Bullying and the late Senator

I don't follow internal party faction fighting in any party in all that much detail; life's too short.   But it's certainly clear that internal fights can be bruising and personal.  (Nothing new under the sun there).

That said, my curiosity about the late Senator Kitching was piqued when Pauline Hanson turned up on TV emotionally shaken by her death.   The fact that Senator K had gone out of her way to welcome (and befriend to some extent, it seemed) Pauline certainly seemed to indicate a strong right wing status within a left wing party.

Then, today, Guy Rundle really puts the boot into the late Senator's particular subfaction and its union adventures in a free to read Crikey article.   He's obviously decided that not speaking ill of the dead can't wait when the death is being politicised so clearly.

Rundle's overall point seems valid enough, though - for the media to just talk about "bullying" without context of the viciousness of the complicated factional and sub factional fighting within the broader Labor movement is outright misleading - and he seems rather panicky about how the small-ish number of pro "Kitching was bullied to death" proponents within Labor are handing Morrison the possibility of re-election.

From my completely amateur perspective, I reckon this will blow over soon enough, and in fact, runs the risk of a backfiring if the Coalition tries to carry on about it for too long.   The main effect of the bad PR, I think will be:

a.    people who never liked Penny Wong or Kristina Keneally will get to feel vindication and double           down on their dislike, but they were already never going to vote Labor anyway;

b.    habitual Labor voters are not to be going to be easily convinced that internal Labor treatment of its       female politicians is any worse than the treatment of Liberal females politicians, and again, votes         won't change;

c.    swinging voters are going to be bored with the issue, given that, in all honesty, the nature of the             alleged bullying doesn't really seem to stand up to scrutiny as being amongst the worst examples of         the genre.  

So the Nine Network, Shy News and the gormless characters who work there can keep trying to spin this for political purposes, but I really doubt it has any legs.

Update:   Rather annoyingly, Mike Rowland on ABC News Breakfast this morning spent about 15 mins with Albo pushing the Morrison/News Corpse line about "why aren't you having an independent enquiry into bullying".   Rowland is smart enough to know the lack of bona fides that Morrison and News Corpse have in promoting the argument, but he never acknowledged the obvious.   I thought Albo handled it pretty well, though.

The rocket everyone had forgotten was being built

NASA’s Giant Moon Rocket Reaches the Launchpad for the First Time

NASA rolled the giant Space Launch System rocket out of an assembly building to begin testing ahead of its journey later this year toward the moon.

 

Brain scan scepticism

Ukraine and war and right wing nuttiness (along with the occasional bit of left wing nuttiness*) has been crowding out other interesting stuff lately, but here's an article at Nature of note, about a field of research that seems to have been making dubious connections:

Now, in a bombshell 16 March Nature study¹, Marek and his colleagues show that even large brain-imaging studies, such as his, are still too small to reliably detect most links between brain function and behaviour.

As a result, the conclusions of most published ‘brain-wide association studies’ — typically involving dozens to hundreds of participants — might be wrong. Such studies link variations in brain structure and activity to differences in cognitive ability, mental health and other behavioural traits. For instance, numerous studies have identified brain anatomy or activity patterns that, the studies say, can distinguish people who have been diagnosed with depression from those who have not. Studies also often seek biomarkers for behavioural traits.

“There’s a lot of investigators who have committed their careers to doing the kind of science that this paper says is basically junk,” says Russell Poldrack, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, who was one of the paper’s peer reviewers. “It really forces a rethink.”

 

*   I saw that trans swimmer Lia Thomas talking for the first time on the weekend and I am completely unsurprised that most Americans probably think it's a nonsense that he is allowed to blitz the women's competition.  What gets up my nose is a decent trans person would recognise and accept the unfairness.  It may be that Right wingers lack nuance on the issue, but so do Lefties who refuse to acknowledge the unfairness and think trans can never be not allowed to do something in their elected gender.    

The view from Russian TV

Oh sure...

