An air of desperation Part 3

American policing noted

Here's what follows in the tweets:

Essentially, it appears this was a classic "good guy with a gun" scenario. And once again, because the good guy was black, it didn't end well. 

Store owner Kevin Penn was holding a robber at gunpoint while he waited for police to arrive on March 15. When they did, his lawyer tells AL dot com, he announced the gun, took out the clip and ejected the bullet in the chamber. 

 

Within 4 seconds of officers entering Penn's store, one of them had punched Penn, breaking his jaw and knocking out several teeth, per the article. 

 

As I type this, Decatur Police are reportedly holding a press conference to discuss the incident. Why didn't they do so in mid-March, when it happened? Because the public finally found out this weekend with the release of the video to social media by Penn's supporters....

Like many Alabamians, I'm reminded of another recent "good guy with a gun" scenario that ended even more tragically. E.J. Bradford, a black man, was fatally shot in the back by Hoover Police after pulling a gun to stop an active shooter at the mall on Thanksgiving Day 2018. 

 

Seeing Bradford running, police immediately assumed he was the shooter and shot at him 4 times, killing him. Only later was the public told he was not the killer, who was still on the loose. The officers' actions were later ruled "justified"

Bram, Walt and Dracula

Well, this is all amusingly odd.   From a review of a book about Walt Whitman:

Bram Stoker wrote a fan letter to Whitman in which he seems to be angling for a date (‘I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked…’). Stoker proselytised zealously for Whitman’s work, which, even in bowdlerised form, struck British readers as an American offshoot of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘fleshly school’. Stoker did meet Whitman, but can’t have experienced his magnetism as entirely positive if we are to believe the claim that he went on to base the character of Dracula on the American poet.

This made me realise that I knew nothing about Bram Stoker.  According to Wikipedia:

Stoker was a deeply private man, but his almost sexless marriage, intense adoration of Walt Whitman, Henry Irving and Hall Caine, and shared interests with Oscar Wilde, as well as the homoerotic aspects of Dracula have led to scholarly speculation that he was a repressed homosexual who used his fiction as an outlet for his sexual frustrations.^[17] In 1912, he demanded imprisonment of all homosexual authors in Britain: it has been suggested that this was due to self-loathing and to disguise his own vulnerability.^[18] Possibly fearful, and inspired by the monstrous image and threat of otherness that the press coverage of his friend Oscar's trials generated, Stoker began writing Dracula only weeks after Wilde's conviction.^[18][19]

Here's a post at Brain Pickings with Stoker's first, gushing, letter to Whitman.  It seems the bit about his weight is edited out?   Another site gives us the full Stoker self disclosure:

I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snubnose and straight hair. I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world. I take a delight in letting people I don’t like— people of mean or cruel or sneaking or cowardly disposition—see the worst side of me.

Stoker included his physical description, because he surmised from Whitman’s works and his photograph that he would be interested to know the “personal appearance of your correspondents.” Wrote Stoker: “You are I know a keen physiognomist.”

Actually, that article goes on to give details of 3 times Bram met Walt, and seems to deny that they went badly.   So Walt may not be the inspiration for Dracula after all.  Bram Stoker still sounds quite the oddball, though. 

Some charming French content

France seems to have a lot of people who still use handkerchiefs - my kind of people.  Of course, they might all be over 70, but who knows? 

The children in the second part look particularly charming too.  I maintain that, amongst caucasians, the people on the streets of Paris when I was there (a long time ago) were collectively the most attractive I have ever been amongst.

Transgender arguments

JK Rowling's tweets about the transgender issue, and Radcliffe's entry into the debate on the side of transgender activists ("a transgender woman is a woman") made me look up so called TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminism) articles.   I found this from 2018 by Katheleen Stock in The Economist:  Changing the concept of "woman" will cause unintended harms.   Which is pretty much what Rowling argues.  I think.

Here's a paragraph that struck home:

In public discourse, there’s a lot of focus on whether trans women should be counted as women. Whatever the ultimate answer, that’s obviously a reasonable question, despite trans activists’ attempts to count it as “transphobic”. But I think we should also ask whether self-declaration alone could reasonably be the only criterion of being trans. There’s little precedent elsewhere. In a superficially comparable case, such as coming out as gay, there is still another underlying factor, sexual orientation, that secures your membership. It’s not just a matter of saying that you are gay. And though, as in the notorious case of Rachel Dolezal, a person might “self-declare” that she is “trans racial”, it has seemed clear to nearly everybody responding to this case that such a declaration would be not only false, but also offensive to genuinely oppressed members of the race in question. There is no such thing as being “trans racial”; there is only thinking falsely that you are.

