Comments driven into moderation

My unwanted commenter Graeme Bird has been sent over the edge again by current events in America, which to his conspiracy addled brain is part of his ever expanding grand conspiracy theory (involving you-know-who from the Middle East) from which he seems to derive his life's meaning. 

As he continually adds anti-Semitic conspiracy rubbish in comments, and I have no ability to ban him on the Blogger platform, I am getting tired of his comments appearing on here - sometimes for some hours - before I can delete them.

All comments are therefore going into moderation for the time being.

Please feel welcome to comment - if they are not from Bird, I will clear them soon enough.

Not hurting Biden, so far

Damaged people watch

Sinclair Davidson likes to host a blog which allows free rein to nuts likes this:

First: it's a worry that such nutjobs are reproducing and helping pass their attitudes to younger males.

Second:  for the thousandth time - great hate site you got going there, Sinclair.  Congratulations.  You must be proud of things like how you banned the word "chink" then your commenters used "chunk" instead.    Or how they can be triggered by something like the above and use "faggot" as a routine insult.

Update:  on a more serious note than a couple of Australian rednecks freaking out because a teacher wants to do a foot tap:

Yeah, great hate site you got going there, Sinclair.  

How about a few common sense suggestions to help defuse riots

*   I find it hard to believe that it is procedurally risky to arrest the other 3 police officers who watched their buddy knee the life out of George Floyd for some charge immediately.  Can't the charges be later modified if needed?   Civil order across the entire nation requires people being able to see justice at least being started promptly - especially when everyone knows what happened from their TV. 

*  How much freaking common sense does it take for heads of police, governors (or even the President himself) to come out and say that restraint methods involving interference with air or blood flow through the neck are banned - never to be used?   That all police forces will ensure that all restraint instruction will emphasise the need to not do things obviously dangerous to the life of the arrested?

*  How much common sense does it take for heads of police or governors (or even the President himself) to come out and say that police who hide their identifying badge numbers are committing at least an administrative offence and will be punished for seeking to protect any of their own unjustified violence?   The riots are about lack of confidence in the police - they need to show why they can be trusted, and hiding identity shows they can't be.   And what about the convenient turning off of body cams?  Some places are acting:

Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer fired the city's chief of police Steve Conrad after it was discovered that police officers had not activated their body cameras during the shooting of David McAtee, a local black business owner who was killed during protests early Monday morning.

Why it matters: Mandatory body camera policies have proven to be important in efforts to hold police officers accountable for excessive force against civilians and other misconduct. Those policies are under even greater scrutiny as the nation has erupted in protest over the killing of black people at the hands of police.

but again, I say there needs to be serious, immediate action against all police who deliberately turn off their body cam.

Uhuh

1.  Andrew Bolt, slavishly following Fox News evening line up and the American Right:

2.  A tweet from America:

The black people were released after a few minutes, apparently, but it still is a remarkable example of policing in modern America.

I think there is too little emphasis in the reporting on the riots on the role that Fox News and the American wingnut Right (joined in by our home grown bunch of race commentary Murdoch morons) are playing in pushing a reactionary line which is escalating the problem rather than defusing it.    

Sounds interesting

A book noted at Nature:

Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World

Philip Matyszak Thames & Hudson (2020)

Western ideas on antiquity are dominated by Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, Greeks and Romans, with other cultures often reduced to stereotypes. Historian Philip Matyszak asks: were the Philistines philistines and the Vandals vandals? His stimulating encyclopaedia of 40 “forgotten peoples” begins with the Akkadians around 2330 bc and ends with the Hephthalites (‘White Huns’) in the fifth century ad. Illustrations include a Roman-style Vandal mosaic; far from vilifying Roman culture, the Vandals respected it, say current historians.

On a sort of related topic:  following a recent post I wrote about how India sent Buddhist monks West before the time of Christ, it did make me think about how we all carry images in our minds of what Greek, Roman, Babylonian and Egyptian civilisation looked like around that time, but for Indian civilisation we (OK, maybe just me) just don't have much mental image.   Is it that the archaeological sites there just aren't all that well preserved?  Or that it has been glossed over in Western education due to a type of educational bias.  (God knows I have no sympathy for the current Right wing Hindu nationalism, but I guess I do feel they have the right to feel their ancient history is overlooked.)

