The Bluestocking, vol 171
Maya Angelou ft Jessica Mitford.
Happy Friday . . .
Yesterday, I talked on Woman’s Hour about the horrible scenes at the US Capitol, and why there are limits to the narrative of white male rage driving Trump supporters. Yes, nostalgia for traditional gender roles and overt anti-feminism are gateways to the far right, but grafted onto that are various strands of conspiracy theory with wider appeal. The QAnon movement (and there were Q patches everywhere at the riot) has attracted plenty of women, because it is framed as a campaign against child sex trafficking.
Like I said on air, it’s important to understand that these people are, in their own minds, heroes and patriots and potential martyrs for a great cause. They’re taking their country back from satanists. They’re “stopping the steal”. They’re fighting against a giant paedophile ring. It’s easy from the outside to see that they’re swinging at phantoms, but if you believed those things were true, you’d want to fight them too. The huge question is: how do you convince people that none of it’s real? Look at Donald Trump — a man with access to classified intelligence briefings and an army of researchers, if he cared to use them — and see how a media diet of fringe television channels and conspiracist memes can sever someone completely from reality.
Helen
Mitford Nerdery Section
Maya Angelou ft Jessica Mitford, singing “Right Said Fred” by Bernard Cribbins, from the album Stranger Than Fiction, which also features . . . Stephen King? Chimamanda, I am free to duet on When I’m Cleaning Windows any time, plz call me.
The fact that this sounds like it was recorded at the end of a large night out only adds to the appeal.
The Lab Escape Theory (New York Magazine)
A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan — where COVID-19 was first diagnosed and where there are three high-security virology labs, one of which held in its freezers the most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world — isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory. It merits attention, I believe, alongside other reasoned attempts to explain the source of our current catastrophe.
One of the findings which has emerged from my book research on geniuses is that true breakthroughs tend to come from iconoclasts. But also that plenty of iconoclasts, intent on turning over established wisdom, later end up endorsing nutbar ideas. Think Isaac Newton: gravity, incredible; alchemy, no. Journalists have the same problem with calibrating the required level of scepticism for big claims. It’s not impossible that the novel coronavirus was the result of a lab accident — as Nicholson Baker writes, “high-containment laboratories have a whispered history of near misses” — and the correct response should be to search for evidence for the hypothesis. (Which will be difficult, given that China is unlikely to welcome independent investigators.)
The trouble is that it’s hard to state a premise in the conspiracy theory maelstrom of our current media climate, without losing control of it. Baker details here all the racism and demagoguery which has flowed from calling this the “China Flu”. Similar situations abound — how do you question this particular alleged Assad atrocity without giving succour to propagandists intent on denying all his war crimes —and I’m interested in how others think that journalists should manage this dilemma. In 2015, I ran a piece by the bioethicist Alice Dreger which argued that calling vaccine-cautious parents stupid and irrational was a bad idea, for example. (Here’s a payfence-free summary by Dreger.)
The fight over the origins of coronavirus matters, obviously, because if China is operating labs with poor safety protocols, that puts us all in danger.
My answer is Georgia O’Keeffe, living in New York and painting this; Boris Karloff, playing an Indian in a filmed version of a Rudyard Kipling story; and Violet Jessop, mysteriously not vowing never to get on a ship again.
Quick Links
“Tankies do illustrate some of the ways that Twitter hurts political discourse, however. The fact that a couple thousand people can terrorize large segments of left Twitter demonstrates that the discussion platform is a huge force multiplier for loud extremists with lots of free time.” (Noahpinion) Bonus: I also enjoyed this post about “the Shouting Class”, which distorts our sense of public opinion, and is the reason that my new year’s resolution, for the seventh year running, is to spend less time on Twitter: “The Shouting Class has caused enormous disasters before, even without social media. One fairly clear-cut case is the French Revolution.”
“Just as it reflects Sorkin’s dramatic strengths, this movie reflects much of Sorkin’s weakness, which is simply that virtually everything he has done has been West Wing in some other, non White House, settings.” Extreme nerdery about the historical truth of the “Chicago 7”.
Why will philosophers entertain infanticide, but not gender-critical feminism? (Blog)
The real story of Democrat success in Georgia is the story of Stacey Abrams. (NYT)
“I tell him that he has to understand that he will die and that he needs to say those words to me if that is what he really wants. Eventually we compromise; he will put his mask on for another hour, then phone his wife and tell me his decision. This man is 61.” Inside a Covid ward. (Unherd)
This week, I’ve been watching Out of My Mind (BBC iPlayer), Sara Pascoe’s fourth-wall-breaking, mini-lecture-incorporating sitcom. The first episode didn’t do it for me — too much narration — but it settles down and becomes something spiky and formally innovative and funny and occasionally moving.
I’m running some journalism masterclasses in the next month: there are still spaces for Political Journalism (8 February, 8pm) and How To Get A Book Deal (25 January, 8pm).
See you next time!