SGU Episode 359
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Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday May 30th 2012, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
B: Hey everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson.
R: Hello everyone.
S: And Jay Novella.
J: Hey Guys.
S: Evan Bernstein has the week off because he is sunning himself in Italy.
R: Ugh.
B: I am jealous.
R: But hey, look at the bright side: I'm back.
J: That's right.
S: Rebecca's back, that's true, it's a good trade.
B: Yay!
R: Back from beautiful Germany. The beautiful beaches of Germany.
J: Wha, beaches?
R: There are canals.
S: Canals.
R: There's a river, there's the Rhine.
B: You meant beer didn't you, not beaches?
R: Oh right, yeah yeah, the beautiful beers of Germany...
S: Deutschland.
R: ...that's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah, I was at a few conferences, the...
B: A few?
R: ...world skeptics' conference in Berlin and the European Atheists' Convention in Cologne. And both of them were very fun, I saw a lot of our friends, both from the US and from Europe and met a lot of really awesome people. Tons of people came up to me and said that they listen to SGU every week...
J: Oh, awesome.
R: ...so it was really cool to see some listeners in Germany.
S: Excellent.
This Day in Skepticism (1:22)
June 2, 1692 Bridget Bishop is the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. Found guilty, she is hanged on June 10.
R: Hey, I have a depressing This Day in Science and Skepticism.
B: Ooh, I like it.
R: On this day on June 2nd 1692, Bridget Bishop became the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials, of course in Salem, Massachusetts. And she was hanged by June 10th 1692.
S: That's a quick trial.
R: Yeah, they didn't need much apparently. There are some differing accounts of who she was really and the exact evidence against her or maybe the exact reasons why she was chosen to stand trial for witchcraft. I've seen some suggestions that maybe she owned a tavern and, you which not many women did and maybe she dressed a bit lasciviously, and maybe she was a bit outspoken.
B: Skirt, the dress above the ankles, that kind of crazy stuff? Wow.
R: Yeah, exactly.
S: Like she had a bit of red in her bodice instead of all black and white, yeah.
B: Oooh, ooh.
R: Exactly. Yeah, but apparently those are not necessarily true, there's a very good chance she did not own a tavern, that she was confused with someone else with a similar name who was married to someone who owned a tavern and also red clothing was apparently fairly common amongst the puritans. So, who knows? But the fact of the matter is that she was accused of being a witch an apparently she was quite saucy on the stand and that was enough to convict her. She was said to have owned a lot of, a number of small voodoo dolls that were found around her house.
J: (laughs)
R: She was accused of poisoning a pig.
J: She had, wait a second, wait whoa whoa. All right, first off she had just random voodoo dolls like strewn around her house.
R: Well, she's accused of yeah.
J: And then somebody actually said, during the proceedings, accused her of actually poisoning a pig.
R: Yeah and as far as I can tell, the pig didn't die, I think the pig was just acting funny and they thought that the pig had either been poisoned or bewitched apparently.
S: And apparently she was cavorting with the devil so there you go.
R: Obviously, yeah. And actually to make a connection to my trip to Germany, at the atheist convention in Cologne, we were very privileged to see Leo Igwe speak and he campaigns on the serious problem of witchcraft in Africa, mostly you know, we've talked about this before, Christian ministers who blame children and old women for witchcraft and they drive them out of their homes, they beat them, they murder them. There are even whole villages set up sometimes to take these people in, it's crazy you know, I think about this happening in the US in the 1600s, well it's still going on in Africa, so it's still, this is still a serious problem four centuries later.
S: Apparently large, well armed men in their prime don't do witchcraft.
R: No. No.
S: No, just children and old people.
R: Oddly enough, yeah it's only the people who are least able to defend themselves.
S: Ah.
News Items
Medical Zombies (4:52)
S: Well let's move on, Jay and Bob, I think you're going to be particularly interested in this next news item. Apparently the zombie apocalypse has already begun.
B: I knew it.
S: Have you guys heard about this?
B: Yeah, I'm speaking, I'm podcasting right now from my safe house 200 feet underground.
S: (laughs)
B: So I'm good.
R: I knew I should have moved to Connecticut.
(laughter)
J: Bob, your proposed safe house would be so epic.
B: (laughs)
S: Well in Miami, police officers came upon a grizzly scene where one naked man was eating the face of another naked man and the police officer told the cannibal to stop, he said stop eating that man's face. The man refused, he just kept, in an apparent rage, just kept eating the other man's face, so the cop shot him. The man still didn't stop, he continued to engorge himself on the other man and then the cop had to shoot him four more times and finally killed him.
B: The head shot got him, right?
R: Jeez.
S: Reports indicate that it was five shots to the chest.
R: Wow.
B: Ah.
S: Took him down.
R: Was it meth? It seems like a meth thing.
J: Not really.
S: It's in that ballpark, in that ballpark. SO the news reports I believe have been a little inaccurate, somehow the meme of LSD, like a new form of LSD or an LSD like drug got out, but that's not, that's inconsistent with the reports and this is in the same articles, saying that it's a street drug called bath salts.
R: Oh, yeah.
S: That is, apparently the main component is a stimulant, a methamphetamine like drug called mephedrone. So it's not in the LSD class, it's in the methamphetamine class. And one of the side effects if you like really OD on the stuff is that it can raise your body temperature which might explain...
B: Hence the nakedness.
S: Yeah, why the man was naked.
J: Yep.
R: Aaah.
S: You take all your clothes off because you just feel really hot.
B: And extreme hunger or psychosis apparently.
S: Yeah, yeah kind of a bad combination. Extreme paranoia, delusions, agitation.
J: Did you see pictures of the two people?
S: Yep.
R: No, I don't want to see that.
J: Well, no no. Not afterwards, they didn't show their corpses.
S: They're not showing photos of, it was a homeless like 60 year old homeless man who, by the name of Ronald Popo. A lot of the news articles are not showing pictures of him post attack but they do describe the pictures and apparently his eyes were eaten out, his nose was eaten off.
B: Oh!
S: Just his beard was left.
J: There are a few things in here that ask for more information like the homeless man who I believe was about, what 65 years old, why was he lying there, how did that happen? How did that guy come to just lie there while his face was being...
S: Well he was physically subdued and barely conscious according to reports. So the guy attacked him, Rudi Eugine is the younger man, 31 who was eating, you know the eater in this exchange, he apparently attacked, beat up and subdued the homeless guy and then ate his face.
J: Well, as sad as that whole story is, I mean it's horrifying and profoundly disturbing, the thing that actually bothered me the most was the health ranger's interpretation of this whole fiasco.
S: Yeah, yeah.
J: And Steve, you blogged about this right?
S: Yeah, so you know, Mike Adams, who is a conspiracy nut and also a promoter of all kinds of dubious "alternative" treatments wrote an article about this now clearly, in my impression, his article was mostly tongue-in-cheek, saying that the zombie apocalypse has started because he writes this way. I'm fine with the use of satire and metaphor etc., but he writes in a way that makes it confusing like where he's drawing the line between what he means and what is metaphor or satire, and I think that's deliberate because that enables him to cater to the conspiracy theory mongering community, different people could read into it whatever level they wish so the people who visit his website just for the alternative medicine can say oh it was all metaphor and the conspiracy nuts can say oh no this is real, he really means it, all in the same article.
B: Wow, that's a good trick.
S: Yeah, so here's one, the quote where I think he's really getting to the meat of the point he's trying to make. He says
Humans who subject themselves to fluoride, aspartame, psychiatric drugs, vaccines and street drugs end up
S: this is his emphasis
lobotomizing their higher brains. Vaccines, for starters, cause extreme neurological damage, and some vaccines are actually made of aggressive viruses designed to "eat" targeted regions of the brain, resulting in a biological lobotomy.[1]
J: Yeah I mean like that is...
B: Isn't he just making that shit up?
S: Yeah, he's just making it up.
J: Yeah, it's patently made up, that's the epitome of I need something dramatic in my blog, let me just make it up on the spot.
S: But apparently he believes this level of nonsense. This, you see this paragraph I think he's dead serious about it, he is an anti-government conspiracy mongering anti-medical establishment, anti-science in my opinion, nut-job.
J: I would love to see his reference for that statement.
S: Right. Yeah what, so there are not vaccines that are made of aggressive viruses, most vaccines don't have intact organisms in them, either viruses or bacteria, they have pieces, just like proteins. Those that are live virus vaccines have attenuated viruses, the exact opposite of aggressive, they are bred to be not aggressive, to not be virulent. They're a weakened form of the virus that the body can easily fend off, and certainly there's no vaccine that has a virus in it that eats your brain, that is designed to eat your brain and cause a biological lobotomy. That is made up fear-mongering nonsense.
J: There's a segment in his blog where he calls it the zombification of America and he goes through a list of things that he's bringing to your attention as the reader that he thinks are bricks in the wall of this slow movement towards making everybody in the United States a, you know he's not saying a literal zombie, like a flesh-eating zombie of course. He's talking more about how we're being physically or emotional and mentally handicapped by the environment, by the drugs that we're on and all this stuff and there's just things in here like I actually have to ask you Steve, because I'm not sure what parts of this you think he's joking about and what parts would you consider serious, like I'll just read a couple of these and you can let me know here. The one about sleep-driving where people are reported to be sleep-driving and then they suddenly wake up and find themselves driving, I thought that was a reference to Ambien right?
S: Uh, there are some medications that cause parasomnias in some patients, like Ambien, that's been reported.
J: But the fact that he brings that up as a brick in the wall here just seems utterly ridiculous to me, you know we've read about drugs that can do this and there's a lot of people taking a lot of sleep medication and the numbers of these events are going to go up but no way does that point to any kind of detuning of someone's intelligence or there's something that's going to deprive them of their higher intelligence.
B: I think the reason he brought it up is that it just goes to support his point of, you know having an example of Americans, of people in some sort of altered state of consciousness and going about their daily lives, it's just tailor-made for that kind of idea
J: It's a big stretch.
B: and he just threw it in like yeah look, see? It was kind of a tame example of what he's talking about but it's just so stupid.
J: Again, he goes into the complete lack of intelligent questioning about events where the official government explanation makes absolutely no sense, 9/11, the killing of Bin Laden, etc. Now, I don't know how that's a brick in the wall. It's an example of the lack of intelligence according to him, which I of course don't agree with.