Update:  for example, have a look at this video of the Buddhist Stupa and surroundings at Sanchi in the middle of India, from around 300 BC.  The whole landscape is also a little surprising because it looks vast and pretty empty.   Not exactly the mental image I have of India - I kind of imagine a village every few kilometres or so:



 Update 2:  this guy's explanation of the Southern Indian Vijayanagar empire is interesting too, and the ruins are impressive - but the place only dates from 14th century CE - even though I would have guessed much older:

  

Sweden noted

Gee, when even a conservative site like Hot Air runs a story headed this:

 you would think Adam Creighton might want to reconsider his pig headed "lockdown has been a dis-aster!" take on Covid-19.

The Hot Air story is actually pretty nuanced and good.   Unlike Creighton. 

The weird optics of this Presidency (Part 1 million)

 

Yes, it's an irrelevant gesture to the current issue, clearly only designed to have partisan appeal to his dimwitted base.        

Claire pokes her head up

I had been wondering if Claire Lehmann was ever going to mention her former Quilette contributor  Andy Ngo's role in promoting to the Right the idea of Antifa as a well funded and organised mob of violent thugs just waiting to destroy American society, now that she can see his influence has gone all the way to Trump.

I thought she might have kept her silence, given that Ngo stopped working for her unusually abruptly, after his disingenuous role in covering for Right wing violence planning activists was getting attention.

But no, she has put her head up, and of all things, to defend an article she ran which was really indefensible:

I think she's like Adam Creighton on COVID 19 - they get a position in their head and then are willing to die in a ditch for it rather than re-consider whether they made a bad call.

Update:

Itchy trigger fingers - of the nutjob Right

Noted in Politico:

Anarchist and militia extremists could try to exploit the recent nationwide protests spurred by the death of George Floyd, the Department of Homeland Security warned in an intelligence note sent to law enforcement officials around the country.

Floyd, a black man who pleaded that he couldn't breathe while a police officer held him down and pressed his knee into his neck for nearly 9 minutes, was killed in Minnesota on May 25. The officer responsible has been charged with murder and manslaughter. 

The memo, dated May 29 and marked unclassified/law enforcement sensitive, cites “previous incidents of domestic terrorists exploiting First Amendment-protected events” as one reason for DHS’ concern of additional targeted violence by “domestic terrorist actors.” 

It also reveals, citing the FBI, that on May 27, two days after Floyd’s death, “a white supremacist extremist Telegram channel incited followers to engage in violence and start the ‘boogaloo’—a term used by some violent extremists to refer to the start of a second Civil War—by shooting in a crowd.” One Telegram message encouraged potential shooters to “frame the crowd around you” for the violence, the document said. 

And on May 29, “suspected anarchist extremists and militia extremists allegedly planned to storm and burn the Minnesota State Capitol,” the memo reads, citing FBI information.

Noted on Twitter:

Now for something more trivial

Let's do a quick review of the Netflix action movie Extraction:

As nearly everyone else has said - some very technically and thrillingly accomplished action (if rather bloody in a way I normally object to) in a merely serviceable story, but quite satisfying overall.   

Some different things about the film:

*  it was odd and a little amusing to hear Chris Hemsworth using full-on Aussie accent and vernacular, rather than the more mid-Pacific accent he usually uses in American movies;

* I can understand why Banglasdesh doesn't like the film - it makes Dhaka look like an absolute 3rd world, dangerous, corrupt, dump of a city, yet I think it was nearly all filmed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad.  (Knowing this may make viewers scratch that Indian city off any "places to visit" list too, since it looks so polluted and dirty.)  

* the camera work and action is just so impressive, though.  And not in an overly editted way which is my main complaint about modern action directors.   (It could hardly be accused of that when it has one widely praised no-cut car chase that goes on for about 11 minutes.  It is really terrific.)

One thing I can justify even though my son complained and complained about it:

*  why, he whined, will I watch this and say it's pretty thrilling, but refuse to watch John Wick movies?  Well, I have watched about 15 to 20 minutes of John Wick movies - the beginning of the first one, and some action sequence from (I think?)  the second one.   I abandoned the first movie because I was finding the dialogue and acting was terrible - I don't remember much about any action in that.    But the second time I was watching a fight in train, and it was all very stabby- stabby and arm breaky (perhaps close up pistol shot to the head as well?) from recollection.

Here's the thing - I found that the John Wick violence was deliberately more "up close and personal" and quasi-sadist in tone than that in Extraction.   Sure, both movies feature baddies getting what they deserve, and lots of blood;  but I thought Extraction did much faster cutaways from things like throat cuttings, stabbings and even gunshots to the head shots than Wick.  It also didn't much feature the sound of bones breaking (I bet that's in Wick) or close ups of stabbings.   And most of the death in Hemsworth's movie was gun fire, which usually (but not always) featured a spray of blood but not much else.

