The loathesome Creighton

I cannot be the only person who is just daily appalled by Adam Creighton and his Twitter coverage about  COVID.    His arrogant mocking tone and completely unwarranted, ideologically drive, certainty that he has been right all along is just a journalistic and personal disgrace, and I hope he has (at the very least) lost friends permanently over it.   (He will have more in the wingnut Right - he can have them.)   He's like an Australian version of that utterly obnoxious, can-someone-please-punch-him-in-the-face Paul Joseph Watson. 

His latest piece of triumphalism is gloating over the apparent rapid drop in UK cases, against expectations.  This does appear genuinely puzzling, as this article in The Guardian notes.     But as I have said for a long time - this has just obviously been a really complicated pandemic, with lots of puzzles that are not going to be fully understood for some time, such as why it took off so fast in some places, and slower in some poorer countries where one might have expected an earlier outbreak; the effectiveness of the various policy responses in different countries; and the extent of "long Covid" and whether it is going to lead to an increase in things as diverse as diabetes, dementia and male infertility and erectile dysfunction (!) 

If ever there was a person who deserves to get it, and suffer badly from it, it's Adam. 

Some religious people had too much time on their hands

I don't know, but I think some people in India and Tibet with religious interests really had too much time on their hands.   From an article with the somewhat worrying title:  Tapping the Body's Nectar: Gastronomy and Incorporation in Tibetan Literature, I extract the following:

This essay will present a set of thirteenth-century Tibetan texts that pre-
scribe the consumption of human by-products—such as flesh, excrement,
or urine—and consider several discursive contexts in which these pre-
scriptions may be understood.....

 A gastronomic discourse of consuming human flesh and other body
products, prepared following recipes targeted at achieving siddhi and other
supernormal aims, is central to the Tibetan corpus of Nyingma tantras,
many of which are said to be based on indigenous Tibetan writings and
on transmissions that occurred during the first diffusion of Buddhism into
Tibet, during the eighth to the ninth centuries....

The Nectar Tantras collection is attributed to Vimalamitra, an Indian
who is said to have spent many years in Tibet around the turn of the
eighth to the ninth centuries and who is considered a central figure in the
transmission and dissemination of Mahayoga and early Great Perfection
(Rdzogs chen) teachings in Tibet. ...

Ok, now for some explicit instructions:

 The Eight Chapters on Nectar’s central practice involves the creation
of nectar by consecrating a brew of fluids said to emerge from sexual union
and various other ingredients. The sixth of the eight chapters contains ex-
plicit instructions on how to make nectar (bdud rtsi sbyor ba). Selecting
and purifying a suitable place, the text says, the practitioner should make
a mandala; it should be covered with excrement and urine, with five hu-
man skulls placed at the cardinal points and in the center and lit with a
lamp fueled by human fat. The practitioner should obtain the skull of a
Brahmin and place it at the mandala’s center, filled with five “fragrant
nectars” (that is, the five human by-products or products designated as
their substitutes). To that mixture a number of fruit, plant, and mineral
ingredients are to be added, as well as the five meats and the five sub-
stances that are extruded by the sense organs (the eyes, nose, ears, tongue,
and heart). More ingredients are added to the concoction: grapes, wood-
apple, mango, jackfruit, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, and so
forth, plus the powder of ground-up gold, silver, copper, iron, and tur-
quoise. As the practitioner stirs this brew, he (the text presupposes a male)
chants mantras. “The excellent nectar mixed from these [ingredients] is
certain to bestow the fruits of siddhi,” the tantra asserts.

Once the practitioner has mixed his brew of nectar, he should next take
up the identity of a wrathful Heruka, he should be joined by a consort,
and the pair should engage in sexual intercourse. At this point, the text
promises, “You will achieve facility with the vastness [of Buddhahood] and
its causal conditions, and you will arrive at the samadhi of the peaceful
dharmakaya. You will become possessed of the eight worldly siddhi and
attain the empowerment of ultimate truth.”10 This ritual should be con-
ducted while the female is menstruating, and the mixture of her blood and
his semen is referred to as “the best rasayana [ra sa ya na’i gtso bo].”11
Instructions for a contemplative exercise follow. 

