The edged tool

Today's post comes to you from the Odd Bedfellows department.

Okay, so all of you probably know all about the Harry Potter series.  Kid finds out he's a wizard, gets an invitation to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has a variety of adventures while under the tutelage of Albus Dumbledore, and eventually duels with and kills the evil Lord Voldemort.  The series is beloved by some, criticized by others (especially for Dumbledore's repeated cavalier attitude toward putting the child he's supposed to be protecting into situations where he could get killed), and rejected completely by an increasing number because of its racist tropes and author J. K. Rowling's vicious homophobia and transphobia.

You may also be aware of the fact that ever since the publication of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in 1997, the entire concept has been under attack by evangelical Christians.  It's all about magic, celebrates witches and wizards, and never portrays any of the characters as believing in God.  With regards to the last-mentioned, the omission is as good as an admission; the Harry Potter series isn't just non-Christian, they say, it's anti-Christian, and inspired by Satan.  Because of this, the books are frequently featured in book bans and book burnings.

It was bad enough that when the staunchly conservative Reader's Digest interviewed Rowling shortly after the skyrocketing success of her first book, they were inundated by irate letters to the editor.  One of the ones they printed said -- this is from memory, so it's just the gist -- "I am outraged that you would publish an interview with J. K. Rowling.  Her book has led to a million innocent children being baptized into the Church of Satan.  I know this because I read it in an article in The Onion."  The editor, showing remarkable restraint, responded, "You might want to be aware that The Onion is a satirical news source.  Its articles are meant for humorous effect only and should not be taken literally."

As you might imagine, this had little effect on the evangelicals, who went right on screeching about how evil Harry Potter is, ad nauseam.  Then, in 2014, one of them, a woman named Grace Ann Parsons, decided to take matters into her own hands.

She rewrote the story, as... um... anti-fan-fic.  The result was called Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles.  Hogwarts is recast as a Christian school run by Dumbledore -- and his wife Minerva McGonigall and daughter Hermione.  Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are evil atheists who have hidden from Harry that his parents were Christian martyrs.  But Hagrid, an evangelical missionary, finds Harry, tells him the sad story, and converts him to Christianity.  Voldemort is there, doing his evil work -- to make Christianity illegal.  The Good Female Students are always subservient to the men; the Bad Female Students are the ones who speak up and/or have talents outside of cooking, sewing, and cleaning.  The four "houses" -- Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw -- represent four different sects of Christianity, with Slytherin being intended to represent Catholics.

Oh, and there's a bunch of stuff about how Voldemort loves Barack Obama.

Well, the whole thing went viral, both amongst true believers and people who found it funny.  It even attracted the attention of book reviewer Chris Ostendorf of The Daily Dot, who said the writing style was so bad it "makes E. L. James [of Fifty Shades of Grey fame] look like Shakespeare."

But the reason this comes up today is that I just found out that Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles has recently been turned into a comedic stage play.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of this.

It's not like Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles was satire from the outset, the way Trey Parker and Matt Stone's musical The Book of Mormon was.  At least most people don't think so.  There are a few who believe that Grace Ann Parsons never existed, and the whole thing was written to be deliberately and laughably bad.  But the majority of the folks who've expressed an opinion seem to think that Parsons was honestly trying to create something that would have the draw of Harry Potter, but sanctified.

And if that's the case, isn't turning her work into a stage play that's meant solely to mock kind of... I dunno, mean-spirited?

Don't get me wrong; I think the evangelicals are largely a bunch of dangerous loonies, and their book bans, book burnings, and lobbying for censorship are horrible.  At the same time, I'm no fan of Rowling either.  Not only is her anti-trans work horrifying, just taken on their own merits the Harry Potter books are far from perfect, with numerous plot holes, some big enough fly a Thestral through.  (My opinion is if you want to read some good fiction with the Chosen One trope, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain beat Harry Potter by a country mile.)

I'm also not arguing against satire, here.  Well-aimed satire -- such as the recent torching of Donald Trump and his sycophantic toadies on South Park -- is a time-honored way of pointing out the flaws of the powerful.  But good satire always does what I call "punching upward."  It's David-versus-Goliath.  The ridiculing of Parsons's book, on the other hand, is punching downward.

Better known as bullying.

I'm reminded of the sickening nastiness surrounding the novel The Eye of Argon, by Jim Theis.  Argon was written when Theis was sixteen, and was published in the Ozark Science Fiction Association's fanzine the following year.  It was picked up and publicized in the 1970s as the Worst Science Fiction Novel Ever Written, and excerpts were read aloud at science fiction conventions to gales of uproarious laughter, and even republished in magazines.  Fifty years later, it's still happening.  It has become a party game -- people take turns reading excerpts, and are eliminated from the game if they laugh.

All this derision, aimed toward a novel written by someone who was sixteen years old.

And the sad postscript is that Theis was interviewed in 1984, and described how hurt he was by all the ridicule -- and stated, unequivocally, that he would never write again.  And he didn't.  He died in 2002 at the young age of 49, determined never to expose himself like that again.

How fucking sad is that?

And ask any writer, and you know what?  Every damn one of us will corroborate that we were all writing complete tripe when we were teenagers.  Many of us, myself included, wrote tripe well beyond that.  (There's a reason that there are no extant copies of anything I wrote before the age of thirty-five.)  They'll all also confirm that when we write, we're at our most vulnerable, showing our hearts and souls, and that nasty critiques sting like hell.  I still remember a "friend" telling me, after reading the first two chapters of a manuscript, that it was "somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  Because of that, I abandoned the story for years, but unlike poor Theis, I did eventually come back to it -- it became my novel The Hand of the Hunter.  

Yes, as creators, we need to be able to withstand some criticism.  Well-meaning and intelligent critiques are one of the main ways we learn to improve, and I have really valued the input of the editors I've worked with over the years (as hard as it is sometimes to hear that My Baby isn't perfection itself, as-is).  But singling out a work simply to laugh at it isn't helpful, it isn't productive, and it isn't kind.

And I'm in agreement with the Twelfth Doctor on this point.

So, yeah.  I find myself in the odd position of supporting the evangelical Parsons over the people who are ridiculing her.  I guess I just don't like seeing people embarrassed.  It's why I find a lot of sitcoms unwatchable.  I hate being a bystander while someone is put in a position of being laughed at, and that seems to be a mainstay of comedic television in the last couple of decades.  I once told a friend I would rather be physically beaten than humiliated, and that's nothing less than the unalloyed truth.

Anyhow, let's be careful who we choose to target with our laughter, okay?  Satire, sarcasm, and ridicule are edged tools, and they can leave lasting marks.  Use them with care, and if you're not sure, don't use them at all.  We humans are fragile creatures, and too damn many artists, authors, musicians, dancers, and other creatives have been turned away from a lifetime of self-expression by an ill-timed nasty comment.

Ask yourself if you want to be the reason someone gives up on creativity forever.

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The laughter weapon

In the episode of the original Star Trek "The Day of the Dove," a malevolent alien entity traps 38 members of the Enterprise crew on board the ship -- along with 38 Klingons.

It sets them up with weapons, convenient grievances (some of which were manufactured by the entity, who can manipulate memories), and a preternatural ability to heal from wounds.  As it turns out, the entity feeds on rage.  It's set up the ship as a feeding station, fueling the anger of the Federation and Klingon crew, getting them to fight with each other so it can gain strength.

The end of the episode is interesting -- especially in light of recent events.  Kirk and Spock realize that the creature is promoting their fury for its own malign purposes, and the only way to defeat it is to refuse to play the game.  In the end, what works best is laughing at it.  Faced with derisive laughter, it is defeated by being starved of what it needed most, which is fear and anger.

I was immediately reminded of "The Day of the Dove" by the discombobulation we're seeing amongst the GOP over being labeled "weird."  The parallels are obvious.  The GOP message has been nothing if not consistent; keep voters angry and scared.  Keep your eye on those depraved atheists and LGBTQ+ people, they warn.  Watch out for the influence of Jews and Muslims.  Look out for the caravans of illegal immigrants, which, strangely enough, never seem to arrive.  (The rhetoric that illegal immigration has increased is false; illegal immigration has been level since 2007.  I'm not saying it's not a problem, but the idea that the Democrats have opened the borders simply isn't true.)  

What the recent "call 'em weird" approach has highlighted is that fascism is, at its heart, humorless, arrogant, and deadly serious.  I remember thinking back in 2016 that what needed to happen was that during one of Trump's speeches, when he uttered one of his countless lunatic pronouncements, the entire room should have burst out in a deafening uproar of laughter.  Trump doesn't mind an argument; he positively thrives on being combative.

But being laughed at?

No wannabe dictator can survive that.

It's already flooding social media.  Over at Bluesky, it's taken the form of "The Republicans have been the party of normalcy my entire life, especially when..."

• "... MTG and Lauren Boebert got into a vicious argument over Jewish space lasers."
• "... Donald Trump apparently believed that he could change the path of a hurricane by drawing on the forecast map with a Sharpie marker."
• "... Trump created trading cards depicting himself as various superheroes."
• "... Louie Gohmert claimed that the Democrats want to jail all Christians for belonging to a hate group."  (Despite the fact that about seventy percent of Americans self-identify as Christian.)
• "... Trump confuses 'asylum seeker' with 'insane asylum' and keeps bringing up Hannibal Lecter and acting as if he's a real person."
• "... DJT Jr. championed the views of Dr. Stella Immanuel, who believes that gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons."  (Yes, this is actually what she believes, and Trump Jr. did support her enthusiastically -- I wrote about it here a couple of years ago.)

And so on and so forth.  

Lest you think I'm exaggerating by calling them would-be fascist dictators, though, you might want to familiarize yourself with Project 2025, which sets the agenda for a second Trump presidency -- and which, despite Trump's recent efforts to backpedal, remains closely aligned with the MAGA leadership's goals.  In fact, Trump's running mate, J. D. Vance, has multiple connections to Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who is one of Project 2025's main architects.  Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts's upcoming book, Dawn's Early Light, and includes in it a thinly-veiled call to violence: "It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine.  But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets."

So I'm serious when I say they're scrapping for a fight.  But what they do not seem to have been prepared for is the simple response of ridicule.

I'm not saying that ridicule is enough; but pointing out to undecided voters that these people are not just dangerous, they're downright crazy, seems to be helping.  It pulls the teeth of their main weapon, which is convincing everyone that (1) we're in danger, and (2) the GOP are the ones who know how to fix what they just now made us all scared of.  It's no wonder that the Nazis suppressed comics and satirists; Hitler preferred to be worshiped, but failing that, was fine being feared.

But the one thing he couldn't tolerate was not being taken seriously.

Trump is cut from much the same cloth.  Perhaps fortunately, he lacks the brains of a Hitler, Mao, Stalin, or Mussolini, and that's not even taking into account the signs in the last year that he's experiencing some profound cognitive decline.  And to be clear, laughing at him and his cronies doesn't mean we shouldn't treat the threat they represent as if it weren't real.  Like in the science fiction setting of "The Day of the Dove," the fact that the solution was to laugh at the entity didn't obviate the need to address the danger it represented.  MAGA, just like the nameless creature in Star Trek, is perfectly happy to incite their followers to bloodshed in order to fulfill their goals.

It's just that the best option at this point is to keep the focus on the fact that at their core, they're total nutjobs.  These people are so extreme that if I were to hop a time machine and go back ten years, and write a novel detailing what's happened in those ten years, my publisher would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

I'll end with another fictional reference -- this from C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength.  Toward the end, the main character, Mark Studdock, has been accused of murder and imprisoned in the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments, where he is being worked upon (with the desired end of brainwashing him completely) by the sinister Dr. Frost.  Frost, like the MAGA leaders, is a humorless, desperately arrogant man, who demands that others treat him with the seriousness and deference he feels he merits, despite his actions being nothing short of fatuous.  Mark realizes the solution, but too late, given that he's a captive, and at the mercy of Frost and his cronies.  Lewis writes, "Often Mark felt that one good roar of coarse laughter would have blown away the whole atmosphere of the thing; but laughter was unhappily out of the question."

Luckily for rational voters in the United States it's not out of the question for us.  So keep laughing... and for heaven's sake, vote this November.

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Air Jordans

New from the I Swear I'm Not Making This Up department, we have: a company selling "Jesus sneakers."

Brooklyn-based design company MSCHF has launched a new concept in trainers, which are Nike-emblazoned athletic shoes which have several interesting features:

• "Holy water" from the River Jordan injected into the soles
• A crucifix on the shoelaces
• The fabric part is made of "100% frankincense wool," whatever the fuck that is
• An inscription saying, "Matthew 14:25" ("In the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went to them, walking on the sea")

They went on sale on Tuesday, and sold out in a matter of minutes.

Now, for the kicker.  I haven't told you how much they cost.

Three thousand dollars a pair.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It is hard for me to fathom that there are that many people with enough disposable income to blow what for many of us is at least a month's salary on a pair of holy shoes.  I mean, did they think the shoes would actually allow you to walk on water, or something?  Because that at least would be kind of funny, combining loopy religious beliefs with the Darwin Awards.

Turns out, the Chief Commerce Officer of MSCHF, Daniel Greenberg, thought the whole thing was a joke.  He'd been amused by "collab culture," where two companies with unrelated products will team up for some kind of marketing drive (a good example is Uber and Spotify).  MSCHF thought they'd push it one step further, with a collab between a company and a divine entity.  "[W]e wanted to make a statement about how absurd collab culture has gotten," Greenberg said.  "We were wondering, what would a collab with Jesus Christ look like?"

Myself, I don't think they were "making a statement," or in fact, gave a rat's ass about the "absurdity" of collab efforts.  This was a money-making effort, pure and simple, and as such succeeded brilliantly.

There's a lot about this that bothers me, though.  It's not that I'm not sometimes critical of religion; any long-term readers of Skeptophilia know that I don't believe in giving a bye to hypocritical or immoral behavior simply because it comes under the heading "this is part of my religion."  But this isn't criticism of religion, unless you take it as some kind of twisted jab at people wanting to spend lots of money for something that they think will confer a blessing on them.

This is using people's beliefs and devotion to make money.

On the one hand, it's easy to laugh at anyone that gullible, but this is where we run head-on into one of the guiding principles of my life, which is, "Don't be a dick."  I have no problem with skewering sacred cows when it's warranted, but ridiculing people's cherished beliefs for no good reason -- even if you don't share those beliefs -- is nothing more than smug, self-righteous nastiness.

And it's a little hypocritical to lambast multi-million-dollar celebrity preachers like John Hagee and Franklin Graham for their smug, self-righteous nastiness, and then engage in the same behavior yourself.

So I find the whole thing distasteful, and Greenberg's blithe attitude toward using people's beliefs to rip them off is a little sickening.  You might expect, given my staunch atheism, that I would have joined in the laughter at people willing to fork over three thousand bucks for a pair of Jesus sneakers -- if so, sorry, I'm not laughing.  There's plenty about religion and politics and the world in general to criticize, or even to laugh at.  This one is just self-congratulatory cupidity -- and, honestly, says more about the people selling the shoes than it does about the ones buying them.

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I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

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

Ridicule to the rescue

Well, if you needed any good news, a study released last week in Frontiers in Psychology found that both rational argument and ridicule can reduce people's belief in conspiracy theories.

The research, done at the Eötvös Loránt University of Sciences in Budapest, was conducted by psychologists Gábor Orosz, Benedek Paskuj, István Tóth-Király, Beáta Bőthe and Christine Roland-Lévy.  The authors write:

Conspiracy theory (CT) beliefs can be harmful.  How is it possible to reduce them effectively?  Three reduction strategies were tested in an online experiment using general and well-known CT beliefs on a comprehensive randomly assigned Hungarian sample (N = 813): exposing rational counter CT arguments, ridiculing those who hold CT beliefs, and empathizing with the targets of CT beliefs.  Several relevant individual differences were measured. Rational and ridiculing arguments were effective in reducing CT, whereas empathizing with the targets of CTs had no effect.  Individual differences played no role in CT reduction, but the perceived intelligence and competence of the individual who conveyed the CT belief-reduction information contributed to the success of the CT belief reduction.  Rational arguments targeting the link between the object of belief and its characteristics appear to be an effective tool in fighting conspiracy theory beliefs.

Well, I don't know about you, but that cheers me up immensely, especially given that here at Skeptophilia I seem to split my time evenly between arguing rationally and lobbing ridicule bombs at people who hold wacky beliefs.  Some days it feels like I'm shouting in a windstorm, and that nothing I'm doing is having the least difference.  It's heartening to find that this may not be true.

Peter Kreko, visiting professor from Indiana University and co-author of the study, was interviewed over at PsyPost and had some interesting perspectives on the study.  An important distinction, he said, is that the research supports ridiculing the conspiracy theories themselves and/or the sources of such theories, but that ridiculing the person you're talking to is not likely to work.  In fact, it can generate the backfire effect -- being attacked because of beliefs people feel strongly about can result in the True Believers doubling down on their certainty.

"Our findings go against the mainstream of the communication literature and 'common wisdom,' as well as the current affective wave of social psychology emphasizing that emotions constitute the most important factor behind shaping beliefs and attitudes," Kreko said.  "Despite the general assessment that we are in a 'post-truth' world, truth and facts do matter when it comes to refuting conspiracy theories.  Uncovering arguments regarding the logical inconsistencies of conspiracy beliefs can be an effective way to discredit them."

And working to discredit them is important, Kreko says. "Conspiracy theories can be extremely harmful, they can lead to the persecution of groups. For examples, the Protocols of Elders of Zion, a conspiracy theory fabricated in the early 20th century on the Jewish leaders’ plot to rule the World, played an important role in the ideological justification of the murders of the Holocaust.  Anti-science conspiracy theories are often similarly dangerous – the anti-vaccination movement is a good example.  Several hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to die each year as a consequence of non-vaccination.  Given all of these negative impacts of conspiracy theories, it is essential to have evidence-based studies on how to reduce the popularity of such theories."

To which I can only say, "Amen."  Also that I'm really happy this study was published when it was, because heaven knows most of the news lately has been bad.  Gives me incentive for continuing to write what I do six times a week.