The fights are heavily choreographed in both, of course, and both feature the same methods of killing.    But my reaction to movie violence depends a lot on how much the movie emphasises its effects - hence I really get sick of the modern Netflix speciality of shots to the head and brains blown out the back as a routine thing.   I think Extraction did an acceptable level of moving on fast from the violent act, whereas Wick seemed to want to dwell on them.  I would have to watch all of a Wick film to confirm this, perhaps with a stopwatch in hand, but I reckon I can justify this scientifically.

Anyway, that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Update:  forgot to mention, I think the deliberate ambiguity of the ending is actually pretty clever.  

Police state Trump

I hadn't really thought much before about how GOP friendly the average American police officer would be, but I see that the Financial Times had a story in 2018 noting how police unions backed Trump:

Donald Trump assiduously courted the law-and-order vote in 2016, earning an endorsement from the national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP). At a time when police shootings and viral videos of cops behaving badly were sparking rolling, racially charged protests — most recently in Sacramento following the death of Stephon Clark — Trump channeled the emotions of a group that felt under threat. New research shows that Trump swung tens of thousands of votes and flipped at least one state on the backs of cops alone....

Harvard researcher Michael Zoorob found that police officer political engagement jumped from 2012 to 2016 on volunteering for a campaign, displaying a political sign and donating money, while the general public was less engaged. His research analyzed the Trump law-enforcement phenomenon in a paper he has submitted for publication. Zoorob found that places where police unions are strongest had the biggest shift from Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, to Trump. Critically, his analysis found the police mobilization effect accounted for more than 13,000 votes in Michigan — greater than Trump’s narrow margin of victory over Clinton — and more than 27,000 votes in Pennsylvania.

Zoorob, a graduate student in the school of government, attributes this to the way Trump talked about the police. “Those peddling the narrative of cops as a racist force in our society — a narrative supported with a nod by my opponent — share directly in the responsibility for the unrest in Milwaukee, and many other places within our country,” Trump said in an August 2016 speech in a mostly white Wisconsin suburb, shortly after a police shooting in nearby Milwaukee. “They have fostered the dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America.”

A month later, the FOP, the nation’s largest police union, endorsed Trump. The union did not endorse in 2012, freezing out Romney for supporting an Ohio bill that would have sapped power from public employee unions. In office, Trump has continued his pro-police rhetoric — notably encouraging law enforcement officers to be “rough” on suspects in a speech in Long Island last year — and delivered a policy win by giving them more access to military surplus equipment, which the Obama administration had restricted in the wake of the shooting and subsequent unrest in Ferguson.

I know there are some commentators fearing that the riots may help Trump win again as the "law and order" President,  but I find that hard to believe, mainly because his response has emphasised his immaturity yet again:

Honestly, it's like having an 8 year old boy (one who barely passes his English class) as President.

Bolsonaro: the man Trump cultists think Trump is

There's been a bit of an (accurate) meme going around this year that it's weird how Trumpists view him as some sort of hyper-masculine antithesis to limp-wristed Left wing males, when in fact so many of his characteristics are well outside the traditional view of what's "manly":

As the writer Windsor Mann has noted, Trump behaves in ways that many working-class men would ridicule: “He wears bronzer, loves gold and gossip, is obsessed with his physical appearance, whines constantly, can't control his emotions, watches daytime television, enjoys parades and interior decorating, and used to sell perfume.”

Not to mention the aura of physical cowardice he radiates, going back to the bone spurs days as a young man.   The only thing you can reliably say is old fashioned "masculine" about him is his sexist treatment of women over his lifetime and preparedness to brag about sexual conquests.

But when you read about nutso Bolsonaro in Brazil, well he's like everything terrible about Trump but with actual macho characteristics.   This is how he was dealing with coronavirus over the weekend, for example:  

President Jair Bolsonaro, who opposes coronavirus lockdown measures imposed by Brazilian cities and states, rallied with his supporters Sunday, as Washington said it had sent two million doses of a controversial unproven COVID-19 drug.

Brazil is Latin America's hotspot for the deadly pandemic, with nearly 500,000 confirmed cases and a death toll of nearly 28,000, the world's fourth highest.

But Bolsonaro met a tightly packed throng of supporters outside the government palace in the capital Brasilia. The crowd chanted "myth! myth! myth!" -- echoing the president's dismissal of the virus pandemic.

Protected by bodyguards, he approached the crowd without touching them, although he did pick up two children and put them on his shoulders, and briefly mounted a police horse, to the crowd's delight.