When the blood and  semen meet, at the five power places (gnas lnga) of the body (the crown
of the head, the tongue, the heart, the navel, and the genitals) the prac-
titioner should imagine five luminous seed syllables and five Buddhas ra-
diating light. As the light rays contract, the practitioner should grab hold
of these “five medicines” (sman lnga) for himself. The five nectars here
are each associated with a Buddha and his seed syllable: Vairocana with
excrement, Amitabha with bodhicitta, Amoghasiddhi with flesh, Ratna-
sambhava with blood, and Aksobhya with urine.12 The seed syllables then
melt into five streams of the five nectars. Repeating this visualization
many times, together with mantra recitation and hand gestures, the prac-
titioner consecrates the nectar vessel at the center of the mandala by rest-
ing his hand on its top.

I haven't heard the Dalai Lama talking up this aspect of his region's religious history.  I wonder why...

PS:  It's all a bit Temple of Doom, the imagery, I reckon.   And how come Christianity never got into sex magic rituals.  A disappointing oversight.  :)

Update:    yet more from that article, which makes going to the doctor in Tibet at the time sound like a real worry:

Gu ru chos dbang’s Accomplishing Medicine Applications (Sman bsgrub
las tshogs) offers a range of practically oriented recipes for the use of
consecrated nectar to achieve various aims. He provides a general recipe
for combining the five nectars into a concoction that may then be used as
a base ingredient for more elaborate prescriptions: “Six liters [bre] of
nectar [bdud rtsi, that is, excrement], a handful of human flesh, one
palmful of blood, half of that of white bodhicitta bezoar [go ro tsa na],
and however much urine is appropriate.”19 Recommended sources for
collecting these ingredients are provided: for example, the bodhicitta may
be the brains of a sixteen-year-old child, the blood may come from your
lama’s consort, caretaker, or female student, and the urine may be taken
from a young child born to your lama and his consort.20 ....

Following the general recipe above, Gu ru chos dbang offers a series
of prescriptions for mixtures that cure illness or enhance personal health
and power. Thus, if you mix the juice-like nectar with more than thirty
additional ingredients, including turmeric, a tooth tip, bitumen, white
aconite (bong nga), barberry bark, camphor, a young boy’s bezoar, and
various other medicinal substances, then this compound may be used to
treat contagious diseases or poisons. Adding calcite (cong zhi), pitch (brag
zhun), saffron, bal bu leaves, the three salts, pomegranate, and the flesh
of a lammergeyer to a handful of nectar will clear up bladder disease.

What the heck is a lammergeyer?   Oh - a bearded vulture, by the looks.   And "a young boy's bezoar"?  

A bezoar (BE-zor) is a solid mass of indigestible material that accumulates in your digestive tract, sometimes causing a blockage. Bezoars usually form in the stomach, sometimes in the small intestine or, rarely, the large intestine. They can occur in children and adults.

I had not heard of that before.   I wonder how you get a small boy's one in Tibet in the 13th century.  I don't want to know.

The tricky concept of self esteem

From an interesting article in The Atlantic:

What should parents do to foster healthy self-esteem in their kids? We should stop obsessing over the concept, because it is probably not the be-all and end-all that we think it is. According to Cho, research has shown, for instance, that many East Asian children score low on traditional self-esteem measures, but that they rarely suffer from psychological problems or do poorly in school as a result. This suggests that “self-esteem is just one thing in a myriad of practices that parents can engage in that could help children thrive,” Cho said. We’re not going to ruin our kids by not focusing on it—and we might even help them, given that our approaches for boosting self-esteem are often counterproductive.  

 We should also be careful about showering our children with indiscriminate praise. Instead, we should be more honest in our appraisals—not by shaming kids or putting them down, but by giving them feedback that is commensurate with their effort. Tell your kid that you like their off-key singing, but don’t tell them it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard. When we praise our kids, we should encourage their efforts, rather than celebrate them for their achievements, abilities, or smarts. And we should let them experience hardships. When kids face adversity and get through it, they learn that they are loved unconditionally and that failure is not a sign of ineptitude, but an opportunity to learn, grow, and come to believe in themselves.

