Slow and steady wins the culture wars?

Showing all posts tagged: current affairs

Slow and steady wins the culture wars?

7 February 2025

Keeping track of what’s happening (or being said) in the world, particularly the United States, in these past few weeks feels like an impossible task. Trying to make sense of it all is another matter entirely. But as Tyler Cowen, writing at Marginal Revolution, seems to suggest, it’s all part of a bigger scheme:

You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda (I hesitate to call it an “intellectual” agenda, but it is). Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today. Then just keep on going. In the long run, you may end up “owning” far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.

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America, current affairs, politics

Don’t believe all the news you hear on commercial TV and radio

4 February 2025

Amanda Meade, writing for The Guardian:

People who get most of their news from commercial TV and radio are more likely to believe the conspiracy theory that climate change is a natural phenomenon rather than caused by humans, a new study has found.

The research conducted by Monash University, based in Melbourne, Australia, also found people who sourced news from commercial media outlets, generally scored lower on a measure of civic values, compared to those relying on non-commercial, and public, broadcasters. People with lower civic value scores tend to be more reluctant to take on views that clash with theirs.

And, if I’m understanding the study findings correctly, almost sixty-percent of Australians source news from social media platforms. With Facebook about to do away with fact-checkers, that’s going to be a lot of people with access to news that possibly has not been substantiated or verified.

Summer sports and the heightened risk of skin cancer

3 February 2025

As someone with an extremely fair complexion, any amount of exposure to the sun can be risky, even over the winter months, when ultraviolet (UV) levels are generally lower. Trying though to explain this anyone who does not also have fair skin, is almost an uphill battle.

In fact, I’m alarmed at just how blasé some people are to the dangers of sun exposure, especially prolonged exposure. The sad reality is, that everyone, regardless of skin type, is at risk. Despite this, being out in the sun is an innate part of the Australian psyche. It’s no surprise then that rates of skin cancer in Australia are among the highest in the world.

But the message seems to getting through, albeit at a glacial pace. The Australian Institute of Sport has twigged onto the danger of sports events taking place in the blazing summer sun, and in 2023 said sporting organisations had a duty of care to provide safe environments for participants and spectators. It’s a start, but many sporting groups have been slow to take action.

But there are a number of options for creating sun safe sporting environments. These include providing adequate shade, and scheduling events at times of the day when UV levels are lower, and considering day/night fixtures where possible.

Colonising Mars the same way Australia was colonised

28 January 2025

Sussan Ley, deputy leader of the Liberal (conservative) opposition party in Australia, has likened Elon Musk’s plans to establish a colony on Mars, to the British colonisation of Australia:

Addressing the St Matthew’s Australia Day mass in Albury, Ms Ley insisted that British settlers did not land at Sydney Cove “to destroy or to pillage”, but in an experiment to establish a new society. “In what could be compared to Elon Musk’s Space X’s efforts to build a new colony on Mars, men in boats arrived on the edge of the known world to embark on that new experiment,” Ms Ley told the church service.

Despite their intentions, over ten thousand Indigenous Australians were killed in clashes with early Australian settlers, between 1788 and 1930.

Ley’s remarks were made on Australia Day, Sunday 26 January 2025. The day is often marked by protests in some quarters, and greeted with ambivalence by others. There are Australians who would like to move the date away from 26 January, being the day in 1788 that the British established a colony at Sydney Cove. Some Australians, particularly Indigenous peoples, feel that the 26 January date celebrates an invasion, rather than national pride.

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Australia, current affairs, history

Time to replace the BMI as a measure, or otherwise, of obesity

20 January 2025

The Body Mass Index (BMI), may, at last, be about to be shown the door. Health care experts from across the world have been calling for a new means of defining obesity, according to research published by The Lancet:

We recommend that BMI should be used only as a surrogate measure of health risk at a population level, for epidemiological studies, or for screening purposes, rather than as an individual measure of health. Excess adiposity should be confirmed by either direct measurement of body fat, where available, or at least one anthropometric criterion (eg, waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio, or waist-to-height ratio) in addition to BMI, using validated methods and cutoff points appropriate to age, gender, and ethnicity.

It’s always struck me as an odd way to determine whether a person is of a healthy, or otherwise, weight, simply by dividing their height by their weight.

My BMI has always been in the OK zone, but I often wondered how it could useful for people who are, say, professional athletes, or front-rowers of the Wallabies. Surely their height to weight ratios would send the BMI into meltdown. I queried a past GP about this, who told me the BMI was but one tool available to medical professionals, but did not elaborate further.

I made me immediately think if there are other such measures, why aren’t they used more widely.

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current affairs, health, trends

How to fact check in places where Facebook is the whole internet

20 January 2025

Upcoming changes to Meta’s fact checking and content moderation policies might precipitate greater free speech in some parts of the world. But the removal of these checks and balances could trigger unrest and violence in other regions, say Libby Hogan and Natasya Salim, writing for ABC News:

Nobel laureate and Filipino journalist Maria Ressa warned of “extremely dangerous times ahead” for journalism and democracy. Celine Samson, a fact-checker with Vera Files, said roles like hers were especially important during the last election. Vera Files recorded a rise in misinformation posts that used a particularly dangerous tactic in the Philippines — portraying opposition leaders as communists. While the term “communist” may seem relatively harmless elsewhere, in the Philippines, it can be life-threatening.

In countries where Meta platforms are among other media channels, questionable content can potentially be disputed, but that’s not the case everywhere. In some places, Meta’s social networks are considered to be the internet. The removal of fact checking and content moderation controls in those environments could have dire consequences.

Meta announces major changes to content moderation polices

9 January 2025

Justine Calma, writing for The Verge:

Meta is essentially shifting responsibility to users to weed out lies on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, raising fears that it’ll be easier to spread misleading information about climate change, clean energy, public health risks, and communities often targeted with violence.

The policy revision seemed surprising initially, but less so as I read more. I wonder why they’ve decided to make these changes, at, of all times, now?

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also says he wants to allow more political discussion, although he refers to it as civic content, on the company’s platforms, while working to keep the communities friendly and positive. Does this mean political discourse, between people on opposing ends of the political spectrum, will be courteous and respectful?

Inauguration insurance, another form of cookie insurance?

6 January 2025

Josh Ellis writes about buying a plate of cookies he had no intention of eating, from an entrepreneurial twelve-year old neighbour going door to door, who was selling them. Why would anyone pay out good money for something they’re not going to consume? Ellis describes the gesture as cookie insurance:

Lastly, I bought cookies I never intended to eat for insurance. A few years down the road, when that pleasant cookie peddling 12-year-old is an angstful teenager marauding the neighborhood with his gang of defrocked Cub Scouts and altar boys looking to slash tires and crack the skulls of garden gnomes, he might say, “Skip that house fellas, old man Ellis bought Christmas cookies from me once.”

A few minutes later I read about Apple CEO Tim Cook making a personal donation (in contrast to one on behalf of the tech giant) of one-million dollars, to US President elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. Trump, despite various legal woes in recent years, is still pretty well off financially. Why on earth would Cook feel the need to send him money? As inauguration insurance?

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America, current affairs, politics

Pack plenty of books and take yourself into internal exile in 2025

27 December 2024

The introverts among us live almost permanently in a sort of internal exile, or a rich inner life, as Waleed Aly referred to it during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

But the idea of getting away from it all, without actually going anywhere, is gaining traction more widely, writes Jacqueline Maley, for The Sydney Morning Herald. This as 2025, and the greater uncertainty that many people are anticipating, looms:

In recent months, I have been reading about the concept of “internal exile” or “internal emigration’. The term comes from the Russian, “vnutrennaya emigratsia” and means a sort of travelling into oneself, to take comfort in small pleasures – often solitary pleasures of the mind, like reading, or listening to music, or gardening or making a pleasant home.

Coffee prices push toward fifty-year high

17 December 2024

The last few years have been bad for both producers and consumers of coffee. Extremes of weather in growing regions has resulted in diminishing coffee bean harvests, which has in turn pushed up prices. This is a topic I’ve been covering for a while here now, but it seems coffee is only going to get more expensive going forward:

On Wednesday, the price for Arabica coffee, the world’s most popular variety, hit its highest level in nearly 50 years, with a pound of beans (453.6 grams) listed in New York for US$3.20 ($5.02). The all-time high was US$3.38 ($5.30) for a pound of Arabica beans in 1977 due to snow destroying swathes of Brazil’s plantations.

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