Dwayne Hoover’s body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind. But Dwayne, like all novice lunatics, needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction. Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness. – Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
When Vonnegut offered that diagnosis in 1973, the bad chemicals he had in mind were ones produced spontaneously within the human body. While often disputed, the notion of innate chemical/biological causes of mental illness had become at least widely familiar by the 1970s. The specific bad ideas Vonnegut had in mind were contained in a book by his fictional alter ego Kilgore Trout.
There are far more bad chemicals making the rounds of the US these days, and far more bad ideas as well. Here are some. You will see them here in print for the very first time, as a shadowy cabal has until this moment succeeded in suppressing them:
1. I am not really Malcolm McCollum, retired professor. That was merely the shell I was sent to inhabit among you. I am in fact a former resident of the globular cluster M89.
2. I was sent here many years ago to reveal the existence of a terrible conspiracy of caninophiles who seek to totally dominate your planet in order to corner the world puppy population for their own sickening uses and raise taxes.
3. Among the leaders of this conspiracy are Nancy Pelosi, Warren Burger, Noam Chomsky, Simon Bolivar, the Dixie Chicks, Tom Cruise, Alex Rodriguez, Erica Jong and Mister Ed.
Some readers might question my veracity on one point or another. Some might doubt the existence of a place called Globular Cluster M89. They would be wrong to doubt it. Globular Cluster M89 not only exists, it has about a thousand associated globular clusters (see Fred Hoyl, The Nature of the Universe, Mentor #125). Some might find it unlikely that Nancy Pelosi could successfully collaborate with Alex Rodriguez, not realizing that the two were secretly married in 1963. Some might wish to point out that Simon Bolivar has been dead for a few centuries. To such naive skeptics I must point out that I have included several intentional falsehoods in my revelations to serve as coded messages to those with eyes to see.
My claims here are of course intentionally absurd (I hasten to say), but some who read them may still find them persuasive. For them, these allegations will explain why they’ve had such trouble finding appropriate work (they own puppies), why their spouses can’t stand them (their spouses’ minds have been colonized by Noam Chomsky and/or The Dixie Chicks), why their television shows keep getting interrupted by incessant appeals for money to help abused puppies (PETA and other such organizations are false flag operations designed to help the conspirators acquire even more puppies to sate their evil lusts), why Tom Cruise hasn’t been defenestrated yet.
My claims are no more absurd or unlikely than those of Qanon. Yet, “A poll released today by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core . . . found that 15 percent of Americans say they think that the levers of power are controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, a core belief of QAnon supporters” . 15% of current US population means that nearly 50 million of my fellow citizens have found the Qanon conspiracy theory persuasive.
Perhaps I shouldn’t find that fact surprising. Throughout our history, considerable numbers of Americans have believed a variety of ridiculous things, and, in the words of one of Stuart Kaminsky’s characters in his novel She Done Him Wrong, “‘Some people will buy a goat’s ass and stick it on their head if a sweet talker gets his jaw going at them.'” But we eddicated folk are not supposed to fall so easily for unlikely nonsense, are we?
In a recent essay I found occasion to write, “James Kimmel, Jr., co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies . . . asserts, citing a number of clinical studies employing positron emission tomography and analysis of gaming behavior . . . .”
Since I anachronistically believe I ought to know what the hell I’m talking about, I looked up “positron emission tomography.” I found that it was “an imaging technology in which substances containing positron-emitting isotopes are introduced into the body, allowing the precise location of physiological processes by detection of the gamma rays produced by the isotopes.” Little wiser, I went on to discover that “positrons are the antiparticles of electrons” and that “the major difference from electrons is their positive charge.” I discovered a few more facts and definitions. I remained none the wiser.
I knew I’d never understand any of this, or be able to assess the validity of the assertions derived from “positron emission tomography,” unless I were gifted with a brain transplant. My own brain, I’d long ago learned in radio school at Ft. Gordon, Georgia, was completely incapable of grasping or usefully visualizing abstractions such as electrons, let alone their antiparticles. I could read sentences such as “Positrons are formed during decay of nuclides that have an excess of protons in their nucleus compared to the number of neutrons” until the Cubs win their next World Series and still not have the slightest idea what they meant. For all I know, “positron emission tomography” may denote nothing more real than Gleem toothpaste’s “GL-70” (which some wag suggested might actually mean “lark’s vomit”).
I chose to transmit Kimmel’s assertions, even though they were based on research techniques whose validity or reliability I hadn’t a prayer of substantiating, for several reasons. First, Kimmel provided a complete list of the research on which he based his argument, research appearing in publications I believe, from past research of my own, to be reputable. These citations are accompanied by brief but coherent summaries of the research. Second, on his home page Kimmel lists his recent scholarly activities, his publications, and print/media articles about him and his work. He also supplies multiple paths by which he can be contacted directly. These qualities seemed pretty solid evidence that Kimmel wasn’t some lone, random nut peddling an unsupported theory.
Most people would not take even this minimal amount of trouble to decide on the validity of an argument they read on the internet. I quite often wouldn’t, myself, though I hope I’d do so in the case of any argument I intended to accept or pass on to others.
When Casey Stengel wanted to assure some reporter he was telling the truth (he often wasn’t), he’d add to his statement, “You can look it up.” In other words, if it’s in print somewhere, you can believe it. For the first two-thirds of my life, this belief wasn’t entirely absurd. For an argument, a narrative, an assertion to get into into print, it generally had to pass through a number of inspections and verifications – by publishers, editors, proofreaders, peer review panels – by people who had had to demonstrate some degree of knowledge of the subject to get and keep their jobs.
A.J. Liebling famously observed that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” and that fact virtually guaranteed that certain biases would control what the editors and publishers found worthy of publication or comment, and what not. But it was generally possible for a reader to identify those biases and to take them into account. This was true for the publishers of books or the producers of television news as well. Some book publishers, it became obvious from their catalogs, published only books promoting a particular political slant – some right, some left – but a reader could usually identify such biases as likely to color whatever books those publishers put out.
Given those qualifications, finding something asserted in print meant there was a reasonable chance it might be true.
With the advent of the internet, it isn’t. You can look it up, all right – look up damn near any question you might have about anything on earth, and chances are you will find at least one answer to that question, usually more than one.
Can you depend on their veracity or accuracy? To answer that, a thought experiment:
Think about the last time you tried to find contact information for someone you knew but whose address/phone number you lacked. Did the information you found – if, eventually, you were able to extract it from the welter of surrounding sales pitches for juicy details of that person’s past – prove accurate? When you called their alleged phone number, did they answer it? Or had it gone out of service years ago, or been given to some other person? Are you aware of all the information about you and your whereabouts that resides on the internet? Do you monitor it for accuracy? Do you change it, to reflect new developments in your life? Chances are you don’t, and chances are nobody else does it for you. On the internet, nobody is in charge of content. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the Global Village is not some analyst’s metaphor; it is a most depressing and humiliating reality. Or, another way to put it, it is as close to a purely democratic marketplace of ideas as one could imagine.
Neil Postman, in Technopoly, offers another metaphor for the internet: “Indeed, one way of defining a Technopoly is to say that its information immune system is inoperable. Technopoly is a form of cultural AIDS, which I here use as an acronym for Anti-Information Deficiency Syndrome. This is why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words “A study has shown…” or “Scientists now tell us that…” More important, it is why in a Technopoly there can be no transcendent sense of purpose or meaning, no cultural coherence. Information is dangerous when it has no place to go, where there is no theory to which it applies, no pattern in which it fits, where there is no higher purpose that it serves….Information without regulation can be lethal.”
Indeed. A recent headline: “Vaccine skeptic US cardinal on ventilator after Covid diagnosis.” He may have been depending on God to keep him immune, or perhaps he had “done his research.” That’s a phrase I hear more and more often from people who subscribe to various currently circulating cockamamie notions. What it generally means is that they’ve hunted around on the internet until they found something that seemed to support whatever position they’d already decided to take. Whatever the position, it’s pretty easy to find someone who’s advocating for it on the net.
Say, for example, you took my claims about a conspiracy of caninophiles seriously, and wished to find more information about this menace on the internet, and googled “PETA puppy killing.” You would shortly find an entry entitled “PETA Kidnaps, Kills Family Pet, Here’s How They Apologized,” which begins thus:
“After PETA kidnapped and killed Maya, the Zarate’s family pet, they were very sorry. So to show just how sorry they were, they brought the family a fruit basket.
“That didn’t sit too well with Wilber Zarate, who bought the cute little Chihuahua as a gift for her (sic) daughter. The child lost weight and sunk (sic) into a deep depression.
“The dog was kidnapped from the front porch of the family’s Virginia home in October 2014. Footage from the family’s surveillance cameras shows a PETA employee coming onto the property and taking the dog, WND is reporting.
“Court documents said that on the day Maya was taken, the family had gone to the store to purchase her a pillow, but couldn’t find her when they returned, reported WAVY-TV.
“When Zarate checked his security camera, the video showed a van with “PETA” on the side parked in his driveway. Two women exited the van and one walked up his porch, took Maya, and put her in the back of the van. The dog was put down shortly after that.
“According to a PETA spokesman, the employee made a “tragic mistake” by euthanizing the pet “without permission.”
“This all stems from PETA’s long-standing belief that humans should not own pets for their ‘personal amusement,’ and some in the organization believe the animals are better off dead than kept as pets”
So begins this account, by someone styling himself “Bushrod Washington.” (Bushrod Washington was a nephew of George Washington and a Supreme Court justice. Perhaps this one is a descendant or admirer of the original. The website on which his account appears, “thefederalistpapers.org,” identifies him as “a political commentator [who] has over 15 years of journalism experience. He lives on a farm in the Midwest with his wife, 3 kids and 100+ cows, goats and other critters.” He is otherwise invisible on Google.)
That description could well apply to your drinking uncle, Joe, who swept out the local newspaper office all his life until his wife inherited the family farm and he could retire to bloviate on the family computer. In other words, it’s rather vague, and doesn’t really give you any way to assess the writer’s competencies or experience or credentials.
Readers who responded to this example of Washington’s journalism or political commentary found it persuasive (Ronnie Medaid wrote, “yay google is my world beater assisted me to find this outstanding website !”) and worthy of further dissemination (Tiffiny Weldin wrote, “Good post. I be taught one thing more challenging on completely different blogs everyday. It would always be stimulating to read content from other writers and follow a bit one thing from their store. I’d want to use some with the content material on my weblog whether or not you don’t mind. Natually I’ll provide you with a hyperlink on your web blog.”). You have to admire the politesse of “whether or not you don’t mind.”
Carlotta Everley, however, was one of only two respondents who found anything questionable about Washington’s account: “Thank you, I’ve recently been searching for info about this subject for ages and yours is the best I have discovered so far. But, what about the conclusion? Are you sure about the source?”
She makes a good point; the major source appears to be the court filing by the plaintiff’s attorney, which presents a rather incomplete picture of the event. It omits to mention, for instance, that the two PETA employees had been called on by the mobile home park’s owner to come help capture wild dogs and feral cats, it omits to mention that the pet chihuahua they picked up had been left unattended and unleashed, and that PETA has stated that “the person responsible” for the dog’s euthanizing had been fired.
The other source Washington mentions is WND (World Net Daily), an internet news and commentary site. A libel suit filed against the site suggests how reliable it might be as a source:
“On September 20, 2000, WND published an article claiming that Clark Jones, a Tennessee car dealer and fund-raiser for then-Vice President Al Gore, had interfered with a criminal investigation, had been a “subject” of a criminal investigation, was listed on law enforcement computers as a “dope dealer,” and implied that he had ties to others involved in alleged criminal activity. In 2001, Jones filed a lawsuit against WND; the reporters, Charles C. Thompson II and Tony Hays; the Center for Public Integrity, which had underwritten Thompson and Hays’ reporting on the article and related ones; and various Tennessee publications and broadcasters who he accused of repeating the claim, claiming libel and defamation. The lawsuit had been scheduled to go to trial in March 2008, but on February 13, 2008, WND announced that a confidential out-of-court settlement had been reached with Jones. A settlement statement jointly drafted by all parties in the lawsuit states in part:
“’Discovery has revealed to WorldNetDaily.com that no witness verifies the truth of what the witnesses are reported by authors to have stated. Additionally, no document has been discovered that provides any verification that the statements written were true.
“’Factual discovery in the litigation and response from Freedom of Information Act requests to law enforcement agencies confirm Clark Jones’ assertion that his name has never been on law enforcement computers, that he has not been the subject of any criminal investigation nor has he interfered with any investigation as stated in the articles. Discovery has also revealed that the sources named in the publications have stated under oath that statements attributed to them in the articles were either not made by them, were misquoted by the authors, were misconstrued, or the statements were taken out of context.'”
It appears from this that Ms Everley was well advised to wonder about Washington’s “source.” The “conclusion” – presumably she means “This all stems from PETA’s long-standing belief that humans should not own pets for their ‘personal amusement,’ and some in the organization believe the animals are better off dead than kept as pets” – is also contradicted by PETA’s official position statement: “Contrary to myth, PETA does not want to confiscate animals who are well cared for and ‘set them free.’ What we want is for the population of dogs and cats to be reduced through spaying and neutering and for people to adopt animals (preferably two so that they can keep each other company when their human companions aren’t home) from pounds or animal shelters—never from pet shops or breeders—thereby reducing suffering in the world”.
So far as I can find, Bushrod Washington never offered his readers an update on his account, but I feel obliged to, so here is The Rest of the Story:
“A trial had been scheduled for September, during which Zarate’s attorneys had planned to question current and former Peta employees about its euthanasia policy.
“The group later said it would pay the family $49,000 and donate $2,000 to a local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) to honour Maya. The family had sought up to $7m.
‘The family’s attorney, William H Shewmake, said: ‘The Zarates felt that the settlement reflects the grievous loss of their beloved Maya. And it allows the Zarates to bring some closure to a very painful chapter of their lives. They’re glad the case has been settled.’
“Both parties said in a joint statement: ‘Peta again apologises and expresses its regrets to the Zarate family for the loss of their dog Maya. Mr Zarate acknowledges that this was an unfortunate mistake by Peta and the individuals involved, with no ill will toward the Zarate family.’”
In short, an unfortunate single incident was put forth by Washington as typifying the practice and operating principle of an entire organization, based entirely on the allegations of the injured party. This incident took place seven years ago, yet Washington’s account of it, and his unsupported assertions about it, remain on the internet today. The general principal this illustrates was nicely put in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: “One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.” It matters not how often or how thoroughly some statement on the internet has been debunked; unless someone takes the trouble to remove it, it will live on so long as the internet exists. And if someone does take the trouble to remove the original statement, no one on earth will be able to remove all the forwarded copies of it. A lie will not have any number of lives at all. It will be immortal.
Back when computers were a novelty, my community college – and I’m sure countless other schools – felt obliged to create a course called “Computer Literacy,” which taught students such things as where the “on” switch was, and, perhaps, how to negotiate one of the early languages such as MS-DOS. After a while, it also introduced them to the internet, and to such arcana as how to reach a website by typing in its url. The course offered nothing in the way of critical examination of the content to be encountered on the internet.
It seems glaringly obvious to me that our schools, starting at the elementary level, need to create and make mandatory a radically revised version of “Computer Literacy” courses, one that equips all citizens with methods necessary to separate propaganda, manipulation, lies, from useful information. We should have been doing this all along, of course, but the need has become acute now that a lie can fly around the world in seconds. Another observation about lies has been widely, though falsely, attributed as well to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.”
When Twain lived, he would have been thinking of the telegraph.
The observation goes back at least as far as Jonathan Swift, who would have been thinking of the speed of sailing ships. Neither could have imagined the viral speed with which information – and misinformation – can encircle today’s globe.
I am about the last person competent to devise the curriculum of the sort of course I have in mind. I use the internet for various purposes, but it is not my world, and I know essentially nothing about how it works. But I do know plenty about how liars work, and I know what anyone who’s survived for seventy-some years in this society knows about what bullshit sounds like. So I can at least offer a few general suggestions about my suggested Internet Self-Defense Course.
If you come upon a statement alleging something is true, the first thing you do is look for supporting evidence. If none is offered, you have no reason to accept the allegation, unless you can corroborate it from your own experience and observation, and even then, you can’t say you’re certain. The sky is blue – go look. Yup: looks blue, even though it isn’t.
If supporting evidence is offered or alleged to exist, what are its sources? Are they believable? Are they known to have specific ideological or political agendas? If the evidence is based on “studies,” “surveys,” or “research,” who paid for them, and what was their methodology?
Many more questions need to be asked before you accept some statement as accurate, but to teach people how to answer even those very basic ones would not be the work of a week or a month of classes. As I tried to demonstrate when talking about my search for the meaning of “positron emission tomography,” even the attempt to answer those basic questions is fraught with difficulty, and usually raises further questions that raise further questions that raise further questions . . . . So my suggested course should offer students some reasonable criteria for reaching a verdict. While the more you know, the more you know you don’t know anything for sure, the fact remains that eventually you have to act, and action requires reaching an assessment of a situation.
For if you don’t act, your puppies will never be safe from Tom Cruise and his kind.
