A meme making the rounds says, essentially, that because Ukraine is war-torn and we’re not, “… it’s time that we all be a lot more thankful and definitely more grateful.”

I cannot begin to express my contempt for that shallow recycling of Think you have troubles? There are people who have it worse, you know and There but for the grace of God go I.

Never mind that “a lot more thankful and definitely more grateful” is the kind of redundancy that suggests a simpleton’s aspiring to profundity. The notion that someone else’s horrible circumstances should make us happy about our own fortuitous ones is galling in its inhumanity. No better is the underlying suggestion that complacency at home is the proper response to someone’s having it worse abroad.

On the contrary, the situation in Ukraine should fill us with  compassion for Ukrainians and horror for Putin. At home, it should galvanize us against the least degree of tyranny, violence, inequity, injustice, racism, intolerance, misinformation, environmental assault, and other ills—not make us grateful that such could be worse.

Far from “a lot more thankful and definitely more grateful,” I am concerned. Deeply so.

Today’s post on my RESPONSE Agency blog discusses wedding cake vendor bigotry. It’s short. If you would care to read it, please click here.

IN HIS COLUMN today regarding the Ahmaud Arbery case, George F. Will claims that hate crimes are actually thought crimes, and that expressing horror at them is naught but virtue signaling.

(No, I won’t link to his column. It is odious, and I prefer not to help it organic search-wise any more than necessary.)

I find it hard to imagine that a mind as acute as Will’s truly fails to grasp the concept of hate crime. Will, of all people, surely knows that hate crime is not the same as thought crime. Hate crimes are terrorist acts that target specific populations.

No one in the U.S. goes to jail for hateful thinking. But if you assault The Other for being The Other, you terrorize other Others, and you damn well should go to jail for it—over and above going to jail for the assault itself.

Granted, hate crime isn’t the best moniker. Unfortunate nomenclature plagues many a worthy cause. Black Lives Matter, not the best moniker. Defund the Police, not the best moniker. But it’s incumbent upon decent people, and especially upon writers of Will’s stature, to inform themselves — and their readers! — of what a movement truly stands for. To argue against what the uniformed think a term means as opposed to what it actually means is brazen intellectual dishonesty. It is the antithesis of what is known in debate circles as the Principle of Charity.

Do not let George Will and other fear-mongers worry you that prosecuting a hate crime is a walk in the park. To prove he killed them because they were black as opposed to he killed them and they happened to be black is notoriously difficult. When a hate crime is established to a jury’s satisfaction, it is not to be taken lightly.*

If you so much as glanced at the evidence in the Ahmaud Arbery case, you are most likely aware (even if unwilling to concede) that because he was black came through loud and clear.

So, no, Mr. Will, Ahmaud Arbery’s killers were not convicted “because of their benighted beliefs.” They were convicted for committing the kind of racially motivated murder that, unchecked, has the effect of terrorizing all African Americans.

And: Virtue signaling? Really?

Virtue signaling, a term that the empathy-deprived seem to thrive on flinging of late, is a propagandist tool used to dismiss laudable actions by accusing the person taking them of a holier-than-thou attitude. It is the would-be sophisticate’s version of calling someone a goody two-shoes. It’s a nifty and flagrantly dishonest way to divert attention from the issue to the character and intent of the person raising it.

I thought George Will was smarter than that. Or least not quite so dishonest. Or at least not quite so childish.

* Not that it is to be taken as holy writ. I am well aware that juries can and do err. No need to @ me on that one.

TWICE IN my life, a father figure showed up when I desperately needed one.

Later, I would learn that each man was guilty of something egregious.

With apologies to your curiosity, I shall not provide details. They would only get us off-track. Suffice it to say that the revelations knocked me for a loop.

An inner voice told me to hate them, to have nothing further to do with them. Yet I couldn’t. The kindness, validation, and support each had shown me was still there. Certainly the good did not erase the bad; but, at least for me, neither did the bad wipe out the good.

“Good person” versus “bad person” is a false dichotomy. Human character comprises many parts, each landing somewhere along its own acceptability continuum.* Some people land consistently near either extreme, but most — including you and me — land in different places on different continua.

Consciously or not, we average the continua, and choose to write off some people and not others.

Some of my friends hold views that I find odious. It’s a charge falling well short of “guilty of something egregious,” yet sometimes someone will ask how I can be friends with “a person like that.”

We love not just because but also despite.

This morning I heard from an aspiring biographer with no better sense than to ask for my thoughts.

In the book he has under way, he attempts a psychological diagnosis of an historical figure. For a mental health professional, that’s already a risky proposition. For all but the most versed layperson, it can border on foolhardy. Worse, the American Psychological Association is considering retiring the diagnosis the writer came up with. They’re beginning to suspect it isn’t a thing.

All of which I pointed out.

The aspiring biographer was grateful for the tip. “Thanks,” he said, “I had no idea. I’ll do more research and fix that.”

Har! Just kidding. What he really said was, “I’m not a professional. These are my opinions. I urge readers to draw their own conclusions.”

Without realizing it, he had just defended perpetrating fake news. With bit of tweaking, his statement could be a slogan for Fox News or One America News Network.

I agree that writers can and should opine. But facts are not matters of opinion. I believe that writers have a responsibility to check and double-check anything they present as fact.

Moreover, writers must exercise caution when it comes to opining outside their respective areas of expertise. It’s wiser, more responsible, to quote, with attribution, experts from the field in question.

And, it should go without saying, it is imperative to be sure that quoted experts really are experts.

I hope he heeds the advice. No matter how well-intended, the world doesn’t need another Fox, OAN, Beck, Limbaugh, or Rogan.

“After reading the excerpt in the Salt Lake Tribune, my wife has discouraged me from reading your book. So congratulations on the book, but it is currently sitting on my dresser.”

So wrote a devout Mormon friend after purchasing a signed copy. I was disappointed but not surprised.

“I’m sure it is scholarly and well researched and well written,” he continued. “It’s the subject matter that concerns her—and me, frankly.”

Um, the subject matter took him by surprise? Long before publication, we had discussed the project at length, face-to-face. Moreover, the title is Behind the Mormon Curtain: Selling Sex in America’s Holy City. You’d think that alone might have made the subject matter at least somewhat clear.

I might add that Behind the Mormon Curtain is NOT porn. I would be surprised if anyone found it arousing at all. Rather, it is a sociological look through a rare window, a glimpse at a world most of us never see. It humanizes sex workers and their clients in heavily Mormon Utah, exposes hypocrisy, looks at legal and law enforcement issues, and discusses Mormon history, doctrines, and practices as they apply to the topic. It is at times grim, at times witty (or so I flatter myself), and at times sardonic. And it is, as my friend speculated, well researched.

Yet it was his closing comment that troubled me most: “You never know what that subject can do to ignite the wrong passions in a man.”

Ignite “the wrong passions”? I suppose I could have asked what he meant by that, but I didn’t need to. A former Mormon myself, I knew. He was worried that the book might get into his head, entice him to misbehave, and ultimately interfere with his access to guidance from the Holy Ghost.

All of which points to a cultish tactic that I find particularly disturbing.

Every cult leader understands, or at least intuits, that curtailing reading — aka keeping people in ignorance — is an effective means of keeping people in line. Hence the pre-Civil War American South criminalized teaching enslaved persons to read, Nazis burned books, and Christian extremists continue seeking to ban selected titles from public and school libraries.

The Mormon Church’s approach is a bit more subtle. Mormons simply dismiss any work casting the least shade on their religion as “anti-Mormon,” which is code for “you shouldn’t read this because it could damage your faith or tempt you to be naughty.” And make no mistake: it is a threat that devout Mormons take seriously.

Which is rather revealing, for it tells you something about the fragility of and commitment to faith. Also revealing is that the panic doesn’t go both ways. I would never presume to tell my readers they “shouldn’t” read the Book of Mormon.

If you’re a Mormon and you’re worried that reading Behind the Mormon Curtain will shake your faith or lead you into sin, it seems to me that your faith and resolve could do with a good shaking. They will emerge stronger or weaker.

Either way, that is all the more reason to read it.

❖

Recently my personal values collided with my fiduciary responsibility. Please read the tale, which I share with some reluctance, by clicking here (which will take you to my other website).

If you write, or, for that matter, if you open your mouth, you will sooner or later risk running afoul of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is the all too human tendency to overestimate our knowledge or ability in a given area by failing to realize that there’s way more to it than we think there is. Like the time that Senator Jim Inhofe thought that a snowball disproved global warming.

I offer two methods for protecting yourself, from yourself, Dunning-Kruger-wise:

Method 1. Don’t venture out of your areas of expertise. Even experts in one field bare their ineptitude when they dabble in another. Like nearly every time Richard Dawkins, a brilliant biologist, has commented on any social issue.

Admittedly, that’s not easy, which is why there is also:

Method 2. Increase the odds of knowing what you’re talking about by setting aside your biases as best you can; doing homework; and running your tentative observations and conclusions by people who know more about the topic than you do.

Oh, wait. That’s not easy, either.

But if you ignore those methods, you’re a bloody fool. Worse, you may cause harm.

A few years ago, fed up with the umpteenth white guy complaining that They always “play the race card” (itself a shining Dunning-Kruger manifestation, not to mention a showcase of empathy-lack), I decided to satirize the expression in my Free Inquiry column. Now, if you happen to have seen my mug on this website’s Books, Articles, and More page, you may have observed that I’m an old white guy. In other words, I was venturing out of my lane. Concerned that instead of helping I might betray myself as less woke than I fancied, I ran the piece by a number of African-American friends. The piece landed well — perhaps you can imagine my relief — but they nonetheless offered valuable tweaks. (Here’s the result, called Rules for Playing the Race Card.)

Flush with that success, I decided to write about transgenderism. I had only one trans friend at the time, so I ran a draft by her. She said she couldn’t figure out what the heck I was trying to say. It was clear that I didn’t really understand the issues after all. Hell, I didn’t even have the terminology down. I appreciated her feedback and deleted the piece. Maybe I’ll try again after I have learned more. Maybe.

Nearly every chapter took me out of my lane in my new book, Behind the Mormon Curtain: Selling Sex in America’s Holy City. I know Mormon history, practices, and beliefs well, but for everything else I interviewed people who know more than I: Salt Lake-area sex workers (female and male), massage therapists, sexual service clients, law enforcement officers, attorneys, and mental health professionals. I was particularly concerned about the chapter on Asian massage parlors — in no way did I want to contribute to anti-Asian sentiment or promote Asian stereotypes — so I ran it by female Asian friends. Again I was relieved when it landed well, but my friends nonetheless  provided valuable tweaks, saving me from myself.

The best way to hide ignorance is not to hide it, but to wipe it out by seeking out and replacing it with solid information. Trouble is, it’s difficult to know when you’re un- or misinformed. Good luck to us all.