In an earlier paragraph:

Healthy self-esteem cannot be universally essential for another reason too: It is largely an American construct. Many other countries, including Japan and China, do not give self-esteem much, if any, consideration (some languages don’t even have a word for it). “Even in very modern societies, cultures that we think are very similar to ours don’t necessarily view self-esteem with the same set of ideals that we do,” Cho told me.

The overlap has always been obvious

As David Roberts notes:

This photo from the Sydney protest has featured on Twitter a lot:

I have the impression that the scale of the weekend protests caught people by surprise - the Right wingnuts in the open thread at Catallaxy, for example, were sympathetic to it but few seemed to have been aware that it was going to happen.  The main avenue for its organisation (probably Facebook?) would be good to know.   Just another example of the unforeseen damage the internet has caused.

Over in England, meanwhile:

Further down that thread:

Let's have a look at the Right wing paranoia that Lew Wallace suffers from:

On the other hand, there is an element of truth in this:

But the problem I keep coming back to is the way the internet has enabled faster communication between the nutters, enabling better organisation, the faster spread of falsehoods, and a sense of community that they interpret as meaning they can't be wrong, because so many others think the same.

 

Sandwiching discussed

I see that this was being discussed in 2019, but it has become more relevant than ever before:

Free love as an anti-Nazi measure

The New Yorker has been promoting this story on Twitter:  

The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles

With the approval of the government, a renowned sexologist ran a dangerous program. How could this happen?

and it's an interesting read, especially for the part that explains post War German theorising about how to have less authoritarian friendly personalities ever again.   I'm not sure I have ever heard of this in such detail before.

I won't extract too much, but it notes that the sexologist in question, Kentler, was a gay man who had father issues - Dad was a domineering jerk, following earlier ideas about how to raise kids, especially boys:

Kentler’s parents followed the teachings of Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber, a best-selling German authority on child care who has been described as a “spiritual precursor of Nazism.” Schreber outlined principles of child rearing that would create a stronger race of men, ridding them of cowardice, laziness, and unwanted displays of vulnerability and desire. “Suppress everything in the child,” Schreber wrote, in 1858. “Emotions must be suffocated in their seed right away.”

Then, according to this article, in the immediate post War years, sexual propriety was culturally significant as a type of "penance":

The postwar years in West Germany were marked by an intense preoccupation with sexual propriety, as if decorum could solve the nation’s moral crisis and cleanse it of guilt. “One’s own offspring did penance for Auschwitz,” the German poet Olav Münzberg wrote, “with ethics and morality forcefully jammed into them.” Women’s reproductive rights were severely restricted, and the policing of homosexual encounters, a hallmark of Nazism, persisted; in the two decades after the war, roughly a hundred thousand men were prosecuted for this crime. Kentler was attracted to men and felt as if he “always had one leg in prison,” because of the risks involved in consummating his desires. He found solace in the book “Corydon,” by André Gide, a series of Socratic dialogues about the naturalness of queer love.

Kentler went on to promote a laissez faire attitude to sex as the solution (a idea which did have a very 70's, countercultural, type of vibe):

He earned a doctorate in social education from the University of Hanover, publishing his dissertation, a guidebook called “Parents Learn Sex Education,” in 1975. He was inspired by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who had argued that the free flow of sexual energy was essential to building a new kind of society. Kentler’s dissertation urged parents to teach their children that they should never be ashamed of their desires. “Once the first feelings of shame exist, they multiply easily and expand into all areas of life,” he wrote.

OK, here's the key part about theories about sexual repression and fascism:

Like many of his contemporaries, Kentler came to believe that sexual repression was key to understanding the Fascist consciousness. In 1977, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit published “Male Fantasies,” a two-volume book that drew on the diaries of German paramilitary fighters and concluded that their inhibited drives—along with a fear of anything gooey, gushing, or smelly—had been channelled into a new outlet: destruction. When Kentler read “Male Fantasies,” he could see Schreber, the child-care author whose principles his parents had followed, “at work everywhere,” he wrote. Kentler argued that ideas like Schreber’s (he had been so widely read that one book went through forty editions) had poisoned three generations of Germans, creating “authoritarian personalities who have to identify with a ‘great man’ around them to feel great themselves.” Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”

