I've been to a couple of Asian restaurants in the last few weeks, over in the heavily Chinese/Asian part of Brisbane (Sunnybank/Sunnybank Hills/Runcorn).
As I said to my family, there is something very pleasing about the liveliness of the way Asian family and friends gather in groups to eat. I mean, eating in Western food places just does not have the same communitarian/family vibe as going to Chinese restaurant where the tables have a dozen or more people eating together, often with kids of all ages, and a busy staff running all over the place.
And you get the impression this is a regular part of their life - good Asian restaurants in predominantly Asian parts of town are very busy.
My son thought I was ignoring things like bar-b-ques at home as a family/communitarian thing that Australians do - but really, we don't hold big ones very often, do we..
Over the weekend, I realised that two women who, if I had been asked, I would have guessed incorrectly had already died, came to mind: Imelda Marcos, and Shirley MacLaine.
I was thinking of Imedla for obvious reasons (her son is probably going to be the next president of her country), but why Shirley came to mind, I don't know.
How old is Sullivan? 58? He's old enough to know better.
I posted before about a Noah Smith substack post in which he countered the American Right wing myth that America has become some sort of dystopian social nightmare in recent years (all caused by Democrats and "Leftism", of course), which goes to show that a much younger man (with an eccentric fondness for rabbits) has a much better grasp on history than someone who has been making a living out of political commentary for decades.
Anyway - back to abortion in the US. I see that Sullivan has joined in with the Creighton "why are Leftists so scared of democracy dealing with abortion in the US?" line.
This is so naive, and so dismissive of the obvious problems with the current operation of democracy in the US, I almost can't be bothered dealing with it. OK, I will, anyway:
*of course if the courts have found a constitutional right that was left in place and re-affirmed over 50 years, and then (on what's obviously essentially religious grounds) remove it, the beneficiaries of that right are going to be unhappy;
* of course the country has enormous problems with how democracy is implemented there - from political interference with gerrymandering, the neverending and politically motivated fiddling with electoral laws, the effort that has to be put in to even get people enrolled and out to vote, to the dubious effect of the Electoral College;
* of course, it was via an ethically illegitimate exercise of democracy - the Republican stacking of the Supreme Court, and Republican judges willing to lie and dissemble about the importance they would give Roe as precedent - which is leading to the overthrown of Roe. It's already an example of the failure of democracy as implemented in the nation right now, writ large!
* of course there is a problem with trying to work out a democratic compromise with people who have built themselves into their own belief universe, not just on the question of "when does life begin" but on something as basic as "who won the last Presidential election".
* of course it's dismissive of women's interests to take the attitude "pro-abortionists will just have to wait for the inevitable Right wing over-reach" i.e. to wait for the high profile examples of women who have died - or are prosecuted for having an early abortion - rather than relying on the protection of a Court found right.
Roe may not have been perfect, but it was a compromise on an already vexed issue that could have been made to work. And the likes of Sullivan and Creighton turn a deliberate blind eye to the rise of Christian Nationalism (read "fascism") that has captured a large chunk of the American Right that makes dealing with many issues "democratically" so extremely difficult.
* David Koch this morning was extremely dismissive of the answers Peter Dutton was giving regarding the Solomon Islands situation. He did all but roll his eyes and say "yeah, you're wasting my time"; instead he just seemed to cut the live cross very abruptly.
* Shortly after that, there was a pretty clear defence of Albanese not being able to list the 6 NDIS policy points without looking at the printed list.
* On Twitter, there is a ongoing strong pushback on the "gotcha" style of questions - and although Twitter does not reflect the general public (especially as one tends to follow people already on your own side of politics), I suspect that there is a broad public sentiment that the media is doing a terrible job in this campaign, including with the "gotcha" attempts.
Greens candidate for Brisbane, Stephen Bates, has
taken out an advertisement on Grindr, “the world’s largest social
networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people”.
“You always come first with the Greens,” one reads, and another says: “Spice up Canberra with a third”.
Speaking
directly to a specific market – in this case, a younger, LGBTQ+ market –
could work, according to Dr Andrew Hughes, a political marketing
lecturer at the Australian National University who says for any other
party it might come across as “tokenistic”.
I do find this supports my feeling that while the Greens are in the right space on the environment and climate change, and (possibly) economics, they have a sort of air of immaturity about them (when they're not being overly earnest on "culture war" issues - which I also think is a kind of immaturity) on other issues that really puts me off voting for them.
Last month, police in India arrested a 46-year-old man who allegedly murdered his wife because his breakfast had too much salt.
"Nikesh
Ghag, a bank clerk in Thane, near the western city of Mumbai, strangled
his 40-year-old wife in a fit of rage because the sabudana [tapioca
pearls or sago] khichdi she served was very salty," police official
Milind Desai told the BBC.