I presume this photo is from the same event:

And what about his past?  From Wikipedia:

He graduated from the Agulhas Negras Military Academy in 1977 and served in the Brazilian Army's field artillery and parachutist units. He became known to the public in 1986, when he wrote an article for Veja magazine criticizing low wages for military officers, after which he was arrested and detained for fifteen days. One year later, he was accused by the same magazine of planning to plant bombs in military units, which he denied. After a first degree conviction, he was acquitted by the Brazilian Supreme Military Court in 1988.^[2]

Of course I'm not saying that there is anything to admire about Bolsonaro:  he's more dangerous than Trump because he leads by even worse example that does his American counterpart.   (Not just declining to wear a face mask, but doing it on the back of a horse amidst a crowd!)   I just think it's funny how Trump cultists imagine Trump as if he had Bolsonaro's characteristics, when he clearly doesn't.

A good comparison

As Axios explains about the Trump tweet saying that "Antifa" will be designated a terrorist organisation:  

Mark Bray, author of "Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook," wrote of Trump's tweet: "To explain a little: it's like calling bird-watching an organization. Yes, there are bird-watching organizations as there are Antifa organizations but neither bird-watching nor antifa is an organization."

It seems that some in the White House see the pointlessness of the idea, but populists Right wingers thought that it was a good idea:

As recently as Saturday night, senior administration officials told me that the designation of a violent cohort of far-left activists, antifa, as a terrorist organization was not being seriously discussed at the White House. But that was Saturday.

Behind the scenes: The situation changed dramatically a few hours later, after prominent conservative allies of the president, such as his friend media commentator Dan Bongino, publicly urged a tough response against people associated with antifa (short for "anti-fascist").

It's just throwing red meat to Trump's ignorant base - I see Australia's stupid Trumpists are putting up Red State posts theorising about how effective such a declaration could be.   

Historians on American riots

Two American historians have had good Twitter threads looking at the history of American race riots (especially with comparisons to 1968).   They are collected in this Threadreader posts:

Kevin Kruse

Tom Sugrue

Not a great weekend

*  I have little to contribute on the riots in the US.   Although - I did notice a couple of days ago (after the first riots) saying that 3 of Fox News evening "hosts" had spent time blaming Obama for increasing racial tension in America.   Pathetic.  Also - it seems both sides are claiming nefarious infiltrators at the riots - Antifa on one side (no doubt Fox News is running with that, and I won't bother looking) and far Right agitators on the other.   Wouldn't be completely surprised if there is some element of truth in both claims.   [Oh - here's a post at Hot Air on this topic - pointing out that America's worst Attorney General in living memory is saying "it's Antifa". Of course.]

* Disturbingly, stupidity seems to be getting younger.  Still pretty white, though:

Australian anti-vaxxers label Covid-19 a 'scam' and break distancing rules at anti-5G protests

This was the photo of protest in Brisbane:

Hard to tell from that one, but the backs of heads look pretty young.

The Daily Mail got the heading more accurate:

COVID-19 is a scam, no mandatory vaccines and 5G equals communism: Inside Australia's WEIRDEST protest ever 

And they have a bunch of photos from demos around the country showing that the anti-vaxxer movement does skew young.   (Probably because people in their 50's and up remember how, as kids, our parents talked about how much they valued the success of the polio vaccination.)  Here's a photo from the Daily Mail:

I haven't read about how this was organised - I wouldn't mind betting that a Facebook page played a large role.

Update:   a couple of other things about the character of the anti-vaxxers movement.   I think it used to be pretty accurate to characterise most anti-vaxxers as people on the Green/Left side of politics, and probably also dominated by women (even if the bogus "science" supporting it came from men.)   But something seems to have happened to move a substantial number to the Right - is it just that they saw the Right was cornering the market in obsessive conspiracy belief, and the anti-vaxxers are joiners?

Also, with this move, as the photos indicate, it looks more male dominated than before.    Look at loony loon Pete Evans, who having been sacked from Channel 7, has come out more strongly than ever with anti-vax and crank medicine as well as Qanon conspiracy tweets.  

I find this rather odd - but I presume some journalist somewhere is looking into this. 

About Wodehouse

You know, I don't think I could have told you a thing about the private life of PG Wodehouse until I  read this article just now in the New Yorker.   (I have never tried his books, or even watched the TV adaptations either.   Perhaps I should read something by him, and I presume Scribd, which I have been using for a couple of months, would have some.)

Anyway, somewhat interesting.

PS:  I make a prediction that Tim T has read something by him.  Tim?

