The practical problem for pro-trans activism

I think I only follow one anti-trans movement person on x/Twitter - Graham Linehan - and I have criticised him before for becoming obsessive on the topic.   It's also well known that Musk has anti-trans sentiment, given that he has fallen out with a daughter over it, so it may be that the algorithm actively promotes trans sceptic content.  So, I know that there is a reason I might be getting trans sceptic tweets pushed my way.

But still - I find it hard to believe that liberal, pro trans rights type people can use social media and not agree that there is some extremism and nuttiness on display in the community they never criticise.  

Without even going into the most extreme examples, such as the "transwomen" whose allegedly erotic selfies make it clear that they are that way because of autogynephilic transsexualism (something pro-trans hate, because conservatives can easily argue that those men are just acting on a fetish, and most people don't consider fetishes as warranting respect) - there is a lot of pretty intense level narcissism on display.  

I wonder sometimes if I am being unfair about this - it has become normalised that young people in particular will continuously post selfies in a way that I wouldn't say necessarily indicates narcissism - but I still find it hard not to conclude that anyone over 30 who feels the need to post selfies all the time has some serious insecurities.

And what about this?   He's running for the Greens in Scotland, apparently:

I can't believe that people would not think there is a deep level of attention seeking nuttiness on display here...

     

History is history, but you can dwell on it a little too much...

The ABC has a story up about the descendents of the Pinjarra massacre that happened in Western Australia in 1834:

In 1834, a band of soldiers, police and colonists led by Governor James Stirling, the leader of the Swan River Colony, attacked a group of Bindjareb Noongar people on the banks of the Murray River, killing many of them.

Estimates of the death toll vary, with official accounts showing the deaths of at least 15 Aboriginal people and one police officer.

However, Ms Martin, from the Bilya or "river tribe" of Bindjareb people, said her community had the number of Indigenous victims at more than double the official figure.

She said that was the type of truth-telling she wanted the Voice to facilitate.

Ms Martin said it was vital to put local leaders at the front of the process.

There is no context given, but there is a very lengthy Wikipedia entry that does (although the lack of citations for some claims is concerning).  Here's just a bit:

There had been numerous Aboriginal attacks on settlers in the preceding years. Notably, in February 1832, Private George Budge was ambushed by Bindjareb Nyungars, and speared to death near Peel’s garden. The following July, Sergeant Wood of the 63rd Regiment was speared and nearly killed.^[1] This was followed in July 1834 by the ambush and murder of Hugh Nesbitt, a servant of Thomas Peel and the wounding of Edward Barron.^[5] Following the Binjareb looting, by means of armed robbery, of the flour mill that provided rations to settlers and Noongars in the district, as well as the murder and mutilation of Nesbitt,^[5] Captain Frederick Irwin, the lieutenant governor in Stirling's absence, is said to have inflamed the situation by adopting a soldier's attitude to crush a warlike group of Aboriginals and reduce them to a state of subjection.^{[citation needed]}

I mean, there are many examples of such incidents around Australia, with Aboriginals disproportionately punished for their pushback against moves on their tribal lands.

But I have to wonder - in another decade, it'll be 200 years since this particular incident - if modern peoples can get over atrocities committed on a massive scale in the period 1939 to 1975 (<cough>, Germany, Japan, Americans in Vietnam), doesn't the call for "truth telling" for incidents 200 hundred years ago seem to be pushing that particular victim narrative a bit, um, unnecessarily hard?

It's a bit late to be prosecuting politicians and troopers from the time, too.

Anyway, interestingly, the report does give another example of indigenous folk who aren't convinced the Voice is a good idea, for practical reasons:

Opinions on the proposed Voice among other descendants of Pinjarra survivors are mixed.

Clarry Walley, who is a respected elder and figure in the Pinjarra community, said he was steadfast in his opposition to the Voice.

He said he was sceptical of the idea changes brought by the Voice would trickle down to smaller communities such as his own.

"I'll vote no," he said.

"It might make a difference for other people, but to some people, it's not going to make a difference. There's still going to be hardship and people are still going to be struggling, and it's not going to change that.

John Michael serves on the cultural advice committee for the Gnaala Karla Booja Aboriginal Corporation, which represents traditional custodians from a vast swathe of the state's south.

He said he was undecided about how he would vote in the Voice referendum.

He said he wanted more Aboriginal advice heard in the corridors of power, but like Mr Walley, wanted firm detail on what his community would get out of the Voice before he decided.

So, once again, a little to my surprise, the ABC provides the voices of local aboriginal elders who don't see the value in the exercise, which gives me "cover" to vote "no".   (Although, given the pretty gormless Warren Mundine's contradictory arguments, I would rather not vote at all.)

Update:  in terms of the total numbers of aborigines killed over time in reprisal killings, there is this estimate -

The research project, currently in its eighth year and led by University of Newcastle historian Emeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan, now estimates more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives were lost in more than 400 massacres, up from a previous estimate of 8,400 in 302 massacres. By contrast it is estimated that 168 non-Aboriginal people were killed in 13 frontier massacres.

The team developed a template to identify massacres and a process to corroborate disparate sources. They include settler diaries, newspaper reports, Aboriginal evidence, and archives from State and Federal repositories.

The project’s online map and database records the massacre site locations, details of the individual massacres and the sources corroborating evidence of the massacres.

Professor Ryan said new evidence, released today in Stage 4 of the project in partnership with The Guardian Australia, showed massacres intensified, particularly after 1860, a point in time when South Australia acquired the Northern Territory from NSW, Western Australia’s Kimberley region opened up and Queensland became a separate colony.

“More massacres happened in the period 1860 to 1930 than in the period 1788 to 1860,” Professor Ryan said.

“We find that the massacres are becoming better organised and there seems to be a more ruthless approach on the part of the perpetrators to the massacring of Aboriginal people.”

I don't know how good her work is, but the numbers are substantial, even if rubbery.   (

I will concede that any such killing that took place within the early 20th century is surprisingly recent - and carries with it the fact that they happened after Australia came into being.

Still, when it comes to terrible treatment of local people at the hands of colonists, I suspect the British in India would be hard to beat.  Even with the new nationalism in India, do the people really spend much time talking about apologies and reparations?

More "being super rich doesn't guarantee good judgement"

 

Quantum eraser confusion clarified - quantum retrocausality in trouble?

I had been wondering about this.

Towards the end of 2021, Sabine Hossenfelder had a video up in which she said that the claim that the (relatively famous) quantum eraser experiment showed retrocausality was mistaken.   Here's my post about that video.

I was a bit confused, though, as she has also sometimes referred favourably to the physics videos put up by Arvin Ash, and I knew he had long had one up following the line that the experiment did indeed show retrocausality.   So I wasn't sure which Youtube science content creator was right.  (Although, now that I check, I see that Arvin's background is more in engineering than physics.)

The question seems to have been resolved, though, by Arvin putting up a video in the last couple of days in which he agrees with Sabine, and concedes he was mistaken in his first video.   (Mind you, it's pretty understandable, given the claim in the first paper). 

Here's the video:

 

I tend to agree with many of the comments following:  it is a clearer explanation than that Sabine had given.    

Given that I have a soft spot for retrocausality as a concept, I'm a little disappointed.  But I don't think the idea is completely dead - probably just resting!

Colonisation: why is it so hard for the obvious to be stated?

So Jacinta Price is being criticised for this part of her speech yesterday (and I'm going by the way The Guardian has extracted it):

The senator’s speech criticised Indigenous bodies which she claimed sought to “demonise colonial settlement in its entirety and nurture a national self-loathing about the foundations of modern Australian achievement”.

Guardian Australia asked Nampijinpa Price to clarify whether she thought any Indigenous people were suffering negative impacts of colonisation, Price responded: “No.”

“A positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food,” she said.

“No, there is no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation.”

Well, I think that last line is clearly ridiculous - in fact, you would hard pressed to find any indigenous group from around the world who you could say is suffering no negative impacts of colonisation.  It's pretty remarkable when you look at their situation in very diverse countries how their communities typically share problems of alcohol and drug abuse, high suicide rates, and economic marginalisation.

On the other side, though, the first sentence quoted above is a pretty accurate critique of how the pro-indigenous advocacy has become intensely about never acknowledging any good to come out of joining modernity - medicine, reliable food sources, travel, more opportunity for different experiences, etc etc.

I may have written about this here before, but I still think it is very telling how an exchange in an episode of Northern Exposure way back in the 90's caught my attention for how, even then, it reflected something that I felt had already become politically incorrect to say in Australia.   The lead character (the New York Jew Dr Joel) asked his laconic, indigenous helper Marilyn what she thought of her ancestors' land being colonised.  And her answer was along the lines "It comes with some good things, and some bad." I'm sure medicine got mentioned in the "good" - but I can't remember what else.  And I think in the bad was the loss of some traditions, although again, I can't remember the detail.

But the thing was that the show, which obviously had a "liberal" bias in its stories and general attitude, did not attract controversy in American for having an indigenous character state the obvious - there are advantages to having entry into the modern world as a side effect of colonisation.   Which is not to deny that there have been better and worse ways in which colonisation has happened in history.   

As I complained in my last post about the Voice, "the vibe" in indigenous advocacy seems to have moved to a completely negative and grievance based approach over the last 30 years, and it's not hard to imagine that this is having a negative effect on the attitude of the young indigenous towards respect of laws and property.   And the higher rate of indigenous youth crime is, I  have no doubt at all, a reason why in many regional parts of Australia, the "Yes" vote would be seen as rewarding the "wrong" attitude.

To go back to the title of the post:   why is it so hard for the both the Yes side, and the No side, to move from the unrealistic extremes on a key question of the effect of colonisation.

The correct answer - it has had a mixed effect of positive and negatives - is obviously true, and it would give confidence that people can reach a common ground if both sides can stop pretending that it's not.

Update:   Well, I think I have found the conversation on a Northern Exposure fan site.  It's not exactly the same as my 30 year old memory, but the gist is close enough, I think!:

Marilyn: Death, like the white man, wasn't happy in his own land. He didn't think his kingdom was big enough. He wanted more. One night, when the good spirit was asleep, Death attacked the world. He killed a lot of people, and he took the Chief's prettiest daughter as his bride. She pretended to be a good wife, but one day she secretly fed him a pumpkin seed. The pumpkin grew and grew inside death. Finally, he exploded, and a million pumpkin seeds covered the earth.
Joel: I still don't get it.
Marilyn: A lot of people died, but a good thing came out of it, too.
Joel: What was that?
Marilyn:: It's the same with white people. They cleared the forest, they dug up the land, and they gave us the flu. But they also brought power tools and penicillin and Ben and Jerry's ice cream.

---

Revisiting, briefly, My Kitchen Rules

Back in the last decade, I used to post every now and then about the current season of My Kitchen Rules, before getting thoroughly sick of the formula and the clear decision of the producers to make it increasingly about contestant bitchiness and conflict than cooking.   And then the show got rested anyway, due to the shame felt by having given tanned nutjob Pete Evans a TV profile for a decade, presumably.

But I see that it's back, and I have to admit, I have dipped my toe into it again.   

Not much though - it was obvious from the first episode that the old, shameful formula is still there.

So I'm not going to bother with talking about it much, but I did want to note two of the "too obvious" drama tactics the show uses:

1.   This season features, once again, an apparently upper middle class couple who might dress well and live in a nice house (perhaps with a flash boat tied up to their canal jetty), but their taste in food is relatively unsophisticated and verges on bogan-ish.  (This year's couple, for example, made a jaw dropping claim - for contestants on a cooking show - that the duck they were being served was the first time they had ever eaten it.  This did make me laugh, actually, as I tried to imagine the number of other viewers around Australia gasping at their lack of culinary adventure.)

But what's worse (for me, as resident and defender of this fair city) is that these couples are from Brisbane, or further north in Queensland.   I am pretty sure, if I were an obsessive with time on my hands, that I could show that this is at least the third time that such a couple have - suspiciously - been Queenslanders.  I have little doubt that the producers are from the southern "foodie" cities, and actively look for contestant applicants from up North who seem to think they know about food, but really don't: all the better for the rest of the country to laugh at.   (Seriously, I would love to be a fly on the wall during production meetings, to hear drama tactics discussed.)

2.   I have mentioned this before, but it seems they just can't give it a rest:   the ridiculousness of the way at least half of the teams, on their first home restaurant night, cook something they've cooked a hundred times before as their speciality, only to stuff it up completely.   "Oh, I don't know what's gone wrong.  It just didn't set/freeze/cook like it usually does."

The fact that they are cooking for a larger number of people is no excuse.   If you have normally cooked for 6, and have to do it for double that number, you can still do a dry run for cooking for 12, surely??

It becomes particularly hard to believe when it's a case of the team who liked to talk up their abilities, and are too harsh on the others' efforts, only to get their comeuppance when they try to cook their No 1 dish.   My eyes can't roll back far enough for the number of times we have seen this scenario.

On a side note, re-reading my old posts on past seasons, reminded me that I used to enjoy the episode reviews of comedian/writer Ben Pobjie.  I haven't thought about him for some years:  in 2017, I noted  that he seemed to be trying to break into stand up comedy with little (or limited) success, and had also made it clear he has some serious mental health issues.  

So, I just looked on Twitter to see if he is still active there.  He is, although it seems with not much of a following.  And he's still a bit of a worry - his current post includes a bit of mocking of RU OK day, which seems a bit odd, given his past (current?) problems.      

Anyway, it's not like I don't wish him well - I thought his writing on MKR could be very amusing indeed.  Hope he finds another niche, eventually. 

 

Thanks, Elon

 Also:

 

Alien humour

Things not going completely well in Portugal?

DW news has a short story up about a bit of a backlash apparently developing over the openness of drug use in Porto, Portugal:

 

 Of course, it's only a 5 minute report, so I can't claim it's very "in depth". But it's interesting nonetheless, given the amount of international fanboying (much of it superficial and inaccurate, I've always said) that has gone on for years about their approach to drug use.

He has form, as a rich jerk

For the full context, in case you haven't seen the news or social media in the last 24 hours:

I see that he is also interested in living until at least 100, using biohacks: 

The 41-year-old Gurner, valued at $929 million in The Australian Financial Review’s 2022 Rich List – and who billionaire Harry Triguboff has described as “the future” – has $10 billion worth of apartments under way, including on several sites across Collingwood.

He has grand plans for his $150 million, high-end health, wellness and anti-ageing brand Saint Haven. Another site is planned around Melbourne’s South Yarra before the end of the year and a third in Melbourne’s CBD, before plans for others in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, north shore and Sydney CBD...

Gurner says his clubs will be social and for networking, but put health and wellness at their core. That’s when he says that he wants to live to 100. It turns out Gurner has become increasingly obsessed about staying young, especially after his dad died from cancer and he came close to financial ruin in 2016...

Gurner says he is one of the guinea pigs for the club’s $250,000 biohacking, anti-ageing packages that include an annual full-body MRI, brain scans and monthly blood testing,

“I get about 250 different tests of my bloods which will say, ‘this month you’re deficient in [vitamin] D, your testosterone is up or down’. Then the physios, dieticians, doctors on call set my regime,” he says. “I take about 50 or 60 tablets a day. It’s always very specific to my latest results.”

I'm sensing some intense Peter Thiel vibes...

 

Floods noted

If you are on (stupid) X, it is worth looking at this tweet thread, as it contains some remarkable and dramatic video clips of recent floods around the world:

 Yeah, climate change is not something you can deal with by installing more airconditioning. 

Four Corners on the Voice

While there's no doubt at all that the ABC takes a very sympathetic approach to all indigenous issues, last night's Four Corners, which involved discussions with both pro and anti Voice referendum voices, was pleasingly balanced.     

Most surprising was the time given to regional local aboriginal activists who indicated that they were either going to vote no, or were sceptical of the whole idea, out of concerns that the Canberra based Voice  was going to work against local communities getting what they wanted.  In other words, they were saying exactly what I've been muttering here - the entire concept seems to about creating a new attempt at a bureaucratic filter to advice to government, which the local community organisations will need to convince on needs and issues, rather than their current ability to directly deal with government.    

These "no" voters were not, it seemed, on the radical Left, who are against it for being insultingly inadequate.  (One such person did feature, but was not given much air time.)

If anything (and I suspect that many Lefty journalists might have been grinding their teeth about this), the program really seemed to legitimatise a "no" vote for those who don't like the conservative "no" campaign, but just have objections to whole proposal on pragmatic grounds.   Like me...

Something good

Over the last week, I've been marvelling at how much bad/somewhat depressing news there seems to be around at the moment.   

So I will go out of my way to note that there is something that is cheering me up at least once a week - the new episodes of Futurama.  The revival of the show has been a clear success, and I find it hard to imagine anyone being disappointed with it.  [Update:  OK, I have checked some online reviews, and there are some people who are underwhelmed.  I would agree, it does sometimes feel a bit "fan-service-y", but I think in a good way.]

Last week's episode - a satire of the Covid pandemic - handled it very well, I thought, with good and clever jokes that both sides (the antivax conservatives, and the sane) could enjoy.  That's quite a fine line they managed to walk...

Excuse my scepticism...

....but seriously, doesn't this sound like an extremely bureaucratic arrangement, and one which I can readily imagine primed for internal fights and dissent?   From the Guardian, explaining in summary form how the Langton idea for the Voice is supposed to work:

• It will provide independent advice to parliament and government.

• It will be chosen by First Nations people based on the wishes of local communities.

• It will be representative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

• It will be empowering, community-led, inclusive, respectful, culturally informed and gender balanced. It will also include youth.

• It will be accountable and transparent.

The voice will work alongside existing organisations and traditional structures.

The Calma-Langton co-design report recommended the national voice have 24 members, with gender balance structurally guaranteed.

The base model proposes two members from each state, the Northern Territory, ACT and Torres Strait. A further five members would represent remote areas due to their unique needs – one member each from the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales. An additional member would represent the significant population of Torres Strait Islanders living on the mainland.

Members would serve four-year terms, with half the membership determined every two years. There would be a limit of two consecutive terms for each member.

Two co-chairs of a different gender to one another would be selected by the members of the voice every two years.

The Calma-Langton model proposed a national voice with two permanent advisory groups – one on youth and one on disability – and a small ethics council to advise on probity and governance.

How would local and regional voices feed in?

The co-design report proposed 35 regions, broken down by state and territory. Communities and governments in each state and territory would jointly determine these.

Local and regional voices would provide advice to all levels of government to influence policy and programs, and advise the non-government sector and business.

The report outlines their roles, how they would be constituted and the principles they would embody, like cultural leadership, community-led design and empowerment.

There would be “a clear, two-way flow of advice and communication” between them and the national voice, the report said.

 

 

 

The "love bomb" approach

As most of the comments following this Tweet indicate, this approach to arguing for "Yes" is very unlikely to be effective:

 

A neuroscientist on her cannabis research

Oh look:  another neuroscientist from America in Science magazine basically saying what I've been saying for a number of years:

Although Hurd opposes the criminalization of cannabis use and possession, she believes legalization has come with underappreciated downsides. She’s concerned it has fanned a permissive culture and a perception that the drug is generally safe. “I am worried about how cavalier we’re becoming and that there is a cannabis smoke shop now practically, in some places, on every other block,” she says...

...she favors regulations that limit potency and using tax revenues from the sale of cannabis to educate people about the risks, and for treatment and research to help those harmed by its use.

You can read what her research has been about - mainly the dangers to children and adolescents who are increasing exposed to THC. 

At the very end, though, there is a box talking about the "good" component of cannabis and it's possible use in reducing other drug addictions:

Yasmin Hurd has spent much of her career documenting the harms caused by the psychoactive compound in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Ironically, she believes another cannabis ingredient, cannabidiol (CBD), could help break cannabis dependence. Her initial focus, though, is on testing it to help heroin users.

In a seminal study published in 2009, she showed CBD could reduce drug-seeking behavior in rats previously exposed to heroin, perhaps by reducing craving triggered by cues they had associated with the drug. “CBD could actually do the opposite of THC,” says Hurd, who heads an addiction research lab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. In 2019, she and her clinical team reported that compared with a placebo, a CBD capsule taken once a day for 3 days reduced drug cravings and anxiety in 45 human heroin users.

Why's the Bible down on dogs?

As usual, an enlightening and entertaining video from Religion for Breakfast, looking at the reasons why dogs are not generally positively referenced in the Bible.   (Worth watching for the brief section on Hittite puppy magic, too):

Yet more "Consider the Ring"

It turns out that Brisbane is not the only place about to stage a Ring Cycle.  As I have explained before [just search "Ring Cycle" in the side bar - I like most of my past posts about this], I'll be there in December, to see if my "sink or swim in 15 hours of dense Germanic storytelling" introduction to the artform pays off.   

But in this lengthy article in The Guardian, I learn that the Royal Opera House in London is about to stage it as well, directed by Australian Barrie Kosky, whose style is most often described as "flamboyant".  That's not a descriptor in the arts world that has natural appeal to me, although I guess that some would say these particular operas are intrinsically flamboyant, so what am I on about?

Well, all I can say is that I consider it a good thing that the Brisbane production is being directed by a Chinese guy who, as this video indicates, has a pretty grounded approach: 

 

I am, by the way, a bit bothered by the lack of media attention being given to this forthcoming Brisbane production, which has been delayed years by Covid.   I hope it gets noticed soon.   

Anyhoo, back to The Guardian article that talks again about the Cycle generally:

Wagner has never felt more culturally marginal than today, even though, paradoxically, many leading cultural franchises, from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Game of Thrones, are unthinkable without his influence. On the face of it, 2023 needs nothing so little as bombastic white-male-supremacist art composed by an antisemitic megalomaniac whom even one-time superfan Nietzsche came to see as a kind of cultural Covid. “Is Wagner a human being at all?” Nietzsche asked. “Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches – he has made music sick.”

Of course, such a paragraph means that it will be followed by several explaining why it is, in fact, still culturally relevant, including its constant re-interpretations:

Wagner at least thought he was issuing a deep, unified statement of cultural truths that could change how we live. “He felt there had to be some kind of drastic step taken in order to revolutionise the way people lived and their demands on life,” Wagner scholar Michael Tanner said. “Otherwise they would just sink to a level where they didn’t mind the fact that they were living so much less fully than they could do.”

Playwright George Bernard Shaw interpreted the Ring cycle as an allegory of the collapse of capitalism. But it is endlessly interpretable. It can serve not just as Marxist tract but as a Third Reich allegory; a sado-masochistic indictment of the have-yachts in the posh seats, or a Buddhist-inflected music drama in which the high body count suggests the death of the ego that Wagner thought, in line with his beloved philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, was desirable.

Richard Jones, director of two-fourths of ENO’s current Ring, favours something like the last account: “Ultimately it’s about the idea of self-renunciation. It’s like great Greek drama. Since it was first performed in 1876, there has never been a period when it wasn’t germane to the contemporary world,” he told the Guardian when his cycle opened in 2021.

Certainly, Wagner supposed his music drama would offer quasi-religious experience in the ancient Greek manner. “His idea was that a sufficiently potent new art form, such as he was perhaps uniquely able to write, would, by being experienced, communally change people’s consciousness,” said Tanner. “You would emerge a different person.” Wagner even built a temple to this cult in the form of Bayreuth’s opera house.

Yes, the radio interview I heard when the Brisbane production was announced did note that many claim that  viewing a Cycle production is life changing.   One has one's doubts that this will be way I react, but I'm willing to go through the experiment.

 

Kayla calms down

There are more important stories in the world, but the bizarre one of the fake gigantic boob wearing Canadian teacher deserves an update.

According to the Daily Mail, he has turned up at his new school looking very conventionally male, which makes all of the warnings about it respecting his "gender expression", and taking a lot of security precautions, seem a bit odd.

It also further adds to the mystery as to whether he was on a massive troll at the other school.  But he did also go skydiving and walking down the street in his fake boobs, so who knows?

Or did a flurry of parental objections to the new school make them tell him that he just can't show up dressed like an idiot?

The tabloids also love to repeat that he had claimed his breasts were real - when does lying on something so obvious move from (what?) creative performance to a sign of clear instability you don't want in a profession like teaching?

 

Sharks and inflatables don't mix

I had never heard of inflatable catamarans before:

 Three people have been rescued in the Coral Sea off the coast of Cairns, after their catamaran was damaged during several shark attacks.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (Amsa) coordinated the rescue early Wednesday morning roughly 835km off the coast of Cairns, after receiving a distress beacon.

In a post to social media, the crew, who were on a round-the-world expedition called Russian Ocean Way, which they were documenting online, said they were first attacked by sharks on 4 September, leaving the rear left “cylinder” of their nine-metre inflatable catamaran damaged.

I wonder what the sharks were thinking, though.  I mean, I give orcas some credit for intelligence when attacking sail boats - but I wouldn't have thought sharks would keep attacking a boat.  Well, unless the crew had been particularly slack about throwing food scraps overboard, I guess.

So, I'm using Ivermectin to fight face bugs

Here's a story of a personal nature.

Since about my early 40's I've had mild rosacea on my face from time to time.   For those who don't know, it presents as red spots or rashes, and it's sometimes described as an adult form of acne, but it doesn't look like your typical adolescent acne with pimples that have a definite life cycle.   Rosacea type acne is more like annoying red spots or small lumps that never fully come to a head, but just linger for a long time.   I should hasten to add, my case has always been pretty mild, never covering any substantial area, and I'm not sure whether anyone would really identify me as having a problem with it, as it has been well controlled by low dose antibiotics which I might take for a month or two, then wait to see how it goes, as well as a topical prescription cream called Rosex. 

I saw a doctor for a renewed script for the antibiotic (doxycycline) this week, and I explained that I recently had to keep taking it because it was only taking a week or so after finishing a 30 day course to find I was getting rosacea type red spots/lumps on my nose - one of the worst places to get them, as it can give a real WC Fields look.   Going back onto the antibiotic would clear it up again within a week or so, but I wasn't sure if it really was a good idea to be almost continually on any antibiotic.   (Doctors and pharmacists had told me before it is very well tolerated - and in fact it's recently been in the news as a potential wonder drug for helping stop the spread of STI's!)  

Anyhow, the GP said, after checking on line, that while it is thought to be very safe to be on long term, some think it is best to have breaks of a month or two to let your gut microbiome re-establish.  (It seems to have no effect on my digestion at all, but yes, given all the interest in recent years as to the effect of gut microbiome on our general health, this is the issue that I had been wondering about.)

I then went to another doctor at a skin clinic to have something else looked at, and we talked about the antibiotic issue too, but he suggested I could try another topical cream other than Rosex, which I had never found as good as being on a course of antibiotics.

He didn't tell me what the alternative cream was, so I was somewhat surprised to find at the chemist that it's the MAGA crowd's wonder drug - Ivermectin!

I had never heard of it as a treatment for rosacea - but it definitely is.  It's also been used, in lotion form, for head lice.

I had no idea it was used externally for parasites, as well as for internal ones, at least in animals.

So, why does it work for rosacea?   

The thing is, it seems the cause of rosacea is not well understood, but yes, I had read before that there was a suspected role, at least in some people, of that the ugly, ugly demodex mite that a lot of us have on our faces, especially as we age:

Newborns don’t have Demodex mites. In a study looking for them on adult humans, researchers could detect them visually in only 14% of people.

However, once they used DNA analysis, they found signs of Demodex on 100% of the adult humans they tested, a finding supported by previous cadaver examinations.

By the way, I also had never read up on the origins of Ivermectin before, either, but it is recent, and derives from a microorganism found in Japanese soil, or all places: 

Discovered in the late-1970s, the pioneering drug ivermectin, a dihydro derivative of avermectin—originating solely from a single microorganism isolated at the Kitasato Intitute, Tokyo, Japan from Japanese soil—has had an immeasurably beneficial impact in improving the lives and welfare of billions of people throughout the world. Originally introduced as a veterinary drug, it kills a wide range of internal and external parasites in commercial livestock and companion animals. It was quickly discovered to be ideal in combating two of the world’s most devastating and disfiguring diseases which have plagued the world’s poor throughout the tropics for centuries. It is now being used free-of-charge as the sole tool in campaigns to eliminate both diseases globally. It has also been used to successfully overcome several other human diseases and new uses for it are continually being found. This paper looks in depth at the events surrounding ivermectin’s passage from being a huge success in Animal Health into its widespread use in humans, a development which has led many to describe it as a “wonder” drug.

So yeah, I'm fairly surprised to find that I'm now using a small amount of the Right wing ratbags' favourite drug, in cream form, on my nose every morning.   It seems to be helping (in that I am not taking doxycycline at the moment, and am pretty much keeping red spots off my nose) so far, but it's a bit too early to tell.  

Another way to burn money

I've always been skeptical of Richard Branson's Virgin Galatic joy ride space plane, and now I see that someone at The Spectator claims that it is wildly unlikely to ever be profitable, and will (economically, if not physically) crash and burn in the relatively near future.

 

A problem in Africa

Here's another gift link from the NYT, about how African countries find it difficult to raise the investment needed for solar power and other clean energy.

Political instability would have to have a lot to do with that.

And on that topic - does anyone really have good ideas as to how to deal with that, in the African context?  

A bottleneck, or not

The NYT version of the science story last week that maybe we (in the generic sense) barely made it through a population bottleneck:

Researchers in China have found evidence suggesting that 930,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern humans suffered a massive population crash. They point to a drastic change to the climate that occurred around that time as the cause.

Our ancestors remained at low numbers — fewer than 1,280 breeding individuals — during a period known as a bottleneck. It lasted for over 100,000 years before the population rebounded.

“About 98.7 percent of human ancestors were lost at the beginning of the bottleneck, thus threatening our ancestors with extinction,” the scientists wrote. Their study was published on Thursday in the journal Science.

If the research holds up, it will have provocative implications. It raises the possibility that a climate-driven bottleneck helped split early humans into two evolutionary lineages — one that eventually gave rise to Neanderthals, the other to modern humans.

But:

But outside experts said they were skeptical of the novel statistical methods that the researchers used for the study. “It is a bit like inferring the size of a stone that falls into the middle of the large lake from only the ripples that arrive at the shore some minutes later,” said Stephan Schiffels, a population geneticist at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Watch this space, I suppose.   I suspect it's an idea that won't hold up - but that's just an uninformed hunch.

 

Crabb on the Voice referendum (and my general bleat about the matter)

I quite liked Annabel Crabb's article on the Voice, as it does explain the difference with the 1967 referendum, and pretty much acknowledges that it's legitimate that the public is confused about the new referendum. 

I see on the increasingly trashy X (my God, I'm getting a lot of Right wing, MAGA guff thrown at me now, but the clear successor to it is still not apparent) that the Lefty pro-Voice folk whose tweets make it through to me are very impressed with the new advertisement featuring John Farnham's song and think it might just turn things around for them.   I'm way less convinced - I thought the ad featured some odd acting by the (I think) key male actor, who seems to stare in puzzlement at the TV while it features some key pro-aboriginal moments in history.  I would have to watch it again to fully understand the narrative it's trying to show in that actor.  

Personally, I'm still conflicted about it all.

On the one hand, I don't want to be on the side of Peter Dutton and the cynical No case which is playing this for party political advantage.   I also don't want to be seen as on the Lidia Thorpe radical side against it.

On the other hand, I am very cynical about many of the presumptions of the Yes case - primarily, that governments have not been listening for the last several decades to the myriad of aboriginal organisations; and that adding another layer of bureaucracy in terms of who the government needs to listen to is likely to achieve any significant change.  (It will, to be very cynical, probably increase the income of a class of aboriginal activist who are already firmly entrenched in the roles of advice to government.)   

Then there is "the vibe" - the Yes case is nominally painted as a racially unifying act, but the general "vibe" of aboriginal activism over the last 30 years seems to me to be moving in the opposite direction.  It has  included attempts at rehabilitating (really, romanticising) the pre-colonial lifestyle and conditions; increasingly common power flexes over matters such as access to national parks because of claims of sacred or special status (including over sites never previously the subject of such talk); increasing and sometimes opportunistic claims to aboriginality by persons with either little (or no provable) actual evidence of aboriginal ancestry; and (if you believe the signs held by young activists at any rally) a denial of the very legitimacy of the Australian government and land ownership in toto (it's "unceded land", after all.)   Similarly, the "welcome to country" fits right into a view that it's not really the land of everyone, but somehow still theirs.  

I reckon the general trajectory of aboriginal activism has moved away from something like a late 1960's multicultural view of everyone working together co-operatively, with opportunity being open to all, to an increasingly divisive attitude centred on a type of identity politics that concentrates on grievance rather than opportunity. 

As I have said before, Noel Pearson used to be an activist who leant towards the "must take responsibility for our advancement" attitude, and he occasionally still makes some noises along those lines, but I think it fair to say that such a conservative-ish attitude is far in the minority.       

To flip back again - to complain about the general attitude - the "vibe" - of recent decades of indigenous advocacy is not to deny that historical institutional racism casts a very, very long shadow, and deserves forms of compensation and assistance to those who are economically disadvantaged from it.

But I don't see that this means we have to pretend that all claims are true or useful:    I'm not of a postmodern view that terms are open to a change of meaning at a whim, such as I complained about in my recent post about the Dark Emu agenda.   And I do think that academia has played a gullible and often unhelpful role in this game of grievance amplification. 

So, I don't know what to do.

If I vote yes, it will be in the expectation that it will further entrench the inherent conflicts across indigenous advocacy, and result in a likely greater waste of money than under the present system, and be taken as a general support for a trajectory in advocacy that I do not support. 

If I vote no, it may be taken as support of the radicals who I really do not want to support.

I think just leaving the ballot blank is an option, but that feels a bit too much like sitting on the fence, too.

Suggestions, anyone? 

Update:   Noel Pearson is now arguing that if the Voice is established it would mean:

... Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders would no longer be able to say, “it’s the government’s fault” for failing to improve educational outcomes, as well as housing and health policies for remote communities.

But how does that make sense when the government is not bound to follow the advice of the body, and (as I have said from the start), what is bound to happen is that on the most contentious issues, the Voice will make a recommendation and there will immediately be dispute about whether it is the right recommendation from within aboriginal activism.   

I mean, I can give credit for Pearson still pushing a line that it's important for the indigenous to take responsibility for some of the problems that befall them, but there is just no reason to believe the argument that the Voice is a way to end "blame the government".

Competing theories

I also saw someone on Twitter/X say "what if there's a Pentagon cabal that is worshipping the aliens?", and I have to admit, that could form a fun basis for a screenplay.  

What if that's only because they don't want us to know they are conscious?

 (I haven't read the paper yet - I'm not entirely serious...)

Tactics changed

I heard Noel Pearson on Radio National this morning, gushing how the "Yes"to the Voice side is coming from the side of Love.   You can read about the message here:

Pearson rejects Voice rage, says Yes side must ‘maintain the love’

This, it seems pretty clear, is an attempt to reset his advocacy from his (and Langton's, and quite a few others) position that (my paraphrase, of course) "to vote No is essentially a racist position that ruins everything about race relations forever, and so we will justifiably hate you and this country forever more."

 

The two Naomi's

Well, at least I'm glad to know I'm not the only person in the world to sometimes get a little confused between Naomi Klein and (now, generic mad woman) Naomi Wolfe.

Klein has written a whole book about it, as explained in this New York Times article, which I'll gift link.

Hard to tell who is most nuts here

I see the bizarre Canadian story about the mega fake boob wearing teacher is back in the news because (as hard to believe as this is) it seems he has been employed at a different school, which has warned parents they have to respect his rights to his "gender expression", and the school will take special security precautions (which sound inconvenient for the kids) because of the expected protests.

In any comments following articles about this, there are people who still suspect this is a massive troll by the teacher, who has at least once been photographed going about his normal life as a  male and without the ridiculous fake boobs.  (He has also, apparently, given all types of explanations as to them being "real".)

I guess, as a troll, it might be considered successful - the total apparent sincerity of the new school board showing that they have zero common sense and are complete ideological captives on such an issue is astounding.  

But even so, how nutty do you have to be to carry out such a troll for so long?

 

 

They would last less than 6 months

Axios notes:

Trump open to Vivek Ramaswamy as vice president 

I reckon that their working relationship would be lucky to last 6 months.  Look at the history of other nuts who have tried to be on Team Trump.

By the way - Vivek is so crazy I don't have any substantial fear of him every support much beyond the MAGA (plus nutty technocrat billionaire and their fanboys) crowd.   

I think Nikki Haley is capable of broader appeal - but as the last post notes, can she really get past changing her view of Trump every second week?

She is one of many, but that is no excuse

Here's a column by Frank Bruni at NYT pointing out the "pathetic" history of Nikki Haley's continual flip flopping on her support/condemnation of Donald Trump.

It's not just the intellectual dishonesty, it's the moral cowardice, and it applies to so, so many Republicans like her.

On our way to an AI Pope

At the Catholic Herald, a big claim in the first sentence here:

As an AI-based app currently in the beta phase, Magisterium AI “could be a game changer for the Church”, Sanders said.

The app is an AI that is trained by using a limited number of Church documents and which, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, can be used to generate human-like text on specific content that could be used by anyone from church scholars and academics, canon lawyers, students seeking well-sourced information to assist in studies, and anyone curious about church teaching.

According to Sanders, the difference between Magisterium AI and ChatGPT is that “our AI is trained on a private database of only Church documents”, and therefore there is less chance the AI will “hallucinate”, which is tech jargon for “make stuff up”.

Further down:

The app, launched earlier this year, currently has around 2,580 magisterial documents in its knowledge database, and the list is growing....

Magisterium AI is currently partnering with the Orientale, which contains the largest library on Eastern Christianity, to digitise the library’s contents and add the documents it contains to the app’s database so the AI can train on them and make them available to users across the world.

I look forward to hearing from the new, future AI PopeBot.

 

I get to amuse myself about Kant, again

First. please read the footnote to this blog entry back in 2010.

Then, I offer as further evidence in support of my proposed Kant fan fiction/screenplay:

I don't recall reading that before.

The billiards bit is at least confirmed here:

He was a sober and quiet student, not engaging in the frivolous activities common to university students.^[9] Yet Kant was no drudge either. He enjoyed playing billiards, and did so with such skill that he and his companions often won small sums of money to help defray the cost of living. 

And the card playing is mentioned here:

He would stay up late drinking wine and playing cards with his friends. He’d sleep late and eat too much and host big parties.

It wasn’t until he turned 40 that he dropped it all and developed the routine life he later made famous. He said that he developed this routine at 40 because he realized the moral implications of his actions and decided that he would no longer allow himself to waste the precious time or energy his consciousness had left.

I don't want to know that he dropped his time wasting ways at 40, though.  In my screenplay, that's when he hit the higher class gambling dens and pleasure houses of Europe, as a Prussian James Bond, before becoming the uber-prude we all know and love.  ;)

 

Krugman connects the dots

Paul Krugman writes:

Recently Dr. Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine scientist and a frequent target of anti-vaxxer harassment, expressed some puzzlement in a post on X, formerly Twitter. He noted that many of those taunting him were also “big time into bitcoin or cryptocurrency” and declared that “I can’t quite connect the dots on that one.”

OK, I can help with that. Also, welcome to my world.

If you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong correlation among the three Cs: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.

I’ve written about some of these things before, in the context of Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But in the light of Hotez’s puzzlement — and also the rise of Vivek Ramaswamy, another crank, who won’t get the G.O.P. nomination but could conceivably become Donald Trump’s running mate — I want to say more about what these various forms of crankdom have in common and why they appeal to so many wealthy men.

The key thing is, success can easily lead to over-estimation of your ability to understand complicated stuff:

Success all too easily feeds the belief that you’re smarter than anyone else, so you can master any subject without working hard to understand the issues or consulting people who have; this kind of arrogance may be especially rife among tech types who got rich by defying conventional wisdom. The wealthy also tend to surround themselves with people who tell them how brilliant they are or with other wealthy people who join them in mutual affirmation of their superiority to mere technical drones — what the tech writer Anil Dash calls “V.C. QAnon.”

So where does cryptocurrency come in? Underlying the whole crypto phenomenon is the belief by some tech types that they can invent a better monetary system than the one we currently have, all without talking to any monetary experts or learning any monetary history. Indeed, there’s a widespread belief that the generations-old system of fiat money issued by governments is a Ponzi scheme that will collapse into hyperinflation any day now. Hence, for example, Jack Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that “hyperinflation will change everything. It’s happening.”

Now, I’m quite willing to admit that monetary economics isn’t as solid a science as epidemiology or climatology. And yes, even noncrank economists argue about some big issues much more than their hard-science counterparts.

But economics nonetheless is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, “a technical and difficult subject” — one on which you shouldn’t make pronouncements without studying quite a lot of theory and history — although “no one will believe it.” Certainly people who think they understand climate better than climatologists and vaccines better than epidemiologists are also likely to think they understand money better than economists and to believe in each case that experts telling them that the world doesn’t work the way they think it does are engaged in some kind of hoax or conspiracy.

He adds near the end:

Thanks to the tech boom, there are probably more wealthy cranks than there used to be, and they’re wealthier than ever, too. They also have a more receptive audience in the form of a Republican Party whose confidence in the scientific community has collapsed since the mid-2000s.

All sounds like a good enough explanation.

Literally, a brainworm

I guess this story will further cement Australia's reputation for all things dangerous: 

Woman complained of forgetfulness and depression before doctors pulled out an 8cm roundworm normally found in pythons

It's kind of interesting that her earlier symptoms were to do with digestion, though:

It was a fairly regular day on the ward for Canberra hospital infectious diseases physician Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, until a neurosurgeon colleague called him and said: “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain – and it’s alive and wriggling.”

The neurosurgeon, Dr Hari Priya Bandi, had pulled an 8cm-long parasitic roundworm from her patient, prompting her to call on Senanayake and other hospital colleagues for advice about what to do next.

The patient, a 64-year-old woman from south-eastern New South Wales, was first admitted to her local hospital in late January 2021 after suffering three weeks of abdominal pain and diarrhoea, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.

By 2022, her symptoms also included forgetfulness and depression, prompting a referral to Canberra hospital. An MRI scan of her brain revealed abnormalities requiring surgery.

The urban doom loop is a worry everywhere

I'll gift a link to this Washington Post article talking about concerns as to whether commercial building values in inner cities are (due to Covid forcing us how to do remote working) going to drop so badly that it will stuff up the economy.

This was a worry I was muttering about early in the Covid pandemic - because it was pretty remarkable how quickly everything was able to keep ticking over despite the dramatic drop in the number of people who needed to be in the inner city.   And it's not as if turning office blocks into apartments or hotels is an easy thing to do in most cases.

It's a tricky thing, though, in the sense that if you're worried about transport's contribution to greenhouse gases, remote working is a great thing.  Is that why John Quiggin is (I think) not worried at all about this as a major problem?

But half empty city buildings - it still feels lonely, and wrong.

Update:  Anecdotal evidence, but still - 

By the way, as far as Brisbane is concerned:   seems to me that it might turn out to be a case of lucky timing that the inner city is having major transport and facility upgrades for the Olympics over the next decade.    They should make the inner city more appealing place to visit, if not work, I would have thought?

I guess "being swallowed by a whale" is not really a thing...

Slate has stepped away from it's first person "this is my weird sex life" stories (why does this magazine spend so much time on these often hard to believe, click baity advice columns?   I only occasionally click on them - honest) to print the account of one of the women who accidentally ended up in the mouth of a feeding humpback whale a couple of years ago.   I'm pretty sure I saw the video about it at the time. 

From the story, there is this fact, which I don't recall being in my brain before (my bold):

...if you slow it down just a little bit, you can see us sliding right into the whale’s mouth as he closes it and the only thing sticking out of the mouth is my right arm. I guess it happens to sea lions a lot and those kinds of animals because whales and sea lions are feeding on the same fish. The throat of a whale is about the size of a grapefruit. Anything that’s larger than that just kind of comes out. Thank goodness for that. We were in more danger of drowning or being squashed.

Has this been answered yet?

Who ordered or arranged the completely over the top police/security escort to Trump's arrest in Atlanta last week?

 Many people were commenting on Twitter about how ridiculously extreme it seemed.  And even if there had been early concerns about the number of pro (or anti) Trump protesters who might be outside the courthouse, you would deal with that with police on the ground, not on motorcycles and in SUVs.

I am amongst those who suspect it was arranged by the creepy MAGA element within the local police force, in a "we ride with him as a sign of support"type vibe.   

But has any journalist looked into that yet?

 

Two interesting videos on Chinese ghosts

The first is by Singaporean content creator Sneaky Sushii, who for some reason has done a series of videos with a supernatural theme, even though he presents himself as an all round skeptic.  (He's also not Buddhist or Taoist - I suspect based on his appearing dressed as a bishop in an old video that his family might be nominally Christian.)   

There are two interesting things about the video:

1.    that in a modern city like Singapore, they do brightly lit, drive in ghost concerts in their Chinese cemeteries;

2.    in the comments following the video, so many of his young fan base praise him for his great bravery in going into the cemetery at night and trying to find a ghost to communicate with (indicating how Singaporean young folk still firmly believe in the supernatural, even if otherwise not so religious.  Well, I doubt they are conventionally religious, anyway. A bit like the Japanese, I expect.)

Anyhow, the video:   

 

The second video is a useful educational background on the history of the Chinese ghost festival, from the great Religion for Breakfast Youtube channel. Not much to say about this, except that as always, he does a really good job. 

 

 

Oh, actually I do have something further to say. He points out in the video that the festival's most important date this year falls on 30 August. This does actually explain why at my work, a matter due to settle that day, involving a Chinese buyer, has been brought forward to 29 August. I guess every year I should keep track of the date, just in case it affects other Chinese I'm dealing with...

Aren't they pathetic?

On the one hand, the reaction to Trump's poseur mugshot from a bunch of delusional men for whom he (bizarrely) represents a strong man:

In the real world, as reflected on Reddit:

Update:  Another delusional culture war wannabe warrior who's won over by a criminal striking a pose.  

Another update, cos these made me laugh:

Assessing the flakey phony candidate

Well, a certain gullible, populist Trumpy type might find it mesmerising - the rest of us, not at all.

I even find him more annoying that De Santis and his faux "let me be Queen of Camelot, please" wife.

Update:  more twitter commentary:

Update 2:  this is probably true, given the sophistication of Trumpists:

Anyway, the Trumpiest of Trumpsters on line already don't trust him.  

Two has-beens having a chat

They are both awful and deserve each other:

 

This also puts me in mind of Jonestown - cult leaders are often into encouraging belief in their gullible followers that someone is out to kill them.