Several years ago, I was a juror on a trial in which Goeffrey Loftus was an expert witness for the defense. He testified regarding the fallible nature of eyewitness testimony. If his name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s the ex-husband of noted memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus. In an effort to discredit Loftus the prosecution asked whether Loftus had also investigated the moon illusion, which of course he had. It was an obvious appeal to the lowest common denominator intellectually, as there are always going to be those who have no idea what the moon illusion is, therefore the study of it must be “loony.”
I’ve read a number of essays regarding the moon illusion, some written prosaically and some highly technical. In all the work I’ve read on the subject, I’ve yet to come across what I believe is a rather simple possible explanation, and one whose fundamental principles were understood several hundred years ago!
At this point I need to make an admission. I have failed to do the serious bibliographic work required to get an essay like this taken seriously. I don’t have a degree in psychology or art history so some might dismiss my musings due to lack of credentials. I accept that, yet I’m convinced that my suggestion is at least plausible. Please take this essay for what it is, a suggestion, a preliminary sketch of an idea, not a rigorous argument.
For those not familiar with the moon illusion, it’s the psychological phenomenon whereby a full moon on the horizon seems unusually large; larger than when it’s high in the sky. Astronomers are quick to point out that it’s not an astronomical phenomenon, and defer to psychologists and those specialized in human optical and spatial perception.
For many people “perspective” in art means spatial perspective, i.e. how is three dimensional space depicted? But there is also “aerial perspective” which is (roughly) what effect the atmosphere has on perception of objects at a distance.
Let’s take a look at two paintings from the Renaissance, which will hopefully demonstrate what I’m talking about. The first is Giovanni Bellini’s Pieta’. Obviously the figure of Christ is the focus of the painting, but carefully examine the hillside behind Mary. It doesn’t seem quite “right,” does it? It almost feels composited, as if George Lucas had created it.
Now compare Bellini’s painting to Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. The rocks in the far distance are far more realistic, and part of the reason why is that Da Vinci’s work was more attentive to aerial perspective than Bellini’s.
When objects are seen at great distances in our atmosphere, they are seen through large masses of air. This tends to do several things. It reduces the contrast of the object as compared with objects at close range, and it reduces detail.
A weird counter-example is how astronauts walking on the moon have reported underestimating the length to big boulders seen at a distance. Da Vinci understood this hundreds of years ago, and astronauts of the 20th century discovered it for themselves: The mass of air between one and a distant object affects one’s spatial perception of the object’s distance.
So how does this factor into the moon illusion? When the moon is at the horizon, several factors are in effect. First off one is looking through a greater mass of air than when the moon is high in the sky. Just like the distant rocks in Da Vinci’s painting, the moon has less detail than when it’s high in the sky. Because the full moon rises not long after the sun sets, the moon also has less contrast against the still-illuminated sky in which it rises.
In my opinion, these two characteristics are sufficient to trigger the brain’s natural perception that the moon is at a great distance. From there our brains naturally adjudge the object to have great absolute size, thus the perception that the moon is larger at the horizon.
In my opinion, the moon illusion is nothing more than a rather unique example of the brain’s natural reaction to aerial perspective.
Several weeks back, librarian and MetaFilter moderator Jessamyn West contacted me and asked for my mailing address. She wanted to send me a surprise gift. I soon received a copy of a novel by Joseph A. Citro entitled The Gore. Jessamyn was curious as to what I thought of the book, so by way of thanks I thought I’d jot down this review.
First off, I think Jessamyn was aware of my interest in Bigfootery, as the book incorporates Bigfoot into the story, albeit in a somewhat tangential way. Citro is a New England author of both fiction and non-fiction, whose subject matter is largely Fortean or supernatural.
Unfortunately, I may not be the best person to give an incisive analysis of a work of fiction, as I’ve read very little of it during my lifetime! My favorite author of fiction is Joseph Wambaugh, who writes about police work in Southern California. In the late 1990’s I went absolutely ga-ga over his masterpiece of burlesque and tragedy, The Choirboys.
Here I’ll put in the obligatory disclaimer that the following review contains spoilers. I think today’s de facto alert is supposed to look like this:
**************************SPOILER ALERT************************
The book’s title itself is a great teaser, as one naturally thinks of horror fiction as incorporating “gore” in the sense of blood and dismemberment. But Citro works in a clever double entendre, as “gore” can also mean a triangular plot of land that is a sort of irregular leftover from roughly orthogonal land division. Indeed, our story takes place in a forested Vermont gore. The novel was first entitled The Unseen, so the title change worked well.
The story starts tragically, as “Lunker” Lavigne sees something in the gore that so disturbs him he commits suicide. We don’t get to learn the identity of what he saw until the end of the book. A variety of characters intersect socially and geographically to investigate the gore’s goings-on.
Citro incorporates two Fortean elements into the novel to create his boogeyman. Native American legends about the “Wild Man of the Woods” are as varied as there are tribes, but one of the more well known is the “Windigo.” This monster is malevolent to be sure, and fits in well in a horror novel. But some of the human characters in the novel can’t be sure of what they saw, and suggest it’s our old friend Bigfoot.
Citro has managed to glean enough from the subculture of Bigfootery to know that some Bigooters, particularly Kathy Strain, have seriously proposed that Native American Wildman legends such as the Windigo are actually derived from a biologically real Bigfoot. It’s amusing to me as a resident of the Pacific Northwest to have witnessed the steady growth of the putative habitat of the Sasquatch from the late 1960’s until the present. Back in the late 1960’s, the dominant Bigfoot advocate argument was that the forests of the Pacific Northwest offered a habitat sufficiently vast and rugged to allow a cryptid megafauna like Sasquatch to evade human detection. But as time went on, reports from areas outside the Pacific Northwest began to come in. This presented a conundrum for the advocates, as the argument from habitat had to be quietly set aside. As one Sasquatch skeptic who posts as “LTC8K6” on the James Randi Educational Forums succinctly put it: “Bigfoot is everywhere, yet nowhere.” Indeed, anecdotal sightings of Sasquatch are now recorded for the entire North American continent. If Bigfooters dismiss sightings from states like Missouri or Kansas out of hand, then the same logic could be applied to sightings in the Pacific Northwest…
As far as the novel goes, Citro is accurately depicting the current state of affairs; people in places like Vermont or New York occasionally report seeing Bigfoot, despite the ludicrous lack of biological evidence for such an animal.
Citro works in the theme of the Underground Railroad, which is of course an historical reality. But that too is the subject of exaggeration and mythology as well. Like all works of fiction, you start with something real, then augment and fine tune it.
Certain story elements didn’t quite work for me, as numerous human characters survive horrific and violent encounters only to recover and go back for more. For me, this had a bit of a Wylie Coyote feel to it, lacking only the Acme anvil. In real life, even a sprained ankle can be deadly out in the woods, yet Citro’s characters survive much worse injuries.
I’m sorry to report that Citro made a glaring technical error on pages 209 and 211 by including a safety on a snub nosed .38.
The dues ex machina of the novel is that the Wendigos are really humans after all, reduced to living in a feral state. Interesting but implausible; I think I would have enjoyed the monsters remaining Windigos.
An even stranger literary genre than Fortean horror fiction are books about Bigfoot “habituation” in which individuals periodically encounter and interact with Sasquatch. Despite the best efforts of individuals like Jeff Meldrum or the producers of TV’s Monserquest to legitimize the oft-mocked topic of Bigfoot, these books push the envelope of credulity to the outer limits. These accounts often become ripe objects of scorn, even within the subculture of Bigfootery itself.
In the end, I’m probably not the best candidate to review a book like The Gore, as I’ve read so much literature on the subject of Bigfoot that Citro’s novel just doesn’t seem that striking to me. The “fringe” of Bigfootery is so vastly weirder and wilder than Citro’s novel that what’s claimed as fact by some outshines even Citro’s fiction.
Thanks again for the book, Jessamyn, the world needs more spontaneous gift giving!
Growing up in Missoula, Montana our family didn’t dine at restaurants very often. In fact the number of times that we as a whole family went out to eat I could count on the fingers of one hand…
I didn’t travel much as a child either. The first time I was out of the state of Montana for more than a day was when I visited my grandmother and cousins in Los Angeles during the summer of 1984. This was shortly before my 22nd birthday. I was immediately impressed by the quality of the Mexican food in this exotic new place. I’ve been back to LA a number of times since then, and I’ve never failed to find world class Mexican food almost everywhere I go. I’ve had excellent Mexican food in San Francisco as well.
I moved to Seattle in August of 1987. At the time I had a naïve fantasy that Seattle was a major West Coast metropolis, and so I’d be able to find Mexican food as easily as I did in LA. NOT SO! Way back then, there was no World Wide Web, so you couldn’t just search the Internet for suggestions. Various Seattle hipsters suggested that Mama’s Mexican Kitchen downtown was really good, but I was shocked at how bland it was. To this day I can’t understand how anyone in their right mind thinks that place is any better than Azteca. Have they ever been to Southern California?
For several years I would read the local free tabloids like the Weekly or the Stranger, especially when they published their annual “Best of Seattle” issue. I would dutifully trot off and eat at whatever restaurant they claimed was Seattle’s Best. Inevitably they would serve refried beans, not boiled beans. The refried beans generally tasted like they came from a number 10 can…
Eventually I gave up. It was particularly galling when I would eat at Mexican restaurants far away from Mexico that would have better food than what Seattle had. I’ve had better Mexican food in Toronto than in Seattle!
But hope never dies, and several years ago I found a place in White Center, Taqueria Guaymas, that I thought was quite good. I still hold my head high if I take a guest there. Recently there’s been an explosion of taco carts around Seattle, most of which I haven’t checked out. I have it on good authority that there are a number of them that are quite decent.
I’ve known that there was a Mexican restaurant literally a few blocks away from where I live for some time now, but I’d never bothered to check it out. Last weekend a friend of mine whose judgment I trust gave it high praise. Tonight I checked it out, and I can honestly say that it’s the best Mexican food I’ve had in Seattle.
Congratulations Huarachitos Mexican Taqueria! Tonight I had my default dinner which is chicken with mole sauce, and everything was outstanding. Boiled beans instead of number 10 can refried beans. Spanish rice done right which didn’t taste like Rice-a-Roni. The chicken was cooked perfectly, and smothered in one of the best, if not THE best mole sauces I’ve ever had.
I have only two minor complaints. The default appetizer was an interesting mixture of pickled carrot slices and chilies. I was expecting jalapeño peppers, but whatever green chilies they served were quite bland. The bottled hot sauces on the table weren’t particularly hot. Frankly I can hardly fault Huarachitos, as Seattle really doesn’t do HOT. At most Asian places I’ve eaten at 5 stars hot is usually “meh” for me…
Seriously, check this place out! I’ve been on this quest since 1987. Like Jimmy Page during his Song Remains the Same fantasy sequence, I have climbed the mountain and reached the pinnacle. Like Jimmy, I saw into my own soul. I had a culinary epiphany on Epiphany. You can too. If you drive, you will probably have to find parking on the side streets. The address is 5418 MLK Jr. Way S. and the phone is 206-568-3019.
UPDATE: I’m afraid that this restaurant has experienced a major fire, and is now closed:
I left pharmacy for good in 2002. Since then when I meet people I inevitably get asked, usually with some degree of amazement, why I did such a thing. Being a pharmacist is seen by most people as classy, high paying job with a reasonable degree of social status. Why would I give that up?
Usually my responses are vague and perfunctory. My basic theory is there are at least two subjects that people don’t like hearing about; descriptions of dreams, and job discontents. For years I’ve thought of writing down all the little things that added up to my decision to leave pharmacy forever. I thought it might act as sort of a purgative, a way to get rid of the bad memories. But in the end, I decided this would be counter-productive, as I would probably come across as a bitter and disgruntled person.
But there’s one pharmacy story that’s bigger than my own personal discontent, and I think it’s striking enough to write down. It’s a wild story, and if you find yourself skeptical about my claims, I invite you to ask other pharmacists who worked in the South Seattle or Burien areas during the late 80’s and early 90’s for their own accounts. I’m quite confident that you would get a very similar story.
Our story is one of corruption. Corruption that goes on for years, corruption which everyone knows about and about which nothing is done. Our story is about a corrupt doctor. I’ll call him Victor Charlie, as I’d rather avoid becoming embroiled in libel litigation.
First off, I worked for a local pharmacy chain in the late 80’s and early 90’s called Pay ‘n Save. They are no longer in business, as I believe they were bought out by Payless in about 1994. I was promoted from being a staff pharmacist at Westwood Village in West Seattle to head pharmacist at a store in Burien. At the time, I was the youngest head pharmacist in the chain.
I had filled some prescriptions for Doctor Victor Charlie in West Seattle, so I knew a little bit about him. But when I got to Burien, the number of prescriptions I was filling for him probably increased by a factor of five or six, as his office was literally just up the street.
Now at this point, I need to make clear that some of this story is information I gained second-hand, and some is direct and personal. I was told, but did not know for a fact, that VC’s office was also his home, and that his “secretary” was his wife.
VC was not allowed to prescribe controlled substances. This is an indication of the power of the DEA, a Federal agency, which issues licenses to Doctors which allow them to prescribe controlled substances. Even before I worked in Burien, I heard wild tales of why VC’s DEA license had been stripped. Again, the stories were so outrageous that I was skeptical of them. So over time, I began asking as many pharmacists as I could whether the stories were true. Indeed, to a person, they would all describe the same scenario. Evidently, during VC’s heyday, he would simply write three prescriptions for each and every patient that he saw, regardless of their medical condition or lack thereof. Prescription one was for a pint bottle (473ml) of Tussionex. Prescription two was for 100 ten milligram Valium tablets. Prescription three was for 100 Percodan or Percocet tablets. I know this sounds like a complete whopper of a tale, as the abuse pattern is obvious. But as I say, I spoke to numerous pharmacists, and they all told me the same thing, right down the particular drugs and quantities.
Well, the “patients” of Doctor VC had to get their scripts filled somewhere, and so to the local pharmacies they went. I was told by the same pharmacists that VC’s clients would be literally standing in line outside the various pharmacies in South Seattle to get their scripts filled first thing in the morning as the stores opened.
Needless to say, abuse on this scale raises red flags immediately with any moral individual, and soon enough the DEA stripped VC’s license to prescribe controlled substances. Amazingly enough though, he still retained his Washington State Medical License!
By the time I came onto the scene, VC still had an active State License, and was still prescribing drugs. But now he had figured out his Great Loophole. He found a buzz drug which was not a controlled substance! This was the magical Soma, whose generic name is carisoprodol. If you have received spam e-mail mentioning “Soma” and wondered why, now you know. For some odd reason, the DEA did not classify it as a controlled substance, even though it’s a highly euphoric downer. I see by the Wikipedia article on carisoprodol that the legal status has now changed, but again I’m talking about the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.
VC prescribed nothing but Soma. His prescriptions all read “Soma #C i TID” then his signature on the “substitution permitted” line. On ONE occasion as a pharmacist, I saw him write a script for HCTZ for a woman. I flat out told the gal what VC was all about. I suspect she had no idea he was a corrupt scumbag, and blundered into him by chance. I suggested she find another doctor.
At this point our story gets ugly, as the raw and corrupt nature of the situation comes to light. Almost all of VC’s clients were on welfare or DSHS, as it’s known here in Washington. The claim that I heard second hand, but could not verify directly, was that DSHS would not reimburse VC for client visits, and so VC would have to charge his legion of scrotes actual cash money for their office visits. Right there, if true it proved corruption and abuse by ALL his DSHS clients, as a genuine and legitimate welfare client wouldn’t pay out of pocket for an office visit.
But the deal was, DSHS would reimburse the pharmacies for the DRUGS THEMSELVES! And here I will publicly admit my shame in participating in this corruption. As a pharmacist, I had a legal right to refuse to fill VC’s scripts. But I didn’t. Why not? Because I had a strong intuition that If I did so, VC would complain to the higher-ups at Pay ‘n Save, and that Pay ‘n Save wouldn’t back me up.
Virtually ALL of VC’s clients were on DSHS. The taxpayers of Washington State were being ripped off for thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars each year, just so the clients of VC could get high. In just the 2 years or so I worked at the Burien location, I must have dispensed 100,000 hits of generic Soma from VC, all billed to DSHS and the taxpayers of Washington.
As a weird aside, all of this was occurring before the World Wide Web. VC had hundreds of clients, seemingly all the human garbage of South King County on his Rolodex. It continuously amazed me how sheer word-of-mouth power was able to connect so many individuals into a gigantic drug-scrote network.
For years after I left pharmacy, I couldn’t even read stories on the Internet about new drugs or medical treatments. It brought back too much negative emotional baggage. I’m mostly over that now, but from time to time, you hear about some horrific human tragedy that occurs because Washington DSHS dropped the ball. Well, I’m here to tell you that DSHS knew perfectly well about the egregious corruption of VC which went on for YEARS, and did nothing about it. And the Washington Board of Medicine was also to blame, as they too did NOTHING. Both of them were taxpayer-funded agencies of flaccid, impotent, castrated eunuchs.
I left Pay ‘n Save in 1992 to go on the road as a sideshow performer. I did that until 1994 when I became a pharmacist again. By this time Pay ‘n Save had been bought out and I was employed elsewhere. Sometime in 1994 or 1995 I received a memo in the interoffice mail that VC’s Washington State Medical License had finally been stripped! As a gag, I called him up and asked him about it. I asked him what to do if I got one of his prescriptions. He claimed he was fighting his battle in court, and that his prescriptions were still valid…
Using the power of the Internet, this afternoon I googled VC’s name and discovered that he continued to prescribe Soma and another drug called Nubain after the board had stripped his license! Indeed, according to court documents, his “clinic” was adjacent to his house. The police set up a sting operation, and VC’s property was seized when drugs were found in his residence and “clinic.” You would think that this would shut the guy down for good, but amazingly enough, he and his wife beat the asset forfeiture rap in court!
The cynicism I have about certain aspects of the medical establishment and the abuse of the welfare system is still hard to shuck. When I read that Michael Jackson’s doctor had not been stripped of his California Medical license even after Jackson’s autopsy verdict came back as homicide, I wasn’t really that surprised…
I’m very late coming into this discussion, so perhaps this post won’t have much impact. But it feels good to put one’s thoughts in order, so I decided to write this piece.
I’ve followed with some degree of care the ongoing debate within the skeptical community about Phil Plait’s now famous “Don’t be a dick” speech at the most recent JREF meeting. When a video of the speech was posted I watched and listened carefully. Most of the salient points about his speech have already been made by others, so what little novel input I can give comes more from a personal and therefore anecdotal perspective.
First off, I have to agree with those critical of Plait in that Plait segues between a person-to-person encounter to impersonal or public pronouncements without clearly demarcating the two. I completely agree with Plait that an in-your-face confrontation is not likely to sway opinion. I remember some years ago reading in Fortean Times about the “moon landing hoax.” While I never seriously doubted that we went to the moon and back, I was significantly flummoxed by the claims that the photographs taken on the moon were faked. Remember, The United States federal government lied to the public about all sorts of much more significant issues like Watergate, Vietnam casualties, and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, just to name a few. Faking photographs as a propaganda move during the cold war frankly didn’t seem that far fetched to me.
Several years after being exposed to the Fortean Times article I ran into a website that went into great detail about the nature of the photography on the moon. Frankly it was a sort of “face palm” moment for me, as it made me realize that I was a total beginner at understanding photography and optical perspective, and was easily taken in by the bogus arguments of the moon landing “hoax” proponents.
In the meantime I attended a social gathering at the Seattle Space Needle in celebration of Yuri Gagarin’s space flight. There I met a man who had worked for NASA. Being a genuinely curious person, I asked him his thoughts on the “moon landing hoax.” His reaction was immediate and totally negative. In essence he stated that the claims were so prima facie ludicrous that they weren’t even worthy of debating. Needless to say, I didn’t come away with any greater understanding of why the photos seemed anomalous. Was he a “dick?” Yeah, he was kind of a dick.
I suspect Plait was put in the unenviable position of actually having to name names if he decided to create a provisional definition of what constitutes a “dick.” But he didn’t and therein lies the big problem. You can’t have a meaningful debate if you’re using fuzzy terms. It reminds me of high school, where we spent inordinate amounts of time arguing what rock bands were “cool.” Concepts like “cool” and “dickishness” are human valuational constructs, and as such lie outside of the realms of science or logic.
One of the more thoughtful rejoinders to Plait’s speech was made by Richard Dawkins, who argued that it’s often third parties reading these exchanges who are swayed, rather than the direct target of the criticism. From my perspective, I can totally agree with this.
Previously I’d written about my encounters with the tracts of Jack T. Chick. While I was never a particularly devout Christian, I still clung to that belief system up until I was about 17. But by the time I got to high school, various things began to make me confused. While I was a lukewarm Lutheran, I had a friend who was a fundamentalist, or at least his parents were fundamentalists. At the time, I was a big fan of Houdini, and I remember my friend’s mother telling me that perhaps Houdini was in league with the Devil, who enabled his escapes. Well, I knew that was obvious bullshit, so cracks in the façade were beginning to form.
My fundamentalist friend took me to a revival meeting, where I witnessed dozens, if not hundreds of people speaking in tongues. As you might imagine, this really blew my mind! I asked one of the Lutheran pastors about this, and he gave me a rather unctuous and dismissive answer, to the effect that “we really don’t do that.” This was one of my first introductions to the schismatic nature of the Christian religion.
But the big break came by reading Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary. It was a sort of humor that went far beyond the simplicity of anything I’d ever seen on TV; sort of like Mad Magazine on steroids. Obviously I had to look up a lot of words, and ask my father about a lot of historical background, but in general I found it very funny.
Bierce was blasphemous, to be sure. But he spread his blasphemy around quite evenly, which suggested that religion was a pathology of mankind, and had existed in many forms and many places since the beginning of recorded history. He was making one of the simplest and most fundamental of atheist arguments, albeit in a roundabout and oblique way; everyone thinks their religion it the One True Religion, and that every other religion is false. Without solid evidence, belief in any particular religion is no better than belief in any other. Belief in the divinity of Thor is just as valid as belief in the divinity of Jesus, which is to say there is no good reason to believe in the divinity of either one!
Was Bierce a “dick?” Well, my mother, who was a Lutheran, certainly thought so, although she would never use such crude language… But my point is that I was reading Bierce as a rather disengaged third party. He certainly didn’t write; “Matt Crowley, you are a fool and an asshole for believing this religious garbage.” I agree with Dawkins that judicious application of humor, sarcasm, wit, and yes, blasphemy, can actually win hearts and minds.
Later on, I found Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian, was utterly blown away by it, and never looked back. Russell’s demeanor was much more urbane than Bierce’s and of course his book was not intended as humor but as a somewhat technical argument against religious belief.
Is Dawkins a “dick?” I don’t think so, but of course I also think Led Zeppelin was the greatest rock band of all time. Both “dick” and “greatest” are human valuational constructs, which cannot be empirically or logically defined. I find Dawkins to be as urbane as Russell, at least in his on-camera presentations. His writings are sometimes more biting. But I think Dawkins’ vitriol is entirely justified, as his enemy, organized religion, is one of the most destructive and evil institutions in the history of mankind.
So who’s a “dick?” well it pains me to say this, but I think Penn Jillette is a dick. Like Ted Nugent, Penn’s personality is so over-the-top that he ends up being a poor spokesman for his cause. Penn’s constant resort to loud-mouthed vulgarity, mockery, and ad hom attacks on his opponents are entirely counterproductive. A sad figure is just that, sad, but when a sad figure is mercilessly mocked, they become a martyr.
I’ve met Penn, albeit briefly, and my impression is that his on-camera persona is very much like his real life persona. I remember trying to congratulate him on mentioning Avogadro’s number in their act, but evidently I misquoted the exponent. Penn was quick to correct me, smugly and condescendingly. I’ve had the pleasure of spending quality time with Teller, and he is perhaps the most genteel man I’ve ever met, diametrically opposite to Penn’s behavior. The great mistake that Penn makes is mocking those who really don’t deserve it. It’s disturbing to see ordinary people being used as guinea pigs to demonstrate a point, like signing a petition against “Dihydrogen Monoxide”, or drinking tap water claimed to be bottled water. You are a professional magician, you have staged the con, yet you make people look like fools for behaving in the very way you coerced them to.
Is PZ Meyers a “dick?” I don’t think so, but then again I think Caravaggio was the greatest painter of all time. I can’t prove either assertion empirically or logically. It seems to me that Meyers picks and chooses his targets carefully, and his targets are eminently worthy of being called out.
Taking a step back here, I think Plait made an unfortunate logical transition at the beginning of his speech, namely by equating a face-to-face interaction with (presumably) what is written on the Internet. It hardly bears mentioning, but the relative facelessness of the Internet has ramped up the level of vitriol and meanness in ALL areas of social interaction, not just skepticism.
I’m curious as to Plait’s take on pre-Internet “dicks.” How about H.L. Mencken? Ambrose Bierce? The Chicago Seven? Again we don’t know, because Plait didn’t specify. I can’t be the first person to have mentioned this, but it’s kind of like Joe McCarthy claiming there were “X” number of communists within the Federal government, yet not naming them. If there REALLY was such a problem, you have to be specific. It’s like taking your car that won’t start to a mechanic and being told “Your car’s really being a dick.”
I’m also pained by watching the near-fanatical and overwrought defense of Plait’s speech. It seems to me the point was made the first time around, and further hand-wringing only comes across as self-righteous moral superiority. “Let he who is without dick cast the first dick.” Jesus dude, gimme a break, this bleat sounds like Bono.
To summarize my own take on the subject from personal experience, I don’t find all biting wit to be counter-productive to effective “outreach.” Sometimes “biting wit” goes too far and becomes venal and ugly, like certain episodes of South Park. I can understand why Plait chose not to name names as being examples of “dicks” as this would be grossly divisive toward skepticism as a whole. Yet this is why this issue will never be resolved; unless you name names, or provisionally define what “dickish” behavior is, you cannot meaningfully discuss it, anymore than you can meaningfully say who the “greatest” rock band is.
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