The big picture on population

From Club Troppo, a fascinating review of a new book arguing that the rate of population growth is peaking much sooner than expected, with large implications both good and bad:

Even before the arrival of Bricker and Ibbitson’s new work, the population pessimists were overstating their claims. The UN forecasts that population will peak at around 11 billion in 2100 then settle into gentle decline.

But Bricker and Ibbitson assert that the UN has got it wrong. Their investigations suggest that fertility rates are falling much more rapidly around the globe than the UN thinks.

They point out that populations are already declining in two dozen countries – by 2050 it will be three dozen. Japan’s population is expected to fall from 127 million to 95 million by 2053! They say that global population will peak at about 9 billion or less between 2040 and 2060 – a lower and earlier peak than the UN predicts. They also say population post-peak will decline much more quickly that conventionally thought.

Their conclusions are based on published statistics and a series of interviews on every continent supplemented by recent survey data about planned family size.

It has long been known that increasing per capita incomes, economic development and urbanisation led to declining fertility. But in developing countries, fertility rate declines appear to be running well ahead of what could be expected on the basis of their stage of economic development. Why? The answer is female education and information technology. Female school enrolment is rising rapidly and access to information is exploding. Women are being better educated younger, both formally and informally, than ever before. As a result, they are choosing to have fewer babies.

 As for the (rather topical) question of Muslims out-populating the West:

The authors dismiss claims that religion and culture dominate other drivers of fertility rates. Claims that, for example, Muslim countries, have higher fertility rates than elsewhere due to religious factors can’t be sustained. The 2010-15 fertility rates for Iran, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Bahrain and Kuwait are all at replacement (2.1) or below and are probably continuing the fall. Developed Muslim countries have low fertility rates just like non-Muslim developed countries. They also argue that immigrates adopt their new homes’ birth rates in one or, at most, two generations.

 The best thing about a reduced population peak?   It's environmental, of course:

Bricker and Ibbitson point out that “if the UN’s low variant [population growth] model played out, relative emissions would decline by 10 percent by 2055 and 35 percent by 2100.”

 The not-so-great aspect is the unclear economic and geopolitical effect:

Population decline is likely to lead to geopolitical instability. Bricker and Ibbitson says that, following its disastrous one child policy and its prohibition of immigration, China’s population could be, astonishingly, as low as 650 million by 2100 if its fertility rates fall in line with those in Hong Kong and Singapore at 1.0 or lower. The associated changes in economic and military power will redefine strategic priorities.

Economic growth will be slower. AI, rather than being a threat to jobs, may come just in time to complement a shrinking workforce. The economic and social consequences are too complex to predict.

 The reviewer makes some comments following the post which are helpful too:

1. This new book is not an example of ‘apocryphal thinking’. The authors, at no point, argue that this is an end-of-the-world scenario. If one had to reduce the book to one sentence it is: ‘fertility rates are lower than is widely thought, are falling faster and will get much lower sooner than the vast majority think – including politicians, economics, bureaucrats, environmentalists and even, apparently, the majority of demographers – to nominate a few key groups’.

2. Yes, it’s ‘old news’ that fertility rates are below replacement in many countries. The new news is that: that club is growing more rapidly than thought; the falls, after below replacement levels are reached, are continuing, and; falls in developing countries are suddenly getting ahead of the economic development curve. Again, to reduce the book’s story to one short sentence: ‘fertility rates are lower than you think’ – to which some big say ‘big deal’ and they’re right but in the non-sarcastic sense.

This seems an important book, and it was only published in February this year.  I wonder why I haven't noticed it reviewed elsewhere...

Control confusion

That Seattle Times article on the problems with Boeing's certification of the 737 Max reads as a classic of investigative reporting.

If I am understanding it correctly, however, what remains unclear s why the MCAS system was triggered at all during both flights, shortly after takeoff.  (The report says it is only meant to be activated "in extreme circumstances far outside the normal flight envelope".)   Was the single sensor it relied on faulty on both planes? 

The whole rush to get the plane certified, and the FAA's delegation of a large part of that task back to Boeing, all paints self regulation in a poor light, yet again.  

Finishing up on The Alienist

My final impressions after watching the last two episodes of The Alienist last night.

Strangely, the second last episode was really good (with a very unpleasant sense of what it would be like to be hiding while a gory murder goes on next to you) and hinted at a thrilling final episode - but it was not to be.   The last instalment was somewhat confusing, poorly explained and no where near the highlight of the series - did something get lost in the editing?

That said, I never got tired of the expensive, high quality production values:  from costumes to extras, it was about as far as you can get from the underpopulated, cheap feel of any Australian movie or series, whether it be set in modern or historic period.  I also think it fair to say that I grew to like all of the characters in the crime fighting team.  Dakota Fanning (the screaming girl in Spielberg's War of the Worlds) was good, but so were all of the men, really.

It wasn't perfect, as I have explained in past posts, but enjoyable nonetheless.  I'm pleased to see a sequel is being made with the same cast.

Update:  I agree with a lot of what is said in this review of the last episode, or series, and particularly with the comment that lists all of the unexplained things that happened the episode.  I'm glad it wasn't just me - it genuinely was a case of a terrible lack of explanation of what was going on.  Nonetheless, I still feel more generous towards the show than perhaps it deserves.

So, how's Sinclair Davidson's ship of fools going?

Same old, same old.   No care, no responsibility.

After not personally saying anything about the collectivist hatred of Muslims for months (or years) on the blog where he can block or ban people, but chooses not to in 99% of cases, it seems Sinclair gets motivated to make a "hey folks, your take on Islam is over the top" post when the content of his threads might get more attention due to current events.   And, of course, he gets told by 99% of people who comment there that he's being a Left wing idiot for saying so.

I can't be bothered spending the time collecting examples of the support for Fraser Anning's "well, Muslims getting shot up by nutters is what you get when you allow them to migrate here" line that are on Catallaxy.   Let's just say, the collectivist derision and panic attacks over the religion are there just as much as it was before - with the  addition by most that of course, they don't want individual Muslims shot up by a nutter, that's really bad.  Huh.

Would be good if the Human Rights Commission were reading the blog though, and asking for a "please explain".   I half suspect, though, that Sinclair wants to be a martyr for free speech.   Good, let him be.

Anyway, on its other favourite theme, climate change denial, we get this inane piece by an economist sacked by the IPA for being too extreme in his take on Islam:

Apart from the ridiculous take on the status of the science, what this with the "Forces of Evil"?    The version of this in The Spectator doesn't share the same headline.  Who came up with it at Catallaxy?

Sinclair Davidson seems to be very comfortable with the general wingnut vibe of Catallaxy now - in which (following the wingnut Right in America),  anything to the Centre or Left of them policy wise is beaten up into some grand, fake, crisis that will bring down the very continued existence of capitalism and the West.   It's Socialism!   It's Venezuela just around the corner!  It's..pathetic.

This demonisation of even vaguely progressive policies is a dangerous and ridiculous phenomena - and Sinclair Davidson should be pilloried for running a blog where the likes of his pals Kates and Moran get to act like the fact free hysterics that they are.

Nick Cohen on Brexit, and other stuff

Nick Cohen has a "pox on all their houses" column about Brexit and the deeply weird state of British politics.

And did you see what Steve Bannon (expert on everything, obviously) said?: Theresa May is ‘not terribly sophisticated’.

Which reminds me, there was this statement in the presence of Bannon too:

Trump supporter: "Never in my life did I think I'd like to see a dictator, but if there's going to be one, I want it to be trump"

 All completely normal...for a European proto-fascist state, circa 1930's.

Getting to the root of mental illness

The Atlantic has a review of a book Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illnes, (by Anne Harrington) and it's well worth reading. Let's take some extracts:

It follows that psychiatrists also cannot precisely predict for whom and under what conditions their treatments will work. That is why antipsychotic drugs are routinely prescribed to depressed people, for example, and antidepressants to people with anxiety disorders. Psychiatry remains an empirical discipline, its practitioners as dependent on their (and their colleagues’) experience to figure out what will be effective as Pliny Earle and his colleagues were. Little wonder that the history of such a field—reliant on the authority of scientific medicine even in the absence of scientific findings—is a record not only of promise and setback, but of hubris....

As Harrington ably documents, a series of fiascoes highlighted the profession’s continued inability to answer Clark Bell’s question. Among them was the 1973 vote by the American Psychiatric Association declaring that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. The obvious question—how scientific is a discipline that settles so momentous a problem at the ballot box?—was raised by the usual critics. This time, insurers and government bureaucrats joined in, wondering, often out loud, whether psychiatry warranted their confidence, and the money that went along with it.

The association’s response was to purge its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the Freudian theory that had led it to include homosexuality in the first place. When the third edition of the DSM came out, in 1980, its authors claimed that they had come up with an accurate list of mental illnesses: Shedding the preconceptions that had dominated previous taxonomies, they relied instead on atheoretical descriptions of symptoms. But as Harrington points out, they did have a theory—that mental illness was no more or less than a pathology of the brain. In claiming not to, she argues,

they were being disingenuous. They believed that biological … markers and causes would eventually be discovered for all the true mental disorders. They intended the new descriptive categories to be a prelude to the research that would discover them.

The DSM-3’s gesture at science proved sufficient to restore the reputation of the profession, but those discoveries never followed. Indeed, even as the DSM (now in its fifth edition) remains the backbone of clinical psychiatry—and becomes the everyday glossary of our psychic suffering—knowledge about the biology of the disorders it lists has proved so elusive that the head of the National Institute of Mental Health, in 2013, announced that it would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”

I wonder if this review (and the book), is exaggerating a bit?   This part, for example:

The need to dispel widespread public doubt haunts another debacle that Harrington chronicles: the rise of the “chemical imbalance” theory of mental illness, especially depression. The idea was first advanced in the early 1950s, after scientists demonstrated the principles of chemical neurotransmission; it was supported by the discovery that consciousness-altering drugs such as LSD targeted serotonin and other neurotransmitters. The idea exploded into public view in the 1990s with the advent of direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs, antidepressants in particular. Harrington documents ad campaigns for Prozac and Zoloft that assured wary customers the new medications were not simply treating patients’ symptoms by altering their consciousness, as recreational drugs might. Instead, the medications were billed as repairing an underlying biological problem.

The strategy worked brilliantly in the marketplace. But there was a catch. “Ironically, just as the public was embracing the ‘serotonin imbalance’ theory of depression,” Harrington writes, “researchers were forming a new consensus” about the idea behind that theory: It was “deeply flawed and probably outright wrong.” Stymied, drug companies have for now abandoned attempts to find new treatments for mental illness, continuing to peddle the old ones with the same claims. And the news has yet to reach, or at any rate affect, consumers. At last count, more than 12 percent of Americans ages 12 and older were taking antidepressants. The chemical-imbalance theory, like the revamped DSM, may fail as science, but as rhetoric it has turned out to be a wild success.

I would have thought that the "chemical imbalance" theory still has significant, experimental support, even if flawed;  but I am not expert, just someone who finds the topic interesting.

 

The history of the Fourth Reich

From the New Statesman:  a rather fascinating review of a book that deals with the history of the Nazi idea of a Third (and now Fourth) Reich:  and it's fairly complicated.

First surprise:

...the concept of the “Third Reich” is more strange than it at first appears. For one thing, the term itself was effectively banned by Hitler in the lead-up to the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

The reason is hard to pin down. Rosenfeld suggests that Hitler found its Christological associations unattractive and, moreover, misleading. The Führer did not want to make false promises about delivering any kind of regime associated with peace and world brotherhood when he was planning to realise it through war, conquest, extermination and sacrifice. Hitler instructed the German press to use other formulations such as the “Germanic Empire of the German Nation” (Germanisches Reich Deutscher Nation) and the “Greater German Empire” (Grossgermanisches Reich).

Second surprise:

A more intriguing explanation for the Nazis’ retirement of the “Third Reich” was that they were already contending with a barrage of counter-propaganda about a coming “Fourth Reich” by the anti-Nazi resistance. This is where Rosenfeld’s book becomes truly revelatory, for it seems perplexing that anti-Nazis would latch on to the concept of a “Reich” at all. But this is what many German Social Democrats in exile did. The former member of the German parliament Georg Bernhard and fellow SPD intellectuals went so far as to write a “Draft of a Constitution for the Fourth Reich” that would come about after the fall of Hitler. The Fourth Reich, its constitution declared, would be dedicated to global democracy and the equality of peoples.  

Third surprise (and perhaps the biggest, since I have never been to Indonesia):

The Fourth Reich is the latest in a grand series of works that Rosenfeld has devoted to the afterlife of Nazism. But towards the end of the book he makes one small assumption that strikes me as opening up the possibility of a further volume, about the Nazi afterlife in Asia. “Germany’s popularity”, he writes, “did not last” after the financial crisis of 2008. This may be true for Europe, but it is hardly the case globally, where, especially in south and south-east Asia, Germany is regularly ranked as the favourite country.

What is disconcerting for any European traveller to Indonesia, for instance, is not merely that people equate Germany with perfection – automobiles, appliances and football – but that Nazi prowess is also admired as an example of German excellence. That there was a genocide is not particularly notable for people who have lived through one of their own, but German nationalism coupled with industrialism and the apparent bounty of its socialism draws admirers. The news-stands of Jakarta are full of magazines devoted to U-boats alone. At the Soldatenkaffee in Bandung, couples order “Nazi goreng”, below the German heraldic eagle and a wall decorated with a slogan that reads: “We are Socialists, we are enemies of the capitalist economic system…” In a country where to be on the left is still forbidden, it’s at least cool to quote to Hitler.

So the wingnuts who have convinced themselves that the Nazis were always and in every sense socialists can go take comfort in some nutjob's cafe in Jakarta.   If only they would go and stay there.

Sums it up well

Some Christchurch commentary of note

At the Washington Post:   The Racist Theory that Underlies Terrorism in New Zealand and the Trump Presidency.

An extract:

Trump is not to blame for the tragedy in Christchurch. But, as an editorial in The Washington Post noted, there isn’t much daylight between the “garden-variety racism” of Tarrant’s manifesto and the far-right nativism at times espoused by Trump and his advisers.

My colleagues pointed to the particular emphasis Tarrant seemed to place on the “great replacement” theory, a belief popular among the West’s far right that white populations face “genocide” as a result of declining birthrates and mass immigration. In his manifesto, Tarrant pointed to the formative impact of a trip to France in 2017, where he was disturbed by the number of Muslims he saw in a midsize French town.

“As I sat there in the parking lot, in my rental car, I watched a stream of the invaders walk through the shopping centre’s front doors,” Tarrant wrote. “For every French man or woman there was double the number of invaders. I had seen enough, and in anger, drove out of the town, refusing to stay any longer in the cursed place and headed on to the next town.”

Though immigration levels have dropped significantly in Europe since 2015 — and though Muslims are a small minority in virtually every European country — this belief remains a virulent mobilizer of the European far right and has spread in various forms both across the Atlantic and to the Antipodes.

Renaud Camus, the polemicist whose thesis in his 2012 book “The Great Replacement” almost certainly influenced Tarrant, decried the gunman’s actions in an interview with The Washington Post. But he felt little concern over how his ideas were being interpreted by far-right politicians and proliferated in the online echo chambers where Tarrant stewed in his hatred.

“To the fact that people take notice of the ethnic substitution that is in progress in my country?” he ventured to my colleague James McAuley. “No. To the contrary.”

Camus is hardly an outlier. Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon has invoked the writings of Jean Raspail, whose deeply racist 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints” conjured an epochal influx of swarthy migrants subsuming France. In 2015, French far-right leader Marine Le Pen urged her supporters to read the book.

And this:

As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in a lengthy essay on American nativism, white nationalist angst over migration — whether it’s Latino arrivals at the border or the Muslims next door — hinges on tacit mainstream acceptance of the “replacement” theory: “The most benignly intentioned mainstream-media coverage of demographic change in the U.S. has a tendency to portray as justified the fear and anger of white Americans who believe their political power is threatened by immigration — as though the political views of today’s newcomers were determined by genetic inheritance rather than persuasion,” Serwer wrote.

A central contention of the Trumpist view on immigration, Serwer added, contends “that intrinsic human worth is rooted in national origin, and that a certain ethnic group has a legitimate claim to permanent political hegemony in the United States.”

That is, in essence, white supremacy. Trump “ought to state unambiguously that the New Zealand suspect’s ‘replacement’ ideology is an unacceptable trope in civilized discourse,” declared The Post’s editorial.

Blog becomes immortal

OK, that heading may be a slight exaggeration, but I just noticed at The Conversation that the National Library of Australia has:

....just launched its Australian Web Archive – a massive, freely accessible collection of content that provides a historical record of the development of world wide web content in Australia over more than two decades.

The new archive is a momentous achievement. Containing annual captures of all accessible pages on .au domains and dating back to 1996, it dwarfs even the the Library’s own PANDORA Web archive – a curated collection of Australian web content deemed to be of national significance by the librarians.

I believe it's the Pandora archive that chose to archive all of Catallaxy - back in the day when it still had a semblance of intellectual credibility.   

But yay, by searching the Australian Web Archive, I see that Opinion Dominion has been snapshotted quite a few times by this new archive of which I was unaware.

Immortality is mine.  (Insert Bwahahahahaha style laughter.) 

The biggest cop out

Here are the simple facts of the matter:

a. Sinclair Davidson will not ban people who comment at his blog who have been busy routinely vilifying Muslims collectively for many years.

b.  If you want to see some examples I have complained about before, use the site search bar at the side of this blog and search "Muslim Catallaxy". 

c.  The reason for his refusal to ban such comments or people is unknown.  I presume he thinks that banning them will look "un-libertarian".   This is kind of ironic, given that most of his followers, if threads are anything to go by, are actually reactionary Right wing  Conservatives who think libertarianism is a fatally flawed philosophy.   (Oh, they do like the idea that they can make rarely moderated and anonymous comments that are blatantly racist, sexist, misogynistic or just downright nutty.  That's the one aspect of libertarianism they're signed up for.  That and guns, lovely guns.)

d.  It's not as if he can't and doesn't ban people when it suits him - he has banned people in the past just for insulting him personally.  He has basically banned people for being too annoying to other commentators.

e. To state the obvious:  given the nature of the internet, there is nothing about being aggressively for free speech  that means you must personally host a site which routinely allows views you personally find "ugly"to repeatedly appear.

f.  It's no justification that he will, sometimes, personally post or comment that he thinks the anti-Muslim views on his site are going too far.

h.  He in fact maintains a forum in which the extremist views on Muslims are "normalised" by their constant repetition and frequent lack of challenge, despite them often representing extremism of the kind that appears in manifestos like that of the Christchurch killer.    



That he will not ban them shows he will take no responsibility for facilitating the promotion of those views.    He should never appear on media without being attacked for why he facilitates them.

To shrug his shoulders and say he is "not his brother's keeper", as he did in a recent comment here,  is a pathetic cop out.   


Update:  I meant to link to monty's post in 2014: Alan Moran sacked from IPA over anti-Islam tweets, in which I contributed comments puzzling over what justification a person of moderate views on Islam (like Davidson) can have for continuing to host a site like Catallaxy with threads full of  rabid anti Islamic views the IPA won't tolerate on its staff.  

Ergas and the elephant in the room

First, I am posting this after the horrible events in Christchurch today, a topic which will no doubt deserve some comment later.

But I just wanted to note Henry Ergas's column in The Australian this morning, purportedly looking at the "broader forces at work" behind the almost certain defeat of the Coalition at the coming election.  (It is very, very hard to imagine how Shorten could possibly blow an election where it seems half of the government has already resigned in disgust at its own internal divisions.)

Ergas notes how the Coalition came into power with Abbott having low approval rating, just that Rudd/Gillards was even lower due to their own shambolic internal divisions (true.)

But the rest of the column is about how the Australian electorate has moved Left, and how that's a long term problem for the Liberals.

What he doesn't seem to get into that noggin of his is that Australian's might have good reason for moving Left - because the Right's policies haven't exactly come out with the glorious results that would keep the voters happy.  

In fact, his treatment of policies is trite:

Yes, the Coalition has made more than its fair share of mistakes; nonetheless, one might have expected the prospect of a Shorten Labor government to induce more concern than it has.

Labor is, after all, committed to the largest peacetime tax rises since Federation, its energy policy threatens to convert a disaster into a catastrophe and its industrial ­relations policy risks replicating, albeit in a more benign macro­economic environment, the worst ­errors of the Whitlam years.

Each of those could have sent shivers down voters’ spines. ­Instead, they have been greeted with remarkable insouciance, even among their likely victims.

Blah blah blah:    The elephant in the room, dear Henry, dear Henry IS THAT THE COALITION HAS BEEN PARALYSED ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND (THEREFORE) ENERGY POLICY FOR 10 FREAKING YEARS.    THEY HAVE REEKED OF DISINGENUOUS CONCERN, UP TO AND INCLUDING THE CURRENT PM CARRYING COAL INTO PARLIAMENT WHILE NOW TRYING TO SELL HIMSELF AS WANTING TO MEET PARIS TARGETS.

If the Coalition wants to make a comeback, it needs to rid itself of climate change denialism.  My biggest regret about Turnbull's departure is that he did not call on the party to actually split to resolve that conflict once and for all.

Secondly, it needs to be centrist and not doggedly ideological about tax and economic policy, taking good ideas from where ever they may come; and in particular, not follow the poisonous populist corruption of the Right wing seen in the US which has become simply an intellectual embarrassment.  

So, yeah,  count me underwhelmed by his analysis, again.

In your own world

There's a MIT Technology Review article about this quantum experiment, but it sometimes throws up a paywall now, which is annoying.

So I'll go with this article instead:

A Wild New Quantum Physics Experiment Suggests That Objective Reality May Not Exist After All

It's all to do with the Wigner's friend thought experiment (now turned into an actual experiment). 

The actual arXiv paper is available at this link.  The abstract:

The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner's eponymous thought experiment where two observers can experience fundamentally different realities. While observer-independence has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, recent no-go-theorems construct an extended Wigner's friend scenario with four entangled observers that allows us to put it to the test. In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we here realise this extended Wigner's friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. This result lends considerable strength to interpretations of quantum theory already set in an observer-dependent framework and demands for revision of those which are not.

Actually, it's worth downloading the paper and reading the discussion at the end.

Modulo the potential loopholes and accepting the pho-tons’ status as observers, the violation of inequality (2)implies that at least one of the three assumptions of freechoice, locality, and observer-independent facts must fail.Since abandoning free choice and locality might not re-solve the contradiction [5], one way to accommodate ourresult is by proclaiming that “facts of the world” canonly be established by a privileged observer—e.g., onethat would have access to the “global wavefunction” inthe many worlds interpretation [17] or Bohmian mechan-ics [18]. Another option is to give up observer indepen-dence completely by considering facts only relative toobservers [19], or by adopting an interpretation such asQBism, where quantum mechanics is just a a tool thatcaptures an agent’s subjective prediction of future mea-surement outcomes [20]. This choice, however, requiresus to embrace the possibility that different observers ir-reconcilably disagree about what happened in an exper-iment.

No nudes Buddha

Just one of those things one stumbles across on the internet:  an explanation as to why, despite India even back then having a tradition of asceticism involving nudity and little care for personal hygiene, Buddhism is not associated with such practices:

The Buddha mentioned that before his enlightenment he went naked which have led some to speculate that he was a follower of Jainism for at least some time (M.I,77). The âjãvakas and several other sects went naked and the Ekasàñaka ascetics only wore a small cloth over their genitals. Nakedness together with tearing the hair out, never cutting the hair and nails, allowing the hair become matted and never washing, were all believed to show an admirable detachment from the world.....

The Buddha made it a rule that monks should never go naked, even within their private quarters (Vin.II,121). He said: `Nakedness is unbecoming, unsuitable, improper, unworthy of an ascetic, not allowable and not to be done'(Vin.I,305). He objected to it on two grounds. The first was because like all austerities or surface changes, nudity does not lead to significant inner change. He said: `Not nakedness nor matted hair, not mud nor fasting, not lying on the ground, being unwashed or squatting on the heels will purify one who has not passed beyond doubt' (Dhp.141). He also objected to nudity because it contravened the norms of polite society for no good reason. Lady Visàkhà once saw some nuns bathing naked and commented: `Nakedness in women is ugly, abhorrent and objectionable'(Vin.I,293), which seems to have been the general opinion at that time. The Buddha wanted his monks and nuns to abide by the normal standards of decorum and good manners, the better to be able to communicate the Dhamma to others. He was also anxious that his monks and nuns should be distinct from those of other sects, inwardly but also outwardly. Because many of these other ascetics were either completely or partly naked or wore whatever they liked, the Buddha stipulated that his ordained disciples should wear a distinct and easily identifiable robe. 

 Sounds kind of sensible to me.  

Late summers

Brisbane did not have a terribly hot summer during December and January, but I had been commenting to people that my recollection seemed to be that high temperatures have in recent years been coming in late summer - February.

This year, it seems later still - record setting 41 degree days just west of Brisbane in mid March. 

Combined with the record breaking warm winter days in parts of Europe in February, this feels somewhat climate change-y to me.

Design issues

Slate writes that this may well be the cause of the Boeing 737 Max problem:

To maintain its lead, Boeing had to counter Airbus’ move. It had two options: either clear off the drafting tables and start working on a clean-sheet design, or keep the legacy 737 and polish it. The former would cost a vast amount—its last brand-new design, the 787, cost $32 billion to develop—and it would require airlines to retrain flight crews and maintenance personnel. 

Instead, it took the second and more economical route and upgraded the previous iteration. Boeing swapped out the engines for new models, which, together with airframe tweaks, promised a 20 percent increase in fuel efficiency. In order to accommodate the engine’s larger diameter, Boeing engineers had to move the point where the plane attaches to the wing. This, in turn, affected the way the plane handled. Most alarmingly, it left the plane with a tendency to pitch up, which could result in a dangerous aerodynamic stall. To prevent this, Boeing added a new autopilot system that would pitch the nose down if it looked like it was getting too high. According to a preliminary report, it was this system that apparently led to the Lion Air crash. 

If Boeing had designed a new plane from scratch, it wouldn’t have had to resort to this kind of kludge. It could have designed the airframe for the engines so that the pitch-up tendency did not exist. As it was, its engineers used automation to paper over the aircraft’s flaws. Automated systems can go a long way toward preventing the sorts of accidents that arise from human fecklessness or inattention, but they inherently add to a system’s complexity. When they go wrong, they can act in ways that are surprising to an unprepared pilot. That can be dangerous, especially in high-stress, novel situations. Air France 447 was lost in 2009 after pilots overreacted to minor malfunctions and became confused about what to expect from the autopilot.

The article notes that Boeing and Airbus basically split the commerical aircraft market between them.   Yet there was talk over the last few years of China trying to become a player too.  I wonder how that's going?   Oh - not so well:

Why China is no closer to rivalling Boeing or Airbus

At the risk of sounding a tad 4Chan...

I'm making my way through Umbrella Academy (on Netflix), and but after a promising first episode, the pace is too often dragging.     

In particular, I find it really starts to get more tedious whenever the two "sisters" are featuring heavily.  I realised this last night - the male members of this superhero family are all distinctive and interesting in their own oddball ways, and really make the females (especially mopey face Ellen Page) seem very dull in comparison.

Of course, it will probably turn out that Vanya will have a secret power that is, like, really powerful. But gee, she is written as a dull character.  As is her sister.

On the other hand, I am amused to see that culture warrior-ing against Captain Marvel has gotten nowhere, with the movie probably already over $500 million within days of release.  I might go see it, even though reviews are a little mixed.  As with all silly superhero stuff, my main question is:  is it funny enough?

Professor under attack

I see that Sinclair Davidson noted in his Open Forum yesterday that people have complained to his tertiary institution about various things:

That makes the complaints sound very ill founded, yet in the bigger picture, he deserves to be pilloried at every opportunity for running a blog full of offensive swill. 

Update:  typical example - from today, aviation expert "Tom":

Boeing’s mistake is selling its aeroplanes to Third World airlines employing Third World trash as pilots 

 Stand proud, Sinclair.  Stand proud.  

Sounds interesting

A very short review at Nature:

War Doctor
David Nott Picador (2019)
For more than 25 years, surgeon David Nott has lived periodically “in a liminal zone where most people have neither been nor want to go”: fields of war from Afghanistan to Bosnia. His memoir interweaves bold surgical feats on these sojourns in hell with his own psychological journey, a chronicle equally soaked in blood and insight. Now co-founder of a foundation training other physicians in this specialized work, Nott remains an important witness to the haunting human price of that modern triad: geopolitical instability, poor governance and ever more powerful weaponry.

Update:  an interesting, more detailed, review of the book appears in American New Statesman, by another author surgeon (who I think I heard interviewed on the ABC once.)  It opens as follows:

Most doctors do not want to be surgeons – indeed, many view them with a slight distaste, as a necessary evil. Surgeons are attracted to surgery by blood, by the excitement of operating and by the power over patients that comes with it, as well as by the technical challenges of the handwork involved. It is a power to help and to heal, but as with so many psychological truths, it is two-sided – the power can be attractive in its own right. All surgeons have to find a balance between these competing poles of altruism and egotism.

As with climate change denialism

David Frum tweeted this the other day:

and lots of people in comments noted that the same can be said about climate change denialism.  It gives them a thrill of being in the exclusive club of insiders who really know what's going on.

Is "paranoia" too strong a word for it?   Probably not, when the wingnut Right whips themselves into a frenzy about SOCIALISM and how its behind climate change; not to mention their idea that a vast network of scientists just deliberately and fraudulently adjust the temperature record to prove that climate change is real.   Firm belief in wildly improbable, or repeatedly disproved, conspiracy is paranoia.

Oh look - even Sinclair Davidson wants Labor to win the Federal election

Yet another - Weekend Update

*  It was my turn to cut my finger while cutting vegetables - I was experimenting with those stupid chef ways as to how to dice an onion.  Back to the old way, I think.

*  Watched "Get Out" on Netflix.   Look, it is very well made - very assured direction and acting, and the creepiness of the white family builds very nicely.   I can see how a key idea is satirically funny too, when written by a black comedian.   (Smart but physically bland white folk actually want to be sexy, physically powerful black folk.)  But really, when it turns out the big secret is actually like a cross between a Twilight Zone episode and The Man With Two Brains, it did lose me somewhat.  I read some reviews saying that the last act is a satire of 70's horror - but when the film works so well before that, a break into that kind of satire doesn't really make sense.  So I am not sure it really is meant to be that kind of satire at that point.   (I also read a user review claiming they were somewhat disturbed at the - largely black - excited audience reaction to the killings at the end.   If that is true, I would be a tad disturbed too.)   Anyway, it's interesting and worth watching - I suppose - but yes, did get way too much unreserved praise from the very liberal group that is mainstream American film critics.

*  Newspoll back to 54/46 TPP in favour of Labor.  Yay.  What changed in only a week?   I think it might be simply that with nearly all high profile Ministers leaving Parliament, the public doesn't see why it should support a side where everyone is leaving the sinking ship already.

Kant eat animals

It's a Philosophy Friday, with a rather good review by Thomas Nagel of a book by a Kantian academic on the matter of whether humans should be giving up on eating animals.

Kant thought we could eat them, because animals don't think as humans do, but this pro-Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard comes to a different conclusion.

Utilitarian ethics gets a look in as part of this review too.

Here are some extracts:

Since the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975, there has been a notable increase in vegetarianism or veganism as a personal choice by individuals, and in the protection of animals from cruel treatment in factory farms and scientific research, both through law and through public pressure on businesses and institutions. Yet most people are not vegetarians: approximately 9.5 billion animals die annually in food production in the United States, and the carnivores who think about it tend to console themselves with the belief that the cruelties of factory farming are being ameliorated, and that if this is done, there is nothing wrong with killing animals painlessly for food. Korsgaard firmly rejects this outlook, not just because it ignores the scale of suffering still imposed on farmed animals, but because it depends on a false contrast between the values of human and animal lives, according to which killing a human is wrong in a way that killing an animal is not.

Korsgaard deploys a complex account of morality to deal with this and many other questions. What makes the book especially interesting is the contrast between her approach and Singer’s. She writes, and Singer would certainly agree, that “the way human beings now treat the other animals is a moral atrocity of enormous proportions.” But beneath this agreement lie profound differences. Singer is a utilitarian and Korsgaard is a Kantian, and the deep division in contemporary ethical theory between these two conceptions of morality marks their different accounts of why we should radically change our treatment of animals. (Equally interesting is Korsgaard’s sharp divergence from Kant’s own implausible views on the subject. As we shall see, she argues persuasively that Kant’s general theory of the foundations of morality supports conclusions for this case completely different from what he supposed.)

To be honest, though, I'm not sure that Nagel's account of how utilitarianism views the matter would be agreed by all utilitarians:

Utilitarianism is the view that what makes actions right or wrong is their tendency to promote or diminish the total amount of happiness in the world, by causing pleasure or pain, gratification or suffering. Such experiences are taken to be good or bad absolutely, and not just for the being who undergoes them. The inclusion of nonhuman animals in the scope of moral concern is straightforward: the pleasure or pain of any conscious being is part of the impersonal balance of good and bad experiences that morality tells us to make as positive as possible.

But the existence or survival of such creatures matters only because they are vessels for the occurrence of good experiences. According to utilitarianism, if you kill an animal painlessly and replace it with another whose experiences are just as pleasant as those the first animal would have had if it had not been killed, the total balance of happiness is not affected, and you have done nothing wrong. Even in the case of humans, what makes killing them wrong is not the mere ending of their lives but the distress the prospect of death causes them because of their strong conscious sense of their own future existence, as well as the emotional pain their deaths cause to other humans connected with them.

Korsgaard, in contrast, denies that we can build morality on a foundation of the absolute value of anything, including pleasure and pain. She holds that there is no such thing as absolute or impersonal value in the sense proposed by utilitarianism—something being just good or bad, period. All value, she says, is “tethered.” Things are good or bad for some person or animal: your pleasure is “good-for” you, my pain is “bad-for” me. Korsgaard says that the only sense in which something could be absolutely good is if it were “good-for” everyone. In the end she will maintain that the lives and happiness of all conscious creatures are absolutely good in this sense, but she reaches this conclusion only by a complex ethical argument; it is not an axiom from which morality begins, as in utilitarianism.

And now we come to the really key part:

In Kant’s view, we impose the moral law on ourselves: it applies to us because of our rational nature. The other animals, because they are not rational, cannot engage in this kind of self-legislation. Kant concluded that they are not part of the moral community; they have no duties and we have no duties toward them.²

It is here that Korsgaard parts company with him. She distinguishes two senses in which someone can be a member of the moral community, an active and a passive sense. To be a member in the active sense is to be one of the community of reciprocal lawgivers who is obligated to obey the moral law. To be a member in the passive sense is to be one of those to whom duties are owed, who must be treated as an end. Kant believed that these two senses coincide, but Korsgaard says this is a mistake. The moral law that we rational beings give to ourselves can give us duties of concern for other, nonrational beings who are not themselves bound by the moral law—duties to treat them as ends in themselves:

There is no reason to think that because it is only autonomous rational beings who must make the normative presupposition that we are ends in ourselves, the normative presupposition is only about autonomous rational beings. And in fact it seems arbitrary, because of course we also value ourselves as animate beings. This becomes especially clear when we reflect on the fact that many of the things that we take to be good-for us are not good for us in our capacity as autonomous rational beings. Food, sex, comfort, freedom from pain and fear, are all things that are good for us insofar as we are animals.

I find this argument for a revision of Kant’s position completely convincing. Korsgaard sums up:

On a Kantian conception, what is special about human beings is not that we are the universe’s darlings, whose fate is absolutely more important than the fates of the other creatures who like us experience their own existence. It is exactly the opposite: What is special about us is the empathy that enables us to grasp that other creatures are important to themselves in just the way we are important to ourselves, and the reason that enables us to draw the conclusion that follows: that every animal must be regarded as an end in herself, whose fate matters, and matters absolutely, if anything matters at all.

 
I'm no doubt pushing the friendship if I cut and paste anything more, so go read the whole thing.

As I may have suggested before, I am started to worry that my brain and heart are becoming too easily persuaded against the interests of my taste buds and stomach that I should veer towards vegetarianism - or at least piscetarianism.   There is some way to go yet, though.... 

Roman army talk

At The Catholic Herald, a review of a book that is specifically about the Roman Army in the New Testament.

The interesting section from the review:

Units of the Roman army garrisoning Palestine at the time of Christ were not drawn from the famous legions. Use of the legions was limited to areas that were either of the greatest strategic significance, under ongoing threat or the scene of at least impending conflict. Less sensitive areas were garrisoned either by auxiliaries or by the armies of technically independent satellite states. Herod the Great and Herod Antipas were among those commanding satellite armies. Legionaries are to be encountered in portions of the New Testament which concern the travels of the Apostles. The “Roman soldiers” stationed in the Palestine of the Gospels were auxiliaries. These were, like legionaries, under the direct orders of the Roman government but, like satellite armies, they were recruited among men living in the area where they served and who did not hold Roman citizenship (a prerequisite for entry into the legions).

The Roman army in Palestine was, therefore, the army of a foreign imperial power without being an army of foreigners (the same combination later seen in the Indian Army of British India). Upholding imperial authority against possible rebellions was obviously among its purposes, but its normal daily functions were not those characteristic of an occupation force. Provision of labour for engineering work and policing were more typical of its responsibilities. In this, the auxiliary units serving in Palestine conformed to the standards of Roman soldiers elsewhere in an empire whose authority was generally acquiesced with.

Jews of the time were not, unlike later Christians, forced to participate in pagan rituals. Roman practices were not unusually brutal by the standards of the age. Depending on the disposition of local officials and military commanders, soldiers could either be little better than thugs running extortion rackets or upright administrators of justice.

This reminded me about Helen Dale's alt history novels:  I wonder, did they dealt with this accurately? 

Incidentally, I recently looked up the (not very many) reader reviews about the second book on some on line sites, and a prominent complaint was about the large number of  sex scenes: even more than the first book, apparently.  As I think I have said before, my impression overall is that, apart from a fan base of libertarians and assorted followers,  the books were not very well received. 

Plant compounds to the rescue

Any suggestions as to what may help stave off Alzheimers are welcome, I guess:

A diet containing compounds found in green tea and carrots reversed Alzheimer's-like symptoms in mice genetically programmed to develop the disease, USC researchers say.

Yay for fluoride

The Guardian has a story up about how Queensland is a good way to track the effectiveness of fluoridation of water:

Dentists and doctors in Queensland are reporting “extensive tooth decay” in parts of the state that refuse to add fluoride to the water supply, especially among children and the elderly.

One in four Queensland children admitted to hospital requires treatment for a dental condition, according to the most recent report by the state’s chief medical officer.

Indigenous children, many of whom live in communities without fluoride, have a staggering 70% rate of tooth decay. The rate is 55% among all Queensland children aged between five and 15.

The thing is, the State government has left it up to Councils to decide on the matter, with some not doing it citing cost concerns, but there are also anti-fluoride activists playing a role (or trying to) as well.  Which means you get evidence like this:

In Bundaberg, which does not have fluoride, the rate of tooth decay is about 2.5 times higher than the rest of the state. There were 244 admissions to hospital for dental conditions in the town last year. Across the state, the number is in excess of 4,000....

Neil Johnson, the foundation dean of the Griffith University dental school and an emeritus professor, has been involved in a long-running study of dental heath in a Cape York Indigenous community.

Fluoride was added to the water supply in 2006. About six years later, there had been “a considerable improvement” in the health of the community, and about a 40% reduction in tooth decay.

The family church

Some really interesting figures here at Vox about what's happening to religious belief in America.  Surprisingly, the Mormons are holding numbers, despite their conservatism on matters sexual:

One-quarter of Americans are religiously unaffiliated today, a roughly fourfold increase from a couple of decades earlier. Christian denominations around the country are contending with massive defections. White Christian groups have experienced the most dramatic losses over the past decade. Today, white evangelical Protestants account for 15 percent of the adult population, down from nearly one-quarter a decade earlier. By contrast, Mormons have held steady at roughly 2 percent of the US population for the past several years. And perhaps as importantly, Mormons are far younger than members of white Christian traditions.

At one time, sociologists and religion scholars argued that theologically conservative churches, which demanded more of their members, were successful because they ultimately provided more rewarding religious and spiritual experiences. This theory has since fallen out of favor as the tide of disaffiliation appears to be washing over conservative and liberal denominations alike. The Southern Baptist Convention, the heart of conservative Protestantism, has sustained 12 straight years of membership loses. Since 2007, the denomination has shed 1.2 million members.

But more than the rules, rituals, and rigorous theology, the success of the Mormon Church may have to do with their unrelenting focus on the family. Few religious communities have made the development and maintenance of traditional family structures such a central priority. Eighty-one percent of Mormons say being a good parent is one of their central life goals. Nearly three-quarters say having a good marriage is one of their most important priorities in life, and a majority of Mormons — including nearly equal numbers of men and women — believe that the most satisfying type of marriage is one in which the husband provides and the wife stays home.

 Actually, though, the article points out that the LDS Church can actively encourage an early sex life - as long as it is within marriage:

Recognizing the centrality of family, the LDS Church has not been shy about encouraging young Mormons to start families early. In 2005, the LDS Church leadership was actively encouraging college students to start families even before they graduated. More recently church elder M. Russell Ballard urged Brigham Young University students to not let educational goals lead them to postpone marriage. “You can accomplish both with hard work, sacrifice, and planning,” he said. “In fact, with a companion’s support, you can be more successful.” It’s a message that resonates with many Mormon college students. 

 The younger members are pressing somewhat for a more sympathetic approach to homosexuality, though:

In 2016, the LDS Church launched a website called Mormon and Gay featuring firsthand accounts of Mormons who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Importantly, the church remains opposed to same-sex marriage, but church leaders have adopted much more inclusive language when discussing LGBTQ members of the church. “It shows the church is taking a step in the direction of understanding and empathy,” Monson says.

Not a sign of a healthy, happy society

Axios posted this graph of American deaths by drugs, suicide and alcohol:

An obvious lesson:  clearly, apparent strong economic growth does not alone tell the full story of the state of well being of the American society.  

Trumponomics

The Washington Post notes:

Tax revenue for October 2018 through January 2019 fell $19 billion, or 2 percent, Treasury said. It noted a major reduction in corporate tax payments over the first four months of the fiscal year, falling close to 25 percent, or $17 billion.

As part of the 2017 tax cut law, the tax rate paid by corporations was lowered from 35 percent to 21 percent.

Spending, meanwhile, increased 9 percent over the same period.

The biggest increases were for defense military programs, which saw a 12 percent increase, and Medicare, which saw a 16 percent increase.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that the deficit this year will reach close to $900 billion, because the government spends so much more money than it brings in through revenue....

During the tax cut debate in 2017, the White House promised that slashing tax rates would end up creating more revenue because it would allow the economy to grow at a faster clip. Economic growth did pick up in 2018, but Democrats have said the growth will be short-lived. So far, the growth has not come close to the levels needed to offset the $1.5 trillion in tax reductions that were part of the legislation.

The federal government is now more than $22 trillion in debt, largely representing an accumulation of all the money it has borrowed to finance programs in past years. A deficit is the one-year gap between spending and revenue, and the debt is the total amount of money owed by the government.

The cycle of abuse?

Slate seems to have become rather more "sex tabloid" in the last 12 months, if you ask me.  The site really highlights some weird personal sex advice questions - I don't why, it brings the quality of the place down.

However, there is still a lot of good stuff there.  Like this article about the widely believed "cycle of abuse", particularly in relation to childhood sexual abuse.   As Daniel Engber writes, the research on this isn't really very strong, often showing some relationship, but it's no where near as strong as the public likes to imagine:

Psychologist and criminologist Cathy Spatz Widom was the first to make some progress through the bramble. In 1989, she published data on the cycle of abuse with a novel methodology. Instead of looking retrospectively at criminals and delinquents, she started by picking out a group of victims of abuse, then following up throughout their lives to figure out what happened. She began her work by identifying more than 900 victims of abuse and neglect whose cases had been registered in the court system of an unnamed Midwestern city between 1967 and 1971. Then she set up a control group, matching up those victims as best as she could with people of the same age, race, and sex who attended the same schools and lived in the same neighborhoods. Finally, she pulled any official records of their delinquency, detention, or adult criminal activity across the next 20 years.

Using this much more powerful and better-controlled design, Widom was able to confirm that victims of childhood abuse are indeed at greater risk of becoming criminals. Perhaps more importantly, she showed that mere neglect—even in the absence of any violent physical abuse—was a noteworthy predictor of later criminal behavior. 

She kept following her subjects, who are now well into middle age, and also gathered information from their children. In 2015, Widom published several decades’ worth of further data. One of her papers in particular focused on the question of whether someone’s experience of childhood abuse can predict their sexual offending later on. While 4.5 percent of the people in the control group had been arrested for a sex crime, nearly twice as many—8.3 percent—of the people who had been victims of abuse or neglect went on to perpetrate such a crime. So there was a link, but the details didn’t fit the expected pattern of “monkey see, monkey do.” The people in Widom’s study who were abused as children in specifically sexual ways did not, in fact, appear more likely to get arrested for a sex crime later on; instead, it was the ones who were either neglected or physically abused who ended up at higher risk. 

That may have been a quirk of Widom’s data set. Among both groups who had been arrested for a sex crime, almost all of them—84 percent—were men. Yet her study included just two dozen male victims of childhood sexual abuse, of whom three went on to be sexual offenders. It may be that this sample was too small for a true effect to show up in her statistical tests.

There's more, and even a large Australian study gets a special mention:

A similar study, published in 2016, looked at records of childhood sexual abuse and sexual offending in a group of more than 38,000 Australian men. Among those who had been molested, just 3 percent went on to commit a sexual offense. That rate was much higher than what was found among the total population (0.8 percent), suggesting a cycle of abuse. But being victimized by other forms of childhood mistreatment was also associated with committing sexual crimes, and there were no clear signs of a special one-to-one relationship in which sexually molested children grew up to be sexual molesters. 

But really—it’s complicated. A paper published two weeks ago combined and analyzed findings from 142 different studies of intergenerational transmission of maltreatment. The study’s authors, led by the University of Calgary’s Sheri Madigan, concluded that there is indeed evidence for a “modest association” between someone suffering abuse and then perpetrating it, and that specific forms of abuse may be passed down in this way.

I think it very likely that part of the reason the cycle is so widely believed is because it is so often used as part of a plea in mitigation for men convicted of sexual abuse.   It is, after all, one of the very few claims a convicted sex offender can make towards showing that it is not just their own volition that was behind the crime, but a psychological issue that was not entirely their fault.

American chicken

David Frum has a good column up talking about the odd importance of American chicken processing to the Brexit vote.

Are Australian meat chickens similarly bathed in chlorine (or whatever it is)? 

It's kind of remarkable how American food and food processing has a kind of poor reputation for all sorts of reasons - e coli outbreaks on salad veges seem so common; but then chicken meat seems to have the opposite issue with too much chemical treatment.

An odd time to be talking Catholic virgins

Well, I continue to be annoyed/appalled that both pro and anti "Pell is innocent" forces continue to wage what seem to be PR wars.  I saw some of 4 Corners last night, and am baffled as to why no one there doesn't think that they will look vindictive if he is successful on appeal, and if nothing comes of the civil action either.   This is especially the case when we know the hung jury verdict of the first trial.

Of course, I am equally upset with the pro-Pell side slandering the accuser in the case too - as they are doing with wild abandon at Catallaxy.  

Anyway,  for some odd reason (perhaps to convince us that Catholics are too obsessed with sex), the ABC website has a story up about an Australian "consecrated virgin".   I wrote about these when I first heard about them last year - and everything I say in that post still seems appropriate.

More miscellaneous observations not worthy of their own post

*   I now know where I can buy a piece of vacuum sealed wagyu steak in Brisbane that sells for - wait for it - $229.99 a kilo.   Ask in comments if you want to know.   (Wildly unlikely anyone will, but hey...)

*   Yeah, this "Curious Kids" item in The Conversation deals with something that has puzzled me more and more over the years (as we have seen more and more video from the depths):  how come in these deepest of deep sea dives, where the submarine would be crushed like an aluminium can unless it was built to super-strength standards, you see pretty normal looking, non-armour plated fish and crustaceans doodling around?   How do their puny bodies operate under such pressure?    Seems the answer goes down to the midi-chlorian cellular level, but not in entirely understood ways.  Huh.

*  The Guardian has a piece on a traditional "third sex" kind of role in the Philippines  (similar to that seen in many other cultures):

Bakla is a Tagalog word that denotes the Filipino practice of male cross-dressing, denoting a man that has “feminine” mannerisms, dresses as a “sexy” woman, or identifies as a woman. It is an identity built on performative cultural practice more so than sexuality. Often considered a Filipino third gender, bakla can be either homosexual or heterosexual, and are regarded as one of the most visible LGBTQIA+ cultures in Asia – an intersectional celebration of Asian and queer cultures. 

The bakla were renowned as community leaders, seen as the traditional rulers who transcended the duality between man and woman. Many early reports from Spanish colonising parties referenced the mystical entities that were “more man than man, and more woman than woman”. Even today, many bakla in the Philippines retain high status as entertainers and media personalities.

When I was eight years old, on my first and only trip to the Philippines, I met my older cousin Norman. He had shoulder-length hair, wore lipstick and eyeliner, and would walk around in heels. His father affectionately called him malambut (Tagalog for “soft”); his siblings called him bading, but he told me he was bakla. He wasn’t an outsider; he was part of the family – my family – and being an eight-year-old who liked to sing karaoke and play dress-up, I didn’t give it a second thought. But on returning to Australia, I told all my friends about Norman and they scoffed – the early seed of masculinity training at play – and when I asked my parents what the word meant, my mum replied, “it just means … bakla”. It didn’t translate directly to English.

Later, I learned that many people problematically mistranslate bakla to “gay” in English. As an identity not tied to sex, the word does not correspond directly to western nomenclature for LGBTQIA+ identities, sitting somewhere between gay, trans and queer. As Filipinos moved to countries such as Australia and the United States, the bakla were mislabelled as part of western gay culture and quickly (physically) sexualised. Even worse, the word can sometimes be heard in Australian playgrounds, used in a derogatory way. When I was younger, we were banned from calling each other “gay”, so the boys accused each other of being “bakla” instead. It was quite confusing to my ears when hearing the word used in a negative way, its meaning truly lost in migration.

I've never made a study of this whole, third sex, cross dressing thing that pops up in various indigenous cultures, but it's curious how it turns up in some but not others.   (Also the different status levels that they hold in different cultures.)   It's funny how the modern equivalent is just making it big in the entertainment industry.   Would Bowie (and glam rockers generally) at their campiest height count as bakla? 

Now easier than ever to get into the country you never wanted to visit in the first place

From Gulf News:

Saudi Arabia’s cabinet has approved electronic visas for foreign visitors to attend sporting events and concerts, local media reported, as the world’s top oil exporter tries to diversify its economy and open up its society.

According to officials, the Saudi Arabia Visa application will only take a few minutes to complete online and there will be no need to go to an embassy or consulate.

Once the application is approved, it will be sent to the applicant by email.

This new move symbolises a change for the kingdom, which was known to be one of the most difficult countries to enter.

Further down the report:

As part of Prince Mohammad’s agenda, the kingdom has ended a nearly 40-year ban on cinemas, allowed music concerts, including performances by Western pop stars, and organised international sporting events. There are a number of tourist attractions being developed in Saudi Arabia, including Amaala and Al Ula.

I'd be rather curious as to which concert acts would ever be inclined to do a show in that country.  Madonna's farewell tour, perhaps?

Weekend update

*  My son cut his finger near the tip, deep and bloody enough to warrant a visit to the doctor.  No stitch, but gee, fingertips bleed easily.  It made me realise I've never cut myself bad enough to warrant a doctor's trip.  I wonder what percent of people get through life with no cut warranting a medical visit.

* I noticed that ABC radio host Richard Glover made a tweet about being a victim of sexual abuse (he was commenting about the George Pell matter.)   Given that he talks about his own life a lot in his books and columns, I was surprised I hadn't heard him claim that before, and Googling the topic I see that I missed that he had published an autobiography in 2013 which apparently dealt with it, but was mainly about his highly eccentric parents.  (I have a vague feeling I had heard him talking about his mother before.)  Anyway, I listened to an interview he did with Richard Fidler in which he talked about it, including briefly about a period of sexual abuse which occurred not as a child, but at 19.   He did have a unusual early life, yet he has had only one long term partner and two sons who he has written affectionately about for many years.   His life story is really one of resilience, then, as he makes plain in the interview.   Quite interesting, really.  

* Speaking of ABC radio personalities, it was hard not to be moved by the Good Weekend article about Red Symons and the difficult life issues he has recently faced.   (His son dying, after battling cancer on and off since he was 4;  his own medical crisis; losing his job for unclear reasons; and a marriage breakup - although that last one appears to have been of his own doing.)    

* Can't everyone stop talking about the Pell conviction until the appeal is heard?  4 Corners is going back to the topic again tonight, although I gather it may be more about the nature of the investigation and the Church's role, rather than on the details of the Pell cases.   Still, I think everyone should drop the topic until an appeal is heard.  

* Not this weekend, but the one previous, I heard a fair bit of a BBC radio documentary about the quite high success of machine learning to detect susceptibility to suicide attempts.   Here it is - "Predicting Suicide".   I see that this topic got some attention late last year, but I missed it.  I must find a good written article about it.

*  Crying "SOCIALISM!":   I continue to be dismayed that Right wing punditry and politicians in the US has convinced their "base" that any policy that would formally just have been called a centrist one favoured in successful, capitalist, social democracies as  PART OF THE TYRANNY OF SOCIALISM.   I think it's a mistake for young Democrats to deal with this misuse of the term by saying "well, if that's socialism, count me in!"    No, don't concede to the sloppy (or ridiculous) re-definitions of the pathetic excuses that now pass for Conservative intellectuals.   Here's an article that is a little helpful in that regard, from WAPO:   Five Myths About Socialism.   The only thing is, I don't think it really goes in hard enough, and still gets too tied up in definitions.  Someone in comments takes the line I am more inclined to argue:

The truth is it doesn’t matter whether socialism is good or bad for democracy because nobody in Washington with any kind of a voice is advocating actual socialism - ie government ownership of the means of production.  So most of this article is fluff.

I think it’s a huge error for AOC, Sanders and the rest to not use the true term for what they are advocating, which is social democracy, not true socialism.

Social democracy is characterized by a strong social safety net and a mixed economy in which both private and public actors operate, (with more or less government regulation of the market to avoid monopolies or price gouging, employment protections, and sometimes employee slots on boards of directors)  with private operators producing consumer goods, and public actors generally producing public goods such as education, public transportation, a functioning energy grid,  and management of the healthcare sector.  There are many examples of stable Western societies which practice social democracy in many different formats.  Even the United States for all one side’s religious worship of the god Market, is still  a mixed economy with free public education up to a point, some government-managed healthcare (Medicare) and a few oddball public operators like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Or state universities.

The key here is the term “democracy”.  As a matter of fact, there is no inherent conflict between socialism as such and democracy - the British had both for much of the 60s until they decided they wanted to try something else, which happened without revolution.  The reverse tends to be true:  dictators who gain power take control of the commanding heights of the economy and claim that what they are doing is socialism, when in fact it is theft.

But “socialism” has been such a bogeyman in this country for so long that it’s politically dumb to try to repurpose the term, inaccurately, to describe social democracy.  

Or this:

Why not begin the discussion with the generally accepted definition of socialism found in most dictionaries and economics books?

so·cial·ism - /ˈsōSHəˌlizəm/Submit noun -- A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

I lived in Sweden for over three years, a country that many people would consider socialist. It's not. Over 95% of businesses are privately owned in Sweden.

Sweden is a capitalist country with high individual taxes to pay for social programs. It's easier to start a business in Sweden than it is in the US. And business taxes are very low there, also. The government encourages the growth of private business.

Individual tax rates are high, topping out at 54%. Those high taxes are used to support excellent schools, excellent medical care and a social safety net which are values that the public supports.

And now for something completely different

From the BBC:   The 'caravans of love' visiting Spain's empty villages

It starts:

Spain is ground-zero for rural depopulation within the European Union. Over decades, millions have migrated to the cities to find jobs. Those left behind in villages are often elderly - or they are single men working in agriculture. So, how does a lonely Spanish shepherd find love?  

The possible answer:

Then Antonio heard about the Caravan of Women - or Caravan of Love, as it is sometimes known.
This is a commercial initiative bringing coach-loads of single women from Madrid to meet unattached men in the countryside at organised dinner-dances. Manolo Gozalo has been co-ordinating these excursions with his partner, Venecia Alcantara, since 1996.

I'm not surprised no one wants to live in rural Spain - from what I can gather on shows where chefs or other folk travel through the country, its centre looks pretty dry and featureless.   

In Australia, meanwhile, I guess we're more known for a movie about a group of drag queens travelling across the interior.   (I've never watched it - Australian movies are cringeworthy at the best of times, and intense campiness is a frequent reason why.)