Neil deGrasse Tyson off the hook!

[Rev. Rye]

A line from A Monster Calls that I took great pains to point out when I reviewed it last year:

How can a prince be a murderer and a savior? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen? … Because humans are complicated beasts. You believe comforting lies while knowing full well the painful truths that make those lies necessary.

Also:

I also think the possibility that an innocent person can suffer from being wrongfully accused is always graver and require more complete guard than thepossibility that a victim of a crime may not see justice.

Absofuckinglutely. I strongly agree with MLK that “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” whether it’s in a rapist going free or an innocent man being accused of it and punished for it.

I should point out that while false accusations are comparatively rare (a recent study pegs them at about 5.5%), even one is a horrible thing, and one thing that's become increasingly common in the post MeToo world, one that alarms me so much about the discourse that it makes me more and more hesitant to even consider myself a feminist, is that, in response to not being believed, many seem alarmingly cavalier about the possibility of false accusations. Yes, many anti-feminists bring the subject up in bad faith to discredit rape culture and many overestimate how common they are. But that doesn't justify going to the other extreme of dismissing the possibility entirely, especially when there's still room for doubt. If one didn't know any better, one would suspect that this is what you're like deep down (why, yes, I do have an extremely poor view of my fellow man, especially in the plural):




I can remember watching Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, and in the middle of his descriptions of filming a movie about the Cambodian genocides, he decides to go into detail about the horrors that Pol Pot inflicted on his people, reducing the population of Cambodia by a third (something even Hitler failed to achieve) and said that they justified it by saying "It was better to kill an innocent than to leave an enemy alive." To be fair, I don't think we're likely to reach the point of "tearing children apart like fresh bread in front of their mothers," and, this may be my cynical mindset talking, but I'm not sure if this is more indicative of any moral standards or more indicative of the limitations inherent in the outrage machines in the social media hiveminds.

Best solution: when an accusation arises, be prepared to either lose all respect for a given person or for that person to be cleared. Don't make any conclusions until we have all the evidence (or at least a preponderance of evidence that all seems to go one way). If things point strongly towards innocence, accept that. If things point strongly towards guilt, accept that. If things are ambiguous, acknowledge that. To do otherwise is dangerous and just fucking irresponsible.