David Dubrow

Author

Update: 6-1-2020

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Over the last several weeks of distance learning for my son and dealing with the other effects of the Corona crisis, I’ve found time to read books in the wee small hours.

A notable effort is Alex Berenson’s nonfiction book Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. The issue of pot in America is so fraught with misinformation, competing political narratives, and controversy that before Berenson’s book it was impossible to determine fact from fiction about any of it. After Berenson’s book it’s still impossible, but what Berenson does is shine a spotlight on the potential dangers of marijuana, and how we did so little research of any kind before decriminalizing it in major areas of the U.S. There’s a massive difference between cannabinoid oil used for medicinal purposes and the THC in today’s marijuana, and pot lobbyists have exploited ignorance about the one to promote use of the other. We don’t know a great deal about both long- and short-term use of today’s strains of pot, and yet we’ve accepted marijuana as a cure-all for everything from insomnia to nausea to anxiety. Berenson does as well as anyone can to cut through the jargon and misinformation, but there’s so much garbage that his book can only be considered a necessary first step to understanding a subject few people seem to want to get to the bottom of.

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I first discovered Jonathan Carroll’s novels in the house of friends who let me stay with them the first few weeks I moved to Colorado decades ago, and I’ll be eternally grateful to them for both their hospitality and library. At the time I started with Carroll’s Sleeping in Flame, a book about a man who discovers that he comes from a far stranger and yet more familiar place than he realizes, and he has to come to terms with a nightmarish legacy that threatens to turn his entire reality inside-out. Surreal, bizarre, and yet matter-of-fact, it’s the perfect introduction to Carroll’s incredible universe of magical realism. Over the years I acquired every Carroll book I could get my hands on, and enjoyed them all.

But, as it turned out, I’d read some of them out of order, namely the Answered Prayers series.

Answered Prayers follows the lives of people touched by the surreal, all of whom know each other in some way: Walker Easterling, Cullen James, Weber Gregston, and others. Odd names, yes. And, like most of Carroll’s books, at least some of the action takes place in Vienna, Austria. While I don’t think I missed anything by reading them out of order, over the last few weeks I reread the series in order of publication, getting the overarching story in full:

  1. Bones of the Moon
  2. Sleeping in Flame
  3. A Child Across the Sky
  4. Outside the Dog Museum
  5. After Silence
  6. From the Teeth of Angels

After Silence is a bit of an outlier, referencing characters from the other novels but lacking the magical connection that binds them. Outside the Dog Museum is kind of a frustrating read, with the protagonist a difficult person to like and a lot going on without much resolution. From the Teeth of Angels is the most disturbing work of the series, and leaves an unsettling mark on you long after you’re done reading it.

—

In addition to reading, I did some writing for Romans One.

This piece talks about going somewhere outside of Hollywood for your entertainment:

You can rail about empty Hollywood tripe produced by hateful narcissists every single day, but until you make the difficult and necessary choice of not watching it, even the stuff you like, you’re contributing to a horribly corrosive system that will never change on its own. The more time and money you give them, the more sewage they’ll pump out.

And here, I discuss social media:

The use of social media, with its laughing/crying emojis, eye-rolling gifs, and relative anonymity, separates the true self from the internet version in ways that make us all seem awful and unlovable. The consequences of ruining someone’s afternoon over a disagreement are minimal, at best. Pile-ons are encouraged. If your ideological opponent says something patently stupid, it would be wrong not to ratio him. Right? Teach that “dummy” a lesson.

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Reading books and avoiding the social media dopamine circus make me more into the person I want to be, so I’m going to continue to do that. I encourage you to do the same.

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Book Review: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

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When Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now popped up on my Amazon feed, I had to have it. I’ve written extensively about the dangers and problems of social media, and I no longer look at Twitter or Facebook for a host of reasons. I have my site post to them, but I don’t look at the feed. In short, I had already formed my own arguments for deleting my social media accounts, so I figured it would be interesting to read what a Silicon Valley insider thought. And it always helps to backfill one’s already-assumed point of view with arguments in favor of it. Most of us do that anyway.

As it was, Lanier’s book was, for the most part, a disappointment.

