About civil war, etc

Prompted by this:

 

I would have thought it obvious that a proper, full scale, civil war is just silly:  there is no political leadership for it, at all; the clearest political area divide is between rural areas and most city/urbanites - and one cannot last long without the other; and wanky militia are just culture war cosplay when it comes to fighting actually properly organised and armed governments for any length of time.   

But,  you would have to guess that the biggest danger - and one which is guaranteed to be freaking out the FBI at the moment - is a period of intensified Right Wing terrorism against government facilities, employees and politicians.

Noah Smith interviewed someone who set it out like this:

..I think the odds of an actual civil war in the US are low. Rich countries with large security apparatuses tend not to have these kinds of conflicts - they tend to have some combination of less-aggrieved populations and more effective deterrence and disruption of potential rebels. There are of course exceptions that matter (think Northern Ireland), so nothing is impossible. But what Aila Matanock and I argue in our Foreign Affairs piece is that it's more likely you see some degree on ongoing, but probably *comparably* low-level and sporadic, political violence linked to radical right-wing actors. We've seen plenty of this already, especially death threats and disrupted plots. The US security apparatus seems to be, in general, taking this stuff seriously now, though at points we've seen both local sympathizers and efforts at the federal level to downplay threats from the right. My fear is that this kind of low-level but potentially fatal dynamic could persist, especially linked to a Lost Cause myth of a stolen 2020 election, and fueled by Trump and his base. Even with sustained policing, this kind of thing could drag on, and could kill people, even if we never hit standard civil war definitional thresholds (much less 1864 America).

Thinking out loud here, and without making it sound like I hope RW terrorism takes place:   seems to me that the whole "election was stolen by massive Left wing fraud" conspiracy justification is only going to be seriously eroded if Republican leadership AND key right wing media outlets completely repudiate their former semi (or full) endorsement of it.

And I suspect the fastest way for that to happen would be for any  RW terrorist attack causing substantial damage (and, probably, death) to occur sooner rather than later.  

So if there is going to be (say) a - hopefully less deadly - mini McVeigh bombing, for example, it would honestly be better for it to happen now rather than in (say) 12 months time.

Don't get me wrong:  ideally, as soon as Trump is out of office maybe there will be a rush of Republicans to denounce him and all of the conspiracy rumours he promoted, and a unified turnaround of some key figures in the Right Wing universe might start to turn around the dangerous conspiracy believing base.

But I suspect it won't go that way, and its going to take more violence first.

Free market at play

Heh:

As I might have expected, Claire Lehmann has an opinion piece at The Australian: Censorship must be taken out of Big Tech’s hands.

She says, ridiculously:

 Almost all avenues of communication and commerce available to Donald Trump have been removed, virtually overnight.

He's a President with an entire Press Office, able to call press conferences at a drop of a hat and 200 journalists and TV cameras would come running to the White House to cover it.   Once he's no longer President, he's free to set how ever many private websites he wants, with frequent updates, video messages, live feeds from his toilet if wants.  Someone will host him. 

She goes on to allow this:

Trump’s permanent suspension may well be supportable from a national security point of view, if these companies, in concert with US law enforcement, have credible evidence of further political violence. 

Um,  aren't the hundreds or thousands of messages on (say) Parler about taking up arms to reverse the election enough evidence of a national security problem, without waiting for law enforcement to agree?

 She then says:

Yet the co-ordinated movement of these companies and their swift removal of Trump’s presence on the internet has chilled observers around the globe.

She cites two people.   Meh, I think she might just be exaggerating.  

As usual, she then complains about what Twitter hasn't taken action against.   This is typical Right Wing whataboutism - although I am not suggesting Twitter or other platforms are above criticism.   But it's irrelevant to the urgency to take action about Trump and the danger his lies and disinformation present to the nation. 

Her answer though is regulation of platforms:

In the absence of regulation that would help tech companies make decisions with transparency, and an appeals process, tech CEOs respond to public outcry with ad hoc censorship.

Sounds all enormously clumsy and costly to me.

I think it safer to leave this question up to the market.

 

Dumb or dangerous? Why not both?

So, on the weekend I was watching a PBS Newshour segment where a couple of female reporters who were in the Capitol during last week's wingnut invasion were on, describing their experiences.

