Some appalling social media news

Noticed this at Gulf News:

Manila: Online misinformation is leaching out from cheap mobile phones and free Facebook plans used by millions in the Philippines, convincing many to reject vaccinations for polio and other deadly diseases.

Childhood immunisation rates have plummeted in the country - from 87 per cent in 2014 to 68 per cent - resulting in a measles epidemic and the reemergence of polio last year.

A highly politicised campaign that led to the withdrawal of dengue vaccine Dengvaxia in 2017 is widely seen as one of the main drivers of the fall.

But health experts also point to an explosion of vaccination-related misinformation that has undermined confidence in all types of immunisations.

In the northern city of Tarlac, government nurse Reeza Patriarca watched with horror the impacts of Facebook posts that falsely claimed five people had died after receiving an unspecified vaccination.

The problem is the popularity of Facebook in the country, even with the poor:

Most of the Philippines' 73 million internet users have a Facebook account, according to Britain-based media consultancy We Are Social.

Many poorer Filipinos rely on Facebook's Free Basics plan to use the internet, trapping them in the social media giant's information bubble.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has defended the service, saying it gives people who could not otherwise afford it an opportunity to use the internet.

Posts about President Rodrigo Duterte flooded Facebook in 2016 and were seen as playing a key role in his election victory - and officials say the site has been a boon for anti-vaxxer groups too.

Wilda Silva, the health department's immunisation programme manager, said fake news about vaccines "travels faster and wider than correct information".

 

 

Some cultural education for you

I should know more than the average Australian about what (some) Japanese don't like about their own culture, but this list by a young Japanese guy (who I think went to college in America) has some amusing surprises in it:  

Wishing him ill

Forgot to mention on the weekend, but this Vox piece:

Is it immoral if you feel schadenfreude about Trump’s Covid-19? 

is really good.  After considering what some famous philosophers have said on the topic, it ends on this consideration:

That said, what if someone wishes for Trump to die, not out of pure punitiveness, but out of a desire for Americans to get a new president who that person believes would save many lives?

 Whether you think this is ethically acceptable depends a lot on your preexisting moral commitments. Specifically, you’ll answer differently depending on which school of ethics you gravitate toward: utilitarianism, deontology, or virtue ethics. Here’s a brief (and admittedly oversimplified) breakdown.

If you’re a utilitarian, you might argue this is a perfectly acceptable wish because something is moral if it produces good consequences — and having a president who doesn’t bungle a national pandemic response would prevent a lot of death, which is clearly a good consequence.

But if you’re a deontologist (also known as a Kantian), then you’d argue this is an unacceptable wish because something is moral if it’s fulfilling your duty to others and immoral if it’s not. Immanuel Kant famously said we have a duty always to treat human beings as ends in themselves, not means to our ends. Wishing death upon someone — even if it’s to save many more people from death — is treating that someone as a means.

A virtue ethicist would likely agree with the deontologist that wishing death on someone is unacceptable, but for a somewhat different reason: By doing so, you’re cultivating in yourself a negative trait, rather than a virtuous trait like empathy. Even if it doesn’t actually harm anybody else (wishes are different from actions, after all), it harms you as a moral being, potentially chipping away at your capacity for empathy in the long term.

The virtue ethicist would probably want to remind us that it is perfectly possible to wish for the alleviation of suffering in a human being who has tested positive for a lethal pathogen, even if we happen to deeply dislike that human being. It is possible to wish for that human being’s recovery even if we feel a simultaneous sense of superiority, of vulnerability, of desperation to see justice in our world — and even if we think the world would be better off if that person didn’t recover.

If we examine what’s under the hood of our schadenfreude and don’t like what we see, it’s worth remembering that we have this option at our disposal.

Despite my general sympathy towards Kantian and virtue ethics, I'm leaning towards utilitarianism on this one.

Just stop it, Patricia

Patricia Karvelas is quite OK as a broadcaster on the ABC, even though her evening slot means I don't hear all that much of her show.   But I have to say, her recent daily tweeting of her radio studio dancing really strikes me as gratingly undignified and more becoming of a "look at me" teenager on social media than a mature adult.   [This is today's example.]  I wish she would stop it.

 

Netflix movie review time

Last weekend - saw the recent Netflix Tom Holland/Robert Pattinson vehicle The Devil All the Time.

First:  how does Tom Holland manage to act American so convincingly?  He's the best thing about the movie, by far.

But secondly and more importantly:  what a strange story, and not in a good way.  Basically, it's a multi-generational tale of psycho/socio-pathic preachers (as well as one or two nutty ordinary believers) which plays like a Southern Gothic written by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins on a drunken weekend tag team effort to come up with the most evil and hypocritical evangelicals they could imagine.   The result is too patently over the top, and lacks an overall narrative credibility, even if on a scene by scene basis, the acting is fine and it is nicely directed.   

A very odd effort.

 

 

 

Kevin has a point

You all know I had no time for Rudd as a politician, but he really has a point here:

 

Typical of Trump supporters

They support an idiot, and they also claim victim status for supporting an idiot.  

Now, I don't know for sure that this anti-masker is a Trump supporter, but what are the chances?:

 

As I mentioned yesterday: Trump supporters are the dumbest people on the planet

And this:

And this:

And this:

That Lahren person is a Fox News host, apparently.   I find it absolutely hilarious when blond conservative women act as if they find Don Trump's version of masculinity attractive, and even funnier when misogynistic men make it clear they admire Trump for having had sex with lots of women, while sympathising with his whiny "everyone is mean to me in the Fake News and Deep State" act.   

In little noticed climate change news...

A rather unlikely allegation

Sinclair Davidson seems very excited by the prospect that a claim by an Italian newspaper that a (now) ex-Cardinal transferred more than a million dollars to Australia for the purposes of paying off witnesses (or just one witness?) to give evidence against his internal enemy Pell might be true.

Yet even some of his culture war brainwashed and dumbed down by "conservative" media followers are wondering how it would be done, exactly.  

Because, yeah - bribing witnesses from afar is more than likely going to involve quite a few people in a chain, with all of them aware of how sensationally corrupt and damaging to them and the Church such a bribe would be.  And we're not talking, say, life-long mafia members who have always lived off corruption, either.  There would, it would be virtually guaranteed, be people involved who were formerly at no risk of ever being convicted of a crime who would have to have decided that it was worth the risk because they really, really dislike Pell.  (Or who were willing to take a piece of the money along the way - but again, if you're not routinely corrupt, you don't usually turn corrupt overnight.)

I therefore strongly suspect the allegation will come to nothing (or nothing serious.)   As I have said before, Sinclair's excitability factor over dubious claims means any barrister should always reject him during jury selection.   

PS:  it is true that a Cardinal getting sacked is a rare event; but there has been suspicion of financial corruption around this one for years, it seems.

Just your average personality based death cult

You know what I'm talking about:

There is much speculation that this (and his series of ALL CAPITALS tweets yesterday) are due to a steroid high - but of course, there is no way Trump will ever admit that, even if true.

The other obvious things out of this whole episode:

*   how do so many dishonest, dubious quality doctors find their way into being his personal physician, or in important roles?   Do they find him, or he find them, so to speak?

*   there is a strong and not unreasonable suspicion that Trump may have had a positive test before the debate [update:  perhaps more likely, was already infected and contagious, even if he didn't have a positive test].  Surely the exact timing of his testing regime last week will leak soon if it is indeed true.

*   Trump's reaction is readily explained by chronic narcissistic personality disorder:   because he might be over the worst, and because he had it, he thinks he is now the most knowledgeable person around on the topic, and that if he can beat it, people shouldn't fear it.    Watching such poisonous and policy dangerous narcissism should, by any normal person's standards, be stomach churning.  But American is suffering from an evidence free personality cult by the dumbest cult leader who has ever ended up heading a cult.   So there is no reasoning with his base.

* It is tempting every day to just do post after post with the title 

TRUMP SUPPORTERS ARE THE DUMBEST PEOPLE ON THE PLANET

because the evidence for it is just so overwhelming.

The secret service will enjoy dragging him out of the White House

This is, of course, in reference to his pathetic decision to get his daily narcissism fix by making his guardians drive him past his cult tragics.

Update:

Ha! 

That's some delay

Googling Steven Spielberg news:

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, fans will have to wait to see Steven Spielberg's new West Side Story film. Originally scheduled to hit theaters on December 18, Variety reports that the movie musical will now be released on December 10, 2021.

This is my least anticipated Spielberg film for many a year.  I'll still see it, though.

Trump and theology

My daughter made the claim the other day that Donald Trump's failure to come down with COVID strikes her as proof that God can't exist.  With news like this, her case is getting stronger, I'm afraid:

 Update:  as God says:

Update 2:   The plausibility of God is re-established with news that the Orange One has it.   But if he is one of these politicians that suffers barely a sniffle, God's credibility will take another hit.   

Meanwhile, in Australian alternative reality land...

As I said yesterday, and has been further cemented in commentary from a string of Trump sympathetic, gormless, Australian Sky News personalities overnight, no one thinks Trump "debated" well yesterday, and all agree that the interruptions were self defeating.   (It's also unquestioned that Trump interrupted more than Biden by a wide margin,)   

But what do the ageing "it's all a socialist plot!" brainiacs at Catallaxy think, especially the embarrassingly cultic Steve Kates?   Obviously, this:

 

 

Honestly, there is not a wingnut trope that Kates will not swallow when it comes to Trump;  he is truly, obliviously, brainwashed by the Right wing information bubble world of Fox News, Breitbart, and the other propaganda outlets of the GOP.   Has he always been this embarrassing, I wonder?  

 

Facebook is a disgrace

As noted in Mother Jones:

“Report: Joe Biden Has Been Given Tonight’s Debate Questions In Advance” reads a headline on arch-paranoiac Alex Jones’ site, Infowars, a notorious peddler of right-wing disinformation. The “report” Infowars cited was from former Fox host Todd Starnes, who was just citing Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy theorist with a history of spreading outright lies. Corsi offered no proof that Biden had been given the questions, but Starnes’ story on the baseless allegation reached over 1 million followers on Facebook and another million on Twitter, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool owned by Facebook.

Infowars published its story around noon. By later that afternoon, more Biden disinformation was hurtling out of control on Facebook. A New York Post story with a single anonymous source from the Trump campaign claimed Biden had agreed to be inspected for an earpiece before the debate, which the Biden campaign denied. Regardless the story spread across Facebook, amplified by right-wing sites and posters.

NBC’s Ben Collins noticed that the claim predated the New York Post story; it had been floating around online for weeks before the online poster at the center of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a user claiming to be Q, posted the theory on 8kun, the successor website to the 8chan forum.

Breitbart‘s story on the claim reached 5 million accounts on Facebook and 3 million on Twitter.

The massive spread of disinformation about Biden came just hours after Facebook essentially blew off Biden’s concerns about disinformation being spread about him.

On Monday, the Biden campaign sent a letter to Facebook calling it “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process,” and saying that “Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression,” according to a copy of the letter published by Axios.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded vaguely, saying that the company has received criticism from both Republicans and Democrats and added that “we have rules in place to protect the integrity of the election and free expression, and we will continue to apply them impartially.”

 

A presidential debate, noted

I happened to see about that last 15 minutes, which was perhaps not quite as full of interruptions as was the first part?   (Certainly, even at the end, it was clear that Trump was the prime interrupter, refusing to follow the rules regarding a two minute statement that was had been agreed to be without interruption.)

Looking at the comments of the Australian based Trump supporters, it seems an uncontroversial opinion that their dumb ass orange hero interrupted too much and was too aggressive.  Many theorised that he wasn't letting Biden hang himself by not allowing him to talk long enough.  

I thought that, in the parts I saw, Biden was doing fine in his language, especially if you make allowances for an old issue with stuttering, which I think does still show itself in occasional vocal hesitations.

It is quite unbelievable that some "two sides" commentators think that neither side won because Biden also cut loose with some personal insults.   I mean, seriously?   Do they think contenders just have to "rise above" the rambling personal aggression of Trump in that context?   

The correct view is that Trump's performance could only possibly have appealed to his already rusted on, beyond all reasoning, culture war fighting, base.    And anyone who claims they were fence sitting and decided to side with Trump after that performance are, with 99% certainty, not being truthful about there ever being a chance that they were going to vote for Biden.

There is no point in saying that Trump won because he "dominated" and would have impressed his base.  His base is not really like rusted on party members of old - they are (in large part) genuine deplorables given permission by their cult leader to finally be open about their worst instincts, and if Trump had gone over and punched Wallace and slapped Biden in the face, they would say they deserved it and still vote for him.   He's their projected revenge figure against, basically, a modern world over which they are losing control.

Biden performed well enough to dispel any genuine concern about his mental acuity, and reinforced his basic humanity, serious approach to issues, and genuine move towards at least trying to not further divide Americans and promote self serving conspiracy based theories damaging to confidence in democracy in the way Trump clearly seeks to.     

So yeah, obviously, Biden was the winner.   It seems most on line polling and the betting market agrees.

10 meters of water!

Science magazine has an interesting article:

Moon safe for long-term human exploration, first surface radiation measurements show

 But I am not sure the details are as encouraging as the headline.  It's about how some recent dosimeters on recent moonlanders have given a more accurate idea as to the amount of radiation astronauts would be exposed to while staying there:

The device measured hourly radiation rates and found that astronauts would be exposed to roughly 200 times the radiation levels as people on Earth, they report today in Science Advances. The dosimeter’s placement inside the Chang’e 4 probe provides partial shielding, much as an astronaut’s spacesuit would to their body, so the findings are quite applicable to human explorers, Wimmer-Schweingruber says.

The measured dose is about five to 10 times what passengers on an intercontinental flight from New York City to Frankfurt, Germany, receive when the plane is above parts of the protective atmosphere, Wimmer-Schweingruber says. Though high for Earth-based standards, radiation is one of the known dangers of spaceflight. NASA is legally prohibited from increasing the risk of its astronauts dying from cancer by more than 3%, and these levels remain below that.

What’s more, the researchers calculated that Moon bases covered with at least 50 centimeters of lunar soil would be sufficient to protect them. A deeper chamber shielded with about 10 meters of water would be enough to protect against occasional solar storms, which can cause radiation levels to spike dramatically. (Between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, the Sun flared up in a way that could have caused radiation sickness, vomiting, and possibly death had astronauts been unprotected in space at the time.) Such a chamber would need to be reachable within 30 minutes, the amount of advanced warning time that is now possible with monitoring satellites.

Why the heck are they talking about 10 m of water on the moon, as if that's what would be readily available to use for your emergency shelter?   It's going to be a long, long time before there's that much of it available for colonists.

If I recall correctly, Gerard O'Neill's work on L5 colonies used to argue that your would need about 2 to 3 meters of moon dirt packed around one of his gigantic space colonies to provide adequate radiation protection.   Is that the same effect as 10 m of water?  I don't know.   I want to know how much dirt moon stations are going to need to bury their shelters under for an emergency shelter.

Oh - and let's not forget - this need for radiation shielding is one of the key reasons why they may as well be looking at old lava tubes as a place to building a station.   Although, the other thing is, I don't know that there are any near the South pole, which I think is where they think the ice may be?

 

 

More than a hint of hypocrisy

Re the Victorian situation with the decision to use private security for COVID hotel quarantine:  am I the only person who detects strong hypocrisy whenever a Liberal opposition goes nuts about a Labor government using private contractors who turn out to be of dubious quality?   Wasn't the "the public service is coddled and inefficient and we should privatise services for greater efficiency and value for money" political party always keener to use private contractors for the last, um, four decades or so?  

It was the exact same thing with the Rudd insulation program.   The crap, profiteering private sector was the one that caused some deaths, and the true lesson should have been "if you want a job done properly, don't rush it out into the private sector".   (Mind you, I know the insulation job could not have been done by public servants.  But still.)

More about Victoria, Adam Creighton continues his hyperventilation:

Ooh, I like the "evil eyes of Dan" photo the AFR is running with.  I bet Adam wished it was being used in The Australian.  But maybe it is?

Adam presumably is still dismissing entirely the reports of long term effects of the virus.  This report from the BBC explains why India should be worried:

Mr Ketkar is not alone in this - tens of thousands of people have been reporting post-Covid health complications from across the world. Thrombosis is common - it has been found in 30% of seriously ill coronavirus patients, according to experts. 

 

These problems have been generally described as "long Covid" or "long-haul Covid". 

 

Awareness around post-Covid care is crucial, but it is not the focus in India, which is still struggling to control the spread of the virus. It has the world's second-highest caseload and has been averaging 90,000 cases daily in recent weeks.

 Lots of experts warning about the long term effects of Covid are quoted.   

But no, Adam hates the idea of people being told to wear masks outside, so that's what's important.

Things seem not to be going so well for the Trump campaign...

There's the NYT story about his tax fiddling, which apparently includes this:

Between 2010 and 2018, Trump wrote off about $26 million in mysterious "consulting fees," helping to reduce his family's tax bill. At least some of those fees appear to have been paid to his daughter Ivanka Trump, despite her being a top Trump Organization executive, according to the Times.

And this:

President Donald Trump spent more than $US70,000 to style his hair when he was on “The Apprentice,” and he wrote off the costs as a business expense, The New York Times reported Sunday. 

and this:

Additionally, nine Trump entities paid nearly $US100,000 to Ivanka Trump’s hair and makeup artist, according to The Times report. 

And the NYT promises more stories to come.

Trump is sounding desperate with "Biden should be drug tested before the debate".   

Polling seems to be sticking pretty solidly in Biden's favour.

And meanwhile, his recently sacked campaign manager is suicidal.   

I find it hard to imagine Biden doing so badly in the first debate so as to undo all of this bad PR.

But I guess you never know...