Thinking about influencers

Gee, there's a real lack of stories that make me feel happier today. 

Even before the terrible event this week in Texas, I have been thinking about how the wingnut Right maintains its beliefs in America.   

It seems impossible to overestimate the effect of hyperpartisan Right wing media in this.   Ted Cruz ludicrously decides to run with "too many doors" as the main thing to be addressed to reduce school shootings (oh, and mental health, while his Republican governor cuts funding for mental health services), and he can be assured that his "ideas" will be run for hours Fox News with no scepticism at all - with full endorsement, in fact.

When independent news challenges him, he accuses the media of "hating America" and retreats, and he will be fully supported on Newsmax, Fox, and the scores of Right wing podcasts which are devoted to selling a story of everything the Democrats say is part of an evil conspiracy to kill freedom and institute socialism.   Tucker Carlson gets to encourage paranoia that "they're coming to take your guns" again - a line that, by no co-incidence at all, was ramped up to the max when there was a black president - and gets to mutter about "civil war" if they try it.

Basically, the country has been ruined by "influencers":  media and media personalities that make a living by promoting one, politically hyperpartisan, view, and the way Right wing supporters cocoon themselves in that information environment.   

It's awful, and so hard to see how it is going to change.... 

Astounding lack of common sense

So, from this BBC report, it looks like there is going to be a blame laying argument over whether a school door was locked or not:

After crashing his truck into a ditch near the school, the gunman emerged and began firing an AR-style rifle at two people who were exiting as funeral home.

The suspect then jumped a fence and began firing "multiple, numerous rounds" at the building, Mr Escalon said.

As he approached the entrance to the school he "was not confronted by anybody", the ranger said.

According to Uvalde County Independent School District Officers protocol, campuses are required to have staff "who patrol door entrances, parking lots and perimeters". Teachers are told to keep doors locked at all times.

"We will find out as much as we can why it was unlocked," Mr Escalon said. "Or maybe it was locked. But right now, it appears it was unlocked."

 Yet the media has been full of photos of the school, like this:

I mean, seriously:  do they think a door is the only way into a ground floor classroom with windows?

The new government vibe: flim flam has been replaced with quiet substance

This is humour, of course:

But really, I'm sure much of the public much be sharing the feeling that it really does look like a serious government of substance after a lost decade of Coalition time wasting.   Morrison's big thing was meant to be marketing, except that he was pretty woeful about it with foreign nations.

PS:  Phil Cooroy, in a column in which he sounds glum about the election result, says it has a very Kevin Rudd vibe, where he and Wong rushed to a climate conference within day of his election.

The difference, the way I see it, is that Rudd was always into self promotion in a way that suggested more style over substance (in a Morrison-esque sort of way.)   I always thought he was a bit of a poseur.  The thing that I find appealing about Albonese is that he has done the minimum in terms of that kind of self promoting PR. 

Police tactics questionned

A lot of people are now questioning whether the police effectively allowed the killer time to kill, while holding back parents on the street.

But to be fair, it is not yet entirely clear as to whether the police really could do something else to prevent the deaths (you would have to first know how quickly he killed after locking the class room door, and whether access through windows was possible) but nonetheless, it is true that the incident makes a mockery of the wingnut argument that all you need is more and more security at schools and this is readily stopped:

 

And this:

Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District had doubled its security budget in recent years, according to public documents, in part to comply with state legislation passed in the wake of a 2018 school shooting in which eight students and two teachers were killed. The district adopted an array of security measures that included its own police force, threat assessment teams at each school, a threat reporting system, social media monitoring software, fences around schools and a requirement that teachers lock their classroom doors, according to the security plan posted on the district’s website. 

It happened anyway.

I have also seen it said on twitter that shooter drills have gone on so long now in the US that a student who wants to shoot the place up knows exactly what to expect, and can work around it.

 

Profound or banal can be a fine line

From a couple of reviews of a new book out about Wittgenstein (a translation of some of his "diary" entries made during WW1).  First, in the Guardian:

The Tractatus is written as a series of numbered propositions, closer in form to modernist poetry than philosophical treatise. Its central ideas can be traced back to the notebooks Wittgenstein kept during the early years of the conflict. The right-hand side of each spread was used to set out his evolving thoughts on logic and language. The left-hand side was saved for his personal notes, written in a simple code in which the letters of the alphabet were reversed (Z = A, and so on).

