Social media outrages in context

OK, so in another Washington Post column which I will gift my readers, Megan McArdle writes about the recent on line controversy over an American chain restaurant offering plant based meat (as well as their regular meat menu),  and some MAGA types reacted on social media that this was outrageously "woke" and they wouldn't eat there again.

McArdle argues that the problem is that social media amplifies crank voices - what used to be a stupid opinion never used to have such a public profile, and we could all ignore easily:

Before social media, these people mostly had to share their crankery in person, unless they could get a local newspaper column or a segment on “60 Minutes.” And Americans knew how to deal with it: We nodded and smiled while Uncle Walter explained that he was never going back to Second Federal Bank because the new bank manager was German, and he hadn’t fought World War II to do his banking with a Nazi.

Then we turned to Aunt Irma and complimented her on how pretty her Jell-O mold looked.

We ignored these explosions because when we had to endure these tirades in person, we had a sense of proportion. Yes, Uncle Walter had crazy opinions. But everyone else we knew chose their bank based on where it was located, or who was offering the best interest rate on savings accounts.

Social media concentrates all the Uncle Walters in one place, where they start to seem like an army. But in fact, their numbers are still insignificant, relative to the 325 million people in the country.

This is true, and something worth remembering.

But I reckon her "calm down everyone" attitude leaves out a couple of things:

*   it's a pity she pitches it towards encouraging people to just ignore some extreme MAGA types, as if it is only liberals who over-estimate the number of nuts on the other side of politics.   For example, Right wingers get off on "Libs of Tik Tok" as if every gay teacher on there is representative of teachers as a whole.  Also, as someone said in a comment following the article:

Ok, so if a few dozen students protest a speaker at their college campus, then Megan will exercise the same sense of proportion and won’t claim that these people are threatening the very foundations of democracy. Right?

I think we know the answer to that.

*  More importantly, I reckon she's ignoring the effect of social media in the reinforcement of extreme views, because people who hold them readily a community of the like minded.   And they probably do what McArdle warns about - overestimate the size of that community - but that hardly matters, and they are not likely to be convinced of their overestimate anyway.   What's important is the mutual support in their nutty views, which help entrench them.   That's the bigger danger of social media free speech, especially in the USA, where you also have a media universe devoted to perpetual demonisation of Democrats and liberals.  This was also noted in a comment:

What happens when the cranks are on major media sites like Fox News, OANN, and they are accusing the president and the DoJ with a conspiracy to get Trump? We have a problem in this country of people who can't think in anything but in terms that the opposition is pure evil and their side is purity and light. Meanwhile, that "side" thinks of itself as purity and light is spreading lies and misinformation 24/7.

Indeed.       

The history of Trump disparaging the FBI

Philip Bump in the Washington Post (I'll gift the article) summarises the history of Trump attacking the FBI for patently political purposes. 

You know what's really sickening:  that most of the GOP politicians (even Pence, the pathetic figure still following the lead of the former boss who thought it was understandable that people wanted him to hang) see this as a good tactic too.  That's what 30 odd years of paranoid conspiracy mongering does to your judgement.  

And what about Fox News?   The Murdoch family never misses an opportunity to encourage the country to burn, presumably because there's money to be made that way.  (What other excuse is there?   Mental illness?)

As Bump writes:

Of course, there’s no reason that any Republican would need to weigh in immediately on Monday’s Mar-a-Lago search. They could simply wait and see, wait to learn why the search was executed and offer an assessment at that point.

But that’s not the culture of the modern Republican Party. Instead, there are rewards to be earned from moving quickly in casting the probe as suspect. Following an example set in part by Trump himself, GOP officials rushed to offer up products in the robust marketplace of social media commentary. The most outrageous denunciation of the search could earn more attention and more followers — and perhaps more clout. A number of people hustled to raise money off the news, including GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who suggested that angry donors contribute to the party’s Senate nominee in Georgia; J.D. Vance, a Senate candidate in Ohio; and Trump himself.

One reason that the Mar-a-Lago search might “unite [the] different factions in the party,” as a Trump aide told Politico, is that it isn’t pro-Trump but anti-FBI. Republicans from both the pro- and less-pro-Trump segments of the GOP get to express outrage at a group that Republicans are primed to distrust. Outrage at a government department that can be cast as the swamp or the Deep State or even the Elites, depending on who’s doing the casting.

Update:  Look at this.  Utterly disgraceful, how Murdoch and Fox News are basically begging the country to become ungovernable because half of it is consumed by conspiracy belief and complete demonisation of the other main political party:

Update 2:  Ah yes - the poisonous feedback loop between Murdochian media and the Republicans, who has resulted in the American Right turning into wannabe totalitarian conspiracy mongers:

 

 

 

An unexpected lead in eggs story

Gee, I would never have guessed that this was a potential issue for home gardeners in our big cities:

Backyard hens’ eggs contain 40 times more lead on average than shop eggs, research finds

Our newly published research found backyard hens’ eggs contain, on average, more than 40 times the lead levels of commercially produced eggs. Almost one in two hens in our Sydney study had significant lead levels in their blood. Similarly, about half the eggs analysed contained lead at levels that may pose a health concern for consumers.

So how do you know whether this is a likely problem in the eggs you’re getting from backyard hens? It depends on lead levels in your soil, which vary across our cities. We mapped the areas of high and low risk for hens and their eggs in our biggest cities – Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane – and present these maps here.

Our research details lead poisoning of backyard chickens and explains what this means for urban gardening and food production. In older homes close to city centres, contaminated soils can greatly increase people’s exposure to lead through eating eggs from backyard hens.

Tim, I thought you might be interested in particular...

Short notes

* Olivia Newton John's singing and movie career was hardly something I personally found terribly exciting, but there never seemed any doubt that she was a likeable and decent person in real life, given how well people who knew her spoke about her.  (She also came across very well in interviews, and celebrities who do a lot of charity work get a big tick from me too.)    So yeah, sad that she didn't get to live longer.

* Ron Howard's dramatisation of the Thai cave rescuse - Thirteen Lives - has got good reviews.  Hope I can deal with the claustrophobia aspect though.  Watching people in tiny caves can actually make me feel very uncomfortable.  

* Schrodinger believed there was only "one mind" in the universe?  I think I had probably read that before, but I'm not sure:

In 1925, just a few months before Schrödinger discovered the most basic equation of quantum mechanics, he wrote down the first sketches of the ideas that he would later develop more thoroughly in “Mind and Matter”. Already then, his thoughts on technical matters were inspired by what he took to be greater metaphysical (religious) questions. Early on, Schrödinger expressed the conviction that metaphysics does not come after physics, but inevitably precedes it. Metaphysics is not a deductive affair but a speculative one.

Inspired by Indian philosophy, Schrödinger had a mind-first, not matter-first, view of the universe. But he was a non-materialist of a rather special kind. He believed that there is only one mind in the universe; our individual minds are like the scattered light from prisms:

A metaphor that Schrödinger liked to invoke to illustrate this idea is the one of a crystal that creates a multitude of colors (individual selves) by refracting light (standing for the cosmic self that is equal to the essence of the universe). We are all but aspects of one single mind that forms the essence of reality. He also referred to this as the doctrine of identity. Accordingly, a non-dual form of consciousness, which must not be conflated with any of its single aspects, grounds the refutation of the (merely apparent) distinction into separate selves that inhabit a single world.

 

This will send Trumpers into a frenzy (or, an even deeper frenzy)

 

The Mexico question

Noah Smith has written about why Mexico economic growth is not doing better, and as usual it sounds reasonable and interesting (as are the comments following.)   

I kind of get the feeling he ought to be working in government - although I guess government is always free to subscribe to his substack and consider his analysis anyway.   (The Mexico post is free to view, by the way.)

Some American political tweets

Stuff like this makes me grind my teeth when people go on about Lefty identity politics and "cancel culture" being the real seriously dangerous ideology around at the moment.

Yep.  

I do think the way Democrats have turned the "Dark Biden" idea on its head is pretty amusing:

Slate explains it here.

For a President who millions of dimwitted Rightwingers have convinced themselves is so mentally feeble he doesn't know what's going around him, he's suddenly making serious inroads into the Jimmy Carter style impression of paralysis.    

Axios explains what the legislation achieves:

The bill includes:

• $370 billion for climate change.
• Allows the federal health secretary to negotiate the prices of certain expensive drugs for Medicare.
• Three-year extension on health care subsidies in the Affordable Care Act.
• 15% minimum tax on corporations making $1 billion or more in income. The provision offers more than $300 billion in revenue.
• IRS tax enforcement.
• 1% excise tax on stock buybacks.

The significance of the climate portion: The bill is the largest investment in clean energy and emissions cuts the Senate has ever passed, with the climate portion totaling about $370 billion, Axios' Andrew Freedman writes.

• This includes tax incentives to manufacture and purchase electric vehicles, generate more wind and solar electricity and support fledgling technology such as direct air capture and hydrogen production. 
• Independent analyses show the bill, combined with other ongoing emissions reductions, would cut as much as 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, short of the White House's 50% reduction target. However, if enacted into law, it would reestablish U.S. credibility in international climate talks, which had been flagging due in part to congressional gridlock. 

• As part of Democrats' concessions to Manchin, the bill also contains provisions calling for offshore oil lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, and a commitment to take up a separate measure to ease the permitting of new energy projects.

 And why would the Republicans think it's a good idea to keep insulin ridiculously expensive?   How are they going to sell that to the voting public?   Can't say I have even seen any attempts to justify it.

Just call it "Christian Fascism"

Max Boot in the Washington Post:

Republicans, once suspicious of government power, are now eager to use it to impose their agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, next to Trump as the most likely 2024 GOP nominee, is establishing his culture-war credentials by, most recently, suspending an elected prosecutor who vowed not to “criminalize personal medical decisions,” such as abortion or “gender-affirming healthcare.” DeSantis even threatened to investigate parents who take their kids to drag shows.

These Republican extremists are often described as the “New Right,” but the term doesn’t fit. The New Right was the movement in the 1960s-1970s that produced Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. You can argue that the New Right helped lead to the present imbroglio, but it’s hard to imagine Goldwater or Reagan flashing Viktor Orban a thumbs-up, as Trump did.

Some other term is needed. “Christian nationalism” and “nationalist conservatism” have been bandied about, but the most apt phrase for this American authoritarianism is the New Fascism, and it is fast becoming the dominant trend on the right. If the GOP gains power in Washington, all of America will be in danger of being Orbanized.

Why does he resist the term "Christian Fascism", when the  most prominent Trumpers are talking about their Christianity all the time?  

A geographically challenged movie

I tried watching Netflix's The Gray Man but had to give up after about 30 minutes.

Look, I thought for the first 10 or so minutes I was willing to go along with it - our hero seemed to have a conscience and wouldn't kill an innocent by standing kid, and the subsequent fight around fireworks going off was at least different.   

But the first warning that this movie was going off the rails was the apparent overnight trip by tuk tuk from Bangkok to Chang Mai.  Wait a minute, I thought:  isn't Chang Mai way in the middle of the country, at elevation, and no way you would make the trip overnight by tuk tuk.   And I was right - Google says it's nearly 700 km, and there are posts from Thai media apparently indicating that tourists who are thinking about copying the trip are saying "The Gray Man lied to me".   I think I saw someone saying you would more realistically allow 5 days (I assume tuk tuks are not known for good speed or climbing performance) but who knows, that might be an exaggeration in the other direction.

But then we had a terribly staged and edited CGI heavy plane flight and mid air struggle for a parachute that was completely and utterly unconvincing and mundane.   (And it started stupidly - no indication of how our hero anticipated that he was about to be stabbed by someone who had appeared to be an old friend.)   It only served to remind me of the actual quality stuntwork of Mission Impossible films, or nearly any Bond film, and how this whole sequence suffered from Marvel over-reliance on CGI, which replaces dramatic stakes with movement and colour. 

Then there was a very short shot which I am pretty sure was meant to show an Australian based quasi military hit squad of some kind getting on an aircraft - with the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the background.  As if there was a runway at Garden Island instead of a naval base.  [I double checked this last night - the Opera House is there too, so yeah, it's as if they are getting on a significantly sized military aircraft either at Woolloomooloo Wharf, or Garden Island.]   

As I said, geography is not a strong point of the film, despite it repeatedly jumping around the world.

There followed a painfully badly written bit of dialogue between our hero and a teen girl he was to protect, and I gave up.

I see that it has scored only 46% on Rottentomatoes, although a suspiciously high audience score of 91%.   Is it possible that Netflix, having allegedly spent a couple of hundred million dollars, has paid for some positive audience feedback via some PR company?  It can't be hard to organise that, surely.

Anyway, I am starting to worry about Netflix and whoever it is that is greenlighting projects.

When I think about it, the things that have been "working" for the network have been pretty original (even if I don't endorse them) - like Squid Games, The Queen's Gambit, even Stranger Things is kind of original even if deliberately 80's retro.   What about the Roma movie - a black and white family drama set in Mexico in the 1960's - pretty original. 

But when they come to recent movies, it feels mainly like very tired retreads of old movie tropes that heavily rely on star power to generate interest.   And for me, that's not enough.* 

 

*  Alert readers might think "what about The Power of the Dog, which was pretty original, but you didn't like that."  Ah well, my rationalisation for that was that it was a retread of tired Jane Campion tropes, and she's never interested me. 

Meat guilt, again...

An article in Vox about the "meat paradox":

“the meat paradox”: the mental dissonance caused by our empathy for animals and our desire to eat them.

Australian psychologists Steve Loughnan, Nick Haslam, and Brock Bastian coined the term in 2010, defining it as the “psychological conflict between people’s dietary preference for meat and their moral response to animal suffering.” We empathize with animals — after all, we are animals ourselves — but we’re also hardwired to seek calorie-dense, energy-rich foods. And for most of human history, that meant meat. 

When faced with that dissonance, we try to resolve it in a number of ways. We downplay animals’ sentience or make light of their slaughter (as Ramsay did), we misreport our eating habits (or dismiss personal responsibility altogether), or we judge others’ behavior so as to claim the moral high ground, as some of Ramsay’s commenters did (even if they likely eat meat themselves).

Someone has written a book about it:

Percival found that the meat paradox isn’t just a product of modern-day industrialized animal farming, but a psychological struggle that goes back to our earliest ancestors. Those animal carvings and cave paintings made tens of thousands of years ago? They may be more than mere caveman doodles.

“It’s partly speculative, but the case has been made by various scholars that these provide evidence of a ritual response to animal consumption which may well have been rooted in those dissonant emotions, that conflicted ethical sense,” Percival said. “There’s a profound moral dilemma posed by the killing and consumption of animal persons.”

But the meat paradox has intensified in the modern age. One of the founding studies of the meat paradox literature, Percival told me, was the one published by the psychologists Loughnan, Haslam, and Bastian in 2010. They gave questionnaires to two groups, and while the subjects filled in answers, one group was given cashews to snack on while the other group was given beef jerky. The surveys asked participants to rate the sentience and intelligence of cows and their moral concern for a variety of animals, such as dogs, chickens, and chimpanzees. 

The participants who ate the beef jerky rated cows less sentient and less mindful — and extended their circle of moral concern to fewer animals — than the group that ate the cashews.

“The act of thinking about a cow’s mental capabilities while eating a cow had created these dissonant emotions beneath the surface, which had skewed their perception in really important ways,” Percival said.

I'm dubious about our early ancestors feeling guilty about it - I suspect more that they were too hungry to care.  I suppose the point may be more that making it a ritual, and a sort of spiritual exercise (by eating all of an animal you respecting them and gain part of its essence or power) is a way of sublimating guilt.  

Anyway, I will continue as "vegan curious" as far as Youtube is concerned.  (I like watching vegans trying to make convincing meat substitutes - it's sort of sceince-y and just goes to show how much we do yearn for meat.  I'm tempted to try to make my own seitan chicken, even though I really have my doubts it tastes any good.)

 

 

Twitter humour

 

 

For the record:   I watched Blow Out on VHS in the 1980s.  I liked it. 

Hope the punitive damages are higher

This seems disappointingly low:

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1m (£3.3m) in damages after falsely claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.

Parents of a victim have been seeking at least $150m in the defamation trial against the Infowars founder.

They said they had endured harassment and emotional distress because of the right-wing host's misinformation.

Twenty children and six adults were shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.

The jury in Austin, Texas, decided compensatory damages on Thursday, and must still determine any punitive damages.

 But how many other parents are suing?  This article mentions another two cases.  That few?

Anyway, maybe this is the reason for the low figure:

“The actual damages were always going to be difficult to quantify, because they were all non-cash damages,” said Epner, a partner at the firm Rottenberg Lipman Rich PC. “They didn’t put in evidence of cash damages, not even how much was being paid for mental health services, since that’s being defrayed by Sandy Hook funds. So I wouldn’t have been surprised by a verdict that was larger than this. I’m not surprised by this verdict, which is double the amount that Jones said on stand would bankrupt him.”

Given the fact that rich idiots are donating funds to Jones, I reckon the only way to get to him is to do him for perjury, and/or contempt of court.   Why hasn't anyone been talking about contempt of court?  He needs to go to jail.

Because it's hard to trust libertarian opinion

 

Vaccination panic

Just saw this on Twitter:

 and my reaction was "Gee, for a disease for which it seems the numbers in Australia have been holding steadily low at about 50 cases for the last few weeks, that a surprisingly large number of vaccinations."   (Apparently, it's two doses, so it covers 225,000 people.  Still seems quite a lot for the people who seem mainly at risk of exposure.) 

But obviously, reading further down the thread, there are people who think this is a disastrously low number:

 

Presumably, Covid has hyper-sensitised some people into seeing every new disease outbreak, and every new vaccination scheme, as reason to hyperventilate and panic.

I don't always agree with him

I've said before that I like a lot of Noah Smith takes, but I don't agree with all of them: 

I've tried watching The Orville, on more than one occasion, and I just find it dull, dull, dull.   

And this:

I like the way that in dispute threads about LOTR, quite a few people will admit the "problem" aspects - "the prose is often clunky", or "you can just skip the poems", yet go on to defend it to death.  

The confusing world of antidepressants

Here's an interesting explanation at The Conversation about how the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression caught on, and arguing that just because the theory is wrong, there is still a case for using the serotonin influencing drugs because they do work well enough anyway.   

 

Never a more deserving self immolation

I'm referring to Alex Jones in court.   I watched this clip this morning:

 

You know the bigger thing that bothers me, though:  I saw Joe Rogan - who allegedly has a much more "rational" audience - give a quasi defence of Jones not so long ago.   Along the lines of "sure, he's made mistakes, and he's battled some addiction and mental health issues, but you know he was right on Epstein."   As if Jones is to be pitied or is a genuine truth seeker.   

Of course, I can't stand Joe Rogan, but in a way I have more concern about his influence than Jones's.

The other disturbing thing reported is how Jones called for, and has been receiving, donations:

Jones’ Bitcoin windfall roughly coincides with a string of losses in the Sandy Hook defamation case. A judge ruled on May 24 that the suit should be removed from bankruptcy protection and move to a trial in August to determine how much in damages Jones should be made to pay. Jones’ anonymous benefactor gave him roughly 206 Bitcoin worth $5 million on May 19, days in advance of that hearing and following a push for donations on Infowars. Hatewatch previously reported on the same donor delivering to Jones Bitcoin worth $1 million apiece across two separate transactions in April. 

America - land of idiots with money.

Update:

Bad covid news

I noticed an article at the ABC last week by an Australian professor who developed a heart issue after Covid infection, and it was a bit of a worry:

Last month, US researchers shared the preliminary results of a study looking at the impacts of SARS-CoV-2 infection and reinfection in a cohort of more than 5 five million American veterans.

The researchers examined the health records of more than 250,000 people who had been infected once; 36,000 people who had been infected twice; and 2,000 people who had been infected three times.

They found that for every health outcome measured, the Hazard Ratio — a measure of how often something happens in one group compared to another — increased with each COVID-19 infection.

The risk of cardiovascular disease, for example, increased after one infection, but doubled in people who had two infections, and tripled in those who had been infected thrice.

The numbers translate into 50 extra cases of heart disease per 1,000 people who've had COVID-19 twice.

Unfortunately, vaccination didn't seem to help: the cumulative risk of heart disease was indistinguishable when the researchers split people who'd received two or more COVID-19 jabs and those who hadn't been vaccinated at all.

The researchers found similar cumulative risks with each reinfection for pulmonary disease, clotting and blood disorders, neurological disease, mental health problems, kidney disease, musculoskeletal disease, fatigue, and so on.

These problems occur most frequently in the first month after infection, but can emerge up to six months later.

Soon after, I checked my own blood pressure (I have a machine at home, but the GP also checked it), and was surprised to see that it was much higher than normal.   Like, 150/95 on few occasions, although more often around 140/90.  (It has also been back in a more comfortable range sometimes - I have been checking morning, noon and night for a few days now.  Before this, and I usually would check once a month or so, I was usually at 120-125/85-90.)

Could this be due to Covid?   Google says "yes":

A total of 211 consecutive COVID-19 patients who were admitted to Parkhayat Kutahya hospital were retrospectively screened. Information was obtained from the electronic medical records and National health data registry. The study outcome was new onset of hypertension according to the Eight Joint National Committee and European Society of Cardiology Guidelines. Finally, 153 confirmed COVID-19 patients (mean age 46.5 ± 12.7 years) were enrolled. Both systolic (120.9 ± 7.2 vs 126.5 ± 15.0 mmHg, P <.001) and diastolic BP (78.5 ± 4.4 vs 81.8 ± 7.4 mmHg, P <.001) were significantly higher in the post COVID-19 period than on admission. New onset hypertension was observed in 18 patients at the end of 31.6 ± 5.0 days on average (P <.001). These findings suggest that COVID-19 increases systolic and diastolic BP and may cause new onset hypertension.

 That seems a pretty small study, but there is at least one other study indicating it  may well be right.

 There is a large American study noting that hypertension went up in a large group during the pandemic, but they talk mostly about whether it was caused by the stress and isolation (and lack of exercise) caused by the pandemic, rather than the virus directly.   But there is still suspicion:

“The disease itself may cause high blood pressure because of the interaction with certain molecules like the angiotensin-converting enzyme receptors. Moreover, many of my patients called to tell me that once they got the vaccines — especially the first dose — their blood pressure went very high, and they ended up in A&E and casualty with systolic blood pressure exceeding 200 in some of them.”

“What is also interesting is that for many of [my patients], the blood pressure did not settle down and remained high — not as high as 200, but higher than it was before. I am doing some research now to look at the effects of vaccination on blood pressure. And I have at least nine patients who had the same reaction: [their] blood pressure went up, and they ended up in casualty at St George’s [hospital].”

“Since then, there have been two publications — oneTrusted Source from Lausanne in Switzerland and the second from Italy — that describe exactly this. Especially with the BioNTech vaccine, the blood pressure goes very high. What we don’t know is why this happens and why it does not settle down,” said Dr. Antonios.

Dr. Antonios also said there could be a connection between long COVID and hypertension. However, this required more research.

 So, this is an incentive for me to actually start getting some exercise.  And drinking beet juice.   (There is a cheap juice mix which is half beet juice.  Can't hurt.)   I'll be watching my readings closely - I've got a blood pressure tracking app on my phone to help with that.

Whose nutty idea is this?

My Twitter feed is full of promoted tweets for some mad person's* idea to build a mirrored city in the Saudi desert that will look like this:

Here are some screenshots for which some graphic artist no doubt made lots of money:

 

You know what it reminds me of?  The over-the-top illustrations for O'Neill space colonies in the late 70's and 80's:

And I would say the chance of it being actually built is about the same...

*  (likely an architect who has gone on a bender after being told by a Saudi Crown Prince to dream up something different in which money is no object)

Pretty accurate