Teo Degas' Books & Decks

"SYBPS" is a compassionate X-ray of shaming, shamers and shamees. Although the main focus is online and media shaming, other areas of life are also mentioned. SYBPS is Ronson's quest to learn how shaming works: why, who, and how, and how affects people. Ronson poses poignant questions to the reader and try to answer them by talking to people who experienced shaming first-hand. The questions are really good, intriguing and the answers worth pursuing:
~ Is modern shaming similar, better or worse than shaming in the 18th and 19th centuries?
~ How do we explain the shaming frenzy in our time?
~ Who is doing the shaming these days?
~ Who are those shamed and why?
~ Is shaming justified any time?
~ Does the online mob needs of constant drama?
~ What rush overpower us at times to turn us into a lynching mob?
~ What do we get out of vitriolic shaming?
~ Why do we dehumanise the people we hurt and shame?
~ Why is modern shaming so hardly and clearly misogynistic?
~ Did any of the shamees escaped unscathed?
~ If so, how do they did it? Was something they did? The way they behaved? The way they felt? Good luck? 
~ Does shaming only work if the shamee feels ashamed?
~ Is shamelessness something that some people just have or can be taught?
~ How long does it take for a shamee to be forgotten online?
~ Does shaming works outside the online world?

***

Shamed tells us the stories of shamed people (those who were destroyed by the shaming and those who weren't) and of some shamers: 
> (Publicly shamed and destroyed) Johah Lehrer, a young pop-science journalist and celebrity author who was exposed by a modest hard-working unknown Michael Moynihan for making up things in his books. After being exposed he apologised publicly in front of a giant screen with real-time twits to be further vilified, shamed and destroyed.
> (Publicly shamed  and destroyed) Justine Sacco who made a stupid joke on AIDS on Twitter before catching a holiday flight to South Africa. The joke went viral and she was vilified, abused and had received death and rape threats before landing. She lost her job.
> (Professional shamer) Ted Poe worked as a judge for 30 years in Houston (Texas) and was renowned for publicly shaming defendants and also for giving sentences in which public shaming was part of the redemption.
> (Publicly shamed and destroyed) Hank, a tech developer who made a sexist joke to his friend Alex when attending a national tech conference in Santa Clara in 2013. A female tech overheard him, took a photo of them, twitted it with their comment and complained about their conduct. Hank was fired and vilified by  women's right groups.
> (Public shamer and publicly shamed and destroyed) Adria Richards, the tech developer who exposed Hank, suffered a backlash to her exposé and received death and rape threats, verbal abuse and personal stalking as a result. She was also fired.
> (Publicly shamed and unscathed) Oswald Mosley, a formula-1 chief was filmed in a sadomasochist session with several hookers, which was labelled "nazi orgy" and exposed to the public by News of the World. A trial followed and he was cleared, compensated for defamation, and became  more popular than ever.
>  (Publicly exposed and forgiven, almost)  Andrew Ferreira, a pastor of the Church of the Nazarene, and six other people were videotaped having sex in a covered-up brothel located in a Zumba studio. The Police investigation exposed the place, exposed them and brought them to Court, with the cameras looking at them. The exposé had repercussions in their private lives, but shaming was never part of it except for the only woman in the group. 
> (Publicly shamed and unscathed) Mike Daisey was caught lying by journo Rob Schmitz in a story about a trip to China where he had supposedly met some workers in a factory making Apple products. He was interviewed for This American Life, one of America’s most popular radio shows, and although he tried to divert the questions he ended the interview admitting his lies and saying sorry. After the shaming began he reacted strongly against his critics until those stopped bothering him and disappeared.
> (Publicly shamed and destroyed) Lindsey Stone and her friend Jamie were used to getting silly photos in front of public signs, one of them happened to be taken in front of a Silence and Respect sign in the Arlington Cemetery and posted on Facebook. The viral reaction got Lindsey, abused, threatened, fired from work, and into a deep depression.  

***

This is my favourite book by Ronson, purely because for the most part Ronson is able to transcend his doppelganger self, the one that looks like a character in his books, to focus way deeper this time into a subject that seems close to his heart.What is more, unlike other works of his, Ronson is not interviewing weirdos, extremists or people who live on the edge but normal people, and what matters the most if not even them, it is shaming. I admire Ronson's compassion and empathy and his ability to dig beyond the surface to show us people as human beings and individuals, not as objects. We see him the most compassionate in SYBPS and also the most openly honest about some issues and shamees. Yet, Ronson's dare devil is still here, like other times, his quest takes him to dangerous territories: the set of a porn movie for example (hilarious!) and  he joins a group go get to know information about shaming in the judicial system. 

***

 SYBPS is really an enjoyable, intriguing and fascinating read overall. There are a few parts that I found really interesting. Some of them are: 

1/ The historical antecedents on shaming used to contextualise the research on modern shaming.
2/ The discussion on the validity and limitations of the Philip Zimbardo's social experiment in Standford in 1971, which is endlessly mentioned in pop-psychology books, without further questioning, to explain group psychology.  

2/ I loved Ronson's reflections on the long-life effects of shaming on shamees, even when everybody has forgotten about them. Google will get them out on the front page of certain searches. The Right to Be Forgotten Law issued by the European Court, the work of online reputation management companies and, how important is to trick Google's algorithm  to get the job done show how much collateral damage brutal shaming does to  shamees.

3/ The hints about how shaming is an integral part of the judicial system. That stupefies me even more than online shaming, to be honest.
4/ The references to the psychiatrist James Gilligan work with dangerous killers and how shame is an intrinsicate part of the mutation of their personality into monsters.
5/ The epilogue, in which Ronson mentions the backlash he suffered because some of the things he says in the book were decontextualised and manipulated before it was published. 

***

"...The way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for the person. One story tries to overwrite the other. And so to survive you have to own your story. Or . . .’ Mike looked at me, ‘. . . you write a third story. You react to the narrative that’s been forced upon you.’ He paused. ‘You have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative,’ he said. ‘If you believe it, it will crush you.’ (Kindle Locations 2226-2231).

NOTES
>  Jonah Lehrer, Justine Sacco, Lindsey Stone, Hank, Adria Richards, and Raquel had never  before spoken to a journalist about what had happened to them before this book.
> Ronson's interviews with Troy and Mercedes Haefer from 4chan appared published before in a column for the Guardian Weekend magazine as well as his story of how his son forced him  to re-enact being thrown into a lake.

TYPOS
Barely any. I noticed just two, which are the result of the conversion from printing format to digital format
> loc. 550 pointed outto me
> loc. 942 dehumaniz-ing them
 
COVER
Another great cover for the Kindle edition of the book! 

Fascinating, entertaining, funny and intriguing, "Them" is a companion to the doco series The Secret Rulers of the World, which revolves around the the Bilderberg Group's nature, aims, members, activities and secret meetings. "Them" is also a portrait of extremists of all sorts and conspiracy-theory believers done by getting to know these people directly and personally via Ronson. "Them" is, above all, an exposé of how nonsensical beliefs morph and adjust in the mind of people and groups whose values and belief systems are, a priori, totally contrary, and on how delusion can create a sort of matrix that feels very real to those people who plug into it. Finally, this book is, at a more personal level, an exploration of the meaning of being a Jew, of who the Jews, the Jewish and the Zionists are according to people who are not Jews done by Ronson, a lapse Jew.

"Them" surprises, like many other Ronson's books, because presents the extremists from a very human point of view, with detachment and compassion at the same time. They are normal people after all, with families, beliefs, and a heart, people who live very normal lives, even though part of their normality is also extremism. They believe that we all, the others, are the real extremists and not them, and they are not happy to be called or considered extremists. As Ronson states, "I thought that perhaps an interesting way to look at our world would be to move into theirs and stand alongside them while they glared back at us."

Who are these persons? They are neo-nazis, anti-Jews, anti-Catholics, anti-blacks, anti-Christians. All these people share the conviction that power elites, the Bielderberg Group, orchestrated the 11/9 attacks, those in the World Trade Centre were part of the New World Order, "an internationalist Western conspiracy conducted by a tiny, secretive elite, whose ultimate aim is to destroy all opposition, implement a planetary takeover, and establish themselves as a World Government."

The people profiled in the book are:
1/ Omar Bakri Mohammed, the so-called Osama Bin Laden's man in the UK, a Muslim extremist who lived in UK from welfare, profited from free speech to preach Holy War on Britain, and was part of an active movement to support Islamic Extremism and Sharia Law anywhere, the UK included.

2/ Rachel Weaver's parents (Randy and Vicky), left the world and retired to an isolated cabin in a mountain area in Montana, because they believed that the world was being secretly ruled by a group of Zionist international bankers, "global elitists who wanted to establish a genocidal New World Order and implant microchips bearing the mark of Satan into everyone’s forehead."

3/ Jack McLamb lives and the small Christian community called Doves of the Valley. He is an ex-policeman, drummed out of the force after he created an organization called Police Against The New World Order.

4/ Big Jim Tucker works for an underground paper called the Spotlight, which supports neo-nazi  views and is obsessed with the activities of the Bilderberg group.

5/ David Icke, an ex-footballer turned sports commentator turned spiritual guru, who believes that the World Rulers are in fact body snatches of the Annunaki Lizards from the lower fourth dimension, whose aim is to dominate the world.

6/ Thom Robb, the Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, lives with his family and an informal army of white supremacists in the Ozark Mountains, wants to create an independent state oblivious to the moral decadence of the USA. He believes that Hollywood is a crucial part of a global Zionist conspiracy and moral decadence.

7/ The movie director Tony Kaye halfway through the  editing of his début film, American History X. 

8/ Jeff Berry, the Imperial Wizard of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of Thom Robb’s chief rivals, a man famed for saying ‘nigger’ freely on television.

9/ The Ku Klux Klan historian Richard Bondira, who sells Klan merchandise on the Internet and advertises himself as the keeper of a Klan museum.

10/ The Aryan Nations group in Idaho.

11/ Dr Ian Paisley, the Northern Irish Protestant nationalist and independent evangelical pastor, obsessed anti-Catholic and anti-Papist. 

12/ Mary Moore, a local anti-Bohemian Grove activist.


Ronson does a great job at creating a profile of what the Bilderberg Group is according to the extremists, to then go directly to the very members of the group, one of the founders included, and provide their version of the group's reality.

So, who are the Bilderberg group according to the extremists?
> They rule the world from a secret room.
> Every year, in May or June, this global elite go to a secret summer camp north of San Francisco called Bohemian Grove, where they get together and do all types of debauchery, sexual perversion and the same people who belong to the Bilderberg Group belong to it. They’re witches and warlocks.
> They start the wars, and cause famines and chaos.
> They control the governments, the presidents, the candidates of the major parties and are setting up the one world order.
> We haven't heard of them because they own and control the Media.
> They have been ruling the world in secret since 1954, when Joseph Retinger, a Polish immigrant, created the BG, which was called this way because their first meeting took place in the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.
> They are Zionist Jews or just Jews.
> They are Machiavellian Papists according to others.
> They meet annually in Bohemian Grove, in the logging town of Occidental, where they perform  ceremony called the owl-burning ceremony or cremation of care, with depraved satanic pagan  ceremonies.

Who are the BG according to the BG Members?
Ronson contacted dozens of Bilderberg members, who ignored him between 1999 ad 2000 when Denis Healey one of the founder members of the BG contacted Ronson. Thanks to this conversations we know how the BG operates, as described at length in chapter 12 How Things are Done. It is important to remark that 
> they rotundly deny that they  secretly rule the world, but Ronson's interviewees admit that International politics and affairs had been influenced by these sessions now and then.
> They are against Islamic Fundamentalism and other extremisms because they go against democracy.
> They don't consider themselves a secret group but a private group as they speak freely of anything and don't want journalists middling in and attacking something they don't know anything about.

I have never seen the documentaries, but the book stands alone well. "Them" is well-written, very well structured and "staged", and most of it has just a great cinematic feeling that makes the reading truly enjoyable. No wonder that the rights of the book were purchased to turn it into a movie. It feels like a movie but, sadly, all of what is mentioned in the book is real. Ronson does a great job at presenting the subject  in a very entertaining way, with very humorous real-life episodes, mixed with serious reflection and research (even adventure) journalism.

Like in other of his books, Ronson has the great virtue of keeping his English Phlegm burning even when people are talking badly about the Jews, and at keeping his Jewish origin as hidden as possible, or perhaps not openly displayed, and at getting the trust of people who, then, he exposes without any regret. Ronson wants to present to us who the extremists are and what they stand for. That is great. What I find somewhat unethical is his apparently willingness to make those same people believe that he is a sort of unbiased analyst, even a friend, when he is basically a journo writing a story.

I think the book can be easily used to study the concept of Alterity.

I found the chapter on Romania's Ceauceuscu very entertaining but way off subject despite the fact that Ronson says that "I had come to Romania because I imagined that an auction of Ceauescu’s belongings was a fitting microcosm of what I believed went on inside Bilderberg meetings." As a reader, I don't agree.

The story of Randy's Weaver is very sad and depressing, and I found great that Ronson delved into the deep trying to bring up to the public the version of the killing of the family in the family cabin.

The chapters Clearing of the Forest and The Secret Rulers of the World are utterly funny, in a weird sense, hilarious at times. Ronson describes himself, perhaps just for narrative purposes, as the naive Jon who gets into weird things by accident.Yet, he is able to make and answer important questions and to provide his honest personal view on different matters. I found that he is perhaps more honest with the reader than with the people he follows and interviews in this book, but this is just my impression.

 NOTES
> Shorter or Modified versions of some of the chapters appeared published elsewhere before publication in their final form in this book.
> The profiling and research on some of the extremists mentioned in the book began in 1995 and the book was first published in 2001,  and the first electronic edition in 2010. In that regard, many of the events mentioned in the book are no longer current and many of them have have had U-turns that aren't mentioned in the book. However, the book reads well and is still valid as an exploration of extremism and extremists. It would have been great adding an addenda mentioning some of those events, an update of what has happened to those characters since the book was written, something really easy to do in an electronic edition.

TYPOS
+ location 520 ‘Oh, give it tome!’
+ loc 2395 wasa mistake.
+ loc 2546 ‘who might want tomarry me?’
+  loc. 3486 to see a filmwhich may
+ All references to Ceauescu have the s replaced with the proper Romanian symbol, but they appear oversized and somewhat distorted in my phablet and a bit odd in my Kindle for PC.

A NOTE ON THE COVER
Ronson's book cover for the kindle edition is utterly cool, like most of his other Kindle editions. Great design and colouring and very humorous with Ronson's glasses and silhouette always un view. So 'catchy'! Kudos to the designer.

A great reading overall.