It is these private remarks that are published in English here for the first time, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff. They range from complaints about the other soldiers – “a bunch of swine! No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievable crudity, stupidity & malice!” – to the number of times he masturbates (“Yesterday, for the first time in 3 weeks”). He recounts his depression – “like a stone it presses on my chest. Every duty turns into an unbearable burden” – and his living conditions. These are accompanied by constant updates on how his work is going. And by “work”, he always means philosophy. “Remember how great the blessing of work is!” he writes. This work is the focus; the war, a backdrop....

...in the material on the left-hand pages Wittgenstein first begins to reflect on the inner self, on God’s presence in the world, on what is required for life to make sense. It can sometimes seem irrelevant to the discussion of logic taking place on the right-hand side. “Have thought a great deal about all sorts of things,” he writes, “but curiously enough cannot establish their connection to my mathematical train of thought.”

And then in 1916, facing death on the frontline, the connection is forged. Paradox in logic arises when you try to say those things that can only be shown. But that applies equally to God, the self and meaning. As he writes on a left-hand page, “What cannot be said, cannot be said”. The purview of ethics, like the purview of logic, lies outside the realm of what can be stated in language. And thus we get to the seventh and final statement of the Tractatus: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

An odd thing to say about a philosopher here:

Even the masturbation is hard to separate from the philosophy: it happens when work is going well. For Wittgenstein, it seems, masturbation and philosophy are both expressions of living in the face of death.

 And in The New Yorker, the bit about Carmen Miranda makes me laugh:

The American philosopher Norman Malcolm, who was a student of Wittgenstein’s, writes of the “frequent and prolonged periods of silence” in his classes, of how sometimes, “when he was trying to draw a thought out of himself, he would prohibit, with a peremptory motion of the hand, any questions or remarks.” Malcolm goes on, “His gaze was concentrated; his face was alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was stern. One knew that one was in the presence of extreme seriousness, absorption, and force of intellect. . . . Wittgenstein was a frightening person at these classes. He was very impatient and easily angered.”

Many things angered him: someone failing to tend to one of his houseplants, a student unable to formulate a thought. (“I might as well talk to this stove!”) But he could sustain the intensity for only so long. A couple of hours of that, and he would be ready for an excursion to the “flicks.”

He loathed British films and generally insisted on American ones, being a particular fan of Carmen Miranda. (He was also a devotee of the pulpy murder mysteries served up in the magazine Detective Story.) He would sit in the front row so that he could see nothing but the screen—perhaps fearing memories of the draining lecture. Woe betide any companion who tried to talk to him. There was only the movie on the screen, and Wittgenstein, rapt in his seat, munching on a cold pork pie.

Anyway, as to the question in the title of the post:

Clever students can eventually make sense of the logic and turn out elegant little essays about the “picture theory of meaning,” “logical atomism,” and “the saying/showing distinction.” But cleverness seems the wrong virtue to employ for understanding a man who tells us, mysteriously, that the “world of the happy man is quite another than that of the unhappy man” (6.43). Or that “he lives eternally who lives in the present” (6.4311). Taken out of context, the seeming mysticism comes perilously close to kitsch. Some clever people (starting with Russell) have concluded that we’d do well not to bother with it.

But others see in those remarks a call to a virtue rarer than cleverness.

And:

Sometimes there are philosophical remarks that are familiar from “Culture and Value,” a volume of miscellaneous observations which drew from the verso pages of these notebooks. “When we hear a Chinese man talking, we are inclined to take his speech as so much inarticulate gurgling,” he writes. “But someone who knows Chinese will be able to recognize the language inside the sound. Just so, I often cannot recognize the human being inside the human being.” As is the case with many of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, it is a real question whether the observation is profound or banal.

Finally:

His tendency to turn every human encounter into a confrontation, a reckoning, sounds an awful lot like moralism. But he was not moralistic in the sense of imposing on people the demands of a received body of rules. Compulsory seriousness might be closer to the mark, although his seriousness was compatible with a deep strain of silliness: he was capable of writing campy letters, of joining his friends at the local fairground, of playing the demanding part of the moon in an impromptu reënactment of celestial movements. An intensely rational man—he had, after all, started off as a logician—he loathed mere reasonableness, a squalid ideal for squalid people.

PS:  I've left out the other bits about his sexuality (primarily homosexuality, but it seems he was uncomfortable with sexuality generally speaking.)   This bit was dryly funny:

Briefly, there was talk of marriage to a Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger, a relationship that appears to have involved a considerable amount of kissing. But he made it clear, during a prenuptial vacation that he decided should be dedicated to solitary Bible study, that the marriage was to be chaste and childless. (She demurred.)

