We're dealing with idiots, Part 2

I think this is Gab, a long time resident at Catallaxy:

Am I being too mean?  Is this idiocy, or just culture war tortured logic that is flabergasting to witness?

I'm sticking with idiocy.   Oh ok:  "Why not both?"

 

Combining solar power and agriculture - actually happening?

Back in 2015 I noted that I had been wondering for some time why you couldn't combine massive solar farms and grazing and agriculture - just by setting up the panels on higher steel framework.   Some crops might even do better in the middle of summer with a bit of shade - who knows?  A lot of cows and sheep would appreciate it, too.

It would seem from this video (a few months old now) that the idea is still being researched:

 

Seems kind of obvious to me that it's a good idea in those parts of Australia which you want to retain good quality land for agricultural purposes.

Now I wonder when anyone will listen to my oft repeated suggestion that Wivenhoe Dam near Brisbane should be at least a third covered in floating solar panels?

Liberal Mormons on the rise?

An article at the Washington Post:  The Rise of the Liberal Latter-Day Saints seems interesting, but I haven't read it word for word yet.

I sometimes wonder why I have a generally sympathetic attitude towards this invented religion.   I think it's because I also find appeal in the Asiatic reverence for ancestors, and the idea that their care and interest in their living descendants extends indefinitely.   Mormonism is like a syncretic combination of that with Christianity, I guess.  

Sure, in mainstream Christianity, perhaps especially in Catholicism, you can also have the belief that the souls of parents or relatives are watching over you; but it's not as intense as it could be.

I trust our domestic terrorist experts in Canberra have placed New Catallaxy on watch

Last night, two or three of the blokey blokes who comment at Dover Beach's (appalling "conservative" Catholic) reincarnation of Catallaxy were talking about having big arguments with their wives because they (the wives) had decided to get COVID vaccinated after all.  How tragic for them [/sarc]. Of course, they don't recognise that what their spouses doing so is only likely to aid their own health future.  As I say, we're dealing with idiots.

Then this morning, local Queensland nutjob, truck driver and pub musician has come over all sympathetic to "whatever it takes", including assassination, presumably: 

He's been expecting the end of the West for years now, even before COVID, but it having come from China has given him all the push he needed into mulling and promoting political violence.

The comment got 4 likes, by the way.

China and crypto

A succinct explanation at Axios of China banning crypto and the likely future of the technology.

I agree with the sentiment at the end - there is no way China, or other nations, are going to let private currencies make too much of an inroad.   Nor should they.

We're dealing with idiots

Hope it's not faked though.

Some commentary on the Arizona "audit"

I've been looking around for articles debunking the "we haven't proved fraud but this might be fraud" style claims of the Arizona election audit:

Arizona ‘audit’: A multitude of unsubstantiated claims and no proof of fraud

 Five takeaways from Arizona's audit results

Trump pretends Arizona election audit findings didn't completely embarrass him 

And in this one:

The goal was to substantiate a new consensus Republican belief that Democrats cannot win elections legitimately, and that any victory they notch must be somehow tainted. It is not a coincidence that the places where audits have focused are those, like Maricopa County, or Harris County, Texas, or Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, with high levels of minority voters, who can be disparaged—mostly implicitly, but occasionally more directly—as illegitimate participants in the polity. Trump has been the foremost proponent of the theory, but he’s been joined by eager sycophants, demagogues, and conspiracists.

 

Meatballs noted

We had 500 g of very nice looking beef mince, and I wanted to do something different.  Not sure why, but I don't think I have ever made my own Italian style (or more accurately, American Italian, I think) meatballs and spaghetti before. 

I followed roughly this recipe, except I used milk to soak the bread, and then following an idea from another online recipe, added about 100g of frozen (de-thawed and squeezed dry) spinach to add something other than protein to them.   (Also lots of parsley.)  

And for the sauce - used a 700ml bottle of Coles branded passata with basil in it.  It was surprisingly nice all by itself (and at $1.95 a bottle, made me wonder why we don't just use it all the time for pasta sauce.)   Fried an onion and some garlic and then put the passata in, and half a cup of water.  And the browned meatballs.   And chilli flakes, as per the recipe.  But didn't worry about other herbs - it was flavourful enough.  All worked out well indeed.   

Given their soft texture (which is what you really want), it does mean that imitation meat meatballs should do a good job too.  I have had some vegan type meatballs at Ikea, actually, and they weren't bad.  I should look up some recipes for vegetarian meatballs.

He won't fit through a standard door soon if that hat gets any bigger

True, that...

I also recommend his review of a book about China's problems...

https://davidfrum.com/article/china-s-trapped-transition

The answer to a labelling problem - more labelling!

So my twitter feed yesterday had some tweets about BiVisibilityDay, which I gather is something relatively new and a reaction to bisexual people getting annoyed at people saying "no, you're just gay (or straight) in denial.  You can't be trusted".

It feels like the intensity of interest in labelling of sexualities (and now, genders) is never going to level out.   I think the reason people can legitimately find it irritating is because it seems to be (for want of a better way of putting it) a passive aggressive way to be narcissistic.  "Call me by the gender I know I am";  "I'm pansexual, and that's subtly different from bisexual" etc.  And in all cases "this is really important to me.  This is who I am." 

So the problem I have with the bisexual pride lobby is that (it seems to me) the disrespect issues arise from an excessive social interest in labelling this one aspect of life, but they try to solve it by creating another type of label.   Why not, instead, attack the way people think about the importance of labelling desire?   

As I have written before, it seems (if you can trust some modern historians) that older societies had a more pragmatic, and less narcissistic, attitude:  one in which sex (and to a degree, relationships) was/were something people did, rather than being thought of as the key to who they are. 

Religion and coping

From The Economist:

RELIGION IS THE sigh of the oppressed creature…it is the opium of the people.” So wrote Karl Marx in 1844. The idea—not unique to Marx—was that by promising rewards in the next life, religion helps the poor bear their lot in this one.

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Jana Berkessel of the University of Mannheim, in Germany, and her colleagues takes a statistical look at the claim. Ms Berkessel's curiosity was piqued by a counter-intuitive finding in development economics. Researchers know that low socioeconomic status correlates with poor mental health. The assumption was once that, as places became richer, this effect would weaken. Being poor in a rich country was presumed better than being poor in a poor one.

But that has turned out not to be true. Abundant evidence suggests the relationship between status and mental health is stronger, not weaker, in rich countries than in poor ones. Ms Berkessel, who studies the psychological effects of religion, noticed that economic development is also inversely correlated with religiosity—the richer a country, the more godless it tends to be. Perhaps that was driving the change?

To check, she and her colleagues analysed three surveys covering 3.3m people in 156 countries. This set of data reproduced the finding that economic development amplifies the link between mental health and status. It also supported the idea that religiosity could attenuate that effect. Among rich countries, for instance, those with higher levels of self-reported religious belief had a weaker relationship between status and mental health.....

The upshot is that religion seems to protect people from at least some of the unpleasant effects of poverty. Exactly how is less clear. One hypothesis is that religious doctrine is directly protective. After all, many of the world’s biggest religions have a sceptical attitude to wealth. Alongside the well-known biblical verses about camels, needles and a rich person’s chance of entering the pearly gates, the researchers point out that the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu holy book, says “The demoniac person thinks: So much wealth do I have today, and I will gain more.” Similar sentiments can be found in the Koran and in some Buddhist texts. If God teaches that the wealthy are spiritually corrupt, or will get their comeuppance on Judgment Day, then poverty may seem less of a burden.

But there are other possibilities. Ms Berkessel points out that organised religion offers a social-support network which might help attenuate the effects of low status, whether or not its members really believe everything their holy texts say about wealth. Her next research project, she says, will look at exactly this point.

 

 

The main thing I know is that no one knows enough

Gee, I have been saying this ever since the COVID pandemic started:  the global patterns of COVID infection, illness, death and recovery (and the waves of these we have seen) always indicated that an enormous number of unknown or unclear factors must be going on.   Add to that the speed with which research has had to be done to develop and assess vaccines and treatments - it's been a real scientific and policy makers nightmare.

To bolster my assessment, German Lopez talks about the Florida surge, and how, in many respects, it was hard to understand:

... Florida’s example complicates any story of recent Covid-19 surges that focuses solely on reopenings and vaccinations. Something else seems to be going on, and experts aren’t totally sure what. “There are things that, to be honest, we don’t fully understand,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me.

We don’t know everything about why Covid-19 cases rise, and we don’t know everything about why they fall, either. David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu at the New York Times recently demonstrated that the coronavirus appears to follow two-month cycles in its rises and falls.

Yet, experts told them, it isn’t clear why. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

Experts point to some possible factors that contribute to trends in Covid-19 — widely discussed ones like vaccination and precautions, but also less covered issues like the weather, geographic concentration, and luck. But they acknowledge that there could be something going on that we just don’t know of or understand yet.

Figuring out all of this is crucial: It could be the difference between enabling and preventing not just the continued spread of Covid-19 but perhaps the next pandemic, too.

What's a government meant to do with such uncertainties, which make it incredibly easy for any policy mix they come up to be attacked?   

I'm not saying that governments are above criticism for policies - and certainly Right wing governments who take nonsensical attitudes towards punishing people who want to self protect are being idiotic - but my attitude towards criticism of government policies that are too strict remains slanted towards being sympathetic for the terrible difficulty they have in trying to work out what is effective and appropriate.  

Racist Right watch

Tucker Carlson Blows Up Murdoch’s White Supremacy Denial on Air

Chait is correct.

People are fickle

Sure, the manner of the Afghanistan withdrawal was not a great look.   But the vaccine mandate provisions still hold majority support, I think.

Yet Gallup shows up a big drop in the approval rating of Joe Biden to a Trumpian level of 43%.  Interestingly, the biggest drop amongst Independents - but then again, given the state of politics at the moment, no one really expects any movement at all from Republicans, do they?   And don't Republicans who like to pretend they are free thinkers register Independent - I think I remember Bill O'Reilly used to say he was one.

Anyway, even Presidents who are seen retrospectively as popular and successful can have periods of low approval.

As far as I am concerned, nothing Biden has done warrants this.  

Reactionary Right watch

Currency Lad, as clueless about the laws of armed conflict (and, I might add, morality) as ever:

 He and fellow conservative Catholic dover beach also think this:

 

Uhuh.   

And the race nationalism basis of the Right is on display at another new Catallaxy:

Can't we start negotiating with the USA for allowing an immigration swap of Redneck Australians for illegal Mexicans, or something?  I know which I would prefer to be around...

How the Polynesians spread

A new genetic study helps confirm the way the Polynesians spread through the Pacific:

The analysis suggests canoes set sail from the shores of Samoa—more than 2000 kilometers north of New Zealand—around 800 CE. The explorers arrived first on Rarotonga, the largest island in a chain now called the Cook Islands. Successive explorers moved in all directions, island hopping over the course of centuries and eventually reaching all the way to Rapa Nui, 6500 kilometers from Samoa and 3700 kilometers off the coast of Chile, by 1210 C.E.

The seems to have narrowed down the timeline considerably:

Archaeologists already had hints of how this great exploration took place. Studying the styles of stone tools and carvings, as well as languages, of the people on the various islands had suggested the original ancestors traced back to Samoa and that the expansion ended halfway across the ocean in Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. But they disagreed on whether it happened in a few centuries, beginning around 900 C.E., or started much earlier and lasted 1 millennium or more.

What's this about Native American ancestry?:

And because the genetic evidence allowed the researchers to reconstruct the order in which the islands were settled, they could spot connections between islands that might not seem intuitive based on the geography. For example, they argue that three island cultures known for carving massive stone statues—Rapa Nui, Raivavae, and the North and South Marquesas—shared a common founder population in the Tuamotu Islands, even though they are thousands of kilometers apart and geographically closer to other parts of the Pacific.

Those three islands also hold the earliest genetic traces of Native American ancestry among Polynesians. That suggests ancient Polynesians first contacted the Americas around 1100 C.E., when the seafarers were beginning their last, and longest, expeditions. “That’s something no one could have predicted through archaeology or oral history,” Moreno Estrada says.

Oh, here's another article explaining that part:

Researchers, published in Nature, sampled genes of modern peoples living across the Pacific and along the South American coast and the results suggest that voyages between eastern Polynesia and the Americas happened around the year 1200, resulting in a mixture of those populations in the remote South Marquesas archipelago. It remains a mystery whether Polynesians, Native Americans, or both peoples undertook the long journeys that would have led them together. The findings could mean that South Americans, hailing from what’s now coastal Ecuador or Columbia, ventured to East Polynesia. Alternatively, Polynesians could have arrived in the Marquesas alone having already mixed with those South American people—but only if they’d first sailed to the American continent to meet them.

Alexander Ioannidis, who studies genomics and population genetics at Stanford University, co-authored the new study in Nature. “The genes show that the Native Americans who contributed came from the coastal regions of Ecuador and Columbia,” he says. “What they can’t show, and we don’t know, is where exactly it first took place—on a Polynesian island or the coast of the Americas.”

 So, some Native Americans might have made it to, say, Rapa Nui, kon tiki style.  I thought that had been discredited - but it was more the idea that all of Polynesia came from the East, rather than the West.  

Some interesting reading

An Ezra Klein tweet led me to this review of a monograph about democracy.   Some extracts:

A central principle of the new Biden Administration is the idea that for democracy to survive our globe’s cascading crises and a shifting geopolitical landscape, marked by the rise of China, democracies need to do something quite fundamental: They must deliver for their citizens. Democracies can justify themselves if they can effectively master the multiplying calamities sweeping the globe such as climate change and the COVID epidemic.

In this new monograph, a follow up to his influential 2016 book What is Populism?, Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Müller probes the potential of such justifications for democracy and finds them important but insufficient. The problem, Müller notes, is that, in democracies, economic growth rates will inevitably falter from time to time. Autocracies may sometimes prove superior at problem-solving, even if only in the short run, delivering peace, health, and stability to their citizens.

If this is so, can democracy still be justified beyond this purely instrumental rationale? Put differently: Why should we value democracy on its own terms?

This book represents an effort to answer these questions. Müller builds on a long line of theorizing on what are sometimes called the “intrinsic,” as opposed to the “instrumental,” qualities of liberal democracy vis-à-vis authoritarianism. Instrumental justifications for democracy emphasize its immediate policy and material benefits for society while intrinsic justifications highlight the values and principles that make it self-justifying. Müller focuses on the latter but does so with an important twist. His focus is post-Trumpian America, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. Rather than weighing the political virtues of the West against Chinese or Singaporean authoritarian models, Müller’s starting point instead is to distinguish what he calls “real democracy” from Trump, Orban & co.’s variants of “fake” democracy. We see here that Trump’s turns of phrase haunt even the most distinguished of political theorists.

Müller’s debate-shaping 2016 book told us what defines “fake democrats,” and this book’s first chapter elaborates this thesis. What ties together the cast of characters—Orbán, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Trump, Narendra Modi, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Benjamin Netanyahu—is that they are all politicians who claim they, and only they, represent the “real people” or the “silent majority.” This basic claim to a “moral monopoly” of the people is pernicious for democracy, Müller powerfully reminds us, because the political opposition can be easily cast as illegitimate and its supporters, even more dangerously, as not part of the “real people.” 

Sounds all very astute.  But I guess I shouldn't cut and paste too much.  But here's another key paragraph: 

The common thread—what we might term the “Müller Insight”—that runs from What is Populism? through to this book is the notion that in a healthy democracy, no group or individual ought to claim to speak exclusively on behalf of “the people.” If politicians or parties do this before an election, they are, in Müller’s view, populists who threaten to poison a democracy. If they do this after an election (the focus of this book), the damage can be even more extensive: A populist who claims to be the only authentic representative of the people also inevitably believes he can lose only if a political system is “corrupt and rotten.” If a populist faces his own demise, he is tempted to demolish the entire system.

The review notes that Muller talks a lot about the key role the internet, and the ease with which it allows politicians (and wannabe demagogues) to communicate directly to their followers, spreading disinformation and partisan lies.   That this has played an incredibly important role in the parties of the Right is obvious.

There is more at the review worth reading.  All good stuff.

Macro woes

I liked Noah Smith's latest free substack piece on macroeconomic theory.   Not that I have any great understanding of economics, but I still get the feeling that we a living through a theoretical crisis within the field that is not widely recognised yet, probably because economists don't like to admit their academic endeavour is built on sand.   

That's my working hypothesis, anyway...

 

China woes

It seems that there is not too much concern that China's property market woes and the collapse of Evergrande can provoke an international financial crisis.  Hope they're right.  

Here's another article's summary:

Many are concerned that losses would force bondholders to sell other investments or shed riskier assets to raise cash, hurting markets that may seem unrelated. The catchphrase being thrown about is “contagion,” with many worried about tightly connected global markets.

Not all analysts agree. Analysts at Barclays called such speculation “far off base” while acknowledging the probable spillover effects with economic implications.

“But a true ‘Lehman moment’ is a crisis of a very different magnitude” and Chinese authorities would need to make a series of policy mistakes in response to the crisis for this to be of the Lehman level, they added.

SocGen economists said investors seem to be “differentiating between safe and risky borrowers,” which at the moment would limit the spillover to the wider financial market. On the whole, the sector’s investment-grade index also remained largely stable, they added.

They agreed largely that China’s situation is “very different” as the property sector’s links to the financial system are “not on the same scale” and noted that the capital markets are not the primary means of funding. The message is that as long as the regulators step in, the situation is manageable.

“The lesson from Lehman was that moral hazard needs to take a back seat to systemic risk,” Barclays analysts wrote.

Update:  a very unspecific explainer in Washington Post notes this:

Another concern is credit markets. Evergrande has done so much borrowing, and so many lenders are at risk of getting burned, would its potential default have a ripple effect for other borrowers? On both of these questions, experts say, it’s still too soon to tell.

But troubling signs already are emerging: Remember, hundreds of millions of Chinese homeowners who could see their property values drop, meaning there’s a good chance they’ll rein in spending. Global consumer markets — on everything from clothes to electronics to food — rely on the prolific buying power of the Chinese middle class. If China is poised to spend much less on consumer goods, there will be economic ramifications around the world.

That bit in italics:  is that right?   I didn't really realise it was so significant on a global scale, seeing I always think of China as more the country getting rich by making stuff the West wants (and therefore driven by our consumers' demands, not their's) 

Update 2:   I have been waiting for a while for a review article about the incredible and sudden degree of Chinese government intervention into industry and society, and how it very much feels a bit like a Cultural Revolution (Lite, perhaps.)

I think this is the article I was looking for, from a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post:

Xi Jinping’s crackdown on everything is remaking Chinese society

It starts:

The orders have been sudden, dramatic and often baffling. Last week, “American Idol”-style competitions and shows featuring men deemed too effeminate were banned by Chinese authorities. Days earlier, one of China’s wealthiest actresses, Zhao Wei, had her movies, television series and news mentions scrubbed from the Internet as if she had never existed.

Over the summer, China’s multibillion-dollar private education industry was decimated overnight by a ban on for-profit tutoring, while new regulations wiped more than $1 trillion from Chinese tech stocks since a peak in February. As China’s tech moguls compete to donate more to President Xi Jinping’s campaign against inequality, “Xi Jinping Thought” is taught in elementary schools, and foreign games and apps like Animal Crossing and Duolingo have been pulled from stores.

A dizzying regulatory crackdown unleashed by China’s government has spared almost no sector over the past few months. This sprawling “rectification” campaign — with such disparate targets as ride-hailing services, insurance, education and even the amount of time children can spend playing video games — is redrawing the boundaries of business and society in China as Xi prepares to take on a controversial third term in 2022.

 And further down:

The scope and velocity of the society-wide rectification has some worried China may be at the beginning of the kind of cultural and ideological upheaval that has brought the country to a standstill before.

Last week, an essay by a retired newspaper editor and blogger described the changes as a response to threats from the United States. “What these events tell us is that a monumental change is taking place in China, and that the economic, financial, cultural, and political spheres are undergoing a profound transformation — or, one could say, a profound revolution,” wrote Li Guangman.

The essay, picked up by China’s state media outlets, prompted comparisons with a 1965 article that launched China’s chaotic decade-long Cultural Revolution, and left even some in the party establishment worried.

Hu Xijin, the outspoken editor of the state-run Global Times, criticized the article as misleading and an “extreme interpretation” of the recent rush of regulatory orders that could trigger “confusion and panic.”  

Differences over the article may be a sign of deeper dispute within the party, according to Yawei Liu, a senior adviser focusing on China at the Carter Center in Atlanta, who wrote that such disagreement indicates “raging debate inside the CCP on the merits of reform and opening up, on where China is today . . . and about what kind of nation China wants to become.”

Update 3:   oh, another good piece in the Washington Post has dropped:

Anyone who has visited China over the past several decades has heard anguished stories from Chinese friends about the results of Mao Zedong’s social engineering in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. China spent 40 years recovering from those disasters to become a great, modern nation.

So, I can almost hear the gasps inside China, from the generation that lived through the nightmare years, as President Xi Jinping has moved down a Maoist path this year toward tighter state control of the economy — including “self-criticism” sessions for Chinese business and political leaders whose crime, it seems, was being too successful.

Xi’s leftward turn represents a major change in the management of the Chinese economy, in the view of a half-dozen experts I’ve consulted over the past week. It has the idealistic goal of “common prosperity” and a fairer distribution of China’s new wealth. But Xi will drive these changes using the ruthless instrument of an authoritarian, one-party state — and you can already see the purges and figurative “dunce caps” for those he views as obstacles.

How much is driven by Xi's own inflated views of himself?  Maybe a lot?:

Xi is a cunning and ruthlessly successful politician; since taking power in 2013, he has purged a generation of leaders in the Communist Party, the military, and the intelligence and security services to gain absolute control. His hubris is that, like Mao, he now seeks to become a man-God, whose thoughts are holy writ.

Xi’s unabated hunger for power is evident in his drive for a third term as party leader. That would break the two-term rule that has prevailed in China’s modern history and provided the checks and balances of group leadership. “China had solved the major problem of a one-party state — succession. Now they are un-solving it,” argues a former top-level U.S. national security official.