This seems a good point about race.  Even allowing for cases where a very small amount of biological ancestry is still sufficient for some Australians to be recognised as aboriginal,  no one ever argues that it would be reasonable for someone with no biological descent at all to self declare aboriginal identity for any meaningful purpose.  Why is race "protected" in this way, but sex or gender not?   Both can be in a biological "inter" state, and both can be understood as having social construct elements too.  Does it come down to how clearly you can see how open membership to "race" would dilute positive discrimination measures?  Because if it does, that is what Stock argues for women (see below.)

But what are the harms Rowling thinks self declaratory gender would bring?   She's a bit vague on this, and runs the risk of being accused of arguing that biological females are just obviously losers if their life experience loses its distinctiveness by being forced to accept others into the club, so to speak; in much the same way that conservatives argued that recognising gay marriage would be an intrinsically damaging insult to heterosexual marriage.   That in fact is what this Washington Post writer accuses Rowling of arguing.  It was not a great argument against same sex marriage, and without some details, not an especially great one regarding trans declarations of gender too.

The Kathleen Stock article does try to give some more concrete examples:

*   It will muddle understanding (basically, statistics) on problems biological women have long faced such as:

....vulnerability to rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and exhibitionism; to sexual harassment; to domestic violence; to certain cancers; to anorexia and self-harm; and so on. If self-declared trans women are included in statistics, understanding will be hampered.

She argues that its fine to collect stats as to how these same issues affect transwomen too, but they should be kept separate if you want a clear understanding.   [Given the small number of transexuals, I'm not sure how much effect this could really have.  But I guess there would be some examples where it is more significant than others.]

*  The weakening of "safe spaces" for women, which she argues is a problem because of the history of violent men.   [Bear in mind she is arguing against the idea that any man, no matter what state their body is in, can declare himself a woman.]    I have previously written that the fuss about a man who thinks he's a woman having access to women's toilets is overblown - especially if they are already hormonally and at least part physically feminised.   However, Stock does have a point that, if transgender activists want to be consistent, their "gender is what anyone declares it is" would allow testosterone filled wannabe male rapist a legal right to enter spaces, like toilets, where other women would be very uncomfortable if they knew his biology.    It feels more like a hypothetical problem, but one which transgender activism just wants to ignore completely.
 
* The last example I will quote:

And changing the concept of “woman” to include self-declared trans women also threatens a secure understanding of the concept “lesbian”. Lesbians are traditionally understood as females with a sexual orientation towards other females. Again, the categorisation is socially useful. It helps members of the category understand themselves in a positive, distinctive way, despite living in a heteronormative society. It motivates them to create their own social spaces. It gives them special protections, as a discriminated-against minority; and access to special sources of charity funding. 

I don't know that I have much to say about that.   In a non discriminatory world, the importance of lesbians, or gay men, having their own social spaces should be decreasing - and it's probably happening, given what I think is the decreasing number of gay bars and venues in many Western cities.    But I can understand lesbians being a bit irked about transgender men moving into their "territory" so to speak.

In my view, then, the points Stock makes have some merit, but you can see the arguments that will be deployed against them.  

I think there are two very pragmatic ones that are more convincing:

a.  the disadvantages birth women face when a transgender woman wants to compete in women's sports; and

b.  the interest of potential or actual sex partners in knowing transsexual status.  

The first point I won't write about - the unfairness to women athletes is obvious. 

As to the second point:   I'm not sure why we can't be honest and say that the transgender process is never a 100% complete physical transition, and the end result is, inevitably, a simulacrum of the physicality of the desired gender.   If transgender ideology taken to its desired legal effect (that a man can legally alter gender to woman, for all purposes) means that no naive man who marries a transgender woman could ever claim he has been wronged by non disclosure of his partner's former gender, I would have to say there is something wrong with the ideology.  This may sound like a hypothetical case if you are talking marriage, but no doubt there have been cases of a transsexual woman bedding a man who did not realise what he was getting into.  