My general impression was that they were the luckier ones, who didn't get amongst the worst of it (and didn't get threatened too severely).

One made the point that it was clear that, having got into the building, a lot of Trumpers didn't really know what to do.   She tried to interview a few, some of whom (typical dumbasses) were offended she was wearing a facemask, and when told she was from PBS told her it was fake news and stopped speaking to her.

It was pretty clear from some of the photos and video that the uncertainty as to what to do once inside the building was not restricted to one or two people.   It was not a massively well organised thing. 

There is also a very sarcastic article in The Atlantic which reads a bit like gonzo journalism:  Worst Revolution Ever.   It is good, and here is a sample:

Outside, a young woman named Elizabeth was weeping and holding a blue terry-cloth towel to her eyes, while a man beside her tried to comfort her. “I made it, like, a foot inside,” she told a reporter, her voice an admixture of misery and grievance, “and they pushed me out and they maced me!” She made it sound like this had happened to her at the Air and Space Museum. When the reporter asked her where she was from, she said, “Knoxville, Tennessee,” in an especially aggrieved tone, as though this was itself part of the outrage. Maced? A person from Knoxville?

Why had she come to Washington? “We’re storming the Capitol!” she whined. “It’s a revolution!” Patty Hearst was more up to speed on the philosophy and goals of the Symbionese Liberation Army before she got out of the trunk. These people were dressed like cartoon characters, they believe that the country is under attack from pedophiles and “globalists,” and they are certain that Donald Trump won the election. In other words, the Founders’ worst fear—that a bunch of dumbasses would elect a tyrant—had come to pass.

On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence of genuine danger and violence,  not only from the crowd crush entry (with that poor police officer stuck in the door way, and that or other video showing the rioters spraying mace at the police), but part of the invaders came prepared for something more.  As summarised in another Atlantic article It was supposed to be so much worse:

 A group led by a man in a QAnon T-shirt chased a police officer up to the second floor, chanting and demanding to speak with senators. Some wore tactical gear—helmets, armor, and black masks covering their entire face. It was easy to miss them with all the coverage of the costumes and poop-smearing and poses struck in Statuary Hall, but they were there, these military-styled men, carrying blunt instruments and fistfuls of zip ties, better known as flex cuffs, capable of restraining hostages. At least one was an Air Force combat veteran, The New Yorker reported. They seemed to act with purpose and knew their way around the Capitol. One carried a semiautomatic weapon and 11 Molotov cocktails. Later, police officers found the two pipe bombs. The devices were outside the buildings housing the Democratic and Republican National Committees, just blocks from the Capitol. Federal agents discovered a truck full of rifles, shotguns, and bomb-making supplies parked outside the RNC headquarters.

The article also makes mention of the Reuters photographer who I have already mentioned in a previous post:

A Reuters photographer on the scene said he heard at least three different rioters say they wanted to find and hang Pence, who supported certifying the results of the election.

There is actually video of the chant to "Hang Mike Pence", so there is no reason to doubt the Reuters guy at all.  

It seems to me that most reporting has actually underplayed the murderous malice that was part of the demonstration overall, with the photos of the gallows set up not getting, I think, quite as much publicity as it deserved:

 There was ore than one, too:

Besides all of this - people actually died in the melee.  How much more serious do right wing apologists want it to be??

Over at Catallaxy, where Australian wingnuts reign, we ever got these bit of ridiculous, offensive commentary from two of the "regulars":

 

They are idiots from way back, getting dumber and dumber over the years from living in the RW echo chamber, but this is just at the level of so stupid it's like performance art for other numbskulls.

CL has since been posting with his standard "whataboutism" with respect to the 1996 unionists riot at Australia's parliament house.   There are physical similarities, but that's about where it ends.   It was a shocking, obviously counterproductive bit of political violence that set the Labor Party back for many years.

Where it differed was this:  the grievance it was based did nothing to justify it, but it was not based on invented facts, such as the Right has been doing for years;  there was not the whole "we have to kill traitors to the nation" mental justification that goes with the American Right's years of bullshit now about it being literally a Socialist/end of the country panic mongering if the Democrats get into power;  it had no paramilitary and gun armed participants.    

