Is Smith or Roberts mainly right?

There are two American internet pundits that I find myself nearly always agreeing with, or at least enjoying their takes - Noah Smith and David Roberts - but they are pretty much on opposite ends of the optimism/pessimism scale.

Noah is relentlessly optimistic and cheerful, and his free Substack article today is a good example of this:

Do we stand at the precipice of radical change?

Maybe, but perhaps we'll just putter along

The best thing about this piece is how it points out what I've been saying for a few years about Right wing catastrophic takes on the recent state of the US (and the world) - it's just politically motivated scary campfire storytelling, ignoring completely the history of how much worse American society (and the world) were faring in the 60's to the 90's:

Most Americans are now too young to remember, but in the early 1970s domestic terrorist attacks became so commonplace that they were practically ignored — over a year and a half during 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted over 2500 bombings in the U.S. Most of these attacks didn’t kill anyone — they were just bombs that blew up empty buildings. But imagine the hysteria if this was happening multiple times a day in 2022! Two left-wing radicals tried to kill President Gerald Ford within a three-week period in 1976!

And people were dying. In the late 60s and 70s, the murder rate — always much higher in the U.S. than in other rich countries — spiked to levels not seen since the 19th century, and stayed high until the late 90s....

The three decades from the mid-60s to the mid-90s were, simply put, a time of violence and madness. And let’s not forget the economic catastrophe of the late 70s stagflation, the wage stagnation between roughly 1973 and 1993, or the double-digit unemployment rates of the early 80s.

And as for looming catastrophes, eco-dystopias were already starting to appear in the 70s, but the true Sword of Damocles was nuclear war. Tens of thousands of Soviet tanks stood ready to roll into the Fulda Gap at any moment. By the late 80s, the U.S. and USSR were facing each other with over 60,000 nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert.

Obviously, the whole "Flight 93 election" meme was just patent crap from the start - and exaggerating the effects of Trump era Left-ish protest (as if the country had never seen massive and damaging race related protest and riots before) was cynical self-gaslighting, promoted by the poisonous feedback loop of Right wing media and the Republican Party, and the stupid people all over the world who follow them.     

Noah then switches to talking about the genuine crisis of climate change and whether it really is the big issue that means the world has to move towards more socialist settings to see its way through.  But, given his optimism, he thinks we probably will get the problem under some sort of control:

And yet to me, it seems easily possible to imagine a future where we don’t just muddle along with business-as-usual, but in which we do address the threat of climate change with only mild disruptions of our current way of life. The biggest reason is the advance of technology. Renewable energy, energy storage, electric vehicles, and other green technologies have gotten so good, and so cheap, so quickly, that the economic incentives now favor decarbonization. 

I have to say, I am somewhat inclined to that view myself.  For example, I have stopped posting much about any climate change scepticism, because it is clear that the handful of contrarian scientists and their ideologically motivated supporters have been routed.   There just is no longer any point in engaging with their arguments, and it's kind of pathetic watching the losers cling to their "but I'll be proved right yet!" pleas while they are ignored by serious political leadership, and only give succour by ignorant clowns.  

As to whether we will get sufficient carbon emission reduction to prevent the really bad long term outcomes - my vague optimism extends to that too, even though I am dissatisfied with the current fiddling at the edges.  (See my recent post - The transition to clean energy - time for specifics, isn't it??)

Yet I still feel a bit dissatisfied with Noah's column, because it doesn't address the key issue that is so concerning for the future of American (and really, global) democracy and well being - the Right wing generated "epistemic crisis" that David Roberts discusses so convincingly.    

I mean, David Roberts is right in today's tweet:

It's incredibly bad that things that would have universally been considered appallingly anti-democratic, fascist worthy actions are now treated by half of the elected politicians to America as if they are just unremarkable "it's how we do business now" part of the landscape.  And people will still vote for those politicians!   As someone said in a tweet following:

As many have said, even worse than Trump himself is the cowardice of the Republican Party to stand up to him.   But this is not mattering to voters.   

I posted recently that if Right wing media is at the core of poisonous Right wing politics in America, maybe if Rupert and his son had a change of heart the turnaound in the political atmosphere could, in theory, be pretty quick?    If you had a new owner announce "we will not be the network of demonisation of Democrats and centrists politics anymore - it is harming the country" and sacked all its current evening line up - how long would it take to get politics back to reason?

I know this is wildly unlikey, and perhaps short of key members of the Murdoch family going down in a plane over a volcano (we all have our dreams), it's not going to happen.   Hence, the Robert's concern about the poor prospects for reasonableness in near-future American politics seems warranted, at least for the time being.   

PS:  another scenario for relatively rapid improvement - Trump and certain key supporters going down in civil or criminal trials.   I still strongly suspect that this is what at least a significant proportion of Republican old blood are hoping for - but it remains unclear how long the heart of the party is going to be tainted by making excuses for a wannabe fascist.   And I still see the Right wing media as the more crucial change needed.    

Update:   I have been having some further thoughts about this.  In particular, as to why, when things were pretty bad in those earlier decades, people (including me) did still retain a long term optimism that feels harder to have now.

I think I have worked it out.

Yes, the United States (and the West, generally speaking) did just "putter along" out of the days of radicalism and violence of the decades of the 60's to 90's;  and that does suggest that it will work its way out of the current social turbulence, too.   (Which isn't, in violence terms, actually as bad as the earlier period, as Noah correctly argues.)  

But the reason it feels different this time is that such a large part of the nation cannot even see that it is being radical.  Because, yes, sympathy to a idiot failed President's direct attempts to have an election overturned on false and imaginary claims is a radical position!  Failing to see the fascism in continual calls at rallies to have your political opponent locked up on drummed up charges, and calling all media that doesn't toe your line "the enemy of the people" is radical!    Yet there is a very big part of the American population that cannot see this as so bad - or even think it is warranted. 

The radicalism of Leftist terrorists in the 60's and 70's was something that the country and its media did not doubt.   The Right wing radicalism that led to (say) the Oklahoma bombing was not up for dispute.  The radical element in the country was small and knew it was radical.  Today it is much, much larger, and really doesn't know it.

To take an example of something unique to these times: the absurd Right's vilification of expertise and wholesale belief in conspiracy means that ordinary people doing their job are under threat in a way that is really novel - see the terrible (and badly under-reported) story of election workers who have been terrorised for purely imaginary actions, and the recent report in the Washington Post about the security that Fauci now has to live through due to the perm-haired idiot of a Senator and gormless media figures like Tucker Carlson.   In fact, let's quote that report:

“There is no truth,” Fauci says, for effect. “There is no fact.” People believe hydroxychloroquine works because an Internet charlatan claims it does. People believe the 2020 election was stolen because a former president says so. People believe that Fauci killed millions of people for the good of his stock portfolio because it’s implied by TV pundits, Internet trolls and even elected leaders. Fauci is unnerved by “the almost incomprehensible culture of lies” that has spread among the populace, infected major organs of the government, manifested as ghastly threats against him and his family. His office staff, normally focused on communicating science to the public, has been conscripted into skirmishes over conspiracy theories and misinformation.

“It is very, very upending to live through this,” Fauci says, seated at his kitchen table in the midwinter light. He pauses. “I’m trying to get the right word for it.” He is examining himself now, at 81, in the shadow of the past two years. “It has shaken me a bit.”

The way he can comprehend the situation is in the context of the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the Capitol. There it was, on live TV, an experiment as clear as day: The abandonment of truth has seismic consequences.

Something has been replicating in the American mind. It is not microbial. It cannot be detected by nasal swab. To treat an affliction, you must first identify it. But you can’t slide a whole country into an MRI machine.

“There’s no diagnosis for this,” Fauci says. “I don’t know what is going on.”

Exactly.  

This is what gives me pause about the nation "puttering along" out of its current state.   

Which leads me to the "civil war" issue.  I think Noah is sceptical of takes along those lines too, but so is David Roberts.  The culture war and political fractures do tend to run along an educational and urban/rural divide, meaning that there is no realistic way the nation can be divided geographically.   And, happily, because the military is led by well educated people, the danger of Trump was clear to nearly all in the Pentagon, and they were not going to support him in a ridiculous coup.

So no, the epistemic crisis is not going to lead to civil war.  I suppose that is a kind of "optimism".   But on the downside, it's hard to see how it can't continue leaving the country in a political paralysis on certain key issues, and weaken effective democracy.  Until the Right comes to its senses, the "puttering out" of the current problems is going to be very protracted, disheartening, and potentially dangerous.  

Some science talk about "Don't Look Up"

I've seen "Dr Becky" before - she's quite an engaging Youtuber, but I've only just subscribed - and her assessment of the science around Don't Look Up is worth watching, even if she doesn't talk about comets and their mineral content (which I thought was probably the biggest single silly science problem in the whole movie):

The Scots and the Inuit

I stumbled across this short article, talking about how the Scots whalers were not all mad rabble-rousers, as I would have thought they might be.  Didn't know that Arthur Conan Doyle had this experience, either:

The Arctic Bar in Dundee is an unprepossessing pub with a modern frontage, but inside the dusty harpoon guns and photographs of ice bound ships displayed around the walls indicate that this was once the pub where Victorian whaler men would go to collect their pay at the end of a six month voyage.

There are many reminders of Dundee’s whaling past around the city. The new Victoria and Albert museum is built in the shape of a ship, seeming to set out over the Tay, because it stands on the site of what was once the Earl Grey dock where whaling boats berthed over the last two centuries. Next to it at Discovery Point lies the ship RRS Discovery – Scott commissioned this converted whaling ship, with its triple-reinforced hulls, for his Antarctic expedition.

The McManus Museum of Dundee holds many Inuit artefacts brought back by Victorian whaler men, a stunning collection of photographs of Inuit and whaling boats crews, and several diaries written by various ships’ surgeons – usually medical students wanting adventure and funds for the summer.

Arthur Conan Doyle, while serving as a student surgeon on a whaler, wrote a ghost story about an Arctic voyage. From early Victorian times, writers have penned gothic tales about the sublime and savage Arctic wilderness and the journey to man’s darkest heart that six months of darkness can cause....

Here's the most interesting bit:

For my novel A Woman Made of Snow, however, I wanted to evoke the daily lives of the whaler men and the Inuit that they worked and lived with. The Dundee whaling industry lasted longer than in any other whaling port in Scotland and England. With steady work available and a strong church tradition the whaler men of Dundee were by and large sober artisans – though with plenty of the famous ‘wild rough lot’ found in most whaling ports. Conan Doyle found the working class Scots crew he sailed with steady and educated, sober and religious. He enjoyed talking with the crew and relished joining in with hunting expeditions.

 

 

Much amusement to be had in reviews of Rogan and Peterson having a 4 hour chat

In Rolling Stone:

There is a meditative quality to both Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson’s work that sucks you in. For Rogan, it is his voice — a soft, curious, always credulous murmur that lends itself to explaining complicated topics. Watching Rogan deconstruct a mixed martial arts fight can be a genuine pleasure for fans of the sport, like listening to a close friend really nerd out over something they’re passionate about. Peterson is not as blessed sonically — he sounds like Kermit the Frog as a freshman philosophy major — but he too projects the same blithe confidence in his own words that can make almost any topic sound compelling. 

The only problem is, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson are two of the dumbest people on earth. The wildly successful podcast host and self-help author’s careers have intersected and built on one another multiple times, as their core audience of disaffected young men is largely the same. Their paths crossed once again this week in a four-hour marathon conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience, during which Peterson bizarrely and very proudly wore a tuxedo. Their topics were varied, but almost all of them were intensely stupid, if not incoherent.

....

This sort of credulity is both Rogan’s biggest draw and his worst tendency. Rogan has built his brand around open-mindedness, which he passes off as “free thinking.” But in practice, instead of thinking about what his guests are saying to him, Rogan’s first instinct is to “mmhm” his way through topics that frequently stray into conspiracies, bigotry, or simple stupidity. Rogan’s guiding ethos doesn’t seem to be much more complicated than “seek out the controversial, and popular,” which has led him, during the pandemic, to repeatedly platform or publish misinformation about coronavirus and vaccines.

At Gizmodo, the nicely sarcastic headline:

Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve

The big boys had a big thinky about climate change.

 

A science fiction idea making progress

In The Guardian:

A frog has regrown a lost leg after being treated with a cocktail of drugs in a significant advance for regenerative medicine.

The African clawed frog, which is naturally unable to regenerate its limbs, was treated with the drugs for just 24 hours and this prompted an 18-month period of regrowth of a functional leg. The demonstration raises the prospect that in the future drugs could be used to switch on similar untapped abilities for regeneration in human patients to restore tissues or organs lost to disease or injury.

“It’s exciting to see that the drugs we selected were helping to create an almost complete limb,” said Nirosha Murugan of Tufts University in Massachusetts and first author of the paper. “The fact that it required only a brief exposure to the drugs to set in motion a months-long regeneration process suggests that frogs and perhaps other animals may have dormant regenerative capabilities that can be triggered into action.”

The ridiculous Peterson

He's getting roasted for a very stupid opening on climate change:

His position: climate is everything, and you can't model everything so climate change is crap.  

Some people have generously explained what he was probably trying to say:

...but as the Tweet says  it's a line of attack which displays both ignorance and arrogance.

And these tweets following sum up the impression both Rogan and Peterson (but more especially Rogan) give me, on any topic:

And for services to the IPA...

Do all American conservatives have brain damage?

It is breathtakingly stupid that American conservatives should rush to play a game of "whataboutism" to try to downplay how Trump talked about the press compared to Biden's very occasional snappiness with reporters.

There is just zero comparison.

How thick and dumb do you have to be to not see the fascist nature of continually, at rallies, and elsewhere, calling all mainstream networks and journalists "the enemy of the people" unless they are bootlickers to the most absurd character ever to hold the Presidency; and outright lying about things like "and look up the back, they're turning the cameras off now."    

And you know what - it's weird, but the absolutely dumbest and most dishonest version of an American conservative seems to be gay conservative commentators - see Gateway Pundit and the awful Glenn Greenwald.   Greenwald's denunciation of Biden's hot mic snark is so weirdly over the top that it seems many assumed he was being sarcastic, but the following tweets just confirm he is an absolute partisan nut with not an iota of a sense of perspective. 

The Murdoch and the Russians questions

Does Murdoch think Putin empowerment by invading Ukraine is a good idea?    If not, why is he relaxed (well, relaxed enough not to be exercising any editorial control) about Fox News gee-ing up the Trumpist conservatives into taking Putin's side?   Is it really worth the money in the US, or does he think  there is money to be made in Russia too?   Is he smart enough to admit that Brexit is a populist failure?  Surely he doesn't think he has successfully "punished" the Europeans, who he complained he cannot control, by forcing Britain out of the EU?   Is he letting Fox's most influential "stars" take Putin's side as a second attempt at punishing Europe for not letting him do whatever he wants?  

So many questions.  Many brought to mind by David Frum:

 

I could come up with a better religion than this..

From a book review in the New York Times, about a young-ish enlightenment seeking trekker (and internet figure) who disappeared in a Himalayan valley knows for its trekker disappearances:

What animates Shetler? We learn that he’s the child of divorce, on the one hand having a father whose own experiences in India heavily influenced Shetler (as did their father-and-teenage-son partaking of hallucinogens) and a mother whose spiritual influence can be attributed to the Hindu-inflected Eckankar religion, birthed in the 1960s by Paul Twitchell, a onetime colleague of L. Ron Hubbard, promoting “soul travel,” the chanting of the word “Hu,” and a belief system said to have begun when an essence known as Gakko came to Earth six million years ago from the city of Retz on Venus.

I have heard of Eckankar, but never bothered reading up on its esoteric beliefs.

He's looking different

Is it just me, or does Newt Gingrich not even look like Newt Gingrich any more?    

He's aged 78 now.

Go home Arabs

We don't hear much about this in the West - but France 24 discusses the rise of anti-Arab sentiment in Turkey, which is such a troubled country now:

Homelessness and meth

So, it seems there is some discussion going on as to whether America's chronic homelessness problem is largely a result of a new form of meth that has been flooding in from Mexico.

A guy who wrote a book about it says:

I don’t know what is causing this very quick descent into psychosis, symptoms of schizophrenia, etc., among people using the meth that’s now on the street nationwide. I said this in the book.

It could indeed be the staggering quantities of the drug nationwide — certainly a byproduct of how P2P meth is made — that leads in turn to far greater consumption. It could indeed be its alarming potency. As I state in the book, there’s no neuroscience on this — no studies of the effects of today’s street meth on rats or mice. I hope the National Institute on Drug Abuse or the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration will fund those studies, using authentic street meth from around the country.

In my book, I’m giving street reporting — just talking with folks who work or have lived in this world — because there are no studies. If there were any, I’d have cited them.

Also, people end up homeless for many reasons. A shredded safety net, release from prison without any family support, registered sex offenders who can’t find housing in the limited areas they’re allowed to live in, massive childhood trauma, etc. The list is probably as long and complex as the people who are homeless. I’m quite sure the high cost of housing is among the reasons for many people.

But people whose problem is a lost job or an expensive surgery with no health insurance forcing them out of housing do not collapse into a tent on the street. They usually have family support, friends on whose couch they can sleep. Not so with folks for whom using meth is the issue.

What’s more, meth’s prevalence is now so complete that once someone is homeless (for whatever reason) it’s quite easy to fall into using the drug. Meth-induced psychosis allows a user to escape the reality of living on the street. Getting out of homelessness then becomes a much more difficult task. My reporting shows that often users do not return to their former state of mental acuity once they stop using this meth. Recovery of brain faculties can take months.

Despite all this, on the list of causes of homelessness, this meth surge and meth-induced psychosis seems to me, after a lot of reporting on it, is the only topic that appears taboo to discuss in many activist/advocate circles. The issue’s narrative is almost entirely about the high cost of housing. Nothing else seems permitted. There’s almost a prohibition, a woke censorship, that prevents meth from being discussed.

Interesting...

 

Take your medicine

As reported in Science: 

Pill derived from human feces treats recurrent gut infections

...The new pill, called SER-109 and made by Seres Therapeutics, is derived from human feces purified to winnow down the resident microbes. Stool from prescreened donors is treated with ethanol, which kills many viruses, fungi, and “vegetative” bacteria—those in a state of growth and reproduction. Left behind are bacteria that can form hearty, thick-walled structures called spores, many of them from the common phylum Firmicutes. Bacteria in this group are valuable because they can compete with C. difficile in the gut, “taking its space and its food and its carbon sources,” says Seres Chief Medical Officer Lisa von Moltke; the Firmicutes also change the composition of bile acids in the intestines, making the environment less hospitable for C. difficile, she notes.

Still, you would want that gel coating to work well...

In glass half full news...

...Paul Waldman in the Washington Post notes what I have read elsewhere - despite Democrat jerks Manchin and Sinema defending the filibuster, what's more remarkable is that every other Democrat in the Senate has turned against it.   Apparently, this was not the uniform opinion even relatively recently.

A recovery story

It's not that I visit the Jezebel website out of habit, but someone on Twitter linked to this article: 

I Got Sober in the Pandemic. It Saved My Life.

and I thought it was a pretty good piece about someone recovering from too much alcohol and drugs, and depression.

Chonky Junkers

More in the series "What Google wanted me to learn about last night."   It was quite interesting, and this guy's channel is full of esoteric historical aircraft information, by the looks: 

Encouraging news

Back to the perennial favourite - the Death of God

Hey, I quite liked this essay at Aeon:  How to Pray to a dead God.  

There are a lot of familiar names in it, and some new-ish stuff I don't recall reading before.   This section, for example:

Challenges to uncomplicated faith – or uncomplicated lack of faith – have always been within religion. It is a dialectic at the heart of spiritual experience. Perhaps the greatest scandal of disenchantment is that the answer of how to pray to a dead God precedes God’s death. Within Christianity there is a tradition known as ‘apophatic theology’, often associated with Greek Orthodoxy. Apophatic theology emphasises that God – the divine, the sacred, the transcendent, the noumenal – can’t be expressed in language. God is not something – God is the very ground of being. Those who practised apophatic theology – 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite – promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. ‘We do not know what God is,’ the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. ‘God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not’ [my emphasis].

 How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsche’s infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a ‘dead God’: by understanding that neither the word ‘dead’ nor ‘God’ means anything at all.

 Well, that's one way to deal with a problem.  

[Update insert:  oddly, it reminds me of the opening lyrics of Birdhouse in Your Soul:

I'm your only friend
I'm not your only friend
But I'm a little glowing friend
But really I'm not actually your friend
But I am

 

I didn't realise they were summarising mystical/radical theology.]

I've always found the question of religion's response to the scientific changes in the understanding of the age of the planet, the size of the universe, and human nature, to be terribly interesting; and as I have written before, the older you get, the greater perspective you have on how it is not so long ago that these radical changes in understanding happened.   We're still living within the lifetime of people who were young when Einstein revolutionised physics and an understanding of the scale of the universe was found at the end of telescope.  It was only 50 or so years before that that evolution was being hotly debated as a new idea.   Is it any wonder this is still having repercussions on religions going back a couple of thousand years before these changes in understanding?

Yet, it seems to me that quite a lot of people never think of this perspective - that the (seemingly newly invigorated) war within the Churches between conservatives and liberals are connected to this problem that is actually pretty new and still being worked through.

The true death toll of COVID

Two articles I have noticed about this:   one in Nature that starts:

On 1 November, the global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic passed 5 million, official data suggested. It has now reached 5.5 million. But that figure is a significant underestimate. Records of excess mortality — a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show many more people than this have died in the pandemic.

Working out how many more is a complex research challenge. It is not as simple as just counting up each country’s excess mortality figures. Some official data in this regard are flawed, scientists have found. And more than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.

And after explaining the complexities, concludes with this:

Amid the search for ways to count deaths, Andrew Noymer, a demographer at the University of California, Irvine, says the pandemic and the increased demand for real-time mortality figures highlight a demographic shortcoming that goes back decades: many countries simply don’t collect good data on births, deaths and other vital statistics. “Demographers have been part of the problem, because we have helped to put band-aids on this for 60 years. We’ve developed all sorts of techniques to estimate demographic rates in the absence of hard data,” he says.

That means the true death toll of COVID-19 might always be disputed. “We still don’t know how many people died in the 1918 [flu] pandemic, but I always figured we would know pretty well how many people would die in the next one, because we live in the modern world,” Noymer says. “But we don’t actually, and that’s kind of sad for me as a demographer.”

Over at Science, the particular difficulties of counting deaths in India is discussed in detail in a paper.  (I have always said that I would not be surprised if the true death rate effect of heat waves in that country was not clear at all.)   Here's the abstract:

India’s national COVID death totals remain undetermined. Using an independent nationally representative survey of 0.14 million (M) adults, we compared COVID mortality during the 2020 and 2021 viral waves to expected all-cause mortality. COVID constituted 29% (95%CI 28-31%) of deaths from June 2020-July 2021, corresponding to 3.2M (3.1-3.4) deaths, of which 2.7M (2.6-2.9) occurred in April-July 2021 (when COVID doubled all-cause mortality). A sub-survey of 57,000 adults showed similar temporal increases in mortality with COVID and non-COVID deaths peaking similarly. Two government data sources found that, when compared to pre-pandemic periods, all-cause mortality was 27% (23-32%) higher in 0.2M health facilities and 26% (21-31%) higher in civil registration deaths in ten states; both increases occurred mostly in 2021. The analyses find that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially.