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Raccoon gets stuck in Florida vending machine (video) + Debunking debunked

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Raccoon gets stuck in Florida vending machine (BBC video report)
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-can...ng-machine

INTRO: Things didn't quite go to plan when a hungry raccoon tried to pilfer a snack from a vending machine at a Florida high school.


https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/btCnSL4qC3Q



Is debunking more about the truth teller than the truth? Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before.
https://aeon.co/essays/is-debunking-more...-the-truth

EXCERPT (Emily Ogden): ‘Bunk’ means baloney, hooey, bullshit. Bunk isn’t just a lie, it’s a manipulative lie, the sort of thing a con man might try to get you to believe in order to gain control of your mind and your bank account. [...] Debunk is a story of modernity in one word – but is it a true story? Here’s the way this fable goes. Modernity is when we finally muster the reason and the will to get rid of all the self-interested deceptions that aristocrats and priests had fobbed off on us in the past.

Now, the true, healthy condition of human society manifests itself naturally, a state of affairs characterised by democracy, secular values, human rights, a capitalist economy and empowerment for everyone (eventually; soon). All human beings and all human societies are or ought to be headed toward this enviable situation. Some – and these are often non-Western people, people of faiths other than Christianity, people of colour – have regrettably gotten themselves faced in the wrong direction. They are still ‘barbaric’ or ‘medieval’ or even ‘primitive’. Maybe they are even getting more so. Turns out the debunking will have to continue. We’ll have to keep de-worming on an individual, an institutional, or a geopolitical scale until everyone is all right.

But scholars have been pointing out for some time just how far off this picture is. These scholars study not just secularisation, but what we imagine secularity to be; not just modernity, but what we think we ‘aim at’, as the cultural anthropologist Talal Asad puts it, when we say we are modern. There is no previously existing or natural secular order that will assert itself when we get the bunk out, a fantasy that the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a ‘subtraction story’; instead, a secular order has to be invented. There is no neutral, universal goal of progress toward which all peoples are progressing; instead, the claim that such a goal ought to be universal has been a means of exploiting and dispossessing supposedly ‘backward’ peoples.

[...] What we should imagine instead of an impartial skeptic is a person who gets a charge out of being the rational member of the exchange – someone who is drawn, for reasons that might or might not be clear to him or her, and that are probably difficult to articulate, to the drama of unmasking. The adversarial scene of debunking breaks down into a strange collaboration between debunker, charlatan and dupe. This collaboration leaves us with a different way of thinking about ‘modernity’ itself. That’s the argument I make in my book, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (2018).

[...An account follows of Loraina Brackett (associated with animal magnetism) and William Leete Stone ... a well-known debunker (see article for details of this and more)...]

[...] Credulity – excessive belief – somehow changed sides in Stone’s story. He went to Providence to set mesmerism down ‘as the work, if not of credulity and imposture, at least of mental excitement, sympathy, and delusion’. He ended up being himself accused ... of ‘headlong, unhesitating credulity’. Stone had seemed to be a public-spirited debunker, and mesmerism was an obvious candidate for debunking. Yet he had not delivered. People familiar with Stone’s career were shocked. ‘Can he be serious?’ asked the editors at the Albany Evening Journal. What had happened?

[...] Whether or not we can give satisfying answers to these questions depends on the picture of the human agent we adopt. We won’t get particularly satisfying answers if we imagine the people in this scene as what Asad has called ‘secular agents’. Secular agency is the picture of selfhood that Western secular cultures have often wanted to think is true. It’s more an aspiration than a reality. Secular agents know at any given moment what they do and don’t believe. When they think, their thoughts are their own. The only way that other people’s thoughts could become theirs would be through rational persuasion. Along similar lines, they are the owners of their actions and of their speech. When they speak, they are either telling the truth or lying. When they act, they are either sincere or they are faking it.

Something like this model of agency not infrequently accompanies the fable of modernity with which I began. The two conceptions make sense together. Modernity, in this picture, is when we take responsibility for ourselves, freeing both society and individuals from comforting lies. ... So you’re probably familiar with the demand that you should know, say and act on what you think; that you shouldn’t be anyone’s puppet. Maybe you bridle against these demands, or maybe you want to live up to them.

Wherever you stand, though, I bet you can also think of some experiences that don’t fit this model. Maybe at some point you fell in love. Maybe you have ideas of yourself that came from your family – ideas that you hate, but that you can’t get rid of. Maybe you have some long relationships in which you know that there is a complicated set of agreements about what everyone will pretend is true. Maybe you’ve managed to psych yourself up in order to give a speech, or sparkle at a party, or be a clutch player, or seduce someone. For a while, you acted like someone else. It wasn’t really acting, in the sense of pretending, but at the same time it wasn’t really you.

Life includes a great many passages in which we place the demands of social bonds above strict truth. But don’t misunderstand me: I’m not just saying that we’re willing to lie for love. I’m saying that, in the context of some of the stories we tell collaboratively in our relationships with others, the question of lying or truth does not arise. We set it aside. We apply a different framework, something more like the framework we apply to fiction: we behave as if it were true. I call that framework credulity. We should imagine the actors in the Stone-Brackett drama as credulous agents.

[...] When Stone became ‘credulous’ toward Brackett, it wasn’t that he started believing really, really implausible lies. Instead, he stopped thinking in terms of truth and started thinking in terms of his relationship to her.

[...] Animal magnetism was a way of formalising a common human capacity for suspending judgment and playing along in the name of social bonds. I use the term credulity for that capacity because I want to draw attention to the fact that our commitment to secular agency, and to the activities of debunking that secular agency implies, can often misrecognise this capacity as belief. It isn’t belief, not really; it’s neither believing or disbelieving, but bonding through the construction of a shared story. Debunkers often dismiss such bonding as credulity in the bad sense – as excessive belief. Animal magnetism is an opportunity to ask what baby is getting thrown out with this bathwater.

What then is debunking? It can be a necessary way of setting the record straight. I’m by no means opposed to truth-telling. We need fact-checkers. The more highly placed the con artist, the more his or her deceptions matter. In such cases, it makes sense to insist on hewing to the truth, and it might not be very important that, in so doing, we are setting aside a significant dimension of what it means to be human: the dimension of credulity as I am defining it here.

But the social dynamics of debunking should not be overlooked, either, especially when the stakes aren’t particularly high – when the alleged lie in question is not doing a whole lot of harm. At these times, what is debunking? It’s a performed refusal to play along, and to recognise the value of playing along. It’s the announcement that one rejects the as-if mode in which we do what social bonds require, and not what strict truth requires. It’s an announcement of that rejection. But the reality behind the announcement might be more complicated.

Even debunkers might not be quite as firmly opposed to that as-if mode as their stance suggests. Consider this. (MORE - details)
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