If everyone can understand why a man or woman going to bed with a partner might be upset if they find their partner has not first disclosed opposite gender genitals, or an imitation of such, well then they are accepting that self declaration is not the only thing that matters about gender and sex.

As to how to resolve this, I have been thinking lately that the idea of a "third gender" seems to have a lot going for it.   It's acknowledging  both a biological and psychic reality, isn't it?   And as I have said before, it's pretty interesting that people who wanted to live as the other gender in those societies did not (as far as I know) spend a lot of time fretting about how their body must in all respects be altered to match their perceived gender, otherwise their life will be one of crushing depression and unhappiness.

The Wikipedia entry on third gender talks about it in the context of transgender, and some parts are pretty interesting:

In a study of people in the United States who thought themselves to be members of a third gender, Ingrid M. Sell found that they typically felt different from the age of 5.^[42] Because of both peer and parental pressure, those growing up with the most ambiguous appearances had the most troubled childhoods and difficulties later in life. Sell also discovered similarities between the third genders of the East and those of the West. Nearly half of those interviewed were healers or in the medical profession. A majority of them, again like their Eastern counterparts, were artistic enough to make a living from their abilities. The capacity to mediate between men and women was a common skill, and third genders were oftentimes thought to possess an unusually wide perspective and the ability to understand both sides.^[42] A notable result of Sell's study is that 93% of the third genders interviewed, again like their Eastern counterparts, reported “paranormal”-type abilities.*^[43] 

But of course, some gender theorists may say it's OK to have a third gender category - let's call it "non binary" - but the important thing is that people can move between whatever category that they feel is true to themselves.  So a person should be free to self label as male, female, or non-binary/third gender.

If that's the argument, it doesn't solve anything.


So, what's my conclusion?   I think Stock and the TERFs make some valid points, but they seem to skirt around the more fundamental arguments about why it's not unreasonable for people to consider the biology of bodies important - and that's something that trans people should be able to live with and not argue that it can be removed from moral and legal consideration by mere self declaration.   


*  On that odd point about paranormal abilities, I think it is well recognised that an above average number of  male mediums in spiritualism are gay.     

Don't forget climate change

What with all the disease, violence and protests, it's easy to overlook the bigger picture.

This study has very big implications for civil engineering (including what is presumably the difficult job of retrospectively increasing urban drainage to cope with peak flows):

The likelihood of intense storms is rising rapidly in North America, and the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects big increases in such deluges.

"The longer you have the warming, the stronger the signal gets, and the more you can separate it from random natural variability," said co-author Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a climate scientist with Environment Canada.

Previous research showed that global warming increases the frequency of extreme rainstorms across the Northern Hemisphere, and the new study was able to find that fingerprint for extreme rain in North America.

"We're finding that extreme precipitation has increased over North America, and we're finding that's consistent with what the models are showing about the influence of human-caused warming," she said. "We have very high confidence of extreme precipitation in the future."

Look at this graph:

From the report again (bear in mind the temperature scale is F, not C):

At the current level of warming caused by greenhouse gases—about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial average—extreme rainstorms that in the past happened once every 20 years will occur every five years, according to the study. If the current rate of warming continues, Earth will heat up 5.4 degrees by 2100. Then, 20, 50 and 100-year extreme rainstorms could happen every 1.5 to 2.5 years, the researchers concluded.

Nut noted

Yeah, I like highlighting how nutty and isolated in their own fantasy world are Australian wingnuts.  So sue me.

This is the same guy, remember, who had to stop himself from freaking out over a teacher doing a foot tap instead of a handshake with his son. Lives in a deeply unpleasant mental landscape of continual outrage and theorising that his side is about to win the dis-aster that is the culture war.   A nut, basically.

Keynes Vs Friedman

A biographer of Keynes has some interesting things to say about him, and the comparison with Friedman, in an interview at the Washington Post:

...Keynes himself never wanted to be remembered as a deficit therapist. He was a social thinker who was concerned with the great problems of his day: war and economic depression. And I think he would be very troubled by the idea that government spending on anything at all became the hallmark of his legacy in the economics profession.  ...

