A Bathtub Full of Baloney

A wise man proportions his belief to his evidence.

— David Hume

"Minds do not create truth or falsehood," philosopher Bertrand Russell said. "They create beliefs."

The same might be said of social media platforms like TikTok.

A new belief making the rounds thanks to TikTok—one particularly appealing to anti-vaxxers—holds that, if you take a "detox bath" in borax after you're inoculated, you will remove all the radiation and government-implanted nanotechnologies the shot delivers.

Now, before you cue the theme music from The Twilight Zone, take a moment to consider that millions of your fellow Americans accept (or are disposed to accept) this baloney as fact.

The baloney-maker is the well-known crackpot Dr. Carrie Madej, who a year ago was called out by Reuters for erroneously claiming that an organism in the Covid vaccine was pointing its tenacles at her. (She was observing house dust on her dirty microscope.)

Where wackos like Madej once had to stand on a box in the park to reach an audience, TikTok gives her a pulpit that faces millions of viewers, many as gullible as two-year-olds.

As a self-described "child of God and believer in Jesus Christ," Madjef ought to remove herself from TikTok and, like her rabbi, find a mount in the desert somewhere from which to deliver her sermon.

A desert on Mars would be perfect. (I hear the radiation problem there is awful.) 

At least one platform provider, Twitter, has kicked Madej off this week for praising borax baths. Hallelujah!

But while TikTok removed Madej’s video last month, the platform permits it to be viewed through a sharing feature called "Duet."

Madej's baloney can also be consumed on Facebook and YouTube.

So where's the issue with baloney? It's a free country. Can't I believe anything I want? 

The issue is fraud.

Madej is defrauding her audience, either knowingly—and therefore recklessly—misrepresenting the facts; or unreasonably—and therefore negligently—misrepresenting the facts.

Either way, it's fraud, and makes Madej a fraudster. 

Trapped

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

— James Baldwin

My favorite line by my favorite writer, William Faulkner, goes, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

But Americans are blind to the past.

White people, content with the now—consumption, recreation, and a middle-of-the-road lifestyle—believe the past is all folderol and "forgotten politics;" sound and fury signifying nothing.

People of color believe the past is unknowable and imponderable and—being little but a trail of injury and injustice—too maddening to reconstruct.

Neither group wishes to grant the past's deterministic nature; that it isn't dead—or even past.

To their way of thinking, they owe the past nothing.

Not everyone on the planet thinks that way. Europeans, for example.

Last evening I saw the movie Belfast, Kenneth Branagh's auteurish childhood memoir.

Like an Irish Tolstoy, Branagh makes clear that he owes his entire life's journey to the past; that the path he took through life was ordained not by personal decisions, but by history's forces.

In Branagh's case, those were "The Troubles"—even though his family members were neutral bystanders in that 30-year war between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists.

Even today, the grievances that rocked Northern Ireland in Branagh's youth echo in Irish politics, as the opening scene suggests.

"Forgetting a debt doesn't mean it's paid," an Irish proverb holds.

If only Americans were more like the Irish.

We'd remember our debt to the past.

Helluva Way to Run a Railroad

This is a helluva way to run a railroad.

— Leonor Loree

When civil engineer Leonor Loree took charge of the dilapidated Kansas City Southern Railroad in 1906, he stood before investors and described the railroad's broken-down operations in detail.

"This is a helluva way to run a railroad," he concluded.

I can now say the same of the online art-supply retailer Jerry's Artarama.

The company recently misdirected a $66 shipment of supplies I ordered.

The shipment was sent to my former address (by default), and when I phoned customer service—within two minutes of placing the online order—I was told Jerry's could do nothing to reroute the package. The package wouldn't ship for days, but, when it did, it would ship to my old address. Like it or not, that's they way the system works. Get over it.

I was on my own to recover the goods, too, I was told. Jerry's was officially out of the loop; and if I involved the company further in the matter, there would be hefty fees billed to me.

I have since located and the misdirected package and it has been returned to Jerry's; but no refund has been issued. I'm out my time and trouble and $66.

Every contact with the company's frontline employees suggests to me that Jerry's corporate culture is toxic.

At Jerry's:

• Everyone clearly is a helpless slave to internal systems, hidebound policies, and an iron-fisted supervisor;
  
  
• Problems must not be acknowledged;
  
  
• Customers—even so-called VIP ones—are annoying, not to be trusted, and always in the wrong.

In the past three years, I have spent several thousand dollars with Jerry's. You'd think someone would know that, in the era of CRM. Perhaps someone does, but doesn't care.

In any case, henceforth I'm a loyal customer of Jerry's competitor, Blick. 

Jerry's is on my s-list.

Forever. 

I plan, as well, to tell fellow artists about my lousy experience with Jerry's at every opportunity.

Helluva way to run a railroad.

POSTSCRIPT: Goodly subscribes to the fairness doctrine, and in that spirit will afford the president of Jerry's Artarama, Mr. Ira Goldstein, his two cents. 

He kindly wrote today in response to the above:

"I am very sorry for the events that occurred that have left you unhappy with Jerry’s handling of your recent order. I assure you that I take all of customers' concerns seriously. 

"I have reached out to our customer service director Steven Gilmore to look into your order and find out where the disconnect was that derailed your shopping experience with us. Steven will reach out after looking into the details.

"Jerry’s tries to set ourselves apart in artist product offerings, our prices and most importantly our service. Sometime things occur not by design and your email will help us to fix what occurred in the future and right this for you to the best of our ability. I would like to thank you, for contacting me will help us make sure this does not occur in the future."

POST POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Steven Gilmore phoned me to apologize for the customer-service failure and suggested that Jerry's computer system sent the package to my former address out of "overzealous fraud protection" and that Jerry's employees could not redirect the shipment once the system decided where it would go. He promised I would receive a refund of my $66.

UPDATE AS OF NOVEMBER 28: Jerry's has refused to refund me the $66. I contacted the company by email to tell them to keep it and buy the CEO a box of cigars.

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 14: I shared the post above with famed marketing guru David Meerman Scott, who reacted forthwith: "Customer service should be an opportunity to build fans. Clearly Jerry's is not doing a good job."

UPDATE AS OF DECEMBER 25: I received a full refund from Jerry's. Unsure why, but I have no complaint. Perhaps Mr. Scott's remark sped it along. Looks like there is a Santa Claus!

Boobarians

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought historians were like crabs, because they always "look backwards."

Most Americans never look backwards. Unless some grievance is concerned, they don't give a fig about the past—or know anything about it.

I've been devoting time recently as a volunteer to an historic preservation nonprofit, and so have been reading and thinking a lot about Americans' grand indifference to history. 

I've learned, among other things, that the American Association for State and Local History published a research paper recently that plumbs the depths of that indifference.

To inform themselves, the researchers interviewed 13 professional historians and 20 adult citizens. 

They found that, on the whole, Americans consider history merely the random concatenation of events—without significance.

(That history and its teaching have become headline news this week has nothing to do with Americans' passion for the subject, but only some people's hatred of others.)

Specifically, the researchers found that Americans share these eight beliefs:

1. History comprises the acts of a smattering of great figures. Martin Luther King, for example, solely crafted the civil rights Blacks now enjoy. (And the Freedom Riders were—who cares?) 
   
   
2. The great figures were nearly all White and male; the acts of lesser figures don't merit consideration. (Sorry, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.) 
   
   
3. Dredging up unpleasant parts of the past is a drag, and to be avoided. (Sorry, Crazy Horse.)
   
   
4. History is factual (transparent, indisputable); and historians are just news reporters. The news that most historians report is simply "old news." (The news that mavericks like Nikole Hannah-Jones and the late Howard Zinn report, on the other hand, is "fake news.")
   
   
5. Evidence-based history is just "historians' opinion," not the truth. (Sure, the truth is out there—but only Mulder and Scully will ever find it.)
   
   
6. History is useless; a dead-end hobby. (Sorry, Ken Burns.)
   
   
7. Learning history is all about memorization. (Why bother when you can Google it?)
   
   
8. Teachers of history get worse and worse all the time. (No surprise. Our schools suck, in general.)  

Odd though it may sound, the researchers concur with belief Number 8: teachers of history have let Americans down. "The K-12 education system fails to teach the skills necessary for students to engage critically with the past," they write.

And while they suggest ways for future historians to tackle these eight detrimental beliefs, the researchers are clear about the intractable nature of the problem educators have created.

As critics a century ago said of America, we're a nation of boobarians.

Smoke

Be sure where books are burned, people will also be burned.

— Heinrich Heine

This week I found a used copy of the famously-banned Stranger in a Strange Land on Thriftbooks and gave it to a sci-fi fan who's never read it.

Were it to grab his attention, that act would put me in the sights of right-wing ideologue Rabih Abuismail, the Virginia school board member who is calling for objectionable books to be burned.

Why book burning is the go-to act of the self-righteous is well understood.

Book burning (also known as libricide) fills the need to terrorize a mainstream culture and represents a baby step toward genocide.

Why Mr. Abuismail, a purported Christian, feels compelled to murder fellow Americans escapes me. 

But have no doubt that's where he and his mob of right-wing brothers and sisters are heading.

Where there's smoke...