In Praise of Crackpots Who Go Way Out on a Limb, and Then Suffer for It

On Wenesday the David Pakman Show, a DIY talking-head program, aired a clip from an interview in which a lobbyist for Monsanto named Patrick Moore steps squarely in a public relations dog turd. In the clip, he claims you can drink his company's pesticide if you want. Then the interviewer tells him, hey, guess what, he just so happens to have some of the pesticide handy, and offers to get him a glass. Moore refuses, saying, "I'm not an idiot."

Then his face goes red, maybe because he's thinking, I am most definitely an idiot.

What the viewer experiences when they see Moore fume and stop the interview is the purest form of that internet heroin we call schadenfreude—pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others, and one of the most joyous emotions in the world. Unfortunately, we're in the midst of a much-needed referendum on schadenfreude, and that can taint the pleasure a little.

Perhaps the leading skeptic of schadenfreude is Jon Ronson, who just completed a book called So You've Been Publicly Shamed. In it, he argues against the famous attacks and demands for apologies that ensue when someone gets exposed for being wrong, racist, or somehow insensitive.

One of Ronson's case studies is New Yorker bullshit artist Jonah Lehrer, who falsified facts and made up quotes by Bob Dylan to spice up an article. Upon his discovery, Lehrer suffered—among other professional setbacks—an immense and unnecessary Twitter shitstorm that sent him fleeing from social media, maybe forever. Ronson very reasonably wants us to think twice before we break out the pitchforks.

He said this to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show yesterday:

But the world is full of crackpot, anti-reality people too, and sometimes, if we're really lucky, they won't just make a mistake on social media. They'll publicly go out on a limb in a really unnecessary way. They'll grab the spotlight, and wind up with their wrongness completely laid bare for the world to see. When that happens, like it did with the guy who didn't want to drink poison, the work is done for us. They look ridiculous without anyone having to tell them they look ridiculous. No shaming necessary.

Earlier this month, according to TheLocal, a German regional court decided that a biologist named Stefan Lanka would have to pay the equivalent of $100,000 to a doctor named David Bardens after Lanka dared someone—anyone—to prove that measles is a virus. So Bardens wisely emailed Lanka a comprehensive study on the measles virus published in a reputable journal. When Lanka refused to pay up, there was a lawsuit, and the court ruled in Bardens's favor, because of course measles is a virus.

Lanka is an outspoken antivaxxer, and he makes for a pretty fun character for Germany to vilify in the midst of a pretty ugly measles outbreak. He actually cut his contrarian teeth in the 1990s, arguing that the existence of the HIV virus was "either self-deception or a bloody lie." He insists that pathogenic viruses don't exist, which we know because they "haven't been isolated."

It's not a recent phenomenon, either. In 1981, a group called the Institute for Historical Review (IHR) formally contended that the holocaust was made up by the Jews—a boring old antisemitic chestnut. Then, they offered a $50,000 reward to anyone who could prove that Jews had really been gassed at Auschwitz.

Mel Mermelstein, an Auschwitz survivor, mailed them proof in the form of notarized personal testimony and then exchanged a few letters with the IHR, asking when he was going to get his fucking money. When the IHR balked, Mermelstein took them to court.

The IHR countered that Mermelstein had to prove the holocaust existed in front of a panel of inquisitors from the IHR itself. A judge ended up ignoring that part, calling it a "stunt." Instead, he simply called the holocaust "a fact, and not reasonably subject to dispute," and awarded Mermelstein $90,000. Unfortunately there was no internet at the time to help disseminate the hilarity.

For an example in which the rush of schadenfreude is still pending, look no further than climate scientist Michael Mann, whose famous "hockey stick" graph of the climate, was met with a shitstorm of climate change denial when it came out several years ago.

The worst of the vitriol took the form of attacks on Mann's integrity, and the integrity of Penn State, where he works. Mann became one of the climate scientists embroiled in the " Climategate" email scandal. He was eventually cleared of all impropriety in his research, but that didn't matter. Mark Steyn of The National Review called his work "Dr. Fraudpants" and one of his critics wrote that "his 'investigation' by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke." Another criticism went further:

Infuriatingly, Mann's reputation has never fully recovered. But he has been in the process of suing his detractors for years. Many briefings have been filed, but the lawsuit seems to be moving forward, slowly but surely. Meanwhile, according to Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists, "It's fair to say that Dr. Mann's original research is among the most scrutinized scientific papers of all time. If it were fraudulent—or even just wrong—we'd know by now."

Mark Steyn, who is being sued, happens to be one of my favorite Twitter conservatives, so I'm keeping an eye on this lawsuit for the sheer entertainment value. I can't claim I know how this lawsuit is going to shake out, but one possible outcome is that Steyn might suddenly have to, say, publicly apologize to his arch nemesis, Michael Mann, and then write him a huge check.

That shit would be hilarious. And I would feel great about it.

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