S: Yeah.
J: That's not really proving any point there, he's just bringing up more of his BS.
S: He's tying together these disparate threads that are filtered through his conspiracy view of reality and that's what conspiracy theorists do, right? They take these little threads and tie them together, weave them together into their conspiracy narrative. That's what he's doing.
B: Yeah, you don't see that connection, but I see that connection.
S: Yeah, you don't see that connection because you're a zombie, you're a metaphorical zombie because you drink fluoridated water. I mean that's right out of the movies, right? I mean the government conspiracy!
R: My precious bodily fluids.
S: Yeah it's precious bodily fluids level.
B: Aspartame!
S: Aspartame, again there's no evidence that there's any neurological effects from fluoride or from aspartame or from vaccines, you know street drugs are the only thing on his list where yeah, you can actually cause altered states of consciousness and brain damage from abusing these drugs. Yeah, don't abuse street drugs.
J: How about this one where he says the rise of a whole new generation of mumbling neurologically damaged children who are now routinely seen out in public. Many of these children are of course vaccine damaged. I mean this guy really, he's up there man, he's trying to jockey himself into the number one anti-vax position. These comments are ridiculous.
S: Yeah, you know it's interesting because you think, the fact that he's combining really off the wall conspiracy theory stuff with the standard unscientific alternative medicine promotion might be an advantage to defenders of science-based medicine because you might think well at least he's exposing the thought process here, you know people who see these two things together will go oh OK well, how much legitimacy could there be to the alternative medicine stuff he's promoting when he's also promoting this conspiracy nonsense? But reading the comments, people easily compartmentalise that. They go, oh yeah. They just ignore the conspiracy stuff, that's just him, he just writes that way but they just completely buy into his anti-medical-establishment, natural medicine, alternative medicine nonsense and not seeing, yeah these are the products of the same unscientific lack of critical thinking process that this guy's engaged in. I concluded my blog saying you know, ironically not using your higher brain, which is what he's talking about, is exactly what he's engaging in, he actually even says that he at some "deep gut level" people realise that our civilised world is crumbling. I'd say yeah, you're thinking with your gut, you're thinking with your...
R: Oooh yeah, that's where the higher brain function happens, right at the gut level.
S: Yeah, you're thinking with your primitive brain, you're not engaging your meta-cognitive practices that are in the higher brain that you're now lamenting the so-called loss of. It's supremely ironic in my opinion.
J: I mean he's against everything.
S: Anything that makes sense.
J: He comments on the next thing here, aspartame, which he claims pickles the brain in formaldehyde. And then he said, he goes, continues to be consumed in ridiculously high quantities through diet sodas, which you know OK, that's legitimate, a lot of people are drinking a lot of diet soda.
S: You would have to drink 60 litres a day every day to overwhelm your body's ability to metabolise aspartame.
J: Yeah, but that's science and I'm sorry but that doesn't belong here.
S: He says the aspartame gets metabolised into formaldehyde which pickles the brain.
R: Yeah, how does that happen?
S: Well it does happen, but a lot of foods we metabolise get metabolised into formaldehyde. It just happens to be one step in a chemical chain of metabolism. Chemicals get changed from A to B to C to D. Somewhere in that chain is formaldehyde, it's a transitional phase on the way to water and carbon dioxide.
R: Right, it doesn't fill up your brain.
S: No!
R: Pickle it like it's in a jar.
S: And other foods, foods he would call natural also get metabolised into much higher amounts of formaldehyde, it's a natural part of our bodies' metabolism. It's there at certain levels in the background all the time, aspartame is no different.
J: Oh yeah!?
S: But that's a perfect example of how you could pull out a little factoid and distort it and spin it into a conspiracy theory without putting it into the proper context that actually makes sense and that is all that he does, that's what he does.
J: He finished that statement about aspartame with, have you ever noticed that people who drink a lot of diet soda are also the most brain-numbed people around?
S: Yeah, it's confirmation bias.
R: What?
J: (laughs) Rebecca, right? You just keep going and literally Rebecca I haven't skipped on, I'm going right down his list, I'm not cherry picking this happens to be them in their order right here, I can keep going but you know we'd be here all night.
R: No, that's OK I've heard enough.
B: We get the idea.
Science of Reruns (18:01)
Leakey on Evolution (27:35)
S: Well Jay, Richard Leakey recently wrote an interesting or gave an interesting interview about his thoughts on the future of public belief in evolution.
J: Yeah, before I get into that I'll give you a quicky on who Richard is in case you don't know. Richard Leakey is a Kenyan palaeontologist who is currently a professor at the Stony Brook University on Long Beach in the United States and he's known for discovering a 1.6 million year old skeleton in 1984 known as Turkana Boy and this happens to be the first known early human with long legs, short arms and a tall stature.
S: He's also, you should say, the son of Lewis and Mary Leakey. Together, the family, the Leakey family probably discovered more human fossils than anyone else.
J: Yes, that is what they claim. I don't know, I haven't been able to find anything to validate that but I did read that on several occasions. He stated recently that he believes that the next 15 to 30 years, evidence for evolution is going to be so blatantly obvious at that point that even the religious will accept it.