Look, Cassie, a ranty, sweary participant of original and current Catallaxy, and now Currency Lad's sad fact free blog, is getting old, and her memory is clearly fading, if this any evidence:

As I said yesterday, this kind of behaviour is consistent with “female” behaviour. And this is why I find that Wong’s comment about Kitching’s childlessness rings true. A man would never comment on a woman’s childlessness. The plain fact is that men don’t say such things. 

Ahem:

The Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan has once again called Ms Gillard "deliberately barren" and unqualified for leadership, because she has no children.

Senior members of the Government from the Prime Minister down quickly distanced themselves from the Senator's comments.

The Treasurer Peter Costello was the most critical.

He said decisions about having children were deeply personal, and Senator Heffernan should not have made the remarks.

Late this afternoon the Senator backed down and apologised to Ms Gillard for his comments.

I would also bet my last dollar on finding within old Catallaxy - if it still existed - plenty of men who joined in with the "childless Gillard just wouldn't understand" line over the years.   Quite possibly, CL himself.

Bolton correcting conservatives

A good recent article at the Washington Post - John Bolton's Crusade to debunk Trump's revisionist history on Russia and Ukraine.

Some parts:

Yes, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton has turned on Trump like many others in Trump’s inner orbit have. His version of events is therefore understandably uncharitable. But if there were one thing that would seemingly earn the gratitude of an uber-hawk like Bolton, pretty high on that list would be Trump’s supposed success in keeping Putin in check.

Bolton has now said repeatedly that this simply isn’t how it went down. And he’s made quite the opposite case: that Putin didn’t do stuff like this during Trump’s presidency because Trump was already doing the work for him — specifically, by undermining NATO. And it’s a case that tracks with plenty of what we already knew, even as few Trump allies-turned-critics have seen fit to weigh in publicly of late.

In late February, Bolton appeared on Trump-friendly Newsmax and told a host who was pushing the Trump line that it was “just not accurate to say that Trump’s behavior somehow deterred the Russians.”

“In almost every case, the sanctions were imposed with Trump complaining about it, saying we were being too hard,” Bolton retorted when the host suggested that it was unthinkable that Trump would’ve handled the situation worse than President Biden has. Bolton added that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was.”...

 

Asked whether we should believe this wouldn’t have happened on Trump’s watch, Bolton said, “Certainly not.” Bolton added that, in a second term unencumbered by future electoral considerations, Trump would’ve been even more freed up to potentially take the United States out of NATO.

“And so Putin would’ve gotten what he wanted in Ukraine for a lot lower price than he’s paying now,” Bolton said.

Then Bolton added, in perhaps his most unvarnished comment to date: “The Leninist phrase is ‘useful idiot,’ and they haven’t forgotten that in Moscow.”

 

Tick Tick noted

I watched the Netflix musical Tick, Tick ...Boom! a couple of weeks ago, and didn't review it.

Probably because I didn't much care for it.   I found most of the music pretty uninspiring and had a dated feeling, and the main character - the real life writer of the musical Rent - is not only played pretty gay for a straight guy (maybe that's how he was), but he's also kind of irritating and not very likeable.  

If it has any value, I thought it was in showing what a ridiculously hard life musically creative types can have - the struggle to get noticed and work performed in the New York theatre scene looks awful.   But I guess we already knew that: "Don't let your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington" was written a long time ago.    On a more positive note,  when you think about it, we should consider ourselves lucky that anyone sticks it out long enough to become a success and put on shows, plays (or movies) which we really do respond to. 

Cognitive dissonance

I'm not sure I should say this, as I'm sure it's objectionable in one way or another, but here goes.

I really think Beverley O'Connor does a great job hosting The World on ABC News every night - she's intelligent, likeable and always well prepared.  But...I keep getting a bit of cognitive dissonance going because of her looks, and particularly her hair style of the last year or more.  It's kind of "USA Barbie" hair, if you ask me, and based on that alone, I keep expecting her to be, well, shallow in a conservative USA media "she's got this hosting job because some ageing leering male boss liked her looks" kind of way.

Please forgive me, Beverley.

[And by the way, I see you were born in 1960 too!   Goodness me.  My email address is available at the side - ha ha.] 

