A short piece against nihilism

Seems an odd piece for the New York Times to publish when everyone is concentrating on the election.  But a cosmologist argues against nihilism in the face of a mostly empty universe:

Artists and philosophers have long understood the power of the void. The 12th-century Buddhist monk and poet Saigyo reflected on the gaps between falling raindrops, noting that the pauses between their sounds were just as important as the drops themselves, if not more so. The composer John Cage challenged us with “4ʹ33ʺ,” a performance consisting entirely of silence, creating a manifestation of the void that audiences sought to fill with awkward coughs and nervous laughter, which became its own music. The famed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas celebrated the utility of negative spaces, proclaiming, “Where there is nothing, everything is possible.” For the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the void was a psychological space that we must enter to realize our full potential and forge a new life.

Billions of years from now the sun will engorge and Earth will turn to dust. The cosmic voids, guardians of great nothingness, will remain. That bare fact, at first uncomfortable, gives us the ability to treasure what we’re given.

Tell a joke to your friends. Fight for what you believe in. Call your mother. Create something the cosmos hasn’t seen before. The implacability of the cosmic voids calls us to action. The universe won’t do anything for us except give us the freedom to exist. What we do with that existence is entirely up to us. It is our responsibility to imbue the cosmos with meaning and purpose.

Some days this sounds an attractive approach; other days, not so much.

The problem comes down to the issue that talking about "meaning and purpose" seems to presume  that there is something by which to judge between competing ideas of what makes for a valid meaning and purpose, but the purely materialist universe says there isn't.

Watching corn grow

I went to the Mulgowie markets last month, and returned again on the weekend. This is the same (enormous) cornfield that featured in my last post, so you can see how much it has grown.  

What an absolute, 100% rolled gold, MAGA moron

Update:  Of course, he is also going to swallow entirely the line, when Trump loses, that it must have been due to cheating, because (he will claim) the polls and betting market showed a Trump landslide.   The New York Times discusses the obvious:

The torrent of polls began arriving just a few weeks ago, one after the other, most showing a victory for Donald J. Trump.

They stood out amid the hundreds of others indicating a dead heat in the presidential election. But they had something in common: They were commissioned by right-leaning groups with a vested interest in promoting Republican strength.

These surveys have had marginal, if any, impact on polling averages, which either do not include the partisan polls or give them little weight. Yet some argue that the real purpose of partisan polls, along with other expectation-setting metrics such as political betting markets, is directed at a different goal entirely: building a narrative of unstoppable momentum for Mr. Trump.

The partisan polls appear focused on lifting Republican enthusiasm before the election and — perhaps more important — cementing the idea that the only way Mr. Trump can lose to Vice President Kamala Harris is if the election is rigged. Polls promising a Republican victory, the theory runs, could be held up as evidence of cheating if that victory does not come to pass.

The importance of the bargaining God?

This is just an idle thought that came to me after watching a video by that secular Buddhist guy on Youtube (Doug's Dharma) that discussed the question "Is forgiveness not Buddhist?" 

The video is about an article by Ken McLeod that appeared in Tricycle, the glossy Buddhist magazine, which argued that forgiveness only makes sense in the context of a transactional religious view, such as in the Abrahamic religions, where the idea of God engaging in agreement (covenants) leads to the idea of debt and forgiveness too - as part of putting broken deals right.   I don't think he mentioned it specifically, but a "transactional" God in the Jewish sense includes the idea of divine bargaining.  God engaged in a negotiation with Abraham as to how many righteous men it would take for Sodom to be spared is the great example.  The idea of deals or transactions being done at the divine level continues into Christianity - with the ransom theory of atonement, for example.   

As to how unique the Jewish origin of the idea of a transactional God is, I suppose you could argue that any religion that practices sacrifice or offerings as a placation to a god or the gods has an element of "bargaining" too; but then again, the Old Testament portrays a very direct and personal involvement of God being prepared to "do deals".   I mean, there were temples all through ancient Greece and Rome (and over in the Americas) at which sacrificial offerings were routine;  but as far as I know, you don't have traditions of (say) Zeus coming down and having lengthy negotiations with religious figures about the exact details of a bargain.