S: Wah wah waaaaah.
R: (laughs)
J: Yeah, here's a couple of quotes I mean his heart's in the right place but I think he's on obvious and very shaky ground here but I'll let you decide on your own. He said if you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, well that all by itself is a magnificently huge statement, but he continues. So if you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid and that we are all African, that colour is superficial, that stages of development of cultures are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges. And it's like yeah, well of course but the fight here as you guys know is the education part of that. Of course all, it's obvious, he's saying you know once, if we can convince people of all of these things then we can have all of these great things that come after that but the skeptical community has been attempting to persuade the media and global governments and the general population that we need to follow the evidence which is what he's saying if we just follow the evidence we can get to this next level. And the fact is we have enough evidence to full accept evolution.
S: Yeah, if the evidence that's available now isn't enough, I don't think, no matter how much more we gather it's not going to matter.
R: Yeah and he betrays exactly how naive he is I think, that he's even referencing the idea that soon we'll be able to logic people out of severe racial and cultural differences, which is just absurdly naive, like oh we're all African everybody, oh OK we'll just stop the gross systemic discrimination that has existed in our culture for thousands of years, what like you know he's such an intelligent person obviously, like it makes me wonder how removed from reality he is, that he thinks these things.
S: I mean you know, it's one of those things, you wonder, there's always that aphorism about futurism that we tend to overestimate short term gains and underestimate long term gains. And I wonder if, that's with technological advancement and scientific advancement. I wonder if that's also true with social advancement, perhaps people 100 years ago would not have imagined that today we would have had the level of racial and sexual equality that we have in the West.
R: I don't know that, there seems, you know I've been reading a lot recently about activists fighting for the right to vote for women and at the same time campaigning for the freedom of slaves in America and it seems to me that by and large all those activists expect... actually no I guess that does fit in, never mind (laughs) like I'm actually just about to support your point and not even realise it, that they all expect that it's going to happen, like in the next year or so and then it doesn't.
S: Yeah, but it doesn't but then...
R: Yeah never mind, you're right.
S: But down the road it probably exceeds expectations. You know, I certainly don't think in 10 or 20 years evolution denial is going to go anywhere, but you wonder about 50 or 100 years from now, maybe we might be farther along than we might be led to believe by our skeptical outlook. You know, hitting our head against the wall. For example I just recently got an email about a Carol County Church that wants Georgia schools to stop teaching evolution as fact, here's the quote from a member of the church saying that evolution, Darwin's theory of evolution,
It's bad science, and it's bad for the culture.[2]
S: You know he says we're going to teach our children that
I'm an ape with less hair?
S: As if this is responsible for the moral decay of the country. Quite obviously this is the connection. So this is what we're dealing with, he thinks that teaching evolution is lying to people. He's got it completely wrong, so it doesn't matter what the facts are, these people are insulated from those facts, they're existing in a propaganda bubble that is actually fairly sophisticated.
R: Yeah there's the old saying that you can't reason someone out of a position that they reasoned themselves, or that they didn't reason themselves into. I think that holds true, unfortunately. You can't just say oh yeah, now the evidence is incontrovertible, you know.
S: Yeah, the power of motivated reasoning should not be underestimated and I think that's the bit that Richard Leakey is missing.
J: That's why, Steve it's not to gain more data as he described, in my opinion it's to educate the next generation to understand real science from everything else.
S: That's a good point and that's mirrored in the experience of scientists who debate creationists, that there are, like we talked about the fact that Duane Gish made a career out of going around the country debating evolutionary scientists and kicking their butts and the reason for that is that the evolutionary scientists, much like Richard Leakey in this interview think that being right and being armed with a lot of factual information about what makes, you know how we know that evolution is a fact, that that was enough, that they were going to win because they were right and they had the facts. And then they got their clocks cleaned because what they didn't understand is skepticism. They didn't understand, you know how people get themselves into those belief systems in the first place, the logical fallacies and other mental distortions and pseudo-scientific arguments that people use in order to distort the science, he didn't understand the skeptical angle to creationism, so turning that around, I think you're right if we are going to achieve the goal that Richard Leakey thinks it's not going to be just by gathering more facts that prove to an even deeper degree that evolution is true, it's going to be creating a more skeptical and scientifically literate culture. That, of course no one knows what the future holds in that regard, but I think that's exactly what we're working towards.
Who's That Noisy? (34:35)
Answer to last week: L Ron Hubbard
S: All right well we do need to move on. I'm going to cover Evan for Who's That Noisy this week. But first, let's play the noisy from last week.
Well psychiatry has to do with the insane, and we have nothing to do with the insane whatsoever. They are, the insane, uh well they're insane.
S: All right, so did you guys recognise that voice?
B: Sure did.
J: Absolutely.
R: That sounded kind of familiar, yeah.
S: I recognised it instantly when Evan played it last week. That is L. Ron Hubbard. Science fiction writer who created his own religion, Scientology, quite successfully unfortunately. Well, the SGU listener who guessed that correctly first, a lot of you did, I did think that was a bit of an easy one, but the winner from last week is chexuma from the message boards.
R: Congratulations chexuma.