The writing style is folksy and conversational, which works fine for the subject matter. And I hadn’t considered some of the arguments Lanier put forth. However, there’s a strong political slant to the book that not only undercuts Lanier’s own arguments, but calls into question his analytical faculties in a way that makes the content questionable.

Lanier is obviously a progressive out of the Silicon Valley mold, which doesn’t disqualify him from writing any sort of book, but he refuses to accept responsibility for the progressive political slant of the social media companies he rails against. He claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, “Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.” The political right has always been the recipient of the vast majority of account deletions, shadowbanning, and social media deplatforming. The people who run these social media companies not only foster far-left political environments in their respective workplaces, they enforce their bizarre version of ethics on their users through Terms of Service that change wherever the political winds blow. When tweeting “Learn to code” to a left-wing journalist is a bannable offense, but calling a conservative person a Nazi is not, that’s a political issue. That’s bias.

The problem with the book is that Lanier can’t afford to admit that the left is culpable for turning social media into a disgusting sewer, because it would require him to turn the force of his analysis on himself, his cohorts, and the culture he helped shape, and who wants to dive into all that ugliness without a hazmat suit? The right shares some of the blame for the hostile social media culture we’ve developed, but when all the bannings and deplatformings go one way and not the other, it’s obvious that the people in charge enforce the rules selectively, to the detriment of social media in general.

When Lanier calls Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who famously claimed that the world would end in twelve years, an “optimistic young politician,” it’s a questionable claim, no matter how you feel about AOC’s politics. When he spends paragraphs boosting Black Lives Matter and attacking Trump for tweeting, it suggests that he has an axe to grind that goes way past the advice of deleting one’s social media accounts. What’s good for Lanier isn’t, perhaps, what’s good for you, particularly if you don’t share his fringe worldview.

In addition, the redundancy of some of the arguments he makes suggests that the number ten was selected for its aesthetic qualities, not because he had ten solid reasons. There’s quite a bit of argument overlap.

Reading Ten Arguments was very much like trying to eat lunch in a nice restaurant, but the waiter is overly attentive and suffers from horrible body odor. If Lanier’s progressive politics, born of unthinking Silicon Valley progressivism, don’t bother you, then you’ll appreciate the book more than I did.

Ultimately, all you need is one argument for deleting your social media accounts, and you probably know what it is already. Do you need a book to tell you what’s good for you?

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An Update and Two Reviews

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Even though I quit using Twitter, it doesn’t mean that you should be robbed of my short, pithy little comments (to be read with a lisp or not, as you like). So I’ve created The Chirper, available on the sidebar. It’s like Twitter, but so much better. Now you can come here and read the contents of my sick, bloated id without having to go anywhere else! I’ll update it throughout the week. (I stole the name Chirper from my son’s favorite program, The Thundermans, which parodied it as a social media platform for teenage girls. As Rosa Blasi said, “Chirp chirp, girlfriend!”)

—

The South Korean cop show Tunnel is a K-drama for people who like K-dramas. A little less polished than Possessed, it still has a bizarre charm that draws you in. In an inversion of the British cop show Life on Mars, Tunnel tells the story of a cop in 1986 who is attacked by a serial killer and finds himself sent thirty years into the future, to 2016. There’s an understandable culture shock, particularly concerning the advancements in forensic science in the intervening decades. Some of it’s played for laughs, with inconsistent results. Much of the plot concerns itself with the protagonist dealing with this temporal dislocation, the grief of losing his wife in the past, and trying to catch the same serial killer…or his copycat.

Park Gwang-ho, the time-traveling protagonist, is portrayed as an old-fashioned dinosaur, and his anachronistic way of speaking, acting, and performing his law enforcement duties works well. He’s just clumsy enough to be excused from being subject to assault charges in 2016’s more sensitive times. The actor Choi Jin-Hyuk does a decent job with the role, though his ability to project sadness is a little less convincing.

I call it a K-drama for people who like K-dramas because it takes some dedication to get through the earlier episodes before the show grabs you. Two of the principal characters are amazingly unlikable and opaque, deliberately so, and this tended to be a turn-off until the events of the plot caught up. One character pops in and out without him going anywhere story-wise, which was jarring. Some of the more graphic parts were blurred out for censorship reasons (I imagine), a choice that took one out of the show from time to time.

