There's a long article in Technology Review (not paywalled) about the Wuhan lab's work and the question of the origin of COVID 19.
I have haven't read it all yet, but I take it from Twitter discussion that it presents a strong case for natural origin, and the Wuhan lab not hiding anything.
Is it just me, or is this an incredibly bad look? [I'm sure it's not just me, although we haven't read if the other side admits any of this yet.]
A former soldier scheduled to give evidence against SAS veteran Ben Roberts-Smith is seeking to pull out, prompting claims in court that Roberts-Smith’s spoke with a senior lawyer who then contacted the secret witness.
In a dramatic turn in the case on Wednesday morning, lawyers for the newspapers defending a defamation claim from Roberts-Smith told the federal court two critical witnesses had been contacted by lawyers, allegedly after Roberts-Smith’s barrister Arthur Moses SC contacted another senior barrister to express concerns the witnesses’ interests were not being properly protected. The witnesses – former soldiers known in court documents as Person 56 and Person 66 – had agreed to give evidence for Nine newspapers.
Person 56 has an application before the court to be excused from a subpoena to give evidence, citing medical grounds.
Nicholas Owens SC, acting for Nine newspapers, on Wednesday said “through means unknown” the two SAS soldiers had been “placed in contact” with new lawyers after Moses contacted another Sydney lawyer.
Owens told the court: “We have become aware that recently Mr Moses has made contact with Mr Phillip Boulten … and we understand that Mr Moses expressed to Mr Boulten concerns that the interests of Person 56 and also 66 may not be being properly protected in relation to [them] being subpoenaed to give evidence in these proceedings.”
Owens raised the issue of how the witnesses’ identities became known to the new lawyers. He told the court “there is, of course, a prohibition on the true identity of Person 56 and Person 66 being made known to anyone” apart from authorised legal representatives. The new lawyers, Owens said, were not authorised representatives.
“There was an agreement by Person 56 to both speak to us and not oppose any application by us to call him to give evidence in the proceedings,” Owens said. But he said after contact from those lawyers “Person 56’s position has changed”.
I haven't been paying much attention to it, but there are two main reasons why it seems to show weird political judgement:
a. does the public have any sense at all that it was needed to fix a problem? I don't. Is it just because the Prime Minister, whose colleagues consider a liar and general psycho, is a member of Hillsong?
b. why give it a priority now, in the dying days of an unpopular government? The far Right conservatives in the electorate who see value in culture warring have already dumped the Liberals for their own stupid reasons - giving up on climate change and COVID mandates.
Gabbard and Russell are useful idiots.
Update: So is Taibbi, who I don't pay attention to, but thought I should after watching Brand praise him.
Update 2: I see from an article questioning the labelling in the list -
Rogan himself has never aligned with any political party, criticizing both Democrats and Republicans, though he’s described himself as a “progressive.” He has, however, endorsed and voted for Libertarian and Libertarian-leaning candidates in the past, such as former Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), and former Libertarian Party presidential nominees Gary Johnson and Jo Jorgensen.
OK, that would explain a lot - libertarians are essentially selfish and make terrible decisions because of that all of the time. So instead of just, you know, not sounding like a racist, ugly sexist, or facilitator of the spread of vaccine scepticism or climate change denial, Rogan and his defenders would prefer to stand up for the "right" of people like him to not be subject to commercial pressure, which is all the fault of the Left, allegedly.
This one in The Guardian links to this one in Politico. Oh, and here's another piece in The Guardian. And an explainer piece from the ABC.
Appalling.
And thanks for explaining, journalists.
(I see that Tim Blair, whose brain has been eaten by wingnuttery, apparently has no problem with it. At least according to a header on a blog post, which is as much as I look at of his now.)
Maybe this was covered in Australian media that I haven't read, but it's surprising that I only found out via a Washington Post article on the anti mandate moron protests in Canberra that some of the idiot "sovereign citizen" mob just openly go on social media talking about hanging politicians and bombing buildings, etc:
On Monday, one protest organizer ended a video with an allusion to hanging the prime minister, while in another clip, a protester warned a far-right lawmaker to stay away from Parliament, adding that if he had his way he would call in “bombers” to wipe it out.
In an interview later, the lawmaker, Sen. Malcolm Roberts from the One Nation Party, said the protests had been peaceful and respectful, aside from a small group.
“They were trying to hijack [things], and they had no, no success whatever. They were set aside,” he said. “I don’t see the very violent in the crowd that I addressed yesterday.”
The federal government will end a highly contentious decision to freeze millions of dollars of ABC funding as it pours billions of dollars into the national broadcaster over the next three years.....
From July, the ABC will receive almost $3.3 billion over three years, while SBS will receive more than $950 million.
As part of that funding, the government has decided to end its controversial decision to impose an indexation freeze on the ABC's annual funding in 2018 which ultimately meant the broadcaster's funding did not keep pace with inflation.
Davidson and Berg wrote the book (literally) on creative ways to have the government stop funding the ABC, written (I always half suspected) in response to being dropped from the invitation list to The Drum (or any other show, ever.)
They might argue they had some success - didn't some Liberal body vote in favour of ABC privatisation? Oh yeah, here's Sinclair bleating about it a year ago in AFR:
This, of course, represents a governance problem within the Liberal party itself. In 2018 the Liberal Federal Council voted to privatise the ABC – a policy position the government has chosen to ignore. If elected politicians are able to ignore their constituents, it should be no surprise that apparently independent government agencies do so too. It is not just the ABC that is out of touch.
Hehe. So they're persuasive to some dedicated crank culture war conservatives in the party - the same group who will continue to deny AGW and whine endlessly about clean energy - but the saner heads can the writing on the wall.
Oddly, I've snuck over to Sinclair's Twitter feed, and can't see any tweet about it. He's just resigned to be forever promoting bad libertarian policies that his own side of politics wisely ignore, I guess. Meanwhile, Chris Berg's rather dull twitter feed doesn't seem to mention the news either.
Come on, boys. Own your failure.
Is there an explanation for this?
Of course it would be The Guardian, writing about English "sex clubs" re-opening, but not your "traditional" type:
Between them all lies Crossbreed, a night where underground stars such as Shanti Celeste and Tama Sumo DJ to a room full of techno fans who can partake in everything from exhibitionist orgies to solo cups of tea in a dancefloor-adjacent wellness sanctuary. “The [queer fetish] community has long been dominated by gay men, who have rightly claimed and taken up space,” explains Alex Warren, who founded the event in 2019. “But that has left bisexuals, pansexuals, lesbians, trans and non-binary people with fewer non masc-dominated spaces to call home.”I don't think it's my age - I've always been leery of normalising fetishism - but it's hard not to mutter something like "nothing that a good war with Europe wouldn't fix." OK, maybe I have to update that to "zombie invasion" or "meteor hitting the Atlantic": the point is annoyance that people have too much time on their hands to engage in the silliest types of self indulgence.
I have to say that my long standing dislike of Jimmy Carr is feeling pretty vindicated by the strong pushback to him trying to make some kind of joke about the Holocaust and its victims. But is it a case of unfair, out of context, criticism?
At this link is a Youtube video of the joke and his subsequent discussion of it. It would seem that the entire special (called "His Dark Material") is some sort of meta show about dark or offensive humour. Here is an extract of a mixed review:
The fundamental difference between a comedian such as Carr, compared to say, Dave Chappelle or Ricky Gervais, is that you never wonder about Carr’s sincerity. He’s not trying to troll you or confuse you about his intentions. He may enjoy writing jokes about offensive subjects. “But these are just jokes. They’re not the terrible things.” He even tells a story toward the end about a charitable gig he has performed at for multiple years through Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival, performing for patients dying from cancer, and how exploring the darkest subject matter can free them and us from the most tragic of emotions.
“I feel sorry for the people that get offended. I feel sorry for the people that can’t laugh at dark s–t. Because when their life is terrible, they’ve just got to f—ing white-knuckle it.”
Now, the bit about the cathartic nature of jokes about death is understandable - but that's a case of the willing participation of the audience facing their own mortality.
And I allow that dark humour has a "proximity" issue (in both time and place) that is sometimes a fine line that can be accidentally crossed - in Australia, perhaps even England, you might get away with a joke about a cannibal murderer in Germany in the news last year; but I doubt you're going to find any Australians yet willing to sit through a set on the Port Arthur massacre, whether you're in North Queensland or Tasmania. And there's the example of Mel Brooks and The Producers, of course.
People will say, in justifying Carr, that he is telling the joke because the shock value is what makes it funny: same as "Springtime for Hitler", really.
But there's a key difference here, and why it's a weak excuse for this particular joke: everyone knows that Roma people are still seen as "a problem" to be solved in England and other parts of Europe. Why could Brooks make an entire movie finding humour in the shock value of a modern neo-Nazi still loving Hitler? I think it was because it both didn't reference the Holocaust itself, and at the time it was made, Jewish discrimination was a pretty much over in America - they were seen an essential and talented part of the American landscape.
But, honestly, I find it hard to believe that a portion of the audience reaction to Carr's "joke" was not tinged with dislike of Roma people and the way they live today. And Carr, in his post joke explanation, doesn't even seem to me give a genuine attempt at explaining that it is only ironically funny - he does say it's a "good" joke because it has educational value, but this is pretty pathetic and weak. A significant part of his audience would know that the Nazi extermination policies extended well beyond the Jews, and even if they didn't, how does the educational aspect excuse the invitation to laugh at the group as the victims?
And let's face it, there's long been a lot of dis-ingenuousness about the ironic use of "edgy" humour - it's a good and mature thing to recognise that it has can work as a convenient cover to allow a significant part of the audience to feel their actual racism (or sexism, or insensitivity to disability) is endorsed. (And how else can you possibly read obnoxious Joe Rogan's recently revived old clip in which he was clapping his hands in delight at a creep explaining how he forced women to give him oral sex in order to get a stand up gig. How can you possibly interpret that as not his endorsement of the view that such obnoxious sexual politics is nothing serious?)
Yes, the "woke police" can go too far - and readers know that I find the trans community tiresomely hypersensitive on this issue. Of course it's not even as if I believe Carr (or Chappelle) are personally anti-Roma, or anti-trans, respectively. But that doesn't mean that making jokes that are clearly capable of being read by the audience as endorsing their worst impulses are excuseable on the basis that it's knowingly offensive, and therefore an innocent case of "funny because it's not funny".
I note, by the way, that all of the comments I can see after the Youtube clip I linked to above are actually supportive of Carr. David Mitchell's wife also supported him. I put this down to an over-reaction to the alleged tyranny of "cancel culture". But seriously, people - put some thought into what you - and the person next to you - find funny, or acceptable, in humour or entertainment.
Oh, this is the first time in quite a while that I've noticed David Mitchell writing in The Guardian. Here I find out that he counts himself as agnostic, not atheist, in the context of talking about a recent comedy event he participated in at a cathedral:
So was it “offensive to everyone who thinks a cathedral is a holy space”? I’m not very religious, but neither am I an atheist. I’m a “don’t know”. I hope there’s a nice big God, and I hope I find myself believing in one when I expire, but I don’t reckon thinking about it a lot is going to give me the answer. I like churches, though – I find them both calming and moving, a combination rarely achieved by TV drama. During the event, I was extremely pleased to be in a cathedral.
I would have judged him as more likely to just be an out and out atheist, so I am pleasantly surprised.
Wannabe military junta cosplayer Riccardo Bosi has made a big splash on social media this weekend with his speech at the moron gathering in Canberra during which he called for 5 million Australians to join the protest (a target I expect will be undershot by about 4,998,000,
give or take), failing which he warned the crowd that their fate would be in the "vaccination camps" which, he assured them, have "gas pipes" connected.
He is an extraordinarily paranoid conspiracy nut, but is it appropriate that the mainstream media largely ignore him? I mean, surely his followers have to cotton on sooner or later that he's a bullshit artist of the highest order who cannot whip up the public support that he claims is essential. But wouldn't that be assisted by mainstream media showing his nuttiness for everyone but his deluded followers to laugh at?
Should I just delete every single comment of Graeme? I mean, my policy for a long time has been to delete anything that makes reference to Jews, directly or covertly, as I won't allow anti-Semitic conspiracy rubbish here. I have been leaving his other rubbish comments up, without engaging with them, including the ones where he happily calls me (and any other commenter) dumb for not agreeing with his esoteric views. Apart from a conspiracy addled brain, he has no manners.
I was watching some of the documentaries on the Holocaust on SBS last week, and it reinforced my view that anyone who aligns with the centuries old conspiracy mongering against the Jews really doesn't deserve engaging with on any topic. I feel that allowing Graeme's comments to remain here, on any topic, is a form of engagement.
So, what do you think I should do? Automatic deletion when I see them?
It continues to look a near certainty that Ben Roberts Smith's defamation case will go down in history as the most ill considered action of its type since Oscar Wilde thought he would come across as straight.
What also continues to be dumbfounding is how badly the government has handled the investigation that we're watching the matter be litigated in a civil court before any action in a criminal one.
Could this possibly be the well deserved end to Roland Emmerich's directorial career? I've never liked any of his movies:
Those of us with a decade's long allergy to the vain self promotion robot that is Tim Wilson are having a hard time reading Twitter at the moment, given his relentless PR re-invention as Mr Clean Energy and Somewhat Wet Liberal:
It must be what internal polling (is there any politician more likely to pay for assessments of his popularity?) is telling him will work for him.
I would bet he will dump any leader in a flash if he can see it as a step closer to the Prime Ministership. Mind you, Morrison thoroughly deserves the humiliation.
Update: yeah, it's time for the party room to put Scotty from Marketing out of his misery:
Update 2: yeah, cowardice killed his Prime Ministership, but it's hard to not to like him at a personal level:
A couple of enlightening comments at dover-beach's Catholics for Fascism (and Complete State Control of Women) blog:
