Thailand and ghosts

Even a bad foreign film can sometimes be an interesting experience due to what you learn about that country's culture.   That's pretty much how I felt about Pee Mak, a Thai film on Netflix that was apparently a big hit in its native country and has some respectable reviews.

It's actually not very good - a comedy version of an old and very well known Thai ghost story.    In the first ten minutes or so, I thought the comedy might work, but it gets progressively worse:  it soon devolves into pretty low grade slapstick stuff.  There are occasional laughs still, but I think for Westerners, it's pretty strained.   

But nonetheless, while looking at Thai movies as a category on Netflix, I realised that the country must really into ghost stories in a big way.   It seems like most selections have a supernatural theme.

And yeah, there is a Wikipedia page devoted to Ghost in Thai culture, as well as an article at Vice about ghosts and superstitions around Chiang Mai, which begins:

Belief in ghosts, spirits, and superstitions are rife in Thailand. Concern for keeping supernatural beings happy affects everything from personal practices to politics to the real estate market. Even the country's current leader, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, boasts about his collection of magical amulets, whose power he purportedly relies on for his success.

Most Thais will freely admit that they believe in phi (the Thai word for ghost), and many citizens identify as animist, a belief system that says everything has a spirit—from a rock to a house to a dead person—and that these spirits must be placated, or there will be consequences. 

According to the author interviewed by Vice, it affects Chiang Mai on a large scale:

There are also malicious ghosts, known as ithaygo, the ghosts of bad death. These ghosts are what I wrote my book about and why an entire section of buildings in Chiang Mai are abandoned.

It all started during the 1997 economic crisis. There wasn't enough money to finish buildings being built at the outer edges of the city or to pay the workers, who were mostly Burmese migrants. These projects were abandoned. No one ever officially lived in those buildings—yet they had ithaygo. People saw shadowy figures inside and some got sick just walking past them.

There was talk that the Burmese migrant workers had squatted inside and died. That was where the bad energy came from. Thais still won't live in that part of the city.

So, ghosts affect the real estate market?
Yes, in Chiang Mai this belief formed an empty donut around the city. You have the city itself and the first ring of housing developments that were being built during the '97 crisis. Many of them have never been officially finished or occupied.

The post-recovery ring of developments is outside of that and Thais bought apartments there. Thai people believe they will be unlucky if they live in a place of misfortune. It doesn't even have to be actual misfortune, it can be potential misfortune. To put it in Thai terms, a lack of progress—a project that stalled part way through—will continue to block current progress.

I have been to Bangkok once, just on 2 or 3 days stopover in my 20's.   Maybe I was jetlagged, but there is not much about the visit that I recall now.   Certainly, no sordid action for which the city was famous was sought, or offered, but I do recall it was a pretty nice hotel I stayed in and some of the food was very spicy.    I haven't seen photos I must have taken there for a long, long time.   But, now that I think of it, a framed silk embroided bird which I gave my Mum, but is now back in my house, must have come from that visit.   I was looking at it the other day and thinking it hasn't faded and still looks quite nice.

On boredom

A rather interesting article in the Washington Post, with the headline explaining what it's all about:

Boredom’s link to mental illnesses, brain injuries and dysfunctional behaviors

Amongst other things I learnt from it, I hadn't realised that an increase in proneness to boredom is a common feature of head injuries:

A harrowing personal experience triggered Danckert’s fascination with boredom as a teenager in Australia.

His older brother, Paul, crashed his car into a tree, suffering a fairly severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Even as his other injuries began to heal, something in Paul had shifted. Frustratingly, he no longer got any enjoyment out of drumming and other activities that he used to love — to him, they were downright boring.

When Danckert trained as a clinical neuropsychologist years later, he treated a number of young men who had head trauma similar to his brother’s. Out of curiosity, he asked them whether they experienced more boredom now than before the accident. Every single one of the men said yes.

“To me, that added up to something sort of organic that has changed in the brain, something that is making it more difficult for these individuals to engage effectively with the world,” he said. “I was fascinated by that and wanted to try to understand it more.”