S: Good job. So let's listen to the who's that noisy from this week, here we go.
(rhythmic whooshing noise)
S: All right, so there we go, make your best guess, email us at info@theskepticsguide.org or join us on the SGU forums, and you can post your guess there.
Questions and Emails
Local Darkmatter Followup (35:52)
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This section is in the middle of being transcribed by rwh86 (talk) as of {{{date}}}. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this section while this message is displayed. |
Dear Rouges, Thought you might find this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4033 interesting given your use of the Moni Bidin paper's claims of finding no evidence for nearby dark matter in science or fiction. Unsurprisingly perhaps, a more thorough analysis of the data actually shows evidence for dark matter in quantities consistent with current models. I enjoy the show very much. Cheers, Paul Hatchman
Interview with with Debbie Feldman (40:06)
S: OK, well let's go on with our interview.
(music)
S: We're sitting here at NECSS with Deborah Feldman, Deborah welcome to the Skeptics' Guide.
D: Hi, I'm so glad to be here.
S: Deborah is the author or the New York Times best selling book Unorthadox. Something about completely rejecting your heritage or something.
D: The scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots, yes.
S: That's right.
(laughter)
D: It's a tough title to wrap your head around.
S: So tell us about that.
D: The word scandalous is actually a bit misleading because it's not scandalous in the sense that I left and joined the real world, it's scandalous for my community that I abandoned. They're the ones who are kind of talking about me non-stop and trying to figure out how they're going to bring me down.
S: You're good with that.
D: Oh totally.
S: They're scandalised.
D: I'm honoured.
S: And what are the scandalised about?
D: They're scandalised about the fact that I left and I spoke out about it. There are people who leave, but they just kind of slink away and disappear. And I didn't, I got up and I started talking and I talked about a life that they would like to keep hidden, you know they're really insistent upon remaining mysterious and unknown and I just kind of laid it all out there, and I said look this is how they live, this is the life I grew up in. And that disturbs a lot of people who want to keep the lifestyle secret.
S: Why do you think they want to keep it secret?
D: I think because it wouldn't hold up under scrutiny. Talk about the fact that women are impure when they menstruate and have to purify themselves and go to ritual baths to become available for sex, the fact that women can't use birth control, that they can't have access to eduction, they can't drive a car, these are not facts that they would like to have out there and you know people talking about, they would like to just come across as sort of romanticised, nostalgic versions of the shtetl Jew. They don't want to talk about the more difficult aspects of gender segregation, racism, lack of education, lack of legal advocacy, they'd like to not discuss that.
E: So they know that their actions and their customs and what they're doing is frowned upon basically by the rest of the world, it's a deception on a certain level.
D: Yes, exactly. And this is something they'll actually like clearly admit to. They understand that their way of living, if it was sort of exposed and available to the outside world, that people would be horrified, that people would, well they say that people would misunderstand, but the bottom line is that they know that it makes them look bad and therefore they are incensed that I dared, that I had the guts to go out there and do that.
S: But that's how they justify it, they say that the outside world just wouldn't understand I guess the reasons why they do these things?
D: Yeah. They don't understand the beauty of the ritual, it's beautiful. It's like going to a spa.
S: Yeah. But they don't, do you think they don't really believe themselves when they say that, they're just covering up traditions that...
D: I think that you get the programming when you're a kid, you get told that this is beautiful but other people wouldn't understand, so you start to believe OK well, that's the reasoning that the rabis gave me, it must be beautiful. It must in someone's eyes be beautiful. Maybe it's only god's eyes, maybe it's not beautiful to the human perspective, but it's beautiful to something or someone.
S: But it, still there's, there seems to be a calculation behind that so I'm trying to figure out, it's a calculation on the part of whom? Is it the rabbis who know that, all right this is scandalous, the outside world really we don't want them to know about this, we want to keep it a secret but they still have to know on some level that's because there's something wrong with it, if not then how do they reconcile keeping it secret with the fact that this is their world view? Because usually religious groups want to proselytise, they want to share their beliefs with the world, so how do you...
D: Well the Satmars are completely against that, they're against being missionaries, against proselytising, against asking less orthodox Jews to join their group, they actually would just like to stay completely insular and isolated and have no inside-outside interaction whatsoever, which is very different from some Hasidic groups like Chabad-Lubavitch which is all over the world and constantly trying to get people to join, but even Chabad has to have two faces: the face, you know the public face of the community that you know is like oh we're all laid back Jews and we accept everybody and the private face of the community that beats up other members for not believing that the rabbi was the messiah. So you have again, you have the private community and you have the public face of the community where Satmar doesn't want to have a public face at all. They've always had this attitude of it's us and them, the rest of the world hates us and we can hate them right back, this means that we, the laws of honest behaviour don't apply to ousdiers, they only apply to insiders. We have to be honest to each other, but the outside world is an other, it's an enemy. And this belief evolved in response to the sort of the Holocaust trauma, the birth of Zionism in the early 20th century and the Haskala movement which was the enlightenment of the Jews in Europe. So what happened was you had a Hasidic movement which started you know about bringing sort of solace and comfort to uneducated Jews in Eastern Europe who were feeling oppressed and that completely sort of dissolved into this new fundamentalist way of thinking which is oh well, here are Jews assimilating, here are Jews becoming Zionist and taking back the state of Israel before the messiah gets here, those Jews caused the holocaust, and we have to just go in a completely different direction so that we can prevent another holocaust happening again so that we can appease this angry god that was punishing us.
