Oh my - Gingrich says something (partly) true

Axios reports that Newt Gingrich has written a column which tells Republicans to stop underestimating Joe Biden:

Republicans must learn to quit underestimating President Joe Biden....

The clarity of winning and losing creates a clarity of analysis about who is doing well and who isn’t.

If you apply that simple model to Biden, you realize how well he is doing by his own definition of success....

...conservatives’ hostility to the Biden administration on our terms tends to blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms. He has only built upon and fortified the left-wing Big Government Socialist woke culture system.

We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats....

....Biden and his team executed a strategy of polarizing Americans against Donald Trump supporters.

Of course, Gingrich would never admit, or perhaps see?, his own key role in the nutty polarisation on the Right (as shown in his own language repeated here - about the "Big Government Socialist(s)" that he wants his followers to believe all Democrats are) which has led to Donald Trump, and the inability to reason with his cult supporters.   And it's a bit rich that he's now suggesting that maybe people should stop saying that Biden is suffering dementia - if he hasn't suggested it himself before on Fox News (I don't know if he has, as I did find one link to an article from 2019 where he said media should stop baselessly speculating on politicians' health) he knows that it is his favourite media outlet which has repeated this endlessly during the Biden administration. 

 

 

 

A complicated life

I always had the feeling that AN Wilson is a somewhat interesting character, and not your typical conservative.   

This review of his new memoir (which only covers half of his life) indicates my hunch was correct.   How's this for a start:

“Confessions” opens with a sorrowful portrait of Wilson’s ex-wife, Oxford don Katherine Duncan-Jones, as she gradually descends into dementia: “It is hard to see how you can still believe in a soul when you have seen unraveling on that pitiless scale.” As an undergraduate, the 20-year-old Wilson wed the decade-older Elizabethan scholar because a baby — the future translator of Homer — was on the way. Each was actually in love with someone else. “In the first two years we were married we spent hours and hours weeping, and wishing we had not married.” Nonetheless, the couple stayed unhappily together until Wilson reached his late 30s, when this memoir ends.

During his Oxford days, Wilson began wearing his hallmark uniform — a three-piece suit, which he wryly refers to as his “A.N. Wilson outfit.” It was Duncan-Jones, he writes, “who urged me always to wear a suit, all those years ago, citing [classicist Maurice] Bowra, his eye darting up and down the gray flannels and sports coat of a Wadham Fellow, barking, ‘Why are you dressed as an undergraduate?’” Consequently, throughout the 1970s and ’80s Wilson was viewed as a Tory, a young fogy. That he was exceptionally thin — for a period he suffered from anorexia because of stress and “marital sadness” — only contributed to this conservative image. Yet he was hardly a fan of Margaret Thatcher:

“The paradoxes of political upheaval make the Muse of History appear to be the eternal satirist. … The so-called Conservatives, far from conserving, carved up Britain with motorways, polluted its farmland with dangerous chemicals and, in their avarice, destroyed all that had made up Britain’s wealth in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution, namely technical skills, exercised in innumerable fields.”

Let me do a bit of "both sides-ing"

First, a spectacularly embarrassing look for the top Fox News/MAGA crowd:

And now for the other side of the culture wars.  I have mentioned Prof Sandy O'Sullivan before, who I don't follow on Twitter, but someone else I follow does, hence I keep seeing their tweets.  And Twitter keeps suggesting I should follow "them".

"Them" because this is the byline:

Challenging gender binaries is anti-colonial work. Aboriginal trans/non-binary/queer/kin & Professor of Indigenous Studies @Macquarie_U   ARC Future Fellow  

Now, I like to think I'm pretty tolerant of universities having humanities schools which can have characters stuck in esoteric areas of research that interest few.   I mean, I'm pretty interested in philosophy as a field, and a lot of that has been spinning its wheels and going nowhere for some time. 

But boy (or "non binary"), I'm pretty sure that if ever you want feelings of "what an extraordinary sheltered workshop and mutual admiration society of academia these people have built for themselves" to feel fully justified, I strongly recommend reading their twitter feed.   

This week, for example, Sandy keep posting tweets about the "Digital Intimacies" conference being held at Macquarie.  I can give you a taste:

 

You get the idea?   Sorry, I found it hard to stop, because nearly every tweet seemed to be asking for ridicule for being such obvious examples of the type of academic endeavour that seems so - what's the word? - introverted? and self serving, mainly in the interests of just providing jobs for the boys (and girls and non binaries.)  

And, I should add, it's not that there aren't areas of interest to them that are worth studying, if you want to see some practical changes, like the safety of indigenous sex workers, or something.  But it's the invention of the terminology which really grates, and gives the strong suspicion that mostly, it's just about writing papers for each other to swoon over.  (Or in some cases, bitch about for not including the "non binary" adequately.)   A bit like blockchain advocates at RMIT!