I think he would be perplexed by what we deem to be political battles in the United States. He thought economic policy was the central political battleground for social justice, and the way economics has become technocratized and hived off from mainstream politics as an arena for specialists would have both excited and frightened him. He would be terrified by the idea that central political questions about equality and inequality have become the terrain of experts who essentially rule in favor of inequality, regardless of which political party is in charge. Keynes viewed inequality as a very dangerous thing — it’s something that preoccupied him when he wrote “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” and “The General Theory” — his two masterpieces.

OK, here's the bit with the comparison:

The conventional understanding now places Keynes, a champion of stimulus, against Milton Friedman, who came after him and is seen as a champion of austerity. Is that a useful binary?

I think we lose track of the fact that Friedman and Keynes had different social visions. They weren’t just arguing across the generations about which policies would best create the same desired result. They were arguing about what kind of world they wanted to live in. And the mathematicization of economics in the 20th century really obscures this deeper ideological conflict, often by design. Keynes wanted everyone to live in the Bloomsbury of 1913, having their hair cut by Virginia Woolf while drinking champagne and debating post-impressionism with Lytton Strachey. Friedman wanted to preserve these activities as the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Why be rich if you can’t live a better life than the masses? To which Keynes would counter: Who cares about the masses when you are drinking champagne with Virginia Woolf?

So literal champagne socialism?

It depends on which Keynes you’re talking to, but by the end of his life, I think that’s about right. Keynes had a complicated relationship with the word “socialism.” He was ferociously critical of the Soviet Union. But he also thought the socialist Labour governments in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s were much too timid and insufficiently committed to economic justice for working people. In the United States, we remember Keynes for deficit spending, but his most comprehensive policy victory was the establishment of the National Health Service in Britain. He was the financial architect of socialized medicine in the U.K. 

An air of desperation, Part 2

He, and the Murdoch family that employ him, are disgusting.

An air of desperation

The Republicans and "law and order"

An interesting long article at Politico about Republicans and their historical relationship with the "law and order" issue.

The subheading explains what it is all about:

A punitive brand of conservatism embraced by Trump and some GOP hardliners is rapidly falling out of step with public opinion.

A big plug for psychedelic psychotherapy

This is in The Guardian:

I head the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, the first of its kind, supported by about £3m in philanthropic donations. For 15 years, my research has focused on how drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT and MDMA work in the brain, and how they may be useful in treating disorders such as depression. Like the present pandemic, a psychedelic drug experiences can be transformative – of the individual – and of society. Both illuminate the extent to which the condition of the world we inhabit is dependent on our own behaviours. And these, in turn, are a consequence of how we feel, think and perceive....

The Centre was founded in April 2019. A few months later, Johns Hopkins University in the US announced a supersized version, floated by $17m. If you have read Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind or seen the first episode of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix series, The Goop Lab (titled The Healing Trip), you may be aware that such developments reflect a rising interest, and investment, in the mental health application of psychedelic drugs.

As I have indicated before, I am not completely against the concept, but I remain cautiously sceptical for a few reasons:

*  seems to be a lot of money involved looking for success, and while with a vaccine or drug treatment for a physical illness you can get very clear cut results, with a treatment of a psychological illness the boundaries of success are (I expect) a bit more rubbery (hence leading to overly optimistic claims of early success).

* the basic idea has been around a long time, with people like Cary Grant famously taking LSD in controlled psychotherapy.   Did those early users really find it had a long lasting effect?   Perhaps the other drugs being tried are better than LSD for this purpose, but I still suspect the issue will be how long term the effects may be.

* although the author of the piece is indicating it is only likely to be a treatment for the more serious cases of depression, as with medical marijuana,  I suspect there is likely to be a drift towards use and prescription to people with less serious cases of illness.

* A bit of a warning of his over-enthusiasm - the claim about how this could be transformative "for society". 

* the treatment featured on The Goop Lab?   Hmmm. 

A life considered

Youtube threw this up at me as a recommendation, and I am glad I watched it:  a short film about a 107 year old American woman who is still as sharp as a tack, looking back at her life.



There is one rather big surprise that comes out of it, relating to her marriage, but I won't spoil it. 

I watched it with my daughter, and at the end was happy to point out to her that her father had been right all along about the husband.   The point being, of course, that if I don't like one of her future boyfriends, she should pay attention.   She didn't say much in response...

Local mental illness

The always interesting topic of mental illnesses which are specific to particular countries or cultures is given a detailed discussion at BBC Future.

