Right wing paranoia watch

 In Australia:

 

Mind you, the evidence from New Catallaxy is that Australian right wingers, who are extraordinarily gullible when it comes to American conspiracy theory about Trump, still find that Aussie-style Qanon garbage is just too much.   Bosi will be lucky to receive a couple of hundred votes.

The New Catallaxy dumb ageing cranks are, however, swayed by "massive voter fraud at the Trump election" conspiracy, as evidenced by them linking to article about that D'Souza "documentary" 2,000 Mules.  

As this article explains, the movie proves precisely nothing, and it's easy to see the misinterpretation (and lack of understanding) of information that has been manipulated by conspiracy theorists who make money by promoting it to the gullible.   

It's once again, as always, a case of Trumpists seeing something they don't understand, saying "Hey, that looks suspicious to me!", and then thinking something has been proved.

 

A case of "grin and bear it", I suppose

A somewhat disturbing picture:

Yes, yes:  pragmatists will argue that this is what politicians do when campaigning - and look at the amount of sucking up Rudd did to News Corp and others to get and try and keep the job.

But, just as it did Rudd no good, what is the point of sucking up to such a has-been who surely can't keep "working" forever.  Mind you, ancient Sydney based radio personalities seem to have found some magic elixir to stay alive enough to keep using a microphone, even if they don't enjoy the best of health.   It's not just confined to Right wing figures either - look at Phillip Adams. And here's a photo of John Laws (86, but he could pass for older) from today:

Can anyone explain why such a rich man can't afford a decent haircut?

A pleasing attack on Rupert by Denis

Denis Muller really puts the boot into the News Corp abandonment of journalism in its coverage of the Australian election.   Good.  [Don't know why I thought it was Michelle Grattan - I was posting in a hurry, of course.  I was a bit surprised if it was Michelle, because I haven't been completely happy with her approach either, this election.]

Asian eating

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..

  

 

Women I thought had probably died

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.

That is all.

 

Climate change in action

Yes, Andrew Sullivan has become very stupid

Spotted on Twitter:

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.

Indications that the Coalition will lose

*  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.

I have trouble taking the Greens seriously

The Guardian notes:

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.    

Just an attention seeking idiot

A simple, and accurate, proposition

 There has never been a worse Prime Minister for the way he has gone about managing his Ministry.

Impressive engineering

Like most of the world, I expect, I hadn't heard of the major airport runway that is (part) built on massive concrete pylons:

Some attitudes needing reform

In a BBC report:

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.
• In 2017, BBC reported on a case where a 60-year-old man had fatally shot his wife for serving his dinner late.

But get this:

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.

 

 

And yet most of the audience probably believes this is correct

The actual number, available at an instant, has dropped to around 800,000 a year.   (Even less on CDC numbers.)

Update:  an important reminder about Roe, and how Right wing politics has changed:

Roe vs. Wade was 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:

• Harry Blackmun (Nixon, R)
• Lewis Powell (Nixon, R)
• Warren Burger (Nixon, R)
• William Brennan (Eisenhower, R)
• Potter Stewart (Eisenhower, R)
• Thurgood Marshall (LBJ, D)
• William Douglas (FDR, D)

Those who dissented on Roe vs. Wade:

• Byron White (Kennedy, D)
• William Rehnquist (Nixon, R)

 

Lying to get a job

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.  

Fickle market

According to Financial Times:

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.

Shocking but true

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.

Do we really want such long range flights?

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".

I wonder how many people feel the same way and won't be rushing to take Qantas's long haul flights direct to those cities.

An interesting problem

It's well worth reading this thread:

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 expect they'll soon be selling tickets for the "Russia/Putin Friendship Tour 2022 - with your host dover beach"

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.