Sex and politics

Once again we're in the murky media ethical question of when it is newsworthy that a married politician is having an affair.   

I find it hard to get upset with the ABC running a story on it where the only figures examined were current Liberal/National Party heavyweights - they're the ones in power, it's obviously more significant than what might be going in the Opposition in the same period.   Go back 45 years and it was a Labor government's turn with Jim Cairns; 22 years ago it was that party's turn again with Gareth Evans. 

Overall, I think 4 Corners did good justification for the relevance of the reporting:  especially for the deep foolishness of Christian Porter, who I have never paid any attention to before.   How stupid to be carrying on with a woman in a public bar frequented by journalists and political staff from all sides.

Malcolm Turnbull sounded pretty reasonable to me in his explanation of why he found the behaviour so galling and inappropriate.   Sure, there is an element of revenge in talking about it now:  but he is right on the principles.  

I used to think that you could generalise that there was a difference between the Left and Right in the nature of their sex scandals, with Labor politicians being more promiscuous (hello, Bob Hawke), while Conservatives had fewer orgasms but in seedier circumstances (using prostitutes, into S&M, soliciting anonymous interactions in toilets, etc).   But perhaps that was too influenced by the impression given by British sex scandals.   Anyway, after last night's reporting, I should probably revise those presumptions.  

Just in case you were wondering ...

Graeme Bird is busy burbling away in comments in moderation that Trump won the election "in a landslide", but "the oligarchy", which has Rupert Murdoch on side - because they lent him money, or something - is busy trying to usurp the will of the people by installing Biden.  He allows that it might work, but we won't know for a few months.  

As I do not believe in being an open forum for the repetition of absurd conspiracy claims, even via the little read comments of my blog,  very few of Graeme's comments are going to be allowed through for quite a while.  (For which he will call me a Jewish c..., again, no doubt.)

  

Quite a burn, this item on the front page of the Washington Post website

 

Oh sure: nothing the US does ever affects Australia

I never trusted Adam Creighton's opinions, but his credibility this year has really been in a nosedive:

As people in tweets following this have pointed out, Trumps effect on:

a.    tariffs and relationship with China;

b.    climate change; and

c.    a general retreat from multilateral co-operation in other areas 

is meant to have no effect on Australians at all?   When China has just last week been sabre rattling on stopping or winding back a huge range of imports?
 

Movie reviewed: His House

Who knew you could make a horror/witchcraft/ghost movie an effective political one?  I kept feeling I wanted Peter Dutton to watch it.

I'm talking about the new, and apparently popular, Netflix film His House.  It's pretty good - well acted, well directed, and very sympathetic to the plight of African refugees in (in this case) England.   I think it is most effectively disturbing in the last third, when you get to see what that main characters went through.

I do think that the malevolent supernatural forces (if they exist at all) are left with ill defined motivation, though.  Why it would want the husband and wife to react that way is unclear.   (This is hard to talk about without talking complete spoilers.)   But overall, a pretty very fine effort.

A Colbert clip that has nothing to do with US politics

This is from last week, I think, and it made me laugh a lot:

 

Call out conspiracy belief on the Right

As much as I thought Biden's speech on the weekend was pretty great for what was needed at the time, I do hope he, at some point, makes this clear:   the Right in America needs to stop living in the world of conspiracy belief.   Denying climate change was their entry drug;  Qanon is the ridiculous end.   But things like believing a widespread organised system of election fraud is plausible is still, at heart, a belief in a conspiracy, and they to stop being so gullible.

People need to be told when they are being ridiculous. 

Watching Rupert

So, it seems clear Rupert wants Trump out: 

And: 

But what will Carlson and Hannity say in light of this? Not to mention the even worse opinion "stars" of the network. Judge what's-her-name? Will she comply? 

 

Update:

 

Speaking of legacy -

 

 

An extraordinarily fine victory speech

Typing this as I watch Biden  finish his victory speech and it's energetic and pitch perfect; really, it's just perfect in every sense. It's extraordinarily refreshing after the pathetic and dark rhetoric of Trump. 

