How to explain without an undercurrent of racism?

Andrew Bolt, who doesn't spend much time critiquing Trump (because that's what culture warriors do - spend all their time on How Bad is the Enemy, Hey?)  does a short post on Obama's criticism of Trump, and gets 300 comments, nearly all, of course, agreeing that Obama was just the worst.  

Ben Shapiro the other day tweeted that it was all Obama's fault - for "lecturing us" - that the US ended up with Trump.   As Ezra Klein wrote:

You see this on the right a lot, and I’ve come to think it the most revealing argument in conservative politics right now. It shows how desperate conservatives are to absolve their movement of responsibility for Trump, but it’s also, in an important sense, true — it’s just a truth the right (and sometimes the left) refuses to follow to its obvious conclusions.

Let’s state the obvious, and state it neutrally: A critical mass of Republican voters responded to the eight years of Obama’s presidency by turning to Trump. The question is why.

Obama’s answer blames demographic and technological shifts that scrambled our economic, social, religious, and civic institutions. Shapiro’s blames an emotional reaction to the first black president.

It's extremely hard to understand why conservatives reacted so strongly against the moderate and reasoned approach to rhetoric that Obama deployed.   (And I say that while fully acknowledging that  the "now the oceans will start to drop" was a very unwise bit of hyperbole - but not one that indicated that there was something wrong in his head,  like Trump looking at photos of his inauguration and insisting that they told a story that everyone else's eye could see wasn't true.)   

But Klein goes on to note that it's not as if conservatives were ever listening directly to Obama anyway:

For all Shapiro’s focus on Obama’s “lecturing,” the reality is that the right experienced Obama less through listening to his full speeches and more through hearing his presidency refracted through Fox News and conservative talk radio. And in those spaces, Obama’s presidency was framed in the most threatening possible terms. In 2009, Rush Limbaugh, whom Shapiro has honored as “one of the founders of the modern conservative movement,” told his millions of listeners:

How do you get promoted in a Barack Obama administration? By hating white people, or even saying you do, or that they’re not good, or whatever. Make white people the new oppressed minority, and they are going along with it, because they’re shutting up. They’re moving to the back of the bus. They’re saying I can’t use that drinking fountain, okay. I can’t use that restroom, okay. That’s the modern day Republican Party, the equivalent of the Old South, the new oppressed minority.

On its face, this is laughable. But Limbaugh’s audience wasn’t laughing. They were listening.

True.  

While Klein doesn't use the word "racism", he does refer to "white fragility":

The term “white fragility” is overused in politics right now, but it is relevant here: The unwillingness to state the obvious — a critical proportion of Republican primary voters enthusiastically supported the candidate who promised to turn back the demographic clock — might be politically wise, but it’s analytically disastrous. Black voters who supported Louis Farrakhan would never be treated with such delicacy.

Personally, from years of reading Catallaxy comments, I think it's hard to deny that an undercurrent of simple racism helps explain the unreasonableness of extreme reaction to Obama too:    this black president thought he was better than us.  For Australians, a useful comparison may be made with Kevin Rudd - sure, he was disliked for being a "I know better than you", plum voiced lecturer;  but the intensity of hatred for him I  think was still significantly less than that which his Australian haters still hold towards Obama (and even his wife.)     And I find it hard to believe that the comparative race backgrounds doesn't have something to do with that.

A germ theory for Alzheimers?

Gee:  I don't recall reading some of the reasons given in this NPR article as to why there are some grounds for suspecting that Alzheimer's Disease is caused by an infection:

Norins is quick to cite sources and studies supporting his claim, among them a 2010 study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery showing that neurosurgeons die from Alzheimer's at a seven-fold higher rate than they do from other disorders.

Another study from that same year, published in The Journal of the American Geriatric Society found that people whose spouses have dementia are at a six-times greater risk for the condition themselves.

Contagion does come to mind. And Norins isn't alone in his thinking.

In 2016, 32 researchers from universities around the world signed an editorial in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease calling for "further research on the role of infectious agents in [Alzheimer's] causation." Based on much of the same evidence Norins encountered, the authors concluded that clinical trials with antimicrobial drugs in Alzheimer's are now justified.