So no, it was bad, Labor and the unions paid the price, as should the Repbulicans electorally for several election cycles.

But they probably won't, unless major changes happen to American political media scene, which will be the subject of a separate post.

Update:  here are extracts from tweet thread by someone liberal who was apparently amongst the crowd.  He makes a few points worth noting:

 

Not surprising

I'm also all in on this take:

The problem continues

First, let me predict that, with the large number of White House resignations yesterday, there is a lot more disclosure to come about Trump and his family's personal desire to see yesterday's historic  insurrection happen and succeed.

Secondly, here is some Twitter commentary worth preserving:

Yes, the theme of responsibility from within the GOP is the key distressing thing  here.  They (or at least half of them)  are still endorsing the RW alternative reality universe even after seeing the consequences in front of their gas masked faces.

But the larger scale issue is that they are willing and gullible pawns of the RW media alternative reality universe, which learnt nothing from yesterday:

Yes: the long term problem is the information alternative reality and hyperbolic political scare universe (in which formerly centrist positions are denounced as socialist suicide) originating in RW media that has brainwashed such a large part of the American voting population, including (it would seem) at least half of Republican politicians.

If moderate Republicans don't push back, the problem continues.

Not good

Well, I guess they figure no one from the US is going to be on the phone to them complaining (for the next couple of days, anyway).

 

I like the sarcasm

 

While we are waiting for events in Washington to play out...

....I offer a diversion:   Google suggested I watch this bit of real estate porn (not normally my scene, but I follow The All Knowing One's recommendations quite often.)   It's a pretty new apartment in a very skinny and tall building in New York:

You know the biggest thing that kept crossing my mind while watching it?   Those full length glass windows look so dirty.   The top of the building is still under construction, oddly, so maybe they haven't got their glass cleaning system going yet; but if I moved into a $28 million (USD) apartment and I was looking through scummy glass windows/walls all the time, I would be annoyed.

Anyway, I still don't care for the idea of being high in the sky and only full length glass walls keeping me from the elements (and falling 43 floors to my death).   The next time a sonic boom creating meteor passes over New York, I will feel vindicated.   

In a pickle

In December, I bought some red radishes at Mulgowie, and decided to pickle them (the first time in my life I had pickled anything, as it happens.)

There are many ways suggested on the internet, all involving various amounts and types of vinegar and sugar.  I went with this recipe, and I thought it worked pretty well.  I like eating them on sandwiches for the crunch, moisture and flavour they add.

 Oddly enough, no one else in the family thinks they are nice.   Now I have gone past the recommended "eat within two weeks", but I suspect any unhealthy growth in them is going to be pretty obvious.  (They are also in the fridge.)   But lots of sites say "eat within 1-2 weeks after opening".   I don't know - seems a tad overly cautious to me.

Nice summary of the American Right

From Peter Wehner writing in The Atlantic:

The problem with the Republican “establishment” and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by their own tribe. I’m guessing that many of them haven’t read Nietzsche, but they have embraced his philosophy of perspectivism, which in its crudest form posits that there is no objective truth, no authoritative or independent criteria for determining what is true or false. In this view, we all get to make up our own facts and create our own narratives. Everything is conditioned on what your perspective is. This is exactly the sort of slippery epistemic nihilism for which conservatives have, for more than a generation, reproached the academic left—except the left comes by it more honestly.

The single most worrisome political fact in America right now is that a significant portion of the Republican Party lives in a fantasy world, a place where facts and truth don’t hold sway, where “owning the libs” is an end in itself, and where seceding from reality is a symbol of tribal loyalty, rather than a sign of mental illness. This is leading the party, and America itself, to places we’ve never been before, including the spectacle of a defeated president and his supporters engaging in a sustained effort to steal an election.

The tactics of Hawley and his many partisan confreres, if they aren’t checked and challenged, will put at risk what the scholar Stephen L. Carter calls “the entire project of Enlightenment democracy.” This doesn’t seem to bother Hawley and many in his party. But what he should know—and, one hopes, does know, somewhere in the recesses of his heart—is that he has moved very far away from conservatism.

