Inside the bubble

A couple of nights ago, my wife and I watched the latest episode in the current series of Doctor Who, "Dot and Bubble."  [Nota bene: this post will contain spoilers -- if you intend to watch it, you should do so first, then come back and read this afterward.]

All I'd heard about it before watching is that it is "really disturbing."  That's putting it mildly.  Mind you, there's no gore; even the monsters are no worse than the usual Doctor Who fare.  But the social commentary it makes puts it up there with episodes like "Midnight," "Cold Blood," and "The Almost People" for leaving you shaken and a little sick inside.

The story focuses on the character of Lindy, brilliantly played by Callie Cooke, who is one of the residents of "Finetime."  Finetime is basically a gated summer camp for spoiled rich kids, where they do some nominal work for two hours a day and spend the rest of the time playing.  Each of the residents is surrounded, just about every waking moment, by a virtual-reality shell showing all their online friends -- the "bubble" of the title -- and the "work" each of them does is mostly to keep their bubbles fully charged so they don't miss anything.

The tension starts to ramp up when the Doctor and his companion, Ruby Sunday, show up unannounced in Lindy's bubble, warning her that people in Finetime are disappearing.  At first she doesn't believe it, but when forced to look people up, she notices an abnormal number of them are offline -- she hadn't noticed because the only ones she sees are the ones who are online, so she wasn't aware how many people in her bubble had vanished.  At first she's dismissive of Ruby and downright rude to the Doctor, but eventually is driven to the realization that there are monsters eating the inhabitants of Finetime one by one.

Reluctantly accepting guidance from the Doctor, she runs for one of the conduits that pass under the city, which will give her a way out of the boundaries into the "Wild Wood," the untamed forests outside the barrier.  Along the way, though, we begin to see that Lindy isn't quite the vapid innocent we took her for at first.  She coldly and unhesitatingly sacrifices the life of a young man who had tried to help her in order to save her own; when she finds out that the monsters had already killed everyone in her home world, including her own mother, she basically shrugs her shoulders, concluding that since they were in a "happier place" it was all just hunky-dory.

It was the end, though, that was a sucker punch I never saw coming.  When she finally meets up with the Doctor and Ruby in person, and the Doctor tells her (and a few other survivors) that they have zero chance of surviving in the Wild Wood without his help, she blithely rejects his offer.

"We can't travel with you," she says, looking at him as if he were subhuman.  "You, sir, are not one of us.  You were kind -- although it was your duty to save me.  Screen-to-screen contact is just about acceptable.  But in person?  That's impossible."

In forty-five minutes, a character who started out seeming simply spoiled, empty-headed, and shallow moved into the territory of "amoral" and finally into outright evil.  That this transformation was so convincing is, once again, due to Callie Cooke's amazing portrayal.

What has stuck with me, though, and the reason I'm writing about it today, is that the morning after I watched it, I took a look at a few online reviews of the episode.  They were pretty uniformly positive (and just about everyone agreed that it was disturbing as hell), but what is fascinating -- and more than a little disturbing in its own right -- is the difference between the reactions of the reviewers who are White and the ones who are Black.

Across the board, the White reviewers thought the take-home message of "Dot and Bubble" is "social media = bad."  Or, at least, social media addiction = bad.  If so, the moral to the story is (to quote Seán Ferrick of the YouTube channel WhoCulture) "as subtle as a brick to the face."  The racism implicit in Lindy's rejection of the Doctor was a shocking twist at the end, adding another layer of yuck to an already awful character.

The Black reviewers?  They were unanimous that the main theme throughout the story is racism (even though race was never once mentioned explicitly by any of the characters).  In the very first scene, it was blatantly obvious to them that every last one of Lindy's online friends is White -- many of them almost stereotypically so.  Unlike the White reviewers, the Black reviewers saw the ending coming from a mile off.  Many of them spoke of having dealt all their lives with sneering, race-based microaggressions -- like Lindy's being willing at least to talk to Ruby (who is White) while rejecting the Doctor (who is Black) out of hand.

When considering "Dot and Bubble," it's easy to stop at it being a rather ham-handed commentary on social media, but really, it's about echo chambers.  Surround yourself for long enough with people who think like you, act like you, and look like you, and you start to believe the people who don't share those characteristics are less than you.

What disturbs me the worst is that I didn't see the obvious clues that writer Russell T. Davies left us, either.  When Lindy listens to Ruby and rejects the Doctor, it honestly didn't occur to me that the reason could be the color of his skin.  I didn't even notice that all Lindy's friends were White.  As a result, the ending completely caught me off guard.  As far as the subtle (and not-so-subtle) racist overtones of the characters in the episode, I wasn't even aware of them except in retrospect.

But that's one of the hallmarks of privilege, isn't it?  You're not aware of it because you don't have to be.  As a White male, there are issues of safety, security, and acceptance I never even have to think about.  So I guess like Lindy and the other residents of Finetime, I also live in my own bubble, surrounded by people who (mostly) think like I do, never having to stretch myself to consider, "What would it be like if I was standing where they are?"

And what makes the character of Lindy so horrific is that even offered the opportunity to do that -- to step outside of her bubble and broaden her mind a little -- she rejects it.  Even if it means losing the aid of the one person who is able to help her, and without whose assistance she is very likely not to survive.

For myself, my initial blindness to what "Dot and Bubble" was saying was a chilling reminder to keep pushing my own boundaries.  In the end, all I can do is what poet Maya Angelou tells us: "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then, when you know better, do better."

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The global melting pot

One of the shakiest concepts in biological anthropology is race.

Pretty much all biologists agree that race, as usually defined, has very little genetic basis.  Note that I'm not saying race doesn't exist; just that it's primarily a cultural, not a biological, phenomenon.  Given the fact that race has been used as the basis for systematic oppression for millennia, it would be somewhere beyond disingenuous to claim that it isn't real.

The problem is, determination of race has usually been based upon a handful of physical characteristics, most often skin, eye, and hair pigmentation and the presence or absence of an epicanthal fold across the inner corner of the eye.  These traits are not only superficial and not necessarily indicative of an underlying relationship, the pigment-related ones are highly subject to natural selection.  Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, this highly oversimplified and drastically inaccurate criterion was used to develop maps like this one:

The "three great races" according to the 1885 Meyers Konversations-Lexikon 

This subdivides all humanity into three groups -- "Caucasoid" (shown in various shades of blue), "Negroid" (shown in brown), and "Mongoloid" (shown in yellow and orange).  (The people of India and Sri Lanka, shown in green, are said to be "of uncertain affinities.")  If you're jumping up and down saying, "Wait, but... but..." -- well, you should be.  The lumping together of people like Indigenous Australians and all sub-Saharan Africans (based mainly on skin color) is only the most glaring error.  (Another is that any classification putting the Finns, Polynesians, Koreans, and Mayans into a single group has something seriously amiss.)

The worst part of all of this is that this sort of map was used to justify colonialism.  If you believed that there really was a qualitative difference (for that, read genetic) between the "three great races," it was only one step away from deciding which one was the best and shrugging your shoulders at the subjugation by that one of the other two. 

The truth is way more complicated, and way more interesting.  By far the highest amount of genetic diversity in the world is in sub-Saharan Africa; a 2009 study by Jeffrey Long found more genetic differences between individuals from two different ethnic groups in central Africa than between a typical White American and a typical person from Japan.  To quote a paper by Long, Keith Hunley, and Graciela Cabana that appeared in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology in 2015: "Western-based racial classifications have no taxonomic significance."

The reason all this comes up -- besides, of course, the continuing relevance of this discussion to the aforementioned systematic oppression based on race that is still happening in many parts of the world, including the United States -- is a paper that appeared last week in Nature looking at the genetics of the Swahili people of east Africa, a large ethnic group extending from southern Somalia down to northern Mozambique.  While usually thought to be a quintessentially sub-Saharan African population, the Swahili were found to have only around half of their genetic ancestry from known African roots; the other half came from southwestern Asia, primarily Persia, India, and Arabia.

The authors write:

[We analyzed] ancient DNA data for 80 individuals from 6 medieval and early modern (AD 1250–1800) coastal towns and an inland town after AD 1650.  More than half of the DNA of many of the individuals from coastal towns originates from primarily female ancestors from Africa, with a large proportion—and occasionally more than half—of the DNA coming from Asian ancestors.  The Asian ancestry includes components associated with Persia and India, with 80–90% of the Asian DNA originating from Persian men.  Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by about AD 1000, coinciding with the large-scale adoption of Islam.  Before about AD 1500, the Southwest Asian ancestry was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the Swahili coast.  After this time, the sources of DNA became increasingly Arabian, consistent with evidence of growing interactions with southern Arabia.  Subsequent interactions with Asian and African people further changed the ancestry of present-day people of the Swahili coast in relation to the medieval individuals whose DNA we sequenced.

Note that on the Meyers Konversations-Lexikon map, the Arabians and Persians are considered "Caucasoid," the Indians are "uncertain," while the Swahili are definitely "Negroid."

A bit awkward, that.

It's appalling that we still use an outmoded and scientifically-unsound concept to justify bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination, despite the mountains of evidence showing that there's no biological basis whatsoever to the way race is usually defined.  Easy, I suppose, to hang on to your biases like grim death rather than questioning them when new data comes along.  Not even all that new; the Long study I referenced above was from fourteen years ago.  And hell, the Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza was researching all this back in the 1960s.  Okay, it takes time for people's minds to catch up with scientific discovery, but how much damn time do you need?

The truth is that (1) ultimately, we all come from Africa, (2) since then, we've continued to move around all over the place, and therefore (3) the world is just a huge single melting pot.  Oh, and (4), the result is that we're all of (very) mixed ancestry.  I'm sorry if that makes some people feel squinky, but as I've pointed out before, the universe is under no obligation to align with your preconceived notions about how the world should work.

Time to accept the beauty and complexity of our shared humanity, and stop looking for further ways to divide us.

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The avalanche

I always give a grim chuckle whenever someone on the far right calls us liberals "snowflakes," because when it comes to taking offense over absolutely everything, there's nothing like a MAGA Republican.

If you think I'm overstating my case, you have only to look at what's currently happening in the state of Florida to see that if anything, I'm being generous.  The right-wing elected officials in Florida are so pants-wettingly terrified of any viewpoints other than their own Christofascist agenda that they don't even want anyone finding out there are people who think differently.

Take, for example, the school principal in Tallahassee who was forced to resign because she had the temerity to show students in the sixth grade a photograph of Michelangelo's David. 

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Michelangelo artist QS:P170,Q5592 Jörg Bittner Unna, 'David' by Michelangelo Fir JBU005 denoised, CC BY-SA 3.0]

David was originally commissioned to be placed in Florence Cathedral.  In, to make it abundantly clear, a Christian house of worship.  But it was soon considered such a masterpiece of art that it was taken out -- and placed in the public square outside the Palazzo Vecchio, so it could be seen by everyone.

But now?  According to the elected officials of Florida, whose sensibilities haven't even caught up to the sixteenth century, we can't have sixth graders see a world-renowned piece of sculpture, evidently because then they'll find out that people have genitals.

Then there's book bans.  Clay County School District just announced a new list of books that are officially banned from any school in the district, bringing the total up to 355.  Here are the new additions:

It doesn't take a genius to notice a pattern, here.  Anything dealing with LGBTQ+ themes (Heartstopper, Radio Silence, One Man Guy), anything to do with the Black experience (Americanah, Notes from a Young Black Chef, Punching the Air, and Black Brother, Black Brother, among many others), anything criticizing Republicans (Russian Hacking in American Elections), and anything written by an outspoken liberal (The Fault in Our Stars, Slaughterhouse Five).  

Apparently we can't have anyone finding out there's a world out there besides those who are straight, white, Christian conservatives.

You'd think if these people were as confident in the self-evident righteousness of their own beliefs as they claim to be, they wouldn't be so fucking scared of the rest of us.

I think the problem here is that we've allowed the purveyors of this narrow-minded, bigoted bullshit to portray themselves as the valiant defenders of the cause, instead of calling them what they are: craven cowards.  They are constantly, deeply fearful, afraid that any exposure to a view beyond their own tiny, terrified world will cause the entire thing to come crashing down like a house of cards.

It's pathetic, really.  No wonder so many of them carry assault rifles when they go to Walmart.

When it comes down to it, though, isn't all fascism about fear?  Why would you be so desperate to build an autocracy if you weren't afraid of dissent?  Yeah, there's the attraction of power and its perks, I get that; but really, the desperation to crush all opposing views is born from a deep-seated and terrified knowledge that if people find out there are other ways, they'll realize they've been lied to and start demanding scary stuff like free speech and free access to information.

So to Ron DeSantis and his cronies who are so determined to erase those of us who aren't like them: I'm sorry you're so bone-shakingly terrified.  I do feel badly for you, because it must be a horrible way to live.  But just because I pity you doesn't mean that I and the others like me are going to stand silent and let you erase us.  You want to fight?  Well, battle joined.

I think you're about to find out that a bunch of snowflakes together create an avalanche.

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Words, words, words

In Dorothy Sayers' novel Gaudy Night, set (and written) in 1930s England, a group of Oxford University dons are the targets of threats and violence by a deranged individual.  The motive of the perpetrator (spoiler alert!) turns out to be that one of the dons had, years earlier, caught the perpetrator's spouse in academic dishonesty, and the spouse had been dismissed from his position, and ultimately committed suicide.

Near the end of the novel, the main character, Harriet Vane, experiences a great deal of conflict over the resolution of the mystery.  Which individual was really at fault?  Was it the woman who made the threats, a widow whose grief drove her to threaten those she felt were smug, ivory-tower intellectuals who cared nothing for the love and devotion of a wife for her husband?  Was it her husband, who knowingly committed academic fraud?  Or was it the don who had exposed the husband's "crime" -- which was withholding evidence contrary to his thesis in a paper?  Is that a sin that's worth a life?

The perpetrator, when found out, snarls at the dons, "... (C)ouldn't you leave my man alone?  He told a lie about somebody who was dead and dust hundreds of years ago.  Nobody was the worse for that.  Was a dirty bit of paper more important than all our lives and happiness?  You broke him and killed him -- all for nothing."  The don whose words led to the man's dismissal, and ultimately his suicide, says, "I knew nothing of (his suicide) until now...  I had no choice in the matter.  I could not foresee the consequences... but even if I had..."  She trails off, making it clear that in her view, her words had to be spoken, that academic integrity was a mandate -- even if that stance left a human being in ruins.

It's not, really, a very happy story.  One is left feeling, at the end of the book, that the incident left only losers, no winners.

The same is true of the tragedy that happened in Buffalo, New York last Saturday.

The accused shooter, eighteen-year-old Payton Gendron, drove for two and a half hours from his home in Conklin, New York, allegedly motivated by trying to find the neighborhood with the highest proportion of Black residents.   He is clearly a seriously disturbed individual.  While in high school, he was investigated by Broome County police for threatening his classmates; ultimately the investigation was closed, with Gendron saying he had been "joking."  One of his former teachers reported that she had asked him for his plans after graduation, and he told her, "I want to murder and commit suicide."  It's a little appalling that someone like him was able to procure body armor and three guns -- including an XM-15 Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, which is banned in New York state -- without setting off enough red flags to stop a freight train.  I'm not intending to discuss the issue of gun laws, however.  What I want to look at is what created Payton Gendron.  Because at the center of his rage were nothing more than words.  Words, words, words.

He wrote a 180-page manifesto that mirrors the "Great Replacement" theory of Jean-Renaud Camus, that the leftists are deliberately crafting policy to replace people of White European descent with immigrants and People of Color.  Gendron made no secret of his views and his intentions.  He had accounts on social media outlets Discord and Twitch; on the former he had a to-do list of preparations for the attack, and he used the latter to livestream the attack itself.  He identified all people of color as the danger, not just immigrants --  after all, the Black people he deliberately chose as targets were just as much American citizens as he is, and almost certainly their ancestors had been here for hundreds of years. 

Gendron himself has no problem explaining why he did what he did.  He told investigators, "I simply became racist after I learned the truth."

But he didn't come up with that "truth" himself; others put it there.  Others fed him those lies and distortions, and in his twisted, faulty logic he bought them wholesale.  Gendron himself is, of course, ultimately the one responsible for the shootings; but what blame lies with the people who, whatever their motives, broadcast the ideologies he espoused?

Tucker Carlson, for example, makes his opinion crystal-clear.  Last year he was interviewed by Megyn Kelly for a radio broadcast, and he said, "'The Great Replacement' theory is, in fact, not a theory.  It’s something that the Democrats brag about constantly, up to and including the president, and in one sentence, it’s this: Rather than convince the current population that our policies are working and they should vote for us as a result, we can’t be bothered to do that.  We’re instead going to change the composition of the population and bring in people who will vote for us."

He's not the only one.  Representative Steve King of Iowa said, "The idea of multiculturalism, that every culture is equal -- that’s not objectively true…  We’ve been fed that information for the past twenty-five years, and we’re not going to become a greater nation if we continue to do that."  Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller posted a photograph of George Soros on Facebook with the caption, "Start the race war."  Fox News host Laura Ingraham isn't exactly subtle, either.  "Massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people and they're changes that none of us ever voted for and most of us don't like," she said on her show in 2019.  "From Virginia to California, we see stark examples of how radically in some ways the country has changed.  Now, much of this is related to both illegal and in some cases, legal immigration that, of course, progressives love."

After the shooting, people like Carlson were blasted for using their positions as pundits to stoke fear, rage, and violence -- and very quickly, they responded in kind, absolving themselves of any responsibility.  "The truth about Payton Gendron does tell you a lot about the ruthlessness and dishonesty of our political leadership," Carlson said, the day after the shooting.  "Within minutes of Saturday’s shooting, before all of the bodies of those ten murdered Americans had even been identified by their loved ones, professional Democrats had begun a coordinated campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.  'They did it!' they said, immediately...  So, what is hate speech?  Well, it’s speech that our leaders hate.  So because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud.  That’s what they’re telling you.  That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time."

Which packs a lot of terrifying rhetoric into one paragraph.  First, no sensible person, left, right, or center, defines hate speech as "speech our leaders hate."  The Supreme Court itself has given the term a clear definition: "abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation."  Second -- sure, Gendron is mentally ill, but that's not why he targeted Black people for murder.  Lots of people have mental illness (I've blogged here more than once about my own struggles with it), and very few of them murder people.  Blaming mental illness for Gendron's actions is just a way for Carlson to deflect any criticism leveled at him for the results of what he has said vehemently and repeatedly.

Third, virtually no one -- once again, regardless of political stripe -- is trying to stop people from expressing their political views.  The vast majority of us agree with British writer Evelyn Hall, "I disagree with what you've said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  Conservative commentator and former GOP Representative Joe Walsh, who -- despite the fact that we'd probably disagree on a lot of things -- is one of the most honest, honorable voices we have today, said, "Try being nonpartisan for a day.  Call out stuff that’s wrong, stupid, or dishonest no matter where it comes from.  Even if it comes from your side. Just try it."  And he summarized Tucker Carlson's self-defense as follows: "[Carlson basically told] his audience that THEY are the victims.  Not the ten innocent souls killed in Buffalo.  Nope, Tucker’s audience are the real victims here...  [His attitude is] 'I don’t even know what white replacement theory is.  All I know is America is becoming less and less white.  And that’s a really bad thing.  But that makes me a racist?  For just stating facts?'"

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ivan Radic, A colorful Stop Racism sign (50115127871), CC BY 2.0

Of course, all Carlson, Ingraham, et al. are trying to accomplish are two things; to use emotionally-charged language in order to make their own opinions sound unassailable, and to generate such a negative spin on their opponents' thinking that listeners are left believing that only morons could possibly agree with them.  

I'm appalled not just because these political hacks are using this tragedy to hammer in their own views with an increasingly polarized citizenry; but because they are doing this, willfully blind to the end results of their words, just like the Oxford don in Gaudy Night whose dedication to the nth degree of academic integrity made her blind to the human cost of her actions.  Words are tools, and they are using them with as much thought and responsibility as a five-year-old with a chainsaw.

I will end with a devout hope for healing for the Buffalo community that has lost ten of its people, and that the families of those who died will be able to find consolation in the outpouring of sympathy from the vast majority of Americans who still value compassion over political rhetoric.  And to the ideologues who are using this tragedy as a platform to defend their own repugnant views, I can only say: shut the hell up.

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Excusing the past

For today's Fiction Friday, I'm asking a question not because I'm trying to lead you in any particular direction, but because I honestly am not sure about the answer myself.

How should we as readers deal with fiction in which there is evidence of reprehensible attitudes like racism, sexism, and homophobia?

I'm not referring here to stories where the bigotry is depicted in order to show how bad bigotry is; the viciously racist characters in the Doctor Who episode "Rosa" are there to illustrate in no uncertain terms what it was like for People of Color in the Civil Rights era American South.  Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, am I really considering stories where the bigotry is presented in a positive light, and is kind of the point.  (A particularly egregious example is the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The White Ape," which is repellent from the get-go.)

I'm more interested in the gray area; stories where there is evidence of a bigoted attitude, but the bigotry doesn't form an essential part of the story.  The topic comes up because I've been re-reading the murder mysteries written in the 1930s by Dorothy Sayers, whose name is right up there with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner and Ngaio Marsh and the other greats of classic mystery literature.

The bigotry in Sayers's work doesn't smack you over the head.  The main characters are (very) upper-crust British nobility in the early twentieth century, so there's no doubt the attitudes she portrays were prevalent at the time.  And there are some things she does pretty well, even to modern eyes.  Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, clearly treats his wife Harriet Vane as a complete equal, and in fact in the book where they finally marry (Busman's Honeymoon) Harriet asks him if he will expect her to give up her career as a novelist, and he reacts with surprise that she would even consider such a thing.

The racism, however, is there, and in more than one place.  There's one book (Unnatural Death) where part of the twist of the story is that in the family tree of the victim, one of the great-uncles had been a sketchy sort, had gone to the West Indies, and married a Black woman; their children and grandchildren remained in that culture, accepting their place as People of Color.

So far, so good.  But when one of their descendants returns to England, he's very much looked at as an aberration.  The Englishman who was the progenitor of that branch of the family is more than once referred to as having done something immoral and offensive by engaging in an interracial marriage; the great-great grandson who shows up in white English society isn't really portrayed negatively, but there's no doubt he's played for laughs (starting with the fact that his name is Reverend Hallelujah Dawson).  

Even worse is her repeated low-level anti-Semitism.  There are Jewish characters here and there, and one and all they are the "of course he's money-conscious, he's Jewish" stereotype.  In Whose Body?, Sayers kind of goes out of her way to present the character of Reuben Levy as a nice and honorable guy, but there's something about it that reeks of, "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."

It boils down to how much slack we should give to authors who were "people of their times," whose attitudes simply reflect the majority opinion of the society they lived in.  In Sayers's early-twentieth-century wealthy British culture, there was a tacit assumption of white British superiority; the racism is almost by default.  The characters don't set out to demean or mistreat people of other races, it's more that the message is, "Of course we're superior, but that doesn't mean we'll be nasty to you as long as you know your place."

Christie herself is not a lot better.  One of her most famous novels (and the first of hers I ever read) is And Then There Were None, which has to be one of the most perfectly-crafted mysteries ever written.  But the original title of the book was a different line from the nursery rhyme that is the unifying theme of the entire plot -- Ten Little Indians.  Worse still, when it was first released, it went by an earlier and even more offensive version of the rhyme -- Ten Little Niggers.

At least she had the good sense to change it.  But that doesn't alter the pervasive white wealthy British superiority that runs through all her work.  

I've found myself wincing more than once over all this, and I'm not honestly sure how much of a bye we can give those writers of an earlier time for attitudes that were all too common back then, but which we (or at least most of us) consider morally repellent now.  Does the implicit racism in Sayers and Christie, and the more overt racism in Lovecraft, alter our ability to read work of theirs that have no racist aspects at all?  More recently, what about Orson Scott Card's homophobia?  His bigotry came out in interviews, not really in his work; I don't recall any trace of it in (for example) Ender's Game.  What about worse things still?  Since reading about her alleged role in her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter, I can't read Marion Zimmer Bradley -- but how much of that is because I never particularly liked her in the first place?  Isn't it a bit hypocritical to give authors' bad behavior a pass solely because we don't want to give up reading them?

I wish I had some black-and-white answer for this.  I'm certainly not trying to excuse anyone for morally repulsive stances, but it seems to me that considering only overtly racist writing such as "The White Ape" ignores the fact that there's way more gray area here than you might think at first.

I'd love to hear how you approach this as a reader.  I can see having students read and study books with problematic attitudes, because (1) that's how they learn that those attitudes exist, and (2) it gives a skilled teacher an opportunity to analyze those beliefs and demonstrate how horrible they actually were.  But what about reading solely for pleasure?  I kind of loathe the words "woke" and "politically correct," but don't they embody the attitude of someone who refuses to read anything that doesn't reflect our current cultural standards?

Even if those standards are laudable?

I honestly don't know the answer to that.  I'm not intending on giving up reading, and for the most part enjoying, Sayers, Christie, and the others.  I can't deny that even Lovecraft -- at least his stories where race doesn't come into it, even subtly and implicitly ("At the Mountains of Madness" comes to mind) -- have been major positive influences on my own work.  

What do you think?  Is there merit to the "(s)he was a person of the times" argument, or are we giving tacit acceptance of repulsive attitudes just because the work is old -- or because we like it otherwise?

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This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is by an author we've seen here before: the incomparable Jenny Lawson, whose Twitter @TheBloggess is an absolute must-follow.  She blogs and writes on a variety of topics, and a lot of it is screamingly funny, but some of her best writing is her heartfelt discussion of her various physical and mental issues, the latter of which include depression and crippling anxiety.

Regular readers know I've struggled with these two awful conditions my entire life, and right now they're manageable (instead of completely controlling me 24/7 like they used to do).  Still, they wax and wane, for no particularly obvious reason, and I've come to realize that I can try to minimize their effect but I'll never be totally free of them.

Lawson's new book, Broken (In the Best Possible Way) is very much in the spirit of her first two, Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy.  Poignant and hysterically funny, she can have you laughing and crying on the same page.  Sometimes in the same damn paragraph.  It's wonderful stuff, and if you or someone you love suffers from anxiety or depression or both, read this book.  Seeing someone approaching these debilitating conditions with such intelligence and wit is heartening, not least because it says loud and clear: we are not alone.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The necessity of representation

This past weekend, I got into two apparently unrelated conversations with online acquaintances that at their basis amount to the same thing.

The first revolved around the one and only television series I am at all dedicated to, which is Doctor Who.  I've been a near-fanatical Whovian since my wife persuaded me a few years ago to watch a selection of iconic episodes like "Blink," "Silence in the Library," "Turn Left," and "Empty Child," resulting in my being hooked for life.  The conversation I got into, which honestly crossed the line into a heated argument, had to do with the choice three years ago of Jodie Whittaker for the Thirteenth Doctor, replacing Peter Capaldi (and a string of eleven other white males stretching back to the series's beginnings in 1963).

The topic came up because of rumors (thus far unsubstantiated, as far as I've seen) that Jodie Whittaker may be leaving the show at the end of this season.  I mentioned how disappointed I'd be if this was true, and how much I liked her portrayal of the character -- that she'd be in my top three Doctors ever -- and this brought up the same "the Doctor is male" nonsense I first saw popping up all over the place when she was chosen.

The choice of a woman, this fellow said, was "virtue signaling."  So, actually, was the choice of an American-born Black actor (Tosin Cole) to play one of the Doctor's current companions, Ryan Sinclair, and British people of Indian descent both for another companion, Yasmin Khan (played by Mandip Gill) and also the most recent regeneration of the Doctor's arch-enemy, the Master (played with brilliantly insane glee by Sacha Dhawan).  The whole thing, said the man I was talking to, amounted to the writers of Doctor Who saying "Look at us, how enlightened we are, having a bunch of people of different races in prominent roles."

My response was that Doctor Who has long been on the cutting edge of representing people of all configurations -- three early examples being in 2005 the character of Captain Jack Harkness giving new meaning to the word "pansexual," two years later the Tenth Doctor pairing up with Dr. Martha Jones (Freema Agyewan) as companion, and a bit after that, the fantastically badass couple Vastra and Jenny, not only a lesbian romance but an interspecies one.

Nope, he said.  That was virtue signaling too.

At that point I told him I thought all he was doing was making excuses for maintaining the illusion of a straight white male hegemony despite the fact that it doesn't accurately reflect the reality of who is actually out there, and he told me to "fuck off with my leftist agenda" and the conversation ended.

The other, marginally less frustrating conversation centered around my novel released a year ago, Whistling in the Dark.  I was asked a question about Dr. Will Daigle, one of the main characters both in this book and in its sequel Fear No Colors (scheduled for release in March).  The reader said she liked the character just fine, but why did I "choose to make him gay?"  It had nothing particular to do with the plot, she said; nothing he does in the book couldn't equally well be done by a heterosexual person.  Then she asked the question that made me realize immediately the parallel with my earlier discussion with the disgruntled Doctor Who fan: "Did you feel like you had to include a gay character to be politically correct?"

Whenever I'm asked about why I wrote a character a particular way, my usual reaction is to say, "I didn't make the character that way.  The characters come to me the way they are, and I just write it down."  But I realized that the reader's question went way deeper than that, that she wasn't asking me why I gave the character of Aaron Vincent green eyes or the character of Rose Dawson long gray hair she wore in a braid.  She was asking me about inclusion and representation, not just how I visualize characters.

So I said to her, "Okay, tell me some reasons why Dr. Will shouldn't be queer."  And she sputtered around a bit and said, "Well, I didn't mean that, of course."  But having already had my blood pressure spiked by a bigot earlier that day, I decided I'd made my point and withdrew from battle.

I found the whole thing profoundly frustrating, both because of the self-righteousness of the people I was talking to (especially the first one), and because they were seemingly blind to two things.  First, representing diversity isn't just "nice;" it's reality.  As far as the choice of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor, I'm reminded of the wonderful quote from the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "When I'm sometimes asked, 'When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]?' and I say 'When there are nine,' people are shocked.  But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."

Second, representation is important.  How many of us have looked up to characters from fiction, especially ones we found as children, and formed our attitudes of what is right and wrong, normal and abnormal, acceptable and unacceptable, based upon their actions?  Being a white guy I can't speak to the racial and sexist aspects of this, and wouldn't presume to claim a visceral understanding of those perspectives; but as someone who is queer and who hid it (literally) for decades, I can say with some assurance what a difference it would have made to me if there had been positive LGBTQ role models in the books, television, and movies I'd been exposed to when I was a teenager.  Honestly, the only LGBTQ character I can remember from those days is the character of Jodie Dallas (played by Billy Crystal) from the brilliant sitcom Soap, but those of you who recall the show will probably remember that Jodie's homosexuality was almost always played off as a joke -- it never came up in any other context than generating a laugh.

Hardly something that would establish queer identity as normal and positive in the eyes of a bisexual fifteen-year-old boy growing up in a conservative, religious culture.

Myself, I've had just about enough of the phrases "politically correct" and "virtue signaling."  In what context is it wrong to avoid being offensive, to include people of all races, ethnic origins, religions (and lack thereof), and sexual orientations?  To create fictional characters who represent the length and breadth of diversity that actually exist in the world?  To break stereotypes like "white men have to be in charge" and "queer people should stay hidden"?

If you want to ask why when the time comes the Fourteenth Doctor should be played as (for example) a Black lesbian woman, you better be prepared to answer the question of why the character shouldn't be.

Anyhow, those are some early-morning thoughts about representation and inclusion.  I wish I'd thought to say all this to the people I was arguing with, but I tend not to be a very fast thinker (thus would make a lousy debater).  It took me a couple of days to let it all stew, and I decided instead to write about it here.

But maybe I'll send a link to this post to my two adversaries, if later on I'm feeling like kicking a hornets' nest.

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What are you afraid of?

It's a question that resonates with a lot of us.  I suffer from chronic anxiety, so what I am afraid of gets magnified a hundredfold in my errant brain -- such as my paralyzing fear of dentists, an unfortunate remnant of a brutal dentist in my childhood, the memories of whom can still make me feel physically ill if I dwell on them.  (Luckily, I have good teeth and rarely need serious dental care.)  We all have fears, reasonable and unreasonable, and some are bad enough to impact our lives in a major way, enough that psychologists and neuroscientists have put considerable time and effort into learning how to quell (or eradicate) the worst of them.

In her wonderful book Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear, journalist Eva Holland looks at the psychology of this most basic of emotions -- what we're afraid of, what is happening in our brains when we feel afraid, and the most recently-developed methods to blunt the edge of incapacitating fears.  It's a fascinating look at a part of our own psyches that many of us are reluctant to confront -- but a must-read for anyone who takes the words of the Greek philosopher Pausanias seriously: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know yourself).

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Pride in ancestry

Here in the United States we're celebrating Thanksgiving today, hopefully by staying home and not turning this into a nationwide superspreader event.

It's a day a lot of folks think about their heritage, and the weird old story about the Pilgrims and Native Americans having dinner together gets rehashed, despite the fact that just about everything we're taught about it in elementary school is wrong.  That's the way with cultural mythology, though, and we're hardly the only ones to engage in these sorts of exercises in history-sanitation.

It did, however, make me start thinking about the whole pride-in-ancestry thing, which also strikes me as kind of odd.  To quote my evolutionary biology professor's pragmatic quip, "Your ancestors didn't have to be brilliant or strong or nice; they just had to live long enough to fuck successfully at least once."  Which might be true, but it hasn't stopped me from being interested in my ancestry, while always trying to keep in mind that my family tree is as checkered as anyone else's.

Take, for example, my 3x-great-grandmother, Sarah (Handsberry) Rulong.  She was born some time around 1775 in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and her surname probably started out as something Teutonic like Hansberger or Hunsberger, especially given that her marriage certificate says she was a Lutheran.  At the age of twenty she set out with a group -- none of whom were her immediately family members -- to cross just shy of a thousand miles of what was then trackless wilderness, finally ending up in New Madrid, Missouri.  She lived there for a time as a single woman, ultimately marrying three times and outliving all three husbands.  She had a total of nine children, including my great-great grandmother, Isabella (Rulong) Brandt, and was in southern Louisiana in 1830 after being widowed for the third time -- but I don't know what happened to her after that.

Now there's someone who I wish had left me a diary to read.

Sarah's father-in-law, Luke Rulong (the father of her third husband, Aaron Rulong, and my direct ancestor) also was a curious fellow.  We'd tried for years to figure out who he was; the Rulong family was of Dutch origin and lived in Ocean County, New Jersey, but we couldn't find out anything specifically about him in the records of the time.

Turns out we were looking in the wrong place.  Look in the court and jail records of Ocean County in the late eighteenth century, and he was all over the place, having been arrested multiple times for such misdeeds as "riot," "mischief," "disorder," "public drunkenness," and "poaching."

See what I mean about interest not equaling pride?

Most of my ancestry is from France, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, and England, something I know both from genealogical research and from the results of my DNA tests.  So I'm solidly northern/western European, something I found a little disappointing.  It'd have been kind of cool to discover a Nigerian ancestor I didn't know about, or something.  But no, I'm pretty much white through and through.

Still, there are some interesting folks back there on my family tree.  I have a great-great uncle who has his own Wikipedia page: John Andrews Murrell, the "Great Western Land Pirate," who was a highwayman in the early 1800s in what is now Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.  Murrell was also a con artist who claimed he was a revivalist preacher, and went around preaching to standing-room-only crowds (apparently he spoke well and knew his Bible; so the praise-the-Lord-and-open-your-wallets televangelists are hardly a new phenomenon).  While he was speaking, the story goes, his cronies would go behind the crowds and loot all the saddlebags.

My great-great-grandfather, John's brother James Henry Murrell, had to go all the way to southern Louisiana to escape the bad reputation John had given the family name.

I have a number of ne'er-do-wells in my ancestry.  One of the wildest stories is about Jean Serreau, one of my mom's forebears, who was a landholder in Nova Scotia (then called Acadia) in the late seventeenth century.  Apparently he came home one day to find his wife in bed with a Swiss army officer, and was so outraged that he walloped the guy in the head with a heavy object and killed him.  (Brings coitus interruptus to new heights, doesn't it?)  He was promptly arrested and looked likely to hang, but his status gave him the leeway to sue for a pardon.  He eventually had to go to France and appeal to the very top -- King Louis XIV -- who upon hearing the case pardoned Serreau immediately.

"Do not fret, Monsieur," the king told Serreau.  "I would have done the same thing."

Like all families, mine has its share of tragedy.  My mother's great-grandmother, Florida (Perilloux) Meyer-Lévy, was widowed at the young age of 37, and unlike the redoubtable Sarah never married again.  Her husband was apparently an unreliable sort, a breeder of horses who "made bad deals while drunk" (this sort of thing seems to run in my family).  Florida was left penniless with nine children, four of them under the age of ten, at his death.  She rented out her home as an inn, making enough to squeak by, but ultimately had to sell the house and ended her life as a domestic servant.  Here's a photo of her, taken shortly before her death at age 77 -- can't you see the hard times etched into her face?

It's tempting to be all edified by her tale, and see in it stalwart courage and an indomitable nature, but in reality, who knows how she dealt with her adversity?  She died when my mother was only three years old, and according to my mom and her cousins, no one much talked about that side of the family.  So anything I could extract about her character from what I know of her life would only be a surmise, with no more anchor in reality than the happy Pilgrims and Natives eating turkey together on the First Thanksgiving.

The truth, of course, is something you can't really tell from looking at a family tree; my ancestry, like everyone's, is made up of a broad cast of characters, kind and nasty, rich and poor, honest and dishonest, servant and master.  We're too quick to jump into fairy tales about noble blood and hereditary lordship, without keeping in mind that a lot of those noble lords were (frankly) nuttier than squirrel shit.  Pride in ancestry has all too often slipped into racism and tribalism and xenophobia, and realistically speaking, it's not even justifiable on a factual basis.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts on Thanksgiving.  We're all the products of a mixed bag of forebears, and if you go back far enough -- honestly, only four thousand years or so, by most anthropologists' estimates -- we're all related, descending from the same pool of ancestors who "fucked successfully at least once."  No real point of pride there, or at least, nothing that you should feel superior about.

Much more important, really, how we treat others here and now.

So for those of you celebrating, I hope you enjoy your meals, and I hope you all stay healthy and happy in these fractious times.  Take care of those around you -- let that be the legacy we leave behind, and maybe our descendants a hundred years from now will remember at least a little bit about who we were.

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I'm fascinated with history, and being that I also write speculative fiction, a lot of times I ponder the question of how things would be different if you changed one historical event.  The topic has been visited over and over by authors for a very long time; three early examples are Ray Bradbury's "The Sound of Thunder" (1952), Keith Roberts's Pavane (1968), and R. A. Lafferty's screamingly funny "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" (1967).

There are a few pivotal moments that truly merit the overused nametag of "turning points in history," where a change almost certainly would have resulted in a very, very different future.  One of these is the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which happened in 9 C.E., when a group of Germanic guerrilla fighters maneuvered the highly-trained, much better-armed Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Roman Legions into a trap and slaughtered them, almost to the last man.  There were twenty thousand casualties on the Roman side -- amounting to half their total military forces at the time -- and only about five hundred on the Germans'.

The loss stopped Rome in its tracks, and they never again made any serious attempts to conquer lands east of the Rhine.  There's some evidence that the defeat was so profoundly demoralizing to the Emperor Augustus that it contributed to his mental decline and death five years later.  This battle -- the site of which was recently discovered and excavated by archaeologists -- is the subject of the fantastic book The Battle That Stopped Rome by Peter Wells, which looks at the evidence collected at the location, near the village of Kalkriese, as well as the historical documents describing the massacre.  This is not just a book for history buffs, though; it gives a vivid look at what life was like at the time, and paints a fascinating if grisly picture of one of the most striking David-vs.-Goliath battles ever fought.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A monumental change

You've probably heard the recent controversy about removing the statues of Confederate officers from prominent positions in the Deep South, with the anti-removal-crowd saying "It's our heritage" and the pro-removal-crowd saying "... but it's celebrating racism."  I don't intend to explore the reasoning behind either position, since I suspect that (1) we all know what our opinions on the issue are, and (2) it's unlikely anything I say would change anyone's mind.  But I do want to offer an alternative, which was (unfortunately) not my idea but the brainstorm of some folks in West Virginia.  They want to replace the statues celebrating the Confederacy with...

... statues of Mothman.

West Virginia high school teacher Jay Sisson explains:

To many West Virginians, Mothman carries more significance than any Confederate general.  In fact, the legend originated in the town of Point Pleasant, when locals spotted a “man-sized bird creature” prior to the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse that killed 46 people.  Mothman was blamed and retroactively seen as a bad omen that foreshadowed the disaster.  From there, the story of the Mothman spread across the country and became an urban legend of sorts.

Twitter user Brenna (@HumanBrennapede) has an additional reason for preferring Mothman; unlike most Confederate generals, she says, Mothman has "a six-pack and an objectively good ass."  The statue of the creature in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, illustrates this:

And I have to admit she's right that he has quite a shapely posterior.  It does remind me, however, of my days teaching Ancient Greek to high schoolers.  One of my classes complained to me one day that they were sick of learning phrases of limited modern utility like "O Zeus, accept my sacrifice" and "Prometheus's liver is being devoured by an eagle."

"Well, what do you want to learn how to say?" I asked.

One boy said, "How about, 'You have a nice ass.'"

I shrugged and said, "Okay.  It'd be, 'kalein pygian ekheis.'"  (Transliterated roughly into English letters.)

They all laughed, and I added, "I guess if you know how to say, 'you have a nice ass,' you'd better learn how to say 'thank you.'"  So I had them repeat after me, 'sas eukharisto.'"

At this point, the class was in hysterics.  Something seemed off -- it wasn't that funny.  So I turned around...

... and the principal was standing in the doorway.

Fortunately, he has an awesome sense of humor, and joined in the laughter at my obvious discombobulation.  And the students used that as their greeting to each other in the hall for the rest of the school year: "Kalein pygian ekheis."  "Sas eukharisto!"

Never let it be said that I didn't make an impact as a teacher.

But I digress.

Anyhow, I think the Mothman statue idea is brilliant.  It could be applied to lots of other states, too, each of which has its own terrifying and inhuman monster.  Florida could have statues of the Skunk Ape.  Louisiana has the Grunch.  Arkansas has the Boggy Creek Monster.  Kentucky has Mitch McConnell.

You get the idea.

So that would solve the problem of injuring state pride, and focus people's attention away from a bunch of military leaders who (to be brutally frank) lost anyhow.

But I'm not expecting it to catch on.  Inspired ideas usually don't.  Even ones that involve making statues of a creature with "an objectively good ass."

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I know I sometimes wax rhapsodic about books that really are the province only of true science geeks like myself, and fling around phrases like "a must-read" perhaps a little more liberally than I should.  But this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is really a must-read.

No, I mean it this time.

Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is something that everyone should read, because it points out the remarkable frailty of the human mind.  As wonderful as it is, we all (as Schulz puts it) "walk around in a comfortable little bubble of feeling like we're absolutely right about everything."  We accept that we're fallible, in a theoretical sense; yeah, we all make mistakes, blah blah blah.  But right now, right here, try to think of one think you might conceivably be wrong about.

Not as easy as it sounds.

She shocks the reader pretty much from the first chapter.  "What does it feel like to be wrong?" she asks.  Most of us would answer that it can be humiliating, horrifying, frightening, funny, revelatory, infuriating.  But she points out that these are actually answers to a different question: "what does it feel like to find out you're wrong?"

Actually, she tells us, being wrong doesn't feel like anything.  It feels exactly like being right.

Reading Schulz's book makes the reader profoundly aware of our own fallibility -- but it is far from a pessimistic book.  Error, Schulz says, is the window to discovery and the source of creativity.  It is only when we deny our capacity for error that the trouble starts -- when someone in power decides that (s)he is infallible.

Then we have big, big problems.

So right now, get this book.  I promise I won't say the same thing next week about some arcane tome describing the feeding habits of sea slugs.  You need to read Being Wrong.

Everyone does.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Blowing the dogwhistle

It's no secret that I'm a privileged white guy.  I've never had to deal with -- hell, I've never had to think about -- being on the receiving end of discrimination based on my gender or the color of my skin.  I'm not saying my life has been without any impediments, but inequities of race and gender have not been amongst them.

So when people who have experienced this kind of prejudice and bigotry tell me about their experience, I listen to them.  Simple as that.

Which is why the nasty rebranding of COVID-19 as "the Chinese virus" is, in fact, racism.

The racist part isn't from the first time the term was used.  Being a privileged white guy, I've probably said things that have been insensitive -- not from any malice, but simply from ignorance of the implications.  But if someone points it out, what you do then is you stop fucking doing it.  If you call COVID-19 "the Chinese virus" and someone says, "you really shouldn't call it that, there are Asians who are being targeted for harassment because they're being blamed for the virus's spread," you say, "Good heavens, I didn't realize that, I'm so sorry, that was so thoughtless of me," then you don't say it again.

You don't say, "here's why your perspective is wrong, I know so much better, so I'm gonna damn well call it Chinese virus if I want."

That is racist.

Of course, Donald Trump, whose attitude is that anything that comes out of his mouth is perfect, is where this started.  And of course, when called on it, he didn't back down.  "It’s not racist at all," he told reporters.  "It comes from China, that’s why."

Which is somewhere beyond disingenuous.  No one doubts that the virus originated in China.  But continuing to harp on it as "Chinese virus" even after you know that Asians are being threatened or outright physically harmed because of it -- yeah, that's racist, however you're trying to whitewash it.

Any argument for it being a casual, offhand slip of the tongue went out the window yesterday when a photograph by a reporter for the Washington Post showed that Trump had actually crossed out the word "corona" and handwritten in "Chinese" (in black Sharpie, if I even needed to add that).  So make no mistake; this is absolutely deliberate.

And of course, as soon as Trump labeled it that way, his various bootlickers were quick to follow suit:

• Meghan McCain: "I agree with you that I think if the left wants to focus on P.C. labeling this virus, it is a great way to get Trump re-elected.  I don’t have a problem with people calling it whatever they want.  It’s a deadly virus that did originate in Wuhan."
• John Cornyn: "[Chinese] people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that.  These viruses are transmitted from the animal to the people, and that’s why China has been the source of a lot of these viruses...  China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like SARS, like MERS and swine flu and now the coronavirus.  So I think they have a fundamental problem, and I don’t object to geographically identifying where it's coming from."
• Marsha Blackburn: "This outlandish claim is crucial to Communist China's propaganda machine.  It is a bold-faced lie and a corrupt attempt to shift the blame and origins of the Chinese novel coronavirus."
• Tucker Carlson: "Today, NBC News sent a tweet suggesting the president's use of the phrase 'Chinese virus' was 'both inaccurate and harmful, in tying racist associations between the virus and those from China...'  Another statement written by morons in our news media.  How is it inaccurate to call a virus from China 'Chinese?'...  That was Trump at his very best."
• Lindsey Graham: "I think it is fair, because China is accusing American soldiers of causing this problem, so yes, we're gonna fight that.  I'm not blaming the Chinese government.  It did come from China...  This problem came out of China.  You guys [reporters asking whether the term is racist] are nuts."
• Brian Kilmeade: "While some here say that’s a racist term, it’s actually just an accurate term of where it started and them not being transparent about how it started really hurt literally the rest of the planet."

Let me put this succinctly: if your words are inciting others to harass, demean, threaten, or harm someone based on their race, and even after finding this out you continue to use those words, your actions are racist.

Of course, I'm not naïve enough not to know why they're doing it; these kinds of racist dogwhistles play well with their base, who just love the ultranationalist, 'Murica-first attitude that Trump and his cronies excel at.  This kind of language has been used against Hispanics, Muslims, and a number of other ethnic groups (remember the "shithole countries" comment directed against people from subsaharan Africa?), to cheering crowds.  And whenever this is flagged as racism, immediately the "political correctness" epithet comes out, as if treating people with consideration, and recognizing that people from other demographics have a different perspective than you do, is somehow a character flaw.

As journalist David Plotz put it: "Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok.  It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who were once barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem to be innocent to you may be painful to others."

[Image licensed under GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2]

For me, it boils down to one of the guiding principles of my life, which is "don't be a dick."  I'm not saying I don't make mistakes or that I've never offended anyone.  Being privileged means that's probably inevitable.  But when I do, I try like hell not to do the same thing again.  Maybe sometimes this will mean I'll change my language because someone's being hypersensitive, but what harm has come to me because of that?

Given the choice between hurting someone and making a small amendment to the way I talk, I know which one I'd choose.  And seeing it that way makes the fact that this isn't just random thoughtless talk, but a deliberate dogwhistle, abundantly clear.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a classic -- Martin Gardner's wonderful Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?

Gardner was a polymath of stupendous proportions, a mathematician, skeptic, and long-time writer of Scientific American's monthly feature "Mathematical Games."  He gained a wonderful reputation not only as a puzzle-maker but as a debunker of pseudoscience, and in this week's book he takes on some deserving targets -- numerology, UFOs, "alternative medicine," reflexology, and a host of others.

Gardner's prose is light, lucid, and often funny, but he skewers charlatans with the sharpness of a rapier.  His book is a must-read for anyone who wants to work toward a cure for gullibility -- a cure that is desperately needed these days.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]