25 years ago, Carl Sagan warned us about the world we live in today

 

I came across a video posted last year in which MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams spoke of astronomer Carl Sagan—who passed away 25 years earlier—and his prescient foreknowledge of our world today, as revealed in his 1996 work The Demon-Haunted World, a plea against ignorance founded on the rejection of science and critical thinking, and the rapid spread of misinformation, and how all of this would negatively affect the world and the society we live in. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection and the continuing belief by many that the 2020 election was “stolen,” accompanied by the acceptance of wild and absurd conspiracy theories by Trump’s supporters, Williams scrolled an excerpt from the book:

 I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Truer words could not be spoken about our world today, when we see the ignorant electing the ignorant, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert, to be their “representatives” in Congress. We have the highest-rated cable news network devoted to conspiracies and hate-mongering.

Having been first fascinated by Sagan’s Cosmos television series on PBS when it first aired, and having read his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Dragons of Eden, I decided to see what else he had to say about what he believed was in store for this country and world, and purchased Demon. I only got around to reading it in the last few weeks, and I’ll share some of other things of interest from the book.

Back in the day, television frequently aired in prime time those National Geographic and Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau specials; I know I found them to be fascinating as a kid. But in today’s world, Sagan bemoaned the fact that

What we almost never find - in public libraries or newsstand magazines or prime-time television programs - is the evidence from sea floor spreading and plate tectonics, and from mapping the ocean floor which shows quite unmistakably that there could have been no continent between Europe and the Americas on anything like the timescale proposed. Spurious accounts that snare, the gullible are readily available.

Nowadays, many people treat science like an annoyance that gets in the way of their belief in the latest conspiracy theory. Science should arouse “a soaring sense of wonder”; unfortunately, “so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham's Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.”

Of course a good example of this is the insistence of many people that climate change and environmental damage doesn’t “exist” if they don’t actually “see” it.  Sagan notes that “Surveys suggest that some 95 per cent of Americans are 'scientifically illiterate'.” This isn’t exactly new; not just the ancient Greeks but the Sumerians 4,000 years were “lamenting” that “the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding.”

That may not be precisely true at all times in the past, when space exploration grabbed the fascination of the public, and the young could imagine exploring the cosmos, just as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey promised. The next big technological advance that would allow it was just around the corner. But then Richard Nixon ended the Apollo program prematurely and thousands of space flight engineers hit the unemployment lines. Today, there is hardly enough money for NASA to scrounge up for even another trip to the moon. The Christopher Nolan film Interstellar suggests that there is a way, if one finds a “worm hole” nearby, that we can find other habitable worlds; but in his book There is No Planet B, Mike Berners-Lee tells us that this is largely a fantasy, that humankind is going to have to find a way to make this planet last for future generations before it is too late.

Sagan writes that “I don't know to what extent ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, but I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth.”

For Sagan, the loss of manufacturing jobs in this country is also a critical problem, for it also is indicative of a loss of scientific and technological knowhow. Bit by bit, this country is losing its capacity to dictate its own future, and allowing other countries that do control the making of things (like China), will result in this country falling further and further behind. But how many find this “concerning”? The scientifically “skeptical” choose to believe “that science puts too much power into the hands of morally feeble technologists or corrupt, powercrazed politicians and so decide to get rid of it.” But as Elon Musk said the other day, this country needs to stop the “infighting” and “punching ourselves in the damn face,” and be “competitive here.” 

It all starts with the intention to be ignorant. People who choose to believe in QAnon conspiracies even when people who regard themselves as “informed” try to educate them on why these beliefs are absurd can only be “educated” when the insanity becomes so great that even they are forced to feel a little “shame” about it. Unfortunately for some people that is a pretty high bar.

Sagan writes that in regard to beliefs in the logically absurd, “It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. It's disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but it is better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?”

Accepting the science is a way back to rationality and progress, “But superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way…Yes, the world would be a more interesting place if there were UFOs lurking in the deep waters off Bermuda and eating ships and planes, or if dead people could take control of our hands and write us messages. It would be fascinating if adolescents were able to make telephone handsets rocket off their cradles just by thinking at them, or if our dreams could, more often than can be explained by chance and our knowledge of the world, accurately foretell the future.”

But “Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.” Sagan could very well be talking about the absurd 2020 election conspiracies, with one-third of all Americans claiming in polls that they believe the election was “stolen” without a shred of proof, and Donald Trump is still the “president” in their eyes. One can well wonder what Sagan would have thought if he was still alive to witness the January 6 insurrection.

Sagan writes that people think that they are “infallible” simply because they have motor skills that allow them to drive a car, ride a bicycle and even remember how to type after years of disuse. But “Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. A most illuminating book called How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, by Thomas Gilovich, shows how people systematically err in understanding numbers, in rejecting unpleasant evidence, in being influenced by the opinions of others.” We can easily conjecture what Sagan would say about the popularity of Trumpism and Fox News “prime time.”

In the vast ocean of pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, finding “the occasional straw of truth… requires vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, a world of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who saunters along. An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children on television and radio and in movies, newspapers, magazines, comics and many booksmight easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?”

Sagan also regarded much of modern “therapy” as pseudoscience, such as witchcraft was in the past and the belief in ghosts and claims of alien abduction today. He was skeptical of people like authors Ellen Bass and Laura David, who wrote a book that essentially gives therapists and psychiatrists license to implant memories of abuse (especially sexual abuse) to explain certain psychological issues even if they were not mentioned or were only “suggested” by leading questions but the patient was “unsure.” Bass and David are quoted “If a client is unsure that she was abused but thinks she might have been, work as though she was.”

The “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s led to numerous cases of such “implanted memories” to put innocent people in prison before common sense took hold. The most infamous case was the McMartin Preschool trial where the “evidence” was largely concocted by an unlicensed “psychotherapist” named Kee MacFarlane, who showed children where to touch anatomically-correct dolls, and from there followed hallucinatory tales of underground tunnels, baby sacrifices, children flushed down toilets and even the daycare workers turning themselves into witches and flying about. It took six years for these sordid falsehoods to completely unravel and the innocent freed from prison.

Today, regardless of who is trying to control the national narrative, whether it is coming from the left or the right (although these things are “relative,” given that followers of the “right” seem more uninformed and susceptible to conspiracy theories), it is easy to do when controlled by a small cabal with an agenda, and thus more dangerous. Sagan writes, “In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I'm imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over new stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.”

Considering the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that corporations are “people,” Sagan also saw how those “small numbers of people” were organized: “Trends working at least marginally towards the implantation of a very narrow range of attitudes, memories and opinions include control of major television networks and newspapers by a small number of similarly motivated powerful corporations and individuals, the disappearance of competitive daily newspapers in many cities, the replacement of substantive debate by sleaze in political campaigns, and episodic erosion of the principle of the separation of powers. It is estimated that fewer than two dozen corporations control more than half of the global business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books and movies!”

Sagan seemed to suggest that it was possible to overcome the power of corporations and their political stooges by the rise of what could pass as social media: “The proliferation of cable television channels, cheap long-distance telephone calls, fax machines, computer bulletin boards and networks, inexpensive computer self-publishing and surviving instances of the traditional liberal arts university curriculum are trends that might work in the opposite direction. It's hard to tell how it's going to turn out.” Unfortunately, we live in world where it seems the truth has only become a titanic struggle between matter and anti-matter, with one often cancelling out the other.

There is “hope” of course, but then “Even a casual scrutiny of history reveals that we humans have a sad tendency to make the same mistakes again and again. We're afraid of strangers or anybody who's a little different from us. When we get scared, we start pushing people around. We have readily accessible buttons that release powerful emotions when pressed. We can be manipulated into utter senselessness by clever politicians. Give us the right kind of leader and, like the most suggestible subjects of the hypnotherapists, we'll gladly do just about anything he wants - even things we know to be wrong.” Yes, Sagan foresaw someone like Donald Trump becoming president—and no, the framers of the Constitution did not.

While those on the left are willing to analyze what those on the right are saying—if only to attempt to explain to them why they are wrong—those on the right seem unwilling to listen to the views of anyone who sees the world differently: “In his celebrated little book, On Liberty, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is 'a peculiar evil'. If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the 'opportunity of exchanging error for truth'; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in 'its collision with error'. If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.”

According to Mill, “If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up as mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame.” Thomas Jefferson was no less skeptical about a willfully uninformed electorate that allows someone with authoritarian impulses to control national and social policy, i.e. someone like Trump and those of like mind: “A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”

Still, “the framers of the Bill of Rights - and even more so to all those who, at considerable personal risk, insisted on exercising those rights - it's hard now to bottle up free speech. School library committees, the immigration service, the police, the FBI or the ambitious politician looking to score cheap votes, may attempt it from time to time, but sooner or later the cork pops” and “activists and the courts episodically hold their feet to the fire.”

Sagan notes that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were composed at a time when those doing the composing were largely of a single mind on the matter. That is no longer true, and “our liberties” are being “slowly eroded and our rights subverted” from within by the willingness of many to have a dumb-downed, paranoid view of the world, and be more susceptible to unscrupulous “leaders” who are only interested in maintaining their own power and greed. Thus Brian Williams was correct, and Sagan was remarkably prescient about how the world was destined to turn.

 

Oliver Stone on the wrong side of the moral equation in regard to Russia's invasion of Ukraine

 

There may be a lot of things wrong with this country, but at least some of us can admit it. Not necessarily what politicians talk about, of course; what the other side is doing is usually always “wrong,” unless it is something everyone can be “patriotic” about, like foreign threats. On the other hand, many people in this country are prone to allow their basest instincts to be their guide, which explains why many people follow someone like Donald Trump—whose personality and “instincts” resemble that of a spoiled child, who like any narcissistic bully views the world only in terms of his personal likes or dislikes regardless of what other people think or the consequences of acting on juvenile impulses. 

Now there are those self-styled truth tellers like filmmaker Oliver Stone who want to tell the “whole” truth and nothing but the truth about this country. Stone attempted to do this in his 12-part documentary Untold History of the United State, which took few prisoners (JFK excepted) concerning the U.S.’ foreign adventures.  Stone most recently worked on a documentary that will “expose” this country unfounded fears of nuclear power, which he regards as “clean” energy—or at least cleaner than fossil fuels—and suggests that a negative campaign against it to con the public was orchestrated by an uninformed media, the greedy fossil fuel industry and its political supporters.

Stone also has received some attention for his willingness to gather the views of people the U.S. government has demonized over the years, like Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro; Stone is not exactly a “liberal” by any stretch, but he seems to think that “socialists” have a right to be what they are when the “alternative” is the right-wing murder regimes that the U.S. has supported in the past, particularly in Latin America.

That is all well and good, but Stone apparently has gone off the deep end in regard to his good friend Vladimir Putin, who Stone apparently feels he needs to be “gentle” with merely because Putin showed him his “good” side and probably lied a lot to him in a few interviews that Putin consented to a few years ago. Before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Stone told NPR station KCRW that “The United States and its allies in NATO have been provoking Russia for, since two years now — actually three years over Ukraine” and that the media has been “bloodthirsty” in its coverage of Putin’s supposed invasion plans, and “they have no proof that Russia intends to invade Ukraine; I doubt that they would. I think Russia is concerned only with the Donbas region.”

Anybody reading that would immediately suspect Stone of being naïve and definitely not a good “look” for him. After the invasion Stone seemed to backtrack slightly on these views, claiming “Although the United States has many wars of aggression on its conscience, it doesn’t justify Mr. Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. A dozen wrongs don’t make a right. Russia was wrong to invade.” Nevertheless he claimed that Putin had been “baited” by the U.S. and its allies to invade Ukraine, and that in fact Ukraine was the real “aggressor” in this fight. Stone rather absurdly claimed that Putin only wants the Donbas, because a lot of “Russians” live there and they were being murdered by the Ukrainians, and Putin only wants to “free” them.

Stone’s naïvete is remarkable here. Putin has always referred to Ukraine in terms as being a “natural” part of Russia, which implied an intention to re-absorb the country into the Russian “empire.” The effort to “liberate” the Donbas was just another effort to cut away a significant portion of Ukraine’s economic base, and looking at the map of the current situation…

 

…we see confirmation of the fact that Putin intends to further strangle the country by cutting it off from the sea. Unfortunately, time has not exactly softened Stone’s support of Putin and his actions; if anything, it has incomprehensibly hardened his views, if this May 17 interview on the Lex Fridman podcast means anything:

  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygAqYC8JOQI

Stone mentions a speech that that Putin gave in Munich in 2007 about “world harmony” and he recalled “the animosity towards Putin” and he remembered the “sneer on John McCain's face,” and “eyeballing Putin and hating him and it was so evident that McCain had no belief whatsoever” in him that he was anything but s “communist.” Putin, Stone asserted, was only interested in national “sovereignty” that was “crucial” for “world balance,” as if that is something that China believes in these days. National sovereignty is “crucial to the new world and I think the United States has never accepted that sovereignty is not an idea that they can allow. They (other countries) have to be obedient to the United States’ idea of so-called democracy and uh freedom.”

So far Stone hasn’t said anything too offensive, but he quickly goes off the rails from here. Stone claims that in the past Europe was more “with” Putin than against him, until the U.S. started “meddling” with its Putin-hate. Of course that may have been true to the extent that European countries were hoping that being “nice” to Putin would persuade him to play “nice” himself. But Putin never wanted to be a part of a “pan-European” state; Russia had always seen itself apart from European fold since 1917 and this has not changed.

Yet Stone naively asserts that “the big thing for America was always to keep NATO and Europe in its pocket as a satellite and with this recent war of course they've succeeded beyond all their dreams. The Russians have fulfilled the fantasy of the United States to finally be this aggressor that they have pictured for years.”

Besides forgetting that Putin has been meddling in the sovereignty of most of the breakaway former Soviet “republics,” Stone seems to completely misread the American public’s view on Putin and Russia. Whatever is happening now he brought upon himself. Putin doesn’t “respect” the sovereignty of other countries if they interfere with his master plan of reinventing the old Russian Empire/Soviet Union. People in this country don’t want a war with Putin or Russia; they just want him to pick up his toys and go home like a good little boy. After all, Ukrainians are “just like us,” and we wouldn’t like it if somebody was doing what Russia is doing to “us.” 

Stone goes on to claim that Putin was such a peace-loving man that in his interviews with Putin, Stone “heard” him claim “he always referred to the United States as our partners and I said ‘will you stop using that word they're not’ and he was a little bit slow in waking up to uh what the United States was doing.” Well whose side is Stone on, anyways? 

Stone asserts that Putin wouldn’t be in power for 20 years unless he was “popular.” Stone is remarkably naïve about how Putin stayed in power and maintained “popular” support. He doesn’t mention the infamous apartment bombings that Putin was accused by at least one former intelligence agent, who “mysteriously” died of poisoning in the UK, of orchestrating himself as a false flag operation to drum-up support for a war against the rebels in Chechnya—as well as the assassination of opposition leaders, journalists and expatriates, and even today is criminalizing any opposition or contrary reporting about the invasion in Ukraine.

According to Stone, he found Putin “to be a human being. I just found him to be reasonable and calm. I never saw him lose his temper and I mean you have to understand that most people in the Western way of doing business get emotional. I don't see that, I saw him as balanced man as a man can be.” OK. Does he think Putin is an “honest man”? “I do.” Of course this all contradicts reports that Putin is on the cusp of dementia and has been acting like Hitler in his last days in the bunker.

Stone claims that Putin was “confused” about “this accusation of poisoning against this person and so forth and he'd explained it to me in I think in the very clearest ways that I understood and he said to me once most of these people who write this stuff about Putin are going off the internet” which “has really been a source of a lot of fractured facts.” Claims that Russian troops are committing war crimes and bombing and killing civilians are responded to thus by Stone: There is “no proof of it, there was just these accidents of war but all of a sudden it was a campaign of criminality and they were talking about bringing Putin into a war crime trial, well why didn't they talk like that when Iraq was going on and Bush was killing far more people or for that matter.” Well, probably because the U.S. military was keen not to target civilians because in the U.S. (unlike in Russia) we have a free media that will report “inadvertent” civilian casualties no matter how small in number. 

While Stone bemoans the continued existence of NATO, in regard to Ukraine Stone tells us this: Where was the media when Ukraine was killing civilians in Donbas and Luhansk (the other “breakaway republic” in Ukraine’s sovereign territory) from 2014 to 2020? That’s the only reason why Putin decided to invade Ukraine and “free” the people in the Donbas region, Stone asserts. Of course the rest of us know that the reality is that after the easy victory in Crimea, Putin set his sights on Donbas and armed the Russian separatists there to conduct an ongoing military campaign which likely included the presence of Russian troops. Of course Putin had hoped this operation wave been finished already, but it’s gone on a bit too long, and so “daddy” has to come in to finish the job. 

Stone never actually addresses the sovereign rights of Ukraine; he “faults” Ukraine for building up troops on the Donbas “frontier,” conveniently neglecting to mention that Donbas is actually part of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. He goes on to assert that warnings of an imminent invasion by Russia were a “false flag” operation by the U.S. government with this bizarre statement: “When you create this propaganda that they are going to invade and then when they invaded the United States was completely ready and all their allies were completely ready for the invasion, so why did Putin do that? He fell theoretically into this trap set by the United States that here you're telling all your allies across the board they're going to invade but why do you think he did it? So here is it madness or is it no strategic calculation; perhaps this one I cannot answer you faithfully” before going into this bizarre tangent: 

“Mr Putin has had this cancer and I think he's licked it but he's also been isolated because of Covid and some people would argue that the isolation from normal activity which he was when he was meeting people face to face, but all of a sudden he was meeting people across the table uh a hundred yards away or whatever 10 yards away it was very hard to perhaps he lost touch uh with contact with people. So it's not just power it's perhaps he thought in his mind that there would be a faster resolution because the Ukrainian army had folded so many times in the past and that they were only backed-up and they were stiffened by the resistance of the Nazi uh or Nazi-oriented battalions..” 

Uh, what? Is Stone allowing himself to be a willing organ of Kremlin propaganda there? If there are any reasons why Ukrainians might actually hate Russians, they are completely lost on Stone. It gets worse: “What people don't understand is that Ukraine since 2014 has been a terror state and they've been run, you know, anytime a Ukrainian has expressed any uh any uh understanding of a Russian-Ukrainian position they've been threatened by the state. From 2014 to 2022 there's been a set of hideous murders that people don't even know about it.” 

At that point Stone completely lost me. Ukraine may not be an “innocent” state, but to try to justify Putin and his actions over the past 20 years and into this unjustified war where thousands of civilians have been deliberately targeted, including in schools and hospitals, in this way doesn’t win him any converts to his “perspective” on the matter; it just makes him look like naïve at best, and at worst, well, pick your poison. It is unfortunate, because Stone has in the past made useful commentary about the crimes the U.S. has committed throughout its history against weaker countries for supposedly ideological but largely economic reasons.

But most Americans—and the rest of the world—see the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “moral” issue no different that the need to stop the Nazis during World War II. Stone is clearly in the eyes of most people on the wrong side of the moral equation here.

Johnny Depp's supporters are reacting to the truth, not because he is a "man"

 

With the case having gone to the jury yesterday, I didn’t really want to talk about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard again, since like the vast majority of people who paid attention to the trial know the truth is simple to ascertain, even if the “system” is rigged against men. In regard to domestic violence, in this society women must to win at all costs, even if they have to lie.

Thus it angered me to read NPR’s media reporter, Anastasia Tsioulcas, fabricate a rationalization for why Depp is winning the court of public opinion: “On TikTok, as of Monday morning, #IStandWithAmberHeard has garnered about 8.2 million views, while #JusticeForJohnnyDepp has earned about 15 billion views. Why is there such a disparity?”

For one thing, if you were doing your homework, you would know that the "justice for Johnny" campaign didn't kick into high gear until the release of those infamous audio recordings that proved that Heard wasn't the innocent victim she pretended to be. Further, if you had been paying attention to the trial and not getting all your information that the networks and tabloids who have been cherry-picking only what puts Depp in negative light and not Heard, you would also know the answer to that. 

But instead of asking a lawyer who is following the trial, Tsioulcas calls in a “specialist in sexual violence”—i.e. in a field that is 100 percent biased against men—named Nicole Bedera, who claimed that “men's rights groups and other anti-feminist groups are better organized.” Oh really? If that is true, then why are men “cancelled” and their lives destroyed by just the suggestion of an anonymous woman accusing them of domestic or sexual violence, while women are almost never held to account for the violence they commit?

Outside the courtroom many and probably most of Depp’s supporters are women, and quite a few billion hits for “Justice for Johnny” are from women as well. But why let reality get in the way? "In our society," Bedera intones, "we expect that victims fit a specific mold. We call it the perfect victim trope. And often we confuse victims' self-defense as a form of aggression. And this is really common in cases like this, where perpetrators will claim that they are the true victims.” But men don't have that same right to "self-defense"? Obviously Bedera hasn’t bothered to listen to those audio tapes, which includes one where Heard tells Depp to stop being a “baby” and take her “hits” to his head "like a man," and another where Heard is talking to him like Linda Blair’s demonically-possessed character in the Exorcist:

 

Bedera goes on: "This is my biggest concern about this case, and I think it's something that's really gotten lost in the sensationalism around the trial. Right now, [Depp's] team is alleging that if a woman comes forward and identifies as a survivor in public, that that could count as defamation." That’s right, for men who are victims of domestic violence from a partner who has clear psychological issues, it is a lose-lose situation. They should just shut-up about it.

Bedera shows her bias again by assuming Depp is the guilty party: "One question I have right now, in our sort of post-#MeToo moment we're trying to decide what the consequences should be for intimate partner violence. And the reality is that Johnny Depp is facing a lot of consequences for committing acts of violence, not just to Amber Heard but also for volatile behavior on set. And people who work alongside him have a bit clearer of a picture than somebody who's watching it on TikTok and doesn't know any of the people involved in this case.” 

First of all, as Hollywood "insiders" testified to in court, Depp's "diva" behavior, and even his substance abuse, was not "unusual" for actors regarded as "stars," and as long as they made money for the studios it was tolerated. It was Heard's accusations, especially in the Washington Post op-ed, that changed everything. On the other hand, another insider testified that Heard's "Q scores"--which measure an actor's marketabilty--were "terrible," which even before the so-called Waldman statements showed Heard with responses three times more negative than positive from media consumers. And as Heard repeatedly accused those whose testimony exposed her lies, Bedera was not “there” either. People like this just don’t care about any reality that contradicts their own preconceived notions of who constitutes a perpetrator and victim.

If you were paying attention to the testimony in court, it is not at all hard to sympathize with Depp’s version of events and feel disgust for Heard as a human being. The following is the “evidence” we were presented by Heard’s team. Here we clearly see that these two images are exactly the same one, except that the one on the left has clearly been “enhanced” by photo editing software to appear more “red,” which is not Heard’s naturally pale skin color:

 

Here we see Heard in court wearing rouge on her cheeks:

 

Do you see a difference? I sure the hell don’t; in fact this image looks more "bruise-like." If she told you the rouge was actually a bruise, would you believe her? I’m sure that a lot of her diehard supporters would. Heard at one point “mistakenly” referred to that round makeup kit as a “bruise kit,” which she immediately “corrected.” A bruise kit is a real thing, used in films for actors to fake bruises and other injuries. Did Heard really “misspeak”? 

Here we see someone on TikTok demonstrating how to fake the kind of bruises seen around Heard’s eyes in another image, using the same “kit” Heard and her attorney were showing the jurors:

 

This is important because all of the witnesses who were actually present during the time of alleged battering incidents stated that they saw no injuries—let alone actual “battering—on Heard; these only “magically” appeared when Heard wanted someone to see an injury.  At the incident that involved police, they saw no evidence that Heard had been “battered,” and no one present at the scene corroborated Heard’s claims, and stated they could not arrest anyone just simply because there was an argument. Let us also remember that there was no corroborating documents from either medical professionals or law enforcement ever produced at trial of any alleged injury to Heard because they simply did not exist--not even from Heard's own personal nurse.

This photo taken of Heard the day after she filed a restraining order against Depp when he was on a European tour did not win Heard any new converts, especially after that “bruise” that the paparazzi had been pre-notified to take pictures of a day earlier disappeared as magically as they appeared:

 

I say "magical" because Heard had last encountered Depp six days prior, when he was leaving for that tour in Europe. This image of a "bruise" on Heard’s arm probably wasn’t faked...

 

…but that doesn’t mean it was caused by a physical blow. How many people have noticed similar bruising on their shoulders or legs for no apparent reason? I certainly have; an article on the website Healthline https://www.healthline.com/health/random-bruising discusses how such bruising happens and why women are more likely to experience them than men.

Heard’s making obvious false statements and lying even about the smallest things have turned people against her, as well her playacting. Her attempts to conceal her lies included the already referred to testimony about the money paid to her by Depp to donate to the ACLU and the children’s hospital, and then we saw those excruciatingly faked “tears”…

 

…that we could tell were faked because immediately upon cross examination she was back to the same old contemptuous, smirking Heard, here calling the Hicksville Trailer Palace manager’s testimony a “lie,” sneering “How would he know, he wasn’t there”…

 

 

…and then this angry response when reminded of Kate Moss’ rebuttal of Heard’s false claim that Depp had pushed Moss down some stairs:

 

 

Who is the real Amber Heard: the one with the laughably fake “tears,” or the one with the cruel, smug demeanor when confronted with her falsehoods and calls everyone who isn’t “for” her a liar?

While Heard’s “expert” psychological witnesses, like Dr. David Spiegel—whose testimony was both weird and irrelevant—and Dr. Dawn Hughes, who was clearly biased against men in general, were exposed as ridiculous on cross examination, Dr. Shannon Curry demonstrated that Heard faked her responses on tests and accused Hughes of helping her do it.  Curry diagnosed Heard as suffering from “borderline personality disorder” and “histrionic personality disorder,” described here: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/wellness/amber-heard-johnny-depp-personality-disorders-311661

Curry also testified that in her interviews with Heard and investigation of Heard’s prior behaviors, she found no evidence of PTSD, but rather someone who was fully in control of her life and was attempting to control others. This would include her sister Whitney, who another witness who identified herself as once being Whitney’s closest friend and confidant, testified that she begged her not to allow herself to be used by Heard to enable her lies and abusive behavior even to her own person.

As Depp attorney Camille Vasquez made abundantly clear in her portion of closing arguments, witness after witness, like Moss, came forward to directly refute Heard’s false testimony—people who Heard apparently believed would never be heard to contradict her lies. The histrionic Heard apparently told wild stories to her friends and they probably told her to "speak out" without thinking of the consequences if her stories were fabrications. Obviously she believed that the MeToo movement protected her from her lies. But not one single witness claimed to have seen Depp strike Heard, only those who stated they saw Heard herself strike Depp. Even a former Sea-Tac Airport employee came forward to testify to witnessing and attempting to stop Heard’s physical assault on her partner at the time--thus proving she had perjured herself on the stand when she claimed this incident was a "lie" too.

The fact is that Heard called everyone who testified against her a liar who just wanted to be a part of the "Johnny Depp Show," and she never admitted to doing anything wrong. She wouldn’t explain why Depp was well-liked and was never accused of abuse by any previous partner until he was in a relationship with her. It was testified by Depp's sister--who recalled that she confronted Heard about her behavior and was contemptuously rebuked--that his instinct to remove himself from Heard's presence when she was abusive was also how she recalled his defense mechanism when confronted by their mother's physically abusive behavior toward him; she recalled calling him "one-eyed Johnny" after he had to wear an eye patch after one incident of abuse. Yet despite this Depp purchased a home for his mother and kept her in comfort until the day she died.

And of course the networks and tabloids like the New York Post cherry-picked for the public only information that made Depp look bad without ever reporting that those incidents were for the most part rebutted as deliberate falsehoods—often by Heard’s own words heard on audio recordings. Although Depp did lose his prior UK libel case, that was because he had to prove that the publication in question deliberately used information that it knew to be false, choosing instead to believe Heard’s allegations without investigating them first. But in the present case, the court was obliged to look at the facts in context and in their totality.

So regardless of what those gender victim advocates who only see this case as a “threat” against women wish to believe, people who want the truth to win out and have been following the trial proceedings to discover that truth will see that truth is on Depp’s side. Even if the jury decides that he was not “defamed,” there will always be the assumption that society isn’t yet ready to accept that women can be guilty of domestic abuse against men, or that some people do lie out of pure vindictiveness. After all that was heard in court, that is the only explanation for a contrary verdict against Depp in this case.