We get the old favourite "koro" (fear of the penis shrinking away), and a description of an outbreak in Singapore in the 1960's.   But we get a few other examples which I hadn't heard of before:

In the central plateau region of Haiti, people regularly fall sick with “reflechi twòp”, or “thinking too much”, which involves ruminating on your troubles until you can barely leave the house. In South Korea, meanwhile, there’s “Hwa-byung” – loosely translated as “rage virus” – which is caused by bottling up your feelings about things you see as unfair, until you succumb to some alarming physical symptoms, like a burning sensation in the body. Dealing with exasperating family members is a major risk factor – it’s common during divorces and conflicts with in-laws.

"Rage virus" seems to be the common affliction at Catallaxy, but I digress.

Then there is this problem, out of Cambodia:

“I would say that there are definitely instances where the meaning that is attributed to experiences actually changes biologically what that experience is,” says Bonnie Kaiser, an expert in psychological anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She gives the example of the illness kyol goeu, literally “wind overload”, an enigmatic fainting sickness which is prevalent among Khmer refugees in the US.

In their native Cambodia, it’s commonly believed that the body is riddled with channels that contain a wind-like substance – and if these become blocked, the resulting wind overdose will cause the sufferer to permanently lose the use of a limb or die. Out of 100 Khmer patients at one psychiatric clinic in the US, one study found that 36% had experienced an episode of the illness at some point.

Bouts usually proceed slowly, starting with a general feeling of malaise. Then, one day, the victim will stand up and notice that they feel dizzy – and this is how they know that the attack is starting. Eventually they’ll fall to the ground, unable to move or speak until their relatives have administered the appropriate first aid, which usually consists of massaging their limbs or biting their ankles.

 There's a lot  more at the article, so go read it.

Observed on Australia's "centre right" blog

If I were the Queensland Premier, I'd be getting the police to give Sinclair Davidson a call:

I mean, we know the quality of the deep thinkers there:

but it's still no excuse.

Woody Allen considered

I'm not exactly a fan of Woody Allen, as I consider most of his work to be overrated.  Yet I did think Crimes and Misdemeanours was very good, and I can see why his two biggest hits (Annie Hall and Manhattan) were liked, even if they didn't speak much to me.

But I still find him interesting, and recommend this review of his autobiography at The Atlantic.  

Surely a popular take

Why does no political party actually take this up as a policy?   It is as clear as day that the government and community has for years been struggling to find nominees for the ridiculous number and category of awards that are given out.

Panic mode

Why is the populist, climate change denying, culture war fighting Right so bad at risk assessment?   Look at Andrew Bolt:

He has no imagination for the effects of 2 or 3 degrees average global temperature on "civilisation";  but some (I think) unexpectedly violent rioting in London that defaces statutes and injures police and it's meant to be civilisation crumbling before our very eyes.

It is, I suppose, all part of the culture war mentality - that their version of the Right is the only side on the side of goodness and light and the rabble is always just barely kept from destroying civilisation.   You see it at Catallaxy all of the time. 

A mustard cream sauce

Seems odd that I have never made one before last Saturday.  (My wife has, but not me.)

There are a million recipes for it out there, but I settled on a simplified version of this, from Epicurious:

Ingredients

1. • 1/2 cup dry white wine
   • 1/4 cup chopped shallots
   • 1 cup whipping cream
   • 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
   • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil
   • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill

Preparation

1. 1. Boil white wine and shallots in heavy medium saucepan over high heat until liquid evaporates, about 4 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-high. Add whipping cream and simmer until reduced to 1 cup, about 2 minutes. Add Dijon mustard, basil and dill. Simmer 2 minutes to blend flavors. Season sauce to taste with salt and pepper. 
    

You might guess the simplifications:  used a finely diced half of a brown onion instead of shallots;  some dried herb instead of fresh.  Also, I don't think it matters much whether it's seed mustard, or dijon, or a mix of both.  I used dijon and some German sweeter mustard that was waiting to be used up.

Worked fine.  Not sure why the recipe says add a cup of cream and reduce to a cup.   I reduced a bit more than a cup. 

Anyway, it was very nice.  

Why didn't this happen within 24 hours of his death?

Axios notes:

Minneapolis has agreed to ban the use of police chokeholds and will require nearby officers to act to stop them in the wake of George Floyd's death, AP reports.