The new political correctness attacked by an insider

A bisexual female philosopher complains about the atmosphere in US academia at the NYT:

...it is with some trepidation that I admit that the current political climate in academia confuses me. The more I read about trigger warnings, safe spaces and petitions to retract scholarly articles, the more my head spins. On top of that confusion, I harbor a fear of expressing views that will offend other progressives, scholars and teachers who may also be fighting oppression. And I fear being subject to public shaming on social media, and receiving private hate mail (I still am, after my response in May to the controversy over Rebecca Tuvel’s article in the journal Hypatia). In short, I find myself in an educational environment in which outrage, censoring and public shaming has begun to replace critique, disagreement and debate.

She partly blames social media:

 Although social media can be effective for organizing, and for forming communities (on both the left and the right), it is also often fueled by emotional reaction rather than thoughtful response. Life is flattened to fit the screen, and cute cat videos play next to photographs of the latest atrocity. Social media works by leveling and ripping bits of life from their contexts as a form of entertainment or news — the more outrageous, the better. As consumers, we engage in the virtual performance of pathos and moral virtue with our likes, crying or angry Emojis, and the circulation of outrage or sympathy through sharing petitions or calls for donations.

Not a good sign...

....when your likely new Right wing Chancellor of Austria:

keeps reminding you of the main character in American Psycho

Sure the lapels are narrower, but apart from that, the look is very similar.   (And he's 31.   That ridiculous nerd Caleb Bond will be working on a fashion maker over as a result of this.   His mini Piers Akerman with acne look is not going to cut it.)

A great explanation of Fox & Friends

Just read this in Slate.  It's both amusing and accurate:

These are remarkably stupid times. For a glimpse of why, consider the daily patter of Fox & Friends—or, rather, consider that I am even asking you to consider Fox & Friends. The show is by now known for being terrible television, something that is neither entertaining nor informative, that is best watched as the coffee brews and then forgotten as soon as the cup is empty. Or at least that once was the case. Since its 1998 premiere, Fox & Friends has largely existed, in ostensibly amiable morning-show form, to flatter the resentments of the network’s core fan base of elderly cranks who resent the existence of other channels. But one of those cranks is now president, and, consequently, Fox & Friends is having a moment.....

The hosts are a supergroup of sorts, and their signature tune is reactionary resentment. Fox & Friends is always hearkening back to the good old days. “Remember when the name of the Redskins was the biggest controversy in the NFL? Those were the good old days,” said Kilmeade on Thursday. “Remember when ESPN used to have sports on it? Those were the good old days,” said Doocy on Tuesday. “Twenty years ago, or maybe it was 30 years ago, when Johnny Carson was there at the Tonight Show, you couldn’t really tell his politics, because he just was an equal-opportunity joker about all that stuff,” said Doocy on Monday morning, in response to Jimmy Kimmel’s recent political opining on his own late-night show. “Things have changed,” agreed Earhardt.

Fox & Friends is bad in all of the ways that most morning television is bad—excessively perky and smarmy and dumb—while adding its own special authoritarian twist. There are workout segments and cooking segments and music segments, interspersed randomly with deranged political commentary and militaristic iconography.

In other Tesla news...

No one seems 100% sure of what to make of Tesla firing several hundred employees last week, but it is good to keep in mind it actually employs 33,000 in total, and 10,000 or so at its main factory.   That's more than I would have guessed.

Anyway, yesterday in Brisbane, I was driving behind a Tesla with the Queensland number plate NCC 1701, which amused me.

If you don't understand why, I'm a bit ahead of you in middle aged* nerd quotient. 

*  I'm working on the basis that anything between 40 and 60 is now the new middle aged. 

Alcoholic news

I enjoyed a schooner of very nice alcoholic ginger beer at a craft brewery on the weekend.   Very spicy.  Not overly sweet, although my wife begged to differ.    The brewery?  Aether at Milton.   (Didn't get around to their beer beer, but the meat heavy menu wasn't bad, too.)

I occasionally enjoy a sweeter alcoholic drink, but different brands of apple cider tend to be rather similar, I find.   I did enjoy a cherry pear cider from Tasmania a couple of months back, though.  Did I post about that?  No matter, it was this:

Back to craft beers, though:   also at Milton, the Newstead brewery (which had its original outlet at Teneriffe) has a much nicer bar and cafe now just opposite Suncorp Stadium.  Went there for the first time a fortnight ago, and again last weekend.  Their antipasto platter and chips and pizza were all very nice, as were the three different beers I tried.    A very pleasant craft beer place.    