 

He is a genuine moron

 As note in the thread following:

Update:

One very small, tiny, but kind of pathetic, thing to apparently be grateful for after the Texas shooting

I've had a look at the Alex Jones Inforwar site a couple of times since yesterday, to see whether his (and his companies) being successfully sued by the parents of Sandy Hook has stopped him from spruiking this latest appalling event as a conspiracy that didn't really happen.

And yes, as far as I can tell, he and his site is not going down that path again.  [He is, however, suggesting that it is "convenient" that it is happening in an election year, as if there is still some Leftist conspiracy involved.  It's just that he is not doing the awful damage to the families when his conspiracy nut followers believe they were involved in a politically staged fake event.]

But isn't it shocking and pathetic that the only way he has been forced into that is by parents taking tortuous and expensive legal actions (which still have not reached finality - damages are yet to be worked out) instead of Jones being called out and punished by politicians.

There is also a column by someone other than him that further demonstrates that it is the special brand of American paranoia and money, utilised cynically by the Right, that prevents any serious action on gun control.   It's the line that only it's widespread gun ownership that prevents American becoming an authoritarian socialist/communist hellhole, and that the true motive of all and any suggestion of gun control measures is actually to disarm the entire nation so that the evil Left can have its way.

Update:  interesting column by a guy who used to be in the gun industry, and now works for gun control. 

Man, I'm glad Uhlmann is retiring

Dare I say it (sorry, Tim! - and Jason if you visit here) but the opening of Chris Uhlmann's commentary on the election helps confirm my allergy to high brow poetry as an artform.   I'm just not enough of a pretentious wanker for it, I think!:

After the concession and victory speeches were made in the sleepless small hours of Sunday morning, a line from The Journey of the Magi worried away in my head: “Were we led all that way for birth or death?”

T.S. Eliot continues: “I had seen birth and death but thought that they were different; this birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.”

I have no idea what that means.   And when does Uhlmann retire - can't be long now, surely.

A pretty remarkable result

I've seen a similar graph before, but never shared it here.   This version is from the New York Times, and I'm posting because of the Australian result:

And so is this:
 

Everyone knows there's nothing new to be said, but I will say this...

The clearest sign of the American Right being absolutely nuts is when the response to an Elementary school mass shooting is this:

Ken Paxton, the attorney general for Texas, told Fox News that more teachers should carry guns.....'Nothing is going to work perfectly, but that, in my opinion it's the best answer to this problem.'

Yeah, because when Mrs Smith signed up to be a teacher of 6 year olds 30 years ago, she went into it for the excitement of learning to become a crack shot so she could take out the nutter with a semi automatic with no risk of accidentally shooting one of her own kids.  

Update:  the bitter reality - 

 

Very mixed feelings

I fit broadly into a "trans sceptic" category - in that I usually agree with most things that are said on the "TERF" side of the argument, and think there are some ridiculous extremes on the pro-trans side, and really cannot stand their attempt to shut down all argument about the difficult margins of the issue (such as the appropriate level of medical treatment to give a under 18 year old) by calling all questions "trans phobia" or such like.

But I really wish there were comedians that I actually liked who are prepared to take on the issue as a subject of comedy.  The thing is, I already found Bill Maher, Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais not very appealing in their comedy style - it's hard to put my finger on it, but they all share some sort of smart alecky air which I don't find very likeable.   (Mind you, as readers would recall, I am pretty resistant to all stand up comedy as an art form.)

So it's with very mixed feelings that these three are the ones who have decided to take on the subject, and cop a mountain of criticism for doing so.

Part of the problem is no doubt that it is very, very difficult to deal with this as a subject in comedy at all without risking genuine upset to families that do have a traumatic time with the issue.   I mean, I can understand parents of a depressed, apparently trans, teen really not wanting to read about any attempted jokes on the subject at all.   On the other hand, it's pretty clear that all of these comedians are trying to attack some of the extremes of the pro-trans movement, and no doubt would not want to wish ill on an adult who has gone through the trans process. 

So it all leaves me with very, very mixed feelings.

Overall, I think it probably is safest to give up attempts at comedy on the subject.  But is that conceding too much to the pro-trans attitude that everything that is ever said in disagreement is an "attack" and "phobia" and "hate speech"?

A difficult issue...

 

Some enforcement needed

A couple of tweets showing the problems that can be encountered on public transport in the US:

You can clearly see the crack pipe being used in the video (as well as the cigarette being smoked.)

I was very amused by this (apparently serious) Elon fanboy comment following, too:

I've been wondering about Barnaby too...

I thought he looked even worse on ABC News this morning.  Even on election night, I thought he looked kind of...sedated?   A bit bleary eyed, at least.  

