The guilt of the instigators

A number of years ago, I was talking with a friend about her recent divorce from a man who was a serial philanderer and emotional abuser, and from whom she had separated more than once, always taking him back when he promised reform.  At that point my own divorce was also recent history, and I asked her what she'd come away with after the experience.

She looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, "I think the biggest lesson I learned is, when someone shows you who he truly is, believe it."

As of the time of this writing, the attempted coup against our government by armed rioters is only twenty-four hours old, and already I'm seeing the distraction campaign by Republicans getting into full swing.  "This isn't who we are," the official GOP Twitter account said.  Rudy Giuliani said "stop the violence" after having called for "trial by combat" only hours earlier.  Ivanka Trump asked for the rioters to leave peacefully -- but when the protests started, had said they are "American patriots."  Brit Hume speculated that they were "leftist Antifa in disguise" despite the fact that there are photographs, and the ones who have been identified are all well-known far-right agitators.  Ted Cruz asked for the rioters to disperse -- but still voted against certifying the results of a legitimate, fair election later that evening.  Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham both made speeches against the riots, the move to question the election, and Trump himself.  Twitter suspended Trump's account for twelve hours, supposedly "pending review for permanent deletion."  Several Trump staffers have resigned, and several more are expected to do so in the next day.  Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of Fox News said that Trump "acted very badly" in saying he loved the rioters and that they were "very special."

And on and on.

The problem is: it's too late.  It's way too fucking late to claim the moral high ground, to act as if they haven't supported an amoral psychopath for four years, making excuses for every insane thing he's done all along the way.  Without the support of these people he never would have been nominated, much less elected.  Especially infuriating is the sudden realization by Twitter and Fox News that they're complicit in violent insurrection -- that between the two of them, they created this monster.  Without Twitter and Fox News, and far-right commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Trump would have remained what he was -- a failed businessman and washed-up reality TV star.

And we've been warning for years that this was coming, that the lies and misinformation and polarization were going to have consequences.  I say "we" because I've been writing about the parallels between Trump's rise and Germany in the 1930s since he was nominated.  I was called an alarmist by people on both sides of the aisle.  The conservatives said Trump was a true patriot who cared deeply for the average American; the liberals said he was an incompetent but that the system of checks and balances was there to keep the reins on him.

But people like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz made sure the checks and balances were never invoked.  They gave Trump carte blanche.  Fox News helped matters along by making sure that any of the innumerable lies and outright insane statements Trump made never got aired, that the loyal viewers only ever saw things that painted him in a positive light.  They created a vision of a man who was a messiah, the only one who could save America from the godless evil liberals...

... and their followers believed it.

Stephen King said -- a long time ago -- "The people who have spent years sowing dragon's teeth seem surprised to find that they have grown an actual dragon."  Trump's enablers created this situation.  Each of them is as culpable as Trump is in what happened on January 6.  They are guilty of the deliberate, calculated deception of a significant percentage of the American citizenry, who were trained to discount every criticism of Trump they heard, and so now... discount every criticism of Trump they hear.

The mealy-mouthed tut-tutting about the violence in the Capitol (and in a number of state capitols as well) can not be allowed to get them off the hook for this.  I'm no expert in jurisprudence, so I am unqualified to weigh in over issues like whether the congresspeople who voted against certification of the election or who instigated the coup attempt could be expelled and/or prosecuted.  But doing nothing -- saying, "Oh, well, it's simmered down, we're okay now" -- will work about as well as when Susan Collins voted against removing Trump after he was impeached early last year, and said, "I think he's learned his lesson."

I guess he hasn't, Senator Collins.

If someone shows you who he truly is, believe it.

Undoing the damage this has done will not be easy or quick.  It'll still be with us long after the windows in the Capitol are replaced, the papers and files that were dumped on the floor are put back, the damage to furniture is repaired.  I don't envy the new administration the work they have ahead.  But if we don't want this to happen again -- which, I trust, is the hope of every American -- we cannot let the ones who did this get away with it.  And I'm not talking only about the participants in the riot.  I'm talking about the ones who created this situation, from Trump on down.  I'm talking about Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, the far-right commentators who built Trump up as a god-figure, the true believers who worship him.  I'm talking about the elected officials who coldly and hypocritically encouraged it -- some of them laughing up their sleeves in private about what a moron Trump is -- because they saw it as a way to fill their own pockets and keep their positions of power.

We need reform, and that doesn't mean accepting that the Democrats have all the answers.  They don't.  It means stopping the continual stream of self-aggrandizing lies.  It means refusing to throw away anything that doesn't immediately appeal to your biases as "fake news."  It means turning off the television and radio and depriving the media that thrives on polarization of the only thing they care about, which is cash from sponsors. 

And it means holding people accountable for what they say or do.  Every damn time.

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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!]

Midnight, the Proud Boys, and the lure of the mob

In the brilliant but devastating Doctor Who episode "Midnight," the Doctor is on a sightseeing expedition that turns deadly when an alien attacks the "space train," and takes over the body of one of the passengers.

The increasing sophistication of the alien -- whose real form we never see -- as it gradually learns to operate the body of the passenger it has hijacked is one of the most chilling progressions the series ever conceived.  The character of Sky Silvestri is played to the absolute hilt by actress Lesley Sharp, and her riveting portrayal of an intelligence that is intrinsically hostile to other life forms is the stuff of nightmares.

By far the scariest thing about the episode, however, is how the other passengers react.  Doctor Who doesn't often flinch from showing us the ugly side of humanity, and here is mob psychology at its absolute worst -- looking for someone to blame for what has happened, and unfortunately landing on the wrong person.  The result is near catastrophe, and the resolution of the story one of the most poignant and disturbing scenes I've ever watched.  (Ask any Whovian about the line "The Hostess -- what was her name?" and you'll be sure to get a reaction, as well as possibly depressing them for the rest of the day.)

The force of mob psychology has been much on my mind since the riots in Washington, D.C. this past weekend resulted in twenty-three arrests and four people hospitalized with stab wounds.  The #StopTheSteal rallying cry, based upon zero-evidence, entirely bogus claims by Donald Trump and his cronies, spurred far-right groups like the "Proud Boys" to stage demonstrations in downtown D.C., and of course -- undoubtedly what Trump wanted -- the demonstrators clashed with counter-protestors.  (If you doubt my labeling the claims of election fraud as "bogus," explain how those same claims have resulted in almost sixty lawsuits, all but one of which was shot down, including two unanimous 9-0 votes by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court.  Apparently no judge is willing to jeopardize her/his career and reputation supporting a lawsuit with zero evidence to support it, even judges appointed by Donald Trump himself.)

It seems like all you have to do is get a sufficient number of people together, and the psychology of the crowd takes over and accomplishes the rest.  As Terry Pratchett put it, "The IQ of a mob is equal to the IQ of its stupidest member, divided by the number of people in the mob."  In the case of the Proud Boys, this would be a vanishingly small quantity.  More scientifically, a paper back in 2017 by French psychologists Serge Moscovici and Marisa Zavalloni tried to quantify this effect, and found something as fascinating as it is horrifying.  It took 140 secondary school students, and asked them beforehand to give an assessment of two things -- their opinion of the French president, and their attitudes toward Americans.  They then had the test subjects join a group, discuss the two topics, and then reassessed their opinions afterward.

A lot of us have the impression that group discussion moderates extreme viewpoints -- something we might characterize as the "democratic principle," that if you give everyone a voice, the fringes on either end are argued out of their extremism, or at least so vastly outnumbered that their rants don't count for much.  What Moscovici and Zavalloni found was exactly the opposite.  Exposing people with moderate views to ones with extreme beliefs makes the moderate people more extreme.

In other words: being in a group increases the polarization of the members, even the ones who started out in the middle of the pack.

As psychologist Robert Cialdini put it, in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, "Whether the question is what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining the answer."

So much of what we do comes from the fact that, all civilization and culture and intelligence aside, at our core we're still just social primates.  It doesn't take much for the veneer of civility to fall away, and once that happens, we tend to base our behavior on the behavior of those around us.

For better or worse.

This all sounds pretty hopeless, but to return to where I started -- "Midnight" -- it's important to acknowledge the fact that sometimes all it takes is one person resisting the pull of the mob to turn things around.  This requires courage, determination, and (often) not an inconsiderable amount of risk.  But ultimately, it's the only way we can avoid the worst outcomes of our built-in tribal mentality -- intolerance, polarization, discrimination, and violence.  Let's hope that there are people today who have the guts to do this.

And maybe this time, we'll even remember their names.

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If you, like me, never quite got over the obsession with dinosaurs we had as children, there's a new book you really need to read.

In The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, author Stephen Brusatte describes in brilliantly vivid language the most current knowledge of these impressive animals who for almost two hundred million years were the dominant life forms on Earth.  The huge, lumbering T. rexes and stegosauruses that we usually think of are only the most obvious members of a group that had more diversity than mammals do today; there were not only terrestrial dinosaurs of pretty much every size and shape, there were aerial ones from the tiny Sordes pilosus (wingspan of only a half a meter) to the impossibly huge Quetzalcoatlus, with a ten-meter wingspan and a mass of two hundred kilograms.  There were aquatic dinosaurs, arboreal dinosaurs, carnivores and herbivores, ones with feathers and scales and something very like hair, ones with teeth as big as your hand and others with no teeth at all.

Brusatte is a rising star in the field of paleontology, and writes with the clear confidence of someone who not only is an expert but has tremendous passion and enthusiasm.  If you're looking for a book for a dinosaur-loving friend -- or maybe you're the dino aficionado -- this one is a must-read.

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

Bringing down the false flag

Of all the nutty beliefs I've examined over the years, the one that I have the hardest time understanding is the whole "false flag" thing.

The idea here is that the government (usually the United States government, although other countries have been accused of this as well) manufactures calamities in order to distract the citizens ("sheeple") from what they're really trying to do.  Their actual aims usually involve establishing a fascist dictatorship, disarming everyone, rounding up and executing civilians, and other special offers.

The fact that none of the latter ever happens doesn't seem to matter much.  Each time there's a new tragedy, raving wackmobiles like Alex Jones start yammering on about how it never really happened, it was just a staged event with "crisis actors" designed to divert your attention.  Maybe they really think by making all this shit up (what they would call "focusing your attention on reality") they're preventing the Bad Guys from killing us all.  Maybe they picture themselves as the dam holding back the flood, that without their brave reporting, we'd all find ourselves in FEMA death camps.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or maybe they're just loons.  I dunno.

So, here are a few things that are said to be "false flags:"

• The Sandy Hook massacre
• The Columbine shootings
• The Boston Marathon bombing
• Hurricane Katrina
• The Bali bombing
• 9/11
• The crash of Malaysia Airlines Flights MH17 and 370
• Hurricane Sandy
• The recent Ebola outbreak in Africa
• The riots in Ferguson, Missouri
• The riots and looting in Egypt following the fall of Hosni Mubarak
• The entire situation in the Ukraine

Yes, you're understanding this correctly; to the false-flagazoids, either (1) these events never happened, or (2) they were pre-arranged and orchestrated by the government for their own purposes.

But what about eyewitnesses, you may be asking, not to mention victims?

That you'd even ask the question means you've "drunk the KoolAid."  The so-called eyewitnesses and victims are either government plants, or else entirely fictitious.

And the conspiracy theorists work fast.  Whenever a story hits the news, you can almost set your watch and time how long it'll take before false-flag accusations start hitting the conspiracy websites.  It's only taken a day or so for the two current tragedies -- the Nepal earthquake and the Baltimore riots -- to be declared false flags by these crazies.  (Don't believe me?  Go here and here, if you can stand to.)

So as I'm considering this whole bizarre phenomenon, the thought crossed my mind; do these people believe that nothing bad ever happens unless it's caused by the government?  Or maybe that nothing bad ever happens at all, given that they seem to think that most of the awful things in the news were invented by the media?

So it occurred to me that maybe this was the common thread.  If you believe in false flags, it gives you a number of comforting fictions to fall back on:

1. Most of the catastrophes that get reported aren't real.
2. Even the ones that are real were staged by the government, so there's always a faceless entity there to blame if you don't like what's going on.
3. Because you are aware of the ruse, it means that you are in the know, i.e., you're not a "sheeple."

But I think there's a fourth underlying cause, here.  If you attribute everything down to your hangnails to the Evil Illuminati, you don't ever have to look at the underlying causes of the things that could be addressed.  If Sandy Hook and Columbine were fictional, then we never have to discuss the American attitude toward guns.  If Ferguson and Baltimore were staged by the police, then we can avoid talking about race and the enculturation of privilege.  If 9/11 was an inside job, we never have to consider the role that American foreign policy has had in the instability in the Middle East, nor our support of the repressive theocracy in Saudi Arabia because of our reliance on oil.

And if we disbelieve in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the Nepal earthquake, we never have to confront the fact that the world is a big, scary, chaotic place, where terrible things sometimes just happen for no apparent reason other than the steering currents in the south Atlantic and the movement of tectonic plates under the Himalayas.  It means we can avoid dealing with our own fear, accepting our own mortality, understanding that we're always insecure, always in danger, and that none of us is going to get out of here alive.

But the blindness comes with a cost, and it isn't just the terrible cost of buying a lie instead of seeking the truth.  The worst part of all of this is that is absolves us of the responsibility of doing something to offer aid to the victims of these catastrophes.  We can sit back, secure in the superiority of our false knowledge, saying that we don't have to reach out and help anyone, because there's no one there to help.

To which I say: fuck that.  I haven't been able to find anywhere to which you can donate for the victims of the Baltimore riots -- there may be campaigns started in the next days, so keep your eyes open.  But here are two to help the victims of the Nepalese earthquake -- an IndieGoGo campaign to raise money for shelters and medical aid, and one of my favorite charities, Médecins Sans Frontières.  Please consider donating to either or both.  

Because despite what the conspiracy theorists would have you believe, compassion and love will always beat suspicion, hatred, and fear.