Numpties

Her facts are all wrong, but does she get the spirit of the thing!

Numpties, science fiction
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While Sarah Newton gets everything, but everything wrong about hard science fiction to rage against a problem with it that does not exist, she inadvertedly gets the spirit of it spot on in her introduction:

ow, a hundred or so years ago, it was widely regarded that all the known laws of physics had been discovered, and that theoretical physics was a “completed” science, with nothing more to do other than cross a few t’s and dot a few i’s. It was also believed that if you travelled more than 15 miles per hour in an automobile you’d probably suffocate…

Can you see what’s wrong with that? That’s right, “a hundred or so years ago” gets you to 1911, after the Wright Brothers, when the automobile was well on its way to become more than just a rich man’s toy and when steam locomotives had been travelling at speeds greater than fifteen miles an hour with no reports of suffocation for donkeys ages. Worse, 1911 was smack dab in the middle of the Einsteinian revolution, six years after Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis in which he introduced the special theory of relativity, his observations about the photoelectric effect that helped get quantum mechanics started, not to mention that whole E=MC squared thingie.

In this small paragraph Sarah gets her facts wrong, doesn’t think through when “a hundred years ago” was and ignores actual history and science for comforting myths about Progress — sounds remarkable like most hard science fiction to me.

(It doesn’t get much better in the rest of the post. Thanks James.)

You don’t prove your feminist credentials with racism

Feminism, Numpties, Racism
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You may know Sugar Ray Leonard as a seventies boxer. He recently released an autobiography in which he admitted he had been sexually assaulted by an unnamed boxing coach, just before the 1976 Olympic Games. Not an easy admission to make, especially not for somebody coming from the macho world of boxing. You therefore expect a leftwing, feminist blog to both take his confession seriously and treat it sensitively. Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes is here to prove you wrong:

I have a hard time imagining that a very middle aged gay man would have chosen Sugar Ray Leonard to make a sudden, un-negotiated, physical sexual assault against just as he was about to win a gold medal in BOXING. Boxing, repeatedly and skillfully and forcefully hitting an evenly matched opponent in the face and head in order to inflict damage up to and including knocking him unconscious. Boxing is not track and field, it’s not gymnastics, it’s the training and practice of how to do physical damage to someone. No matter how physically attractive Leonard was, the possibility that he might beat you to a bloody pulp if he didn’t welcome your entirely unannounced, unapproved physical advance would have made him an unlikely man to choose to make one on.

Though he never quite comes out and says it, everything McCarthy says is based on the assumption that Black man = violent thug and especially that a Black boxer is a violent thug. Obviously it’s absurd to assume that just because Sugar Ray Leonard was a career boxer, he would beat up people outside the ring as well, as if boxing and criminal assault are the same thing. To make his case McCarthy has to ignore all other power considerations that could exist between a young, Black boxing hopeful and a well established, white boxing coach, has to ignore what the likely consequences for Sugar Ray had been had he indeed physically attacking this coach, had to ignore the very fact that awareness of sexual assault, especially sexual assault aimed at men, was pretty low in 1976. Instead he has to rely on unspoken but understood stereotypes of young Black men, dogwhistled through emphasising Sugar Ray Leonard’s boxing career.

Without this racism he only has own incredulity as an argument, but just because Anthony McCarthy finds something hard to believe doesn’t mean it didn’t happen — I found it hard to believe any self declared feminist could engage in victim blaming this blatant, yet Anthony made it happen anyway.

Fake Syrian lesbian turned out to be a real American douche

geekdom, Numpties
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So there was this Syrian blogger, supposedly a gay girl living in Damascus, who got a lot of attention recently, as her blog was one of the few direct eyewitness accounts of the Syrian revolution and subsequent government crackdown. This attention reached a fever pitch when it looked like she had been abducted, perhaps by government agents. But several bloggers smelled a rat however; she sounded slightly too good to be true, certain details didn’t add up and people started digging in “Amina”‘s background. Surprise surprise, it was all a hoax and “Amina” wasn’t a Syrian lesbian living in Damascus, but a straight American douche called Tom MacMaster.

Yesterday the shit hit the fan as various people closed in on his story, so he dropped the mask and posted a non-apology:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in thıs year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience.

This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism.

However, I have been deeply touched by the reactions of readers.

Which was followed by a longer explenation today which I won’t bother with. Even in his apology it’s all about him and his feelings, with no thoughts spared to the people he decieved or the damage he has done. There’s no awareness whatsoever that his actions might have consequences beyond the internet. As Daniel Nassar put it, an actually existing Syrian LGBT activist puts it:

Because of you, Mr. MacMaster, a lot of the real activists in the LGBT community became under the spotlight of the authorities in Syria. These activists, among them myself, had to change so much in their attitude and their lives to protect themselves from the positional harm your little stunt created. You have, sir, put a lot of lives, mine and some friends included, in harm’s way so you can play your little game of fictional writing.

This attention you brought forced me back to the closet on all the social media websites I use; cause my family to go into a frenzy trying to force me back into the closet and my friends to ask me for phone numbers of loved ones and family members so they can call them in case I disappeared myself. Many people who are connected to me spent nights worrying about me and many fights I had with my family were because you wanted to play your silly game of the media.

You feed the foreign media an undeniable dish of sex, religion and politics and you are now leaving us with this holier-than-thou semi-apologize with lame and shallow excuses of how you wanted to bring attention to the right people on the ground. I’m sorry, you’re not on the ground, you don’t know the ground and you don’t even belong to the culture of the people on the group.

You took away my voice, Mr. MacMaster, and the voices of many people who I know. To bring attention to yourself and blog; you managed to bring the LGBT movement in the Middle East years back. You single-handedly managed to bring unwanted attention from authorities to our cause and you will be responsible for any LGBT activist who might be yet another fallen angel during these critical time.

I’m outraged, and if I lived in a country where I can sue you, I would.

MacMaster’s little stunt is born out of an attitude that denies the reality of the people on the other side of his computer screen, an attitude you see a lot on the internet. It’s clear he never thought about the impact his lies might have had on the lives of real Syrians, gay or otherwise, because he’s clearly never really believed that what he did on the internet might matter “in real life”. It’s also clear that despite his protestations, MacMaster never saw the Syrian and other Middle Eastern activists and bloggers who fell for his story and became concerned about “Amina” as real people, or he could not have done this. These were the actions of a psychopath, but it’s the sort of psychopathy that all of us are vulnerable to on the internet, as it is so easy to stop believing in the humanity of people who aren’t part of your own social circle. Proof for this can be found in every collision between two separate net cultures, going back to e.g. the invasion of rec.pets.cats by alt.tasteless in the prehistory of the internet, 1993. Internet as a game, rather than as a way to communicate, where because you’re manipulating symbols on a screen it’s easy to forget you’re dealing with people.

Scott E. Adams, supergenius

Comix, Numpties
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Wile E. Coyote, supergenius

James Nicoll links to a Gawker post on how Scott Adams has been trolling MetaFilter under a pseudonym. So far, so Mary Rosh, but what struck me was how his alter ego “PlannedChaos” defended Scott Adams:

As far as Adams’ ego goes, maybe you don’t understand what a writer does for a living. No one writes unless he believes that what he writes will be interesting to someone. Everyone on this page is talking about him, researching him, and obsessing about him. His job is to be interesting, not loved. As someone mentioned, he has a certified genius I.Q., and that’s hard to hide.

Emphasis mine. That’s the hallmark of a true internet kook that is, that insistence on being a supergenius, too smart for your opponents to understand. It’s one consequence of the Dunning Kruger effect: people who are too obtuse to realise how dumb they are tend to overestimate their IQ as well, not to mention the importance of IQ as a real measure of intelligence.

(That this is not an exclusive internet phenomenon can be seen in Chuck Jones’ “Wile E. Coyote, Supergenius” cartoons, hence the title.)