Update:  another subject covered at the mini conference - 

 

I have no problem with this trailer...

 

I see that one of the main anti-woke movie and TV critics of Youtube (with whom, I have to reluctantly say, I actually kinda/sorta agree.  At least sometimes.  And maybe only broadly, if not always specifically.  While holding my nose at the idea he probably supports Trump and believes BS about Biden) - The Critical Drinker - has complained that there seems to be time travel in the story, as if that is going to ruin it.   Many of his followers seem to agree.

But seriously - if your fictional universe includes the reality of God and (apparently) other gods, supernatural entities in the service of God, eternal life, and aliens as universe artefact collectors, it seems a case of straining at a gnat to then have a big problem with time travel.   (And come to think of it, one other successful franchise, Men in Black, incorporated it perfectly well.) 

Vat sushi

Hmmm:

 

Although I remain very skeptical of how beef or chicken meat grown from cells in a vat can be converted into something with the same texture as the muscle fibres we eat from those animals,  I can imagine how it should be easier to copy the simpler texture of raw fish with vat grown cells. 

This company is still just doing it experimentally.  I don't know if the nutrient broth the cells need to grow in is simpler than that needed for mammalian meat - but I presume it would be.   But I still have my doubts that it is ever likely to be a cheaper or better way of doing it than aquaculture.

Controlling weevils must be harder than I knew

My goodness, I learn some unusual things by watching CNA.   I had no idea at all about the fumigation of rice being a thing, and especially that they have to keep re-fumigating it while it's in storage:

Singapore's largest rice stockpile contractor is using its own patented tech to defend against bugs. Rice sacks had to be fumigated every five weeks previously, but they can now be kept for up to a year. Singapore Storage & Warehouse houses its grains in these boxes that can keep oxygen levels inside low. This is crucial because insects like weevils need oxygen to survive. Currently, only half of the pallets in the company's rice storage warehouse are enclosed in these boxes. The firm plans to scale up and cover its entire inventory.

Here's the short video about it (and man, what a clean looking facility for rice storage):

Here's an Australia site that talks about using the poison gas phosphine to fumigate all grains.

Guess I had no idea that one of our basic foodstuffs needed so much exposure to poisons.    

Seems to be sort of thing that might attract rumours of danger to health from time to time.   And yes, it does -  here's a story from the Bangkok Post in 2013 about how rumours spread on the net about over-fumigated rice being unsafe to eat.   

Kind of makes me wonder why I haven't spotted a weevil in any foodstuff for many a year.  They are obviously pretty hard to control. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I still doubt that the reasons for the speed of the change are really well understood, but it was fast:

Compared to the decades and decades it took to dismantle Jim Crow laws or secure women's right to vote, America's about-face on same-sex marriage happened in the blink of an eye.

The big picture: Just 27% of Americans supported same-sex marriage in 1996, the year President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal recognition to same-sex marriages.

• That's flipped on its head: 71% now tell Gallup that same-sex and opposite-sex marriages should have the same legal recognition.

Driving the news: The Senate voted 61-36 on Tuesday to codify the rights to same-sex marriage and interracial marriage into federal law. The House is expected to quickly follow.

• Twelve Senate Republicans voted for the bill. All 36 no votes came from Republicans.

 

Pathological liars considered

Interesting article in the New York Times about one example of a guy who compulsively lies, as a mental health type problem that he recognises.  I will gift the link, but here are some interesting parts:

In 1891, the German psychiatrist Anton Delbrück coined the term pseudologia fantastica to describe a group of patients who, to impress others, concocted outlandish fabrications that cast them as heroes or victims.

That argument is advanced in a new book by the psychologists Drew A. Curtis and Christian L. Hart, who propose adding a new diagnosis, Pathological Lying, to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Psychiatry, they argue, has long misidentified this subset of patients. Rather than “dark, exploitative, calculating monsters,” they argue, pathological liars are “often suffering from their own behavior and unable to change on their own.” These liars, the psychologists argue, could benefit from behavioral therapies that have worked with stuttering, nail-biting and trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder....

Just before his fabrications were exposed, Mr. Massimine checked into a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with a cluster B personality disorder, a syndrome which can feature deception and attention-seeking. For many of the people close to him, a diagnosis made all the difference.

 More generally on the topic:

In 2010, when researchers from Michigan State University set out to calculate how often Americans lied, they found that the distribution was extremely skewed.

Sixty percent of respondents reported telling no lies at all in the preceding 24 hours; another 24 percent reported telling one or two. But the overall average was 1.65 because, it turned out, a small group of people lied a lot.

This “small group of prolific liars,” as the researchers termed it, constituted around 5.3 percent of the population but told half the reported lies, an average of 15 per day. Some were in professions, like retail or politics, that compelled them to lie. But others lied in a way that had no clear rationale.

This was the group that interested Dr. Curtis and Dr. Hart. Unlike earlier researchers, who had gathered data from a criminal population, the two psychologists set about finding liars in the general public, recruiting from online mental health forums. From this group — found “in mundane, everyday corners of life,” as Dr. Hart put it — they pieced together a psychological profile.

These liars were, as a whole, needy and eager for social approval. When their lies were discovered, they lost friends or jobs, which was painful. One thing they did not have, for the most part, was criminal history or legal problems. On the contrary, many were plagued by guilt and remorse. “I know my lying is toxic, and I am trying to get help,” one said.

This profile did not line up with the usual psychiatric view of liars, who are often diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder, a group seen as manipulative and calculating. This misidentification, the authors argue, has led to a lack of research into treatments and a general pessimism that habitual liars are capable of change.

 

 

 

The weirdening

A good article at New Republic:

Elite Conservatives Have Taken an Awfully Weird Turn
As it leaves behind American values, has the right gotten too strange to win elections? 

Some sections:

The right is getting weirder. That might begin to cost Republicans elections in years to come and undermine their own appeals to American patriotism in a way policy extremism alone could not. American voters see the political parties as equally extreme in policy, ignoring evidence that Republicans have moved right much faster than Democrats have moved left. However, a party fixated on genital sunning, seed oils, Catholic integralism, European aristocracy, and occultism can alienate voters not because of its positions but because of how it presents them—and itself. Among the right’s intellectual avant garde and media elites, there is a growing adoption of habits, aesthetics, and views that are not only out of step with America’s but are deliberately cultivated in opposition to a national majority that the new right holds in contempt.  

This is a different—though parallel—phenomenon from the often raucous, conspiratorial personality cult that surrounds Donald Trump and his devoted base. This new turn has predominantly manifested among the upper-class and college-educated right wing. Indeed, as Democratic strategist David Shor noted, as those with college degrees become more left leaning, the remaining conservatives have gotten “really very weird.” In this well-off cohort, there exists a mirror of the excesses often attributed to the college-educated left, fairly or unfairly: an aversion to mainstream values and an extreme militancy....

The elite educated right has moved even beyond the overt pessimism of Donald Trump’s “American carnage”—now disgust with equitable citizenship, personal liberty, and democratic self-governance is commonplace. Fed by an endless outrage cycle and a motivated and well-resourced donor class willing to pour money into increasingly reactionary think tanks like the avowedly anti-democratic Claremont Institute, right-wing thinkers and activists have begun to identify the foundational pillars of the United States itself with immorality and adopted a new fascination with medieval Catholicism and imported European extremisms. Today, the right has shed its American and conservative roots and seeks a radical shift—a national “refounding.” Indeed, leading right-wing intellectuals like John Daniel Davidson have said that “the conservative project has failed” and that people like them constitute the educated vanguard of a “revolutionary moment.”  ....

John Gibbs, a Republican nominee for a Michigan swing seat, founded a think tank that argued for overturning the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The country, he said, had “suffered” from women’s suffrage. He narrowly lost his bid. Blake Masters and J.D. Vance—two Republican candidates for Senate funded in part by tech billionaire and new-right linchpin Peter Thiel—have embraced new-right ideas and actively courted the “weird right.” Vance has questioned whether women should leave violent marriages; Masters has praised domestic terrorist Theodore Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto, argued against legal access to contraception, and openly said that democracy is a smokescreen for the masses “stealing certain kinds of goods and redistributing them as they see fit.” (Americans on balance like democracy; legal contraception is almost universally popular; and Kaczynski’s unpopularity is so widely assumed that pollsters rarely ask about him.) Masters, perhaps unsurprisingly, lost his bid to unseat Mark Kelly, and Vance badly underperformed in his blood-red home state. 

 You do see such views turning up in the post Catallaxy comments, a lot.  So it's not just the "elites".

As I've been saying for about 12 years now, but still good to see I'm not alone

A culture war story that has a point

Since Allahpundit left, Hot Air has become much more Right wing culture war-y and less worth visiting.  But this story seems to me to have a point:   a prominent and (shall we say, distinctive looking) Biden appointee who is a transgender, gender fluid person has been charged with a theft of a kind that really makes it sound like he (gawd, they) may well have some mental health issues.  (Hot Air complains that the main stream media is giving it no prominence - although I wonder if that may change.)

And look, I do often think that if the social media of some trans personalities is chock full of selfies and an ongoing commentary on their feelings, it reads as a plea for approval (which many trans fans are often more than willing to give) and a sign of potentially serious degree of insecurity.   (Sorry to be ageist, but this particularly applies if you are of mature age - selfie obsession in the younger is one thing, but in anyone over 40 I find harder to handle.)  Perhaps you could say "well, the way broader society treats them, they have reason to feel insecure".   Yeah, I get that point - but there are some trans identities who don't conduct themselves that way, and just do it for themselves without the need for continual reassurance. 

It's the paradox that you can see in anyone with an insecurity about anything:  if you want others to treat you as just an average person, asking every day for reassurance that you are OK is not the way to achieve it.   And it's not as if all insecurity is a concern - but it can be a sign that it's someone who might not be the best employee and figurehead for a certain identity.

 Update:   I guess I didn't really get to the point that I was merely alluding too.  The articles and photos about Brinton when he was appointed certainly indicate that he has the kind of intense "need to be seen" as a trans/kink person that I think is reasonable to take as a warning sign for his future employment.   The gut reaction of conservatives on this seems to have been vindicated, and while those on the Left can complain that the private sexual sphere says nothing about what a person may be like in their area of employment - come on, there are limits, if the person doesn't want to keep that side private.

Elon takes on Apple? I don't even like Apple, but pass the popcorn

 

The Trump problem (for the Republicans)

There's very, very little support to be found (if any, really) on the American Right for Trump getting friendly with Kanye and having dinner with him and Fuentes.   The "I don't know who he was" excuse seems to have worn way too thin - it certainly suggests a person who would be a security nightmare as a President (again.)  

But the cowardice within the Republican party itself remains its defining feature - with most just declining to comment on it:

Republican lawmakers have largely remained silent in the wake of former President Trump's dinner with antisemitic rapper Ye and white nationalist Nick Fuentes, reviving a tactic they frequently relied on during his presidency.

Driving the news: Spokespeople for nearly two dozen House and Senate Republicans — including party leaders, co-chairs of caucuses and task forces focused on Judaism or antisemitism and sponsors of legislation to combat antisemitic hate crimes — did not respond to requests for comment.

Why it matters: The dynamic highlights the stranglehold Trump still has on the Republican Party outside a small group of vocal critics, even in the aftermath of poor performances by his handpicked candidates in the midterm elections.

What are Hannity and Carlson going to do about it?   Ignore it, or try to provide some pathetic defence?  

The pit bull problem

An article at the BBC explains how pit bulls, popular as guard dogs (and fighting dogs) in South Africa, are facing a strong public backlash over their propensity to attack and kill children.   

I have always been a complete skeptic with respect to the "it's how your raise them" defenders, regardless of whether they are the public, vets, or from the RSPCA:

"The defence by pit bull lovers that it is how you raise the dog does not hold water. So many people, including joggers have been attacked and killed by pit bulls," says the petition, which has more than 129,000 signatures so far. 

When you go to a dog park often (as I do) and see things like a young collie's innate inclination to start playing with smaller dogs in a "round them up like sheep" sort of way, I don't understand why certain people think a bred can't have an inclination to attack small humans at the slightest deemed provocation.

A remarkable floater

A passenger who went missing from a cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico has been rescued after more than 15 hours in the sea, the US Coast Guard has said.

The 28-year-old man had been at a bar on the Carnival Valor ship with his sister on Wednesday night but did not return after leaving to use the toilet.

Several rescue crews scoured the area and the man was finally spotted on Thursday evening, some 20 miles (30km) off the coast of Louisiana.

Yeah, if it was in a movie you'd think the writers were really pushing credibility.

 

As expected

After careful reflection on why his side lost another election, commentator thinks the winner should resign

George Monbiot has a fake steak

I mentioned this last week, but George Monbiot has a column in The Guardian on the topic of "precision fermentation" - the idea of replacing animal protein with vat grown microbial protein - which he is very keen to see happening.

And over on Twitter, he has eaten a fake steak and reckons it's really good:
 

 

The texture looks more tuna than steak to me, but of course, I would like to try it.

And boy, do I get sick of people going on about "why does a vegan/vegetarian want to eat pretend meat - you're betraying your principals" after stories like this.   "Because it tastes great and we like the texture" seems the obvious answer, no?   Why is that so hard to grasp?

Pretty much

 

Twitter is going to die, I'm still pretty sure of that.

 Update:  to be clearer, this is why:

 

Lobster man probed

He looks so happy about it, too.  I was thinking of trying to make a joke about where her hand might be,but I'm above that.

Then there's this:

Does Peterson give advice on resume writing too?

 

Update:  wish I had thought to do this -