Count me amongst the amused

There's no arguing with these people, Part 2

The Wall Street Journal - yes, another Murdoch owned disinformation outlet - has editorialised excitedly that Hilary Clinton has to be condemned by history for starting the "Trump-Russia collusion" narrative.

Philip Bump explains at length why this is ahistorical nonsense.  But millions of wingnuts will feel vindicated.

Well, at least from the Murdoch press and Sky News at Night

 

There is no arguing with these people

Story old as time - at least if you define "time" as about 20 years - there's a large slab of conservatives (and even libertarians) who can't support the Liberals anymore because they hitched their wagon to a giant conspiracy theory about the greatest environmental/economic issue facing the world (with the support of a mere handful of scientific contrarians) and they have an inability to recognise, or admit, that they chose wrong.   Hence we get post-election comments like this:

Cassie of Sydney says:

21 May, 2022 at 8:59 am

I have just written this on DB’s forum…

For over fifty years ordinary people across the West have stood back and allowed the Marxists to steadily infiltrate our institutions, academia, church, entertainment, education, MSM and social media and so on, even the monarchy is now a Marxist mouthpiece. And over the last two decades we’ve seen how this infiltration has ramped because of the scam known as climate change. This scam called climate change has been a perfect vehicle for the Marxists to fully indoctrinate our young and our impressionable. They’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams because most ordinary people have stood back and allowed it to happen, even politicians and parties on the centre and the right across the West have refused to engage in pushback, fightback, rebuttal or discussion about the science of climate change, more often than not they’ve naively, gullibly and stupidly just accepted the far-left false narratives. A few years ago, at a conservative function, I asked a Liberal politician in attendance whether the Liberal party would do with gas what they’ve done with coal. In other words, will the Liberal party just sit back and allow the demonisation of gas the same way they sat back and allowed the demonisation of the the one fuel that has lifted more people across the globe out of poverty in the last two hundred years than in previous human history. Whilst he agreed with me, his response was to just shrug his shoulders…..and you see, ladies and gentlemen, therein lies the rub. Why should I vote for supposedly centre-right, right-wing parties and politicians that just shrug their shoulders and refuse to fight and refuse to stand up about anything, and not just about fossil fuels, but about this insidious transgender nonsense, about free speech, about fiscal responsibility, about religious freedom and so on? Why? All the Liberal party has done is swallow this Marxism, it makes most of the so called Liberals we elect no different to those in Labor.

There is no arguing with this - and the Liberals have finally paid the price for not telling this significant slab of their "normal" support base that they are simply wrong and have to face up to it. 

That comment, by the way, appeared at Currency Lad's blog, where he has (of course) posted that the problem for the Liberals is that they are not conservative enough.   All of the old Catallaxy crew are applauding him, leading my reader Homer to make the following astute comment:

Not Trampis says:

23 May, 2022 at 12:46 pm

oh dear reality bites.
If CL was right then the UAP vote would have gone gangbusters. Sorry only the morons voted for it.
If the Liberals cannot win back the teal seats then they will never win government. If you think Dutton can do that I have some Harbour bridge shares to sell to you.
I have never thought any party should have more then two terms. The Liberals have a problem. Unlike the ALP they have little talent. just look as who has been proposed as leader.
In terms of the ALP losing we can throw some scenarios out. They won’t become a divisive rabble like last time if only because the NSW right neither have any ‘strategic geniuses’ like last time and after the Keneally fiasco little credibility.
It is unlikely like Abbott Albo is not up to the job as his record as a minster is okay BUT even if you disagree his cabinet will will chockful of talent.
If you are thinking we are entering conditions to the early 70s then both Treasury and his ministerial team ham have the experience to learn from that.

We will need a change of government two elections from now and if the Liberals think being more ‘conservative’ ( a true conservative would support a federal ICAC as it wouls make instituions more open and transparent as they should be.) they are living on another planet.

 Not sure that I agree that you ideally have a change of government every 3rd term - but otherwise, a sensible comment.

 

  

Suspect this is true

I think the frequency of fire and flood crises all over the world over the last 3 years is consistent with this, and explains why the "Teals" and Greens did well this election:

Dumb column by legal academic

Here's James Allen, in the Spectator (Australian edition, which has always been trash), complaining about the weekend election:

The only way to show your displeasure with your own side of politics – because you can’t even stay home when there’s also compulsory voting – is to preference the other side. I did that this past Saturday, practising what I preached.