Handy infomation

My son is approaching legal drinking age, although the level of interest in actually drinking is not very clear.   In any event, I should get him to read this soon.  (I didn't really know the detail about the slowness of breathing):

Still, there are a few simple ways to spot when someone’s blood alcohol level has entered the dangerous territory of alcohol poisoning.

UVA has developed the acronym ‘PUBS’ to help its students remember the signs someone may be dangerously drunk. Call 911 right away if someone is:

• Puking while passed out
• Unresponsive to stimulation (pinch or shaking)
• Breathing (slow, shallow or no breathing)
• Skin (blue, cold or clammy)

If a drunk person is asleep and breathing normally, something called the ‘Bacchus’ move is a way to help them stay safe and keep their airway clear. Using their own left arm as a pillow, roll the person onto their left side and drop their right knee forward to help stabilise them. Check often to make sure they’re breathing normally and regularly. The Mayo Clinic suggests a gap of more than 10 seconds between breaths is a sign of alcohol poisoning.

The Big Bang Theory gets it right

Peter Woit over at Not Even Wrong notes that a recent episode of Big Bang Theory gets the current worrying dead end-ish state of physics right.  For example:

SHELDON: What? Look. (sighs) Not all science pans out. You know, we’ve been hoping supersymmetry was true for decades, and finally, we built the Large Hadron Collider, which is supposed to prove it by finding these new particles, and it-it hasn’t. And maybe supersymmetry, our last big idea, is simply wrong.
LEONARD: Well, that sounds awful. Now I get why everyone hates me.

Penny later comes in:

PENNY: So you guys are upset because the collider thing disproved your theories?
LEONARD: It’s worse than that. It hasn’t found anything in years, so we don’t know if we’re right, we don’t know if we’re wrong. We don’t know where to go next…
PENNY: Come on. You guys are physicists. Okay? You’re always gonna be physicists. And sure, sometimes, the physics is hard, but isn’t that what makes it boring?

It's impressive to have a comedy that is accurate about something like that...

Weasel words confirmed

I said the NRA was using weasel words in its announcement that it thought bump stocks should "be subject to additional regulations".  This is confirmed:

The NRA came out against Sen. Dianne Feinstein's bill, which would make it illegal for companies and individuals to buy the firearm accessory, and Rep. Carlos Curbelo's bipartisan bill, which would ban bump stocks. "We oppose the gun-control legislation ... These bills are intentionally overreaching and would ban commonly owned firearm accessories," the NRA said. But "the ATF should review bump-fire stocks to ensure they comply with federal law."

The NRA is saying the ATF should do something it already determined it cannot do:  

But the ATF did finish a classification review of a bump stock, also known as a slide fire, in January 2010. It concluded that the device was a firearm part, not a machine gun, and therefore it was not regulated under the Gun Control Act or the National Firearms Act. 

The NRA is just playing games, as it always does.

Only interested in culture wars

Man, haven't the wingnut blogs gone into ecstatic overdrive about Weinstein.   It's given them (what they think) is valid cover to avoid talking about Trump's economic nonsense/BS from the Hannity interview (see previous post), his weirdly personal and vindictive take on aid to Puerto Rico (what is his problem with that place?), and the obvious fact that it is an open secret in Washington that large numbers of Republicans think Trump is nuts and unstable and needs constant "minding" by people who aren't impulsive and as wilfully ignorant as the current leader of the free world. 

It is, of course, just a sign of the sickness in Right wing politics that point scoring is more important than sensible policy or the very worrying situation of internal warfare within the Right.  

Anyway, I liked this Slate bit about Trump's stupid statement on Hannity:

I sometimes wonder if it’s worth cataloging the vapid things Trump says about the economy. On the one hand, he’s the president. It should matter if he thinks the national debt goes down when the stock market goes up, even in a vague, philosophical sort of way (and to be clear, it does not). On the other hand, anybody reading a center-left website like Slate.com knows that America’s guy in the Oval Office is terminally uninterested in fact or data, except insofar as a number paints his presidency in flattering terms. Remember how the unemployment rate was a fiction, until it wasn’t anymore? This is a man who can only view history and current events as fragments of light endlessly refracted through the prism of his ego. He draws logical connections where none apparently exist, living according to an almost premodern perspective that by merely mouthing an idea, however inarticulate, he makes it real. Maybe this is his power—maybe he really is the übermensch, breaking the chains of our middle-class morality, including the idea that what we say should have some grounding in the world around us, hoisting our politics into the realm of pure myth. 

Or maybe this was just word salad, a confused and careless man following his own babble to its own nonsense conclusion, “in a sense.” Thus sprach POTUS.

 Where is cult follower Kates's explanation of what Trump meant?

Update:  there have been a few article around like this one lately, pointing out that this doesn't actually make sense:

The article notes:

While it’s unclear what media Trump is consuming if he hasn’t seen wall-to-wall, practically deafening coverage of stock-market gains, he is correct that we are in the midst of a historic, if inexplicable, rally, and that unemployment is at a multi-year low. Unfortunately, he either doesn’t understand or is powerless to stop himself from seeking adulation for the very things that experts say point to an economy that doesn’t need a giant, deficit-funded stimulus in the form of big, yuge tax cuts. As the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s Maya MacGuineas told NPR, “If we have a tax cut right now at a time when the economy doesn’t need stimulus and our debt is at near record levels, that will do a lot of damage for the economy and it will be a huge missed opportunity.”

It's a living

I noted with some interest a skeptical take on the matter of lab grown meat having the potential that certain Silicon Valley types think it has, but I don't think it's all that good a piece.

But what I will point out is the title of the author:

Orson Catts:  Director of SymbioticA;The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, Professor in Contestable Design, University of Western Australia

His article is at The Conversation, but his job suggests "peak Guardian".

Betel juice

A detailed report at the BBC about the problem of rampant betel nut chewing in Papua New Guinea and its terrible health consequences:

Papua New Guinea has the highest rate of oral cancers in the world. According to the World Health Organisation, nearly one in every 500 new cases of mouth and oropharynx cancer is in Papua New Guinea and it is the nation's biggest cancer killer. 

A parent says:

"When my children were just six or seven they already knew how to chew," the mother-of-four continues. "I tried stopping them, they were too young. But they grew up with betel nut. We have to educate the children to not chew."

Long term exposure to the mixture dramatically increases risk.

"If a child started chewing betel nut at a very early age, he would be likely to get cancer before reaching the age of 30," said Dr Paki Molumi, surgeon at the ear, nose and throat department at Port Moresby General Hospital. 

I also imagine that is one of the worst forms of cancer from which to die, and PNG one of the worst countries in which to suffer from it.  The article confirms that:

This in a country with limited and healthcare facilities, frequent drug shortages and few oncologists. At Papua New Guinea's only specialist cancer centre, radiotherapy treatments were put on hold after its only radiation specialist resigned last year. 

"Most patients come to the hospital very late. Our health system is fragile and cancer services are not fully functional, so the survival rates are low."

With the popularity of betel nut on the rise, the future burden of cancer treatment on the national health system is a ticking time bomb.

I had no idea its use was a health problem to that degree.

There's also a tie in with another PNG-centric disease, tuberculosis:

"The government has to stop people chewing because it makes so much rubbish. Everyone spits everywhere and it makes the place dirty - it's unhygienic."

One of the motivating factors behind the ban [in Port Moresby only] was to clean up the capital from this residue. The spitting of pathogenic saliva increases the spread of disease. In a country with one of the highest infection rates of tuberculosis in the world, this habit poses huge contamination risks.

What a country...

Oh, Good Lord

Come on, Trump quasi apologists, defend his level of understanding expressed in this:

Clearly, a moron

Am slightly curious to see how followers of the Cult of Trump will explain away this.  (Well, not really.  Their Moron in Chief has already told them it is "fake news", and they have brain washed themselves thoroughly enough by only believing what their inner circle of fellow cult members repeat that they will believe it.)

It's been clear from day one that normal people in the world of politics and government worry a lot about Trump and his capacity for the job.   The big question has always been - how long will key Republicans keep pretending that it's all under control, no need to worry, he's actually on top of things, etc.

Anyway, I liked the sub heading to Kaplan's commentary on the Trump Goes Nuclear story:

Only this president could think 4,000 nukes aren’t enough.  

From the body of the report:

All presidents are ignorant of certain issues when they come into office. Most are aware of their shortcomings and take care to study up on what they need to know. The uniqueness of Trump is that he has almost no self-awareness, deals with his flaws by projecting them onto others, and seems allergic to study. He has asked for his daily briefing to contain no more than three subjects, with no more than one page devoted to each, and containing only the consensus judgment with no space for dissenting views within the intelligence community. Presidents have easy access to the most highly classified information and, if they want, the most knowledgeable experts, in or out of government, on any subject. Yet Trump learns most of what he knows from Fox News and Breitbart.

Seems entirely accurate.

Allahpundit at Hot Air, no Trump fan, has nonetheless defended his right to be completely ignorant on the matter of the international nuclear arsenal and to put stupid ideas at meetings.  

If only we could all be so comfortable with having idiots completely ignorant of key things under their control in control of the US. 

To their credit, in another story, Hot Air does call out as rubbish the Trump tweet about "challenging" NBC's licence for running the story.    Again, true Cult of Trump followers, who have convinced themselves via conspiracy think that criticism of Trump is all just "the Establishment" undermining Trump by lies, so as to enable the coming Socialist Takeover of the World, will find a way to defend the idea.   They are incapable of believing their Glorious Leader really is a dangerous moron.   I'll go over to Catallaxy shortly to see if there are some examples there.

I've said before - Presidents don't have to be the smartest person in the room, but they should have good instincts, know who to take advice from, and have at least a basic level of understanding of key things both as they stand, and from history.

Just how many times does it need to be demonstrated that Trump does not even come up to that standard?

Lesson not learned

A good, pretty detailed explanation at the New York Times about how the Kansas experiment in tax  was a complete failure, yet the Republicans at a Federal level want to try the same thing.   (Not just a tax cut, but to do with the pass-through exemption.)

How can they not have learnt the lesson? 

Never been stupider, I keep saying - and with plenty of evidence.

Bannon BS noted

Men dancing

Seeing that most straight men who happen to see male ballet dancers perform are probably already thinking at one point or another "that looks pretty gay", is it such a big step to have ballets developed to show "two men fall in love"?   Maybe not, but one would have to bet that an art form that is surely already female heavy in audience is not going to do anything to change that by going into gay stories.   (I've never been to a ballet:  it's an artform I "get" in much the same way as I get poetry - pretty much not at all.)

Dance generally is a funny medium regarding this male sexuality thing.   I've probably mentioned this before, but for some reason, I've often felt that Australian male dance performance on Australian TV looked particularly, well, not exactly straight - but is it just a thing about Australian choreography rather than the dancers themselves?   I think that it is not generally noticeable in American movie or TV choreography.   It's a subtle thing, and a bit curious, as I would assume that dancing as a career in both countries attracts a somewhat higher than average number of gay men (as does many parts of show business.)  But look at the dancing in something like La La Land - you virtually never get a gay vibe at all.  Is it partly to do with more black men, with their annoyingly natural grace in dance movement, being in American dance? 

Just one of life's puzzles.

Oh, is that all?

Axios extracts the thoughts of Anne Applebaum on the matter of "what Putin wants":

...a concise description of what Vladimir Putin's Russia aims to achieve by interfering in elections in Germany and throughout the West this week on NPR's Fresh Air:

• "It wants to end the European Union, which it sees as something that thwarts its ability to do corrupt deals, and do bilateral deals in Europe.
• "It wants to end NATO, because it wants the United States and its influence out of Europe.
• "More generally it seeks to undermine and dislodge liberal democracy wherever it can, partly for practical reasons because Russian companies do business using corrupt methods and it would be more useful to them to do business in states where rule of law isn't so respected and they can bribe people…
• "But I think they also seek to undermine democracy for a bigger reason — namely that democracy rhetoric, or the ideals of rule of law, and freedom of speech and freedom of decision, these are ideals that are undermining for the current Russian regime. It's an oligarchic, corrupt dictatorship, so what it fears the most is people on the streets calling for democracy. So the extent to which it can undermine its neighbors, and undermine their democracies, it's good for them. Then they can point and say, 'look, democracy is a disaster, it doesn't work for the United States, it doesn't work for Germany, so why should you want it either?'"

And Jason - going to give a big "meh" in response?

The tantrum White House

I thought this was a pretty good look at all the reporting of Trump's tantrum problem. 

Cult followers will not have a problem with it, of course.  They just view their glorious leader as righteously angry.

Hollywood's a weird town...

You know Terry Crews - the muscle bound, very likeable, black actor who plays Sergeant Terry on Brooklyn Nine-Nine?   He's tweeted out a story of being openly groped by a "high level Hollywood executive" at a function only last year!   He wanted to floor the guy, but knew it would be bad PR, so just left (with his wife.)    He therefore finds it stressful reading about Weinstein's behaviour.

How remarkable.  First tweet about it is here.

A look at Mexico City

Given my general interest in Mexico, I was happy to watch World's Busiest Cities - Mexico City last night on the ABC.

I had not realised how many of the suburbs were more or less completely "owner built" - but by owners whose only qualification as builders was watching and helping their neighbours build their homes!    And God knows how such structures went in the recent earthquake.

It seems many suburbs have to rely on trucked in water, too.   It looks like such a ramshackle place to live, yet the ties of family and community always seem appealingly strong. 

The government is undertaking some grand improvement schemes for infrastructure, though: most notably a very large, deep sewer line.  Would have been a scary place to be during the recent earthquake, too.

The other thing that surprises me whenever I watch any documentary about Mexico is how the place genuinely does seem infested by roaming mariachi bands, which also seem to genuinely spend most of their time repeating the 2 or 3 greatest hits of Mexican music.  Don't the residents get sick of that!

Anyway, well worth watching...