An odd mix

I haven't been paying any attention to his views, but I watched a bit of a 2018 interview with John Cleese, and was surprised to learn that:

*    he had supported a change to proportional representation voting in England, and even did videos promoting it.  (I didn't even realise there was anything in the way of campaigning for it in the UK.  And now that I Google it, he's been arguing for it for a long time.)

*   While proportional representation is seen usually as thing pushed by Lefties, he was in favour of Brexit.   He is quoted back in 2017:

UK comedy legend John Cleese has reaffirmed his position in the Brexit debate, saying that while it will be five years before we know the full outcome, he thinks leaving the European Union is the correct decision.

“I don’t want to be run by a bunch of European bureaucrats because they always look after themselves first,” he commented to Screen.

The Monty Python and Fawlty Towers star admitted that “it will be five years before we know if it was a good thing or a bad thing, or if it will be a hard of soft exit”, but added that he supported the possibility of the latter option.

Now that he is going to be turning up on GB News with an "anti-cancel culture" show, I wonder if he will be offering his 5 year mark assessment of how it's gone.

And speaking of Brexit, lots of people have been watching this video from Financial Times that sets out clearly the giant "own goal" that Brexit has been: 

When, I wonder, will libertarian types (Helen Dale, Sinclair Davidson - did Jason Soon kinda support it, I forget?) come out and admit it's a complete failure and the predictions of the Remainers have been thoroughly vindicated?

Your depressing read for the day

Although this sounds a little bit like one of those New York Times Pitchbot tweets:

The Mess in Los Angeles Points to Trouble for Democrats

the article, which I have gift linked, seems pretty balanced and was more interesting about the history of race relations in the city than I expected.   But it contains depressing stuff like this:

A series of public opinion surveys of Los Angeles residents conducted by Loyola Marymount University in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2022 suggested a recent deterioration in race relations in the city.

The Loyola study found a sharp drop in optimism concerning race relations in 2022. For example, from 2017 to 2022, the percentage of Los Angeles residents saying race relations had improved fell from 40.6 to 19.3 percent. The percentage saying relations had worsened grew from 18.0 to 38.5 percent.

Similarly, the percentage of residents saying riots were likely to happen in the near future grew from 40.8 in 2015 to 64.7 percent in 2022. From 2019 to 2022, the percentage of residents saying racial and ethnic groups were getting along well fell from 72.4 to 61.2 percent.

Metaverse humour

This was very witty, and accurate:

Trans in Singapore

I see that Noah Smith, who said he was going to visit Singapore for the first time, has cancelled that leg of his trip.  He will go there next year, though.  I am going to be disappointed if he doesn't like it.

On a whim, seeing I wrote about transgender issues today, I thought I would check what the situation is like in that country.    The Wikipedia entry indicates this:

Singapore has one of the most progressive transgender attitudes in Asia. Sex reassignment surgery is legal in the country since 1973, the first country in Asia to legalise it. A citizen of Singapore is legally permitted to change the designation of their gender on government documents through self-determination. In 1996, marriage was legalised for transgender people.^[1]

That's a little surprising, but then again, I wonder  if it might be that (as in some other countries) it's the negative attitudes towards homosexuality that leans them towards viewing trans surgery as a sort of cure for that perceived problem?  

As for the age at which this can happen (which is the most controversial issue in the West), look at this pragmatic approach from a support organisation that that just tells it like it is:

If you are under 21, you will need both your parents’ consent to start HRT. This applies even if your parents are separated, though exceptions may be made for extraordinary circumstances. HRT is not available in the Singapore public healthcare system to those under 18.

If you are presently enrolled in a local school, do be aware that trans students typically face immense challenges within the school system and are unlikely to be accommodated on issues of uniform and toilet access. You may thus have to consider options such as withholding transition until after you graduate, living as your gender only outside of school contexts, or going on HRT without social transition. (e.g. if you are a trans male student, that would mean going on T but continuing to wear the girls’ uniform and presenting as female while you are at the school. In some cases, trans people find that HRT eases their physical dysphoria enough to make social dysphoria more tolerable, although the opposite could also be possible.)

International schools are usually known to be more accommodating and even strongly supportive of transgender students, but this differs from school to school.

Those under 21 will typically have a longer and more stringent assessment process when seeking HRT through the public healthcare system. We advise you to be mentally prepared, as well as not to hold off too long if you know that you will be transitioning eventually.

Wow.  Not unsympathetic, but just advising pragmatic stoicism.  An example I wish the West could go back to.  

 

  

Will the middle ever be recovered?

It's just the most poisonous social issue on Twitter, by far:  transexual hysteria on both extremes.

I haven't yet watched all of John Oliver's episode which is a full on attack on Right wing moral panicking of the "they're coming for our children" kind in the USA.  From what little I saw, he made some good points, but also showed uncritical acceptance of a key "hot" pro-trans claim that seems very much up for debate:  the question of whether puberty blocking hormones for teens are essentially harmless (and truly reversible).   One of the biggest issues, which I have only just read about now, is how there is no doubt that the blockers during the teen years can cause serious loss of bone density, with permanent effects.   I presume the pro-trans side argue that it is manageable if monitored,  and is something fully disclosed as a risk to patients and their families; but you would have to suspect that informed consent from a young teenager who will typically (I gather)  not just have a desire to change their bodies, but also suffer depression, is a very tricky issue to be confident about.  

I strongly suspect there will be other lines that Oliver should have been more sceptical about:  such as a dismissal of the likelihood of a degree of social contagion in recent years, especially with respect to the rise in girls deciding they are trans.  

I followed a bit on the recent TERF wars in England, with Graham Norton getting a lot of praise from pro-trans people for saying people should listen to experts and families, not celebrities.  But this was after saying that "cancel culture" is really just "accountability for what people say", and I felt this was a rather weak stuff:  pretending that there isn't a serious issue from overly aggressively and censoring on line campaigns.   Then JK Rowling made comments that set off (apparently) a Twitter pile on by her supporters against Norton, which led to him cancelling his account.  Some sort of irony there. 

Rowling complains about threats of violence and rape which trans supporting extremists have made against her.   And I have to say, pro-trans people - like Greg Jericho in Australia - who refuse to acknowledge extremism on their own side of the fence are just part of the problem.

[UPDATE:  I had missed though her exact response, to Norton and something Billy Bragg said, which was this - 

 which is, to be honest, over the top in its own way.   Although, I can understand her frustration if no one on the pro-trans rights side never, ever, acknowledges that anyone on that side has made vile threats against her.] 

Rowling's key issue at the moment is the belief that it is wrong to allow any male (whether intact, or on hormones, or not) to legally have access to women's "safe" spaces by being able to simply declare he's a woman.  She is active, I take it, in the "TERF" movement to prevent that law change in Scotland.  This is the situation:

Typically, at present, successful applicants must obtain a diagnosis of gender dysphoria and must swear an oath that they have been living in their new gender for two years and that they intend to do so for the rest of their life.

They must provide one medical report outlining their diagnosis and a second detailing any relevant treatment or surgery. Other information, such as utility bills to prove how they have been living, can also be requested by the panel.

The Scottish government is proposing to relax some of these requirements, making the process "less onerous".

Under the proposals applicants would no longer need a clinical diagnosis or medical reports, and the two-year period would be reduced to three months. This would be followed, if an application was accepted, by three months for reflection before the gender recognition certificate was issued.

Cases would be handled by the Registrar General for Scotland, removing the need to apply to the panel.

Applicants would still have to swear an oath confirming that they intended to live permanently in their acquired gender, and making a false statement would be a criminal offence.

I don't see how the TERF concerns about this are controversial.  The current law seems to indicate that the change of gender normally would be for people who have been on hormone treatment for some considerable time.  I doubt that many women who were confident that a man whose testosterone has been chemically removed, so to speak, and who dresses as a woman, would be particularly concerned about him (or her, whatever) being in their toilets.   But to argue that all women in, say, a change room or (even worse) a rape refuge centre, have to accept that any fully intact, hormonally normal man in their space who simply has declared he is a woman would never represent a risk to their safety just doesn't make any common sense.   

Anyway, it's easy to despair of a middle ground ever being recovered here - although, to be honest, it's hard to convince me that JK Rowling isn't the one who is much closer to being there already.  

 UPDATE:   Oh!  I see via a video posted only 4 days ago on Youtube, and which seems credible, explains that the big, big problem many now have with Rowling is that she has appeared with, and offered support to, some very Right wing, anti-gay and anti-abortion figures, some who are supported by the worst type of Trump-ish Right wing culture warriors, as long as they align with her on the trans issues.    Apparently, there is a divide in the "TERF" world as to whether it is appropriate to ever do that, but it would seem Rowling is definitely falling on the side of "the enemy of my trans enemy is my friend", no matter how illiberal they are on other women's issues.

That really is a bad way to win an argument, at least if you claim to be a long time liberal.

Speaking of things Chinese...

I enjoyed this recent video from Religion for Breakfast that attempts to explain Daoism: 

 

For one thing: I didn't realise (or had forgotten) it had its own trinity of Gods. There is a motherly God figure too, if I recall correctly.  

Religions tend to have a hard time keeping to unique ideas, it seems...

Just a bookholder for myself

I've been puzzling about Buddhism again recently, and this article refers to the key thing that I think is very messy about it as a religion/philosophy:

Understanding Morality and No-Self in the context of Western and Buddhist Themes 

I will try to follow a couple of the links within it, to see if they help make it make any more sense....

Why the China change?

Sometimes I fear my choice in what I post might be making it seem like I'm a little bit too sympathetic to China.   I'm more puzzled by why it's gone the way it has in the last 4 or 5 years.  Noah Smith has a theory:

  And John Quiggin seems inclined to agree:

 

There's an American guy who has lived in China for 12 years, and he has a video out in which he reflects - carefully! - on what has improved and what has gotten worse about the country since he has been there.  It seemed reasonably balanced to me, even if he does complain about Western media bias giving false impression:  

Mind you, maybe Western media coverage would be better if journalists weren't treated like they are always out to harm the country and have to be tracked and monitored like they are all spies and enemies of the State.

Some champagne sarcasm here...

 

Not a RRR fan

So, that Indian Netflix movie RRR has attracted a lot of positive reviews in the USA and elsewhere, and I thought I would give it a go, given my general fondness for good foreign content.

I knew it was not going to be realistic; I knew it was going to be over-the-top and rather silly in a Bollywood way at times.   And I thought for the first 30 minutes or so that maybe I would enjoy it.

But it wore me down and I gave up at the half way mark.  I wasn't expecting the intense cartoonishness of so much of it;  the extremities of anti-colonialism in the English characters' acting and dialogue that made the cringe aspects of the Titanic screenplay sound like Shakespeare; or the unexplained motivations of the lead character, who I presume redeems himself by the end, but in the giant action sequence in the middle (the one where scores of CGI animals are running rampant in the colonial mansion) is prepared to beat his former friend to a pulp in order to gain a promotion.   Another thing  that continually bothered me was how the locations felt so inauthentic - it looked far too much like it was mostly filmed in a giant studio set, and now that I check, a lot of it was actually filmed in bits of Europe.     

So no, it didn't get my seal of approval, and I am a bit puzzled as to why so many people do like it.   If you are into film for OTT action, I think any good kung fu film has more "authentic" feeling. 

A balanced take on a complicated issue

Oh, Science has a good balanced article on the difficult question of whether young people should continue getting COVID boosters, over the issue of possible heart damage from mRNA vaccines.   The basic problem is the great difficulty in getting accurate risk/benefit analysis for a problem that may or may not cause symptoms in both the vaccinated and people who get COVID.  

Now, I know I criticised that Florida Surgeon General for this last week - and a case could be made from this article that maybe his conclusion was correct - or at least one that has a lot more support than I knew. But nonetheless, he obviously approached the problem from a highly politicised, grandstanding, point of view, and with evidence that was not properly detailed.  This was damaging the interests of public health in the long run.    

Wasteful competition

So there is a fair amount of talk about Joe Biden taking an aggressive approach to stopping China getting ahead with its technology, particularly chip manufacturing:

U.S. officials pushed to choke off China’s access to critical semiconductor technology after internal debates and tough negotiations with allies.

Noah Smith also has a long post about it, and even the (far too Right wing) guy who has taken over from Allahpundit at Hot Air finds he has to reluctantly praise Biden for this.

I guess my feeling is not that this is a mistake - just that it's a great pity that at a time you really want the globe to be working together towards significant goals, it's instead being set up now for time-and-resource-wasting duplication of technological effort for a decade or two until there is some new  realignment of mutual Western and Chinese interests.    

I noticed when shopping for a tablet in Singapore recently that Huawei still seemingly has (or is trying to maintain) a significant market there, with tablets, phones and (I think) small laptop-ish things (like Microsoft Surface.)   They all had brilliant screens, I know that much.  But no Google apps - the special Huawei ecosystem instead. (Interestingly, recent surprise survey results indicated that Singapore has weirdly - for a very capitalist country - positive feelings towards China and Xi.  I wonder if that makes them particularly inclined to give Huawei products a go, more so than everywhere else.   I do have lingering doubts, just based on a hunch, really, that the Huawei 5G ban was not well justified.) 

As far as I can tell, China has done well with high speed trains;  they are (with very little attention from the West) building a smallish but significant space station.  (According to this article, it's about 20% as massive as the ISS, and is expected to be used for at least a decade.)   They are perhaps catching up somewhat in aviation, with their first significant home grown passenger jet just getting off the ground now.

So overall, they do some pretty remarkable stuff with some pretty sophisticated technology, and it seems such a pity that instead of a global market for all technology, we seem destined to a prolonged period of two global hubs of competing technology, with little cross over.

I guess it means industrial espionage is going to be bigger than ever before, too.   At least that provides some drama and good movie plots, though.  (Trying to find the upside here.  Well, apart from the obvious one that it should presumably make their weaponry less effective?   But I want the other good stuff they can do, too.)

 

Bourdain considered

There's an article at Slate talking about the new biography, somewhat controversial for its "warts and all" approach, of the late Anthony Bourdain.   This section sounds to me like an accurate take on his appeal:

It reads as if it were written in 1999, the year that Bourdain’s life changed as a result of the publication of “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” the sensational New Yorker article that became the basis for his bestselling book, 2000’s Kitchen Confidential.

Leerhsen likes to hover over this turning point, a time when Bourdain, 43, was living with his first wife, Nancy, in a shabby Manhattan apartment where they once left a Christmas tree lying on its side for nine months. Bourdain worked as a middling chef at a middling restaurant, and Nancy spent most of her time watching Court TV. The pair were recognizable New York types, stunned remnants of the bohemian heyday of the East Village, former junkies clinging to the fringes of a city that was rapidly shedding its grit. The haut-bourgeois exaltation of chefs and restaurants was both a symptom of this transformation and the condition that made Bourdain’s midlife success possible. He was a funny, earthy iconoclast, dishing the dirt on what went on behind the scenes at the eateries that were increasingly central to New York’s culture. Most gifted chefs are meticulous and imperious, not qualities that make for charismatic personalities. Bourdain, however, was more like a musician, specifically the kind of downtown rock ’n’ roller who once played CBGB. He wanted to become “the culinary equivalent of the Ramones.”

Bourdain’s old-timey hipness is a primary source of fascination for Leerhsen, who compares him to Frank Sinatra in an extended passage in the book’s prelude: Each is “the epitome of cool, a sad-smiling Jersey boy who combined supremely high standards with the under-appreciated art of not giving a shit in ways that seemed to excite both sexes. You wanted either to be him or to do him, especially if you’d heard the gossip about his gargantuan member.” (OK, that last line is pretty lurid, but the subject never comes up again!) Leerhsen’s Bourdain was a swashbuckling “renegade” drawn to the piratical culture of restaurant kitchens and sworn to a code of authenticity that, despite his age, seems quintessentially Gen X. His drinking and smoking and his past history of drug use were badges of this street cred. “When traveling for his show,” Leerhsen writes, Bourdain “never dealt with official tourist agencies because he disdained the authorized version of things; he balked at the word ‘brand.’ ” As a kid, Bourdain rebelled against what he once described as “the smothering chokehold of love and normalcy in my house,” which, along with the bland comforts of his suburban upbringing, irked him simply because they were bland and suburban and therefore phony.

Nothing a well aimed torpedo wouldn't cure

I'm joking, of course:  I wouldn't want the staff, nearly all of whom would be nicer people from the Philippines, to suffer.

Anyway, this is a despatch from long time Catallaxy character:

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Beare says:

October 17, 2022 at 11:22 am

There are a lot of Republicans on this cruise, not surprising due to the demographic of older and spending it, and when we start talking to people the anger at what is happening in the US is palpable.

One woman today said to me she didn’t like Donald Trump ‘as a person’ but she sure as hell developed a liking now for ‘his polices and the way he got things done’. She and her husband both thought the 2020 election was rigged. However that’s just one demographic, and people express plenty of concern for the hand-out mentality of many younger Americans now. There’s a terrible sadness in these older generations about it and the decline of their country.

Rather as many of us in Australia also feel, we told them.

Discussion started with this woman and her husband when Hairy mentioned we’d had two years in Australia with no immigrants. We can give you a few, the woman dourly commented.

I used to toy with the idea of going on cruise for the experience, and I have watched a lot of Youtube videos from people who now make a living by reviewing their cruises.  But thinking about the politics of most of the people on board, at least on a US passenger heavy cruise, is kind of off putting. 

I have commented to friends before:  if there was a cruise line which specialised in catering to men (OK, OK - people - but let's be honest, it's going to be many more nerdy men than women who would like this) with a technical interest in how the massive operations are run, I would be all in on that.  Like, being able to wander up to the bridge anytime you want, and get explanations of their navigation systems, or guided tours of the engine room, kitchens, and all other "hidden" workspaces - that would be interesting.  

But just stuffing yourself full of food and drink all the time with the occasional brief shore excursion - not sure anymore how much fun I would get out of it.    

 

A very small element of truth, but too much excuse making

Megan McArdle, who I count as a far from reliable commentator, writes in the Washington Post (I'll gift the link) about why she thinks attacks on Trump tend to (somewhat counter-intuitively) only boost his support in his base.

I mean, one might say something like "that's how cults work", and "hey, Megan, perhaps you should consider the effect of nightly brainwashing sessions by Fox News", but she writes this:

It’s such a fascinating moment, and not just because it so neatly encapsulates the evolution of Republican politics in the Trump era. It also suggests a reason for why that politics is so effective — and why mainstream Washington’s frantic attempts to anathematize the Trumpian style might paradoxically have increased its appeal.

I was part of those mainstream efforts; I spent years arguing that Trump’s impulsivity and his savage attacks on everyone from Gold Star parents to those with physical disabilities ought to have disqualified him from high office. Like most of my colleagues in the media, I was astonished to find that this only made his voters love him more. Many observers concluded that this must be because Trump’s voters were simply awful bigots who loved meanness for its own sake. (“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer wrote in 2018 for the Atlantic.)

Presumably, they’re right in some cases; there are bad apples in any large political movement. But as I’ve watched Trumpy candidates and spoken to Trumpy voters, I’ve begun to wonder whether there isn’t another point that we’ve been missing.

Trump voters are famously convinced that establishment Republicans sold them out — and there is a grain of truth to their belief. As political consultant David Shor noted in March, the median voter is center-left on entitlements but right-wing on immigration, yet for years an “ideological cartel” of educated journalists and political professionals kept that combination off the table for either party.

Trump got elected by promising to break up the cartel. But many politicians make such promises — almost all of them, in fact. Then they get to Washington and turn into boringly normal politicians.

There are structural reasons for that — Washington is too big and complicated for any one person to reform, so delivering for your voters inevitably means accommodating yourself to dysfunctional bureaucracy and uninspiring compromise. But to the voters, it looked as though their fiery outsiders had been seduced into betraying their promises by the infamous lure of the Georgetown cocktail-party circuit.

Though Trump voters had grown cynical about such promises, they trusted Trump to follow through. In part that’s because he was a billionaire, which meant, they thought, that he didn’t need to sell out for a plush lobbying job. But looking back, it seems that Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric was also serving as a kind of insurance policy for those voters: Having made himself a pariah with the establishment, Trump couldn’t sell out even if he had wanted to.

Trump’s norm violations functioned as what game theorists call a “credible commitment,” enabling voters to trust him even if he wasn’t particularly trustworthy. And ironically, the establishment boosted that signal by proving that we considered him utterly anathema, absolutely beyond the pale. We thought we were helping to minimize the threats Trump posed to the system, but the very vehemence of our rejection might actually have increased his power.

The problem with this type of analysis is that it takes us further down the "normalisation of anti-democractic fascism" path.  And it avoids what is really the heart of the problem - the cowardice and lust for power of pathetic Republican leadership who have let Trump walk all over them, and will not tell the truth to the voters who they know believe any old BS that comes out of Trump's mouth.

It's like Meagan is insisting "you just can't tell the truth to these people.  You just have to live with that".  

 

 

White voter problem

 It's surprising to see the racial voting divide set out so clearly, from a piece in Wapo:

A clear majority of White Americans keeps backing the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, even though the Republican Party is embracing terrible and at times antidemocratic policies and rhetoric. The alliance between Republicans and White Americans is by far the most important and problematic dynamic in American politics today.

Non-Hispanic White Americans were about 85 percent of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, much larger than the 59 percent of the U.S. population overall in that demographic. That was similar to 2016, when White voters were about 88 percent of Trump backers. It is very likely that White Americans will be more than 80 percent of those who back Republican candidates in this fall’s elections.

The political discourse in America, however, continues to ignore or play down the Whiteness of the Republican coalition. In 2015 and 2016, journalists and political commentators constantly used terms such as “Middle America” and “the working class” to describe Trump’s supporters, as though the overwhelming Whiteness of the group was not a central part of the story. In this year’s campaign cycle, recent articles, in The Post and in other outlets, have highlighted Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s supposed weaknesses with Black voters. This is a strange framing. It is likely that more than 70 percent of White voters in Georgia will back Abrams’s Republican opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp, but fewer than 20 percent of the state’s Black voters will vote for the incumbent. If Kemp wins reelection, it will be because of White Georgians, not Black ones.

If you unite both sides, you're doing it wrong

Unfortunately, not a good point being made by normally sensible David. 

He seems to have stopped ageing about 35 years ago

He's 82:

 Had some "work" I would guess.  Still looks remarkably good for his age.

This was ridiculous

I don't think this got the amount of ridicule it deserved:

 

 I mean, of course stories about AI development are interesting, but this was a silly stunt.   

In a groundbreaking hearing, a robot “gave evidence” to a House of Lords committee on Tuesday – where it read typos from its pre-written script, struggled to hear questions, and needed to be rebooted halfway through the session.

“Ai-Da”, described by its creator, Aiden Meller, as “the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist”, appeared in front of the Lords communications and digital committee as part of its inquiry into the future of the creative industries in the UK.

The chair of the committee, Tina Stowell, emphasised at the outset that it was “a serious inquiry”, before explaining to Meller that “the robot is providing evidence but it is not a witness in its own right, and it does not occupy the same status as a human. You as its creator are ultimately responsible for its statements”.

A relatively close black hole

This was in Science last month:

Unless they’re belching up stars or rippling spacetime in a partnered dance, light-trapping black holes are notoriously difficult to spot. But a new proposed discovery of a dormant black hole may help unveil a population lurking in the darkness, New Scientist reports. Because the object emits no light, astronomers detected it by studying the warped orbit and spectrum of a nearby Sun-like star using the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope and multiple ground-based observatories. The black hole candidate (artist’s impression of a different black hole, above), dubbed Gaia BH1, is 10 times the mass of the Sun and a mere 1500 light-years away—three times closer to Earth than the next known neighbor, researchers report on the arXiv preprint server last week. The long orbital period and proximity make this black hole a prime target to study the physics of these invisible enigmas, which could help scientists identify many more examples in the two remaining data releases from Gaia.

Update:  Oh, just a minute.  In 2020 I posted about a black hole that might only be 1000 light years away.