Another dream jumble

Last night, Jason Soon invited me to his country house where he was having Bob Dylan attend to give a private concert.  I was having trouble getting there on time.   There was also something about a very large sort of accommodation place I was staying at, downhill from the concert venue, with really creepy looking vast toilets which weren't working (unusually, a dream not inspired by waking up needing to go to the toilet.)    There seemed to be some morphing then into a completely separate story about working in a hospital where a heart patient was waiting for a donor heart for transplantation - from a dog.  I visited the potential dog donors too, but the one we were hoping to use was not well.   [I have yet to work out the source material for that one.  Can't think of any transplant stories have I read in the last few weeks, but something will probably come to me soon.]

White House Cluedo continues...

Allahpundit at Hot Air summarises the theories floating around about who wrote the Anonymous op-ed.  

I think it seems reasonably clear that it's not going to turn out to be someone at the very bottom of  the range of people who could be called a "senior official"  - which was one way I thought it might pan out.

Quiggin on Creighton

Back on 29 August I noted that it seemed rich (ha, a pun) of Adam Creighton, given his history of trying to make out that it is obviously wrong that the well off pay so much tax and the lower income don't, to be talking positively about inequality not having increased when the report he was citing said it was due to our well targetted tax and welfare policy.

I see now that John Quiggin made the same point last week:

Shorter Carling and Creighton:  High income earners pay more tax than everyone else and that’s bad.

All this contrasts strikingly with last week’s rightwing talking points, making much of the relatively limited growth of inequality in Australia due, almost entirely, to the redistributive policies introduced under Hawke and Keating. The Oz was all over this, and one of their sources was none other than Robert Carling

If you thought I was sounding cranky...

...you should read David Roberts twitter thread (handily put together here) for his similar despair.

Meanwhile, I thought Politico had a good article about the 25th Amendment (and the author's certainty that it could not - yet - be used against Trump, even though apparently some White House insiders have discussed it.)

Politico also has an article criticising many liberal historians' takes on the history of conservatives.     
Finally, although I don't pay much attention to Andrew Sullivan any more, I think he has a neat analogy here:

Sometimes I think it’s useful to think of this presidency as a hostage-taking situation. We have a president holding liberal democracy hostage, empowered by a cult following. The goal is to get through this without killing any hostages, i.e., without irreparable breaches in our democratic system. Come at him too directly and you might provoke the very thing you are trying to avoid. Somehow, we have to get the nut job to put the gun down and let the hostages go, without giving in to any of his demands. From the moment Trump took office, we were in this emergency. All that we now know, in a way we didn’t, say, a year ago, is that the chances of a successful resolution are close to zero.

My big gay wedding

No, it's no self outing, it's just that the King Street area where I often am on a Saturday afternoon is set up today for some late afternoon gay weddings:

If you can read the sign, it says Bob Downe will be there.  His camp act still in demand, I assume. 

The sign also notes an after party at a nearby venue, which appears to be this:

Yes.  All weddings should be followed by parties featuring disembodied splayed legs. 

Look, while I know we don't police the solemnity of straight weddings or receptions, I still have an issue with gay ones when they go out of their way to appear as unserious and profane parodies of, dare I say it, the real thing.

Disclaimer: of course gay relationships can be loving and respected.  They don't need weddings for that. 

Is time the only answer?

Everyone with a brain can see the problem:   a significant chunk of the Right has constructed its own reality:  self-propagandised itself into thinking cultural warrioring is all that matters, and that a few simplistic ideas are all that count in economics, or any field, really. Trump is the pinnacle of such self delusion:  look at his absurd self puffery in talking about how his speeches will be highly regarded in future, just like the Gettysburg address got better press over time.   In the same speech, I think, he was unable to pronounce "anonymous". 

It's become kind of distressing to see it repeated day after day after day:  and you can't even see how they think that they are being internally consistent.    It takes some pretty strong self brainwashing for pro-Trump conservatives to applaud tax cuts and increased military spending that all objective forecasts say will turn what was an improving deficit situation into a much worse one.  But they do.   

There seems to be growing concern that economic problems from Turkey, Argentina and (perhaps) China will grow into the next global economic contagion, and who could possibly think that Trump would have any idea who to listen to with respect to a response?  Well, of course, pro-Trump conservatives think that a many who has used bankruptcy several times to swing past business mistakes does.  Again:  the guy has shown repeatedly he doesn't understand the very basics of economics and repeatedly, insiders have explained he is impossible to teach.   Yet they think he will save them.

Anyway this is just a bit of a bleg to complain that I get tired of mainstream analysis understanding the problem, but not really having a clue as to how it is going to be overcome.  Does anyone have ideas about how it will change?

