According To Hoyt

I first became aware of the concept of attractive nuisance when I was living in North Carolina.  A toddler had wandered off from home, and drowned in a neighbor’s uncovered pool.  The mother wasn’t sued for neglect – apparently there were reasons for this, like, she thought she’d secured the door well enough (as a mother whose kid would undo three latches, one of them safety and get out, I doubt you can secure a door well enough) and she was asleep due to a medical condition.  Something like that.  BUT the neighbor was sued for keeping an attractive nuisance, because his pool was uncovered and also unfenced.

This was a concept I’d never heard of, but then again, to be honest, in Portugal there was never an unfenced property, so the idea of its being unfenced was odd enough.

Look – we were talking about lack of rule of law yesterday – Portugal even at its best has always had low-rule-of-law.  Part of it I think is a Latin thing, perhaps dating back as far as the Roman Empire, perhaps to the invasions that destroyed it.  I can’t tell you.  What I can tell you is that Portugal would seem as alien (if you really went into the neighborhoods and mingled with the people) to you as the US did to me when I first came here.

What blew my mind was not that you had eight (?) TV channels on all day, or the fact that my future MIL (though I didn’t know it, of course) had a microwave, or any of the things that my host family kept pointing out and expecting me to be amazed by (the fact that their idea of Portugal harked back to my host mother’s grandmother who, btw, came from Azores, which is always behind the times didn’t help.)  No.  Two things amazed me: The sheer amount of forestation and the unfenced lots.

They’re related, in a way.

We took a bus from NYC to Ohio, and we passed miles and miles and miles of green, unmolested trees.  If it were in Portugal, those trees would be cut down so fast, and used for building, burning, etc, by people not the owners of the trees.  In fact, they would require armed guards to patrol them to stop people dumping their trash in the woods in such numbers that they would choke out the undergrowth.

In the same way, my parents live in a relatively well to do suburb.  Even back when there was “almost no crime” and the back door stayed open all day year around (it still does, but now there’s a locked gate in the way, which wasn’t there at the time) there were thick shutters on the windows at night, of the type that roll down and which here are only used by shop-keepers.  And there were low walls and gates.  As theft has become more common (because “strangers” have moved to the village and now outnumber the natives) the walls have climbed.  Now the walls of my mother’s house are eight feet tall and all the gates lock.

But even in the good old days, the mailbox looked.  To leave your mail unlocked was to have it stolen. And anything left in public and not attached to the ground is considered yours for the taking.  No, seriously, they get the covers on the air quality measuring units stolen on a regular basis, even though those are bolted to cement and by the side of busy highways (in case you wonder where the temperature readings come from!) and even though they are too strangely shaped for any natural use.  I asked mom what in heck people did with them, and even she couldn’t figure it out “Perhaps hen houses?  Or in-ground flower beds?”

What I know is that they get stolen on a regular basis.  And grocery shopping carts have to be checked out with a coin which gets given back when you put the cart back in.  Otherwise people would view the cart as “free gift with purchase.”

I’m saying this not to run down my native country, but to explain that the culture is very, very different.  The culture was shaped by a lot of things, including the country being trampled by Napoleonic invasions – something that meant two armies scoured the country clean (even monuments had portions of it stolen) and the common people could only live by grabbing what they could, theirs or not.

But it was also shaped – is shaped – by a legal culture that harks back to Rome, where official jobs are viewed as sinecures and opportunities for squeeze, and all jobs are viewed as something you do as skimpily as possible, because you can’t be fired.  It’s a post, not a job. Such as if you have an accident you’re better off not calling the police, because both of you will then have to pay squeeze, in addition to whatever needs to be paid.  Such as if you interrupt a retail clerk while she’s talking to her boyfriend on the phone and ignoring you, you’re the rude one, not she.  Such as writers turn in work completely unproofed because “THEIR JOB” is to write, someone else can do that demeaning typo hunting stuff.  (This was the hardest for me to adapt to – and yeah, I know I don’t typo-hunt in these posts, but then I don’t get PAID for these posts.)

It’s cultural.  It is the way it is.  You can trust a Portuguese as much as you can trust anyone else once they’re in a rule of law society and you probably can trust them more if they have some reason to think you’re a member of their tribe.  The culture – the software in the head – is very family oriented and very tribe oriented and very, in ultimate instance “compatriot” oriented.  Far more so than in the US.  The Arab proverb would apply, if you view it as the Portuguese NOT attacking others but rather viewing each successive circle as less deserving of respect to their persons and property: Me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousins; me and my cousins against the tribe; me and my tribe against the world.

But put enough Portuguese together, and you play by their rules.  The software in head is not – much as I like to make faces at Spanish – at all very different from Spain or Mexico or most of central and South America.

So, what does all this lead to?  In the past we discussed minimum wage here.  I think mandating minimum wage is about as effective and sane as mandating good weather on Sundays.  Okay, maybe a little better – suppose you could mandate good weather and enforce it for a period of hours.  You couldn’t do that everywhere.  Those clouds would still have to go somewhere.  So the price of sunny Sundays in highly visible areas, like say NYC or Chicago, would be snow storms in the hinterlands in July.  (I don’t know much about meteorology, so it might mean other stuff too.)

Mandating minimum wage is like that.  Dave Freer talked about the very generous minimum wage of Australia with approval.  Kate pointed out that yes, but it’s a trade off.  They trade a good minimum wage for beginning workers against a high unemployment rate and low entrepreneurship.  That’s a given.  I’d argue they also trade in high innovation, since that’s mostly started by wild cat small businesses.

If the people of Australia consider that well and good, that’s fine.  It’s their business.

All that is besides the point when it comes to America.  Australia’s nearest neighbor, whose citizens could get there without much effort is New Zealand, which has similar laws and is about at a similar level and has similar software-in-head.

I.e., Australia can have an open, in ground swimming pool, uncovered, because its nearest neighbor, in human house terms is fifty miles away.  No toddler can escape its mother’s vigilance and just wonder over and drown.  Attractive nuisance or not, it is highly unlikely they’ll be fishing toddlers out of the pool every Summer morning.

This does not apply to the US.  It applies to the US even less than it applies to Europe, and Europe is finding out and fast its nuisance is too attractive as is.

The US has always been a country of immigrants.  But most of our waves of immigration of the past came here to become Americans (present writer included.)  They came determined to leave everything behind and learn to be as American as possible.

As a kid, growing up in a country of emigrants, I noticed early on that the ones from America came back less often (even than the ones in Africa) and were more acculturated.  They were the ones less likely to be building a little house in their native village for when they retired.  They were unlikely to be sending money back, unless they had elderly parents they were supporting.  They came here to be here, not to earn and send back until they could return.

This is for two reasons: coming here involved a lot more effort, both in crossing the ocean and in getting a visa (coming here illegally was near impossible back in the sixties and seventies) that it wasn’t worth it to “scavenge-migrate.”