In a 2013 study, Danckert discovered that the connection between brain injury and boredom went beyond mere anecdotal evidence. He surveyed 52 patients who had suffered either mild, moderate or severe TBI, finding that the presence and severity of head trauma predicted levels of boredom proneness.

The exact mechanism remains unclear, but Danckert suspects it might have something to do with damage to an area of the brain that helps represent value and reward. The orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the frontal lobe that sits just above your eye sockets, is commonly affected in TBI and known to be dysfunctional in patients with depression.

“It may be the case that, having damaged this area, things just don’t seem to have the same kind of value to patients,” Danckert said. “When things lose value or meaning, there’s a good chance that you will be bored by them.

I guess it's a case of the development of anhedonia - the inability to feel pleasure - that is behind it?

There are other points made in the article that were interesting:

The poet and philosopher Lucretius described the plight of the Roman rich in his most famous work, “On the Nature of Things,” as he flees from city house to country home to escape a lingering sense of dissatisfaction. In the fourth century, theologian Evagrius Ponticus warned his fellow monks about the “noonday demon,” a passing feeling of exhaustion and listlessness brought on by the monotony of life.

Of course, in the case of monks, I wouldn't be surprised if they had been awake since 4.30 am and really were exhausted by midday!

One (very modern) irony is whether the internet, by making the vicarious experience of everything from sex to travel so readily available, is making people more prone to boredom by reducing their engagement with the actual experiences.  Maybe the vicarious experience isn't exactly boring, but ultimately becomes unsatisfying.

I think I have been lucky to have low boredom proneness:

More recent research has explored boredom as an inherent trait — known as boredom proneness — which has a whole host of negative associations. People who experience boredom more frequently and with greater intensity are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, gamble compulsively, binge-eat, drop out of school, drive recklessly and suffer from anxiety or depression. Studies conducted during the coronavirus pandemic also found that individuals high in boredom proneness had a greater tendency to break the rules of social distancing.

“There’s a distinction between in-the-moment feelings of boredom — what psychologists refer to as ‘state boredom’ — which isn’t good or bad,” said psychologist James Danckert at the University of Waterloo. “If you’re high in boredom proneness, however, there really aren’t any positives to be associated with that. It’s not good for your mental health to have this sort of chronic sense of being disengaged or disconnected with the world.”

The article does not talk about something I think relevant to the topic - the extent to which religious belief may affect proneness to boredom.   I mean, put a highly religious person who believes they can engage at any time with a meaningful communication with (or at least, towards) their deity in solitary confinement, and they may presumably cope much better than a person who thinks they are alone in their mind in the universe.   Worked well for George Pell recently...

Anyway, the whole article is good and worth reading.

 

 

The German/Belgian/Dutch floods

Perhaps the single best collection of incredible flood video I have seen is this one from the BBC - although there are some other good examples around:

 

 All of the climate scientists I have seen commenting on it have been very reasonable - pointing out that they have yet to do the "attribution to climate change" calculation, but they have been warning for decades that the additional water in the warming atmosphere (and the additional heat when its not raining) means both more intense rainfall when it does rain, plus more intense (and rapid, I think) drought.

Of course, climate change denialists can still be readily found to say "They never predicted this.  And what is it - more flood or more droughts - you can't have both."

 

Nuance, but it's all bad

If you are interested, he does comment more after this tweet to explain his attitude towards using "fascism".

Tourist visit noted

A conclusion to that very weird story from last year

People who carefully read this blog might recall a post last year about a young man in Brisbane who decided to provide a castration service to men who wanted it.   (To be honest, it makes me feel a bit queasy just imagining this.)

It turns out he's been in jail for a about a year, waiting for a sentence for "malicious acts with intent", and has now been released on probation for another 3 years.

Two of the guys on whom he had performed this gruesome service spoke up for him:

Judge Jones told the court the two men involved had provided "positive" victim impact statements, with one saying the procedure had been a "great benefit to his health and wellbeing".

Judge Jones read victim impact statements to the court. 

"I am eternally grateful to Ryan for enabling me to enjoy life," he read.

Judge Jones said the younger man had wanted all of his sexual organs removed ever since he was a child because he "wanted to be a eunuch".

 And how does one locate someone willing to help you achieve this end?:

The court was told King met the men, a 26-year-old from New South Wales and a 66-year-old from Victoria, on a eunuch-interest website, and the two surgeries occurred at a motel in Logan and a hostel in Brisbane.

 Am I brave enough to Google that topic?   I presume it might be like those pro-anorexia sites - all people trying to turn a mental issue into something unobjectionable.

Anyway, I had forgotten that in my post last year I had found some 2004 research on what motivates  men who want to be castrated.   You can refresh your memory, too, at the first link in this post.

Actually, I see now that a Melbourne based researcher has studied this too (about a decade ago):

Professor Wassersug is researching the motivating factors behind the modern day voluntary eunuch.

“At the moment there are probably over 600 in Australia and interest in and access to voluntary castration here and around the world is growing because of the Internet,” he says.

 “Some of these men have a non-specific Gender Identity Disorder, others a Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and some have extreme sadomasochistic paraphilias (fetishes),” he says.

“The common theme is that they are opting to change their fundamental identity as male – they wish to be emasculated but do not want to be female.”

Other motivating factors, according to Professor Wassersug who has conducted a review of personal histories from 200 voluntary eunuchs include sexual abuse as a child, having witnessed the castration of animals in their youth, having been threatened with castration in their youth and having a strict religious background that condemned sexuality.

Professor Wassersug’s area of research is providing valuable insight into unfamiliar parts of the human condition and in an area of science that has been too long ignored.

“What we are discovering is a tangle of motivating factors which are not being addressed by the medical profession at all – and it needs to be,” he said.....

 

Wassersug and colleagues have been posting questionnaires on the Internet a to understand more about this little discussed area.

Among 178 castrated individuals who have responded to the questionnaire, only 37% had received surgery from medically qualified professionals.

“We are talking about a highly educated population who want to get sexual urges under control. They don’t actually identify themselves as wanting to be a eunuch.”

‘Many who have undergone voluntary castration are neither informed, nor prepared, for the plethora of additional long-term side effects of castration,’ he added.

“Worse still, because they are not discussing these issues with their doctors, they often seek the services of people who are not medically qualified for free or at costs below those of medically qualified personnel. Some of the would-be eunuchs end up in emergency rooms as a result.

The same survey has discussed voluntary castration with 108 ‘underground cutters’, some of whom are experienced in surgery but are putting their clients at risk because of inadequate equipment and procedures.  

What is even more disturbing is that nearly a quarter of the voluntarily castrated men did their own surgeries,” he said.

Good grief:   surely those 108 "cutters" weren't just in Australia?   What a world.

Brexit and farms

I was a bit surprised by this story on Euronews - not because it shows a bad consequence of Brexit, but more because I didn't imagine you could have such a lush looking capsicum farm in England:

More on Tucker

Why does Rupert Murdoch, who virtually pushed everyone else in Britain out of the way to be one of the first to get a COVID vaccine, let his American wingnut outlet's star continue to talk up vaccine fears, when he too has had it:

Also, Tucker's jumped on the election fraud bandwagon (about Georgia) again this week - with claims immediately thoroughly debunked in the real media.

Rupert Murdoch, who could stop this but doesn't, is an appalling person.
 

The ever non-reliable Tucker

The Washington Post has a profile of Tucker Carlson (one he did not co-operate with), and its take on him is best summarised (accurately in my opinion):

“He has positioned himself as the presentable face of White grievance,” said Joseph M. Azam, who resigned in late 2017 as a senior vice president of News Corp., which, like Fox, was controlled by the Murdoch family, because he objected to the company’s tolerance for what he felt were Carlson’s hateful views and other commentary. “He’s on mainstream media, he’s dressed in a suit, he speaks in a way that people see as eloquent and informed, and he’s super confident in what he’s saying.”

But the one anecdote which I have notice people tweeting about is his lies about his first grade teacher:

His mother had left the family. He was raised in La Jolla, in San Diego, by his wealthy father, Richard Carlson, a prominent Republican who worked in the Reagan administration, oversaw Voice of America and married an heiress to the Swanson frozen food family. From the door of his childhood home, Tucker Carlson overlooked La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, in one of the country’s most expensive communities.

He attended the elite La Jolla Country Day School, where a woman entered his life whom he grew to detest. It was his first-grade teacher, whom he referred to in his book as Mrs. Raymond. He caricatured her as “a parody of earth-mother liberalism” who “wore long Indian-print skirts. . . . She had little interest in conventional academic topics, like reading and penmanship.” He recalled her sobbing theatrically at her desk, saying, “The world is so unfair! You don’t know that yet. But you’ll find out!”

Carlson said he just wanted liberals to “stop blubbering and teach us to read. . . . Mrs. Raymond never did teach us; my father had to hire a tutor to get me through phonics.” Thus, Carlson says, he began his sojourn as a conservative thinker, questioning the liberals who he said were all around him, exemplified by his first-grade teacher.

Which is all rather shocking to Marianna Raymond, 77, who remembers Carlson as “very precious and very, very polite and sweet,” and said she had no idea, until contacted recently by a Washington Post reporter, that her former student had ridiculed her as a key to understanding him.

Raymond said in an interview that she never sobbed at her desk, didn’t wear an Indian skirt and didn’t advocate her political views. She said that not only did she teach Carlson reading at La Jolla Country Day School — with a student body that was “very affluent and White” — but that she also was then hired to tutor him at his home.

“Oh my God,” she said, when informed of Carlson’s attack against her. “That is the most embellished, crazy thing I ever heard.”

No wonder Fox News lawyers argued in a court case that no one should believe what he says - he's just a blowhard.

Carlson is very popular with the white grievance folk over at Catallaxy, by the way.

 Update:  an interesting thread on this on Twitter:

 

Some memeing been done

 

More on fascist friendly approaches to democracy

So, there are a few books coming out about the Trump election loss, and WAPO has run extracts from one on of them in which we learn:

Finally, Election Day had arrived. The morning of Nov. 3, 2020, President Trump was upbeat. The mood in the West Wing was good. Some aides talked giddily of a landslide. Several women who worked in the White House arrived wearing red sweaters in a show of optimism, while some Secret Service agents on the president’s detail sported red ties for the occasion. Trump’s voice was hoarse from his mad dash of rallies, but he thought his exhausting final sprint had sealed the deal. He considered Joe Biden to be a lot of things, but a winner most definitely was not one of them. “I can’t lose to this f------ guy,” Trump told aides. 

Tick off the narcissism box.   Next:

Around noon, his detail whisked Trump across the Potomac River to visit his campaign headquarters in Arlington, where campaign manager Bill Stepien and the senior leadership briefed Trump in the conference room. Stepien outlined what to expect that night — when polls closed in each battleground state, how quickly votes should be tallied and which states would probably have the first projected winners. He explained that because of the huge number of mail-in ballots in many states, it might take long into the night for votes to be counted. Patience was in order.

Stepien explained to Trump that in many battleground states, the first votes to be recorded were expected to be in-person Election Day votes, which could lean Trump, while mail-in votes, which were likely to heavily favor Biden, would be added to the tally later as those ballots were processed. This meant that the early vote totals could well show Trump ahead by solid margins.

“It’s going to be good early,” Stepien told the boss. But, as he cautioned the president, those numbers would be incomplete and the margins probably would tighten later in the evening.

So, he had full warning of what would happen with the count.   

We get an account of how he went off his brain when Fox News called Arizona for Biden:

“They’re calling it way too early,” Oczkowski told Trump. “This thing is close. We still think we’ll win narrowly — and not just us. Doug Ducey’s modeling people show us winning.” Ducey, Arizona’s Republican governor, and his political team had kept in close contact with Trump’s aides.