 

The sun returns

The previous forecast for days of rain seems to have been a bit out:

Another old movie review no one asked for

So, I finally got around to watching Cabaret on DVD last night.  I was 12 when it came out so it held no particular interest at the time. But of course Liza Minelli kept singing the title song for the next 20 years and then Andrew Bolt started misusing Tomorrow Belongs to Me to bolster his alleged martyrdom, so I had a fair idea of what it was about.

But I have to say I was seriously underwhelmed. 

On the upside, Liza was pretty good as a ditzy, likeable and dislikable in equal parts, character.  You can tell it was a genuine star turn.

But as for the downside: gee, it's an intensely early 70's kind of movie, isn't it?  The period seemed unduly interested in "bad/promiscuous girl/prostitute with a kind heart" stories, if you ask me, as well as ones about open relationships/threesomes (all a part of coming to grips with the sexual revolution I guess) and this story falls into that category.  But it feels thematically very dated now.

Apart from the mystery of whoever told Michael York he could act, the main problem is that I was expecting more drama in the story.  I thought that maybe someone would die or disappear at the hands of the early Nazis; that York would turn out to be a spy; or there would some sort of redemption or improvement of Liza's character.  But no.  There's also a side story of two Jewish characters that has little in the way of drama and doesn't seem to serve much point.

I also wonder about whether the movie overdoes the somewhat grotesque appearance of cabaret of the era.  I mean, the female performers apart from Liza all looked too old, too plump, and with such garish make up that  it made it hard to understand the sex appeal of the shows, even to an older male audience.

I am sure there must be heaps of photography books devoted to the topic, so I will go looking and report back one day.  I don't expect it looked like the quasi techno rave re-imagining that Babylon Berlin gave nightclubs of the time, but I wonder if the movie goes too far the other way and makes it look too dingey.

Anyway, can cross that one off the list of famous movies I feel I should have seen by now.  Wish it had been better.

More playing with the camera

That was a couple of days ago, as was this:

Unfortunately, the rest of the week is going to be like this:

This is actually the first I can recall of many Christmas - New Year beach holidays over the years which will have a majority of days wet.  So no big complaints - our luck has been pretty good.

Proving the world is round (from sea level)

My annual short but well earned break is, for a change, taking place with a fair bit of ocean view. Like this: 

It occurred to me today that, although I have stayed in ocean view apartments before, I had never tried very hard to check out the old proof of the world being round by watching closely how a tall ship disaplears from view. The problem is, of course, that you need to spot a ship going in the right direction away from the coast, and not just parallel to it. This is likely the reason I hadn't done this before

Today was my lucky day, and to prove it, I even have the shots taken through my binoculars. 

Here's the first shot (just holding the phone lens up to the binocular's eyepiece): 

Let me crop that for you: 

This was exciting: a ship heading away by about a 45 degree angle. It did go behind a tree for about 20 to 30 minutes. 

But when emerged into sight, there was a lot less to see: 

Close up crop: 

And finally, a bare white smudge, being the top of the ship: 

And thus we have the  reverse of a tall ship's mast being sighted before the rest comes into view. 

I thought this cool, even though my kids just rolled their eyes. 

Anyway.. Back to holiday stuff.. Like testing out night mode on my phone's camera:

Nice. 

Christmas 2020

I don't recall reading about the first Christmas card before, but this is it. Smithsonian magazine explains that it was privately produced for one family in England in 1843, and it does contain the surprising detail of young children apparently being given wine to drink. And to think both of mine have now reached adulthood and I never gave that a try.

Have a good Christmas, folks. 

Fancy

This video is more or less an ad for Otis elevators, but the imagery it presents of the re-vamped Empire State Building is still pretty pleasing.   (I see now that this renovation has been open for a year or so, but this is the first I have heard of it.)

Conjuncted

Lo and behold! Brisbane actually got clear-ish skies for this evening's viewing of the Jupiter and Saturn conjunction. Here it is, taken just on my phone and cropped... Your can see it's two dots.. just: 

 

Ah, no...now that it's on my laptop, the dots are bigger than I expected.  Cool.