Despite these quibbles, the show does everything else right. The end is satisfying, the whodunit aspects of finding the serial killer work, and you care what happens to whom. Once you get into it, it gets its hooks into you and won’t let go.

—

I’m a bit more ambivalent about the K-drama Life, but that may have something to do with the show’s political/social aspects than its quality. I’m sure I’d appreciate it more if I lived in South Korea or had personal experience with the issues the show brings up, but other online commentary says that its depiction of life in Seoul is accurate.

It’s a medical show, but unlike most American hospital dramas, the focus is less on the patient of the day than it is the power struggle between the medical staff and the new executive brought in to make the hospital more profitable. This emphasis on the bigger picture allows the plot to address ideas like privatization and its attendant changes to medical care with more detail, instead of tacking them onto the beginning and end of each episode the way other dramas might. It would be foolish to draw parallels between South Korean medical care and American health care, so I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that Life has a point of view, but it doesn’t let that bias change a good story.

The protagonist Ye Jin-woo, played by Lee Dong-wook, is kind of an unknowable figure, even after close to sixteen hours of watching him. I’m not sure if it’s a function of the performance or the writing, but you never really understand why he does things; his motivations are unclear. Not terribly likable, he simply plays a role and that’s that. His handicapped brother Sun-woo is a more accessible character who comes right up to the edge of becoming tragic without quite getting there. What really shines is the relationship between the two, which is multilayered and complex.

Ye Jin-woo’s opposite number is the hard-charging businessman Gu Seung-hyo, who’s not quite a villain and not quite a decent fellow, but you get to know him and even like him a little, despite yourself. He’s played by Cho Seung-woo, who had also portrayed the emotionally distant protagonist in the legal drama The Stranger. Here he shows a little more range; he’d almost have to. Yoo Jae-myung, who was also in The Stranger, does a turn in Life as a surgeon with a somewhat troubled past, and invests depth and pathos into the character that’s desperately needed.

More a slice-of-life story than a tightly-plotted narrative like other K-dramas, Life provides a window into South Korean health care, journalism, and big business that’s interesting, but not compelling.

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News 10-30-2019

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I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Twitter for some time, in the same way a drug addict has a love-hate relationship with heroin.

In August of 2014, I wrote about my somewhat naive observations of Twitter a couple weeks after joining the platform.

In June of 2017, I described how Twitter is the worst thing ever devised, calling it “the mirror of my worst self.”

In November of 2018, I advised readers not to quit Twitter.

Today, I quit Twitter. Actually, I did it last week. More specifically, I stopped reading Twitter except for DMs. Twitter is a time-sink, it doesn’t sell books, and it’s horribly poisonous. I contributed in small part to this toxicity, but no longer. When you find yourself arguing with teenage wannabe transsexuals about anything, let alone the disturbing confluence of gender and politics, you’re in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. I’ll still have my site post to Twitter, but that’s the extent of it. I very much enjoyed kibitzing about non-book/non-political issues with friends, and I’ll miss that. But I don’t miss the rest of it.

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The print version of Appalling Stories 3: Escape from Trumplandia is ready for purchase in the Amazon store. If you have even the smallest hint of a sense of humor, you will laugh at least a few times reading this short novel, written by Ray Zacek and yours truly. There’s sci-fi action, Native American culture, searing political satire, and almost fifty rude names for the President of the United States. Love Trump or hate him, you will dig Escape from Trumplandia. And if you don’t, Amazon offers a money-back guarantee! I think.

—

Appalling Stories 4: Even More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice is on track for a December 2019 release. I’m really excited about this one. Here’s the back cover copy:

Buy this book before they ban it!

With Woke Progressivism corroding every American cultural institution, there’s only one place to find the best of the new literary counterculture, and that’s here: the Appalling Stories series.

In Appalling Stories 4, we skewer the left’s sacred cows and make burgers from the carcasses. You’ll find tales of hilarious Hollywood degeneracy, disturbing dystopias, Green New Deals gone black, old-school treasure-hunting, and much more. Triggering, microaggressions, macroaggressions, punching down, punching up, punching Antifa: like the old spaghetti sauce commercial says, it’s in there.

And it’s all fun to read. We’re not preachers or pundits: we’re entertainers, and we keep you on the edge of your seat, glued to every page.

Just don’t ask us to unstick you.

Closer to the publication date I’ll give you a sneak peek at the Table of Contents and let you know who wrote the kick-ass foreword.

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Social Media and Politics: The Endgame

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You’ve heard this story before: a guy makes a political statement on social media, and the people who disagree are so incensed that they try to get him fired from his job over it. It starts with doxing (broadcasting his personal information online) and ends with calls to his employer. Maybe he gets fired, maybe he doesn’t. A cautionary tale for the Internet Age. By now it’s acquired the patina of urban legend: Watch what you say or they’ll dox you. It happens, you know. 

It does happen. It happened to my friend R.M. Huffman. I can’t say enough good things about Dr. Huffman. He’s a practicing anesthesiologist, a skilled writer, an illustrator, a husband, and the father of small children. In addition to writing the Sweet Tooth horror-comedy series, he’s also written the fantasy novels Leviathan and Fallen, was kind enough to write the foreword to Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice, and wrote the short story Never Again for the Appalling Stories 2 anthology. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll remind readers that I’m the managing editor of the Appalling Stories series.)

He’s also a Christian conservative, and he’s on Twitter. Not long after the 2019 State of the Union Address, while the abortion debate was still fresh in everyone’s minds thanks to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam publicly approving of the murder of newborn infants and New York State permitting the abortion of an infant up to the day of delivery, Huffman posted this:

We could make the claim that it’s a reasonable statement: after all, sex makes babies, generally. But to a certain segment of the population, it’s inflammatory. In a brief interview, I asked Huffman why he posted the tweet and tagged the Democrat politicians:

The political milieu at the moment still involved fallout from Governors Cuomo and Northam publicly supporting legal infanticide, which is exactly what “late-term abortion” actually is. The abortion question is entirely dependent on axioms: is a fetus a living, autonomous human, or is it simply tissue in a woman’s body? That being so, I thought that tweeting out the obvious truism that sexual intercourse can lead to pregnancy, albeit with a rhetorical flourish intended to catch people’s attention, and tagging some women whose voices would resonate with the target cohort might lead to a few pre-pregnancy decisions that would obviate the need to consider abortion whatsoever. In other words, I wanted girls to be reminded that “pro-choice” ought to mean “I can choose whether or not to have sex, and if I’m not also ready to carry a child, my choice needs to be ‘no.'” That’s all.

The tweet occasioned the expected anger and invective, which ran the gamut from standard name-calling to informing him, a father of four, that he’ll never get laid. Par for the course, and nothing to get exercised about. All you have to do is flip a switch and you’ll never see it. And if you do see it, who cares? The world’s full of angry people who say things on the internet that they’d never dare utter outside of it.

Not long after the tweet got a lot of heat from progressive Twitter, someone with the pseudonym Jimbob bigguns (sic), without buying or reading Huffman’s novel Fallen, gave it a one-star review on Amazon. (You’ll note that Jimbob’s done this to another conservative author, too.) It happens. It’s nasty, but it happens. You can’t keep people from doing that, and Amazon’s too busy to look at every single review for accuracy or political bias. Just about every conservative author’s dealt with that kind of thing. It’s what progressives on social media do to writers.

Then things got really ugly. At the time, his Twitter bio mentioned that he’s a practicing anesthesiologist.

Dr. Kat got the ball rolling with this tweet:

Not satisfied with simply linking to Huffman’s personal information, she added this statement: “It’d be funny if his ratings blew up with a sh*t ton of 1 *’s from his negative tweets.” Now Dr. Kat is coyly suggesting that her followers try to destroy his professional rating over words he posted on the internet. (Funny how she won’t spell out the word “shit,” but doesn’t scruple to attack him professionally.) They’re not his patients. They’ve never interacted with him on a professional level. Dr. Kat has never worked with him. And yet they’re trying to affect how he makes a living. This is not just malicious, but fraudulent.

So it’s bad, but not terribly damaging. Do most people check those ratings before allowing Huffman to treat them? Hard to tell. But this is where Dr. Kat’s buddies signal their intent to go for the real prize: getting him canned. The Launch Journals says, “Would be kinda great if this hill he’s choosing to die on also kills his current employment situation.” And Jaynie Campbell is only too happy to oblige by posting a list of Huffman’s hospital privileges and telling people to report him to the Texas Board of Medicine. Because of what he said on Twitter. Not because of his professional conduct as a physician. Not because of how he practices medicine. But because he said something she didn’t like.

When Jaynie Campbell gets called out for posting this information with the intent to get him fired, her response is, “It’s all PUBLIC information.” As though posting it on Twitter and encouraging people to destroy his career is perfectly reasonable because his information is readily available.

Last Stand in Oregon couldn’t wait to tell the world that he’d reported Dr. Huffman for professional misconduct over words on the internet. Huffman never treated him.

MIMI Pro wasn’t satisfied: “Make copies of his Facebook page and Twitter account.”

This encouragement to contact Huffman’s employers continued for some time, including suggestions that Huffman might rape an unconscious patient. Even though he never said anything of the kind. Even though none of them have seen him in a professional capacity.

Me: When did you first learn that people actually did contact your employer?

Huffman: As soon as I saw the first tweet that contained (inaccurate) hospital names and contact information, I knew they would. Anonymous leftist fascists aren’t bluffing; they really do want to ruin your life. To answer the question, though: the day after, when the CEO of an anesthesia group that mine occasionally associates with called me and told me that several hospitals had been asking him about the tweet. That’s when, as a personal favor to him and at his request, I deleted it.

What’s remarkable about the mindset of the people trying to put Huffman out of work over his politics is that they feel perfectly justified in doing so. Donna Jergentz, exulting in her cohorts’ efforts, said, “It’s just starting. I’ve heard of people doing stupid things online – throwing a medical career away for Politics? What a fool.” Nobody threw anything away. A mob is comprised of individuals, and individuals perform individual actions, including the attempt to destroy a man’s medical career. Over his Politics (sic).

Tina Desiree Berg simply saw the attempt to put Huffman out of work as the consequence of his problematic opinions. If you have the wrong thoughts and have the temerity to express those wrong thoughts, you shouldn’t be able to make a living.

The best justification for all of this came from A Cranky Yankee, whose magnum opus must be read to be believed:

Me: How has this affected your career?

Huffman: It hasn’t, because I scrubbed my Twitter feed entirely. A hospital administration that was a recipient of the doxxed information looked at my timeline and decided that my Christian, conservative beliefs about human sexuality were discriminatory to the “LGBTQ community” and thus violated hospital bylaws. I was given the choice to delete my account or face disciplinary action. Reluctantly, and with much counsel, I simply deleted my Twitter history instead of fighting a battle that I’d win, but would still hurt me professionally. My wife didn’t like me spending time on there anyway.

You’ll notice that the majority of the people trying to get Huffman fired use anonymous accounts. It’s a good strategy, because it shields them from similar attack. The anonymity makes them feel safe to say and do anything they want. Those few who have gainful employment and, presumably, something to lose, are protecting themselves with that anonymity.

The difference between social media and a firearm is that you don’t need a background check to use social media. Like a firearm, it’s a tool. It’s often very destructive in the wrong hands, and most of the time you only hear about how terrible it can be after someone’s been hurt by it. But it’s not intrinsically evil. Few things are. You just have to use it properly:

  1. Never talk about politics on social media, even with people you agree with.
  2. You’ve ignored 1., or you’re planning to. Fine. Never use your real name, use your real photo, or make references to your family while you’re on social media.
  3. Choose an anonymous handle, one that you haven’t used elsewhere. Anonymity is key.
  4. Don’t disclose any personal information on social media.
  5. Don’t take anything other people say on social media seriously.
  6. Don’t take what you say on social media seriously.
  7. Use social media for 5 minutes a day, at most. This is not a joke.

Like it or not, there are many, many people out there who are angry, hostile, and petty enough to put you out of work if they take a mind to. We can explore what makes them tick another time, but suffice it to say that there’s more than enough ugliness out there to make you realize that even if you’re not at war with them, they’re at war with you. Act accordingly.

Me: What are you doing differently RE: online behavior now, versus before this foofaraw?

Huffman: From now on, the little I tweet will be strictly related to art and writing projects, which was the intended purpose of my having a Twitter account in the first place. My political efforts will be focused on local and state politics, where real battles can be won; Twitter victories are meaningless, but an online horde of angry liberals upset because you told them that sex can make babies can cause real-life damage. It just isn’t worth it.

A mature person learns from his own experience. A smart person learns from someone else’s experience. Despite my deeply-held opinions about politics, the culture war, and similar subjects, I’m finding that expressing these opinions on social media contributes more to noise than signal. I just don’t have anything original to say on these topics; at least, not that can be communicated in 280 characters or less. Combined with the knowledge that the internet is filled with undiagnosed psychopaths who are perfectly happy to destroy your life simply because you express an opinion that differs from theirs, and it makes using social media to say anything except for the blandest of things a fool’s game. The heckler’s veto works. Their endgame is to silence all opinion different from their own.

Let the psychopaths have Twitter. They own it, they run it, they populate it.

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Twitter Is the Worst Thing Ever Devised

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Actually, social media is the worst thing ever devised. Twitter’s just the ugliest side of it. The seething, malignant id of the internet.

I’ve talked about Facebook many times in this space, and my having quit it has made a marked improvement in both my mood and productivity. However, to do a true cleanse, a social media high colonic, the next step would be to quit Twitter.

Like everything, Twitter is what you make of it. My Twitter is an unmitigated horror, because it involves the two non-family things that I spend the most amount of mental real estate on: politics/current events and writing. So my abhorrence of Twitter is my own fault: I choose what to see and what not to see. It’s the mirror of my worst self.

Writer Twitter is a cesspit of indie/self-published book advertisements, writing tips given free of charge by people who can’t write, memes/cartoons about writing Retweeted by people who love the hashtag #writerslife, left-wing political hot takes, and J.K. Rowling quotes. For some, it’s Heaven. For others, it’s a thing to be endured on one’s way to social media-fueled publishing stardom. For the rest of us, we unhappy few, it’s Hell. If you’re lucky you’ll meet some nice people to talk shop with, particularly if/when you get off Twitter and go to a less communication-hostile medium. Genre fiction Twitter, such as horror Twitter or sci-fi Twitter, isn’t much different except that it has more Stephen King quotes.

Political Twitter is far, far worse. Imagine an unflushed convenience store toilet five miles past an all-you-can-eat fried chicken restaurant. The hot takes are the worst: snarky quote-lets designed to make both reader and writer feel superior to the issue being commented upon. At 140 characters, that’s pretty much what Twitter’s made for. That and online slap-fights where nobody’s mind is changed, no relevant information is transferred, and everybody walks away having owned one’s opponent. If you’re popular enough you’ll get an audience of like-minded people who appreciate the time and effort you took to Tweet that sick burn off Donald Trump with the proper hashtag. That your time was utterly wasted is of no moment: you stood up for your side and put the other guy/gal in his/her/xer place.

You want to know what’s worse than both of these flavors of Twitter? When they mix. The combination of politics and genre fiction is one short step above the approving Retweets of jihadist beheading videos. Every minute of every day you’ll see no-talent hacks nobody’s ever heard of Tweeting hot takes like, “If you believe in X, unfollow me right now,” as if they’re the universe’s gift to ethics. Your political stance doesn’t make you more ethical than anyone else: it’s what you do that makes you ethical. Hard to hear in the era of internet slacktivism, but someone had to break it to you. Very, very few people can write both fiction and political commentary with any degree of insight, original thinking, or competence. Despite their popularity, neither Rowling nor King, both political activists, are worth reading outside of their respective fictional spheres. Stay in your lanes, guys. You don’t have it. You never did.

When I see someone with many thousands of followers and tens of thousands of Tweets, I see someone who’s underemployed. Political pundits can’t help it: they have to Tweet or they’ll die. The world has to know what they think about everything in 140 characters or fewer. Writers have to approvingly Retweet Stephen King’s latest broadside against Donald Trump; the King of Horror might notice them and lift them up out of undeserved obscurity. And what’s the point of being virtuous if nobody sees it?

Got me, man. I’m off to check my mentions.

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