That hardly reassured the president. “What the f--- is Fox doing?” Trump screamed. Then he barked orders to Kushner: “Call Rupert! Call James and Lachlan!” And to Jason Miller: “Get Sammon. Get Hemmer. They’ve got to reverse this.” The president was referring to Fox owner Rupert Murdoch and his sons, James and Lachlan, as well as Bill Sammon, a top news executive at Fox.

Trump’s tirade continued. “What the f---?” he bellowed. “What the f--- are these guys doing? How could they call this this early?”

Oczkowski again tried to soothe the president. “They’re calling this way too early,” he said. “This is unbelievable.”

Giuliani pushed the president to forget about the Arizona call and just say he won — to step into the East Room and deliver a victory speech. Never mind that Meadows had earlier snapped at Giuliani and said the president couldn’t just declare himself the winner.

Talk about your fascist entitlement to power frame of mind - both from Trump and Giuliani.

Does Trump's reaction make any sense, apart from showing how fragile his narcissism makes him?   Getting Fox to reverse the call would obviously make no difference in the long run - either they were right, or would be proved wrong, and Trump could have gloated later.

I laugh at the image of Trump's dimwitted, entitled, sons losing it:

Eric Trump, who the night before had predicted to friends that his father would win with 322 electoral college votes, flipped out in the Map Room.

“The election is being stolen,” the president’s 36-year-old son said. “Where are these votes coming from? How is this legit?”

He yelled at the campaign’s data analysts, as if it were their fault that his father’s early leads over Biden were shrinking. ”We pay you to do this,” he said. “How can this be happening?"

Eric Trump, through a spokesperson, insisted that he did not berate campaign staff, as described by witnesses.

Donald Trump Jr. said, “There’s no way we lose to this guy,” referring to Biden.

 And then Trump went out and immediately declared it a fraud on national TV.   

Nancy Pelosi's reaction is so accurate:

Pelosi watched Trump’s speech in horror. “It was just a complete, total manifestation [of] insanity,” she recalled in the interview.

“It was clear over that four-year period that this was not a person who was on the level — on the level intellectually, on the level mentally, on the level emotionally and certainly not on the level patriotically,” she said. “So for him to say what he said, I wouldn’t say was [as] surprising as it might have been if we hadn’t seen the instability all along.”

David Frum on post election Trump fascism

I think this is an important and well argued article by David Frum that Trump and his supporters are going down a clear fascist path, and it's time to call it that.

Some extracts:

The Trump movement was always authoritarian and illiberal. It indulged periodically in the rhetoric of violence. Trump himself chafed against the restraints of law. But what the United States did not have before 2020 was a large national movement willing to justify mob violence to claim political power. Now it does.

Is there a precedent? Not in recent years. Since the era of Redemption after Reconstruction, anti-government violence in the United States has been the work of marginal sects and individual extremists. American Islamic State supporters were never going to seize the state, and neither were the Weather Underground, the Ku Klux Klan killers of the 1950s and ’60s, Puerto Rican nationalists, the German American Bund, nor the Communist Party USA.

But the post-election Trump movement is not tiny. It’s not anything like a national majority, but it’s a majority in some states—a plurality in more—and everywhere a significant minority, empowered by the inability of pro-legality Republicans to stand up to them.  

I like this paragraph:

Two traits have historically marked off European-style fascism from more homegrown American traditions of illiberalism: contempt for legality and the cult of violence. Presidential-era Trumpism operated through at least the forms of law. Presidential-era Trumpism glorified military power, not mob attacks on government institutions. Post-presidentially, those past inhibitions are fast dissolving. The conversion of Ashli Babbitt into a martyr, a sort of American Horst Wessel, expresses the transformation. Through 2020, Trump had endorsed deadly force against lawbreakers: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” he tweeted on May 29, 2020. Babbitt broke the law too, but not to steal a TV. She was killed as she tried to disrupt the constitutional order, to prevent the formalization of the results of a democratic election.

 And towards the end:

In his interview on July 11—as in the ever more explicit talk of his followers—the new line about the attack on the Capitol is guilty but justified. The election of 2020 was a fraud, and so those who lost it are entitled to overturn it.

