Far too late

The SMH repeats the news from the Washington Post:

Facebook said on Friday it had permanently banned several far-right figures and organisations, including Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, Infowars host Alex Jones, commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, for being "dangerous", a sign that the social network is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups.

Helen's made a goose of herself, again

Only yesterday I mentioned Helen Dale in the context of climate change, noting that she had once at least called on libertarians to stop denying it.   

I had missed, though, that only last week she had a nasty sounding tweet about Greta Thunbergpril: 

She explains at the Spectator this was "fairly obviously" a joke.

Very few people took it that way.   Helen has apparently deleted Twitter from her phone, such was the blowback she was getting.   And given that Dale herself has claimed she probably has a degree of Aspergers, it is very hard to see her tweet as anything other than (at least) somewhat callous from a person who should know better.   (Jealousy at the attention Thunberg has received is another theory I've seen in the Twitter response.)

Now look - I don't hold any great interest in Greta Thunberg and have paid her very little attention.   I actually share Dale's view in her Spectator attempt at self-justification that under 18's should basically never be shoved into political leadership roles.   And Britain in particular is having an outbreak of idealistic climate protest founded on exaggerated slogans and claims.   (I am extremely rarely impressed by any form of protest, though.  Not a joiner that way.)   I just take the view of "at least their heart is in the right place" and don't resent that it might have some political consequences in a useful direction.

I still say, though, that it's hard not to see behind Dale's Tweet the typical libertarian ideological motivation to just ignore climate change - either deny it exists, or deny it's bad enough to do anything about, or deny we're capable of doing anything about it and put all the eggs in the techno basket of successful geo-engineering that would have to done for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. 


She belongs on a seasteading "nation" with all other libertarians.  

A diet would help

I don't know anything about the rapper/comedian/actor Adam Briggs apart from seeing him on The Weekly from time to time.  I'd put him in the category "mostly harmless".   But last night on the show, he joked, as on Twitter, that as an indigenous man he may be 32 but (in terms of much lower indigenous life expectancy), that's like 67 in "white years":

Look, the guy's from Shepparton and it seems he has lived either there or in Melbourne all his life.     As such, he has (unlike some fellow indigenous)  ready access to healthy food and all the medical services he could need.  Yet he clearly carries quite a lot of excess weight - and on his gut, which is well recognized as the worst kind of overweight to be.

He may well be the equivalent of 67 in "health" years (I am surprised he is only 32 - he could pass for much older), but it's a bit rich to even joke that it's due to just being a "Blackfulla". 

Judith not good at analogies (when it suits her)

Whenever The Australian or AFR run articles by the likes of Judith Sloan or Alan Moran on climate change economics, they should (but don't) put a large rider in bold "READERS SHOULD KNOW:  THIS ECONOMIST DOES NOT BELIEVE CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL OR NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED IN ANY MANNER AT ALL.".  Because, of course, if your analysis is springing from  that fundamental belief, there is no reason to trust its objectivity at all.

So I see today that Sloan's column in The Australian on the modelled costs of Labor's climate plan is able to be accessed.  

To be honest, much of her account of the uncertainties is pretty well aligned  with what I heard on Radio National this morning - she could have put more effort into poohing-poohing Labor's policy than she did.   Is this a sign of a crack in her noggin that is letting in light that action is going to happen and she had better start sounding like she hasn't always been a flat earth climate change denier when talking about policy responses?

But my main reason for posting about this:  she claims to be completely puzzled by Bill Shorten's "fat person eating 10 big macs" analogy.  It's not perfect, but the point is clear enough:  the fat person [Australia] can't just continue with the easy and fast fix for hunger [energy needs] by eating fast food all the time [building coal power stations], because we all know that in the long run it will hurt/kill them [climate change effects].   They  have to put the effort in to get a better diet [clean energy and reducing all emissions] even if a good meal costs more than a Big Mac [that's where the analogy starts to go off road - although if the only choice were restaurants, it might work.]

She's just being deliberately obtuse in saying she doesn't understand it.

Suicide, poison and phones

The Washington Post has an article noting the increase in girls trying suicide by poison (boys prefer guns and strangulation), but it then talks more broadly about the rise in youth suicide and the search for a plausible causes.   Some think the rise of the mobile phone is more than a coincidence:

Spiller said he and others have overlaid their findings with other data to try to identify why the rates have spiked so sharply since 2011. They studied data from the rise of opioid addiction and deaths in recent years, thinking that the sharp increase could be due to increased access to drugs or fallout from parents’ deaths or addictions. But the timing did not fit precisely — the beginnings of the opioid epidemic traces back years before the 2011 spike.

They also compared it against economic data, but much of the country’s downturn occurred in 2008 or 2009.

“Unfortunately, we can’t definitely answer the why. That’s not how the data works,” said John Ackerman, a co-author and clinical psychologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

Ackerman and Spiller, however, suspect the sudden increase in recent years has to do with the advent of smartphones and how they have made social media much more pervasive in young people’s lives.

The iPhone 3 came out in 2008, Spiller notes, and the Android phones had come into widespread use by 2011. Adults adopted such devices first, but within a year or two, such smartphones became more common among adolescents.

For years now, across all demographic groups, the death rate from suicide has been rising broadly. Experts cannot easily explain it. There is no single factor driving the phenomenon.

Vegan health

Isn't it kind of obvious that veganism (as opposed to mere vegetarianism - especially of the variety where dairy and eggs are still eaten) isn't that great a health plan for humans when pro-vegans have to write articles about the great care that must be taken by vegan pregnant mothers to get all the nutrition they and their embryos need?

Yesterday, I saw on twitter some young women who said she was going to try eating some form of flesh again for health reasons, but she tried mussels and found them repulsive.  She also went on and on about how traumatic it had been and how the mere idea of eating flesh (even of a brainless bivalve) makes her skin crawl.   It sounded to me like some borderline form of anorexia.

I know that most people have some image of eating some forms of animal food as being repulsive - I wince at the idea of eating roasted bone marrow on My Kitchen Rules for some reason, and lamb brains are icky too -  but to have a generic revulsion for all form of animal protein, including all forms of seafood, seems pretty exceptionally broad.

Anyway, you do read of her type of health issue from time to time - did I post about the vegan Youtube woman who secretly started eating a small amount of meat again on doctor's advice?   I'm not sure how many vegans do have to give it up for health reasons, but it seems to be a not insubstantial problem...

More Shinto

Surely I can't be the only person who was surprised at the apparent simplicity of the ceremonies for the replacement of the Japanese Emperor?    But I see now that there is more Shinto stuff to come, but not til October:

As Emperor Naruhito ascended the throne on Wednesday, a key imperial succession ritual related to Shinto rekindled controversy over the separation of state and religion that is stipulated in the Constitution.

Shinto is a Japanese indigenous religion in which the emperor is venerated as a descendant of a sun goddess. In the ritual, the emperor inherited the imperial regalia, which are said to have been bestowed by the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami as proof of his ascension to the throne.

As the Kenji to Shokei no Gi rite marking the emperor’s enthronement was staged as a state occasion financed by public funds, critics pointed to the possibility that it violated the Constitution banning the government from engaging in religious activities.

Japan’s postwar Constitution stipulates no religious organization shall receive any privileges from the state or exercise any political authority.

The regalia, called Sanshu no Jingi, consist of a sacred mirror, sword and jewel. In the ritual, the jewel and a replica of the sword were passed to the new monarch together with the state and privy seals.

Besides the regalia inheritance ceremony, the government decided in April last year to publicly fund the main Shinto-linked imperial succession rituals to be held in the fall, following the precedent set for the ceremonies of Emperor Emeritus Akihito’s enthronement in 1990.

The upcoming key rituals are Sokuirei Seiden no Gi on Oct. 22 to proclaim the enthronement of the emperor and the Daijosai grand thanksgiving rite in November, in which the emperor will make offerings to ancestral deities and pray for the peace and prosperity of Japan and its people.

 Interested readers in what goes on in Shinto ceremonies for an ascending Emperor might like to read this previous post from 2017.

Seasteading enthusiasm dwindles

According to Slate, the libertarian dreams of seasteading seem to be fading.  Peter Thiel, apparently, seems less enthusiastic these days.

I kind of wish it would work, so that a few score of the most dangerous libertarians (Kochs, Thiel, Stark*, etc) - those who either deny climate change or think you just watch the world burn and then work out if you can science your way out of the extremes - could be set adrift in the Pacific Ocean and lose all influence in the rest of the world.

*  Oh wait, he's taken care of.

Not exactly the law and order country

India seems to have a very real problem with mob justice.   It sounds like a rather lawless and dangerous place (if not for visitors, then at least for residents!)   Some examples from today's perusal of the Times of India:

Some peculiar artwork decision with this sad story, too:

Bear in the mind the undue influence that WhatsApp has for spreading false rumour there too, and the number of deaths it has caused, I'm adding it to my list of "no hurry to visit" countries.

Negative interest

Aren't conservatives going on and on about the Folau matter to a ridiculous degree?   Yeah, sure: climate change is a crock of no interest but the really important thing is whether a rugby player will get booted or not.

My interest level in this is already in negative territory.   I could only be less interested if it were a racing horse up for a Code of Conduct hearing for tweeting offensive stuff about jockeys.

Product endorsement - curry chips

Maybe it's because I usually only buy them when especially hungry due to missing out on lunch, but I find that the "curry night Korma" flavoured chips by Tyrells are especially delicious:

This easily remains my preferred chip brand.  Not oily (Smiths are the worst at that) and flavours that are not too overpowering. 

Libertarians clinging to climate change denial

I see that the annual "We Hate Tax" conference, run by some libertarian mob together with some other/associated "we hate tax!" group, has the following guests (with my added commentary in brackets):

Local speakers including former Finance Minister Nick Minchin [well known climate change denying politician], Tom Switzer from the Centre for Independent Studies [dunno], John Roskam [runs Rinehart funded pro-actively climate change denying IPA] ..., LNP Senator Amanda Stoker [can't find direct climate position - but seems to love coal] , climate blogger Jo Nova [most prominent solo climate change denying blogger of Australia, also a goldbug with a husband very suspicious about the great banking families of Europe - nudge, nudge, wink, wink], and Professor Sinclair Davidson [runs persistently climate change denying Catallaxy, almost certainly a "I don't deny, I'm just not convinced" disingenuous type - he won't actually tell us anymore if he personally believes that AGW is real and worth addressing]  and Dr Chris Berg from RMIT University [the more affable face of IPA who also stays silent on climate change, and deserves derision for giving moral support to deniers even if he isn't one himself].

This reminds me: in 2014, I gave rare praise to Helen Dale for at least having stated this in 2013:

5. Libertarians in particular need to drop their widespread refusal to accept the reality of climate change. It makes us look like wingnuts and diverts attention from the larger number of greenies who spew pseudoscience on a daily basis.

Sorry Helen:  they're not listening to you.   (And anyway, your willingness to work for denier - or "I'm not convinced" twit - Leyonhjelm shows you didn't really treat it as an important issue yourself.)

What Emperors do in retirement

It's hard not to be impressed with the apparent gentleness and humility of the retiring Japanese emperor and empress:

The imperial couple will move to a temporary residence in Tokyo before settling at Togu Palace in the Akasaka Estate, currently home to the incoming emperor — Crown Prince Naruhito — and his family, once renovation work is completed.

Togu Palace will be renamed Sento Imperial Palace, which translates as “the place where the retired imperial couple live.”

Their temporary residence is the Takanawa Imperial Residence in Minato Ward, formerly home to Prince and Princess Takamatsu which has been empty since the princess — aunt of Emperor Akihito — died in 2004.

The couple has fond memories of their final home, the place they brought up their children when the emperor was crown prince.

The emperor will hand off all public duties to the new emperor immediately. The couple will pray for the country and its people after they move, and spend more time with friends, listening to music and reading, according to Imperial Household Agency officials.

A keen marine biologist, the retired emperor will periodically visit the Imperial Palace to continue his research on gobies, they said.

“I am looking forward to being able to take my time to read every book that I have yet to read,” Empress Michiko said in a statement to the press last October.

Trump and oversight

An article at New Repbulic argues that Trump is ironically building the case for impeachment by being so obstructionist about Congressional oversight.  It ends as follows:

In the aggregate, however, the White House’s obstinacy suggests a deeper problem. Presidents are supposed to accept the principle that Congress can act as a meaningful check on their power. Trump does not. His resistance to scrutiny isn’t limited to Congress, of course. The president habitually complains that mainstream news outlets don’t show him the deference he thinks he deserves. “In the ‘old days’ if you were president and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism,” he fumed on Twitter earlier this week. Trump’s hunger for a fawning press was already bad; his authoritarian craving for the same treatment from Congress is worse.

It’s possible that this all-or-nothing approach could eventually backfire on Trump in court. It was already hard to argue that his resistance sprung from a good-faith attempt to preserve the executive branch’s powers. If anything, his categorical public refusal to cooperate with Congress only makes explicit what was already implicit. Then again, the Supreme Court still might not care. Even when faced with clear evidence of the Trump administration’s bad faith, the court’s conservative justices have chosen to pretend that nothing is amiss.

There’s a certain irony to the timing of these all-out efforts to block congressional oversight. Democrats have spent the past two years arguing that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and disinterest in the rule of law would endanger American democracy. The president doesn’t seem interested in disputing the Democrats’ portrayal of him beyond soundbites like “No obstruction!” If anything, he seems almost eager to prove them right.

David Brooks and the mountains

I've never read David Brooks much, but he seems a very gentle character for a quasi-conservative (he's fallen out with most of his former buddies over Trump - so that's a good sign.)

I saw him recently on PBS Newshour talking about his increasing interest in matters spiritual, and his book on the matter, and it sounded somewhat interesting.

This review of the book at the New Yorker gives me a lot more biographical information on him, and the book, and he is indeed an interesting guy.

I would say his current position seems to be one you could classify as close to Unitarian Universalism - someone who is interested in seeing if there be some sort of common agreement between everyone, whether of a religious faith or not, as to the sort of principles that are involved in living a good and moral life.

Psychiatry's problems, noted again

I posted about another review of this book last month, but this review from Nature contains other highlights of the failures of psychiatry that I hadn't thought about for a long time:

In January 1973, Science published an article called ‘On being sane in insane places’. The author, psychologist David Rosenhan, described how he and seven other healthy people had reported themselves to a dozen psychiatric hospitals, claiming to hear voices uttering odd words such as ‘thud’ or ‘hollow’ — a symptom never reported in the clinical literature. Each person was diagnosed with either schizophrenia or manic-depressive psychosis, and admitted; once inside, they stopped the performance. They were released after an average of 19 days with diagnoses of ‘schizophrenia in remission’ (D. L. Rosenhan Science 179, 250–258; 1973).

One research and teaching hospital, hearing about the study, declared that its own staff could never be so deceived. It challenged Rosenhan to send it pseudopatients. He agreed, but never did. Nonetheless, the hospital claimed to have identified 41 of them.

Psychiatric hospitals, it seemed, could recognize neither healthy people nor those with mental illnesses. Rosenhan’s study exemplifies much of what went wrong in twentieth-century psychiatry, as biologists, psychoanalysts and sociologists struggled for supremacy. Science historian Anne Harrington takes us through the painful history of that struggle in the enthralling Mind Fixers, which focuses particularly on the United States.  

Something new I hadn't known:  it took this long to identify syphilis as eventually caused dementia?:

Certain discoveries, such as the findings in 1897 and 1913 confirming that syphilis causes late-onset psychosis, bolstered biologists’ view that mental disorders were brain-based. 

I also did not realise that psychoanalytic approaches had the sort of revival related here, even though of course I knew the 70's were the heyday of - gee, who was the guy who seemed to blame most  psychosis on families and pressure they put their kids under?*:  

As Harrington relates, the horrors of two world wars generated hundreds of thousands of cases of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, indicating a clear role for environmental triggers for some mental illnesses. By the 1970s, the Nazi eugenics atrocities had led most US psychoanalysts to disdain biological approaches even more vehemently, but their reasoning caused its own distress. They extended Freud’s view that mental disorders were rooted in early sexual fantasies to encompass all causes of early childhood anxieties. The idea that families, particularly mothers, were to blame for unexplained mental conditions such as psychoses became mainstream. By the 1950s, psychoanalysts dominated US psychiatry teaching.

Around this time, notes Harrington, social scientists emerged as the third influential force, aligning with psychoanalysts on the purported role of ‘toxic’ families in causing psychiatric disease. Yet within a decade, US psychiatrists experienced a backlash — both from patients’ families, fed up with being vilified, and from the professional ranks. What’s more, a 1962 study showed that two psychiatrists disagreed on the diagnosis of the same person 70% of the time (A. T. Beck Am. J. Psychiatry 119, 210–216; 1962).

*  RD Laing.  Haven't thought about him for a long time, too.

Dumb, populist, flakey perpetual politician who never achieves anything can't understand why she attracts dumb, populist, flakey wannabe politicians

My heart breaks for Pauline Hanson, who's decided to take on the mantle of martyr instead of looking in the mirror to understand why she attracts self-serving idiots to her party.   Like attracts like, Pauline...

Update:  Re-reading this, I think it uses harsher rhetoric than usual, but I did give her some praise yesterday, so it all balances in the end.

Yeah, thanks, Netflix

Seems fairly likely that what some people feared would happen with the release of teen suicide story "13 Reasons Why" did:

The Netflix show "13 Reasons Why" was associated with a 28.9% increase in suicide rates among U.S. youth ages 10-17 in the month (April 2017) following the shows release, after accounting for ongoing trends in suicide rates, according to a study published today in Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The findings highlight the necessity of using best practices when portraying suicide in popular entertainment and in the media. The study was conducted by researchers at several universities, hospitals, and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health. NIMH also funded the study.

The number of deaths by suicide recorded in April 2017 was greater than the number seen in any single month during the five-year period examined by the researchers. When researchers analyzed the data by sex, they found the increase in the suicide rate was primarily driven by significant increases in suicide in young males. While suicide rates for females increased after the show's release, the increase was not statistically significant.

"The results of this study should raise awareness that young people are particularly vulnerable to the media," said study author Lisa Horowitz, Ph.D., M.P.H., a clinical scientist in the NIMH Intramural Research Program. "All disciplines, including the media, need to take good care to be constructive and thoughtful about topics that intersect with public health crises."

I have to say, though, that I would have expected it would be a show watched by more girls than guys, so the increase in male teen suicide is a surprise.  I hope they looked for any other possible media event that might have been related.

Pauline does the right thing

Gawd, what's coming over me?   When I heard Pauline Hanson's comments on her horrible* candidate Steve Dickson's resignation for the video of him carrying on like an absolute yobbo at a strip club, I thought she put it very well.   The Guardian reports it as follows:

Speaking at an early morning media conference, an angry Hanson said the footage “cannot be ignored or condoned” and she had accepted Dickson’s offer to resign. She said she would not tolerate her children behaving that way towards women, and would not condone her candidate’s “dealing with women in this fashion” either.

“Steve’s language and behaviour was unacceptable and does not meet my expectations nor the greater public’s expectation of a person who is standing for public office,” the One Nation party leader said.

“Steve Dickson yesterday offered his resignation from all positions within the party, which I have accepted.”

It was actually better than that - she referenced being the mother of 3 boys, and that she would find their similar behaviour unacceptable.

I offer, probably for the one and only time in my life, congratulations to her for not mincing words and saying that expects men (whether politicians or not) to behave better towards women.



*  I had previously noted in two posts his appalling smarmy hypocrisy when dealing with the NRA and the Christian element in their ranks.

Poets and depression

As I don't care for poetry, I didn't know much about the late Les Murray, but heard on the radio this morning that he had suffered from depression for a long time as a younger man. Which made me think:  are my less-than-positive feelings about this art form because it seems to be the preferred artistic outlet  of angsty teens and (later) adults with depression? 

I don't know that I have really thought about this much before, but I see that the matter has been studied, particularly in relation to female poets.  From the Wikipedia entry on "The Sylvia Plath effect":

The Sylvia Plath effect is the phenomenon that poets are more susceptible to mental illness than other creative writers. The term was coined in 2001 by psychologist James C. Kaufman. This early finding has been dubbed "the Sylvia Plath effect", and implications and possibilities for future research are discussed...

In one study, 1,629 writers were analyzed for signs of mental illness. Female poets were found to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness than female fiction writers or male writers of any type. Another study extended the analysis to 520 eminent women (poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, visual artists, politicians, and actresses), and again found the poets to be significantly more likely to experience mental illness.^[1]
 
In another study performed by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Kentucky Medical Center, female writers were found to be more likely to suffer not only from mood disorders, but also from panic attacks, general anxiety, drug abuse, and eating disorders. The rates of multiple mental disorders were also higher among these writers. Although it was not explored in depth, abuse during childhood (physical or sexual) also loomed as a possible contributor to psychological issues in adulthood. The cumulative psychopathology scores of subjects, their reported exposure to abuse during childhood, mental difficulties in their mothers, and the combined creativity scores of their parents represented significant predictors of their illnesses. The high rates of certain emotional disorders in female writers suggested a direct relationship between creativity and psychopathology, but the relationships were not clear-cut. As the results of the predictive analysis indicated, familial and environmental factors also appeared to play a role.^[5]

I see at Quora someone asks:

Do poets get depression or do depressed people write poetry?

Anyway,  Tim, you seem a jolly enough fellow whose poetry is not a downer.  But has anyone done a study on how much published poetry could be categorised as "cheerful" as opposed to "deals with a depressing subject" or at best "melancholic"?