I have a problem with this so-called trolley problem problem

David Roberts, one of the best people to follow on Twitter, says he hates the trolley problem (for reasons he doesn't explain) and tweets with approval this AEON essay which criticises "thought experiments" in ethics.

Curiously, I don't think the article actually goes on to explain much about the issue the author has with the actual trolley problem.  Instead, he gives examples of other thought experiments which have, I think, some obvious problems.

And at the end of the article he says:

Overall, ethical thought experiments are, at best, fallible ways of constructing simplified models that map rather imperfectly onto the world as we experience it, and can distort as much as they illuminate. So should we give up on them as sources of ethical insight?

and answers that with (in my paraphrase) "no, we just have to be careful how we use them."

Well, that's kind of obvious, isn't it?   

A question about the executive order

I haven't seen much about Trump's attempt to scare Twitter into not fact checking him, but I don't understand this:   if Trump wants social media companies to be at risk of being sued for content as a publisher, doesn't that make it more likely that said companies should delete his tweets due to things like the defamatory rubbish about Joe Scarborough?   Otherwise they are at risk of being joined into any defamation action that the defamed may take.

And anyone honest can see that it's the American Right that is living in a bigger conspiracy fantasy world than the Left, by far, and so many of the conspiracy claims are potentially defamatory.   Any change in the law is therefore more likely to hurt the Right than the Left.

Am I wrong in my understanding of this?  I will have to wait for more on line commentary to be able to tell.

Update:   I see that, no, I wasn't wrong about this.   Someone writing at National Review (found via one S Davidson*, posting something useful for a change) writes:

Stripping Twitter and other social media of liability protections is likely to make them more inclined to censor speech, not permit it. Either these companies will have to pass a “neutrality” test imposed by the government, or they’ll simply take down as much controversial content as possible. 

I mean, isn't this obvious??  Yet you have "must make my boss happy no matter the logic" AG Barr standing next to Trump pretending giving effect to the Order would have the opposite effect.

I also recommend reading Allahpundit's lengthy and hot take down of the executive order.  He really hates Trump, and it would seem from comments at Hot Air that 95% of its readership hates him for hating Trump:

.... this is a glimpse at an ugly authoritarian soul fantasizing openly about using government power to censor a critic. Not even a critic, as Twitter’s let him run wild on their platform for a decade. All they did to piss him off was append a note to two of his tweets that slightly complicated his scheme to scapegoat voting-by-mail for his possible defeat in November. Two days later we have the president ranting in the Oval Office next to the Attorney General about closing down a prominent media company that’s used by millions to communicate.  

The post notes that there are some within the White House strongly opposed to Trump's and Barr's little revenge fantasy.   Chances are, nothing concrete will come of it.  But making futile executive orders makes you look weak and impotent, no matter how much cultists will think the order is still the best thing since poisonous kool-aid. 

Update:  yeah, here's Jennifier Rubin at the WAPO arguing that it would be good for Twitter to not have legal protection for content published:

Well, the argument goes, how would Twitter decide which of Trump’s tweets to block or which user to banish? Let’s not overthink this. Let Twitter operate by the same rules as traditional media. No more protection from lawsuits. Let Twitter figure out which tweets it wants to be legally responsible for and which will leave it open to legal attack.

* his link was useful, his take on the matter pretty stupid.  He thinks Twitter made a big mistake by provoking Trump.   How does he figure that when he's quoting a guy saying that the whole idea behind the Order would backfire on Trump - not to mention my last point in this post that an ineffectual Order that doesn't go anywhere makes Trump look weak.

This is going to go over well

Trump, even by his own appallingly low standards, seems to gone into a tailspin in the last couple of weeks, so much so that even Andrew Bolt and a few of the old commenters at Catallaxy are calling him out over the Joe Scarborough murder tweets.   (Catallaxy remains the Australian home of the true Trump cultists, though.  I'm waiting for the Steve Kates "whataboutism" post which explains that everyone needs to forgive Trump for conspiracy based defamation because of how he is was so horribly victimised by the Russiagate media coverage.)

Anyway, with Trump saying that he'll do something about social media not treating him fairly, and then this news:

it looks like he hasn't bottomed out of the tailspin yet.

This is going to backfire massively.

Update:  human/alien hybrid Zuckerberg isn't going to risk Trump hurting his multi billion dollar business model, so he's out with the pre-emptive "suck up to the President my platform helped Russia elect" interview already:

Zuckerberg Says Twitter Is Wrong to Fact-Check Trump

Update 2:  this made me laugh: