The Accidental Weblog

The Accidental Weblog http://accidentalweblog.org/ en-us Nucleus CMS v3.64 © Weblog http://backend.userland.com/rss http://accidentalweblog.org//nucleus/nucleus2.gif The Accidental Weblog http://accidentalweblog.org/ Also, I'm Spartacus http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1567

So one Ms. Jessica Ahlquist has been getting some pretty shitty email ‘n tweets of late, since that whole ACLU case in Rhode Island earlier this year.

I figured I’d wear this today in solidarity. Sure, I’ve generally not been much into activist wear. And, honestly, much as I’m pretty visible with my opinions on stuff like this on the net, I tend to keep it a little more on the not-quite-as-visible in real life.

Normally. But y’know, I think mebbe this whole image of an insanely gutsy high school student having to put up with shit like that is kinda, well, y’know…

Well, putting me to shame, pretty much.

So, seriously, I think I can afford to do this much. It’s kinda in the ‘least I could do’ category, even, wearing one shirt with a hardly obvious message to my two errands outside the home office today… And, I mean, it ain’t like they usually make death threats for that sorta thing around here, after all.

Oh, also, to the hammerheads who pull charming crap like that: congratulations. You have successfully dragged someone else that little bit further out of the closet. Well done.]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1567 Thu, 17 May 2012 15:33:03 -0400 Powerful http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1560
But then, there’s also stuff less funny. Like a small boy on crutches and his parents, who’d come to several shows in a row, hoping for a miracle. But, regrettably, and as you may have noticed, faith healers and the gods they claim to serve generally prefer to ‘cure’ conditions rather less graphically visible than those. So, well…

Look, you already know how this ends, right?

… Those crutches were aluminum, badly worn and bent, and the boy’s legs were terribly twisted. These three people told me they’d driven for eight hours to get to this Popoff meeting, the fifth—and last—one that they could afford to attend, always trying to get to the stage for healing, but always being held back behind the security barrier where Popoff’s minions placed them if they were obviously not the sort of disabled person who could at least show some small sign of fake recovery to please the audience and raise Popoff financial “love gifts.”

A film crew from a local TV station had accompanied me, and we witnessed the usual farce inside the auditorium, then went outside to interview the victims as they left. We saw the family slowly going to their beat-up old car, tears streaming down their faces, shaking with sobs since they’d failed—again—to receive a miracle.

The cameraman placed the lens cap on his camera. “Sorry, I can’t do this,” he said. I just nodded in assent, and as far as I know, none of that footage was ever used.

— Randi, in Wired, re credulousness, cons, and faith healers.

]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1560 Fri, 11 May 2012 09:55:13 -0400 Can't so much relate http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1544 No Man Knows My History, I happened to read this interview on the PBS site of one Michael Coe, an anthropologist and expert on the Maya, who thus knows a fair bit about the people who inhabited the same part of Mexico and Central American where Mormon scholars say the events of the ‘Book of Mormon’ took place…

… and honestly, I find it a bit weird. Coe’s a secular scholar who’s also read Brodie, and who also happens to know as a consequence of his field of study how utterly flaky Smith’s bizarre claims about North American prehistory are revealed to be against the actual archaeological evidence, and who concludes, obviously enough, that Smith was full of it. Furthermore, and kinda interestingly, he mirrors quite exactly my supposition on Smith’s thinking, and, more generally, my suspicion about how characters of this ilk may frequently proceed:

I really think that Joseph Smith, like shamans everywhere, started out faking it. I have to believe this — that he didn’t believe this at all, that he was out to impress, but he got caught up in the mythology that he created. This is what happens to shamans: They begin to believe they can do these things. It becomes a revelation: They’re speaking to God. And I don’t think they start out that way; I really do not…

So far, so perfect. Yes, indeed, that’s probably very frequently exactly how it goes, I do just as strongly suspect*…

But then Coe also says, of Smith, things like: ‘I think he was one of the greatest people who ever lived’, and ‘my respect for him is unbounded…’, on the basis, apparently, that, hey, he actually carried this whole crazy thing off well enough that his movement succeeded.

I don’t know howinhell I could ever grok that particular sentiment. I mean, seriously? He was ‘great’? And this garners ‘respect’? Even ‘unbounded respect’? What?

Look. If you ask me, the guy was a cheesy, incredibly unprincipled little con man who happened to have a talent for lying to everyone consistently enough that he essentially got away with it, or well enough with enough people that the religion he thus founded outlived him. Further, a cheesy, incredibly unprincipled little con man who, in fact, rather than ever admit he’d been having people on took his con to absolutely ridiculous and appalling lengths, compelling gullible people to sell their farms and abandon their former lives in support of his movement. Furthermore, yes, his own grip on reality was plastic enough that he probably did eventually manage to convince even himself** of his own spectacularly risible line. That was his achievement.

I mean, I’d like, charitably, to imagine maybe Coe is going on about this ‘admiration’ with a certain eye to strategy, seeing as, sure, he’s also saying the guy was completely full of it at the outset, and maybe he figures that’s how he might blunt some outrage that might otherwise follow, and actually get his interview published, here…

But whether or not that’s the case, putting it plainly: there is no place for ‘respect’ here, except maybe the technical admiration of a forensic scientist who has to acknowledge the murderer is, okay, giving credit where credit is due, here, actually pretty skilled at killing people…

… or, to construct another such simile, to me, this is a bit like saying you respect the cow in which a particularly virulent prion first formed. Great. We now have a whole new nasty and effective infectious agent running through the herds of the world, and you, Bessie, gave it its start. Moo proudly, my dear.

… a major difference being: the cow doesn’t do it on purpose, I suppose. Not that this much help’s Smith’s case, here.

Oh, also, singling this out for your attention, also from that interview, re one Tom Ferguson, a formerly believing Mormon archaeologist who finally got wise after the whole ‘Book of Abraham’ fiasco***, but who lived the rest of his life never admitting as much publicly—essentially because he was caught in the same ‘not so tender trap’ of social ties contingent on the suppression of public apostasy or dissent Dennett and LaScola describe in their study of non-believing Christian clergy (PDF)—we have:

But the terrible, sad thing was that here he is in Mormon culture with his family, as a churchgoer, and all the social events and good things that are part of a whole Mormon way of life he would lose if he turned his back publicly and openly. And he never did. He went to his grave as a unbeliever but still feeling that the Mormon way of life was the best and not giving it up. So it was a total disjunction between these two things that must have really torn him up.

Oh, I bet it did.

And it’s the acts of cons like ole’ Joe who set up that—I suspect actually quite common—general misery.

(So: thanks so much, Joe, you bloody sleaze, you.)

Moving back a little closer to the point of this thing: I also have to make a comment on casting Smith as a ‘shaman’ that I’m rather of two minds:

First, actually, I find this a rather brilliant insight. There’s so much about the man’s life that fits this category of social behaviour exceptionally well, if a little bit oddly, given the 19th century culture he sprung from does have some differences from the tribal milieu we usually associate with such phenomena. And you could do worse than to speculate the figures like him do succeed because in some sense humans or human societies are rather wired to let them.

With or without that ancillary thought, however, I’m pleasantly impressed. These anthropologists, they got them some brains, they do.

Secondly, however, if the realization that such figures have been so ubiquitous in human culture is the reason Coe (or anyone else) expresses ‘respect’ for Smith as having been an awfully successful one (as opposed to generally being appalled at what an utterly unconscionable con he would happily pull in that guise), I don’t so much see how that follows, exactly, either. And there’s a caution I really feel I have to express about that particular insight.

Yes, the social role of the shaman is ancient and ubiquitous. Such figures crop up throughout cultures, in tribal ones uncontroversially, and you could even (as Coe does here) frame more recent figures as fitting in the category as well. But if you take from this (as I’ve seen done) that somehow this implies they were ever or even, in fact, remain a necessity, this is going a bit far.

Yes, I think that conjecture of necessity, where I’ve seen it, is a bit naive. And, frankly, it doth look an awful lot like a rationalization, too, in the contemporary world, especially. Put a bit baldly: that something is so common does not on its own imply any kind of utility—plenty of downright nasty pathogens were once ubiquitous; the fact that so many people once suffered from it does not at all somehow imply polio must somehow be useful. That our societies have absorbed and lived with such figures and the movements they spawn, this fact no more recommends them to us than does the fact that there are any number of bits of viral DNA surviving in our genomes suggest we should be happy to have any given virus around.

Furthermore, about that rationalization angle: yes, I do rather strongly suspect people make those apologiae for religions because they’re ubiquitous, all right, but not because they’ve really any good reasons for thinking this ubiquity implies utility. They offer these defenses because religions are powerful and difficult to unseat and deeply entrenched within and entwined around the institutions of our various societies, and coming out and saying: ‘look, generally, their founders were manipulative little parasites and the cosmologies they imagined as a means towards their various ends were complete bunkum’ is likely to make you enemies who may be in a position to make your life miserable.

Note also that whether shamanism in tribal cultures or the religions of larger cultures ever had any utility in their respective societies is rather a different question from whether they still do now, and both are separate questions from whether there’s really much to admire about any single shaman, let alone this one in particular. Re the former question: I would say that I do suspect state religions, nasty as they frequently were (and nasty as they remain, especially where they retain the power to punish apostasy with mob violence or even the machinery of the state), may just have had a stabilizing effect on monarchies in particular, and that may be one of the reasons you could argue they weren’t all bad… If you also can argue that absent monarchies we’d have had still nastier, less stable absolutisms less friendly to developing and building codified systems of law… And if you focus on those societies in which those eventually did evolve into systems with some respect for human rights and upon which framework was built more egalitarian systems following the enlightenment****…

But note how many ifs are in that conjecture. And note also: even if you can grant that, it still does not follow from this we still actually want them around. That they may have been better than the alternative in their day doesn’t mean we should still be celebrating them as some kind of brilliant idea anymore than we should still be using dynamite for mining and for building roads, with all its inherent hazards, when there now exist far safer alternatives.

And re that latter question, let’s not lose sight of this: fascinating as it may be that Smith can so easily be understood as stepping so smoothly right into this ancient role, he was still a bald-faced liar. The people he drew into his schemes often suffered enormously, guaranteed again and again and again that the god had spoken to Smith, that this disembodied voice only he could hear had, apparently, indicated to him it was his command these followers should sell their farm and/or move to Missouri or some damn thing, and that their prosperity would thereby be guaranteed by the deity, somehow, at the end of the rainbow.

And he did not know this. Whether he’d convinced himself it was true by the point he’d made any single such claim we can only guess at, but he did not know this. He was making it up, same as any con does, whether he knew it by then or not. And the people to whom he gave such guarantees were in no way assured they actually would so profit from it. And as yet another illustration of what misery this can make, if you want another modern figure properly parallel to Smith, take Harold Camping, for instance…

Yeah, Camping. Remember that guy? Predicted the end of the world in 2011? Didn’t happen, and a lot of people were rather embarrassed…

… and, frankly, they were the lucky ones if all they were was embarrassed… Seeing as some of ‘em had, indeed, quit their jobs and spent all their money on the assumption the old bugger would actually be right this time…

And yes, I think the comparison has some validity. As, yes, that was part of Smith’s line, too, and probably part of how he did so compel his followers to suffer as they did for the movement. This notion they were living in the end times, that things were winding up and the god was a-comin’ any minute, that was a big part of his game. And if we accept (again, I think very validly) that Smith was in social/anthropological terms very much a ‘shaman’, we have to realize that the self-styled apocalyptic ‘prophet’ who variously brings his followers’ lives to ruin***** is a notable subcategory of those, and a rather common one, and apparently long has been.

And honestly, how we still have ‘respect’ for such figures, when we can be properly appalled at, say, Bernie Madoff and his Ponzi schemes, I can hardly fathom. Unless, indeed, it’s yet another manifestation of some conjectured wiring that predisposes us to make excuses for anyone who gets excitable around the campfire and starts insisting some god or other is speaking to him from out of the smoke.

I dunno. If that is the case, however, I really have to say: let’s see if we can’t break that habit, already.

*And as a slight aside I’d add there’s probably a similar process at work in at least some of those who otherwise belong to religions, not just the founders: tho’ in them it’s more that what starts as a social thing or a matter of familal duty becomes more and more internalized, the longer they belong to the group. They mouth the words initially as a matter of necessity, but gradually, the need to rationalize their behaviour and thus align their cognition with it—or, shorter, the compulsion that follows from the general discomfort of cognitive dissonance—edges them toward ‘believing’, in some fashion.

**I’d add that there’s an ethical question here for anyone who follows that path: just because you believe it now because you lied to yourself and everyone else long enough that you had to: does this now somehow also make you less a liar?

And me, I think I have to say to that question: no. Not. At. All.

***If you haven’t heard of this bit, it makes for rather amusing reading. One of the more conveniently blatant examples of a self-styled ‘prophet’ getting caught in an out-and-out howler.

****And remember also that state religions weren’t and aren’t always exactly friendly to such reforms.

*****Or even ends them, and see also ‘The Order of the Solar Temple’, ‘mongst others.

]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1544 Thu, 10 May 2012 01:18:31 -0400 Oh, and speaking of AGW denialism http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1542 Fox News is full of shit. Again.

(/I suppose I could also just write ‘still’, as opposed to ‘again’, there.)]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1542 Wed, 9 May 2012 11:44:38 -0400 You know who else advertised on billboards? http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1540 Hitler, that’s who!

Seriously, if someone pulls a line of that form on the net, in general, you can assume they’re being facetious. And, indeed, with the right setup, it could actually be funny.

Random sample:

‘You know who else flossed their teeth? Hitler, that’s who!’*

But when someone actually pays for a billboard campaign to pull this…

Well, seriously, guys, that’s just above and beyond. A bit much, even…

But hey, let’s give it up for the Heartland Institute, all the same. If only all comics were so dedicated to their craft.

(*/Also: try this in person at your dentist’s office, for extra lulz.)

]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1540 Fri, 4 May 2012 11:56:34 -0400 Sex lives of the prophets http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1536
Or, okay, no, maybe it’s not quite entirely that…

Maybe just mostly. As I will, honestly, be mentioning that particular aspect of their lives rather briefly, at best.

It’s a bit slimy of me, I know, but then, you’ve got to appreciate the company I’ve been keeping lately, and the sort of negative influence it’s apparently had on my character. And a bit more more on that in a sec.

Anyway. So I got on a brief kick over the last week or so of reading biographies of founders of two relatively recent religions. Specifically, I’d picked up various electronic and hard copy editions of Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, Russell Miller’s Bare-Faced Messiah, Jon Atack’s A Piece of Blue Sky—the first of these concerning Joseph Smith, the man who began Mormonism, the latter two on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

Oh, and about those sex lives…Well, you’ve probably already heard about Smith. I’ll spare you. But then there’s Hubbard…

And… actually… y’know, I should probably spare you there, too. Apart from mentioning the whole three wives, some additional alleged dalliances, and one pretty solid indication of bigamy thing. But let’s call it right there, and move on. As me, personally, honestly, after a week or so of reading this stuff, mostly in fits and starts, I’m starting to find the whole subject deeply unpleasant. It’s perhaps a mite cliché to say I find it unpleasant even to have to think about Hubbard’s sex life…

But honestly, I do. Beyond that, I find it unpleasant to have to think about the man much at all.

As, quite frankly, taking the totality of their lives the way critical biographies like these try to do, both these men do rather come off as incredibly unpleasant people. As, in fact, at least some of those they met during their lifetimes eventually decided themselves.

I say ‘eventually’, because, of course, both men were known also to be almost magnetically charismatic, to some, at least, and this seems to have been a large part of their success, and something of a frequently-noted feature, obviously enough, ‘mongst founders of religions. And many of those who would later talk to the biographers or to the press or to the courts and/or otherwise leave records and so on of just how nasty they found these guys did, in fact, start off by being quite profoundly taken with them. They had that quality, apparently.

That’s something to keep in mind at the start about so-called ‘prophets’. As one of the cultural pictures we have of such a figure is of a somewhat alarming and/or repellent and/or ascetic figure (this last adjective, in case you’re wondering, is yes, also a euphemism for ‘having extremely poor hygiene’) with blazing eyes and possibly on the verge of madness following an allegedly divine encounter, who then comes howling out of the desert to warn of encroaching plagues of locusts or rivers of brimstone or suchlike troubles. In contrast, these guys—Hubbard and Smith—and they’re not, apparently, so unique—were rather of a different mould. Seductive, apparently, on many levels, both toward potential sexual partners and potential followers. Charming to a fault, even, when they needed to be.

And then people would get to know them better. And that’s when it got ugly.

And yeah, that’s a pattern they do seem to have in common. As a pattern: they seem to have made pretty good first impressions. Helped, perhaps, in part, by their own incredibly diligent myth-making on their own behalf…

Yeah. And I think I’m going to have to rephrase that ‘diligent myth-making’ thing, in a moment.. And it’s a funny thing. We take it as a given that around religious figures, myth-making will take off. Take the more ancient figures, in fact, and the level at which this accretes over time tends somewhat to bedevil working out what actually happened in the actual life of any presumed historical figure that gave the increasingly swelling and improbable legend its genesis.

But like I said: it’s funny. I always sorta assumed the legends tended to build up after their deaths, for the most part.

Hubbard and Smith, however, cannot be taken as exemplars of such a pattern, if, indeed, that’s really how it usually works. For neither man, apparently, was quite so patient as to wait ‘til later for people to build up their lives into monuments of the numinous and the heroic. Both, apparently, were absolutely shameless tellers of tall tales, exaggerators of the first order, during their own lifetimes. Both, indeed, seem to have pretty much started out their lives that way, well before their careers as ‘prophets’. Of the young Smith, Brodie quotes a Daniel Hendrix (who helped typeset the Book of Mormon) as saying ‘He could never tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing the story with his imagination’ (Brodie, 26). Of Hubbard, we have a well-established record of this exaggeration—similarly to Smith, he had a way of talking up the most mundane experiences into grand adventures—so a family sea voyage on a navy ship in which he visited ports in China would later become a dramatic pilgrimage to distant villages during which he consulted with rustic mystics. My favourite anecdote, among many, concerning this facet of his character, I think, is this one, concerning an evening in New York, in his days as a young writer for the pulp adventure magazines:

In the evenings he used to sit in Frank Gruber’s room at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel, kicking ideas around with other young writers and holding forth, although his host eventually tired of Ron’s apparently endless adventures. One evening Gruber sat through a long account of Ron’s experiences in the Marine Corps, his exploration of the upper Amazon and his years as a white hunter in Africa. At the end of it he asked with obvious sarcasm: ‘Ron, you’re eighty-four years old aren’t you?’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Ron snapped.

Gruber waved a notebook in which he had been jotting figures ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you were in the Marines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six years, you spent four years in Brazil, three in Africa, you barnstormed with your own flying circus for six years . . . I’ve just added up all the years you did this and that and it comes to eighty-four.’

—Miller, 67

In case you’re wondering, no, Hubbard did not handle this challenge particularly gracefully.

So, anyway, as to that rephrasing: ‘diligent myth-making’ is rather a kinder way of saying both these guys, on balance, were, apparently, ‘obsessively self-aggrandizing braggarts’, quite possibly ‘pathological liars’, and the very least ‘spectacularly full of shit’.

So please forgive me the title. Yes, I lied, when I implied so baldly this thing was mostly going to be about sex. But I’ve been hanging out with these guys, through their biographers, lately. I’m afraid. It hasn’t, apparently, been good for me.

(Also, this article is totally going to be republished as a book-length expose in a month. Published by… Knopf. Yeah. Yeaaaah…. Knopf. That’s the ticket…)

Anyway. Moving on: like I said, it’s funny. I always assumed, as I said, that much of the legends around religious founders tended to build up after their lifetimes. But now, with the evidence around Smith and Hubbard being what it is, I find myself vaguely amused picturing a young Jesus at a bar bragging to an attractive brunette: ‘Hey, baby… Have I mentioned yet how I just totally raised a guy from the dead last weekend?’

… And at her other elbow, of course, a young Mohammed is offering to take her for a spin on his totally pimped, custom flying black horse.

Scurrilous and cruel of me even to suggest it, of course. But let’s remember: I do rather assume the term ‘false prophet’ is a bland redundancy. So, following this assumption, I also tend to assume pretty much anyone who somehow manages to get either ‘seer’ or ‘messiah’ on their business card is at least somewhat full of it, even if they don’t quite invent on their own behalf the bulk of the silliness that might later get bandied around about their lives (and, of course, again, about the ancient figures, it’s far harder to know the proportion they contributed themselves). Otherwise, my point is, they’d have wound up in a less dodgy profession.

Anyway, sorta more seriously: I can recommend at least the Brodie and the Miller for your reading pleasure (the Atack, I’m still trying to decide upon… tho’ it may be mostly oversaturation/fatigue induced by an overexposure to sleaze that makes me less enthusiastic, so far).

But feel I should also warn you: maybe you should take them in smaller doses than I did. These guys really aren’t particularly nice people to have around.

References

Brodie, Fawn M., No Man Knows My History: the life of Joseph Smith, New York: Knofp, 1945.

Miller, Russell, Bare-faced Messiah, London: M. Joseph, 1987. (Note: now also available as a free PDF here.)

]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1536 Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:30:06 -0400 Check your sources, again http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1531
So there’s this story making the rounds that Egypt’s Moslem Brotherhood-dominated parliament is considering this law that would make it legal for a man to have sex with his wife up to six hours after her death…

… Sounds a bit unlikely, huh? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not terribly fond of the Islamists, either. Not at all, even. But c’mon. Seriously?

This hasn’t stopped a whole pile of people quoting it, passing it around. Including, y’know, several actual newspapers…

(… ‘kay. So The Daily Mail barely qualifies as a newspaper, exactly. Anyway.)

Anyway, for what it’s worth, this is what is out there: al-Arabiya’s Abeer Tayel is quoting al-Ahram’s Amro Abdul Samea as reporting it’s a letter from Egypt’s National Council for Women protesting this…

Which, you may already note, is a bit convoluted. And note also that the al-Arabiya story doesn’t quote the alleged parliamentarians considering the law, and I note that the NCW site seems to make no mention of this, at least on the front page, so far as I can work out through machine translation.

… and, also, The CSM’s Dan Murphy thinks it’s ‘utter hooey’.

Shorter: a little skepticism is in order, here.

(/Or, really: more a lot.)

(/Updated: This Egyptian blogger says she follows parliament pretty closely, and that this has no basis.)

(/Updating again: The part about ‘farewell sex’, yes, is bullshit. The 14-year old age of marriage thing, not as much so. Details at link.)]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1531 Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:08:39 -0400 Oh, also http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1529 David Edgar Love is a Big Damn Hero.

(/And see also Inside Scientology’s Rehab Racket.)]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1529 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 18:26:26 -0400 Please check your sources http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1528
So today’s CBC thing on 4 20 I’d normally have almost nothing to say about…

… oh, ‘cept for this one bit: they quoted a ‘Narconon’ ‘drug prevention expert’…

Yeah. Right. Narconon. Tip to reporters in general: before quoting anyone from Narconon, please Google ‘Narconon and Scientology’. And ask yourself if you really want to give these folk the credibility they could gain from your doing so.

A few news stories for your consideration, to get you started:

This one…

.. and this one.

That is all.]]> Flim-flam http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1528 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:37:54 -0400 Pretty much awesome http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1526 David Irvine’s ‘redirected paintings’.]]> Stop me if you've heard this one http://accidentalweblog.org/index.php?itemid=1526 Fri, 20 Apr 2012 13:40:14 -0400