Bad Douthat

Yes, this Ross Douthat analysis of the Ottawa blockade as a new kind of "class warfare" is really bad.   He starts:

A great and mostly unknown prophet of our time is Michael Young, whose book “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” published way back in 1958, both coined the term in its title and predicted, in its fictional vision of the 21st century, meritocracy’s unhappy destination: not the serene rule of the deserving and talented, but a society where a ruling class selected for intelligence but defined by arrogance and insularity faces a roiling populism whose grievances shift but whose anger at the new class order is a constant.

This year it’s Canada’s turn to live inside Young’s somewhat dystopian scenario, set in the 2030s but here ahead of schedule....

And throws in:

This last division was not precisely anticipated in Young’s book, writing as he did before the true rise of the computer, but it has ended up being a key expression of the meritocracy-populist divide. To quote the pseudonymous writer N.S. Lyons, the trucker protests have sharpened a division between “Virtuals” and “Practicals” — meaning the people whose professional lives are lived increasingly in the realm of the “digital and the abstract,” and the people who work in the “mundane physical reality” upon which the virtual society still depends.

This completely ignores the role of the digital in promoting conspiracy and crank science amongst the "Practicals" - which is surely the key dynamic driving the anti-mandate motives.  

He finally does get around to acknowledging this in the second last paragraph....

And the conflicts are also more complex, inevitably, than any binary can capture: The resilience of reality creates fissures inside the meritocracy (as lately between parents and educational bureaucrats, say), while the populist side has its own virtual dream palaces (the world of QAnon and related conspiracies is not exactly a practical dimension).

...but I reckon with inadequate acknowledgement that this makes a mockery of his whole earlier analysis.   

And then this pathetic last paragraph:

Still, once you recognize the divisions that Young prophesied, you see them in some form all over, as a novel class war that constantly raises the old question: Which side are you on?

I guess it's too much for Douthat to just come out on the side of those who live in scientific reality and don't see everything through the Right wing culture war perspective.

Isn't he pathetic?

Many laughs being had on the 'net at the rank desperation of James Morrow today:

Given Rupert's usual personal interest in who should be the next PM, the only question is whether this is in anticipation of the boss wanting Morrison to return, or actual telegraphing from afar that this is the desired outcome?   Because, to be honest, unless he's got the start of dementia, it's hard to imagine Murdoch thinking Morrison has performed well; and as such, it would not be entirely surprising to see News Corp tabloids editorially wind back support for him. 
 

Updating the count

I see that Gallup has come out with it's annual "who's identifying as what" sexuality survey (for Americans).  

Here's my post last year about the last update.

This year, the headline news is that LGBT identification is up to 7.1%, but (as might be expected from watching pop culture), the growth is mostly from younger people - especially women - identifying as bisexual.  Here's the two key tables from 2020, and last year:

So "transgender" is pretty steady, and only slow growth in "gay".   But "bisexual" is up a whole percentage point (nearly).  As for the gender break up between men and women, this table shows the details:

 

Isn't that split between men and women curious, summarised again in this line:  

Women (6.0%) are much more likely than men (2.0%) to say they are bisexual. Men are more likely to identify as gay (2.5%) than as bisexual, while women are much more likely to identify as bisexual than as lesbian (1.9%).

One other thing of note is this:

In addition to the 7.1% of U.S. adults who consider themselves to be an LGBT identity, 86.3% say they are straight or heterosexual, and 6.6% do not offer an opinion.

I would suspect that a higher than usual proportion of that group should be in one of the LGBT categories.

Anyway, the results still seem to back the guesstimate I made in my 2013 post that, at least amongst men, the gay and bisexual percentage is probably around 4 to 5%.   The article also ends with this:

Given the large disparities in LGBT identification between younger and older generations of Americans, the proportion of all Americans who identify as LGBT can be expected to grow in the future as younger generations will constitute a larger share of the total U.S. adult population. With one in 10 millennials and one in five Gen Z members identifying as LGBT, the proportion of LGBT Americans should exceed 10% in the near future.

However, a large number of bisexual claiming women behind that figure are going to end up in marriages with men, and overall, the growth in alternative sexual identities is not going to be reflected to the same degree in the number of gay marriages (or gay relationships).

Update: a tweet about this noticed:

Democracy has become just a side interest for many "conservatives"

Is Gray Connolly, who I consider an eccentric pompous windbag, re-tweeting this with approval?:

Pretty typical Trump-ian excuse making here:  everything is supposed to be so bad in the West, who are we to complain about Putin?   It's pathetic.  Yet Connolly thinks everything was going fine under Trump:

And Gray ends up with this yearning for old world order:

He's really quite the nut, I think.

Finally getting attention

I see that violent fantacist Riccardo Bosi is getting paid more attention by mainstream media, Twitter and (hopefully) the Federal Police. 

I know what he will say if charged with something:  "I've always called for peaceful replacement of the government, then a fair trial, and then the public hangings of politicians, media stars, nurses, doctors, etc.  What's wrong with calling for a fair process like that?"

 

Count me as amused

I forgot to mention in my comments on Insiders yesterday, that the Huw Parkinson contribution was very funny this week:

Victorian magicians and The Prestige

I finally got around to watching the 2006 Christopher Nolan movie The Prestige on the weekend - about warring stage magicians of Victorian England.

I found it quite entertaining, and would recommend it, but after reading a bit more about it, it's one of those movies where the plot definitely does not bear thinking about.   

SPOILER ALERTS:

The main issue is the involvement of Tesla - as the initial reaction (certainly my son thought so) was that the Christian Bale character had taken advantage of Tesla's clone machine first.   But no, apparently if you pay closer attention, he always had a twin brother, and the Tesla thing was just to send his rival off on a wild goose chase.  Seems a little crazy, then, doesn't it, that Tesla should be able to whip up a clone machine in short order?  

Wouldn't it have made more sense the Bale really had been cloned?

Secondly:  there has been a fair bit written on the net about the vanishing bird cage trick.   It would seem it was never done as portrayed in the movie, and although the trick was hazardous to the bird, it was not necessarily fatal.   I guess I would count this as fictionalisation that is (more or less) justified.  

In any event, here's a lengthy article that appeared in The Conversation last year about the history of magician-ship in Victorian England.

 

Olives appreciated

I wrote some years ago about liking green Sicilian olives. I still do, but they tend to be pretty expensive.

I'm now recording for posterity the fact that I probably like just as much  the small olives called Ligurian olives. 

I didn't know that was a place (the Italian Riviera), and the actual cultivar of olive is noted at one website:

Liguria has been renowned for the production of Taggiasche olives for more than 600 years. Benedictine monks from the town of Taggia developed the species many centuries ago. 

(Sicilian olives are apparently Castelvetrano olives.)  

 

There's a continental deli at West End in Brisbane that sells Ligurian olives and they seem pretty cheap.  I never notice them in supermarkets.  I don't know why they aren't better known, because the flavour is, I reckon, pretty distinctive and pleasing.

Bald men problem

With the absolutely pathetic alternative reality performance of Murdoch editor James Campbell on Insiders this morning, I realised that middle aged, chonky men who like to shave their head bald is a bad sign for political reliability.  Either that, or low intelligence!  (I can think of a couple of other examples.  And no, I don't think Peter Garrett is a good counter example.  First: not chonky.  And besides, I never trusted him much either. "Every song's a whinge", as someone said to me in the 1980's.)

Harder

I've not mentioned before that I have joined in with the Wordle playing crowd, and today sealed it for me:  I am definitely in the "it's become harder since the NYT took it over" camp.  

Quite the cycle, there

I've had posts before about the idea of toilets collecting urine separately so it can be turned into something useful.  In Nature, this description of a scheme planned for a Swedish island is bound to be easy material for joke writers:

 Starting in 2021, a team of researchers began collaborating with a local company that rents out portable toilets. The goal is to collect more than 70,000 litres of urine over 3 years from waterless urinals and specialized toilets at several locations during the booming summer tourist season. The team is from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, which has spun off a company called Sanitation360. Using a process that the researchers developed, they are drying the urine into concrete-like chunks that they hammer into a powder and press into fertilizer pellets that fit into standard farming equipment. A local farmer uses the fertilizer to grow barley that will go to a brewery to make ale — which, after consumption, could enter the cycle all over again.

The researchers aim to take urine reuse “beyond concept and into practice” on a large scale, says Prithvi Simha, a chemical-process engineer at the SLU and Sanitation360’s chief technology officer. The aim is to provide a model that regions around the world could follow. “The ambition is that everyone, everywhere, does this practice.”

What's wrong with people?

An unusual mistreatment of wildlife story out of Thailand:

BANGKOK: Dozens of live monkeys tied up in small sacks have been found in an abandoned building in central Thailand, national media reported on Thursday (Feb 17), in what authorities believe was a failed operation by illicit wildlife traffickers.

Footage from broadcaster Nation TV showed police and wildlife protection officers in the building in Saraburi province inspecting plastic crates containing sealed blue mesh bags with monkeys in each of them.

The video shows some monkeys trying to scamper away while still inside bags that were secured with string and plastic zip ties.

Wirom Wanalee, a resident, told Nation TV she and neighbours heard the monkeys' cries and found nearly 100 of them in the building.....

Thailand and the wider Southeast Asia is home to some of the world's most diverse flora and fauna, but the region has suffered from rampant poaching and trafficking of wildlife.

The pandemic halted much of the lucrative trade, but it is now picking back up as countries lift border restrictions, according to the United Nations.

Who is wanting poached monkeys from Thailand??

 

 

The self serving dishonesty of Republicans

We saw the same tactic deployed in the past on climate change:  after actively promoting the mere handful of contrarians, you would see them pointing to polls and saying "but the public just isn't convinced enough that climate change is real or serious or deserves government action, it would be wrong for us to move on this now."

Now it's used by Republicans regarding the completely unjustified claims of widespread voter fraud in the Trump election, and pointing to polls as to the number of Republicans who believe it meaning that voter laws just have to be reformed.

While fighting off professional sanctions for her legal career, Powell noted in a filing, “Millions of Americans believe the central contentions of the complaint to be true.” Then the filing added — tellingly when it comes to Powell’s lack of actual proof — “and perhaps they are.”

The same filing also alludes to another arena in which this widespread belief has been used to justify certain actions. It states that “dozens of laws have been enacted by state legislatures in response to concerns similar to those raised in the complaint.”

And it’s right. GOP leaders in key swing states across the country have repeatedly cited the perception of fraud — rather than actual widespread fraud — as legitimizing their efforts to add new voting restrictions. One Iowa state senator went so far as to say, “The ultimate voter suppression is a very large swath of the electorate not having faith in our election systems.”....

It’s not difficult to see where this kind of justification can go awry. It incentivizes creating a pretext for something you already wanted to do, as long as you can find enough people to embrace it.

Powell wanted to overturn the election, so she cited all kinds of dodgy supposed evidence for that, and she earned credulous media coverage from others who wanted to believe (or at least allow other people to believe) the election had been stolen from their side. Likewise, Republicans writ large haven’t generally subscribed to Trump’s most far-reaching claims of fraud, but they’ve done virtually nothing to rebut them, allowing the situation to fester.

What results is a bunch of legislators and extreme actors in the effort to overturn the election citing the very perception they’ve fomented as somehow legitimizing their original argument — and justifying the particular bandage they had already wanted to apply to the perceived wound. If a lie makes its way into the mainstream, is it really a lie? Or just a difference of valid opinions? Who can know? And how can you impose sanctions on someone or block a voting restriction if both were predicated on a sincere belief held by so many people?

 

Catholic technicalities

God's quite the stickler for precise words, it turns out:

Thousands of baptisms at a Catholic church in Arizona have been invalidated because a priest used the wrong words in performing the ceremony.

Father Andres Arango resigned from the St Gregory parish church in Phoenix earlier this month after diocese leaders discovered he had mistakenly used the phrase “we baptize you” instead of “I baptize you” for years.

His error means that countless baptisms – an irrevocable requirement for salvation in Catholic theology – will have to be performed again. And some churchgoers could find their marriages are not recognized....

The fount of knowledge on the matter is the Vatican’s 2020 congregation for the doctrine of the faith, which along with declaring Covid-19 vaccines “morally acceptable” also spelled out the correct words that needed to be used during baptisms.

The congregation “affirms that baptisms administered with modified formulas are invalid, including: ‘We baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’,” the Vatican announced.

The declaration was deemed necessary following questions over whether such phrasing meant that three separate holy entities were involved in the baptisms, or only one.

“The issue with using ‘We’ is that it is not the community that baptizes a person, rather, it is Christ, and Him alone, who presides at all of the sacraments, and so it is Christ Jesus who baptizes,” Olmsted wrote in a message posted to the Diocese of Phoenix website.

I wonder if there is an Arizona lawyer looking at offering to sue for clerical negligence, citing emotional harm over concern that the client's deceased child didn't make it into heaven because of this?

 

A consumer observation

I recently consumed a Kelloggs product for the first time in years, just because it was on special.  It was - not great.

Why do Kelloggs products seem to so uniformly be so dull and overpriced?  I wouldn't say "bad quality" as such; just really uninteresting and expensive for what they are.  I've felt this about them for perhaps 40 now, and nothing changes.   I presume this is not a assessment too widely shared, given the survival of the company, but I feel very certain of my opinion on this anyway.  

PS:  I've eaten a lot of breakfast cereal over those 40 years.  I love a good breakfast cereal.  Uncle Toby's or some Sanitarium have had much better cereals, although they didn't up their game when I was a child, and it probably was mostly Kelloggs I ate back then.   Now, I'm into the cheaper toasted muesli style products (Heritage Mill, sold in Coles and made in Australia, goes ridiculously cheap on about a 4 or 5 week cycle and has been my favourite for a year or two.  Just so you know.)  

  

 

As I've been saying...

John Quiggin brought this to my attention:

 And the opinion piece itself is very annoying - a journalist who says he's independent and generally thinks Biden is doing pretty good and who says he knows the Republican anti-democracy campaign is  worse than identity politics in the Democrats nonetheless writes that the identity politics issue is so big it's completely understandable that people won't vote against Republicans and their wannabe Christofacism.   He thinks it's time for the rise of an independent Presidential candidate - fat chance of that, and as if they would get reason out of the current Republicans.

Anyway, encouragingly, the comments following the article are mostly full of ridicule of his both-siderism.  For example:

Excuse me.

One party’s mob violently attacked the capital, beating police officers with flags, smearing feces everywhere and threatening to lynch a VP that wouldn’t bend to their will. Hint - it wasn’t the Democrats. A Republican Congressman said it was just another tourist group and the RNC declared that this was merely “legitimate political discourse”.

Today’s GOP wants to ban books, censor teachers and overturn elections. They are far more dangerous than a party that says racism is bad, let’s address it.

I am so weary of writers comparing “wokism” with the anti democracy scourge that is today’s GOP. No -Democrats are not perfect. But their excesses in no way compare to the disturbing trends in today’s GOP.

 More succinctly:

How about we stop fascism from taking over America, and then we can address the stifling oppression of being nice to minorities on the internet?

Sheesh, this isn’t rocket science.

And this:

I swear to God, it's the extremist centrists that are going to end this democracy by letting the GOP complete the coup they started last year.

 

A comforting bit of information for the next time you're flying with a mad person

From the Washington Post:

In two high-profile incidents since Friday, airline passengers terrified fellow travelers when they tried to open a plane door during their flight. It has been a repeated move by unruly passengers in the past year.

Both passengers were arrested in the most recent incidents. Even if flight attendants and passengers hadn’t intervened, neither passenger would have been able to wrestle the door open.

“People are not strong enough,” said Doug Moss, a retired airline pilot and instructor in the aviation safety and security program at the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering.

That is because no human is a match for the tremendous pressure holding the door in place.

Airplane cabins are pressurized, which lets people breathe normally even when flying at about 35,000 feet in the air. At typical cruising altitude, Ask a Pilot writer Patrick Smith notes on his website, as much as eight pounds of pressure push against every square inch of the plane’s interior — or more than 1,100 pounds against each square foot of the door.

“Just by pure pressure alone, the force required to open the door would be astronomical,” said Bob Thomas, an assistant professor of aeronautical science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Moss said the pressurization would have the same effect on any door on a plane, including the emergency exits, which are designed to be used in the event of an evacuation when the plane is no longer in the air.

That’s the door a Delta passenger tried to open during a flight from Salt Lake City to Portland, Ore., on Friday. The 32-year-old man allegedly removed the plastic covering over the handle of the emergency exit and pulled the handle; he later told police that he wanted to be recorded so he could share his thoughts about the coronavirus vaccine.

I guess the caveat to this is that if a mad person leaps out of their seat (or is sitting right next to an over wing exit) and tries this immediately on take off, they might succeed?  

 

A relatively simple explanation of superdeterminism

I barely look at Discover magazine's site anymore, but I'm glad I did today because of this pretty easy to follow explanation of superdeterminism.  (I reckon this idea is catching attention because the popular Sabine Hossenfelder likes it.)  

All about present day Russia

Some Twitter threads by people who seem to know their subject well are really good to read.

I liked this one today that explains a lot about present day Russia, mainly from a geographic and population point of view.  (It's more interesting than it sounds).

 

The Right wing and hysteria

With the Right wing hysterical reaction to Trudeau's moderate and targeted use of emergency powers to rid Ottawa (and other cities) of useless and unjustifiable blockades (according to "my employer says no one should take me seriously" Tucker Carlson, it's martial law and the end of democracy), I am reminded once again how the tide has turned.

When I were a lad (well, at least into my 20's), Monty Python used to ridicule Left wing political hyperbole:

Man:      (laughingly) Listen: Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords

is no basis for a system of government!  Supreme executive power

derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some... farcical

aquatic ceremony!

Arthur:              (yelling) BE QUIET!

Man:      You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some

watery tart threw a sword at you!!

Arthur:              (coming forward and grabbing the man) Shut *UP*!

Man:      I mean, if I went 'round, saying I was an emperor, just because some

moistened bink had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

Arthur:              (throwing the man around) Shut up, will you, SHUT UP!

Man:      Aha!  Now we see the violence inherent in the system!

Arthur:              SHUT UP!

Man:      (yelling to all the other workers) Come and see the violence inherent

in the system!    HELP, HELP, I'M BEING REPRESSED!

I think "what have the Romans ever done for us" could similarly be said to be mocking the Left for wanting victim status all the time.   

And that was because political over the top hyperbole used to be a thing more of the Left than the Right.

Now, it's the speciality of the wingnut Right, and is amplified by its media that makes money out of spreading fear and misinformation.