And this led me to think - is the Jewish reputation for success at capitalism traceable to a cultural attraction to the idea of bargaining that was there from the very start? 

The topic of Jews and success at capitalist enterprises is not exactly a new topic, and this book sounds interesting:

...in his slim essay collection “Capitalism and the Jews,” Jerry Z. Muller presents a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune.

As Muller, a history professor at the Catholic University of America, explains it, much anti-Semitism can be attributed to a misunderstanding of basic economics. From Aristotle through the Renaissance (and then again in the 19th century, thanks to that Jew-baiting former Jew Karl Marx), thinkers believed that money should be considered sterile, a mere means of exchange incapable of producing additional value. Only labor could be truly productive, it was thought, and anyone who extracted money from money alone — that is, through interest — must surely be a parasite, or at the very least a fraud. The Bible also contended that charging interest was sinful, inspiring Dante to consign usurers to the seventh circle of hell (alongside sodomites and murderers). In other words, 500 years ago, the phrase “predatory lending” would have been considered redundant.

Lending at interest was thus forbidden across Christian Europe — for Christians. Jews, however, were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church to charge interest; since they were going to hell anyway, why not let them help growing economies function more efficiently? (According to Halakha, or Jewish law, Jews were not allowed to charge interest to one another, just to gentiles.) And so it was, Muller explains, that Judaism became forever fused in the popular mind with finance. In fact, Christian moneylenders were sometimes legally designated as temporary Jews when they lent money to English and French kings. 

As Europe’s official money­lenders, Jews became both necessary and despised. The exorbitant interest rates they charged — sometimes as high as 60 percent — only fed the fury. But considering the economic climate, such rates probably made good business sense: capital was scarce, and lenders frequently risked having their debtors’ obligations canceled or their own assets arbitrarily seized by the crown.

This early, semi-exclusive exposure to finance, coupled with a culture that valued literacy, abstract thinking, trade and specialization (the Babylonian Talmud amazingly presaged Adam Smith’s paradigmatic pin factory), gave Jews the human capital necessary to succeed in modern capitalism. It also helped that Judaism, unlike many strains of Christianity, did not consider poverty particularly ennobling.

Most of Muller’s strongest arguments are in his first essay, which draws on everyone from Voltaire to Osama bin Laden to illustrate how the world came to conflate the negative stereotypes of Jews with those of capitalism’s excesses. The book’s remaining three essays deal somewhat unevenly with the fallout of the Jews’ economic success, and in particular the resentment it inspired among history’s economic also-rans. Muller explores, for example, how Jews improbably became associated with both abhorred poles of political economy: hypercapitalism and ­Communism.

I'm not sure that he covers "because they always thought a deal could be cut - even with God" - but it seems worthy of consideration!

A remarkable photo from the Spanish floods

Once again, we are watching the consequences of a remarkable flash flood, this one in Spain, with at least 95 people killed: yet the Washington Post puts its story about it way, way down the website:

 

This short clip shows some of the flood in action:  

The best role

It seems I have spent years bemoaning the general lack of likeability I find amongst younger Australian comedians.   The latest season of Question Everything confirms it again - I do quite like Wil Anderson and his material, co-host Jan Fran is OK-ish, but I routinely do not care at all for the panelists and their over-rehearsed "bits".   (And really, why does lesbianism seem to be so overly represented - or referenced - amongst Australian female comedians these days?)   

I was somewhat amused, though, that a new episode of Fisk last night (a show which is likeable and gives me some laughs, but it also doesn't exactly set the world on fire) featured another young-ish comedian who made me grind my teeth when he had his own shows years ago - Tom Ballard - playing an intensely dislikeable character.  Given that I have never liked him, I find this a perfect match and can say he's pretty good in the role!

And once again, I feel a tad self conscious whenever I talk about this topic and realise that most of the young comedians I complain about are gay or lesbian.  In my defence, and while I'm not sure because I could never watch him for very long, I don't think Ballard's comedy has ever been strongly gay themed -  I would dislike him as a comedian even if he was as straight as a ...[add your own witty simile, I'm having trouble coming up with one.]    And I found that very campy gay (and rather odd looking) Rhys Nicholson can be pretty funny on The Weekly with Charlie Pickering. [Update: I just read his Wiki entry, and he apparently identifies as "non binary" and uses "they".  Let me just roll my eyes about that for a a couple of minutes.]

I've also been finding the Asian gay guy (Bowen Yang) on Saturday Night Live can be pretty funny too.  This segment made me laugh:

 

As far as non campy gay personalities are concerned, I guess I can put Graham Norton in that category, and surely everyone thinks he is witty and pretty smart? So, no, it's not about the gay, honest!

Not sure what is going on at Twitter

I've noticed that, despite Musk's grubby fingers on the algorithm, the content on the "For You" side of Twitter ever since Trump's "definitely not a Nazi rally" rally (the fact he even has to emphasise this is telling) has been chock full of negative commentary of the event and (in particular) about the Peurto Rico and Latino "jokes".    This seems kind of odd, given how MAGA friendly Musk made it.   Perhaps a sign that even the MAGA crowd knows it's hard to convince anyone with the "it's just comedy, guys" line, or something else?  

Musk is also in the news for muttering approvingly after a guy pointed out that Trump policies would initially destroy the economy, but that would be a good thing as it would allow something better to arise from the ashes.

Overall, I agree with those saying it feels as if momentum has switched to Harris in the home stretch.   (And I still suspect polling has not been catching the registered Republicans who are secretly voting against Trump.)  

Tracking down a science meme source

I don't often watch this channel, but this video about their (eventually) successful effort to track down the source of an improbable sounding, but much repeated, science meme was pretty interesting.  (And yes, the meme has a figure exaggerated by a factor of about 10 - although it still feels hard to believe, really!)

 

Goodbye Teri

Yeah, I always had a bit of a soft spot for Teri Garr, who didn't have that big of a career, but I think she had a kind of vulnerability about her screen presence that was appealing:

Teri Garr, comic actress in ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Tootsie,’ dies at 79

A tricky time for those who follow American mainstream newspapers

I have mentioned before that I subscribe to both the Washington Post and New York Times, and that I share the common disdain expressed for years by people on Twitter for the New York Times repeatedly 'sanewashing' Trump and his speeches.   In fact, I thought of unsubscribing for this reason, but never got around to it.  I generally prefer reading the Washington Post anyway.

But now that WAPO has been told by its billionaire owner to not endorse Harris (or Trump), and is reported to have lost 8% of its digital subscribers over this, I feel the temptation to join the former subscribers, because (who knows) such customer outcry might make a difference?   (Well, I doubt it. But still...)

And then, for quite a while now, I have noticed that the Los Angeles Times has a remarkably good subscription deal of $60 per year, or $120 for two years (true, that is US dollars, but still great value.)   But it is also in the "rich owner intervenes to keep a fascist on side" club.  

The New York Times has at least endorsed Harris, and seems to be suddenly being braver in its headlines, at least:

The Misogynistic, Bigoted and Crude Rally Remarks Trump Hasn’t Disavowed

A range of speakers at Madison Square Garden on Sunday disparaged Latinos, Black people, Palestinians and Jews, and made vulgar references to Kamala Harris. The Trump campaign has distanced itself from only one of these statements.

So, I don't really know what to do about my subscriptions right now... 

Update:   So, Bezos is trying to sell his decision as a principled one about trying to get the public to trust the mainstream media more.  He claims that the chief executive of his rocket company meeting Trump the same day of the announcement was a pure co-incidence that he was not aware of.

Many people in comments (more than 6,000 of them) do not believe him.

About that rally

About the Queensland election

I generally don't pay too much attention to State politics, but my reaction to Labor losing at the weekend is one that I reckon is pretty widely shared:

a.   It was definitely due to a combination of the "it's time" factor and a huge amount of media attention give to crime and youth justice over the last couple of years.

b.   To be honest, the media attention to crime has been deserved, despite it also obviously playing into the hands of conservative politics.   Part of the reason I say that is because the type of crime that attracts a lot of attention (stolen cars for joy rides, often causing huge danger on roads) is one that is exasperatingly pointless and stupid.   It's not like we're dealing with the starving stealing food to live on.  

c.   If you are going to have a Liberal/National Party leader in Queensland, you could do much, much worse than David Crisafulli.  He is striking me as pretty moderate in tone, and somewhat similar to Labor's Chris Mins in New South Wales in that he claims to be more into pragmatic approaches and not too ideologically driven? 

d.  This will be a real test of how difficult it can be governments to quickly get on top of a wave of pointless and stupid crime in a hurry, and whether criminologists will get any real input and/or be proved right or wrong with their forecasts.   Interestingly, the ABC is today running a story about the inability of the tough talking Northern Territory government to handle the existing number of prisoners, let alone any increase the approach of the new conservative government may get.

 

Future reference pie

 

I haven't checked the date of the very thin cookbook that I got this recipe from, but I reckon it would be from the 1990's. The Real Man's Cookbook, or something, I think it's called. Kind of looks like a bit of a vanity project by a minor (very minor) celebrity, except I have no idea who the guy on the cover is. 

Anyhow, this pie has always seem a pretty nice and economical meal - a $5.50 can of salmon is extended out to at least 4 big serves.  

You can also add additional stuff - like a small can of corn, or some peas.  You can double the amount of mushrooms too.

Very true...

Headline of an opinion piece on Washington Post:

The double standard for Harris and Trump has reached a breaking point

One candidate can rant about gibberish while the other has to be perfect. 

Some extracts:

Something is wrong with this split-screen picture. On one side, former president Donald Trump rants about mass deportations and claims to have stopped “wars with France,” after being described by his longest-serving White House chief of staff as a literal fascist. On the other side, commentators debate whether Vice President Kamala Harris performed well enough at a CNN town hall to “close the deal.”

Seriously? Much of a double standard here?

Somehow, it is apparently baked into this campaign that Trump is allowed to talk and act like a complete lunatic while Harris has to be perfect in every way. I don’t know the answer to the chicken-or-egg question — whether media coverage is leading public perception or vice versa — but the disparate treatment is glaring.

This week, it became simply ridiculous.

Further down:

Let’s review: First, Harris was criticized for not doing enough interviews — so she did multiple interviews, including with nontraditional media. She was criticized for not doing hostile interviews — so she went toe to toe with Bret Baier of Fox News. She was criticized as being comfortable only at scripted rallies — so she did unscripted events, such as the town hall on Wednesday. Along the way, she wiped the floor with Trump during their one televised debate.

Trump, meanwhile, stands before his MAGA crowds and spews nonstop lies, ominous threats, impossible promises and utter gibberish. His rhetoric is dismissed, or looked past, without first being interrogated.

Imagine if Harris were promising to end the war in Gaza on her first day in office but wouldn’t say how. Imagine if she were proposing a tariffs-based economic plan that economists say would destabilize the world economy and cost the average family $4,000 a year in higher prices. Imagine if she were promising a “bloody” campaign to uproot and deport millions of undocumented migrants who are gainfully employed and paying taxes. And imagine if Harris were vowing to use the military to go after her political opponents, as Trump repeatedly pledges.

 The article has more than 3,600 comments (virtually all in support), showing it has really resonated.

 

A decent Stewart piece

I don't always like his shtick, but I thought this Jon Stewart segment was pretty good - swinging from funny to serious and exasperation, which is how about 90% of the rest of the world feel when watching America at the moment: 

A very peculiar scandal, Singapore style

If you read the BBC report, it sounds as if the brother of the last Singaporean PM (who resigned not so long ago, and both being sons of the famed Singaporean founder Lee Kuan Yew) has been hard done by - with the British government even giving him "asylum".    

The trouble all stems from shenanigans around their father's wishes:

The Lees' years-long dispute over their family home began with the death of Lee Kuan Yew, the country's first prime minister and widely considered the architect of modern Singapore.

It centres on 38 Oxley Road, a small and nondescript house sitting on a quiet street in Singapore's downtown that is estimated to be worth tens of millions of Singapore dollars.

The statesman, who was famously averse to the idea of a cult of personality built around him, had stated in his will that he wanted his house to be demolished either after his death or after his daughter moved out of the home.

Lee Hsien Loong, who was prime minister at the time, said the house would be preserved for the time being, while his siblings insisted it should be knocked down immediately in accordance to their father's wishes.

Following his sister's death earlier this month from a brain disease, Lee Hsien Yang has now applied for the demolition of the house and, in its place, the construction of a "small private dwelling" that would be owned by the Lee family.

 But if you go over to the (admittedly, government run) CNA website, you get much more detail:

 In 2020, Mrs Lee [wife of the brother who has asylum] was suspended from practice by the Court of Three Judges for 15 months after she was found guilty of misconduct over the handling of Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s last will.

In its response to The Guardian, the Singapore government said the Court of Three Judges, led by the Chief Justice, found that the couple had cut off the late Mr Lee’s own long-time lawyer in preparing the last will. They had procured the execution of the last will with "unseemly haste (that) can only be described as improper and unacceptable", the judgment read.

The judges also found that Mrs Lee had "acted with complete disregard for the interests" of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, and had "blindly followed the directions of her husband, a significant beneficiary under the very will whose execution she helped to rush through".

In view of these findings, the police started investigations against the couple for potential offences of giving false evidence in judicial proceedings. Although they initially said they agreed to be interviewed, they did not show up and left the country.

 There's even more detail here:

Somehow, I don't think the brother in exile is really going to win the PR war over this.   (I also think his brother, as PM, was very popular.)

Another interruption to "I remain rather busy..."

Just an interruption from my present "too busy at work to post" format.

I never could stand Lidia Thorpe, and her "look at me" protest at Parliament House yesterday is only likely to increase the probability of a Coalition win next election, despite Albanese not endorsing it, and even with Mr Potato Head as his competitor.    

This is because of my thesis that we are currently seeing Labor go through one of its cycles in which they are perceived as too ideological and sensitive on social justice/identity politics and not pragmatic or tough enough, and it's the Coalition that benefits from that.  

Currently, in Queensland in particular, youth crime is seen as a major issue and it's usually tied, particularly outside of the capital cities, to indigenous politics.   But at the Federal level, Albanese pushing "The Voice" early on in the government's first term gave an impression of having indigenous social justice priorities that are popular in the inner cities, but far less shared the further out you go.  (And yes, I am aware that in fact the ageing indigenous leadership actually were arguing it was a modest reform compared to the radical indigenous politics of the youngest activist set, like Thorpe.   But it still felt an unnecessary step to a majority of Australians, as the result tells us.)

The reform to the NDIS earlier this year may have been able to sold by Labor as a "return to pragmaticism", because I think to an extent it was*, but it's hard for Labor because as it's their "baby", it's hard for them to admit that it had serious flaws from the start.   I am no expert on the matter, but surely the original claim (that the scheme would actually "work" economically, because it would enable a lot of people with disability get back into the workforce when they had previously not been able to because of inadequate support) was always extremely dubious?   (Yet it is still argued as such.) 

But again, I think the vibe the public got from the review played into the "Labor isn't pragmatic enough" line of thought.    

The other thing that hasn't affected us as much as America is the culture war on transexual issues - but as I have made clear before, this is another identity issue that I don't think help Left wing parties if they appear too gullible.   

I haven't been paying too much attention to Australian Federal politics lately, but it does seem that to me that Albanese is giving the impression of someone who doesn't have his priorities "right", and it's the Right that is benefiting.  I think it is similar to the situation with the end of the Hawke run, although Albo doesn't have the same personal issues that were worn heavily by Hawke.

 

 

 

*  I thought it was kind of lucky for the government that, as far as I know, it was never publicised all that much that the NDIS was (after a court action) funding sex worker access for the disabled.  

Bluesky ahoy!

I saw that Bluesky, the early competitor to Musk era Twitter, was getting a surge of new users because of Musk's changes to weaken the "block" function, which I saw described as his response to realising so many X users were blocking his own account!    (Yes, count me amongst them - I was getting so sick of seeing him parading his conspiracy and pro MAGA rubbish.  Although, truth be told, I am not sure if the block changes - which haven't come into effect yet - really will mean I have to see his posts.)

Anyway, I think that one of the early issues with Bluesky was that you had to wait in line to be able to start using it, so I never bothered.   (I did start trying Mastodon, but it wasn't exactly intuitive and seemed more like a hobbyist effort trying to make it into the mainstream.  I haven't looked at it for ages.)

But this morning, I did start a Bluesky account, and it was easy and I was pleased to find quite a few people I follow on Twitter are using it actively.   Not as many journalists as I would like, but scientists, David Roberts, and some others I forget now are there and active.

The only odd thing is that, for some reason, the first "home" list of posts in the feed when you start is extremely dominated by people posting cat and pet photos.  Many more cats than dogs - although occasionally rats and rabbits feature too.   Anyway, the app tells you to start liking some posts, so that the algorithm can tell what to start recommending, and also you can search for people to follow.   The process of "likes" takes a while, because there are so many damn cat photos to scroll past!   I don't really understand why - but now that I have finished, yeah, my "Discover" feed still has a lot of cats, and home made illustrations (it seems to be the preferred platform for people who want to display their amateur anime skills), but I am getting posts on topics I like, and I guess I just have to keep hitting the "show me less like this" to all the cat photos and it might start to pay attention.  (Or muting the threads they are on.)

Of course, I can just jump over to the "Following" feed, which will be stuff I definitely want to see, but as with Twitter, I like being open to finding new things the algorithm thinks I might like.

So, overall, this is looking pretty promising - very much like the previously moderated Twitter before Musk made it into his own mini 4 Chan and MAGA network.  But just with a present issue of too many cats!

If Noah Smith finally makes the leap over, everything will be great.  He will like that there are rabbit photos there...

 Update:  I see from reddit that it's not just me - 

About that Catholic charity function

We live in different worlds now

It seems, from reading Twitter at least, that Trump MAGA people who watched the Fox News interview with Kamala Harris thought it was a disaster for her;  whereas Harris supporters watched it and thought she performed very credibly with a hostile and interrupting interviewer.   (I haven't had time to watch much myself - I have only seen the widely posted segment in which she called them for not showing the full clip of Trump calling his political opposition evil and "the enemy".)

This is not news - but it's a great example of how both social media, and the fragmentation of media into arms which are outright propaganda networks for profit, have allowed for the creation of completely different mental and information worlds in which people now live.  It's a great reminder of David Robert's 2017 column on the problem of tribal epistemology - and, you have to say, the mainstream media really still ignores it. 

I mean, people don't create their own mental worlds in a vacuum.   They form it in a community, and while it has always been possible for people to follow cranks and form a self supporting community around them, billionaires now (for profit and other self interest) use the modern tools of communication to create and sustain such bubble worlds of "alternative" crank takes by creating the community needed to support it.

Really, the mainstream media, and politicians, need to be saying that, day in and day out, instead of just pretending its just the landscape now, there is nothing to be done about it.