Update:  I can just imagine my daughter reading this and saying "Didn't 'Legally Blonde' teach you anything??" 

Hope this is true...

 

So, how's the Ben Roberts-Smith "I must defend my reputation, so that anyone who hasn't heard about it before, will now" trial going?

Oh:

Ben Roberts-Smith machine-gunned an Afghan prisoner to death as an “exhibition execution”, a comrade has told the federal court during cross-examination.

“He wanted people to see he was going to kill someone out there in front of everyone,” the former SAS soldier, anonymised before court as Person 24, testified during a combative, and at times emotional, second day in the witness box.

So many people are so puzzled as to why this trial is happening.  It's unbelievable. 

Update:  more "Oh!" -

Person 7, a serving Special Air Service soldier whose identity cannot be revealed for national security reasons, told Mr Roberts-Smith’s defamation case on Wednesday that the decorated former soldier’s actions in 2010 in assaulting the man, who posed no threat, were “completely and utterly unnecessary”.

Person 7 said Mr Roberts-Smith approached him on a separate occasion in 2012 as he was sorting equipment and said: “I’m going to talk the talk, I want you to make sure I walk the walk. Before this trip’s over I’m going to choke a man to death with my bare hands, I’m going to look him in the eye and watch the life drain out of his eyes.”

Person 7 said he told Mr Roberts-Smith he was busy and ended the conversation....

Person 7 said he and another soldier, Person 8, discovered an unarmed man sitting with his legs crossed in the corner of a room in a compound in Afghanistan. The man rolled onto his side as the soldiers approached him to detain him for questioning, Person 7 said, and “started to make a whimpering type sound”.

The man was extremely scared and in the foetal position, and his body was so tense that it made it difficult for Person 7 to lift him, he told the court. He said he turned to his comrade and said words to the effect of: “Jeez, this bloke is shitting himself, we’ll give him a moment.”

Mr Roberts-Smith entered the room without speaking to his comrades, Person 7 said, before kneeling and delivering “three to four quick fire punches into the side of the Afghan’s head”, and kneeing him in the chest and stomach area.

Person 7 said he yelled, “Woah, woah, woah, what are you doing? We’re looking after this, get out of here,” and Mr Roberts-Smith turned and left without a word. The Afghan man was left with significant swelling to his face and nose, he said.

Person 7 said he subsequently witnessed Mr Roberts-Smith in 2012 assaulting a second unarmed Afghan man who was with a young girl. He said Mr Roberts-Smith told him he believed it was suspicious that the man did not give the name of his daughter.

 

 

More Trump-ian gullibility

I noticed that old JC and others at fascist (as long as they don't care for the gays) friendly New Catallaxy, amongst other gullible wingnuts, were excited about a Special Counsel report on voting in Wisconsin that claimed that nursing home votes there were very, very suspect, including a claim that some showed 100% of votes for Biden.

Nevermind that the author of the report had already decided in November 2020 that the election had been been "stolen":

Leading the investigation is former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman, no neutral arbiter but rather a man who told a group of supporters of former president Donald Trump in November 2020 that the election had been stolen. Asked last week if he had voted for Mr. Trump, he proudly declared: “You bet I did.” 

or that he has now suggested "de-certifying" the election (something that has no legal basis whatsoever), gullible wingnuts just have to read any claim of fraud and they'll gobble it up without bothering with the details.

As I've said before, all Trump-ian "the election was stolen" evidence is actually just a bunch of conspiracy primed twits seeing something they don't understand, thinking "that looks suspicious to me", and then leaping from that to thinking it proves fraud.   

So I knew that a more careful examination of the Wisconsin situation with nursing homes would show how little there is to this report.   And those examinations have been done now.

Have a read of this article, for example:

Senior citizens have long been more likely to vote than the population at large. But after reviewing thousands of pages in the 2020 poll books from the 10 Dane County municipalities in which nursing homes are located, the State Journal could find only one where turnout was 100%: Nazareth Health and Rehab Center in Stoughton, where all 12 people listed as registered in the poll book had their ballots tallied.