The trials of twenty-two former Auschwitz officers had revealed a common personality type: ordinary, conservative, sexually inhibited, and preoccupied with bourgeois morality. “I do think that in a society that was more free about sexuality, Auschwitz could not have happened,” the German legal scholar Herbert Jäger said. Sexual emancipation was integral to student movements throughout Western Europe, but the pleas were more pitched in Germany, where the memory of genocide had become inextricably—if not entirely accurately—linked with sexual primness. In “Sex After Fascism,” the historian Dagmar Herzog describes how, in Germany, conflicts over sexual mores became “an important site for managing the memory of Nazism.” But, she adds, it was also a way “to redirect moral debate away from the problem of complicity in mass murder and toward a narrowed conception of morality as solely concerned with sex.”

Suddenly, it seemed as if all relationship structures could—and must—be reconfigured, if there was any hope of producing a generation less damaged than the previous one. In the late sixties, educators in more than thirty German cities and towns began establishing experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies. “There is no question that they were trying (in a desperate sort of neo-Rousseauian authoritarian antiauthoritarianism) to remake German/human nature,” Herzog writes. Kentler inserted himself into a movement that was urgently working to undo the sexual legacy of Fascism but struggling to differentiate among various taboos. In 1976, the magazine Das Blatt argued that forbidden sexual desire, such as that for children, was the “revolutionary event that turns our everyday life on its head, that lets feelings break out and that shatters the basis of our thinking.” A few years later, Germany’s newly established Green Party, which brought together antiwar protesters, environmental activists, and veterans of the student movement, tried to address the “oppression of children’s sexuality.” Members of the Party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults.

The only thing I am unsure about is that I am not sure how it fits in with Germany having a reputation for sexual liberation in the early part of the 20th century.  Or was that just a city thing, eschewed by clean living country folk?   Here's a couple of extraordinary paragraphs out of the (rather specific!) Wikipedia entry European Sexuality leading up to and during World War 2:

Within Germany in the 1930s, many German Protestants and Catholics shared the view that Jewish people were responsible for the sexual immorality that pervaded Weimar Culture. Many church leaders supported the Nazis, welcoming radical measures against “public immorality” that included shutting down brothels, gay and lesbian bars, and nudist organizations.^[2] The initial support of the leadership of both the Catholic and Protestant churches was based on the belief that the Nazis would purify German sexual mores and reinstitute respect for family values.^[3]

In the early 1900s, Germany, and particularly Berlin, developed a reputation for relaxed sexual mores; as Dagmar Herzog writes in Sexuality In Europe: A Twentieth Century History, “There was more detailed discussion of the best techniques for enhancing female orgasm under Nazism than there would be in the far more conservative decade of the 1950s.”^[4] The flipside to liberalization for some was crackdowns on others.^[5] By the 1930s, Nazi leadership was increasingly anxious about being perceived as “queer”.^[6] In 1934, Hitler facilitated the murder of a friend and leader of the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, an openly gay man, Ernst Röhm. Until that time, many bars frequented by members of the Sturmabteilung were well known as gay bars, and there was no perceived tension between activism espousing greater rights for homosexuals and right-wing politics.^[7] The prevalence of same-sex institutions like Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls fostered suspicions of homoeroticism, and subsequently the regime tried to prove its straightness. All of that would change, however, when the virulently homophobic Heinrich Himmler became one of the most powerful people in the Reich.^[8] In 1935, Nazis strengthened laws on the books that criminalized male (but not female) homosexuality. Not only mutual masturbation but parallel individual masturbation and even “erotic” glances fell under the purview of the law.^[9] Penalties for homosexual behavior escalated considerably by 1937. By the end of the war, approximately 100,000 men had been prosecuted for same-sex behavior. Close to half had been convicted, sent to labor camps, prisons, or penitentiaries, subjected to medical experiments, or forced to have sex with female prostitutes.^[10] Many Jewish people who were held captive would realize a similar fate.^[11]

Gee.   Germany sure has a special, kinda weirdo, place in sexual cultural history.

   

Cold and COVID

My son got a head cold a few days ago, and dutifully went off and got Covid tested.  Came back negative.  Only lasted a few days. 

I seem to have developed one myself now.   No headache or pains:  just "normal" post nasal drip that I often get as the first sign of a head cold.   Throat's not really sore, just a bit irritated like you get with post nasal drip.

I'm suspecting it's not really worth get Covid tested.    I've managed to avoid the swab so far.  

What do you think?   

By the way:  I am an AstraZeneka resister.   Covid barely exists in Brisbane, with (I think) several days this week of no new cases; so it's not as if we are in the midst of a Delta outbreak.

I appreciate that you have to be very unlucky to get the blood clot problem from the vaccine:

In its latest weekly Vaccine Safety Report, the TGA said there have been 87 cases of clotting from the 6.1 million doses of AstraZeneca administered in Australia.

but that's one in 70,000 or so - and even though only a few of them have died, it seems those who get it still end up in hospital for weeks, and it's a very serious condition.  (I am not even sure whether they ever fully recover - the old guy who turned up on 7.30 a couple of weeks ago was out of  hospital but still on blood thinning drugs.)

When the virus isn't really circulating in my local city, and don't need to travel anywhere for a while, I don't really see it worth the risk of taking a medicine that carries a risk of making me seriously ill itself.

Don't get me wrong - if any other vaccine were available I would be in the line up as soon as possible.  

But in my circumstances (more so than if I were a resident of Sydney or Melbourne) I don't think holding off for now to wait to see if Pfizer will soon be available is unreasonable.

Who would want a country full of such nuts anyway?

Floods in China

I find it hard to believe that the people in the train were not in a bigger panic.   Very extraordinary scenes, worthy of a disaster movie:

As for floods and climate change, I wrote this back in 2013: 

...I have been saying since the extraordinarily widespread Australian floods of 2011  that increased flooding and drought may well be the first climate change effect which really becomes very clear and convinces government and voters that serious action on CO2 needs to be taken.  Recent events suggest I may be right. 

I remain unimpressed

I like most space things, and think a permanent lunar base would be a worthwhile endeavour.

But these suborbital flights taken by billionaires are just joy rides for the rich.   Last night, I started watching live the preparation for Bezos's flight, and thought the countdown was paused at 15 mins.  I went and had a shower and by the time I got to bed, the capsule was back on the ground.   

The brief bit of freefall at the top of these rides seems hardly worth it - going for a ride on a "vomit comet" plane could achieve that, and give a much longer overall time to bounce off walls.

If the point is to see the curvature of the Earth and a black, space-like sky, I still think a high altitude balloon ride may be better value.  A much, much longer viewing time, too.

I also think that one of these suborbital flights will crash soon enough, and the market for them will dwindle pretty quickly. 

I don't like being cynical of high tech, rocket related stuff; but on this, I am.

People got around

Is it just me, or are others sometimes surprised to read of how far people would travel in the days when travel was not easy?    I just read a short piece about the Todaiji temple in Nara, which noted that although Japan had its isolation period, it wasn't so disconnected from the rest of Asia before that.   In particular, the Great Buddha statue inside it was the subject of an consecration ceremony that had many guests.   This is the brief description:

A rite to consecrate a newly created Buddhist image is called an eye-opening ceremony. In the year 752, thousands of important monks and court, civil and military officials from around the known world were invited to the commemoration ceremony.

It is said to have been a huge, cosmopolitan affair with representatives from Persia (Iran), Silla (Korea), the Tang Dynasty (China), Vietnam, Central and Southeast Asia and other places in attendance.

The Indian monk Bodhisena invited the spirit into the Buddha by painting the pupils on the eyes of the statue. International music and dances were performed, and it was one big bash!

The story of the influential Indian monk who did the ceremony is expanded upon in this article.

Actually, I see from another site that maybe it was a retired emperor who did (or shared?) the eye painting.  History is so unreliable:

The Great Buddha and Tōdai-ji temple were consecrated in 752. The “eye-opening” ceremony was attended by visitors from the Asian continent. The 17,000 attendees included monks and nobles from Japan, as well as monks and dignitaries from China, Korea, and India. Of course, the reigning Empress Kōken was there. So was her father, the retired emperor Shōmu. Shōmu played an important role at the dedication. As the person most responsible for the building of the statue and temple, he held the paintbrush as the statue’s eyes were painted. This rite was seen as an invitation to the spirit of Buddha to enter the statue (Morimoto 2002).

Anyhow, my point is:  this was a big ceremony with quite a lot of people who had travelled from very far away.   Pretty impressive.

 

Drama at home

The ABC is currently heavily promoting a new (what I think is) light drama series "The Newsreader".  Here's the synopsis:

ABC and Screen Australia are thrilled to announce production is currently underway in Melbourne on the six-part drama series The Newsreader.  Produced by Werner Film Productions (Riot, Dance Academy) and created by Michael Lucas (Five Bedrooms, Offspring), The Newsreader is set in the maelstrom of a commercial television newsroom in 1986.

Starring Anna Torv (Mindhunter, Secret City, Fringe) as Helen Norville, a notoriously difficult star anchor determined to build credibility and Sam Reid (Lambs of God, The Hunting) as Dale Jennings, a diligent young reporter, desperate for a shot at the desk. Together, they’ll cover an extraordinary chain of breaking news including the shock of the Challenger explosion, the misbegotten hype of Halley’s Comet and the global terror of Chernobyl. From messy beginnings, a deep bond is formed that will upend their lives and transform the very fabric of the nightly news bulletin.

It looks pretty dull from the trailer.

But it did make me think:   why do I find Australian drama so unconvincing?   

I can find Australian comedy very funny and good to watch - both the sketch comedy (Micaleff continues to have the funniest - and only - political comedy around), and the more whimsical, character based humour of something like Rosehaven or Fisk.  Even some silly Australian sitcoms I can find funny (not many, mind you.)    And that's not to say there are no comedy failures - I have written about how underwhelming I found Benjamin Law's The Family Law, and how my reaction to Please Like Me was to kind of dislike Josh.  (Gay content creators do get a special privileged run in Australian funded comedy, I'm sure.) 

But Australia drama has always left me completely cold.    It never feels very realistic to me.   

I don't feel completely alone in this - because one of the funniest things in Mad As Hell has always been their mocking takes on the ABC's drama series.   

How does this happen?   Do Australian drama writers all go through the exact same training?  Do they all know each other (it is, presumably, a small community.)  Is it the pool of producers is so small all the stuff they are interested in is the same.   But they just seem to have the special ability to write stuff I find doesn't feel like the world I live in.    I don't know how they do it...   

Money wins

No one really trusts that Michael Wolff all that much, but apparently the interviewer agreed that there are several sources to back him up on Rupert hating Trump:

Michael Wolff, the author of Landslide and two other bestselling books about the Trump administration, has claimed Rupert Murdoch “hates” Donald Trump.

“Rupert hates Donald Trump,” the author told CNN’s Reliable Sources. “Hates him – but Rupert loves money.”...

Wolff said Jason Miller, a former Trump spokesman, backed his reporting. He also insisted that whatever Murdoch feels about Trump, he knows where his interests lie.

“At any rate, the Rupert Murdoch thing is I reported that at that point the decision desk got in touch with Lachlan Murdoch, Lachlan Murdoch called his father, his father said to go with this report, obviously including quite a fetching obscenity directed at Trump.

“How do I know this? I’ll give you the background here. The fact is that I am Rupert Murdoch’s biographer … who was given enormous access to him. I am well-sourced throughout the company and throughout his family, so therefore I know that this happened. My sources are extremely good and without a doubt on this point.”

The CNN host Brian Stelter, who has also written a book about Fox News and Trump, said “there are a lot of sources of say Rupert despises Trump. So why is Fox still so attached to him? Why do you think he hasn’t changed Fox’s editorial strategy?”

“I think that there are two worlds going on here,” Wolff said. “There’s Rupert Murdoch’s world … [and] the Fox network has moved its business model or the Fox News network to an old Trump model, that’s where the money comes from. Would Rupert Murdoch have an alternative to that, that would supply that much money?

“Rupert hates Donald Trump. Hates him. But Rupert loves money. Those are two warring things.”

 

 

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: