  Here are the opening paragraphs:

On July 4, 1775, just his second day serving as commander-in-chief of the American revolutionary forces, George Washington issued strict orders to prevent the spread of infection among his soldiers: “No person is to be allowed to go to Fresh-water pond a fishing or any other occasion as there may be a danger of introducing the small pox into the army.” As he wrote later that month to the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, he was exercising “the utmost Vigilance against this most dangerous Enemy.” On March 8, 2020, well over two months after the first case of Covid-19 had been confirmed in the United States, Dan Scavino, assistant to the president and director of social media at the White House, tweeted a mocked-up picture of his boss Donald Trump playing a violin. The caption read: “My next piece is called Nothing Can Stop What’s Coming.” Trump himself retweeted the image with the comment: “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Donald Trump is no George Washington, but his descent from commander-in-chief to vector-in-chief is nonetheless dizzying. Trump’s narcissism, mendacity, bullying, and malignant incompetence were obvious before the coronavirus crisis and they have been magnified rather than moderated in his surreal response to a catastrophe whose full gravity he failed to accept until March 31, when it had become horribly undeniable. The volatility of his behavior during February and March—the veering between flippancy and rage, breezy denial and dark fear-mongering—may not seem to demand further explanation. It is his nature. Yet there is a mystery at its heart. For if there is one thing that Trump has presented as his unique selling point, it is “utmost Vigilance,” his endless insistence that, as he puts it, “our way of life is under threat.”

If the United States is to be run by a man who has perfected the paranoid style, the least its citizens might expect is a little of that paranoia when it is actually needed. Yet even on March 26, when the US had surpassed China and Italy to become the most afflicted country in the world, Trump continued to talk down the threat from the virus.

Many people have it. I just spoke to two people. They had it. They never went to a doctor. They never went to anything. They didn’t even report it. . . . The people that actually die, that percentage is much lower than I actually thought…. The mortality rate, in my opinion . . . it’s way, way down.

 Oh, OK.  I can't resist posting a few more paragraphs further in, which really do point to deeply offensive attitudes held by Trump:

Trump has long characterized those who do not appreciate his genius as “haters and losers”: “Haters and losers say I wear a wig (I don’t), say I went bankrupt (I didn’t), say I’m worth $3.9 billion (much more). They know the truth!” runs a typical tweet from April 2014. In The Art of the Deal, Trump claims that “There are people—I categorize them as life’s losers—who get their sense of accomplishment and achievement from trying to stop others.” But in Trumpworld, as in the rightwing ideology he embodies, life’s losers are not just hateful. They are a different species. Winners are one kind of human; losers a lesser breed. Trump— like so many of the superrich—believes that this division is inherited: “What my father really gave me,” he tweeted in June 2013, “is a good (great) brain, motivation and the benefit of his experience – unlike the haters and losers (lazy!).”

In How to Get Rich, Trump links his own germaphobia to the idea that some people are born losers. Winners are people who think positively—and positivity repels germs. “To me, germs are just another kind of negativity.” He then goes on to tell the story of an unnamed acquaintance who is driven home from the hospital in an ambulance after being treated for injuries sustained in a crash. The ambulance crashes and he has to be taken back to the hospital. “Maybe he’s just a really unlucky guy. Or maybe he’s a loser. I know that sounds harsh, but let’s face it—some people are losers.” The train of thought here is typically meandering, but the logic is clear enough. Losers are inevitably doomed by their own negativity, of which germs are a physical form. Infection happens to some people because they are natural losers.

In 2013 Trump suggested that there was an upside to the great recession caused by the banking crisis: “One good aspect of the Obama depression is that it will separate the winners from the losers. If you can make it now, you deserve it!” Apply this to Covid-19 and you get an instinctive belief that it too will separate the wheat from the human chaff. Great public crises are not collective experiences that bring citizens together. On the contrary, they reveal the true divisions in the world: between those who “deserve” to survive and thrive and those who do not. Faced with the threat of the coronavirus, this becomes an ideology of human sacrifice: Let the losers perish.

A not so late movie review: Knives Out

Saw this in Google Play on the weekend, encouraged by strong reviews (not that I read any - I was just going by the average on Metacritic and Rottentomatoes) and good word of mouth on Twitter.  I had seen the trailer at the cinema and didn't think it looked all that good, but I assumed that it was just a case of a poorly made trailer.

Turns out my trailer reaction was a bit closer to the mark.   Look, there is nothing wrong with it, really:  it kept my attention to the end and I hadn't worked out the resolution ahead of time (but I virtually never do in murder mysteries);  it's just that it was much more old fashioned and traditional in the "whodunit" genre than I expected.  For some reason, I was expecting something more innovative.

Sometimes funny, but not that often.   Whoever did the make up (and perhaps, the lighting) seemed to make no effort to make the big name stars look less than their age - in fact, I thought it was like they were made to look older.   Except perhaps for Chris Evans - he looked his age, whatever that is.

Overall, maybe it was just a case of the movie being oversold in its reviews that I felt under-whelmed.  Not trying to put anyone off watching it; and maybe I was just in the wrong mood.   But I think despite it being well directed and having a complex script, it's still pretty forgettable.

Update: it just occurred to me that I felt a similar way about the movie Spotlight.  Nothing wrong with it; well made, etc:  just it didn't meet the expectations indicated by reviews, and feels forgettable.  In fact, I already can't remember any "classic" scene from it. 

Not how things should work

In any normal presidency, a crank economist would not be shouting at a medical expert that he (the economist) knows more about how a drug has been proven effective. 

And a president would not be pretty much taking the side of the crank economist and encouraging people to try the drug.

Who is paying the Institute of Paid Advocacy to have this thought?

Anyone who has been paying close attention would know that the IPA (see title) ran a video a few days ago in which one its current gormless "I'm just waiting for pre-selection by the Libs" youngsters [geez, I wonder how much Roskam smarts over still being there] advocated for an immediate reduction of COVID-19 restrictions, all in the interest of not killing the economy and avoiding the unemployed killing themselves.   [Note how this advocacy kindly puts into the minds of the unemployed that they will soon be contemplating this.]

What I want to know is this:  the IPA's takes over the last couple of decades have virtually all been traceable to funding sources - the support of the tobacco industry, climate change denial, kill the ABC, etc.

Which of the current funders would be pressing a line that they know better than experts when it is safe to reduce restrictions?  

I suspect Gina Rinehart would - she has a family background of generic nutty ideas and is still devoted to climate change denial.  It is bad for business.   But it would be good to know who else.  Has Rupert made any statements to anyone?   It is very suspicious.

Anyway, about the only media outlet reporting on the IPA video that I can see is The Australian.   Of course it would. 

Genki desu

Because we cannot live on a diet of COVID19 news alone, let's consider this story of Japanese pop!

I'm not sure why, but Youtube was recently suggesting World Order music videos to me, and in a recent bit of late night curiosity, I watched quite a few. 

I was vaguely aware of them before: the Japanese "boy" band which shows a deep resolve to sticking to the formula of electro pop with robotic choreography done in public while wearing Japanese business suits.   I'll even put up (what I think is) their biggest hit, which is as intensely idiosyncratically modern Japanese as you can get:

Anyway, watching the videos made me curious about the leader of the group - especially as the song credits show that he writes them (sometimes in collaboration).  There was something a bit familiar with his odd set of characteristics:  a good looking, clean cut man heading a band, writing its thematically unusual songs and heavily into choreography as part of performance;  and I realised I was thinking of David Byrne.

Yeah, so I'm coming a couple of decades late to learn about him, but looking up the life story of this guy - Genki Sudo - was quite surprising.  While David Byrne is seen as a man of wide ranging interests and talents, he's got nothing on the career path of Genki.   He made his name as fighter in that mixed martial arts UFC competition, and was allowed to do over-the-top, theatrical (and somewhat amusing) entrance choreography.  I think it makes UFC look a lot less serious than I assumed it was, and a bit like WWF.  Here is an (apparently) famous example from 2006:

He went from that to form World Order, whose song titles indicate a strong interest in liberal internationalism, with a cynical attitude towards the American Right.  As its most recent example, have a look at this 2018 video, for the sarcastically upbeat anti-Trump song (turn on the captions to see the lyrics) "Let's Start WW3":

The video ends on Genki's long standing slogan "We Are All One" featuring all nation's flags.

And now - Sudo has now left the group to become a politician!   Here's his entry on the Japanese Diet website:

His political goals according to this website are:

As a politician, his three main goals is furthering food safety, helping global environment protection and “a foreign policy that involves peaceful and realistic negotiations (translated quote).”

Yep, he's definitely liberal.

Wikipedia says he has also been a successful wrestling coach, and has written 14 books! [David Byrnes has written quite a few books himself, and in another similarity, I see that they have both been married once and divorced.  Sudo has no kids, though, apparently.]

Quite the varied career, to put it mildly.  

Hope he does well as a politician, anyway.  I have no idea whether he is likeable in real life - there are not that many interviews with him around, that I can see.  But a pretty interesting character.

Oh - and the title for the post:  "genki" means healthy, lively or vigorous, and the Japanese greeting of "genki desu ka" (pretty much "how are you going"?) can be answered "genki" or "genki desu".  So I believe.  Genki Sudo does seem pretty "genki".  

So obviously,wildly, inappropriate

And yet, Fox News is trying to endorse it (mind you, this was prior to the above Trump performance, but still):

Quite frankly, if this virus doesn't manage to take out Rupert Murdoch as ironic revenge for his malignant effect on American politics, there ain't no justice.

This seems...a really bad idea

From the Jakarta Post:

Annually, some 20 million people from Greater Jakarta travel to their hometowns to celebrate Idul Fitri in a tradition called mudik (exodus). The tradition, public health experts say, could lead to massive COVID-19 contagion on Java, an island of 141 million people, where many regions have far worse healthcare systems than Jakarta....

 President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo announced that he would not officially ban people from traveling for the Idul Fitri holidays, ignoring warnings from public health experts that the consequences of failing to prevent people from leaving Jakarta, the epicenter of the outbreak in the country, could be dire.  

“[The President] underlines that there is no official ban on people going on the mudik during the 2020 Idul Fitri holiday period. The travelers, however, must self-isolate for 14 days, will be given ‘people under observation’ [ODP] status, as per the World Health Organization health protocol, and will be monitored by the respective local administration,” presidential spokesman Fadjroel Rachman said in a statement on Thursday, shortly after a speech by the President on the matter.

State Secretary Pratikno, however, later clarified Fadjroel’s statement, saying that the President actually called on people to stay in the capital, though he did not categorically state that the President would ban the mudik.

More about the mudik tradition, due in May this year, which until now I knew nothing about.

Would suggest facemasks are worth wearing

As noted at Science:

You may be able to spread coronavirus just by breathing, new report finds 

The disagreement over whether apparently healthy people should be wearing masks when out and about is surprising.   Provided there are enough around (so that health care workers have plenty), it's hard to imagine it hurting. 

In other COVID-19 news:

What a surprise.

The sad thing is that I thought Austin had a reputation as a Democrat stronghold within Texas.   Seems even liberal students in the US did not exercise common sense.  Or did the fact that they went on a chartered jet mean that these were the Republican students in Austin?   Would be interesting to know...

Pell and the ABC

I thought I had missed one episode of the ABC's Revelation series, but I was mistaken.  Turns out I saw part of the first one, all of the second episode (which I posted about), and then last night I saw most of the final one, which centred on Ballarat and George Pell. 

I reckon if it weren't for the COVID-19 situation, it would have attracted more commentary questioning its timing, when Pell's High Court appeal is due next week, and the most widespread view seems to be that the court will overturn his conviction.

I thought the show was most interesting in it description of the highly insular nature of Catholic schooling and clerical life in the period of the 1950's to (say) about 1990.   Both Paul Collins's and David Marr's comments on that seemed insightful.  I was also interested to hear a woman (unfortunately for her, the sister of the prolific child sex offender Ridsdale) who knew Pell from a young age saying he was always arrogant and a bit of a bully.  I'm sure I have said here before that I used to suspect that it might be more a case that his odd manner of speaking made him sound more cold and arrogant than he might really be.   My generous assumption seems to have been wrong.

I also have no doubt that he was legitimately considered with suspicion by some adults for his fondness of swimming and playing with boys, even at a time when there was much less awareness of the possibility that male authority figures in child centred organisations might be fond of sexually touching kids. 

At the end of the day, it's hard to know what to make of some of the allegations against him.  As the show suggested, though, they did tend to fit a pattern:   one of a sexually frustrated young man who would touch where he shouldn't but was perhaps smart enough to never do anything with an absolutely clear sexual motive.    (That is, of course, ignoring for the sake of the argument the offences for which he was convicted.)

As David Marr indicated, though, the overall impression of Pell's life is one that feels sad and tragic - a conservative wanting to fight societal change and maintain the influence of traditional Catholic thought, but becoming increasingly ineffective at doing so even while he climbed the ladder of authority within his Church.

Good news for some

I feel sorry for the donkeys, though. 

In which I once again save everyone's time

Spotted at, well, you can guess where:

Come on, once again I can save everyone's time.

It will be 200 pages devoted to the urgent need for the Australian governments to:

a.  deregulate everything, as fast as possible;
b.  start using blockchain technologies, they're terrific;
c.  urgently reduce all government spending on things other than the temporary workforce support, with public broadcasting getting special mention;
d.  reduce taxes.

Done and dusted.

No 1

Update:  at the same press conference, this answer, which will (I suppose) let Trump later claim that he always thought the recovery would be slow:

Update 2:  yet more from this bizarre presser:

Has any journalist attending these yet asked the obvious question - "why are the journalists in this room seated far apart for social distancing, but at every press conference it's breached on your side of the podium?"

Just another quick COVID-19 comment

Planet America on the ABC is really good:  smart, sharp and knowledgeable programming of the  kind  that has pretty much disappeared from commercial television.

Unfortunately, though, I often overlook watching it on its first screening, and it's the sort of topical show which it seems not worth going back to view on line even after a few days, given the speed with which Trump generates new, usually appalling, news.

However, I watched last night's episode and it was well worthwhile.  They had an interview with a New York doctor who painted a very bleak picture of the city at the moment.  You should watch it.

And I have been meaning to comment on this for a good few days now:   New Yorkers, being at the epicentre of the North American COVID-19 crisis, must be absolutely hating listening to Trump downplay the problem, trying to claim that there is plentiful protective equipment, and giving himself top marks for how his government has responded.    They must despise the man.

Our numbers do seem pretty good

Far be it for me to want to give any succour to right wing figures who are screaming "Think of the economy!  We have over-reacted!",  but I do get the feeling that it's not unreasonable to be starting to think that Australia might have caught COVID-19 in time.  I've been looking at the Worldometer table, and note that:

a.    as everyone knows, the South East Asian rich countries did exceptionally well;

b.    you can ignore the poorer SE Asian countries which currently show tiny case numbers, but presumably they have tiny testing rates, and I think the WHO should rightly be warning everyone of  terrible death tolls that may come from those places over the next 6 months;

c.    but compared to other Western nations, including virtually all of Europe and the USA, Australian figures do seem remarkably good, especially on a per capita basis.   We're still under "1" for deaths per million of population, and our "total cases per million" at 195 is close to that of South Korea, and a fraction of the figures for the likes of Germany, France (around 1/4), the USA (about 1/3) and the UK (about 1/2).   In fact, looking at the UK, why is their death rate running at 35 per million, while ours is barely 1?    

The trick, of course, is going to be how to judge an appropriate rate of "return to something like normalcy" without risking the numbers getting out of control.

But, the figures do seem to give some optimism that early action may have worked well, and the government should not be shy of saying that.   I think that, for general economic confidence reasons,  it would good for the government to also start talking about the criteria it will be using to look at when they will start to relax the present semi-lockdown.  It's probably a pretty hard thing to communicate, as I expect the expert opinion on that will be divided.

Update:  here's a report on the same topic in The Guardian today.

Update:  I see from Bolt's blog (I can only see the header - no way I would part with a cent of money to a Murdoch publication) that he is saying something similar to what is in my last paragraph.   (Except he puts it in his bombastic way, that the PM must tell us how the lockdown will end; it can't go on for 6 months, that would be a disaster, etc)     The problem with Bolt's take on it all, though, is that he helping encourage the dangerous Right wing views that it was never a serious danger; it's enabled something like a Left wing dictatorship; and it's already low risk to go back to normal.  Just have a look at the headings of his other posts.  

Yes, too soon. Still amusing, though.