I do not consider myself guilty. I admit all the factual aspects of the charge. But I cannot plead that I am guilty of high treason; for there can be no high treason against that treason committed in 1918.

Maybe you recognize those words. They come from Adolf Hitler’s plea of self-defense at his trial for his 1923 Munich putsch. He argued: You are not entitled to the power you hold, so I committed no crime when I tried to grab it back. You blame me for what I did; I blame you for who you are.

 Trump’s no Hitler, obviously. But they share some ways of thinking. The past never repeats itself. But it offers warnings. It’s time to start using the F-word again, not to defame—but to diagnose.

Peter Doherty getting cranky

He makes good points:

 

A town I don't understand

It's been decades since I have visited Townsville, but I always felt it was a bit of an underappreciated place.    I made my first visit there backpacking as a university student, and thought Magnetic Island was a lovely backwater that might do well in future development.  Yet I get the impression it has never really "taken off" - although perhaps I should just go there and have a look.

Anyway, my impression from recent years of reporting about Townsville was that it was suffering economically and had large social problems with some pretty poor unemployed and indigenous families in particular.

Yet today, I read this on the ABC:

A North Queensland family of six has been forced to live in a tent for almost two months as rental shortages reach crisis point in Townsville.....

The Kennison family is among a growing number of residents in Townsville finding themselves homeless for the first time.

With the rental vacancy rate in the city at 1.2 per cent — largely driven by interstate migration and the return of ex-pats to the community — Townsville is not alone.

Across the state, the majority of rental vacancies remain under 2.5 per cent, according to the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ)

The Red Cross in Townsville is supporting more than 200 people every month who are experiencing problems with securing affordable accommodation.

Maybe because it hasn't been doing so well in recent years it hasn't had more housing built?   But you usually associate lack of enough housing with boom towns, not economic struggle towns.

 

As seen on Twitter

Hey there. I have had some internet (NBN) problems at work - and let me say, Optus clearly seems to have bigger issues with their NBN to business service than Telstra.   I have suffered outages at much higher rate than that suffered by the office right next to me on Telstra.   Most of what Optus does seems pretty good to me - but the NBN service I have had from them is, shall we say, problematic.

Anyway, I've been saving some screenshots on my phone, and will dump some here today: 

 

I'm pleased to see today Biden calling out strongly the Big Lie.   The Big Problem, of course, is senior Republicans failing to do so for fear of Trump's brainwashed cult base.

In some rare, obesity positive, news...

Obese patients with a form of advanced prostate cancer survive longer than overweight and normal weight patients, new research has found.  ...

They looked at survival rates in 1,577 patients involved in three different clinical trials, with an average age of 69 and average BMI of 28. They found that BMI was a protective factor in both overall and cancer-specific survival, with 4% higher overall survival probability and 29% cancer-specific survival probability. Even when they adjusted for higher doses of chemotherapy given to larger patients, the team found the protective effect remained. Over 36 months, around 30% of obese patients survived compared to 20% of overweight and normal weight individuals.

Dr. Nicola Fossati, a urologist at San Raffaele University says: "Looking at patients with metastasis of prostate cancer, we found that obese patients are living longer. This means that BMI could be used to predict survival in these patients.

"This obesity paradox has been seen in some other cancers, possibly due to the relationship between tissue fat and cancer genomes, and more research is needed in this area. It's also possible that improved survival may be due to the interaction of chemotherapy with other drugs. Obese patients in this older age group tend to be taking medication for other conditions and we do not fully understand how these medicines interconnect.

Here's a link to the full story.

Expats for China

The BBC has a story up about something interesting I have mentioned before - how China's pro-government (to put it mildly) media network CGTN features pro-China ex pats a lot.  

Question with an obvious answer

 

Nice, low key humour spotted

 

Poor Japan

It's sort of been Japan week here, and to top it off, we now have what was long suspected might happen - an Olympics without spectators.

To make it a good television spectacle in any event, maybe they should be covering all stadium seating with plastic so they can green screen in a full audience?   Do you even need to do that with modern video techniques?  

I guess in 100 years time, the audience could just be robots.