Sure, the GOP losing control of Congress would help, but will that solve the more the fundamental problem that David Roberts called the tribal epistemology problem?

Because, at the moment, it seems that time is the only answer.  
 

Finding the happy medium

Isn't it sort of frustrating to hear, on the one hand, if reported accurately:

* that carpenters in the new Brisbane Queen's Wharf hotel/casino development will get a base annual salary of $288,000 - indicating some pretty ridiculous salaries negotiated by a building union with a bullying reputation;

and on the hand:

*  Amazon operating its sales warehouses on completely casual, outsourced staff, at low rates of pay, with workers being  permanently in fear of losing position because of tough "performance targets".   All for a company run by a multi-billionaire.

Both things are not right, but from opposite sides of the spectrum.   

On a related matter:  I'm deeply sceptical of the "gig economy", and am very reluctant to ever engage with it - I haven't even tried a Uber yet.

On the other hand, it is too hard for small businesses to deal with difficult employees who take unfair advantage of the Fair Work rules.

On the third hand:  it is pretty ridiculous when some businesses - often franchises - will operate on clear underpayment of staff for years before it is corrected.   You know for some of them it is no error made in good faith:  the business model itself means it could not survive with full pay.

And often that model is as result of it being a franchise:   man, hasn't this model taken a battering in credibility in recent years?   Does anyone go to "Franchise Expos" anymore to find the franchisors selling their "product" as a safe way to get into business?    Greed seems to overtake all common sense - with franchisors imposing competition that hurts all franchisees, and supply deals that just kill profitability, all as a way of the franchisor maximising profit.

In short, as in politics, where it seems the "happy medium" is harder to find these days, our business economy seems to have been hit by extremities too.  

I miss the middle ground.

Another observation

You know, I have looked through the long, long list of the late Burt Reynolds film appearances, and I am pretty sure that I have seen none - not one - in which he was the headline star.  It's almost uncanny, but if he was the star, I had no interest in it.  Not that I ever felt a particularly strong dislike of him  - I pretty much considered him harmless - just he chose material which had no appeal to me.  

I am a bit embarrassed to admit I did see Boogie Nights, for which he did get fairly prominent billing, but I don't recall that he had all that much screen time.  I thought it greatly overrated.  I should have continued using my rule of thumb and not seen it.

It's funny how many of us can find some actors who become a pretty reliable guide to whether a film will be enjoyed or not, regardless of box office success.    

Trump madness update

Jonathan Swan at Axios (who I don't entirely trust, given his apparent disdain of the Left) noted yesterday that it's not just one renegade within the White House administration:

The big picture: He should be paranoid. In the hours after the New York Times published the anonymous Op-Ed from "a senior official in the Trump administration" trashing the president ("I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration"), two senior administration officials reached out to Axios to say the author stole the words right out of their mouths.

• "I find the reaction to the NYT op-ed fascinating — that people seem so shocked that there is a resistance from the inside," one senior official said. "A lot of us [were] wishing we’d been the writer, I suspect ... I hope he [Trump] knows — maybe he does? — that there are dozens and dozens of us."

He then got a threatening email which he showed on Twitter in full, including the guy's email address.

I note that the letter writer calls the Trump election the Flight 93 election - exactly the same way Peter Thiel was describing it in a recent interview.  This must be quite the meme on the wingnut Right - seeing electing Trump as a civilisation saving necessity. 

More later....

Update:    So the White House reaction is to try and call their wingnut base to harass the NYT to reveal their anonymous source:

Many on twitter have pointed out that it breaches some online harassment law - but whether it does or not, it's a ridiculous thing to do that will only be supported by the wingnut base.

The Trump madness

A few observations:

*   If Trump's staff are so readily disclosing embarrassing behaviour they have seen during the term of his presidency while they are still working for him, can you imagine what is going to come out when he has actually left the White House?   I'm pretty much expecting another 20 Omarosa  books with the theme "Of course I was lying that everything was great - I had a job to keep.  But let me tell you some stories."

*  The "soft coup" of an administration which simply sidesteps Trump because he's an idiot is an incredible situation.    Any normal person in the Oval Office faced with the deluge of savage, highly personally insulting, leaking against him would already have resigned - if you can't find staff that actually support you in private as well as public, it's humiliating.   But the GOP have decided it's best to keep Trump and his tribal, dumb, conspiracy believing base just ticking along, thinking he's actually doing a great job, so they can just work around him.  Or does this NYT piece signal a rebellion from within?   Because surely the author would know it would increase the paranoia in Trump's head - with any luck, sending him over some sort of edge.   David Frum's piece, This is a Constitutional Crisis, puts it well: 

If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no “riskiness” exemptions in the text of that oath.

 *  We actually know what will hasten the end of the Trump Presidency - Fox News turning on him.   But is it a case of Rupert doesn't know how to do that without shedding a huge slab of his brainwashed audience?  

Update:  sounds about right:

The problems on the Left

I watched that Jazz Twenlow segment from Tonightly about the self defeating Leftwing outrage machine and it is pretty good, but not perfect.   (Can't people like him admit that Hillary was correct in her judgment about half of Trump's base being pretty much deplorables, even if it was politically unwise to be honest about it at that time?  And never forget - who won popular vote convincingly despite that mistake?)

But more importantly, someone commenting on Twitter linked to this article in a magazine I have never heard of before:  No, Liberal Lefties are Not Right Wing, and it does seem a very good analysis of the Left's problem with what she calls the identitarian Left.   A sample:

To understand this, it is probably necessary to have a quick look at divisions on the left right now. While all lefties support economic policies which seek to redistribute wealth, reduce inequalities and support the most socially disadvantaged in society, the largest and longest split is between the socialists who advocate social ownership of the means of production—thereby putting control in the hands of the workers—and the social democrats who seek to redistribute wealth within a regulated capitalist system within a liberal democracy. These have loosely been understood as the “radical Left” and the “liberal Left” and this is also loosely connected to differing principles around social issues such as feminism (radical feminism vs liberal feminism).

There has been much animosity between these groups with the radicals accusing the liberals of being half-measure sell-outs and the liberals accusing the radicals of being delusional Utopians. Nevertheless, these have been straightforward disagreements on comprehensible issues and civil and reasonable conversation and compromise have also been possible because both groups believe that objective truth exists, that evidence and reason are the way to access it and that language is a tool for conveying these.

More recently, we have seen a rise of the identitarian lefties who hold very different ideas about objective truth, evidence, reason and language and who view society as structured by discourse (ways of talking about things) which perpetuates systems of power and privilege. As they often fit the definition of “radical” but have little in common with the older radical leftism and seldom address economics or class issues coherently, preferring to focus on identity groups like race, gender and sexuality, things have become much more messy, and communication and compromise much more difficult. These are the individuals who frequently insist that the liberal lefties are actually right-wing. As the liberal lefties make up the majority of lefties and as they are the most moderate and reasonable element of the left—and therefore the most likely to win the support of the political middle ground—this is an accusation we cannot allow to stand. We are the left and we cannot let the identitarians define us any longer.

 And further down:

These lefties share some core tenets of leftism in that they want to support the most vulnerable in society, but they tend to neglect the poorest people if they lack other identity characteristics associated with disadvantage—being female, of ethnic minority or LGBT. There is little support for white, working class men and they frequently deny that straight, white men can face any disadvantages at all or speak in ways which assume this. This has almost certainly assisted the present reactionary surge to the right.

Identitarian lefties also share the care/harm foundation of liberalism with this drive to end inequality and prioritize groups seen as marginalized, but this is accompanied by a rage at groups seen as privileged. The result is a highly illiberal practice of evaluating the worth of individuals by their gender, race or sexuality. Because of the belief that power in society is constructed by language, they are also prone to authoritarian censoriousness about what language can and cannot be used and which ideas may or may not be discussed.

This bent to control is in profound contrast to the traditionally liberal support of the “marketplace of ideas.”

The final summation of the state of play:

We are now in a situation in which the three parts of the left—radical, liberal and identitarian—are locked in an unproductive deadlock. The radicals oppose the identitarians whom they see as bourgeois elitists rooted in the academy who have completely abandoned the working class and the meaning of leftism. They remain at odds with the liberals for their lack of support for socialism. The liberals oppose the identitarians whom they regard as profoundly illiberal and threatening to undo decades of progress towards individual freedom and equality of opportunity regardless of race, gender and sexuality. They find the radicals of little help in supporting liberalism. The identitarians largely ignore the radicals except in the form of radical feminist rejection of trans identity which they condemn as transmisogynistic hatred but pay some confused lip-service to anti-capitalism (which does not mollify the radicals). They reserve most of their ire for the liberals who are addressing the same social and ethical issues that they are.

If you think those paragraphs are convincing, go read it all.  

News best left unreported?

At the BBC, a story of a woman who poisoned her husband by putting eyedrops in his water.   Who knew this was a such a readily available poison?:

She was detained when a toxicology test discovered a chemical called tetrahydrozoline in his body.

The substance is found in over-the-counter eyedrops and nasal sprays that are available without a prescription....

Tetrahydrozoline can cause seizures, stop breathing and induce comas, according to the US National Library of Medicine.

Even a few drops of the drug, which is intended to reduce redness, can cause "serious adverse events".

Somewhat blackly amusing, though, is this part of the report:

Prosecutors say they are now reviewing a 2016 incident, in which she shot her husband in the head with a crossbow as he slept.

Police determined that that shooting was "accidental", according to a police report obtained by the Charlotte Observer.

Investigators found Mrs Clayton at home "crying and upset" after the crossbow incident, according to the report.

Update:   OK so, obviously, eyedrop poisoning has been a "thing" for some time - just that I have missed it.   From Wired in 2013:

Surprised? You shouldn't be. Eye-drop poisoning is more routine you might think. Remember the Ohio man arrested last year for sending his father to the hospital by putting two bottles of Visine into his milk? The Pennsylvania woman who'd been sneaking Visine into her boyfriend's drinking water for three years? (The poor man suffered all that time with nausea, breathing and blood pressure problems). Oh, and let's not forget the Wyoming teenager who was angry with her step-mother; the girl just pleaded no contest to aggravated assault charges this Friday.

Risky encounters with eyedrops have turned up on poison center roundups; the myth-busting website Snopes.com has tallied up even more. And those are lists of deliberate eye drop attacks. Let's not forget the hazards posed by accidental poisonings; the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning to parents about leaving eye drops containers around where they might be found by children.

Snopes took up the question to debunk an apparent belief that sneaking eye drops into a drink would basically induce a hilarious case of diarrhea – a scenario portrayed in a prank scene in the 2005 movie Wedding Crashers. Did I mention that Snopes specializes in myth busting? The website labeled the diarrhea scenario false and more. It went on to issue this warning: "Ingestion of such a concoction is downright dangerous making this 'harmless' form of retaliation fraught with hazard."....

The record tells us that tetrahydrozoline while poisonous is not a top-of-line-lethal substance. According to the safety sheet, acute oral toxicity in lab mice stands at an LD50 of 345 mg/kg. (LD50 stands for lethal dose 50 percent, meaning the amount of a toxic substance that will kill half of a test population). For comparison, the LD50 of potassium cyanide in mice is 5 mg/kg. And that difference means that while people do end up the hospital, they tend to survive the stay. This is good news for victims and also for perpetrators, as so many of them end up arrested thanks in part to the very characteristic symptoms of eye drop poisoning.

That's weirdly irresponsible of Wedding Crashers, isn't it?  (I've never seen it.)

Back to Bannon

I agree with the tweet, and most of what is said supporting it in the thread:

I think there is a world of difference between a writer's festival disinviting Germaine Greer and Bob Carr, both somewhat eccentric but (for want of a better description) harmless professional thinkers willing to engage in genuine debate,  and one disinviting a person who was crucial to the rise of the most blantantly authoritarian President we are ever likely to see, still supports him, and seeking to get back into political influence by preaching hyper-nationalism and shallow populism.

If you don't support people who would refuse to attend a writers festival if Bannon is there, you don't appreciate the danger and obnoxiousness of the guy.   [Leigh Sales might be well served to read this article, for starters.]   And that's pretty shameful and dumb, especially for journalists.

Three propositions

1.  What you choose is what the Universe chooses.

2.  Therefore, choose carefully.

3.  "Grace" is a matter of being  aware of points 1 & 2.


Update:   Gee, I had a really nice curry for dinner last night, and it seems to have turned me into Jordan Peterson.   (Actually, I was thinking about free will and determinism and Tipler and spacetime and Burt Bacharach and whether he was really onto something with that awful song from Lost Horizon, etc.)

Bannon out

Even allowing for the fact that literary writing or "ideas" festivals seem to have increasingly become an insular haven for the political Left and (in the last few years at least) the worst of identity politics,  I still think that the great majority of people who watched Steve Bannon's 40 minute interview on Four Corners last night would see no point in him appearing at something like the New Yorker festival.  (He has been disinvited after public outcry.)

He motormouthed his way through the interview, and doesn't address correction or criticism so much as dismiss them as simply being typical liberal media takes on the matter, and therefore obviously wrong.

He shows no sophistication or nuance in his understanding of trade, economics and corporate behaviour;  everything is perceived simply through his populist, nationalist, "clash of cultures" worldview, with his apparent love of capitalism mixed up with his somewhat contradictory distrust of corporate elites for making too much money.   (The Catholic influence is pretty clear - but only in so far as identifying a problem with capitalist excess.  There's not much sign that accepts the simple proposition that is also Catholic:  that it is an appropriate role of government to directly intervene in those excesses for the greater good.   Instead, he just seems to think that if all globalism stops, all companies will naturally behave better.)

In short, as lots of people have been saying about the New Yorker decision - it's ridiculous to think we don't know enough about his views and politics already, or that he is ever amenable to genuine, detailed debate.  He has his views; he makes his living by being a polemicist; and he dog whistles for support from the obnoxious and racist alt.right continually.

There is no point in his coming to a Left leaning festival, other than to invite an unedifying shouting match.

Update:

I've gone back over some of my past posts about Bannon. 

Even if I do say so myself, I nailed it pretty good in this one. 

And from another post, look at the way he was the source of the Trump quasi-fascist "fake news" meme that has killed hope of rational debate with Trump cultists:

But it's clear that a huge part of the problem is the people around him - particularly the unhealthy looking Stephen Bannon, who is obviously either behind, or completely supportive of, Trump's paranoia with how the media presents him.  Here he is, quoted by the NYT:

“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Mr. Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.”

“The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Mr. Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” (He did not name specific reporters or editors.)

“That’s why you have no power,” Mr. Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” 

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Yes, just what you want.  An unstable, vindictive culture warrior who won't accept that the Trump victory was, in fact, very narrow, advising a vain, insecure man-child who stumbled into a presidency he didn't really expect.

The guy has ideas, sure:  but they are obnoxious and merely asserted - it is not as if they are well researched or ever justified with details you can argue about.

As such, no matter how much you don't care for Lefties not challenging themselves at literary love ins (or however you want to put it), to invite Bannon to a serious "ideas festival" is too much like the false equivalence of  claiming you must have a climate change fake "skeptic" at a science festival or a serious TV discussion in order to say it has given the topic proper coverage.

No, he has shown he does not deserve a mainstream platform to bluster his views again, or to attempt to rehabilitate himself as some sort of misunderstood Mr Reasonable.

Update:   amusingly, I see that some of the old characters at Catallaxy thought Bannon did great in that interview.   Their reactions are so predictable:   if any right wing guy talks over a woman interviewer (especially one from a public broadcaster), they'll think he's fantastic.

Transgender research wars, continued...

I've mentioned the 4thwavenow website before [it's subtitled "A community of parents & others concerned about the medicalization of gender-atypical youth and rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)"], and how transgender activists hate it.  Now Science reports on a researcher who did surveys with parents from that and similar sites, only to be condemned for, you know, investigating what a lot of concerned parents were claiming:

Controversy is exploding around a paper published earlier this month in PLOS ONE by a public health expert at Brown University describing reports by parents that their children suddenly experienced unease with the gender they were assigned at birth; the paper calls the condition “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD). The paper, by physician-scientist Lisa Littman, is drawing fierce criticism from transgender advocates, who call it antitransgender because it suggests that some cases of gender dysphoria may be “socially contagious.” They say the paper has serious methodological flaws, noting that Littman interviewed only parents, not the young people themselves, and recruited from websites frequented by parents who were concerned about their children’s apparently sudden gender transitions. Meanwhile, the reactions of Brown and the journal are being assailed by critics who accuse them of caving to political pressure.

On Monday, PLOS ONE announced it is conducting a postpublication investigation of the study’s methodology and analysis. “This is not about suppressing academic freedom or scientific research. This is about the scientific content itself—whether there is anything that needs to be looked into or corrected,” PLOS ONE Editor-in-Chief Joerg Heber in San Francisco, California, told ScienceInsider in an interview yesterday.

Also on Monday, Brown officials removed the university’s press release highlighting the paper from its website. On Tuesday, Bess Marcus, dean of Brown’s School of Public Health, wrote in an open statement that the university acted “in light of questions raised about research design and data collection related to the study.” She added that people in the Brown community have raised concerns that the study’s conclusions “could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.”

 Another researcher says there is no denying the upswing in sudden onset transexuals, though:

But Ray Blanchard, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto in Canada who worked for 15 years in a gender identity clinic that screened candidates for sex reassignment surgery, says the paper points to a clear phenomenon: a new subgroup of adolescents, mainly women, with gender dysphoria and no behavioral signs of such dysphoria during childhood.

“Many clinicians in North America and elsewhere have been seeing such patients,” Blanchard, who worked with adults, wrote in an email, “and it has been speculated that this subgroup is one reason for the predominance of adolescent females now being seen in North America and elsewhere (Aitken et al., 2015). No one can deny the clinical reality,” he wrote, that the documented increase in adolescent girls being referred to clinics for gender dysphoria is being augmented by those with no history of the condition in childhood.

In the study, Littman acknowledged its limitations, describing it as a starting point. “Like all first descriptive studies, additional studies will be needed to replicate the findings,” she wrote. She told ScienceInsider that in upcoming research she plans to recruit parent-teen pairs in cases where the teenager experienced ROGD that later resolved.

About that Productivity Commission report on inequality

I wrote about Adam Creighton's biased take on it last week, and I see that Peter Whiteford has written on the topic, showing that my complaint was well justified. 

I don't really know how he manages to always be so polite.

A modern Gothic well worth watching

First off:  I think Gore Verbinski is pretty underrated as a director and visual stylist.   I'm a strong defender of all three initial instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean, even as the pace lagged in number 3: they all show real directorial and visual flare.    I then enjoyed Rango, his eccentric animated Western, as well as The Lone Ranger - not a perfect film by any means, but again, always watchable, great to look at, and amusing enough to keep me watching.    [I've never seen his version of The Ring, as it happens:  perhaps soon.]

This is by way of explaining why I was interested to see his last movie - A Cure for Wellness.   I caught up with it on Saturday via Google Play.

I knew that it had received mixed reviews - 47% on Metacritic - so I was expecting flaws.  And while I knew (before double checking) that it had been been a box office flop - I didn't realise it was a spectacular commercial failure - $8 million in the US, and only $26 million worldwide!

But it turns out to be one of those movies in which lowered expectations are well exceeded.

Best reason to watch it - looks absolutely fantastic, with great directorial flair.   Honestly, it's worth watching for that alone.

As for the story - I think it's best described as modern Gothic, and a pretty weird one at that.   In many respects, it reminded me of The Shining:  it's often ambiguous as to whether we are seeing reality or full or partial hallucination.   As such, it could in theory make for a lot of interesting on-line analysis (like Kubrick's move), except for the fact that no one saw it!  Also like Kubrick, the characters are not overly sympathetic or deeply drawn, but it doesn't matter much in this case.  And it does have a touch of redemption at the end.

I thought it was also interesting how unsympathetically Europeans are generally portrayed:  the village outside of the Alpine sanatorium looks like a dump full of punks with no jobs, and as for the  German speaking workers back in the spa - none of them are to be trusted.   I see that Verbinski was born in the US but had Polish grandparents.  He is also credited as co-story writer for this film.   I wonder if he intended that it have a "never trust a German" subtext, even though set in Switzerland?

It is obviously not going to be everyone's taste:  there are two scenes in particular that are somewhat over the top (one a torture scene that was short but so intense I had to look away.  That's not so common for me, although that's perhaps because I don't watch awful torture themed movies - like the Saw series - anyway.)   There is too much ambiguity in terms of where reality ends and hallucination begins.   And really, do movies with plots involving incest ever do all that well?   (OK, excepting Chinatown - which, incidentally, I consider over-praised.) 

But overall, I would strongly recommend that folk with a taste for dreamlike Gothic horror, and who want to see a stunningly good looking film made by a director who really knows what to do with a camera, go watch it.

Finally, here's an article that talks about where they filmed it - part of it was in a military hospital where Hitler was once treated!  Interesting.

Update:   I suppose I should have checked Reddit, but there is a fair bit of discussion there trying to get to the bottom of the story.   I would love to know whether there is a deliberate hidden explanation waiting to be found in it, or whether Gore deliberately kept things so ambiguous so as to make that a talking point.  (Same could be speculated about Kubrick and The Shining, too.)