The
couple's 12-year-old son, who witnessed the crime, told the police that
his father followed his mother, Nirmala, into the bedroom complaining
about salt and started beating her.
"He
kept crying and begging his father to stop," Mr Desai said, "but the
accused kept hitting his wife and strangled her with a rope."
Some other examples of death for food related matters are listed:
The murder of a woman by her husband, triggered by a quarrel over food, routinely makes headlines in India.
Take some recent cases:
In
January, a man was arrested in Noida, a suburb of the capital Delhi,
for allegedly murdering his wife for refusing to serve him dinner.
In June 2021, a man was arrested in Uttar Pradesh after he allegedly killed his wife for not serving salad with his meal.
Four months later, a man in Bangalore allegedly beat his wife to death for not cooking fried chicken properly.
More than 40% of women and 38% of men told government surveyors that it
was ok for a man to beat his wife if she disrespected her in-laws,
neglected her home or children, went out without telling him, refused
sex or didn't cook properly. In four states, more than 77% women
justified wife beating.
In
most states more women than men justified wife beating and in every
single state - the only exception being Karnataka - more women than men
thought it was okay for a man to beat his wife if she didn't cook
properly.
The
numbers have gone down from the previous survey five years ago - when
52% women and 42% men justified wife beating - but the attitudes haven't
changed, says Amita Pitre, who leads Oxfam India's gender justice
programme.
Roe vs. Wadewas
decided with a 7-2 vote, and not along partisan lines. Those who ruled
in favor were as follows, with the president who nominated them and the
party of that president indicated in parentheses:
With the news that it appears the conservative majority of the US Supreme Court is set to overrule Roe v Wade, it is of course worth remembering that members of said majority were quite willing to lie about their views:
As someone else pointed out in the thread following:
And:
Update: Gee, my 2019 post arguing that laws on abortion should be about compromise (of the type set up in Roe) still reads fine to me.
Shares in the Google parent fell more than 5 per cent in after-hours trading after Alphabet reported a 23 per cent increase in revenue in the three months to the end of March, to $68bn, slightly below forecasts for $68.1bn. A year prior, revenues had increased 34 per cent. Net profits fell 8 per cent from a year ago to $16.4bn.
I increasingly have the desire for politicians on the Left to tell people that they are simply being stupid if they think the energy status quo is not going to have to change quickly, even if there is a cost.
In short, people need to be told there has to be temporary sacrifice.
Basically, there's a part of my mind that always whispers to me that it's more dangerous to be flying at high altitude that it is to be going up or down from that altitude (with the exception of flying into storms, of course). I would guess that this is very much not true, with most accidents happening at below cruising height. I'll check later.
But still - I find it difficult to sleep on planes at all, and with seats as close as they are, it's hard to get comfortable. A flight of about 8 to 9 hours is fine, but more than double that?
So, overall, I would prefer to have one landing on the way to either London or New York, should be I be going to either. Yes, any more than one would be a pain, but one landing seems "right".
A crisis in fertilizer chains of supply might finally get some serious reconsideration going for how nations deal with their sewerage, given that scientists have been saying for ages that it's being wasted. [OK, yes I know, a lot of solids have been put to use as fertilizer in Western countries, but it's been controversial, and I think the separate management of urine has been something proposed and trialled on a small scale very often, but never widely implemented anywhere.]
I don't like linking to the New Catallaxy site, but just have a read of this post (and the comments following) to luxuriate in the "Conservatives for poor, misunderstood Russia" vibe oozing from the site. (I use "luxuriate" ironically, of course.)
I am also amused how over recent weeks the unctuous-for-Russia owner of the site, dover beach, now considers himself a military analysis expert.
As Noah Smith wrote in his post Putin's War and the Chaos Climbers, about how the worst of the Left and Right have united in Putin/Russia sympathy (oh no, they'll say, of course Putin has done the wrong thing - it's just that it's completely understandable why he did it and Ukraine and the West were asking for it), there are a few possible explanations to consider:
a.he (Putin) just appeals to authoritarians (and it is clear the American Right has moved to embracing authoritarian to get their way - look at the gerrymandering and enforcement of religious views on abortion by stacking the Supreme Court);
b. But there is also this:
Another, more subtle theory — which I’ve advanced myself — is something I
call Last Bastion Theory. This is the tendency of people in the U.S.
and Europe to view Russia as the distant protector of something they
hold dear. For traditionalists, Russia can be seen as the last protector
of Christianity, or of traditional gender roles. White supremacists might see Russia as the last White empire on the globe.