The ones most likely to scavenge-migrate were the ones who went to France.  This is because France was attainable on foot if absolutely needed, through two borders almost impossible to secure, and because it had GENEROUS welfare benefits which it wasn’t fussy about giving to Portuguese.  For Portuguese peasants living hand to mouth, going to France meant that you could cram ten to an apartment and send back as much money as possible, or if you took your wife, she worked mostly under the table, and you worked mostly under the table, and your kids got free schooling and assistance.  I remember as a little girl seeing people who’d been far below us in the social scale and completely untrained go to France for two or three years and come back with cars and fashionable clothes and…

They never stayed though.  They would take full advantage of French welfare and social benefits, while working far more than would be allowed if they were “legal” and they sent money back.  I suspect that other than the trips to Portugal and how well they dressed to lord it in those times, they lived near squalor.  Their goal was to build a big house and live well in their retirement.

At the time I viewed what they did as fully justified.  See, being far away from their “tribe” they could work hard without loss of face, so those lazy Frenchmen were getting all that work for near nothing.  I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t embrace Portuguese immigrants, or why there was so much resentment.

Now I sort of do.  It was the strain put on public services.  It was the fact that these people working under the table depressed unskilled wages.  It was also unstoppable.  Two things eventually stopped it: France became less attractive, as there were fewer jobs (and welfare alone is not enough to raise a family and send money back) and Portugal’s lifestyle became closer to France’s.

This is more what we’re facing with Mexico, but amped up to eleven, because we also give “Hispanics” special consideration in social services, in getting their kids in school, in deference of treatment.

These people come from a highly stratified society and mostly the ones who come here are treated like dirt in their homeland.  Imagine coming here and finding they’re special and we feel vaguely guilty for their “oppression” – which is a piece of Marxist nonsense.  Mexico’s “poverty” is largely self inflicted.

Are they despicable people?  No more than Portuguese are, no more than Americans are.  Some of them are probably despicable.  And most of them are just decent people, seeking to survive.  BUT their software in the head IS different.  And not all cultures are fully functional for a modern rule-of-law society.

Compound that with the fact that our social workers and the teachers of their kids tell them we owe them and that we stole their land from them.  Tell them they’re a separate race and can never integrate.  The stage is set for very ugly stuff indeed.

Then add in the tribal thing and the fact they will feel very little loyalty to those not of their nationality/group.

Do most of them work very hard?  Actually according to studies about fifty percent of them do.  But even the ones who work very hard are still using free schooling and emergency room visits.  Why?  Because they’re socking away the money so they can go back “home” and build the big house and impress friends and neighbors with how well they did.  They want to go back home and have their kids marry well.

What they don’t want to do is become Americans, except where it means receiving social security in their old age, when they go “back home.”

All of this is understandable and human.

Then add in our attractive nuisance.  We have enough unemployed, untrained people that we should have people willing to work.  Americans are no more lazy than anyone else.  Arguably we’re more industrious.  But the minimum wage means many kids never get their start.  They’re not worth that.  It’s too much to pay them that.

And meanwhile, there’s this tide pouring over a huge and unsecured border that will do the work for a fourth of the price and allow low-margin businesses (chicken boning plants; farms) to survive.

We’re an attractive nuisance.  I don’t know how much a toddler likes a pool, but I know that a man desperate to support his family will move heaven and Earth to do it the best way he can.  And somehow coming here illegally and working really hard is hard to reconcile with “crime” even for us, much less for them. Through their eyes, Americans are lazy layabouts who don’t want to work.  They grew up in low respect for laws.  They don’t GET why Americans wouldn’t work under the table and take advantage of social services to round out the money, as they do.  Their concept of honesty doesn’t include honesty-to-people-in-power because where they come from people in power treat those below like dirt.

There are other effects of the tide pouring over the border.  Socialists of various stripes like to scream that wages have been stagnant for blah blah years.  (This goes hand in hand with “innovation and tech is making people unemployable.”  Poppycock.  Laws are making people unemployable.)  It is true STATISTICALLY.  Not true in any other way.  Dan and I have struggled on our own, with no advantages, not even family help for thirty years, and our income hasn’t been stagnant.

Where income has been stagnant is what I’d call the “semi-skilled middle class” – mostly retail clerks, but also the vast number of women who would on very little training become typists or factory workers.

This is the result of two things: most factories can’t survive by paying current benefit requirements (and it’s about to get worse.)  It’s not the salary so much, it’s the other stuff and the immense amount of paperwork that is impossible to keep up with.  Faced with the choice of going under or hiring illegals under the table, they hire illegals and pay them a fraction of the full cost of an employee and let the collective “we” pay for their other needs.  Even retail to an extent is starting to hire with not too many questions asked.  That means the legal people still working retail are squeezed from below by people who are being paid a fraction of what they get (what they must get by law) and from above by our truly horrible education which has forced employers to demand at least community college diplomas before they hire you.  It’s the only way they can tell you know how to read.

This leaves nowhere to go for people with high school diplomas, who have been making the same amount since the eighties or so…  And they too end up at the mercy of our welfare system to survive, which in turn drives the call for higher minimum wage, which in turn destroys more of these jobs.

We’re keeping an attractive nuisance.  We create a vast number of jobs that Americans CAN’T fill and stay on the right side of the law.  And we share a large unsecured border with a people who come from a low-respect-for-law environment.

Amnesty won’t solve anything.  It won’t make these people consider themselves American.  They never wanted to be American.  They haven’t left their past behind as other immigrants have to do.  They just walked a few hundred miles.  (Or more likely drove.) It won’t make them a more open community – their culture will remain us vs. them.  They will take it, but they will continue working under the table and avail themselves of our social services and our social security payments.   In their code that’s not even slightly wrong.  Their history has taught you take as much as you can while you can because those above you will take from you as soon as they can.

Securing the border will do something, but not to the extent that we’re willing to do.  The only thing that would stop the tide would be shooting to kill or a massive electrified fence.  NO ONE is going to do that.  All you’d need would be a few pictures, and our resolve would crumble.

So… what stopped the Portuguese tide into France?  Two things.  France became less able to give lavish benefits; and there were fewer jobs available because more French (or more Portuguese who’d naturalized) were willing to work under the table.  And Portugal became a little better.  (Or more like France.)  The only people now streaming into France come from the real sh*tholes, for whom even French “scarcity” is better.  And Portugal has more generous social services, which are getting scammed by Russians and other Eastern Europeans.

There are indications that as our economy spins into the Khaki Mexicans are going back home.  I know my local supermarket (a tiny one) used to carry about half the magazines in Spanish five years ago.  Now you can’t find a single Spanish title.  And there are indications the flooding-back tide is helping Mexico too.

But our choices, other than continuing to spin into the hole, until no Mexicans or people from points further  South want to come here (except perhaps to cross to Canada) are stark: we can get rid of minimum wage, tighten the benefits spigot, and let the economy settle itself.  Or we can become the sort of regime that shoots people trying to come over.

There is no other choice.  And I don’t see either of those happening in the near future, unless of course we collapse.  Which is the inevitable result if we don’t do either of those.

To call people explaining the facts “racist” is to ignore that most of the people who are hurt by this unchecked tide are our own racial minorities.  It is also to ignore that economics is race-blind.

It is a dismal science and the results are always the same, no matter how much you scream that they’re insensitive.

I was going to write this before the election and I might have mentioned it, but then I got more upset about other stuff, so it never came out.  Though I’ll grant you I’ve written about this again.  Responsible for this incarnation are Foxfier in comments yesterday and Dr. Helen with her article which got infested by an incarnation of teh stupid in comments.

However, as someone who used to call herself a feminist (before feminism went off the cliff at a run) on the run up to the election I was appalled, disgusted and insulted with the “War on Women” meme ( you might have gathered this, once or twice) but most of all with the bizarre freak show of women who didn’t know well-to-do law student Sandra Fluke getting offended on her behalf for her being called a “slut.” (We’ll leave aside that Limbaugh was making a nomenclature error.  The lady wants someone to pay for something associated with her having sex, she’s not a slut.  She’s a whore.  All that remains is haggling about the price.  Sluts do it for joy de vivre.)

This was a bizarre demonstration of the brainless sisterhood, invoked ONLY because she, like these other women, had a vagina.

Even my sensible friends said “well, I can see where he had a point but no one should say those things about women.”

No?  WHY NOT?

Do you call men “bastards” in public life?  You might not if you don’t swear, and consider it swearing.  I confess to episodes of turning the air a deep blue when I get going.  (In my defense, English swear words don’t feel like swear words to me.  I think the taboo needs to be ingrained in you from earliest years.)  But lest some commenter decides I’m extrapolating from me (rolls eyes) I’m also politics addicted.  I’m not much for talk radio.  I’m not auditory.  But I read an awful lot of commentary online, I watch commentary on TV, and I’ve heard male politicians and indeed journalists called everything but a child of G-d.

Can anyone imagine the furor and the president of the United States calling some journalist who got called, oh, a bastard or a sh*t weasel?  Can we imagine it being called “disrespect to men” and used to build up the idea of a completely phony war on men?  No?  Neither can I.  (And men have more claims to a psychological war on them.  Just yesterday watching a commercial where all the boys in the class are morons and all the girls are soooo brilliant at math, I almost threw something through the computer screen.)

So, why women?  You’re going to say “Because women have to be respected.”  Really?  Why?

And now you’re sitting there staring at the screen and spluttering aren’t you?  I’d like to remind you “Because they have to” is not an answer.

This idea that women are fragile, must be respected and must be protected is relatively new.  Before that the human idea that anyone weaker was born to be enslaved/mistreated/killed without compunction/ruled.  Since most women are weaker than most men (yes, there are exceptions, but not enough to make a difference) women got the short end of the stick throughout history.

This is not because men are particularly evil.  They aren’t.  They’re human.  Women were weaker, so men ruled.  Women in turn took it out on infants and the elder in their care.  This is still normal in most of the world.

Yes, yes, Christianity had a lot to do with changing the way things were done, and before that Judaism, though not being a messianic proselytizing faith for most of its history, Judaism spread its beliefs on the humanness of women less.  And even then, the progress was slow.  The married lives of some of the patriarchs read to women as the sort of horror show you see in Islam today.  And the Christian married life till very recently doesn’t bear thinking about.

This is because in societies where physical strength is essential for survival, men will always have the upper hand.  At least they will barring some kind of bio enhancement that effectively turns women in to men.

There were bits of “equality” throughout history.  Greece and Rome were “more equal” than other times and places, but scratch the surface and you find it doesn’t go very deep indeed.  Female poetesses and noble females might have had ALMOST the freedoms of males, but the other women were bought and sold like chattel.

Again, remember this is not a male thing.  This is a human thing.  Get us in a position of pinching, and we ALL take it out on those weaker than us.  This is why centralized power is so scary.  It makes someone that much more powerful than everyone else, which removes the humanity of those subjected to that power.  (As we’re seeing proof daily.)  If we’re a particularly kind of sh*tweasel, we convince ourselves – and those we abuse! – that we’re doing it for the greater good.

BUT the idea of women as sacred, fragile, and not to be hurt by word or deed comes from the whole chivalric tradition and the troubadour poets.  (In case you think writing and stories can’t change the world.)

By making the ideal of woman perfect and pure (and yes, there were reasons for this, having to do with the structure of feudal society) it ennobled all women a little.  While that had not much effect until society became affluent enough and equalitarian enough (mostly due to the US) that every woman could be a “lady”, once that happened, every woman aspired to be treated as a “lady.”  You couldn’t say swear words in front of her, and certainly not to her.  You would open the door to them.  You treated her as both more and less than human.  The goddess of the house, the mother of children, the fragile, innocent, blah blah.

Few women lived up to this.  A lot of women exploited it.  Then came the feminism I remember, you know, the one that wanted to be treated as equals, forget the other stuff.

To me it seemed natural.  I knew nothing about history, nor what a great stride forward chivalric rules were (no?  Think about it.  In a time of enormous and indiscriminate turmoil, every man’s hand against every other’s, it kept the women and children RELATIVELY safe, because it would be “despicable” to treat them otherwise.  Yes, the kids might still be killed (but less often, and evolutionarily that’s important.)  The mothers might be sent to convents.  BUT that was a marked improvement over what would have happened before.)  And I came from a long line of “horrible women.”  I mean, seriously, by the time I was ten mothers in the village warned their little boys about me (and me not even aware of boys yet) because to marry a woman of my family meant you’d never “be master of your own house” and you’d never “be able to call your soul your own.”  (In the spirit of fairness, I DID warn Dan about it.  He didn’t sheer off.  Mathematician got courage. Or insanity.)

First of all, I haven’t heard (i.e. not in memory of people who were living when I was little) of any ancestress who couldn’t read and write (voluminously, usually.)  Second, if any of them didn’t run their own business and usually out-earn their husbands (yes, I’m falling down on the job, but I AM working at it) I also have failed to hear of her.  And they all did this while raising broods of children (though the family on dad’s side, to be honest, always ran to low fertility so three or four at most, still), running subsistence farms (everyone did at the time even when that wasn’t their job,) raising livestock, and – usually – helping neighbors, orphan kittens and whoever came to them for help.

I ran down the list of accomplishments that Heinlein thinks most humans should have and I’m sorely deficient.  But other than higher math my ancestresses could do all of those.  I am, in fact, a pale shadow of them.

So it never occurred to me that being fragile/protected was a good thing.  I viewed it as an attempt at infantilizing me and got upset.  And it never occurred to me anyone would oppress me for being female.  I remembered mom’s snort when a neighbor told her that she just didn’t realize she was oppressed and her answer of “I would just like to see the unlucky fool who would TRY to oppress me.”

Now, I want you to remember I grew up in Portugal.  Women in schools at the time were treated as men are in schools in the US now.  They were there on presumption of inferior intellect.  Getting called on?  What is that?  And teachers instinctively thought boys must be smarter.

Did that affect me?  Well… no.  I was aware of the fact that up to the first test I must put up with the assumption I was hen-witted.  Once the teacher read that first test I was treated like one of the boys or slightly better.  End of discussion.

Note I didn’t whine and scream and say “but I’m a gurl.  You have to cut me slack.”  I simply out-thought, out-studied and out worked the boys.

Of course, I also got treated as a half-wit because I was massive for my generation of Portuguese females (I finally stopped growing at five seven – for those who know me, yes, I’ve lost about two inches.  Eh.  Has to do with medical stuff. – and a size 12.  I adjusted my diet – as in, lived on espresso and half a toast a day — and got it to a size 7.  This was still massive by Portuguese standards.  I rarely could find ready-made clothes that fit.)  As you know from movies, etc, the tall, large one is always dumb and slow.  Eh.  That too was not worth fighting until they saw that first test.

But see, I believed in equality and in women being allowed to compete as men did in male fields.  I would have been very happy if they hadn’t assumed I was stupid because I was female, but I was willing to prove them wrong (cheerfully and with malice aforethought.)

I think – and here I might be wrong – that was the principle of early feminism.

Oh, my how things have changed.  Partly, they’ve changed because frankly most women don’t want to compete in male fields as men.  They want to be wafted up to success as a form of bizarre reparations.  (I mean, they’re compensating you for what your ancestresses suffered?  WHY?  Aren’t they men’s ancestresses, too?)  They – being human – want in fact unearned perks.  Every human (yes, men too) does.  If he or she can get it.

But the only way to enforce that is government.  And because government is very powerful, it’s now become de rigueur to – instead of competing with men – simply whine and stomp until the regulators come down from on high and give you the other kids’ toys and privileges.

So now you have the bizarre, distorted spectacle of women demanding to be treated as superior to men.  No?  They want to fill the same positions, do the same jobs, but NOT have to suffer the slings and arrows of everyday life like men do.

And part of this is that, due to political correctness in schools, we’re raising a generation of women for whom males are an alien race.  I don’t have the time nor the inclination to give them a full education, but let me give you a few quick hint: 1-Men are not women.  They’re wired differently 2-The three musketeers is not an aberration.  Some of men’s best friendships start with a massive – and often physical—fight.  3- If you think making the work environment “uncomfortable” with jokes or comments, some of them off color, should you ever be glad you’re not a man.  And never try working in an all-male environment.  4- males, particularly in Anglo-Saxonic culture often show affection by calling each other names.  I’m not sure if any other culture on Earth could have coined the term “you magnificent bastard” but from a linguist’s point of view I love it. 6- What males do they do very well.  They do things women in general can’t do – though a few exceptional ones can, and should be allowed to – mostly the dirty, heavy, dangerous jobs.  But also some jobs in science that require an unusual degree of concentration.  We’re multitaskers, they’re laser-focused.  There’s jobs for both in building civilization.

You want a man’s job?  Fine.  Do what they do and act like them.  I promise you that you will be accepted.  (It might take a little more effort today because they’ll assume you got there thorough affirmative action, but be competent and good and they’ll come around.)

And that last point is what I want to call your attention to.  This confusion where women not only want to be “just like” – but without the work – but also want to be treated like the belle dame of troubadour songs is poisoning both sides of our society.

Women think it’s their duty somehow to be “just like men” only most of them of course don’t want to be just like men.  And meanwhile the environments that NEED men and a masculine spirit are  getting feminized and less effective.

And for the love of heaven, spare me the idea that a post-grad student at Georgetown, and one who inserted herself in our national discourse by the force of her sex life, blenches at the word “slut” like a well brought up Regency debutant would.  THAT sad show both infantilized every woman in public life, who should now be regarded as a shrinking violet, and INSULTED everyone who happens to have a vagina.  I mean, am I now expected to faint at the word “slut”?  No?  (And let’s not start on the incoherency of the slut walks, which can’t decide if they’re pro or against sluts.)  Then what was that all about?

DO you want to bring back the stereotype that women – all women are shrinking fainting violets not well up on the upper story, and therefore must be protected and cajoled?

No?

Then stop acting like it.  Stop saying stuff like “every woman who cries rape should be believed, no presumption of innocence on the male’s part, because women must be protected.”  Your only defense – the only thing keeping you from the natural law where the weaker get it in the neck IS the law of the land.  Shred that at your own risk.

You want equality?  You have it.  Take your lumps like a man.  You’re playing with the big boys now.  Every time you demand special treatment, you’re holding back the rest of us who CAN compete.

Will men treat you differently?  Of course they will.  No man can forget you’re a woman.  Evolutionarily this leads to slightly different treatment.  BUT it’s both good and bad.  Their desire to protect you will both hold you back and keep you from the worst punches in the scrum.  At the same time, you’re not acting like a man either, even when you think you are.  A lot of the glass ceiling is women not ASKING – let alone demanding – what they’re worth.  Low dominance males get treated the same way.  Women are designed to do this.  We’re the link makers and the peace makers in the tribe.  This is because women, being smaller and weaker, couldn’t survive otherwise in competition.  You need to remember that to get anywhere in a man’s world.  But it’s nobody’s fault, and asking government to step in only creates ANOTHER layer of problems.

The morality and societal benefit of having men in women roles and vice versa is debatable and couldn’t interest me less.  I’m concerned only with individual liberty and pursuit of happiness.  As far as I’m concerned, you can be all you want to be.  Just don’t ask for special privileges.

You’ve come a long way baby.  Don’t skitter back.

UPDATE: Gypsies, Tramps and Writers is up over at MGC now.

We come back to how things are changing, how the future is changing, how work is changing.  Part of this is stupid government tricks, of course.  Yes, 30 hours work week has long been a socialist dream.  Besides drinking their own ink – i.e. believing their own propaganda – the rats in their heads about wealth tend to spread to everything else.  Since wealth is finite, then work is finite.  (Well, think about it.)  At least work on decently planned and properly efficient and NEEDED goods.  (Why would you want luxury goods?  Do you want to be better than other people?  You want to have a lollipop?  Did you bring enough to share with the entire country? I don’t think you’re properly committed to socialism, tovarish.)

Since work is finite, the only way to deal with unemployment is to put things in the law that make it impossible to work more than 30 hours.  In places like France they simply pass legislation making it impossible to work more than thirty hours – which is another reason it’s an American socialist dream.  You see, they’ve gone to France on vacation, and they’ve seen people lounging about with time to enjoy life.  What they don’t see is the outdated appliances, the outdated houses and the narrow lives of common people, because they also normally stay in the best hotels and hang out in the rich areas – but Americans are so… ungovernable, that if if you just did that to them, they would work seventy hours, just to spite you.  So instead you hide the 30 hour a week poison pill in the Health Care legislation.  Employers who would be bankrupted by it, are then forced to dial back everyone’s hours to 30 a week (at least on paper.  Look, I worked exempt positions before. Your hours are not what you put on the time sheet.  Your hours are what it takes to get the job done.)  In the bureaucrat’s mind (not in the real world) this means that the employer will have to hire a new employee for every three on the payroll.  More jobs created.  Everyone is up.  Up everyone’s chocolate ration to two grams a week.

As I mentioned in Drinking Their Own Ink (I really need to tag these d*mn posts.) what actually happens is that everyone lies about it.  People report thirty hours and go on working the normal forty or fifty or sixty.  (Remember the reason the employer is cutting down people’s hours on paper is that he’s already so close to the bone he can’t afford the mandated boondoogle of minimum insurance which includes hypnotherapy and weight loss or whatever they consider minimum.  Perhaps little Asian girls who run on your back for back pain.  Who knows?  It’s a government scam plan.  You will pay for treatment for Brucitis Of The Cleaning Lady Knee even if you’ve never been in the same zip code as a cleaning lady.)

So, everything changes on paper, but not in reality.  Except that analysts, bureaucrats and those of us who work with words, look at the figures on paper, confuse it with reality and announce that due to efficiencies and robotics and stuff we no longer need to work as long.  Then the big government types start talking about this vast underclass who will never find jobs again, and which includes everyone but the top two percent or whatever, and who will need structures to support them the rest of their useless lives.  How can you be against that?  Do you want the useless to starve?

(Rolls eyes.  Rolls eyes so hard that she should use a cup to contain them.)

I confess I would be far more impressed with this if I weren’t following the politics and the laws and seeing the pressures bringing it about, which have nothing to do with technology.  I also confess that I MIGHT still fall for it if I didn’t happen to have a good enough memory to remember Carter’s administration.  (Yes, I was in my cradle.  Shuddup.)

The exact same things were said then, and the science fiction magazines were full of stories about how most people would be unemployed forever, because… because… because… CHEESE!  Okay, they didn’t say cheese.  That would have made way more sense. They said that back then – seventies, remember – our tech was just too darn efficient, and so all these low-level employees weren’t needed and therefore we were headed to a world where the majority would be unemployed like forevah.  The kindly state had to take care of them or they would die – die I tell you, die!

Then came Reagan and near-full-employment and they forgot they’d ever said all that stuff and slinked off without even the decency of a “Never mind.”

Now it’s back.

Ignore them.  Ignoring people who think that a vast majority of people “NEEDS” to be taken care of by an incompetent, massive, bungling bureaucracy is always a good idea.  Look, these jokers aren’t even good at taking care of the few desperately needy people.  You think they can take care of a majority of people in a way that doesn’t lead to massive atrocities?  PFUI.  Most people – even the truly needy – dependent on the government have to exert themselves NOT to be destroyed by clerical error.

No, robotics didn’t become that all-better in the last four years.  Would that they had.

To some extent automated factories were already much, much better.  Eric Flint last week was talking about the hell of assembly line work, but the truth is that the only places that remains are places where it has to by union rule.  Back in 88 I knew someone who ran a plastics factory.  It was just him (and I don’t think he’d ever finished high school) and a bunch of automated machinery.  He poured the mixture in and he pushed buttons and voila, plastic spoons and forks and stuff just came flying out the other end.

This was sort of held back or perhaps dialed back by the commerce with China, where it’s cheaper to have five year olds carve the plastic forks from a plastic block (I’m joking, I’m joking.)  But the tech is there and has always been.

The robots, they shall always be with us.

So… what about work?  How will we deal with the vast army of unemployed people roaming the country side going “braiiiins.”

We won’t because as with zombies, they won’t exist.  At least they won’t exist if our government stops making it a crime to start/run/make a profit at a business.  And even if they continue their war on what you DID build, they still won’t exist.  They’ll just be unemployed on paper, collecting welfare, but inexplicably very busy and perhaps driving Mercedes.  (See Portugal and Greece for what people do when making a living becomes illegal.  And that’s Portugal and Greece, not the US. If you ask in Portugal and Greece, I bet you that they’d say their reason for living is their – hyper extended – family.  In the US people are likely as not to mention work.  Even those who mention family tend to mean their nuclear family, and then after that work.)

What this law has the potential of doing is making us all contractors.  Which means what is happening to writers is heading everyone else’s way fast.

Yesterday some of you in comments got rather lost in the weeds of “specialization versus generalist.”  But, truly, that’s not what’s at stake.

Look, I’m a contractor anyway, so it’s a little different, but being a writer working for a house (or many houses) is sort of a limbo thing, since not only do you license your copyright to them, but they expect you to do all sorts of other things which makes you sort of a contractployee.  What I mean is, the way things used to be, with the few gatekeepers and a lot of writers trying to sell, they could require you do all sorts of things beyond writing the book.  I’m always highly amused by the people who say they’re now going traditional because “that way all I have to do is write.”  Sure it is, if you want the book to tank so badly it leaves a dent.

Among the things I routinely did for my publishing houses were: paying someone to edit, so that if they missed something I’d catch it; paying someone to go over their edits to make sure nothing got changed in a weird way (and with Berkley this was a constant battle); working at publicity, including making publicity materials; paying someone (agent.  Yeah, that worked) to verify the contracts and make sure that everything was right, and to negotiate for me for less than appalling covers (that worked too!)

So, I was already running a little empire of sub contractors.  All that is happening now is that I’m adding another layer.  I might, for instance have to pay someone to put the books in paper, since I can’t seem to figure it out (though I might experiment with my How To Write Interesting Books and maybe I can.)

As an indie publisher it’s the same thing, only I’m doing it on my own and adding artists.  That’s it.  But I also get a much bigger cut of the money, so it works out better.

The only other thing is that you have to look for work, and see the opportunities for work.  And that’s the BIG, major difference.  Look, not all work will ever be automated because work like wealth is infinite.  If everyone automated everything we all do tomorrow, people would come up with new things they need.

Let’s not even go to buggy whips and candle makers.  What about the typing pool?  Every company used to have it, even in the eighties when I started working.  Where has it gone?  Are all those typists roaming the streets flexing their fingers in despondency?

No.  Some are now computer design specialists.  Some are serving coffee at Starbucks.  Some are doing other things that, like those two, were not major employment categories in the eighties.

Open your eyes.  Then (to quote Pratchett) open your eyes again.  See what you’ve been ignoring.  Don’t count on anyone to look after you.  You do not belong to the Government, no matter what the government thinks.  And if you did, yeah, they’d have to feed you but only to their standards, not yours.  And they could choose to stop at any time.

I’m giving you the same guidance I give my kids, who, though they’re both in STEM degrees, cannot – of course – be sure of being able to do anything with them, because – beyond stupid government tricks – the tech is changing so fast:

Look for things people might pay you for.  Then do them.  Get good at doing them.  In the future there might be no jobs, no “employment” as we have grown to think of it.  But there will be work.  And people will still pay for work that benefits them or makes their life easier.  Now, you might end up working four contract jobs in ten hour increments and taking the income from those multiple streams to make a full living.  I’m here to tell you it’s doable. (At least if you add the Jim Baen dictum “Don’t work for buttheads”.)

The future is wide open.  You just have to make it yourself.

NOTE:

Sorry to be so late on this.  I woke up to find out the marking wars were all over our living room and front hall.  Normally I’d have ignored it – I don’t work on that floor – and cleaned in the afternoon, but the fug was that thick that I ended up cleaning the living room and waxing.

Part of this, I think, is that I’ve been away so much over the last week, they haven’t got their due petting.

Some days, I swear, living with this particular set of bewhiskered miscreants is like living with fuzzy Hells Angels.  (No Hells Angels harmed in this metaphor.  These are imaginary Hells Angels that exist only in my head, which is good because I REALLY would hate for them to pee all over my living room floor.)

Also — I’ve put content up in the subscriber space.  And sorry to be late on all of these.  The good news is that things are getting done, which means there’s fewer of them to do, so it must calm down at some point — right?

FURTHER NOTE: I’ll put up the promo post of ya’ll probably tonight.  (And miss my free short story, but c’est la vie.)  It’s that copious spare time thing.

Sorry to be so late on this.  I got up very late, around eight thirty, and I’m trying to get ready for a dentist’s appointment which delayed everything.  This means this post might be incomplete or too breezy, but I expect comments will be interesting.

I grew up in a country with Earthquakes.  The North is fairly sound – being on granite – but the Southern part can add or lose strips of coast and horrible things can happen to buildings.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about look up The Great Lisbon Earthquake.

I grew up in the North, which means I had only experienced three relatively small Earthquakes by the time I moved to the US.  Experienced is a big word, since I slept through the first (I was three) despite my brother carrying me in his arms back and forth between front and back door, unable to decide whether the narrow street with its tall buildings which might collapse, or the backyard with trees and stone pillars supporting grape vines which might fall (the pillars, not the grapevines.  Well, those too) and crush us was safest.

The second happened at school and was truly minor.  The first started with such small foreshocks that I didn’t realize we were having an Earthquake.  You see, I’d been studying for exams and was really really focused and sometimes it would feel like things shook, but it was only astigmatism and tiredness.  So…

When the phone rang, I ignored the little tremblors, and headed for the stairs.  In my stocking feet.  Let’s say we should all be very grateful that I’m still here to tell the tale.  Mom and dad had a semi-spiral staircase (Only two half curves, and broad) of polished, waxed mahogany.  I was wearing fuzzy socks, since I hadn’t left the room all morning — and as I hit the center of the bend, at a half run, the real quake hit.  I was picked up and flung down to the front hall.  Fortunately I landed on my behind, which has always been exceptionally cushioned, and in such a way I broke nothing, though I was black and blue and couldn’t sit comfortably for weeks.

This is apropos what is going on in publishing and, from what I understand, in the rest of the professions – almost all of them.  I’m saying publishing, because it’s my field and therefore I’m hyper aware of it.

It’s also, btw, a good illustration of what fools we SF writers are.  Or at least we are when we try to focus on an invention and how it changes things.  Say you get flying cars.  The story is going to focus on being able to fly faster, and get there sooner.  You can live I Kansas and work in Denver.  Stuff like that.

But … but what about roads.  What happens when all roads revert to forests.  What happens to neighborhoods, when houses are no longer situated along roads.  What happens to commerce when “city” might be a matter of opinion?

Well, we didn’t – curse it.  They PROMISED – get flying cars.  But we got computers.  I remember feeling back in the nineties we’d got the booby prize.  “Okay, so I can email people instead of the post office.  And I can write faster than on the type writer.  Whatever.  I want my flying car.”

Except that was the foreshock.  I was focused on what I was doing and didn’t realize it.  I headed for the staircase of publishing, at full tilt, in my fuzzy socks…

For those of you not in publishing, let me tell you that looking at it, you should be able to think through how this will affect your field and whether it will be in the near future or you can relax a little.  Only don’t relax too much.  Things hit in weird ways.  I’ll put at the end some of the things I see coming for EVERYONE.

When I came into publishing we were at the height of the push model.  If you wanted to get published and get on the shelves, you not only had to go through the publisher, you’d BEST charm the publisher and do the politically correct thing.  They published any number of books that never even got on the bookshelves.  (No, don’t ask me why.  Maybe a tax thing.)

Meanwhile, as a reader, I was having more trouble finding stuff to read.  What was on the shelves didn’t appeal, and there was nothing I could do.  I spent five years or so re-reading old books, afraid to find a new author who disappeared after three books, and finding the effort of discovering gold in the dross all too much work.

But we had computers.  And then we had Amazon.  My book buying skyrocketed, because I could find all those books that weren’t put on the shelves.

However, by and large, the bookstores and the push model reigned supreme.  You wanted to be on the shelves, you went traditional, and you were a good boy or girl.

However, Amazon made a dent, and the old model started looking like it was in trouble.

But then came the kindle.  The first one seemed like a toy.  I still wanted one, but no one was seriously reading most of the stuff on them.  They were expensive too.  I thought we’d have… twenty years or so before the tech was viable.  No one but Baen was making money from ebooks.

But then came Kindle II and all the others, and the competing readers.  Smashwords, KDP and the other self-publishing programs.

Old style publishing looked a bit scared, but they were standing buff and saying that the ebooks were a fad.  And even though the bookstores were now also stocking according to how you sold in Amazon, the best way to get on the shelves was still to go traditional.  Validation, etc.

…  The shot heard around the world just  echoed.  Go read Kris Rusch, then come back.

Now self-published books can get on the shelves for a very little expenditure.  And the price is very little more than for traditional publishers (unless it’s Baen, but that’s something else.)  And the price WILL come down.

So… what is this all about?

Boom.  Unless publishing houses have been cultivating their brand (and who but Baen has?) they’re going to find themselves at the bottom of the staircase in a world of butthurt.

As for writers?  It behooves us now to bring things also in paper, if length warrants.  Particularly if we have a (very little) name that might make bookstores want to stock us.

Other than Baen – and I have sentimental attachment to the house anyway – I now can’t even imagine why any sane person would want to go with a traditional publisher.  Heck, I’m having trouble imagining why an INSANE person would want to.  Unless they’re masochists (Fifty shades of publishing.)

That is my field.  I’m sure the tremors aren’t done.  I’m picking myself up off the floor going “What?  When?  Did anyone get the number of that truck?”  And I’m awake and aware.  Half of my colleagues won’t realize this for a while.  By then we’ll be off to the next temblor.

Things will stabilize, of course.  Eventually.  In my lifetime?  Who knows?

Some of you might be immune from this, but I doubt you’re as immune as you think.

Look, computer control, distributed manufacturing, delivery of goods long distance, delivery of data at virtually no cost, three d printing, virtual socialization…

It’s a lot like flying cars, but more so.  It brings the possibility of rendering cities meaningless, but also countries.  (Which is I think part of the reason that governments have gone even more obnoxious.)  It will change the way we work, the way we relate to each other, the way we pay for goods (no?  Well, what if you live in a place where cost of living is very cheap but work in one cost of living is very expensive?  Won’t your salary affect local economy?  And long term, will it equalize prices?  Or will there be crazy pockets?  And with international commerce, where do fiat currencies fit in?) the way we fall in love, the way we marry, the way we have children.

I don’t have time to unpack it, but I’m sure you can.  Or I can unpack it in a post tomorrow.  I’m sure the following fields are next on the “hit with the change stick:”  Education, movie making, programming, real estate.

… but the others aren’t far behind, and the only thing I can guarantee is that the order and magnitude will surprise us all.

They’re exciting times to live in, and like all revolutions not a bit scary.

Hold on tight and be not afraid.  No one is promising you won’t have to fight and struggle, but there’s a good chance that the future belongs to those who want to be free.

So, yesterday Glenn Reynolds linked to this story at Hot Air about a home invader (IN TEXAS!) who was so unfortunate (as well as stupid) as to lock the son of the homeowner in the gun closet…  Hilarity ensued.

Only, as I was getting ready to go out and unable to work in those ten minutes or so, I thought it would be a good idea to read the comments.  Which was fine too, except…

Except that I came across something that made me sit down and think.  In fact, I thought all the way in the car to Denver (business) and all the way back, and decided this must be written about.

For those of you not inclined to click on that link, let me summarize.  Story goes something like this: a house in Texas was broken into by three home invaders (a completely different thing from burglars.  Growing up I was always told that the real danger from burglars was to interrupt them in the commission of the crime – please keep in mind that I grew up in a country where gun ownership is not allowed – and so was instructed that, if coming home and suspecting the house was being burgled, I should run next door the neighbors and call the police.  Home invaders are burglars who PURPOSELY go into occupied houses, which is a completely different ball of wax.  In fact, often – from what I read, though I confess I didn’t look at statistics – they’re there for a bit of bizarre sexual assault or other acts of random sadism, as well as property.)

After wrestling with the occupant of the house in residence, i.e. the son of the homeowner, they locked him in the closet.  He got his gun, broke out of the closet, exchanged fire with one of the invaders, the other two fled.  The one who was shot (shoulder and leg.  Cut the homeowner’s kid some slack.  He was probably agitated.  I would be) tried to run, collapsed, was captured.

So far so good and a fairly straight forward story.  And then I hit the comments.

Before I report on this comment I want to point out that from the replies other people made him, he might be a “regular troll” on the blog.  (AFAICT we’re the only blog with active commenters without a resident troll.  This is probably because I’m testy and an overheated Latina.  Deal.  I know it would give us great cache and also that I never let you guys have any fun, but you can MOST ASSUREDLY deal.)

However, the comment bears mentioning because a) if you tell this type of a story at a party, this is almost sure to come back as a talking point.  b) because when I was in college – or high school – while I would PROBABLY not have made this point myself, I would have bought it, hook like and sinker.  c) because not only it’s not a valid “counterpoint” but it’s not even a sane one.  d) because nine times out of ten someone not politically involved will buy it sight unseen.  e) the reason people will buy it.

So, now that you are ready – the comment was made by someone named “nonpartisan” and while I can’t find the comment itself (you can search!) it was quoted enough for me to get the gist of it.  Apparently this critter opened with a gambit that he didn’t think burglars deserve death.  And either in this comment, or in another, he identified himself as a Harvard Law graduate.  The commenters make much fun of this last.  They shouldn’t.  Having received an excellent liberal (!) education in Europe, this seems perfectly plausible to me.

But here’s the part of the comment I could find:

what if you know for a fact that the burglar is unarmed, would you kill him?

a burglar could be a father who is unemployed and at his wits end at finding options to provide for his starving family. Not every burglar is a violent, armed psychotic rapist.

nonpartisan on May 18, 2013 at 9:01 AM

This is exactly the type of story my text books, from middle school on were full of.  The criminal was a misunderstood soul, an exploited work, down on his last dime.  We were hammered with comparisons to medieval people stealing a loaf of bread and being hanged for it.  (Suburbanshee will know better than I, but I’ve come to doubt those stories too.  The Arab world might punish first-time thieves, but I sort of doubt western civilization did.)

When someone brings up a story like that, I’ve been conditioned to feel a pang and go “well, what if…”

Why have I been conditioned to do this?  Well, because that’s a plot for a Hollywood movie, and, beyond my text books, it’s been tossed at us a thousand times in movies and mysteries.  (Did any of you watch Boogie Nights?  Might be one of the worst movies ever made.  We watched it for the same reason we watched a lot of cr*p.  It was in the dollar theater.  Unfortunately once we paid for it, we had to sit and watch it, because Dan feels wasteful otherwise.  No, don’t ask.  It’s a thing.  Anyway, from what I dimly remember, Boogie Nights has that type of thing, where they decide to rob a store, because they’re desperate and stuff.  More on that later.)

We all know about the honest-but-desperate father who goes and robs someone for money to feed his starving brood.

We all know of him – but does he exist?  I’ll remind you that we all also know of Santa Claus.

Right now, off the top of my head, I’m going to say that not only doesn’t he exist, but that if he ever existed, in history, it was probably before the eighteenth century.

Look, in normal human beings there’s  a huge stop before “commit crime to solve my problems.”  There just is.  It might “simply” be fear of retribution, but it’s there.  And when one things of “committing crime” and is desperate enough to break that taboo, there are a bunch of things a normal human being would do LONG before burglary, let alone home invasion (which as we said, is a different animal.)  There’s swindling someone.  If you don’t have the brains for that, there’s credit card number theft.  There’s even up the scale, mugging.  (You get your loot in money.)  Further, burglary, let along home invasion, is a fairly sophisticated crime.  You have to know how to break and enter.  This might have been easy in a medieval hovel, but these days it’s not so much (Okay, I can break into a house in five minutes.  I never claimed to be nice.  What?  Mostly to not be grounded for coming home late.  “But mom, I was in bed all along.  Maybe I was in the bathroom and you missed me?”)

