Walking Disaster, Chapter 21

This is a chapter-by-chapter review of problematic romance novel ‘Walking Disaster’ by Jamie McGuire. Posts in the series will all be linked back to the initial post, here.

This was initially a companion series to the magnificent Jenny Trout‘s review of the original novel, ‘Beautiful Disaster’. Jenny has since stopped her review, not wanting to give McGuire any further publicity in the wake of her attempts to run for office.

 

Content warning: Fighting, refusal to listen to concerns, breakup, refusal to accept breakup.

Chapter Twenty-One: Slow Death

Unfortunately, I think it a reasonable assumption that this will not in fact refer to Travis’s fate. Oh, well. At least we seem to have found our way to actual plot, after all that tiresome circling around on ‘I must have Abby but will never be worthy, whinge, whinge, drink, drink, shag, shag, misogyny, misogyny’. To recap where we’re up to: Travis is going to be fighting a very unpleasant fighter whom he’s sure he can nevertheless beat, and Abby is going to fulfil a bargain by having dinner with her ex-boyfriend, who is giving indications of wanting to shed the ‘ex’ part of that. So, The Drama all set up.

Yikes; I was reading through some old posts and realised that now I’m forgetting the puppy. Who the hell is taking care of the puppy while this foursome are off in Vegas, McGuire? Enquiring minds want to know. (Updated: He was with Brazil, apparently. At least McGuire remembered him this time.)

Anyway… chapter opens with Trav, America, and Shep in the waiting room prior to the fight, which is apparently going to be a cage fight, which is a new experience for Travis. Abby is off having dinner with Jesse as planned, and Trav is fretting about this as expected. Shep points out that he needs to get his mind off that and onto the problem of beating Brock McMann. Travis tells us that Brock is known for doing ‘blatantly illegal shit just out of sight of the ref’ and has been ‘banned from the UFC for sucker punches’. Also, apparently Travis has to win this fight, not just take part, in order for Benny to consider Mick’s debt paid; missed that detail when I was reading the last chapter. Shep advises him on strategy; play it safe and let Brock attack first.

Abby turns up at the last minute (as in, Brock and Travis are actually both in the cage ready to start) and she and Trav kiss through the cage bars. Not sure it’s the best of ideas to take your mind off the fighter in the cage with you who’s known for doing blatantly illegal shit, but maybe the ref was watching. Anyway, it’s all good, all’s right with Trav’s world now that Abby’s here, and he’s all set to go win this for her. He’s also still on a roll with the badass lines:

I leaned over to whisper in Brock’s ear. “I just want you to know I’m a big fan, even though you’re kind of a prick and a cheat. So don’t take it personally when you get KTFO’d tonight.”

Which apparently confuses the hell out of Brock. Anyway, the start bell rings and Travis immediately ignores Shepley’s advice and lets all his aggression out in punching ninety shades of hell out of Brock, and it works. It also feels very therapeutic:

I felt no pain, only the sheer pleasure of unleashing every negative emotion that had weighed me down for so long. I remembered how relaxing it felt to beat the hell out of Benny’s men.

Trav’s been doing the underground fights for over a year now. Why are these particular fights being framed as some kind of life-changing catharsis for Trav all of a sudden?

Win or lose, I looked forward to what kind of person I would be after this fight.

Maybe someone with better grammar? Probably not.

Trav and Brock get pulled apart as the round’s over. Second round, same as the first. Third round, they’re both getting tired but Travis manages to elbow Brock in the nose hard enough to knock him out, so he’s won. Cheers, wild applause, Abby gives him a victory kiss, great scenes for the eventual movie.

Benny wants to talk to Trav, so Abby reluctantly agrees to meet him outside in ten minutes. Benny, of course, wants to offer Trav a job; he’ll pay him $150,000 per fight for one fight a month, plus first-class tickets there and back if Trav wants to stay in college during this time. Trav shows some sense for once in his life and says he’s got to discuss it with Abby first. Abby ‘wasn’t receptive at all’, which I thought at first just meant she didn’t say much on the trip back but now suspect means she told him ‘no’ loud and clear and McGuire didn’t bother including the conversation.

(Yup. Just checked with ‘Beautiful’, and Abby was in fact emphatic, detailed, and consistent in telling Travis that a) it was a terrible idea to get involved in working for a mobster and b) she wanted absolutely no part of it, yes, including the money. Travis, of course, just kept brushing right past that with ‘but moneeeyyyyyy’. Portraying Travis here as not only disagreeing but ignoring and dismissing that whole conversation as just Abby not being ‘receptive’… that’s not nearly as good a look for Travis as McGuire seems to think.)

They get home. Abby is giving Toto a bath because he stinks from being in Brazil’s apartment over the weekend. Travis tells Abby that he wants to do the fights, and when she still says ‘No’:

“You’re not listening. I’m gonna do it. You’ll see in a few months that it was the right decision.”

Travis is disregarding Abby’s very clearly stated wishes and not only expecting her to put up with it, but blithely assuming that she will of course come round to his superior way of thinking. Just in case any of my readers were not already clear on this… behaving this way is really not a good idea. (For that matter, nor is signing on to work for the Mafia.)

We have another round of Abby making it completely clear that she wants nothing to do with Benny, any money earned from him, or that world, and Travis brushing this aside and telling her that she’ll see, it’s all going to be OK. Abby asks the obvious:

“Why did you even ask me, Travis? You were going to work for Benny no matter what I said.”

Travis tells her he wants her support, but it’s too much money to turn down. And Abby, in a quietly glorious moment, develops some actual common sense and a spine:

She paused for a long time, her shoulders fell, and then nodded. “Okay, then. You’ve made your decision.”

Well, granted, it’s odd that her shoulders were nodding. Other than that, however, this is a great way to respond to someone who’s determined to go their own way regardless of how hard you try to talk them out of it; accept you’re not going to change their mind and that the time’s come to get the hell out of Dodge, then from that point forward don’t bother with further arguing or ultimatums. Especially when you already know that they’d react very badly to knowing you plan to leave.

Travis, being Travis, completely fails to realise what Abby means and thinks everything’s now A-OK, so he goes happily out to make a sandwich and is unfazed by Abby walking past him and out the door with suitcase in hand, which, y’know, some people might have considered a subtle clue. He does run after her to ask what she’s doing, but because he has the approximate IQ of a pile of rocks he easily accepts her explanation that she’s just off to do laundry at the dorm. He doesn’t twig until he sees her crying as she drives off, whereupon, of course, he freaks out.

He sprints after the car yelling, realises he cannot actually outrun a car, and so leaps on his bike and races round to the dormitories, where he manages to trick someone into letting him in. He knocks on Abby’s door demanding that she talk to him, refuses to believe Kara when she says Abby’s not here and she hasn’t seen her for days, and barges in to see whether Abby’s hiding in a cupboard somewhere, which she is not. (Poor Kara!)

Then he sits outside the door sending off a barrage of texts running the gamut from begging her to talk about this to telling her she’s being unreasonable to apologising for saying that and going back to begging. All with textspeak ‘u’ instead of ‘you’, which I realise is a long way from being the most objectionable part of the situation but which happens to be one of my bugbears. I mean, seriously, we have text suggestion software now; no excuse.

Trav spends the whole night this way. Even he recognises he’s acting stupidly.

The fact that security had never showed to escort me out was amazing in itself

Lampshading! I really wish either Abby or Kara had called security; that would have been a better message both for Travis in-book and for readers.

Trav goes home, and Shep tells him Abby probably isn’t going to be in class today. Yes, probably not, since by my count it’s Sunday. Oh, well, we all know by now that McGuire can’t keep track of her own timeline. Speaking of which, it is mentioned that it’s winter and bitterly cold, so since we haven’t had any mention of Christmas it’s probably meant to be December. McGuire, I’m keeping an eye on you to see whether you screw that one up too.

Shep and America both try to tell Travis that Abby’s done with him, but Travis doesn’t want to hear it. He heads to class (which is happening, so I guess we lost a day somewhere, again) but Abby isn’t there. He stands up mid-lecture and kicks over her empty desk and then his, with a scream of ‘GODDAMMIT!’ Dare I hope that the lecturer will direct him to some therapy? For the moment, the lecturer just makes it clear he’s got to leave. Trav storms out and encounters Megan strolling up the corridor. She promptly tries to flirt with him and tell him she knew it would never work out with ‘the nun’, because McGuire apparently felt it had been too many chapters since she portrayed A Woman Who Is Not Abby as being awful. Also, she’s there to add to the angst factor:

“We’re the same, Travis; not good for anybody.”

…said no actual person ever. Anyway, Travis tells her to go away (I paraphrase) and walks off himself. Chapter ends. Well, at least quite a bit happened this time. It feels as though someone tilted the book and all the plot ran down to one end of it.

‘The Lost Child’, Anne Atkins: review, Part Four (aka 3B)

This is the fourth part of what is now a six-part review of 1990s anti-abortion novel The Lost Child, starting with this post. In the third post, I started reviewing the part of the novel in which protagonist Caz, as part of her own book, tells the story of her life complete with detailed description of a younger sister who is, in fact, entirely a product of her imagination in response to her mother’s abortion. This might make more sense if you start with the first post, but I can’t promise anything on that score. Anyway, this post started out as the second half of that post before I split it, and is the continued story of Caz’s life with her imaginary sister.

Content warning: Mention of child death including national disaster with huge numbers of deaths. Mention of infertility leading to suicide.

 

The letter

Caz – now in her mid-20s and living in her parents’ old house in London at what seems to be largely their expense – gets a letter from a person she knew at university. This is plot-relevant as it ends up inspiring the series of books that will make her name as a children’s author, but it’s also Atkins’ excuse to dive into more moralising.

It probably would be unfair of me to say this if everyone in the comments didn’t already hate the book anyway, but, since it seems you all do, I’ll go ahead: Reading through the general level of annoyance/indignation/outright anger directed at this book in the comments on the previous posts, I have had to fight the urge to say ‘But, guys! Pace yourselves! We’re not even at the really annoying bits yet!’ And, IMO, we are now there. But see what you think.

The letter comes from a Swedish woman whom Caz knew from Oxford. Caz tells us ‘For a term or two we’d been very close’ and that she assumed they’d be friends lifelong, but then Katerina got pregnant and had an abortion, and

Soon afterwards, our friendship, like many an Oxford affair, fizzled out without comment; we found ourselves amongst different friends almost without noticing it.

Come off it, Caz; we already know how you feel both about abortion and about people having different beliefs from you, so, no, you’re not convincing us that this close friendship just coincidentally happened to fizzle out right after her abortion. Also, we get Katerina’s version in the letter, and it’s a sight more plausible from what we know about Caz:

You criticised me, and made me very angry, and our friendship was broken. I still have some hurt in me because of this.

However, it seems that Katerina is not actually writing after all these years just to call Caz out. She’s writing to say that, although she still disagrees with Caz over the abortion, she’s come to agree with her over something else; namely, Caz’s views on the dropping birth rate.

You said we were disposing of our children, and soon there would be nothing left.

‘But wait’, you might possibly be thinking right now (if you are managing coherent thoughts beyond the ‘WTF’ rage-blurt), ‘isn’t this the same Caz who has gone on to have precisely zero children by this point in her life?’ Why, yes, indeed it is. Well, as long as you’re not being hypocritical or anything, Caz.

I didn’t hear you well at the time, the larger thing that you were saying, because you also said that a baby should be more important to me than my studies, with which I very strongly disagree: our grandmothers and great-grandmothers worked very hard to allow us to put our minds before our bodies.

So… it was all right for Katerina to decide something was more important to her than having a baby, but she doesn’t like the fact that other people are making the same choice? Well, as long as you’re not being hypocritical or anything, Katerina.

But now that I have lived in Sweden again for nearly three years, I see a society robbed of some of its most beautiful people. Here, the middle-class members value their salaries, and their careers, and their fine homes and materials. And they have one child, perhaps, or sometimes none. […] Perhaps you say I shouldn’t criticise, as I didn’t want a child in that time and place.

Ding ding ding! But more to the point, Katerina, do you have any children now? If you think Sweden needs more children, by all means have some instead of complaining about all those other people who don’t. (And if there are reasons why that’s not an option for you, then please bear in mind that you have no idea how many of the people about whose choices you’re complaining have the same reasons or ones equally valid.)

I don’t criticise: I merely observe.

Ah, ‘merely observing’. The companion to ‘just asking questions‘.

And the streets are empty and cold.

I do want to point out again here that this is Sweden. I’m sure the streets are cold, but that’s hardly due to the lack of children.

And the mountains are climbed by old people who have taken early retirement. And more than half the desks in the schools are empty.

It’s interesting that, although this is clearly meant as alarmism, it’s actually describing some positive things. If older people are still up to mountain climbing and can enjoy early retirement, I think that’s great for them. If class sizes are smaller, that’s a good thing for the children still there, who can benefit from more individual attention (though I expect the teachers will in fact have the sense to take the unoccupied desks out and do something more constructive with the space).

And what the government does not tell us is that the recession which has been eating our society for many years will soon cause it to collapse unless something can be made to change.

I don’t know whether Swedish society is actually close to collapse or whether Atkins is exaggerating (it seemed to be going strong last I heard anything on the matter), but she actually has touched on a genuine and well-known problem here. We’ve developed the technologies for successful contraception at around the same time as developing the technologies that greatly expand life span, with the result that we have increasing numbers of old people at the same time as getting decreasing numbers of the new babies who will some day grow up to replenish the healthy working population who will be needed to support all these dependent elderly financially and sometimes physically. So on the plus side the population is decreasing overall, which is something our overstrained planet desperately needs, but on the minus side we’re ending up with an increasingly unbalanced population, with too high a ratio of dependent elderly to people who are fit to work.

I haven’t yet seen a good solution to this conundrum, but that’s not a valid reason to leap after bad solutions. ‘Expect people to have children they don’t want, then berate them when they don’t do this’ strikes me as a bad solution by any measure.

There is an old, old myth […] You will know this story, through your poet Browning, as ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’. Earlier versions of the tale do not have the rats; the basic element of the story is simply that the town gets rid of its children. Sometimes there are some disfigured, poor children left behind. The beautiful ones always disappear.

Wow. Just… wow. I’m actually lost for words at this implication that the loss of children only matters if they’re appropriately attractive and rich. But it gets worse:

Perhaps this story is based on true events: the last time such a thing happened was in your Welsh town, Aberfan, in the 1960s. Usually, the society which loses its children is to blame in some way.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FSJKDJFJKJ (keyboard smash)…

I’m guessing most or all of the people reading this will not have heard of the Aberfan tragedy (even in Britain, I don’t think it’s widely known these days; it’s only by chance that I’ve previously read about it) and will not know what this is all about, so I’ll explain. Content warning, again, for major tragedy involving multiple child deaths.

Aberfan is a Welsh mining village. As is typical practice, the waste coming out of the mine was piled up in giant piles known as ‘spoil tips’ or ‘slag heaps’. During the ’50s and ’60s, Aberfan residents repeatedly expressed concerns over the stability of one such tip which was piled up on a hill overlooking the primary school, but their concerns were ignored by the National Coal Board. On 25th October 1966, the spoil tip spilled over and buried the school and the nearby houses in an avalanche of mud and slurry. A hundred and forty-four people were killed, most of them children. The subsequent inquiry found that blame for the tragedy lay squarely with the National Coal Board. Their negligence, in the face of the repeated concerns from the residents, had caused the tragic death of so many of the village’s children.

Now, I suppose Atkins might be lumping the NCB and Aberfan together in her mind as all part of the same society, which would make her comment here technically accurate. However, when you are referring to an incident in which the poor and the powerless suffered the worst possible loss due to being unable to change the behaviour of the callously indifferent well-off, talking about blame in a way that sounds as though you’re attributing it to the people who suffered the loss is about as appallingly tactless as you can get. This is a viewpoint that Atkins apparently thought it was quite all right to write down unchallenged and submit for publication. Wow.

From using mass child death to score a point, to using suicide to score a point:

But something has happened recently which made me see it in a wider context, and prompted my letter to you. A friend of my sister’s has committed suicide because the doctors told her she could never have children.

Given the context, the implication of including this particular tragedy seems to be ‘if only there were more spare babies around that she could have adopted!’. Now, my heart goes out to anyone who wants children but doesn’t get the chance to have them. It’s a horribly sad situation to be in. However, I really don’t like the attitude that this imposes obligations on random other people to go through unwanted pregnancies and give up the newborns.

It has been impossible to adopt children in Sweden for many years now,

There is a whole tangential debate here that I feel the need to comment on but hope to keep brief. While it would be wonderful to picture a society that cared for its children so well that no children were stuck in foster care without permanent families, I doubt very much that this is what Atkins meant; I suspect what she was actually picturing was the impossibility of adopting babies. Sweden might well have very few babies available to adopt; that’s certainly the case in the UK, due to a combination of reasonably available contraception and abortion and a passable social support system, and from what I’ve heard Sweden is better at those things than we are and probably therefore has even fewer babies in need of adoption. However, while it might also have fewer older children in foster care than we do, I really doubt if the number’s zero either now or when Atkins was writing this.

The reason this topic is contentious is because of a school of thought that anyone who wants to adopt should be trying to adopt an older child from foster care rather than a baby, a claim which I suspect is about to get made forcefully in the comments (hi, Katydid!). So, I’m going to say up front here that I actually disagree with this. I think that older-child adoption is an excellent option which I would love to see more people exploring; what I object to is the idea that it should be an obligation for would-be adopters. Adopting an older child with a traumatic history is a whole different kettle of fish from starting out with a baby, there are excellent reasons why even people who want to be parents might not be up for older-child adoption, and going in reluctantly can do far more harm than good.

However. With all that said… I do find it highly distasteful that Atkins is not only ignoring the existence of this option, but is doing so in the context of an implied ‘if only there had been some children around to adopt so that this poor woman wasn’t driven to suicide’. Older children in foster care do exist and are not chopped liver. So Atkins is implying here not only that childlessness is a fate worse than death, but that adopting an older child is also. About the best thing I can say about that is that I think at least the second of those two implications was unintentional.

and it is not usually legal to adopt from another country.

I’ve no idea why Atkins thought this, but it seems to be flat-out wrong. Adoption from abroad is, apparently, not only legal but reasonably common in Sweden. I was willing to allow that perhaps things had been different back in 1994 when Atkins was writing… and then I remembered reading this autobiography by a woman born in Brazil who was legally adopted by Swedish parents back in (checks book) 1991, just three years before ‘The Lost Child’ was published. I’m guessing Atkins just made this bit up to suit her story.

So she kills herself. I find it tragic, too, that even in our advanced society a woman can find nothing to do with her life but have babies.

This last line clashes rather oddly with the context. Katerina seems to be presenting this tragedy as another warning against the consequences of the general dearth of appropriate baby-production in society, and she’s certainly chosen to write to someone who she knows will agree with that viewpoint. But she’s simultaneously lamenting the idea of women being too devoted to having babies. I’m honestly not quite sure what note Atkins was trying to hit here; I think she was trying to present the ideas Katerina presents in this letter while at the same time depicting Katerina as one of these misguided (in Atkins’ eyes) women who thinks there’s something deeply wrong with devoting your life to having babies, and didn’t entirely think through the contradiction.

Anyway, this is almost the end of the letter, and is the end of the moralising part of the letter. Katerina tells Caz she misses her and hopes to see her again, and signs off. We now get to the point of all this plot-wise, which is…

The book series and the fictitious artist

All this stuff about a society without children inspires Caz to write an illustrated children’s book about children disappearing from London into a fantasy land. This sells very well and Caz follows it up with a series about the one child who remains behind in an otherwise childless city, which, again, is a huge success and makes Caz’s name as an author.

However, here is the really weird part; she publishes these books as a collaboration with Poppy. She attributes the artwork to Poppy and the writing to herself, and publishes the books in both their names.

This raises some major questions. As far as I can gather from the text, Caz didn’t even tell her publishers the truth. So… how did that work? What happened when they wanted contracts signed? What about the payments? Did Caz end up collecting a double share of royalties under this pretence of being two separate people? Wasn’t that fraud? That goes way beyond enjoying pretend conversations with your imaginary sister in your quiet moments.

And what about her family? It’s established that Caz has two parents and two brothers, with all of whom she’s still in contact; they’d have kept track of her glorious writing success and wanted to see her books. (In fact, it’s explicitly mentioned that Jack, now married to Shangani, bought them for his children). Did they have no reaction to seeing her claim to be collaborating with a non-existent sister? What on earth??

Atkins doesn’t address any of these issues at all. As far as I can see, she sees Caz as driven to these lengths by her mother’s abortion and hence entirely justified in taking the whole bizarre fantasy as far as she does. It doesn’t seem to occur to Atkins to consider how it would realistically be seen by the different people in Caz’s life.

Anyway, the series sells extremely well (which Caz attributes to the deep-seated loneliness of modern British children, because parents are having smaller families and not spending much time with their children, hint, hint) and Caz and Poppy become household names despite refusing to give any interviews about the books. Caz does do other writing of her own and does sometimes give interviews regarding those pieces, and tells us that she is ‘constantly’ asked why Poppy never appeared. That seems like more interest than the media would actually show in a children’s book illustrator not wanting to do interviews (and also seems ironic in view of the unintended implication that her own family were so implausibly uninterested in the whole setup). However, Atkins wants a set-up for the writing of the book-within-a-book, and so Caz tells us that she wrote this book to answer the question.

And on that note, the last-but-one chapter of the book-within-a-book ends. That leaves the conclusion of the book-within-a-book, in which we will get the Big Reveal about Poppy being imaginary, and then several more chapters of Caz’s frame story. I’m planning one more post for each of those parts.

And, for this Hallowe’en…

 

…it is, once again, time for the monthly fundraiser and general showtime, when you get to see the gifts of FTB’s amazingly talented members!

Unfortunately, this time around, you also get to see me. That’s right; I seem to have signed up to do the FreeThoughtBlogs Hallowe’en QI show tomorrow. (Have you ever had those moments of looking back on the conversation you just had and thinking ‘How… how did that just happen…?’? It was like that.) So… if you guys were hoping for the chance to see me make a total prat of myself, well, I guess this is your lucky weekend. Enjoy! And, y’know, if you wanted to throw a bit of money the way of our fundraiser, so that I get to feel my hideous embarrassment is at least in a good cause, then that’d be great.

Well, f&*%

I don’t normally use the F-word on my blog even with asterisks (I’m not squeamish, but my mother reads this blog) but there’s simply no other response to the results at this point.

Last night, when the polls were suggesting Clinton would just squeak through, my husband told me something he’d read in Reason magazine; that it was worrying to realise that if a competent racist without a history of sexual assault allegations was running for president in America today, he’d win. It now seems that an incompetent racist with a history of sexual assault allegations can do so. It’s beyond terrifying to think how many voters may have found his racism a feature rather than a bug. Or how many disliked the idea of a woman as president so much that they would literally vote for any available alternative.

I now have a header!

Took me long enough, I know. Well, it’s nothing to write home about – just something I threw together on Canva – but I like it and, at any rate, it’s a big improvement on not having any header.

If anyone has any particular suggestions about how it could be improved, fire ahead.

The Wyndham Fallacy

Hi again! Sorry for my long absence! I had a pretty busy week followed by a week of being absolutely wiped out by a horrendous cold, so I haven’t had a lot of energy for posting.

I came across another Answers in Genesis post that I thought was worth a mention (via the same route as before; a post on Libby Anne’s Love, Joy, Feminism blog. So hat tip to her once again.) This one was written by someone called Avery Foley and is called Why Does God Allow Bad Things to Happen? The answer, in case you were wondering, is apparently because anyone who’s a Christian eventually gets to go to Heaven for all eternity. So, uh, that’s quite all right then and glad we cleared that up. Anyway, here’s the bit that I (like Libby Anne) wanted to comment on:

Evolution supposedly progresses by the death of the less fit and the reproduction of the most fit. So, if this the case, why should we help the old, sick, infirm, and disabled? Shouldn’t they be eliminated as less fit? After all, in the world of evolution the strong survive, and tough for you if you’re born weak or less fit. According to an evolutionist’s own worldview, how can death, disease, suffering, cancer, and disabilities really be “bad”? In nature, the weak and ill die off and the strong survive, passing on their good genes to the next generation—this is how evolution supposedly progresses. Death and weakness from disease and mutations is a must for “bad” genes to die out. So by what standard do evolutionists call these things bad? Certainly not by their own standard! To claim a standard for good and bad, they have to borrow from a different worldview—the biblical one—to define what good and bad even are.

Well, first off, I don’t have to borrow from the biblical or any other worldview to say that it’s bad for people to suffer pain or distress or loss of autonomy, and good to take steps to help or prevent situations in which those things happen. Sure, there’s room for plenty of complexities and grey areas and debate around those basics, but I’m still baffled as to why the ‘So how do you even define good or bad without a God, huh? Huh? Huh???‘ question is meant to be such a ‘gotcha’. But what I mostly wanted to comment on here is this bizarre claim that a belief in evolution as a scientific fact somehow requires us to also accept it as a moral imperative.

This is a fallacy that shows up now and again in creationist writings, and it is exactly as logical as saying that, having discovered that gravity causes people to hit the ground when they fall over, we are now morally obligated to push them down. I have for some time thought of this as the Wyndham Fallacy, because it’s rather nicely summed up by a line author John Wyndham wrote in his novel ‘The Kraken Wakes’; the main character tells his wife ‘Darling, if I happen to mention that, as a process, autumn follows summer, it does not follow that I am all for getting a ladder and pulling the leaves off the trees.’

‘The Kraken Wakes’, by the way, is unrelated to evolution and uses that line in a different context. In general, though, it’s in creationist writings about evolution that this fallacy typically shows up. After all, the story creationists believe about how the world got started is one that’s heavily tied in to their morality and their worldview in general; not only does this make it virtually impossible for a creationist to question that version of events (because they so strongly believe it’s morally wrong to believe anything else), but it actually makes it difficult for many creationists to get their head round the fact that beliefs about origin don’t, in fact, automatically have to tie into our moral beliefs, and that the two can be independent.

Or maybe they just push that line as a way of making non-fundamentalists look bad. Why go for accuracy when you can have propaganda?

But either way; no. Yes, in nature the less fit are more likely to die. No, that doesn’t put us under any sort of moral obligation to kill them off. If you think otherwise, I look forward to seeing you at the end of summer with that ladder.

Hello there, everyone…

Yes, indeed… I am yet another of the large new influx of bloggers that Pharyngula has just been telling you about. And this is very exciting and quite scary for me, because, while I have been blogging for almost ten years now on one site or another, they’ve always been the kind of tuppenny-ha’penny personal blogs that people occasionally stumble across when they’re googling something. And, suddenly, here I am on a very public platform doing the metaphorical Internet equivalent of worrying about how silly my voice sounds over the microphone.

If you clicked on this blog then you probably want to know a bit about me, so here you are: My name is Sarah and I’m a 45-year-old GP living in England with one husband and two children. I’m a skeptic, a humanist, a feminist, and an atheist, and I love debunking myths when I can find the time to do so. I also love reading, and I’m a big fan of fantasy: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (most of his non-Discworld books actually aren’t all that), Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series, Diane Duane’s Young Wizard series, Mercedes Lackey’s 500 Kingdoms and most of her Valdemar books, and probably several others.

In case you’re interested, here are some of my previous blogs:

Good Enough Mum: a general one about my life, in practice mostly about my life as a mum.

Thoughts From An Atheist: some writings of mine on religion and on the not having of it.

Parenting Myths, Parenting Facts: a few things I’ve written debunking some of the latest dogmas around parenting practice. For those who are interested in that sort of thing.

I’m also about to be late for dinner, so that should do for now. I’m thrilled to be here and look forward to posting more and getting to know people.