Turnout among all the others ranged from 42% to 91%. In the case of the facility with 91% turnout, Capitol Lakes in Downtown Madison, it’s likely that number includes mostly independent living residents along with nursing home residents because both types of voters registered at the facility’s main address, 333 W. Main St., according to Capitol Lakes executive director Tim Conroy.

Even those turnout figures are inflated, since the state Elections Commission considers turnout to be the number of votes cast divided by the voting-age population, not the number of registered voters, since that number can change up to Election Day. It’s not known how many voting-age residents lived at the nursing homes in 2020.

The DHS list of nursing homes does not include all types of long-term care, which also includes various kinds of assisted living care, but the list provides a snapshot of one county’s nursing facilities as defined by a state agency.

Turnout figures compiled for city of Milwaukee nursing homes by city elections administrator Claire Woodall-Vogg also call into question the 100% turnout figure Gableman reported for all nursing homes in Milwaukee County. Woodall-Vogg found turnouts of between 36% and 97% for 32 city nursing homes.

Gableman and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who appointed him, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

So once again, a highly partisan person made a big claim (without providing the detailed evidence), it got inflated on the Wingnut web by partisan commentators who make a living by promoting Trumpian conspiracy, and gullible Australians believe it.

 

 

Tourist spot I'm unlikely to ever see

It's kind of hard imagining Iraq having a snowy, ski-able area with chairlift, but they do:

Neat summary

Of personal interest

At phys.org:

A new study from Keck Medicine of USC finds that the incidence rate of metastatic prostate cancer has significantly increased for men 45 and older and coincides with recommendations against routine prostate cancer screenings. ...

The introduction of screenings resulted in drops in both metastatic prostate cancer and prostate cancer deaths. However, the benefit of routine screenings was counterbalanced by risks of overdiagnosis and overtreatment of low-risk prostate cancer.

In 2008, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), a leading national organization in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine, recommended against routine PSA screening for men older than 75. This was followed by a recommendation against screening for all men in 2012.

Research shows that prostate cancer screenings for men declined after the recommendations changed across all age groups and racial backgrounds.

I wasn't sure what the recommendation is in Australia, but I see from some recent publication that it seems to be this:

Men who are at average risk of prostate cancer who
have been informed of the benefits and harms of testing,
and who decide to undergo regular testing for prostate
cancer, should be offered PSA testing every 2 years from
age 50 to 69. Further investigation should be offered if
the total PSA concentration is greater than 3 ng/mL....

Digital rectal examination is not recommended for
asymptomatic men as a routine addition to PSA
testing in the primary care setting. Note, however,
that on referral to a urologist or other specialist, digital
rectal examination remains an important assessment
procedure prior to consideration for biopsy. 

OK, well that seems consistent with my GP's thinking.   I've had PSA checked 3 or 4 times in the last maybe 6 years, and all's looking good, so far.

More on Ukraine and bio-labs

An explanation here of how the US Right wing conspiracy web (as well as Fox News) went all in with bio lab propaganda.

More reason to de-populate the rural areas

Look, I live in Queensland, with its large regional centres and persistently Right wing bias (in Federal elections, at least), and home of nutty, dumb Right wing populists like Pauline Hanson and Clive Palmer (amongst others).    So I can sympathise with the problem of the rural/urban cultural and voting divide in the US.  Was it last year that I (with wistful facetiousness) suggested that the best hope for the world is a "reverse Pol Pot" policy of de-populating the rural regions and forcing them into the larger towns and cities?   [I've checked now - it was at the end of 2020.]  Let robots and remote control equipment farm the land and do the mining.   Why do people want to live on such crappy, dry, flat landscapes as exist in much of the outback, anyway?

These thoughts were revived by this recent article from the Washington Post, confirming that the problem there is that the rural areas went further Republican and outbalanced the urban areas that went further Democrat:

“Republicans’ plight as the rural party of a increasingly nonrural nation has so far been balanced out by the fact that rural America has moved toward the GOP at a faster pace since the 1990s than urban America has shifted away,” political scientist David Hopkins wrote last year. “When combined with the structural biases of the electoral college and Senate in favor of rural voters, the current Republican popular coalition can easily remain fully competitive in national elections.”

The data reinforces that point. From 2000 to 2020 — and particularly in the last two, Trump-inflected elections — rural counties shifted to the right more than urban counties moved to the left. That’s helped rural areas add votes on net even as they trail urban counties in terms of population. On the graph at right below, you can see the net vote totals from each type of county. That the Democrat earned far more votes in 2016 than the Republican was offset by the Republican’s votes coming in rural areas that cumulatively hold disproportionate power in the electoral college.

Update:   How to force the de-population of the rural, I wonder?   Actually, maybe I don't want it de-populated, just as long as their susceptibility to dumb populism doesn't interfere with things like, you know, the fate of the entire planet for millennia.   Perhaps instead of marching them at gunpoint into the cities, the deal could just be "if you want to be able to vote, you got to live in an urban area.  Sure, keep your farm life if you want, but you just don't get a vote.  Us city folk need your food, so don't worry, it's not like we're going to make things intolerable for you."  Sounds fair, no?

Job and sarcasm

Slate occasionally still throws up interesting stuff - even though it's not as good as it used to be.

This article, about the unclear meaning of the Book of Job, is pretty good.   You should read it all, but I'll extract a key part:

Edward L. Greenstein’s astounding recent translation taught me that Job’s suffering is only half the story. It’s not even the most important half. Greenstein’s version does not rob readers of the comfort that comes from sympathizing with Job. But it also exhorts us to rebellion against power and received wisdom.

Greenstein points out that a huge portion of what looks like Job praising God throughout the text may be meant as the opposite: Job sarcastically riffing on existing Bible passages, using God’s words to point out how much He has to answer for. Most importantly, Greenstein argues, there’s something revolutionary in the mysterious final words Job lobs at God, something that was buried in mistranslation.

In the professor’s eyes, various words were misunderstood, and the “dust and ashes” phrase was intended as a direct quote from a source no less venerable than Abraham, in the Genesis story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In that one, Abraham has the audacity to argue with God on behalf of the people whom He will smite; however, Abraham is deferential, referring to himself, a mortal human, as afar v’eyfer—dust and ashes. It is the only other time the phrase appears in the Hebrew Bible.

So, Greenstein says, Job’s final words to God should be read as follows:

That is why I am fed up:
I take pity on “dust and ashes” [humanity]!

Remember, for this statement, God praises Job’s honesty.

The deity does not give any logic for mortal suffering. Indeed, He denounces Job’s friends who say there is any logic that a human could understand. God is not praising Job’s ability to suffer and repent. He’s praising him for speaking the truth about how awful life is.

Maybe the moral of Job is this: If God won’t create just circumstances, then we have to. As we do, Job’s honesty—in the face of both a harsh, collapsing world and the kinds of ignorant devotion that worsen it—must be our guiding force.

The key quote with the uncertain translation is this (from earlier in the article):

Job then utters a few enigmatic lines of Hebrew that scholars have struggled to translate for millennia: “al kayn em’as / v’nikham’ti al afar v’eyfer.”

The King James Version gives those lines as “Wherefore I abhor myself / and repent in dust and ashes.” Historically, most other versions stab at something similar—though, as we will see, modern scholarship suggests some very different alternatives.

Whatever Job says, it seems to work: In an abrupt epilogue, we see Job restored to his former comfort and glory. Many analysts think the happy ending was added to an initial core text that lacked such comfort. But even if you accept it as part of the story, it’s unsettlingly cryptic. We are not told why Job is rewarded, whether his reward was divinely given, or what scars the episode has left upon him. We are merely told that he’s materially back to something resembling what he had before.

 

 

How not to win a PR war

 

Yep, the modern "Lefty" (or libertarian) who do "just asking questions" videos for clicks are pseudo-intellectuals who give succour to the nutty Right

William Hurt, RIP

Going by the online reaction to his death, I guess I didn't appreciate how many people really liked William Hurt.   I did too, although I seem to recall he was quite eccentric in real life.