This will get very postive reviews, I reckon; and it will deflate those in the Right wing media who will know they have to recalibrate how to attack him. 

A good day

At last.. waking up to the good news on the Biden win. 

Some stuff I've noticed on Twitter (the first from yesterday):

The problem is, though, the length of time it will take for the poisonous conspiracy belief system of the American Right to give up hope of changing the outcome.The Murdoch family could play an enormous role in this... But will they? 

I liked this parody of that nutjob's paintings: 

And meanwhile, over at Catallaxy, it's all: 

Yes, cokehead Tailgunner still thinks it all a Qanon play that will be revealed as a trap... Any...moment.... now. 

Actually, he has lots of support.. Their willingness to be gullible  consumers of  lies and deflection from bad faith propagandists for 20 years on climate change means they have no ability to tell when they are being played anymore.

On that serious problem, Ezra Klein's column at Vox is pretty pessimistic.. He is talking about Trump's discrediting the result: 

This is, to borrow Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar’s framework, “an autocratic attempt.” That’s the stage in the transition toward autocracy in which the would-be autocrat is trying to sever his power from electoral check. If he’s successful, autocratic breakthrough follows, and then autocratic consolidation occurs. In this case, the would-be autocrat stands little chance of being successful. But he will not entirely fail, either. What Trump is trying to form is something akin to an autocracy-in-exile, an alternative America in which he is the rightful leader, and he — and the public he claims to represent — has been robbed of power by corrupt elites.

“Democracy works only when losers recognize that they have lost,” writes political scientist Henry Farrell. That will not happen here.

As I say, I reckon Fox News has disproportionate power here... But what would it take for Murdoch to tell them they have to stop degitimitising democracy?Some militia shooting up Democrats?

Stupid people like those at Catallaxy think that Trump will start his own rival media network which will crush Fox, if Fox does not maintain the pro-Trump rage. This theory is based on the idea that Trump knows how to pick people with competence, and that Fox "stars"are willing to jump ship to a purely one person cult based enterprise. It won't happen, or if it does, it will fail like most of Trump's vanity projects. 

Anyway, for now, things are looking up. 

Cult members at work

For goodness sake.  The Christian participation in the Trump Cult has tarnished the reputation of the religion irreparably:

The longest week

How many other Australians have been reading Twitter in bed up to midnight, and going to sleep thinking "with any luck, when I wake up in the morning, the Biden win will be confirmed" only to be disappointed at 5.45am?

Seems to me the numbers are moving in the right direction still.

I was surprised to see Andrew Bolt, of all people, saying that Trump shouldn't be promoting voter fraud claims that are not well founded because it's harmful for democracy.   My message to Andrew:   TELL THAT TO YOUR OTHER SKY NEWS HOSTS AND THEN GET ON THE PHONE TO RUPERT MURDOCH AND TELL HIM HE'S LETTING FOX NEWS RUIN DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA.   Yeah, I know:  as if.  And by today Andrew will be back to spewing something in support of Trump anyway - he does these occasional swings into momentary centrist positions before coming back to his Pauline Hanson friendly attitudes.

As I have complained before - anyone with any decency should not be playing the game of "I'm an independent thinker and working for the Murdoch media empire to provide much needed balance to the extreme right wing bias that is 90% of the rest of the commentary here".    No.  You're working for or with a company that runs a propaganda network working in the cynical interests of a money and power hungry billionaire family that is using you as a fig leaf cover to say they really provide diverse opinion.    The media empire that is the single biggest cause of the "epistemic crisis" in American (and to an extent, Australian) Right wing politics.    No one decent should do anything other than leave them and rubbish the corporate line endlessly - like the amusing Twitter feed of Tony Koch.

Anyway, back to count watch....

Rupert Murdoch and democracy

Interestingly, Vanity Fair claimed (although I really don't put much faith in this) that "a source" told them that Trump rang Rupert Murdoch directly to angrily complain when Fox News put Arizona down as a Biden win yesterday, but Rupert declined to do a Packer and ring the network to tell them to change it.

But Fox News' evening opinion line up - surely the most influential part of the network - is apparently running hard on the "unfair election/fraudulent vote counts" claims.   

I put Murdoch into the category of rich men who consider Trump a useful idiot - but doesn't he care at all about democracy?   He would know that spreading purely partisan rumour and conspiracy about election counts is bad for respect for democracy.   

Is it really worth the money and the feeling of power, Rupert?   

Update:  look at this, for example -

 and

More amusement

 Update:  how embarrassing for Joe (Hockey) -

Prediction: there will be too much analysis

Of course I haven't given up on an eventual Biden win, but the one thing I am not looking forward to is the months and months of over-analysis of why Trump (win or lose) did much better than expected.

Can't we just circumvent it all with a these observations:

a.    Trump and Republicans are the party of the rich*, and the dumb**.  Combine those two proportions of the population, and you get into "could always win" numbers.

b.    The US will not return to reasonable politics while ever the Murdoch family doesn't want it to.   We can only hope that things might improve when Rupert dies; but the population will be kept dumbed down while ever the "in it for the money" Right wing propaganda media continues to have influence.  

c.    Social media also has its role in dumbing down and polarising the population as well - but they do get at least some credit (unlike Murdoch) for their role in moderating how much misinformation and rumour were spread in the lead up to this election.   

 

*  OK, have to make allowances for some categories of the rich being more liberal than others.  But as a general rule...

**   OK, I still worry about using that as a general description of people who otherwise function normally except in their politics.   Perhaps it's more - been so propagandised into an inability to tell truth from fiction it plays like they are dumb.   

Update:   I understand people being upset that so many Americans, knowing Trumps personality and performance, still voted for him.  But it's worth remembering that voluntary voting has an effect on the total numbers who did so:

Around 239.2 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2020, according to the U.S. Elections Project. NBC News’ projected 159.8 million ballots cast in 2020 would constitute about a 66.8% voter turnout rate among eligible citizens — the highest since 1900.

Actually, I'm not sure about that number of ballots figure - the total votes counted on the election outcome pages show about 139 million votes - but other sites agree that the proportion of eligible voters figures of about 66% seems right.

So, if about 48.5% of the vote ends up going to Trump (it's closer to 49% at the moment), that's 32.4% of the eligible voters.  As I have often said before, a significant number of those likely consider him a useful idiot (he's good for their tax rate, Right wing media business, or investment in defence industries, etc).   So who knows, but maybe 20% of the voting population are true members of the Trump cult - and helped made that way by the self interested Right wing propaganda industry and cynical culture warring which has become the strategy of the Republicans for two to three decades. 

I mean, that's still bad.   Maybe just not quite as bad as it first seems.

Made me laugh

 And more:

Talking big figures (while we wait for the US election's big figures)

I've been browsing arXiv again, and turned up this recent paper The Information Catastrophe:

Currently we produce 10 to power 21 digital bits of information annually on Earth. Assuming 20 percent annual growth rate, we estimate that 350 years from now, the number of bits produced will exceed the number of all atoms on Earth, or 10 to power 50. After 250 years, the power required to sustain this digital production will exceed 18.5 TW, or the total planetary power consumption today, and 500 years from now the digital content will account for more than half of the Earths mass, according to the mass energy information equivalence principle. Besides the existing global challenges such as climate, environment, population, food, health, energy and security, our estimates here point to another singularity event for our planet, called the Information Catastrophe. 

Um, not entirely sure what to make of this.  All sounds a bit silly, really.  Here is the conclusion:

In conclusion, we established that the incredible growth of digital information production would reach a singularity point when there are more digital bits created than atoms on the planet. At the same time, the digital information production alone will consume most of the planetary power capacity, leading to ethical and environmental concerns already recognized by Floridi, who introduced the concept of “infosphere” and considered challenges posed by our digital information society [27]. These issues are valid regardless of the future developments in data storage technologies. In terms of digital data, the mass-energy-information equivalence principle formulated in 2019 has not been yet verified experimentally, but assuming this is correct, then in not a very distant future, most of the planet’s mass will be made up of bits of information. Applying the law of conservation in conjunction with the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, it means that the mass of the planet is unchanged over time. However, our technological progress inverts radically the distribution of the Earth’s matter from predominantly ordinary matter, to the fifth form of digital information matter. One could say that we are literally changing the planet bit by bit. In this context, assuming the planetary power limitations are solved, we could envisage a future World mostly computer simulated and dominated by digital bits and computer code.

 

Horses again

With this happening yesterday in the Melbourne Death Race 2020:

 ...I am reminded of my very reasonable proposal of last year for racing to change into robot horse racing, with these transitional provisions:

a. University engineering schools to develop courses devoted to robot horses, and their rechargeable batteries (the entire economy will benefit from the latter).

b. Race meetings to immediately move to having half of all races run with jockeys and trainers in pantomime horses until sufficient robotic horses start to come on track.

c. All retired thoroughbred horses to be housed in spare bedrooms of the breeders.  That should solve the over-breeding issue.

I think this is a wise and reasonable suggestion.  If there was a way retired horses could shoot injured pantomime horses I would try to factor that in too, but I am a realist.

Actually, I was thinking:  it's going to take a while to get to battery powered horses with jockeys on their back to be able to run, quickly, the sort of distance that will satisfy punters.    Ideally, as a further transitional provision, I would now add:

*   Jockeys allowed to carry robot horses on their backs over the rest of the race.

Of course, should they break their legs doing so, some real horses could probably be trained to shoot guns, couldn't they?   Even if just a tranquilliser, the imagery would be terrific.

Islamic State really hates education

News from Kabul:

At least 22 people have been killed by gunmen who stormed Kabul University before engaging security forces in an hours-long battle on Monday.

A spokesman for the Afghan interior ministry said the attack was eventually stopped when three gunmen were killed.

A regional Islamic State group claimed responsibility in a statement....

The Taliban denied involvement and condemned the attack shortly after it began on Monday. Hours later the Islamic State group issued a message on the Telegram app saying it had targeted "the graduation of judges and investigators working for the apostate Afghan government".

And last week (and going back further):

A massive suicide bombing on October 24 outside the Kawsar-e Danish educational center in west Kabul was the latest attack cruelly targeting the Hazara Shia minority. The explosion took place in a crowded, narrow street outside the center, killing 30 people and injuring more than 70, mostly children and young adults between 15 and 26 years old who were attending classes.

Since 2017, the Dasht-e Barchi neighborhood, home to a predominantly Hazara community, has seen numerous attacks on civilians. A bombing at the Imam Zaman mosque in October 2017 killed 39; an attack on a school in August 2018 killed more than 34 students; and twin bombings at a wrestling club in September 2018 killed 20, including journalists and first responders who arrived after the first explosion. In May, gunmen murdered 15 women in the maternity wing of the Dasht-e Barchi hospital, many of whom were in labor or had just given birth.

The Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), the Afghan branch of the Islamic State (ISIS), claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack.  The armed group has claimed responsibility for many such bombings and has long singled out Afghanistan’s Hazara Shia community for attack.

Nothing says "let's set things back a 1,000 years" like attacking schools and universities.  And so cowardly when targeting kids and older students.

I don't get the ideology - they want high tech when it comes to weaponry and (probably) modern communication that allows for co-ordination of attacks.   But for nothing else.  So stupid.

 

The "let's praise the narcissist and see if that works" strategy clearly didn't work

Hey, wasn't this the same person who earlier this year thought Trump was really on top of the details and believed science?  Yes, yes it was:

“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data,” Birx said. “I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”

She deserves to feel stupid.