As a law professor (and one who appears to unfortunately decided to call Australia his permanent home), I would have thought he would be more careful to explain that, yes, you have to "vote", but you can always "vote" for no one. Or cop the fine of (I believe) $20 and stay in bed all day.

But he also bemoans this:

Many may not like that fact, but it’s already happened in Canada, Britain, and America. Our voting system merely slowed it down here. The truth is that the well-off rich (and I generalise of course) now vote solidly Left – maybe because they can afford to and like to virtue-signal? They vote more like Canberra public servants than anything else.

He may like to consider other possibilities:  such as "the rich" having an education level high enough to see through the culture war/conspiracy denial of reality, not to mention authoritarian and wannabe be fascist bent of current American brand of conservatism, and reject it.

Look, I pointed out back in 2019 that to Allen, evidence is optional.   He encapsulates what has gone  completely wrong with the Right.

Problem not recognized

Barnaby Joyce quoted in the AFR today:

Barnaby Joyce has put the next Liberal leader on notice that he will “bargain hard” for extra National Party shadow positions after the junior Coalition partner withstood an outgoing political tide by retaining all its seats and gaining one senator.

Chiding some inside the Liberal Party for their failure to manage the fight against independents, Mr Joyce also blasted the teal independents movement for doing “an exceptional job of decapitating the moderates out of the Liberals”.

“I’m hoping they’re happy with their work,” Mr Joyce told The Australian Financial Review on Sunday. “They’ve managed to get rid of three gay guys, one Aboriginal and one Asian. Was that their game plan?”

The Nationals are on track to retain every one of their 16 lower house seats and will pick up a NSW Senate spot, taking their total to 22. By contrast the Liberals look set to lose more than 20 Senate and lower house seats, dramatically decreasing the relative weight of the senior partner.

Saturday’s Liberal Party devastation was concentrated in southern states, turning Queensland into the Coalition’s bulwark. One analyst said the Queensland LNP was set to provide as much as 40 per cent of the Coalition’s national total. If Peter Dutton survives in his seat, there’s every chance Queensland also supplies the Coalition’s leader.

Well, if there's one way to ensure a resurgence of support for the LNP in the big cities where it crashed, it's to have the climate change denying (or at the very least, downplaying) Nationals, led by a guy who faced an internal investigation into drunken misbehaviour with a woman, get more influence in the Opposition ranks!     [Sarcasm, of course.]

I see in the SMH that Barnaby had been making brave predictions about the result on the election day:

Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce started the night in a bullish mood, telling Channel 7 shortly after voting closed that the polls published during the campaign had missed a groundswell of support for the conservative side of politics.

“I think you’re going to be in for a big surprise. I think that the pollsters have got it wrong again,” Mr Joyce said.

“I think there were two different elections on here, the regional Australia election and urban Australia election and urban Australia election. I think in regional Australia there is a sense of anger.”

And now the question on every reader's mind:  does the election result mean I still see a need for a Reverse Pol Pot policy to de-populate the rural areas, as the only hope to actually crush stupid Right wing ideas?   Well, yeah, but sorry: if the people of New England can't see their way to vote out Barnaby, I don't see much alternative... 

Update:   a tweet summary of a Bernard Keane article at Crikey:

From the article itself:

Even a moment’s glance at the election results shows that Antic, Canavan, Credlin and Bolt are either incapable of simple maths or deliberately misrepresenting the outcome.

Australia shifted towards climate action, integrity and respect for women, dramatically. The Liberals lost seats to the teals, to Labor, to the Greens. Labor lost seats to the Greens, too. On the results so far, no one, anywhere, lost a seat to a more right-wing candidate. But there are plenty of ex-Liberals who lost seats to a more progressive one.

There was no shift to the right. Credlin’s claim that “one-time Coalition supporters … moved in droves to splinter parties on the right” is simply wrong. One Nation lost votes compared to 2019, despite fielding candidates in far more seats, and Hanson may lose her Senate spot. The main beneficiary of the fall in the LNP vote in Queensland was the Greens, who will take Ryan.

This Australian version of the Big Lie is the first stage of a war for the future of the federal Liberal Party, with the far-right unable to resist the opportunity to exploit the removal of so many more moderate MPs to drive the federal party away from climate action and towards culture wars, division and attacks on women and minorities.

At the centre of it will be the foreign political party News Corp. Despite its irrelevance to mainstream Australia being demonstrated by the election result, the Murdochs will continue to wield significant influence within a purged Coalition, and the company will seize on its status as an opposition party. From yesterday, the Murdoch campaign of regime change in Australia began — it’s just that the campaign extends to the Coalition as well as a Labor government.