Some beautiful videos from the far North

A month or two ago, Google suggested I watch an 8 minute BBC video about Svalsbard, the island up north of Norway which used to be Spitzbergen.   Its legal status is pretty unusual, as Wikipedia explains:

Svalbard (/ˈsvɑːlbɑːr/ SVAHL-bar,^[3] Urban East Norwegian: [ˈsvɑ̂ːɫbɑr] (listen); prior to 1925 known as Spitsbergen, or Spitzbergen, (lit. Sharp Peaks; Russian: Шпицберген) is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Situated north of mainland Europe, it is about midway between continental Norway and the North Pole. The islands of the group range from 74° to 81° north latitude, and from 10° to 35° east longitude. The largest island is Spitsbergen, followed by Nordaustlandet and Edgeøya. While part of the Kingdom of Norway since 1925, Svalbard is not part of geographical Norway; administratively, the archipelago is not part of any Norwegian county, but forms an unincorporated area administered by a governor appointed by the Norwegian government, and a special jurisdiction subject to the Svalbard Treaty that is outside of the Schengen Area, the Nordic Passport Union and the European Economic Area.

Apparently, this means that you do not need a visa to go work there, which,  as the video explains, means that some people go there on a whim to see if they can a living, and end up happy enough:

All Knowing Google, thus detecting I was interested in the place, took some weeks to do so, but eventually recommended the Youtube channel of Cecilia, a (I think) Swedish woman who lives there (with a boyfriend and a beautiful dog.)   

I haven't watched them all, and maybe she will soon run out of new things to show, but I have to say that the images she puts up of the place are remarkably beautiful and pretty interesting.   (Even just watching her shop in the town's one big store was interesting.)

Anyway, here she is, showing exactly what the midnight sun looks like back in April, at the start of 4 months of permanent sun!:

 

 Her videos are not exactly slick - some of the explanatory stuff goes no longer than necessary - but for an amateur just showing the world the really remarkable and unusual part of the world she lives in, I find it very pleasing.   Here she is showing us a spectacular example of the Northern Lights:

 

I recommend watching them on you big smart TV if you have one. 

One other thing that's pretty interesting about the place - it has coal mines.   I find it quite surprising that Norway found it economically viable at the start of the 20th century to mine coal in such a frigid part of the world.  It's also a big reminder about how much the Earth has changed over its geological history.

I'm not sure I personally need to visit such an isolated part of the world (even though I would love to see Norway generally.)   But an amateur vlogger can make you feel as if you're experiencing the next best thing anyway.

Guilty pleasure admitted

I quite the new Spicy Pepper Paneer pizza now in Australian Domino's.   It's vegetarian too.   In fact, I don't mind their regular Vegorama too.

I get the feeling, reading lots of liberals from America on Twitter, that it's the opposite of hip to admit liking Domino's.   But I do.

And in other completely unimportant fast food news:   needed a quick lunch yesterday and McDonalds as nearby.   I know I have posted about it before - probably this year in fact -  but when you haven't eaten anything there for 6 months or so, you can get completely surprised all over again at how their main burger diameters have shrunk so much that they look like toy food or something.    

End Times noted

Phil Plait has a fun post up noting that, provided protons do not decay, the last big thing to happen to the universe might be black dwarves (modest size star remnants) exploding a bit like supernovae.   But it will take a very, very, very long time:

When enough iron builds up, they too will collapse and explode, leaving behind a neutron star.

But pycnonuclear fusion is an agonizingly slow process. How long will that take before the sudden collapse and kablooie?

Yeah, I promised earlier that I'd explain this number. For the highest mass black dwarfs, which will collapse first, the average amount of time it takes is, well, 10^1,100 years.

That's 10 to the 1,100th power. Written out, it's a 1 followed by eleven hundred zeroes....

And that's the black dwarfs that go first. The lowest mass ones take much longer.

How much longer? I'm not terribly glad you asked. They collapse after about 10^32,000 years.

That's not a typo. It's ten to the thirty-two-thousandth power. A one with 32,000 zeroes after it.

 He also points out, though, that at time frames like that, the expansion of the universe will mean that the observable universe is actually pretty small, so that you would have to be lucky to even have one of these explosions observable. (!)

All sound rather implausible - which Plait acknowledges readily, since it seems more likely that protons do decay, this puts a much "shorter" timeframe for everything to disappear.

Anyway, I expect everyone will have moved via black holes into alternative, much younger and newer universes well before this.