S: Mmhmm. That appeasement involves completely isolating themselves from the world?
D: It involves recreating the ghetto, again it's going back to their idea of exile and diaspora, we belong in exile and we have been forgetting ourselves by thinking that we can take ourselves out of exile before god is ready. So it's about going back into exile, which often means separating yourself from the mainstream population, separating yourself from access to the rights of every citizen in the country, it's no education, no real freedom because this is what god wants, obviously. And if we don't accept, and if we don't obey then we make him angry. So they take all these basically Jewish laws, like you have that married women are supposed to cover their hair, which is like a really ancient law and it applies in many other cultures as well, and the rabbi, the Satmar rabbi who came over to the US after the war said oh well, that's not enough because you know, what if the hair slips out or what if women are tempted to take their coverings off, let's have them shave their heads. And now that's part and parcel of being Hasidic.
S: Is that right?
D: Yeah, I shaved my head after I got married. Kept it shaved for a couple of years and then I just like, got so frustrated that I refused to do it again. I grew it out when I was pregnant and I never, I didn't cut if like four or five years afterwards because I was so attached to that new growth.
B: What was the reaction to you not cutting your hair.
D: Well the first people who knew that I wasn't cutting my hair was my husband, because he started seeing you know inch after inch and he was like well what are people going to say if they find out? He was more worried about appearances and about what other people's perceptions of us would be and he was scared of getting in trouble. Rightly so, because the community is so controlling that the do this, there's this culture of punishment where the minute you step out of line they're there to get your right back in. So he was nervous that someone in the community would see and you know gossip is so huge there it's like everyone's past time, there's nothing else to do and so that spreads like wildfire and of course the rabbis would have found out and he was scared that we'd just be blacklisted and then we'd never have a life, because we'd never be accepted anywhere and that was our only world, we didn't want to lose it. So you know, my hair kept getting longer and longer and at some point I showed up at a salon to get it died, because you know it was virgin hair and the woman thought I'd had cancer and she's like taking care of me and she was being so sweet because she thought I was a cancer survivor and I was like, I didn't want to tell her the truth, I was embarrassed.
E: Different kind of cancer.
(laughter)
J: So was that the start or did you already...
D: My hair?
J: Well the hair, is that the genesis of your leaving the faith?
D: I think that's like a symbol of my rebellion, I mean the cover of my book has got this photo, this image of a woman with really long hair kind of blowing in the wind and we chose that image because hair for me has always been a symbol of liberation and freedom and especially for women it's, well it's just associated with strength I mean you have the story of Samson and Delilah and Delilah cutting his hair and him losing his power but I really feel like that's switched around for women these days, and you often see that in mainstream media as well, women who want to appear powerful put in extensions, they'll just have like really long hair. I don't know if this podcast is censored or anything but can we say it's the equivalent of the penis in a sense.
J: Absolutely.
S: Yes you can.
D: OK. Because with long hair I do feel more powerful, I do feel more feminine in the sense that men feel more masculine if they're better endowed. So for me the hair has always been a symbol, not necessary the birth as you assumed but just very symbolic of what's going on inside.
S: That's interesting you make the allusion to the penis, seriously because that in film and art that has been a sort of a symbol in like cutting the hair is a castration.
D: Yes.
S: And the castration is the ultimate way to control somebody to repress them.
D: Exactly.
S: So I think that that symbol has been there in art and culture for a long time.
D: And it's so clear in the Hasidic community women's sexuality is considered so threatening that to shave a woman's head essentially negates that, negates that threat and it's so obvious to me where that thinking comes from. Of course no one will ever put it that way, it's like oh we want to protect you because we don't want you to be attacked by men who can't control their lust, it's all about protection because we want to shelter you. That's what these men will tell you. I mean I've had rabbis try to come and debate me after my book came out and the way they spin everything, it's completely ridiculous to me that they don't see through their own fallacies, like how can you possibly say these things and not realise that they sound absolutely ridiculous?
J: Well their logic is flawed and they never were taught how to think.
D: True story.
J: It's very pathetic, you're confronted with that and you want them to see the logic and you're quite obviously a logical person now.
D: Now! (laughs)
J: Yeah.
S: Going off on that, you say now as if you weren't always logically.
D: I really wasn't, no.
S: So there was obviously a journey for you. So give a little bit of an idea what that journey was like, where did you start off from and how did you get out of it?
D: I think that the way to start that conversation is to explain, and this is probably really hard for you and anyone who's listening to imagine, but if you're never given basic tools to think critically, it never really shows up as an option in your life, you never really, you're never presented with an opportunity to do so. So I never was aware that I could think critically or think in a certain way or analyse information in a certain way, because the only way that people in my community think is by absorbing information and memorising it, for example when men study Talmud they're not actually encouraged to question or analyse the statements they're studying, they're actually just encouraged to memorise, and what's considered genius or prodigy in my community, if you can memorise a really large portion of Talmud. And so when they would want to show off how smart people were they would say oh, he can point to any phrase in Talmud and tell you which page it's on because he's memorised it. That's how we measured genius and intelligence in the community, by absorbing information and being able to spit it back without thinking, so the entire approach to scholarship is actually just blind memorisation. So we, I was never exposed to any kind of analysis, processing, digesting or absorbing of information in a really sort of critical way and so my whole relationship to the information I was being given was more about, it was at an emotional level, it was more like this doesn't feel right. Like that would, it would be this gut feeling and this sort of response of no, that's not OK and I don't know why, it just isn't. So eventually when I left, I left for emotional reasons, I left because I was unhappy, I felt oppressed, I felt like I couldn't keep going, I couldn't raise my son in this community, so I left the community, but I left with that same framework of belief, the same I still believe in god, god has a path planned out for me, this is all predestined and I'm just waiting for a sign to keep going. And then I got out and there were no signs. (laughs). And I waited for a while (laughs).
S: That must have been a huge shock.
D: It was disappointing and scary and then I had a bunch of people come into my life and wanting to offer me signs, you know Christians wanted to show me the way and plenty of people wanted to give me a belief system to replace my old one with, but I was still sort of stuck in the whole like well what happens next, am I not going to receive a message, like is this really how it is out here in the big bad world?
S: You're on your own?
B: What kind of message, what kind of message did you expect?
D: I just um, I expected miracles, you know. I expected things to fall out of the sky, I expected the whole world to just operate in this, on this level where nothing is realistic and everything just falls into your lap magically. Because that's how I was raised to feel and to be honest when I was a kid I read fairy tales and that really kind of makes you believe that too, that whole like that's just how life works.
J: Oh absolutely.
D: You make that big brave leap and everything figures itself out for you.
J: I think we're all kind of victims of fairy tales and the adventures that we see in movies and everything which you grow up, hopefully you grow up, you realise first of all you have to make your own adventure, they don't usually find you, you have to go get it.
D: Yeah.
J: and second of all it's never like it is in the movies or in the story books, that's the biggest...
D: Except that was the only information I was able to get, was when I went to the library and I read the fairy tales and I read the childrens' books, I always thought I just have to leave a glass slipper somewhere, I just have to wait for a pumpkin to turn up. It was always about like waiting, it was never about acting on behalf of myself or being proactive, and right around that time, I was a year or two out, I met my friend BJ Kramer and he had left the orthodox community, he had divorced his wife, he had shared custody of his two children and he seemed to be doing pretty OK but he didn't believe in anything. He pretty much figured that after he died he'd be gone and there would be nothing there, and seeing him totally comfortable with that kind of boggled my mind, how could anybody be comfortable with that idea, that's the most terrifying thing I could have ever imagined, especially after having been through what I'd been through, my only consolation at that point was it'll get better one day, maybe only after I die, but it'll still get better. When he found out that I was still a believer I think he was really shocked because everyone assumes you leave the Hasidic because you make a rational sort of split, you reject it intellectually, but not everybody leaves the community for that reason. Some people really just leave because they're unhappy, and I've met both kinds. And he was so surprised, and he could have just like turned his nose up and said well you're just ignorant and I don't want to be friends with you, but instead he just let me kind of hang around the periphery of his life and he would keep sort of passing books my way and just sort of mentioning bits and stories he'd picked up from TAM and from his friends Penn Jillette, who I didn't know was famous at the time, because I wan't really exposed to that world, but he would just talk about his different interactions with the skeptical community, and just kept putting you know throwing a bit of information my way without any judgement or condescension. Eventually I started to understand my relationship with my beliefs and how it was all, again, emotional it was all about like that crutch, that like, being able to keep going because of that hope that it's not in your hands, it's actually in someone else's hands and you don't have to take responsibility or really be in charge, you know in the driver's seat of your own life. And I was like, that's not me at all, like I know myself as a very strong person, very independent, why would I be comfortable admitting that I'm not in the driver's of my life? That's not cool, and it was just kind of like that click in my head, just like actually you have been undermining yourself this entire time, you've been underestimating your own ability to survive and to accomplish your goals. And the minute that happened, the minute I let go of that mental and emotional crutch, things did start to happen, I did start to accomplish my goals because I stopped waiting and I started doing. And since then I've felt truly liberated.
J: Deborah, would you say that most people in the community are unhappy or have a feeling like you did, like something's wrong and I just don't know what it is?
D: Based on the mail I get, yeah I feel like most people are in some way unhappy. The funny thing about unhappiness is that um, when it's the only thing we know, it's very hard to realise that we are unhappy and I think that the conditions of life in that community are such that you get sort of lulled into acceptance of the everyday routine, you just don't know any better, you don't know any different, and until someone feeds you that bit of information that shows you that, that shows you that there's a bigger better world out there, it's really easy to just sort of stay complacent, and that's kind of why the community wants to keep that information out there, they want to keep education out of the community, they want to keep advertising out of the community, they try to control everything about that piece of land they live in because they know that the minute that kernel of information is available, that one thing that can spark a train of thought, they're done, they're finished, everyone will get up and go.
J: What about the internet?
B: Yeah I was just going to say that.
J: How do they avoid it?
D: Here's the funny story. The internet is banned in the Hasidic community, but you can't ban phones and I remember when cell phones came to be, you know everybody got a cell phone, a cell phone isn't non-kosher, you can talk on the phone, but then smart phones came along and the rabbis didn't know what to do because they were, you know the Haseds were saying we need them for business so they legalised Blackberrys for men. Uh, I don't know why Blackberrys over iPhones and Androids, is it something about the way Blackberry accesses the internet that's different?
S: It's more for email and less...
D: Apparently, you know they can trust the Haseds who need it for work purposes to only use it for work purposes, but of course everybody is accessing porn whenever they can and you know, these are the Haseds you're running into at strip clubs and dungeons, you know dominatrix dungeons in Manhattan all the time, I mean my best friend worked as a dominatrix on Manhattan, most of her clients were Haseds. So of course they're trying to access the internet but it's usually the select few, the group of men who are higher up in the hierarchy of the community who can get away with making their own rules because they understand that this is the exchange. They have to say and sort of play the game and they can do their own thing on the side. But the women are completely not allowed to have that kind of access or interaction with the outside world, they can't just get in their car and go to Manhattan for a night with their friends. They can't have Blackberrys or work or live that kind of life so they really are stuck, they can't access the internet or go to college or find out this information. So when a woman lives in Liesburg(?) she's got nothing.
S: So before you got out, you said that you did not have access to education and obviously your world view was authoritarian and not critical thinking, were you taught to read as a girl in that community?
D: We were taught alphabet and we were taught to write but when I was in class, I remember I was in high school, I was 15 or 16 years old, the reading practice that we got were these little censored pamphlets taken out of literature textbooks. And I remember when I was 15, we were reading an excerpt from Milo and the Phantom Tollbooth which is, I believe that is for kids way younger. And we'd get these sort of two or three page samples from the book and it would be passed around the classroom and all of the girls would take turns reading a paragraph and it took us three weeks to get through that pamphlet because the girls would stumble over every world and they would sort of sound out the syllables and it's really clumsy reading. And I was the only girl in the class that could actually speed through it and everyone was suspicious of that, I had to pretend sometimes, read more slowly than I could because I knew it would raise eyebrows. How the hell does she know how to read and what is she doing to get that kind of skill?
J: Wow. You know, realising that we don't even know what's going on, that they did enslave themselves so well that the regular people walking around have no idea that these weird things like swinging chickens over your heads and all of that stuff is taking place today right around the corner from us.
S: And it's easy to think when you do hear stories about an insular community, it's easy to think oh that's just a myth, that's just people talking about another group because people make up stories about other groups.
D: Like the hole in the sheet.
E: Yes.
S: Yeah, it's all kind of rumours so it's easier to assume that the really weird stuff is probably all just stories so...
D: Yeah, and that's actually the kind of belief that these Satmars rely on.
S: Yeah.
D: So that they feel confident you don't think they're crazy.
S: Right, right.
D: Because they figure if there are any rumours out there, everybody thinks they're just stories, but they're not stories.
S: Right. But we're only knowing it now because people are like you who are coming out of the community...
D: But they're still trying to poke holes in my book and say that they're just stories. They're still trying to deny that everything I'm saying is true, they're trying to deny that there's blatant sexism in the community, they're trying to deny cover-ups of sexual abuse, they're still trying to deny all of that.
S: So what's your next step? What are you thinking of doing next?
D: Well I actually just sold my second book, and my second book is kind of about, not so much my story but stories of people who have left religion all over the world and it's kind of the story of the religious landscape in the 21st century which is a topic which has become really interesting to me ever since I left because I discovered that there are people all over the world that feel like they have a lot in common with me even though they didn't grow up Hasidic. Because they grew up in a closet of sorts, and in the end it all does feel just like a closet and you just have to open that door and come out and we're all coming out in one way or another, whether it's intellectually, sexually, spiritually.
S: Yeah I mean at the end of the day oppression is oppression.
D: Yeah.
S: You know when, thinking shutting down critical thinking, not letting you think for yourself, removing any ability to be self-sufficient, it's all the same machinations.
D: And we always have to stay vigilant and aware of when that's happening so we can fight back.
S: Absolutely, I mean it's almost ironic that they're so Fascist in their approach, and controlling, I mean do they perceive the irony of that? I mean I wonder...
D: Do you understand that I am an ex-Hasidic Jew and I have been compared to Joseph Goebbels, called a Nazi and accused of starting another holocaust? I've been told to date Mel Gibson.
S: Mmhmm (laughs).
D: It's not ironic.
J: Wow, don't do that.
E: Don't do that, yeah.
D: No no, it's fine, it's fine. (laughs) I think he's out of my league anyway. (laughs).
S: All right well Deborah thank you so much for joining us, it's really been interesting.
D: It really has, thank you very much.
E: Thanks, Deborah.
Science or Fiction (62:27)
Item number one. A new study confirms the popular belief that old people can be identified by their smell. Item number two. A new analysis indicates that children are more imaginative in their play today than they were 20 years ago. And item number three. Updated data indicate that American brain size continues to slowly decrease over historical time.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (82:14)
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
- Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)
References
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