Some dinner

Looking at the 'real' reason for Trump's Dallas trip...

....you have to suspect that some of those half mill donors must be worried about getting value for money.   Even the betting markets have finally turned against him.

Chait on illiberal liberals

I think Jonathan Chait's column "The Still-Vital Case of Liberalism in a Radical Age" sums it up pretty well:

The preconditions that permitted these events to go forward are the spread of distinct, illiberal norms throughout some progressive institutions over the last half-dozen years. When I wrote about the phenomenon in 2015, a common response was to dismiss it as the trivial hijinks of some college students, a distraction from the true threats to democratic values. It certainly was (and remains) true that the right poses a vastly greater danger to liberalism than does the far left. My own writing output reflects this enormous disproportionality. It is also true that the intended (if not always actual) target of the left’s illiberal impulses — entrenched systems of inequality — remain an oppressive force in American life, and that the cause to dismantle them is just.

Nonetheless, it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing authoritarian racism is far more important to the conclusion that left-wing illiberalism is completely unimportant. One can oppose different evils, even those evils aligned against each other, without assigning them equal weight.

Both American public opinion and many institutions have moved left on race and gender during this time. It is a positive change opening humane new possibilities for reform, but it has come along with some illiberal side effects. Over the last few weeks, as protests against the murder of George Floyd produced outrageous brutality against protesters, the good primary effect and the bad side effect seem to have advanced rapidly in tandem.

Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives. (Even oppressed people themselves may argue against their own authentic group interest; that a majority of African-Americans oppose looting, or that Omar Wasow himself is black, hardly matters.) Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

Working from these premises, many reactions by the left that might seem bizarre to somebody unfamiliar with this world (say, an older or more moderate person who doesn’t work in academia or the progressive movement) can make perfect sense. Since criticism of violent protests is racist, and racism obviously endangers black people, an act as seemingly innocuous as sharing credible research poses a threat to safety.

 I could probably be accused of saying that the issues of illiberal colleges is one of "trivial hijinks of some college students" too, and I am happy to be gently reprimanded for that.

But presumably Chait would agree with me that, in the bigger picture of world problems (*cough*, climate change; *cough* economic policy) it is a relatively small issue.

We're having a moment

People, people:  let's calm down a bit.

It's always tricky, judging where righteous anger turns into counter-productive acts of mere symbolism which start to ostracise maximum public support for worthwhile reforms.

But some of the things going on at the moment are starting look like they are tipping over that edge.


Update:  on Aboriginal issues - I just managed to read Henry Ergas's column today in the Australian (you can get to it behind the paywall if you go to the link on his tweet.)   I think he's going to cop some criticism for the way he gets to an end position that I have suggested many times.

Look at these paragraphs:

It was not indigenous Australians who destroyed thousands of Aboriginal jobs in country areas by suddenly raising the wages of cattle station labour in 1965; it was the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.

Nor was it indigenous Australians who decided, just as the commission’s judgment was having its devastating effects, to massively subsidise remote Aboriginal settlements, condemning generation after generation to inadequate housing, an education scarcely worth having and a future shorn of jobs and hope; it was the Whitlam and Fraser governments.

And it was not indigenous Australians who removed the prohibitions on the consumption of alcohol by, and the sale of alcohol to, Aboriginal people that had been in force throughout Australia since 1929.

It was state and territory governments that, in keeping with the 1960s zeitgeist of self-determination, repealed those controls and decriminalised public drunkenness, plunging fraying Aboriginal communities into a spiral of alcohol-fuelled violence and helping to ensure that indigenous offenders are nearly three times more likely than non-indigenous offenders to be intoxicated when they commit their crimes.

This annoys even me - someone who has never managed to find much interest in aboriginal culture. (So sue me: I find cities and technology of any kind more interesting than low tech hunter/gathering, or even low level farming if you want to believe Pascoe.)

I just think it's counterproductive and insulting to suggest that following "the zeitgeist" of self - determination was the wrong thing to do over the last 70 years.   I think it's even wrong to broadly suggest that government was wrong to support at least those substantial settlements where people did want to keep a connection to land.

But at the end of the day - yes I think it is fair to say that the problem is that living in a location, or even a cultural milieu (such a family with a long history of welfare dependence, even if within a town) with little or no chance of having a strong connection to the economy (not just in a financial sense, but in the broader human sense of the opportunities for a broader range of life experiences) causes boredom and a sense of lack of purpose.   (Which leads to drug abuse, higher crime, and continues in a cycle.)   But the trick is how to encourage people to get out of the situation, and the balance between self determination and policies to encourage people to make the choice to try something new.

This is a challenge for all indigenous peoples in the modern world.  Cultural pride (and our respect for their mistreatment in the past) can take some a certain distance to self respect and good functioning in the modern world; but to be honest, the evidence is that, at least for the Australian situation, it's not going to be a universal panacea to their problems.   I do wish well intentioned people would stop thinking that it is. 

Yay for the pangolin

The Guardian has reported:

Pangolin scales have been removed from an official 2020 listing of ingredients approved for use in traditional Chinese medicine in a move lauded by animal protection groups as a key step in stamping out trade in the scaly anteater, the world’s most trafficked mammal....

The news of the delisting from the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) pharmacopoeia, reported by China’s Health Times newspaper, comes after the country’s State Forestry and Grassland Administration (SFGA) raised the protected status of pangolins to the highest level last week, with immediate effect.

“I am very encouraged,” said Zhou Jinfeng, secretary general of the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF), who has long pushed for better protection of pangolins and for stopping the use of their scales. “Our continuous efforts for several years have not been in vain.”

In February, China’s National People’s Congress pushed forward a ban on the consumption of meat from wild animals, though there has been uncertainty as to what wildlife will still be allowed for use in TCM and the fur and leather industries.

Nice photo the article ran, too:

JK explains

JK Rowling writes a detailed explanation of her interest in, and concern about, transgender issues.  It's well written, and to my mind, well reasoned and convincing.

The rabid attacks on her are undeserved.   She deserves more support from some prominent folk, and hope she gets it.

Some quick takes

*   Yeah, this business of attacking statues:  it's starting to get a bit too much of a "cultural revolution 2" vibe about it.   It's not the end of the world if some ill deserving historical figure gets his bronze dumped in the river; but it's not as if it ultimately does much to achieve social reform, either.   Moving Confederate hero statues in an orderly manner, though - that's OK.   But kids - getting out and voting is much, much more important.

*   Speaking of Confederate - the NASCAR decision to ban the flag is, I reckon, going to drive the wingnut Right berserk.   Honestly, I would not be surprised if there is some nutter who goes on a shooting rampage over this.   I have opined before that it's pretty incredible that it has taken this long for Americans to realise the insult that pride in that flag represents to such a huge slab of Americans.   David Roberts recently tweeted:

and recommended this New Yorker piece by the great Adam Gopnik:  How the South Won the Civil War.   I haven't read it yet, but must do so soon, before the shooting starts again.

Or - am I misreading this?   Is this cultural moment so strong (and polling indicates it is) that even the great majority of NASCAR fans will accept this?  

*  Ah, Sinclair Davidson:   out there calling a private company's decision not to provide a movie as part of its product line "censorship".   Who knew that a libertarian could be so post modern as to insist "censorship" means just whatever he wants it to mean, and those private companies had better agree with him and stop doing it.  And so should the ABC, or it should be defunded! 

He just makes the stupidest statements on issues involving racism, closely followed by issues of free speech and "censorship".  

Oh, and to round it off:   he's a complete loser on the matter of tobacco plain packaging.  Ha.

An air of desperation Part 3

American policing noted

Here's what follows in the tweets:

Essentially, it appears this was a classic "good guy with a gun" scenario. And once again, because the good guy was black, it didn't end well. 

Store owner Kevin Penn was holding a robber at gunpoint while he waited for police to arrive on March 15. When they did, his lawyer tells AL dot com, he announced the gun, took out the clip and ejected the bullet in the chamber. 

 

Within 4 seconds of officers entering Penn's store, one of them had punched Penn, breaking his jaw and knocking out several teeth, per the article. 

 

As I type this, Decatur Police are reportedly holding a press conference to discuss the incident. Why didn't they do so in mid-March, when it happened? Because the public finally found out this weekend with the release of the video to social media by Penn's supporters....

Like many Alabamians, I'm reminded of another recent "good guy with a gun" scenario that ended even more tragically. E.J. Bradford, a black man, was fatally shot in the back by Hoover Police after pulling a gun to stop an active shooter at the mall on Thanksgiving Day 2018. 

 

Seeing Bradford running, police immediately assumed he was the shooter and shot at him 4 times, killing him. Only later was the public told he was not the killer, who was still on the loose. The officers' actions were later ruled "justified"

Bram, Walt and Dracula

Well, this is all amusingly odd.   From a review of a book about Walt Whitman:

Bram Stoker wrote a fan letter to Whitman in which he seems to be angling for a date (‘I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked…’). Stoker proselytised zealously for Whitman’s work, which, even in bowdlerised form, struck British readers as an American offshoot of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘fleshly school’. Stoker did meet Whitman, but can’t have experienced his magnetism as entirely positive if we are to believe the claim that he went on to base the character of Dracula on the American poet.

This made me realise that I knew nothing about Bram Stoker.  According to Wikipedia:

Stoker was a deeply private man, but his almost sexless marriage, intense adoration of Walt Whitman, Henry Irving and Hall Caine, and shared interests with Oscar Wilde, as well as the homoerotic aspects of Dracula have led to scholarly speculation that he was a repressed homosexual who used his fiction as an outlet for his sexual frustrations.^[17] In 1912, he demanded imprisonment of all homosexual authors in Britain: it has been suggested that this was due to self-loathing and to disguise his own vulnerability.^[18] Possibly fearful, and inspired by the monstrous image and threat of otherness that the press coverage of his friend Oscar's trials generated, Stoker began writing Dracula only weeks after Wilde's conviction.^[18][19]

Here's a post at Brain Pickings with Stoker's first, gushing, letter to Whitman.  It seems the bit about his weight is edited out?   Another site gives us the full Stoker self disclosure:

I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips—sensitive nostrils—a snubnose and straight hair. I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world. I take a delight in letting people I don’t like— people of mean or cruel or sneaking or cowardly disposition—see the worst side of me.

Stoker included his physical description, because he surmised from Whitman’s works and his photograph that he would be interested to know the “personal appearance of your correspondents.” Wrote Stoker: “You are I know a keen physiognomist.”

Actually, that article goes on to give details of 3 times Bram met Walt, and seems to deny that they went badly.   So Walt may not be the inspiration for Dracula after all.  Bram Stoker still sounds quite the oddball, though. 

Some charming French content

France seems to have a lot of people who still use handkerchiefs - my kind of people.  Of course, they might all be over 70, but who knows? 

The children in the second part look particularly charming too.  I maintain that, amongst caucasians, the people on the streets of Paris when I was there (a long time ago) were collectively the most attractive I have ever been amongst.

Transgender arguments

JK Rowling's tweets about the transgender issue, and Radcliffe's entry into the debate on the side of transgender activists ("a transgender woman is a woman") made me look up so called TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminism) articles.   I found this from 2018 by Katheleen Stock in The Economist:  Changing the concept of "woman" will cause unintended harms.   Which is pretty much what Rowling argues.  I think.

Here's a paragraph that struck home:

In public discourse, there’s a lot of focus on whether trans women should be counted as women. Whatever the ultimate answer, that’s obviously a reasonable question, despite trans activists’ attempts to count it as “transphobic”. But I think we should also ask whether self-declaration alone could reasonably be the only criterion of being trans. There’s little precedent elsewhere. In a superficially comparable case, such as coming out as gay, there is still another underlying factor, sexual orientation, that secures your membership. It’s not just a matter of saying that you are gay. And though, as in the notorious case of Rachel Dolezal, a person might “self-declare” that she is “trans racial”, it has seemed clear to nearly everybody responding to this case that such a declaration would be not only false, but also offensive to genuinely oppressed members of the race in question. There is no such thing as being “trans racial”; there is only thinking falsely that you are.

This seems a good point about race.  Even allowing for cases where a very small amount of biological ancestry is still sufficient for some Australians to be recognised as aboriginal,  no one ever argues that it would be reasonable for someone with no biological descent at all to self declare aboriginal identity for any meaningful purpose.  Why is race "protected" in this way, but sex or gender not?   Both can be in a biological "inter" state, and both can be understood as having social construct elements too.  Does it come down to how clearly you can see how open membership to "race" would dilute positive discrimination measures?  Because if it does, that is what Stock argues for women (see below.)

But what are the harms Rowling thinks self declaratory gender would bring?   She's a bit vague on this, and runs the risk of being accused of arguing that biological females are just obviously losers if their life experience loses its distinctiveness by being forced to accept others into the club, so to speak; in much the same way that conservatives argued that recognising gay marriage would be an intrinsically damaging insult to heterosexual marriage.   That in fact is what this Washington Post writer accuses Rowling of arguing.  It was not a great argument against same sex marriage, and without some details, not an especially great one regarding trans declarations of gender too.

The Kathleen Stock article does try to give some more concrete examples:

*   It will muddle understanding (basically, statistics) on problems biological women have long faced such as:

....vulnerability to rape, sexual assault, voyeurism and exhibitionism; to sexual harassment; to domestic violence; to certain cancers; to anorexia and self-harm; and so on. If self-declared trans women are included in statistics, understanding will be hampered.

She argues that its fine to collect stats as to how these same issues affect transwomen too, but they should be kept separate if you want a clear understanding.   [Given the small number of transexuals, I'm not sure how much effect this could really have.  But I guess there would be some examples where it is more significant than others.]

*  The weakening of "safe spaces" for women, which she argues is a problem because of the history of violent men.   [Bear in mind she is arguing against the idea that any man, no matter what state their body is in, can declare himself a woman.]    I have previously written that the fuss about a man who thinks he's a woman having access to women's toilets is overblown - especially if they are already hormonally and at least part physically feminised.   However, Stock does have a point that, if transgender activists want to be consistent, their "gender is what anyone declares it is" would allow testosterone filled wannabe male rapist a legal right to enter spaces, like toilets, where other women would be very uncomfortable if they knew his biology.    It feels more like a hypothetical problem, but one which transgender activism just wants to ignore completely.
 
* The last example I will quote:

And changing the concept of “woman” to include self-declared trans women also threatens a secure understanding of the concept “lesbian”. Lesbians are traditionally understood as females with a sexual orientation towards other females. Again, the categorisation is socially useful. It helps members of the category understand themselves in a positive, distinctive way, despite living in a heteronormative society. It motivates them to create their own social spaces. It gives them special protections, as a discriminated-against minority; and access to special sources of charity funding. 

I don't know that I have much to say about that.   In a non discriminatory world, the importance of lesbians, or gay men, having their own social spaces should be decreasing - and it's probably happening, given what I think is the decreasing number of gay bars and venues in many Western cities.    But I can understand lesbians being a bit irked about transgender men moving into their "territory" so to speak.

In my view, then, the points Stock makes have some merit, but you can see the arguments that will be deployed against them.  

I think there are two very pragmatic ones that are more convincing:

a.  the disadvantages birth women face when a transgender woman wants to compete in women's sports; and

b.  the interest of potential or actual sex partners in knowing transsexual status.  

The first point I won't write about - the unfairness to women athletes is obvious. 

As to the second point:   I'm not sure why we can't be honest and say that the transgender process is never a 100% complete physical transition, and the end result is, inevitably, a simulacrum of the physicality of the desired gender.   If transgender ideology taken to its desired legal effect (that a man can legally alter gender to woman, for all purposes) means that no naive man who marries a transgender woman could ever claim he has been wronged by non disclosure of his partner's former gender, I would have to say there is something wrong with the ideology.  This may sound like a hypothetical case if you are talking marriage, but no doubt there have been cases of a transsexual woman bedding a man who did not realise what he was getting into.  

If everyone can understand why a man or woman going to bed with a partner might be upset if they find their partner has not first disclosed opposite gender genitals, or an imitation of such, well then they are accepting that self declaration is not the only thing that matters about gender and sex.

As to how to resolve this, I have been thinking lately that the idea of a "third gender" seems to have a lot going for it.   It's acknowledging  both a biological and psychic reality, isn't it?   And as I have said before, it's pretty interesting that people who wanted to live as the other gender in those societies did not (as far as I know) spend a lot of time fretting about how their body must in all respects be altered to match their perceived gender, otherwise their life will be one of crushing depression and unhappiness.

The Wikipedia entry on third gender talks about it in the context of transgender, and some parts are pretty interesting:

In a study of people in the United States who thought themselves to be members of a third gender, Ingrid M. Sell found that they typically felt different from the age of 5.^[42] Because of both peer and parental pressure, those growing up with the most ambiguous appearances had the most troubled childhoods and difficulties later in life. Sell also discovered similarities between the third genders of the East and those of the West. Nearly half of those interviewed were healers or in the medical profession. A majority of them, again like their Eastern counterparts, were artistic enough to make a living from their abilities. The capacity to mediate between men and women was a common skill, and third genders were oftentimes thought to possess an unusually wide perspective and the ability to understand both sides.^[42] A notable result of Sell's study is that 93% of the third genders interviewed, again like their Eastern counterparts, reported “paranormal”-type abilities.*^[43] 

But of course, some gender theorists may say it's OK to have a third gender category - let's call it "non binary" - but the important thing is that people can move between whatever category that they feel is true to themselves.  So a person should be free to self label as male, female, or non-binary/third gender.

If that's the argument, it doesn't solve anything.


So, what's my conclusion?   I think Stock and the TERFs make some valid points, but they seem to skirt around the more fundamental arguments about why it's not unreasonable for people to consider the biology of bodies important - and that's something that trans people should be able to live with and not argue that it can be removed from moral and legal consideration by mere self declaration.   


*  On that odd point about paranormal abilities, I think it is well recognised that an above average number of  male mediums in spiritualism are gay.     

Don't forget climate change

What with all the disease, violence and protests, it's easy to overlook the bigger picture.

This study has very big implications for civil engineering (including what is presumably the difficult job of retrospectively increasing urban drainage to cope with peak flows):

The likelihood of intense storms is rising rapidly in North America, and the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects big increases in such deluges.

"The longer you have the warming, the stronger the signal gets, and the more you can separate it from random natural variability," said co-author Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a climate scientist with Environment Canada.

Previous research showed that global warming increases the frequency of extreme rainstorms across the Northern Hemisphere, and the new study was able to find that fingerprint for extreme rain in North America.

"We're finding that extreme precipitation has increased over North America, and we're finding that's consistent with what the models are showing about the influence of human-caused warming," she said. "We have very high confidence of extreme precipitation in the future."

Look at this graph:

From the report again (bear in mind the temperature scale is F, not C):

At the current level of warming caused by greenhouse gases—about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial average—extreme rainstorms that in the past happened once every 20 years will occur every five years, according to the study. If the current rate of warming continues, Earth will heat up 5.4 degrees by 2100. Then, 20, 50 and 100-year extreme rainstorms could happen every 1.5 to 2.5 years, the researchers concluded.

Nut noted

Yeah, I like highlighting how nutty and isolated in their own fantasy world are Australian wingnuts.  So sue me.

This is the same guy, remember, who had to stop himself from freaking out over a teacher doing a foot tap instead of a handshake with his son. Lives in a deeply unpleasant mental landscape of continual outrage and theorising that his side is about to win the dis-aster that is the culture war.   A nut, basically.

Keynes Vs Friedman

A biographer of Keynes has some interesting things to say about him, and the comparison with Friedman, in an interview at the Washington Post:

...Keynes himself never wanted to be remembered as a deficit therapist. He was a social thinker who was concerned with the great problems of his day: war and economic depression. And I think he would be very troubled by the idea that government spending on anything at all became the hallmark of his legacy in the economics profession.  ...

I think he would be perplexed by what we deem to be political battles in the United States. He thought economic policy was the central political battleground for social justice, and the way economics has become technocratized and hived off from mainstream politics as an arena for specialists would have both excited and frightened him. He would be terrified by the idea that central political questions about equality and inequality have become the terrain of experts who essentially rule in favor of inequality, regardless of which political party is in charge. Keynes viewed inequality as a very dangerous thing — it’s something that preoccupied him when he wrote “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” and “The General Theory” — his two masterpieces.

OK, here's the bit with the comparison:

The conventional understanding now places Keynes, a champion of stimulus, against Milton Friedman, who came after him and is seen as a champion of austerity. Is that a useful binary?

I think we lose track of the fact that Friedman and Keynes had different social visions. They weren’t just arguing across the generations about which policies would best create the same desired result. They were arguing about what kind of world they wanted to live in. And the mathematicization of economics in the 20th century really obscures this deeper ideological conflict, often by design. Keynes wanted everyone to live in the Bloomsbury of 1913, having their hair cut by Virginia Woolf while drinking champagne and debating post-impressionism with Lytton Strachey. Friedman wanted to preserve these activities as the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Why be rich if you can’t live a better life than the masses? To which Keynes would counter: Who cares about the masses when you are drinking champagne with Virginia Woolf?

So literal champagne socialism?

It depends on which Keynes you’re talking to, but by the end of his life, I think that’s about right. Keynes had a complicated relationship with the word “socialism.” He was ferociously critical of the Soviet Union. But he also thought the socialist Labour governments in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s were much too timid and insufficiently committed to economic justice for working people. In the United States, we remember Keynes for deficit spending, but his most comprehensive policy victory was the establishment of the National Health Service in Britain. He was the financial architect of socialized medicine in the U.K. 

An air of desperation, Part 2

He, and the Murdoch family that employ him, are disgusting.

An air of desperation

The Republicans and "law and order"

An interesting long article at Politico about Republicans and their historical relationship with the "law and order" issue.

The subheading explains what it is all about:

A punitive brand of conservatism embraced by Trump and some GOP hardliners is rapidly falling out of step with public opinion.

A big plug for psychedelic psychotherapy

This is in The Guardian:

I head the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, the first of its kind, supported by about £3m in philanthropic donations. For 15 years, my research has focused on how drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT and MDMA work in the brain, and how they may be useful in treating disorders such as depression. Like the present pandemic, a psychedelic drug experiences can be transformative – of the individual – and of society. Both illuminate the extent to which the condition of the world we inhabit is dependent on our own behaviours. And these, in turn, are a consequence of how we feel, think and perceive....

The Centre was founded in April 2019. A few months later, Johns Hopkins University in the US announced a supersized version, floated by $17m. If you have read Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind or seen the first episode of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Netflix series, The Goop Lab (titled The Healing Trip), you may be aware that such developments reflect a rising interest, and investment, in the mental health application of psychedelic drugs.

As I have indicated before, I am not completely against the concept, but I remain cautiously sceptical for a few reasons:

*  seems to be a lot of money involved looking for success, and while with a vaccine or drug treatment for a physical illness you can get very clear cut results, with a treatment of a psychological illness the boundaries of success are (I expect) a bit more rubbery (hence leading to overly optimistic claims of early success).

* the basic idea has been around a long time, with people like Cary Grant famously taking LSD in controlled psychotherapy.   Did those early users really find it had a long lasting effect?   Perhaps the other drugs being tried are better than LSD for this purpose, but I still suspect the issue will be how long term the effects may be.

* although the author of the piece is indicating it is only likely to be a treatment for the more serious cases of depression, as with medical marijuana,  I suspect there is likely to be a drift towards use and prescription to people with less serious cases of illness.

* A bit of a warning of his over-enthusiasm - the claim about how this could be transformative "for society". 

* the treatment featured on The Goop Lab?   Hmmm. 

A life considered

Youtube threw this up at me as a recommendation, and I am glad I watched it:  a short film about a 107 year old American woman who is still as sharp as a tack, looking back at her life.



There is one rather big surprise that comes out of it, relating to her marriage, but I won't spoil it. 

I watched it with my daughter, and at the end was happy to point out to her that her father had been right all along about the husband.   The point being, of course, that if I don't like one of her future boyfriends, she should pay attention.   She didn't say much in response...

Local mental illness

The always interesting topic of mental illnesses which are specific to particular countries or cultures is given a detailed discussion at BBC Future.

We get the old favourite "koro" (fear of the penis shrinking away), and a description of an outbreak in Singapore in the 1960's.   But we get a few other examples which I hadn't heard of before:

In the central plateau region of Haiti, people regularly fall sick with “reflechi twòp”, or “thinking too much”, which involves ruminating on your troubles until you can barely leave the house. In South Korea, meanwhile, there’s “Hwa-byung” – loosely translated as “rage virus” – which is caused by bottling up your feelings about things you see as unfair, until you succumb to some alarming physical symptoms, like a burning sensation in the body. Dealing with exasperating family members is a major risk factor – it’s common during divorces and conflicts with in-laws.

"Rage virus" seems to be the common affliction at Catallaxy, but I digress.

Then there is this problem, out of Cambodia:

“I would say that there are definitely instances where the meaning that is attributed to experiences actually changes biologically what that experience is,” says Bonnie Kaiser, an expert in psychological anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She gives the example of the illness kyol goeu, literally “wind overload”, an enigmatic fainting sickness which is prevalent among Khmer refugees in the US.

In their native Cambodia, it’s commonly believed that the body is riddled with channels that contain a wind-like substance – and if these become blocked, the resulting wind overdose will cause the sufferer to permanently lose the use of a limb or die. Out of 100 Khmer patients at one psychiatric clinic in the US, one study found that 36% had experienced an episode of the illness at some point.

Bouts usually proceed slowly, starting with a general feeling of malaise. Then, one day, the victim will stand up and notice that they feel dizzy – and this is how they know that the attack is starting. Eventually they’ll fall to the ground, unable to move or speak until their relatives have administered the appropriate first aid, which usually consists of massaging their limbs or biting their ankles.

 There's a lot  more at the article, so go read it.