Merry Christmas 2022

 

"It is the only nation that believes it is in the right – in every way – while all others are wrong."

 

Translation and Postface by Raymond Ibrahim

 

As we know, the wonders of the world are seven; but there is an eighth "wonder -of-wonders" not counted among the seven: this is the "Muslim nation [umma]." I specifically did not say the "Islamic nation," for within this Muslim nation are wondrous matters not witnessed by any other nation since Allah Almighty created Adam. Here are some of these wonders:

 

1. It is the only nation that believes it is in the right—in every way—while all others are wrong;

 

2. The only nation that exonerates or lightens the punishment of an indicted criminal if he is Muslim and has learned some Quranic verses;

 

3. The only nation where a cleric evades indictment for inciting murder if he describes one of his adversaries as "an apostate";

 

4. The only nation that does not penalize a murderer if he killed "an apostate";

 

5. The only nation that shows leniency and assuages punishments for the "honor killing" of a sister or a wife;

 

6. The only nation whose holy book [Quran] starts with the word "read" [iqra'] and yet it is among the least nations that reads books, if any at all;

 

7. The only nation that still uses the word "infidel" [kafir] against those who oppose its clerics or religious groups;

 

8. The only nation where the ruling of a fatwa [religious edict] upstages the ruling of the law—and yet it brags about being a nation that upholds the "rule of law";

 

9. The only nation that does not contribute to the modern era—not even by producing a tooth brush—and yet brags about its extinct civilization.

 

10. The only nation that insults and condemns the West—yet lives as a parasite relying on the West in every way.

In 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of the charge of murdering Trayvon Martin, a black teenager. This was the spark that lit the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). Three self-described “radical black organizers” responded: Alicia Garza coined the phrase in a “love letter” to black people, Patrisse Cullors turned the phrase into a hashtag, and Opal Tometi started organizing followers online and building BlackLivesMatter.com.

 

Tometi, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, was raised in Phoenix, Arizona. She attended the University of Arizona, where she earned her bachelor’s in history and her master’s in communication and advocacy. Before BLM, she served for eight years as executive director at the Black Alliance for Just Immigration.

 

According to her BlackLivesMatter.com biography, Tometi “is a student of liberation theology and her practice is in the tradition of Ella Baker, informed by Stuart Hall, bell hooks and Black Feminist thinkers.” Furthermore, as a “transnational feminist,” Tometi “supports and helps shape the strategic work of Pan African Network in Defense of Migrant Rights, and the Black Immigration Network.” 

 

Patrisse Cullors is now the executive director of the Black Lives Movement Global Network Foundation. This foundation's financial support initially flowed through a nonprofit co-chaired by Susan Rosenberg, a co-founder of the May 19th Communist Organization, a domestic terrorist group active in the 1980s. In a 2011 memoir, An American Radical, Rosenberg stated: “I pursued a path that seemed to me a logical step beyond legal protest: the use of political violence. Did that make me a terrorist? In my mind, then and now, the answer is no.”  

 

Cullors wrote a 2017 memoir that expresses similar sentiments. She titled it When They Call You a Terrorist. For its epigraph she chose lines penned by Assata Shakur, another domestic terrorist, that echo Marx’s Communist Manifesto: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. / It is our duty to win. / We must love each other and support each other. / We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

 

According to When They Call You a Terrorist, Cullors was born in Van Nuys, California, and raised in the San Fernando Valley in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood. Her mother became pregnant at 15 and was thrown out of the house by her family, who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. Later, she had several more children, including Patrisse. The father, who worked at a GM plant, was able to support them until the plant closed. When Cullors was six, he ceased to live with the family, though he didn’t “disappear entirely from our lives.” At age 12, Cullors discovered an upsetting truth: “Alton is not your father, [mother] says. He’s Paul’s and Monte’s and Jasmine’s. But in between Monte and Jasmine, we broke up and I fell in love with Gabriel and we had you.”

 

In high school, Cullors entered a magnet program with a humanities curriculum “rooted in social justice.” In this program, the students studied “apartheid and communism in China. We study Emma Goldman and read bell hooks, Audre Lorde. . . . We are encouraged to challenge racism, sexism, classism and heteronormativity.” She began to question “the Jehovah’s Witnesses world I had come up in.” 

 

“I always knew I wasn’t heterosexual,” she writes, and describes how she came out in high school. By senior year, she and a friend were “completely on our own, couch surfing” or sleeping in cars. After graduation, an art teacher let the girls live with her. This experience inspired her ideas about “intentional families,” she says, as opposed to biological ones. 

Even though many or even most UFO sightings are best explained as delusions, hoaxes, and ordinary stuff misunderstood, there appears to be a large remnant (>1000) that are much harder to explain, and which show consistent patterns. Such as ~30-1000 second episodes peaking near ~9pm (tied to local sideral time), at random spatial locations, of quiet lights or objects in the sky with intelligent purposes and amazing speeds and accelerations. Sometimes confirmed by many people and recorded by many instruments.

 

If they aren’t delusions, hoaxes, or misunderstandings, the main remaining explanations are a) some sort of secret society or agency that arose on and is tied to Earth, or b) some sort of aliens. I’m not saying its aliens, but in this post, it’s aliens. That is, here I want to “go there”, and think about how best to explain UFOs, if they are in fact aliens.

 

Many have worked on trying to explain UFOs in terms of their immediate physical effects. I kinda like “laser pointers for cats” style theories wherein aliens in orbit send beams to paint a local disturbance, while using telescopes to watch local reactions. But these details aren’t that important for whether we believe that UFOs are aliens, as aliens would almost surely be a lot more advanced than us, and so plausibly capable of a wide range of such approaches.

 

No, it seems obvious to me that the main reason that most resist believing that UFOs are aliens (or secret societies for that matter) is the apparent implausibility of the social thesis. We find it hard to integrate this hypothesis with the rest of our social world views. That is, with our views on what agents can exist, how they are socially organized, and the sorts of behaviors that we expect of social agents within particular kinds of organizations. If aliens are around, why haven’t they made more direct contact, or built more obvious stuff, or traded with us, or conquered or killed us?

 

If the main block to believing in UFOs as aliens is a lack of a plausible enough social theory of aliens, then it seems a shame that almost no one who studies UFOs is a social science theorist. As I’m such a person, why don’t I step in and try to help? If we can find a more plausible social theory, we could become more willing to believe that UFOs are aliens. And if we can’t, we can at least confirm more expertly that the usual reluctance is justified; the social theories you’d have to invoke are so crazy unlikely that yeah, we gotta attribute UFOs to delusions, hoaxes, and misunderstandings, no matter what our eyes and instruments seem to say.

 

In social science, we often prepare for theorizing about a topic by first summarizing its “stylized facts”. These are key data patterns in need of explanation, phrased in language that is closer to theory. In this post, I will attempt this “stylized fact” exercise for UFOs-as-aliens. In my next post I’ll take my shot at explaining them. Here are three key stylized facts:

 

1. LIMITATION – The very idea that UFOs are aliens, rather than a secret society on Earth, implies either a completely independent origin from us, or that any common ancestor was long ago. (~100Myr+.) So unless aliens civilizations are very short-lived, then any modest randomness in the timing along either evolutionary path implies that one of us reached our current level of civilization millions of years before the other. And since we just got here, it must be they who reached our level millions of years ago.

 

(Note that having a civilization last for many millions of years is itself quite an achievement. Which raises obvious questions: what sort of genetic, cultural, organizational, etc. changes were required to achieve that, and at what cost came such longevity?)