This book is kinda odd. Having read some of the author's other work, I was expecting something with a little less personal skew to it, but I don't believe that necessarily made it a bad thing, more simply I wasn't expecting this style of book. Because this book did not have a specific topic and was more generally about how the author keeps getting confused in the public eye with a woman whose ideals run the opposite direction, the information in the book is a bit scattered. This, again, isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if one get bored easily on a single topic. There was, as always, lots of interesting information, much of which I'd like to share with you.
- "... sending your child to elementary school without fearing that they will come home with a highly contagious and potentially lethal virus that they contracted from a classmate whose parents believe that vaccines are part of a plot to commit genocide and enslave humanity because some lady on the internet named Naomi convinced them it was so."
- "Being creatures of narrative, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning vacuums. Which is why those opportunistic players, the people I've termed disaster capitalists, have been able to rush into the gap with their pre-existing wish list and simplistic stories of good and evil. The stories themselves may be cartoonishly wrong. You're either with us or with the terrorists..."
- "It is not only an individual that can have a sinister double, nations and cultures can have them too. Many of us feel and fear a decisive flip, democratic to authoritarian, secular to theocratic, pluralist to fascist. In some places, the flip has already take place. In others, it feels as close and intimate as a warped reflection in the mirror. As my investigation has worn on, this is the form of doppelganger that increasingly preoccupies me, the fascist clown state that is the ever present twin of liberal, western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its selective fires of belonging and ferocious despising."
- "The horror of a society that flips fascist from within, without the aid of a foreign invasion, lies precisely in this unsettling feeling of familiarity. When that ferocious force is conjured up to wage war on a portion of the population, there are no outsiders to blame. It's the nice, normal people down the street who turn out to be capable of monstrosity."
- "People living in poor US counties died (of covid) at almost twice the rate of those living in wealthy ones." Political eugenics brought to you by conspiracy nuts.
- "In my conversations with autism parents who have gone the vaccine-blaming route, I am always struck by their sense that they have been cheated or wronged. That someone or something robbed them of what they were sure were their neurotypical kids and substituted them with ones who were different and defective."
- "The persistent appeal of the vaccine-autism myth, no matter how many times and in how many ways it has been debunked, is that it gives parents who see difference as tragedy something external to blame. It's not the genetic lottery. It's not parental age. It's the jab they tell themselves, egos safely protected."
- "The legend goes like this: Fairies would snatch healthy, human babies and young children from their beds and secret them away to the fairy realm. In their place would be the magical changelings who are identical doubles of the kidnapped children only with physical deformity or behavioral trickster challenges, like having a withdrawn other-worldly affect. To Wing and her coauthor, the autism advocate David Potter, it was clear that these legends of fairy doppelgangers were ways of making sense of disability. In some versions of these changeling myths, they write, the description of the beautiful but strange and remote changeling sounds very like a child with autism. There are versions of the changeling mythology in many cultures, German, Egyptian, Scandinavian, and English among others. In some of these stories, families raise these changelings as their own out of fear or punishment from the fairy world. In others, the recommended response is to torment the doppelganger, at times to death, in an effort to entice the fairy parents to reclaim their kin and return the supposedly stolen human child. In a 1968 paper, Karl Haffter, a Swiss psychiatrist and professor at the University of Basil, goes into detail about the kinds of torments that the legends describe to drive away the double. The changeling must be beaten 9 times with birch rods until it bled while the parents call out, "Take yours and bring me mine." One should hold it over boiling water and threaten to plunge it in. The oven should be heated with 9 different kinds of wood and the child placed on the shovel as if it was intended to thrust it into the fire. It should be fed on leather and red-hot iron. It should be given poison to drink. It the torments were successful, the stories went, the changeling would be driven out of the house, scurry up the chimney, and disappear back to the fairy realm. In some tales, the real child would be returned. In others, it was enough resolution to be rid of the double."
- "This is surely why the Bannons of the world, bank-rolled by a rotating case of billionaires, love conspiracy theories, whether they personally believe them or not. They reliably shift attention away from the scandals we know about, and that many have already painstakingly proved, and focus us perennially on something more explosive, something that is just on the verge of being proved. The election was really stolen! The vaccines really are killing babies! And doctors!"
- "The effect of conspiracy culture is the opposite of calm. It is to spread panic. The conspiracy is capitalism."
- "We were a society after all! That the young and healthy should make sacrifices for the old and ill. That we should wear masks as an act of solidarity with them, not for ourselves. And that we should all applaud and thank the very people, many of them black, many of them women, many of them born in poorer countries, whose lives and labor had been most systematically devalued, discounted, and demeaned before the pandemic. Those expressions of solidarity were the real vertigo, the real upside-down world, since they bore no resemblance to the ways capitalism had taught us to unsee and neglect one another for so very long."
- "The people who are exploiters of this planet are people who put themselves first, unable to unself even for a moment."
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