Not a good idea

Yeah, I have to admit, I don't understand why Biden staffers would think it's a good idea for him to be interviewed by the transgender guy (comedian?) whose Tik Tok act is to parody "girl" behaviour.   Biden's comments in the interview were not unreasonable, but I think you still have to be careful about who you are seen with when buying into the trans culture wars.   I mean, the American Right take this very seriously - and while they are wrong in much of their response, it doesn't help move them into any more reasonable takes if those on the activist side are so hard to understand.   (To take an Australian example - I have read mad old Cassie at Catallaxy say she has no great problem with Cate McGregor - who transitioned as a mature adult and whose behaviour and appearance could not be said to resemble a parody of feminine behaviour.  Same with that trans former golf pro, whose name I forget.   Conservatives don't have that big a problem with trans who transition later in life and act conservative and respectful of "traditional" feminity.)  

As for the other big trans news item in recent days:  I am reluctant to spend too much time on the matter of Jordan Gray (first time I'd heard of him*) doing a live strip to display his breast/penis combination on Channel 4 in England.   His song performance reminded me very much of Tim Minchin, with its intense crudity overlaying an obvious talent - but the intention behind the appallingly bad taste lyrics remains unclear to me.   Was it meant to be satirical of transgender self promotion as being "better than normal"?  I think so - but if you then strip to show off your trans body on national TV, it seems a case of "sorry, not sorry", doesn't it?   

It did get me thinking of the ways in which male nudity can be seen to be funny - it's often just the unexpectedness of it, especially if its from a character you would never think of in the undressed state.  (I am thinking of some TV show, a long time ago, in which that JJJ Sandman character suddenly appeared nude on stage.)   But this Gray incident had an obvious political and advocacy motive, taking the "just innocent fun" aspect out of it, at least to those of us who have a lot of trouble understanding this issue and who feel there is an extreme element that has set up a cultural divide that's becoming harder and harder to find common ground with.  

It also reconfirmed to my mind - England has become a very strange place.  [Here I am, in 2010, complaining about the decline in British media culture.]

*  I didn't even realise I wrote "him" - perhaps it was under the influence of assuming a body which has just been displayed on TV with a penis is indeed a "him". 

On new religions

I knew about Manichaeism a little from remembering that St Augustine has attacked it a lot (I had sort of forgotten he was a former follower), but this great explanation from Religion for Breakfast enlightened me as to how eccentric some of its beliefs were.  (It's the talking vegetables that really threw me!)

 

But beyond the whole vegetable issue, which seems almost to be a way a priest class could get food delivered to them for free, the religion seems to have had no great problematic elements, and represented a real effort towards a syncretic amalgamation of two or three of the then current great religions.  (Christianity was still finding its way at the time, though.)

The thing is, I feel broadly sympathetic towards syncretic religions, while at the same time somewhat  bemused by how someone goes about inventing a new religious explanation of the universe without feeling any hesitation about how they are, well, just making stuff up.   

I mean, one can be cynical and say that the creators of new religions are usually just self interested con men (*cough* L Ron Hubbard, and - probably - Joseph Smith), but it feels harder to see other creators of big religions as being as self interested as them.   I suppose dreaming up stories under the influence of hallucinogens, or actual mental illness, is one way of explaining it.  Or - possibly - followers who take something more seriously than the originator? 

In my lifetime, if you accept that Scientology is not exactly taking over the world, there seems to be a distinct lack of successful innovation in syncretic new religions.   Perhaps George Lucas had a chance here, with the Force, but as I have said before, he really blew the potential by being thoroughly inconsistent in the approach to it in his invented universe.   No doubt, he would say he doesn't see it as desirable to be the inadvertent creator of a new religion, and I get that.   But I still think it's a bit of a pity, the way the world's old religions are going... 

I bet the nurse votes Trump, too

The person who tweeted this is from New York, it seems. Although exactly where this happened is not clear.

Podcasting noted

Comparison noted

Nobody likes her

Lidia Thorpe, I mean.  She's a clear liability to the Greens, and even Marcia Langton can't stand her:

Lidia Thorpe should not remain Greens’ Indigenous spokesperson, Marcia Langton says

Langton went on to say she did not think it was appropriate that Thorpe remains the Green’s spokesperson for Indigenous Australians, adding Thorpe had shown a “significant lack of judgement” and that the Greens should largely ditch their current set of policies....

They have chosen a person with apparently no common sense or an inability to understand the rules and a willingness to break the rules. I despair that because people like Adam Bandt must surely be thinking or perhaps trying to give the impression that all Aboriginal people are like Senator Thorpe and that’s simply not the case.

Here's my previous post about how she does not get on with other activists.

Let's not pretend bugs are the future

Look, I know they're idiots, but sometimes, it just doesn't pay to feed them propaganda opportunities regardless of the truth behind the matter.

I'm referring to the now common wingnut meme "the Green Left wants us to eat bugs and insects instead of meat - it's disgusting and I'm not doing it!".  This is being pushed along with stories like this:

Aldi considers selling edible INSECTS to help families through the cost-of-living crisis

    Aldi is considering introducing a line of edible insect recipe kits in its UK stores

and people like that professional whiny moron Paul Joseph Watson is all over it, posting videos in his  intensely grating style of performative politics.  

We can try to argue with them with reason:  that there are many countries in the world in which kids and adults are happy to eat fried or raw bugs - your "yuck" reaction is a cultural thing that can, no doubt, change over time.   (They can try to counter - and I am seeing this - "but insects carry dangerous parasites"; to which I suppose one can respond "if you eat sushimi, you run the risk of getting parasites, but I don't see you worried about that."  Etc.)

In any event, given the bigger picture here, which is surely that the West turning to bug farming is rather unlikely to be a significant replacement for eating cows, pigs and sheep in anything like a near term future, why give the wingnuts potential propaganda fodder in the first place?    It just makes their "job" too easy.

I know, you get all these studies and claims about how much better for the environment eating insects would be - but surely it just isn't going to scale easily both in terms of how quickly you can change public perception, and how much replacement protein you can expect to grow quickly as a total percent of human protein consumption.   Even in the long term future, I reckon vat grown microbial derived protein has a much bigger prospect of being a significant global source of human protein than bug farming.

 In the near term, getting people to move to a vegetarian diet supplemented with eggs and the most sustainable forms of seafood should be a relatively simple exercise and have significant benefits.  As we have seen, with sales growth stalling, getting people to eat more of the good quality, plant based fake meats is a big enough task, let alone getting them to eat powdered mealworms, or whatever.  

Well intentioned people should just stop pretending that trying to sell insect consumption is a worthwhile exercise.

 

New York considered

This Cash Jordan New York real estate guy seems pretty famous, but I've only occasionally watched his videos, because All Knowing Google suggested it.  However, this one is pretty interesting - looking at the odd situation New York finds itself in.  (Namely, lots of commercial space still vacant because COVID forced businesses to realise that work from home is perfectly do-able now, but residential rents are higher than ever, and general cost of living is up.   As well as a general concern that crime is rising and not being adequately responded to.   I don't really understand how that combination of factors works - I mean, the relationship between empty office space but high residential rent especially.) 

 

There are some people in comments making the point that New York used to be much more dangerous than it is now, but it's still never great to see a place going backwards in terms of perception of safety.

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.)