Clap Your Hands If You Believe in Aliens!

Today Ryan Knight, a young leftist writer and activist, posted excitedly on Twitter about a report that water -- "multiple 'water bodies'" -- has been detected on Mars: "The fact that there is water on Mars means they very well could have had or have alien life on Mars."  Uh, who's "they"?

Anyway, this (and a Twitter poll on whether we "believe in aliens") set off a long thread of terrifying prattle about the "absolute" "100%" "statistical certainty" that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, with some people arguing that we couldn't see life on other worlds because our eyes can only detect light in a narrow wavelength, the usual jokes about how there's no intelligent life on Earth anyway, and the ever-popular declarations that it would be so dumb if we were alone, and that it is "insane," "ignorant," "selfish," "egoistic" not to believe that the universe is full of potential extraterrestrial BFFs who'd like to meet us but they think they'd blow our minds.  Several people quoted a line from the movie Arrival, that if there is no life out there, the universe is a terrible waste of space.  None of this is particularly surprising; it's just terribly depressing.

There were numerous claims about the certainty that there must be gazillions of habitable and indeed inhabited planets out there.  They were presumably based on the Drake formula, invented in 1961, which postulates imaginary percentages to "stimulate scientific dialogue at the first scientific meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) ... It is more properly thought of as an approximation than as a serious attempt to determine a precise number."  The people who referred to it mistook it for a serious attempt, and seemed to believe that it proved anything, which it doesn't.  Only a couple had heard of the Fermi Paradox, which argues that there probably are no civilizations out there.  The people who dogmatically asserted the huge numbers of intelligent ETs in the universe seemed to forget them when they tried to explain why we haven't detected them, though some of course declared that the ETs have already found us but the Dang Gummint has suppressed them, or they decided we were too feral to deal with, or some such.

If there is life on Mars, it won't be "alien," it will be native Martian life.  We Terrans, if we go there, will be the aliens.  If anything is egoistic, it's demanding that the universe sprout ETs so we won't feel alone.  And even if there were oodles of inhabited planets out there, the universe is so unimaginably large that you could still call it a waste of space if you're a real-estate developer.  People have seen too many sci-fi movies and TV shows in which space travelers move from galaxy to galaxy in no time, but even without them we can't visualize the distances involved -- even within the Solar system, let alone interstellar space. 

Since Knight is a left-wing activist -- he goes by the screenname ProudSocialist -- I presume that he and most of his followers think of themselves as pro-science, smarter than the ignorant masses who don't believe in evolution.  It was painful to see just how ignorant, misinformed, and downright tinfoil-hat wacko almost all of the comments in these threads were.  I shouldn't be surprised, and I probably am not, I just didn't care to be reminded today.  Knight probably jumped on the story to have a chance to talk about something other than the current electoral campaign.  I sympathize with him, but this was no improvement.

If you ask, I'm agnostic on the question: I neither believe in extraterrestrial life nor disbelieve in it, because we have no evidence of its existence yet.  That means we can't concoct statistics for now because we have only one datum about life, on this planet.  The media keep stirring up interest with reports of water on Mars, or fart gas on Venus, which excite many people, as they're intended to.  But none of these reports are evidence of life on those planets, let alone elsewhere.  Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and these people have a lot of faith.

Shame Me Once, Shame on You; Shame Me Twice, Shame on Me!

2020 is turning out to be a replay of 2016, campaign-wise.  Specifically, the Democrats are running another superannuated party hack whose main selling point is that he isn't Donald Trump, and they're furious that voters aren't as enthusiastic about him as they think we ought to be.  Even more than last time, though, they're on the attack against anyone who declares his or her lack of enthusiasm and criticizes the candidate or the party for running a lackluster campaign.  They accuse the dissenters of wanting Trump to win, and their venomous attacks again lack factual truth, rationality, and even good political sense.  Among their targets are Susan Sarandon, Bernie Sanders, former Sanders staffers such Brianna Joy Gray, the journalist David Sirota, and the podcaster and organizer Ryan Knight.  I've been spending more time than I should on Twitter, just for the pleasure of attacking the attackers in turn.  

One thing that has begun to bother me is the term commonly used for the attacks: "voter shaming."  I suppose it fairly captures what they're trying to do, but I don't think it's an effective epithet if, as I've been seeing, they see it as a valid strategy:

Calling it "vote-shaming" lets them know they've scored a hit, and that you don't know how to fight back.  It's another version of the liberal standby, "Oh, how can you say such an awful thing, you're an awful person!"  This never works, and one would think liberals would have figured that out by now, if one didn't know better.

I think that if you want to get the "vote-shamers" to back off, if you want to defeat them, you need to find ways to put them on the defensive.  And I feel a bit uneasy about telling people to grow a spine, but I really think they need to grow a spine.  Why should you be ashamed of doing what you believe to be right?  If you are ashamed of not liking Biden and Harris more, if you are ashamed of wanting substantive policies rather than platitudes, if you're ashamed of being angry at the Democratic Party establishment for waging an inadequate campaign against the most dangerous President of the past century and possibly ever, then maybe you need to pause and take stock.

My preferred term for what these people are doing is "voter suppression."  They clearly are less interested in winning over undecided, let alone opposed, voters than in getting their licks in against people they blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016: Sarandon, Sanders, and the like.  If you really want to persuade people to vote for your candidate, hurling abuse at them is exactly what you shouldn't be doing.  It's not as if this is some extreme-left, avant-garde, postmodern idea: it's the basic principle of canvassing and organizing.  Yet I'm seeing a lot of (admittedly anecdotal) reports of people telling Biden phonebankers that they're undecided, and being blown off, no attempt made to find out why they're undecided and persuade them to vote Biden/Harris.

I have to remember that people feel isolated and so find it hard to stand up to attacks from any direction, and I don't want to attack them myself.  I must have felt much the same way fifty years ago when I was just coming out and forming a left political stance, but although I did get attacked, from the left as well as from the right at times, I somehow kept bouncing back.  I know that within a year or two of coming out I was enjoying attempts by homophobes to try to shame me for being queer, even though there was in those days precious little solidarity from other gay people.  Somehow I felt that I was part of something larger than myself, a network of people who rejected bigotry and bit back at it, even if I knew few of them in my own locale.  I later learned that some of the writers and thinkers I felt connected to didn't live out their own rhetoric very well.  No matter: they gave me the courage to do it. The same was true of politics, though that took me longer to develop.

It just occurred to me that when I tried to get involved in local politics, the local party organization had nothing for me to do.  I left my name and phone number at the local Democratic Party office, but no one called me.  Maybe I should have tried harder, but why?  (Part of the problem was that I had an odd, irregular work schedule, and the local party was oriented to people who worked 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.)  The same happened in the 1990s when I volunteered for a new LGBT organization in town: I signed up, no one got back to me.  That organization, as I recall, didn't last very long anyway -- I wonder why!  One of the ongoing problems with left organizing is that it is more oriented to getting media attention, which the groups don't know how to exploit even if they get it, than to welcoming new members.

Then too, even if I'm not a joiner I'm still enmeshed in a network of left media that keeps me informed.  I don't sit around surrounded by hordes of the conventionally political, the inhabitants and devotees of the two-party system, without any sources of information to buttress me against corporate media propaganda.  I tend to forget that most people don't know about alternative media, which is why so many people are flocking to follow Ryan Knight's Twitter account.  But we've been there before: I'm seeing echoes of the exaltation many people expressed to Michael Moore, or Noam Chomsky: At last somebody dares to tell the truth!  They're looking for someone to follow, a hero or heroine who'll tell them what to think; and when they find out that their hero has feet of clay or, worse, doesn't want to tell them what to think, he or she would rather they think for themselves, they'll fall resentfully away, looking for the next hero.  I went through something like this myself when I was younger, though I didn't usually reject those who'd taught me: I honored and cherished what I'd learned from them, and added on more teachers.

What to do, then?  I don't know, and I'm not optimistic.  But for now, I'd like people to stop using the term "vote-shaming."  They have nothing to be ashamed of, only the vote-suppressors do.  They also need to remember that you don't learn to do politics, winning politics at any rate, while standing on one foot.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the more inspiring success stories of late, didn't just stand on a street corner, give a speech, win a primary, and then win an election and go to Congress.  She got involved with Justice Democrats, who welcomed her (along with others), trained her, and supported her.  And then she defeated an entrenched, complacent incumbent and won the general and went to Congress.  Ignore the vote-suppressors, don't let them get to you; you aren't alone.  Look at how others are answering them, and work out your own response.