So someone you like is accused of something bad

In these times we feel an instinctive reaction, we want to believe that the people we like are not Bad People. We find ourselves tempted to defend them, to say nice things about them, to paint their behavior in the best light and read their apologies with rose-colored glasses.

I would like to offer some rebuttals to the thoughts you may be having.

1. “I want to say something in his defense”

Ok, but do you need to say something right now? Is what you’re about to say going to add something to the conversation? Is it possible to just wait until you know more before you weigh in on these particular accusations?

So often with these stories, after the first accusations, more end up being brought forward. Do you want to have gone to the mat for someone only to find out there are a lot more stories waiting in the wings? Is it possible that your skepticism could be misplaced or even that you could hold onto it for a few days and see how it all shakes out? Is this comment right now going to help anyone or just make you feel better about having liked this guy before?

Are you just trying not to feel guilty about liking someone? It’s ok that you liked him, he was very likable, it was probably his job to be liked. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.

2. “But I’m a good judge of character”

You probably are a good judge of character insofar as it involves how people are going to act towards you, especially if you’ve actually met the person involved. The thing is, it’s likely that you haven’t met the person involved and, if you have, that you didn’t met the person in the same circumstances as those that are accusing him. Lots of people would vouch for the character of Jeffrey Epstein, but most of those people wouldn’t be teenage girls.

Even people who abuse a lot of people don’t abuse most of the people they interact with. Most people are safe around most abusers most of the time. This is especially true for people who are successful. They’ve got jobs and things to do with their time. It’s not abuse 24/7.

It’s not your fault that you didn’t know about these character flaws, they weren’t aimed at you. But maybe give a little benefit of the doubt to people in a better position to know. Especially if the person you like confirms that the accusers actually did know and interact with him in ways that mostly match the accusers stories.

3. “But this person in particular seems so nice and good”

Ah yes, this guy is not like so-and-so who seemed like he was so angry or creepy with women, he’s downright affable and friendly. How could he have done a Bad Thing? He’s professional and a good guy? So many of these other accused people were openly jerks, but not this one that I like!

Well, being nice and affable doesn’t prevent you from being a jerk in private. In fact, it helps you get away with being a jerk in private. Even when you’re not doing it on purpose to get away with stuff, the fact that people like you means you will get away with more stuff and won’t be held accountable for your actions. It means you’re more likely to have crossed boundaries without being called on it because no one wanted to tell the nice guy he wasn’t being nice.

Best case scenario, it means a mostly good person never had the opportunity to learn to be better because no one called him on his shit. Worst case, he’s using his niceness to hide his not niceness. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trust someone just because they seem nice, it just means that if you don’t know someone very well, what they seem like isn’t very much to go on, one way or the other.

Anyway most people aren’t all one thing or the other. People are complicated, someone can do a bad thing without being a bad person, and still deserve to face repercussions for that. Unless you are his personal friend or family, you’re probably not the support network he needs right now.

4. “But I really like his work”

His work doesn’t disappear because he’s been accused of something, and even if he’s held accountable for his actions, the penalty is generally not the erasure from existence all previously published work. You can still watch the show and it still has value. You just no longer have the luxury of enjoying this work without knowing the context of the creator. Everyone gets to decide how to cope with the context of the creator in their own way.

It’s also important to remember that often their work comes at a greater cost than we can know, all the people they abused who left their industry whose work we will never see and the human cost on how that abuse shaped those people for the rest of their lives.

5. “Fine but his position/fame is too valuable to my cause to lose”

So this is a question of strategic value, and it is a cold and calculating one that has nothing to do with who you believe but what is most useful to you for others to believe, but let’s be honest: is he really that valuable? And are you in any position to be the strategic mastermind here? Are your comments online going to be the thing that gets people to dismiss the accusations and rally around your hero to your cause? Is your flawed hero really better for your cause than someone new or different?

And finally, to return to #1, are you sure you want to defend him right now, before the facts are known, before other stories have come to light? Are you sure that’s strategically valuable? And are you sure that being his defender right now is going to be a good look for you in a week or a month? And if it is, why not wait a week or a month and say it then?

So someone you like is accused of something bad
{advertisement}

75 Books 41-45: George, Adams, Hines, and Tyson

Bitch, I will cut you

41. Dragon Slippers – Jessica Day George

Having read her version of 12 Dancing Princesses and liked it, I thought I’d find some of her other work. This is her first novel, and it is quite different than the Princesses, in a good way. It reminds me very much of Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons series, but is slightly less flip. I enjoyed it. A

42. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams

I had read this a long, long time ago, probably when I was 15 or so. I love Douglas Adams. It was interesting to go back and read this after having read all of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s work. It’s amazing how much they remind me of one another. It also reminds me of Dr. Who/Torchwood, now that I’ve seen a bit of that. I love it all. A

43. Goblin Hero – Jim C. Hines

I actually had to buy this book because the library only has the first and last in the series. This one was not as good as the first one, but I admire the fact that Hines added new characters and didn’t continue to focus solely on Jig. The thing is that when you write a book that has a complete character arc, it’s very difficult to follow it up with another book about the same character and also have a complete character arc. He cleverly kept the same character, but added someone else to support the arc thing. I didn’t like it as much as Goblin Tales (see 46), but it was good. B

44. Dragon Flight – Jessica Day George

This is the sequel to Dragon Slippers and it was quite good. I’m not sure if she wrote the first one with the intention of following it up, but it is a very natural continuation of the story, I thought she handled it quite well. The dragon characters are surprisingly complex, as are the intercontinental politics. B

45. The Pluto Files – NdGT

I am in love with Neil deGrasse Tyson. He is so hysterically funny and bombastic and snarky.  But he killed Pluto, and that was so sad.  But today they discovered a fourth moon for Pluto, so maybe Pluto’s going to be OK.  This just tells the story of the downfall of Pluto, it’s very good.  A-

75 Books 41-45: George, Adams, Hines, and Tyson

TAM Friday

First up this morning was a marginal breakfast.  I don’t understand this — why do people put cooked fruit into things that don’t need cooked fruit.  Cooked fruit is not chocolate.  It does not make things better.  It makes them measurably much worse.  Croissants don’t need jelly on the inside.  It’s gross.

George Hrab opened the conference with a brilliant song, the best part of which was the direction to make sure that any questions you direct at a speaker are actually questions, not opinions, speeches, or comments on the speaker.  It was pretty funny.

Michael Shermer was first up and I literally don’t remember what he talked about.  I was not awake and not that interested, so I guess it just didn’t stick.

Then there was a panel, Skepticism and TV.  I got over the fact that *I* wasn’t on the panel, but I have to say it is really hard to look at these panels of old white guys and think that they’ve made the effort to get more than one point of view.  When they found out Adam Savage wasn’t coming, they had the opportunity to try to get a minority or a woman on the panel, and they didn’t.  Which was a shame because everyone on the panel agreed with one another and didn’t have a lot of useful advice on how to get more skepticism on TV.

Here’s the thing, when you don’t have young people talking about what’s going on, you miss stuff.  If you don’t have women, or mothers, or people of color, or people from different socio-economic levels, you don’t hear about whether people are actually being exposed to skepticism on TV.

Did the old white men mention any of the children’s programming out there?  No, not at all.  And that’s probably the place where you see the most skepticism incorporated into fiction storylines.  Look at Dora the Explorer, or any of the other investigative type shows that are aimed at kids.  Those teach critical thinking and why don’t they think that that qualifies as skepticism on TV.  Yes, you watch Bones or whatever and it’s absurd and not related to real critical thinking, but prime time adult television is not the only thing on TV.  There’s more than the Discovery Channel.

They also talked a lot about editing and how to get around being edited in ways they don’t want to be.  I’ll just say that it’s almost impossible to get by a determined editor.  They’re tricksy people.

*deep breath*

Yes, so I took some issues with that panel.

Next up was Lawrence Krauss.  A few months ago, Krauss made some statements in support of his friend who was an admitted rapist of underage girls.  There was a fair amount of backlash, and threats to walk out on him at TAM.  If that happened, I couldn’t tell.  There’s so many people in and out of the room anyway, it wouldn’t have been noticed, but also I think that elevatorgate has so overshadowed this that no one quite cared as much.

He gave a history lesson on Richard Feynman, which was OK, but I wasn’t that interested in a biography.

Then Jamy Ian Swiss led James Randi and two others in a recap of Project Alpha, which was when two magicians pretend to have Uri Gelleresque powers for several years and the lab believed them despite the fact that it was very obvious what they were doing.  Embarrassing for science, but kind of hilarious for magicians.  It shows how lame psychics are.

Eugenie Scott was up next, but I didn’t listen to that talk, I looked at books and walked around.  I wasn’t very interested in Climate Change Denial and I was tired and wanted to move around.  I’m trying to get over feeling guilty for not going to every talk, but it’s uncomfortable to sit all day.

And then it was lunch — I sat with the amazing Greta Christina and several other really cool people.  Elevatorgate was the primary topic, but what I liked that we talked about was how the movement needs to be getting people in disadvantaged circumstances involved.  So many people who are in the movement are there because they are the ones who can afford it.  If you look at where the large populations of black people are, they are also poor places with strong religious communities.  South Carolina and Mississippi have huge percentage of black people in their population, and those are places where being an atheist is not necessarily safe but more importantly, these are places where there are problems facing the community that are so much more pressing than religion.  Teen Pregnancy, education, jail time.  These are problems that the skeptic community should be working on, because we can’t get people to participate if they’re struggling to live.  Let’s get people in better life circumstances so that they can spend time on education and learning to be scientifically literate.  And it’s not just the South, of course, it’s inner city, it’s Detroit, it’s Compton.

Ok, sorry, off the soapbox.

After lunch, it was just pure uninterrupted awesomeness.

Jennifer Michael Hecht spoke first, and she decided she was going to try to talk about everything that ever happened ever and that she would accomplish this by talking super fast.  She talked a lot about the history of skepticism, which is the focus of her very excellent book Doubt, A History.  She was fantastic.  She talked about the movie The Road to Wellville, and said that a lot of people who go to quacks do it because, essentially, they want the attention.  Though she also implied that women could get a happy ending from a chiropractor.

They had to cut her off before she was finished, and then it was time for PZ, who was hilarious.  Every slide had a picture of either squid or octopi, which I feel is necessary.  He was talking about the biology of aliens.  I think his most interesting point was that there are several highly intelligent animals on earth that are self-aware that we still don’t know how to communicate with, yet we’re seeking out aliens.

He was awesome, and was followed by Pamela Gay, who I didn’t particularly like.  Not that she wasn’t good, she was calling for more funding and emphasis on science.  What I didn’t like was her criticism of the skeptic movement as scattered, as though the emphasis of everyone on the movement should be on science.  The fact of the matter is that not everyone can care a lot about every cause — outrage fatigue.  Science education is important, and I’m for it and happy to support it, but it’s not what I’m particularly interested in.  It’s not the cause that I’m going to spend time on.  That’s not because I’m scattered, it’s because my time is spent elsewhere.  I appreciate her enthusiasm for the cause, but it’s not a very useful criticism.

And then it was time for the best thing I’ve ever seen ever.  I can’t wait for it to be on YouTube, because I want to watch it again.  It was a panel on the future of humans in space.  It was moderated by Phil Plait, and had Bill Nye the Science Guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Pamela Gay, and Lawrence Krauss.  NdGT started off real quiet and then he jumped in like a ninja and started kicking ass.  He thinks that we don’t spend enough money on science and we should double NASA’s budget and do everything.  The bank bailout was more money than everything we spent on NASA in its fifty year existence.  Lawrence Krauss sort of poo-pooed the idea of humans in space, and Neil deGrasse Tyson bitch slapped him, with major assistance from Bill Nye.

NdGT totally dominated, and I didn’t want it to ever end.  I would say it was impossible to follow, except it was Tyson himself who was following it up, so he was fine.  He is a great speaker — he’s funny, he’s passionate, and he knows what he’s talking about.  Once again, it was simply so amazing that it’s difficult to sum up.  His focus was on stupid things that people believe that aren’t true.  I told Jarrett that Bill Nye and NdGT should be in a buddy cop movie together, he tweeted it, and the Jen McCreight saw that NdGT in his talk was going to go on his Twitter feed and she quickly posted it AND he read it outloud.  Hysterically funny.  I want it to happen.

And when NdGT was finished, that was it for the day.  I went back to my room for a while, came back up while Jennifer Michael Hecht was doing autographs.  I sat in a throne-like chair beside her while she fielded people who wanted her signature on her books.  It was entertaining sitting on that side of the table.  After that, I went down to eat.  Saw Heidi Anderson briefly and then got ready for Penn’s Party.  I hung out with Jen McCreight and some people before the party and then it was time for Donuts and Bacon.

Penn has a band called the No God Band — they’re decent, and the party was essentially a concert for them.  They did a lot of covers and some original songs as well.  I ended up hanging with Jen some more, as well as Hemant and a few others.  I saw Christina Rad briefly, and that was fun.  It was really loud and I was really tired, so I ended up bailing after about an hour and a half.  Then I collapsed in exhaustion because my legs could no longer hold me up.

AND THAT WAS FRIDAY!

TAM Friday

Here comes TAM9 from Outer Space

image

As faithful readers of the blog will know, I am going to TAM in Las Vegas this weekend.  I am currently writing from the airplane because I was bored enough to shell out the $13.  It is the future.

Today, I will land around 1PM and then I’m going to go get food at Baja Fresh.  I’m very excited, it’s been so long since I’ve had Baja Fresh and it’s amazing.  There are workshops going on all day but I didn’t have the money to be going to all of that.  Tonight Rebecca Watson is having some thing that also costs money, so I probably won’t be going. I also don’t understand what the thing is, so that doesn’t help.

OMG trying to use wordpress from this droid browser is going to make me shoot myself. FFS.

Tonight, I am insanely going to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 at midnight. This is insane because it won’t start until 3AM east coast time, so I’m going to be very very tired. But how often do you get to go see the last Harry Potter the first night it comes out? Never, exactly.

Then tomorrow is filled with all sorts of stuff and I don’t even know what the schedule is. I feel somewhat guilty about that, like I should have paid more attention, but I’m going to all of it, so there’s no real point in looking into it more. Tomorrow night is Penn’s Donut Party, and I’m quite excited about that. I mean, it’s donuts and Penn Jillette, what isn’t to love? I even brought a special party dress! It, alas, doesn’t have a donut on it.

Saturday is more talks that I don’t remember who is when, the third place WWC game is that day between France and Sweden, and I honestly don’t care that much so I probably won’t watch, and then that night I get to go to a double top secret thing that is going to be awesome so you should be jealous, and also feel pretty cheated that I won’t even tell you what it is. On Sunday, I am presenting my paper at 9:50 AM. Awesome, right? There’ll only be like a thousand people in the audience, so no pressure. Then! Then then then!!! USA vs JAPAN, EPIC BRAWL 2011!

I want the US to win, but I have to say I would be really happy for Japan if they won. The team is really amazing, and it’s the first time an Asia side has gotten this far in the WWC. Plus, the whole tsunami meltdown thing. But, I want the US to win so that people will pretend to care about womens soccer for a few more days, I would find that greatly pleasing.

I am on the plane! On the plane! So bored on the plane! I’m on a plane and it’s going fast and I got a aeronautical themed pashmina afghan

Weirdly enough, George Hrab, the MC of the event, is on the same flight as me. I met him originally at the SCA summit in Washington DC where he performed and we took silly pictures and sent a message to a friend of mine who was insane jealous. Mostly because I don’t listen to the Geologic Podcast and he does, so I don’t have a terribly good knowledge of the George Hrabness. Anyway, he’s sitting behind me and threatening to throw things at me, though I think he’s so absorbed in his iPad or whatever it is that he won’t remember to do that. Plus, they don’t hand out free snacks, which is really the best thing to throw at people.

T-minus 1 hour to Las Vegas. Woooooooo!

Hopefully you’ll get lots of really boring updates from me, because I know you’re all really friggin jealous! I’m going to be hanging out with Heidi Anderson, Jenna Marie Griffith, Jen McCreight, Neil deGrasse Tyson (he will hang out with me, dammit, it will happen), and like 200 other awesome people who are awesome.

Alright, enough of this, I’m going to go back to surfing the web in an attempt to find something to write about for social axcess, I can’t find anything worth writing about.

Here comes TAM9 from Outer Space