And for leftists who view America as the world’s imperialistic Great
Satan, Russia might seem like a bastion of resistance. Of course, the
Russian government goes out of its way to encourage
such perceptions. To all of these groups, the distant sphinx of the
Kremlin might have seemed like a power capable of offering support while
representing no threat.
c. Noah then expands upon any way of looking at it:
The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game
of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that
“Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime,
he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I
see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left
as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal
order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe
ideologies to advance their power.
This might sound wildly accusatory, but it’s not — it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.
It
was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement
and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq,
laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian
conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative
paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at
once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump —
sort of took over the party.
Yup.
So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to
want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO
loss. This doesn’t mean they’re ready to cheer for Putin openly, or even
to hope for his victory — the blazing moral clarity of the situation is
still too strong for that. But it does mean that they feel the need to
muddy the waters, to curb U.S. support for Ukraine and make the
establishment look irresolute, and to prepare narratives that would
allow them to take advantage of a Putin victory.
What these
people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to
the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible
systems of human organization.
Well, what a coincidence. Just when I start talking about Pure Land Buddhism and how it sounds (more or less) consistent with a Many Worlds multiverse (inspired, as I was, by Everything Everywhere All at Once), up on my Youtube recommendations pops up this:
Just in case you can't see it - the title is "Pure Land Buddhism: The Mahayana Multiverse". And it was only published this week, too.
In fact, the whole channel that this comes from (Religion for Breakfast) is new to me - but it's very good. The guy who runs it is has a doctorate (I presume in religious studies) and is currently in (of all places) Cairo, but he's very listen-able and crams a lot of information in a short space of time. I recommend, for example, his video on the development of the idea of the Anti-Christ.
Thank you, almighty Google for guiding me to it.
Anyway, I mentioned this "co-incidence" to my son, and mused again (I'm sure I've raised it before) the theory that Google is already so all knowing, and will continue to grow in knowledge, that it is likely the beginning of the God that will be fully formed by the end of the Universe (the Tipler-ian God). In fact, it might already be alive and at least God-like: how would we know?
He responded with something like "Geez, it's only cookies".
Oh yea of little Google faith.
Anyway, I also asked him if there already was a Church of Google - something I've probably Googled before, but I don't recall the results.
So I checked again today, and note that a site now called The Reformed Church of Google has been around for a long time, although it's just an inactive re-creation of a parody religion "Googlism" set up in 2009 by one Matt MacPherson but which he let lapse in 2016. Most of the content is pretty dated, but still gives me some amusement:
Anyhow, while we are on the topic of religion, another Youtube recommendation which amused me somewhat is this one, about the once (and by once, I mean around the time of Buddha) relatively popular (although it's hard to see why) Indian sect known as the Ajivikas:
The problems of time and change was one of the main interests of the
Ajivikas. Their views on this subject may have been influenced by Vedic
sources, such as the hymn to Kala (Time) in Atharvaveda.[48] Both Jaina and Buddhist texts state that Ājīvikas believed in absolute determinism, absence of free will, and called this niyati.[8][12]
Everything in human life and universe, according to Ajivikas, was
pre-determined, operating out of cosmic principles, and true choice did
not exist.[12][49] The Buddhist and Jaina sources describe them as strict fatalists, who did not believe in karma.[8][16]
The Ajivikas philosophy held that all things are preordained, and
therefore religious or ethical practice has no effect on one's future,
and people do things because cosmic principles make them do so, and all
that will happen or will exist in future is already predetermined to be
that way. No human effort could change this niyati and the karma ethical theory was a fallacy.[16]
James Lochtefeld summarizes this aspect of Ajivika belief as, "life and
the universe is like a ball of pre-wrapped up string, which unrolls
until it was done and then goes no further".[8]
Riepe states that the Ajivikas belief in predeterminism does not mean that they were pessimistic. Rather, just like Calvinists belief in predeterminism in Europe, the Ajivikas were optimists.[50]
The Ajivikas simply did not believe in the moral force of action, or in
merits or demerits, or in after-life to be affected because of what one
does or does not do. Actions had immediate effects in one's current
life but without any moral traces, and both the action and the effect
was predetermined, according to the Ajivikas.[50]
Like Jains, Ajiviks wore no clothes, and lived as ascetic monks in
organised groups. They were known to practice extremely severe
austerities, such as lying on nails, going through fire, exposing
themselves to extreme weather, and even spending time in large earthen
pots for penance! There was no caste discrimination and people from all
walks of life joined them.
Another Youtube video did explain, though, that they still believed that there was a soul that had to sort of evolve upwards before being released from the life and death cycle. So I guess that has something to do with their idea that there was a point in extreme asceticism?
Or maybe, just maybe, it's a religion that disappeared because as a philosophy it made no sense?
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