Merry Christmas/Atheistmas. Have a read of this – “How Dickens Made Christmas White”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181217-how-dickens-made-white-christmas-a-myth
The context was it turns out that white is not normal. To conceive of white as the normal, everything else as a disappointment is simply wrong. Am I talking about white supremacism and the normative bias around that? Well, yes, of course I am. But I’m also talking about the idea of a white Christmas – that it would snow on Christmas Day. Enough for postcards and all that. And the amazing thing is that you can #BlameDickens. There’s a really good article See, link here, pointing out that when Dickens was writing in the 1840s and 50s, he was harking back to some really severely cold winters including the last time the Thames froze solid, in 1814. Enough for an elephant to walk across.
What we learn is that our memories and norms around what the weather was like are exceptionally unreliable. For all sorts of well-understood reasons about how memory functions – with the peak end bias and so forth.
What happened next denialists keep pointing out that memory is faulty as if that is a knockdown argument.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
December 25, 1988 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands says “the earth is slowly dying”
December 25, 1989 – business press pushback about Global Warning “panic” begins…