Second, once you break into a house, your chances of walking off with a bundle of untraceable bank notes are slim.  Most people simply don’t sew money into the mattress.  So, if you’re breaking in for money to feed your children (snort) you’re going to have to convert whatever you find into cash.  (I’ll note that I have never heard of ANYONE breaking into a house and making off with the contents of the freezer, so if it’s food they wants, they’re going about it the wrong way.)  This means you need to know fences, or you’re going to be a one-time burglar.

But before that let’s look at how an otherwise law-abiding person could get desperate enough  to become a burglar in order to feed his chil’uns.

Kids, I’ve been broke.  I’ve been so broke that merely being broke would be a relief.  At one point twenty years ago we spent six months paying our Visa with our Mastercard and vice versa.  Twice, we parked in front of soup kitchens, then decided we were NOT desperate enough to go in and went home hungry.

The idea of robbing another person NEVER EVEN OCCURRED TO ME.  In that situation, the hierarchy would go something like this: charities/soup kitchens.  This by itself, might be enough to hold us, until we could get back on our feet.  (who was that guy who moved to a town with his girlfriend and found he couldn’t starve even if he tried to?)  Friends and relatives.  No, I don’t care how broke your friends are, you can usually sleep on the sofa.  Unemployment/Federal/State assistance. (This might come first for most people.  Even for us, unemployment would.)  If you exhaust all of these, if you lose your home, there’s still the charity of strangers.  Look, our city supports a large (!) and colorful (dirt is a color!) population of homeless which I GUARANTEE haven’t done a lick of work in years.  NONE OF THEM IS STARVING.  (And most of them are also not burglars or even muggers.)  There’s soup kitchens.  There’s informal soup kitchens (college students host a dinner for the homeless near my house every weekend.  No. Don’t get me started.)  There’s begging on the street.

And if you’re not going “but all of those are demeaning.”  Yes, they are, but they’re not VIOLENT crime.  And which would you rather be?  A beggar or a burglar?

Neither, right, but begging is at least honest, and I’d bet you most NORMAL people would do that.

It turns out, weirdly enough, that a small percentage of the population commits 90% of the violent (or potentially violent) crime.  It’s not need.  It’s something broken in them.

A lot of these people are heavy drug users or mentally ill.

That said, I’m the first to say our mental health system is broken.

IOW you’re unlikely to find a starving father of four in your home unless he’s also mentally ill and POSSIBLY also an acid dropper.

The problem is that someone with that combination and willing to commit a violent crime has no breaks.  (A lot of mentally ill drug users just want to sit in a corner and talk to the lizards because they’re awesome and stuff.  The ones who get violent are inherently very dangerous.)

So, should you shoot someone who breaks into your house?  Yep.  What are the chances of your killing an otherwise innocent man?  Next to none.  What are the chances of you getting killed otherwise?  VERY high.

So, how come that comment, or the gist of it would have got even me to hesitate when I was much younger?

Because in a million stories, movies, novels, we’ve been sold the story of a creature that if he ever existed is vanishingly rare – so rare that his sightings are more scarce than those of Bigfoot.  – the “poor but honest, desperate father, driven to crime to feed his brood.”

And people tend to think of stories as things they’ve lived.  They “experienced” it.  So, of course, it’s true.

It’s a great story, of course, but I bet you it was much rarer in Victorian times.  (And if you read the bios of Victorian criminals, the being it depicts was almost as rare.  People would go to the workhouse, horrible as it was, rather than commit crimes.  Unless they were one of the few who PREFERRED crime over anything else.)  And it was even rarer before that.

What it comes down to is people have to be told these stories, and be told them over and over again, before they will be scared of defending themselves lest they hurt others.

Civilizations don’t commit suicide unless they’re brainwashed into it.  And destroying a civilization starts with corrupting its story tellers.

Go you, look closely at the stories you tell and make sure you do no harm.

Oh, yeah, and be not afraid.

Note: Will update subscriber content this evening.  To make things clear – I was at workshop Tuesday through Thursday and would have caught up on Friday, except I was cleaning form “fridge burst.”  The weekend is taken up with business relating to managing my business (because I DID build that, and I intend to keep it.)  But there will be content, and there will be a more detailed explanation in the subscriber side.

*For new readers.  No, I’m not now going to switch to just posting chapters.  This is something I normally do on Friday, though sometimes on Saturday when things get… difficult.  It is a free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  You get it free in pre-draft format, glorious typos and all.  If you want the edited, formatted and cleaned up ebook when it is done, a donation of $6 will get you that once it’s ready which could be a year or so (if you put in the field that it’s for Rogue Magic.)  Once I put it up on Amazon or other outlets, I plan to price it at  $9, but I can give readers’ of the blog the price break that amounts to what I’d receive from Amazon.  I will probably also have paper editions, but I can’t promise to send those out, as I think the costs would soon become prohibitive.  For previous chapters, go here.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon (we’re looking at early July) be taken down (once edited) and put for sale.*

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case this week, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Chapter Eight

Jonathan Savage, Earl of Blythe,

I stood up.  Not in this world seemed to me the ravings of a maid without much experience of magic, and besides the girl couldn’t be much more than thirteen, maybe fifteen, so she could not possibly know what she was talking about.

That the spell Helen had used must have gone wrong was not surprising.  Wolfe had, after all, just been telling me that something had gone seriously wrong and there was rogue magic woven in the spells we sold.  I had no reason to doubt Wolfe who was neither a maid, nor inexperienced in practical magic.

But there is quite a difference between a spell going wrong and taking you to a place you didn’t intend to be and a spell taking you to another world.  There was a difference of degree.  If one steps onto a staircase and the step breaks, one can end up in the lower floor – also, with a broken leg, which happened to me this one time that my friend Marmaduke and I went exploring an abandoned mansion.  We’d drunk a bit much, and if Duke hadn’t hit upon the idea of screaming for a watchman who’d then brought help, I’d be a gonner today.  But damme, what I mean is, if the step breaks, you don’t end up in the cellars, or in the carriage house.

And while the utter prohibition on magical travel to other worlds had been lifted, since the restoration of the princess Royale and my papa’s death, still it was a serious business and overseen and regulated by the king.  When you had such a magically powerful world as Avalon, you had to be very careful that your citizens weren’t up to illegal magics in other worlds less well equipped to detect it.  It was distressingly easy to swindle other worlds, when no one could match you in magic – as my papa had shown.

So having spells out there that could and would take you to other worlds was unlikely.

I started to rise from my chair, and told the girl, Annabel, “Do you take us to my sister’s room.  I trust the hair hasn’t been disposed of?”

“Of course not, Milor’.”

“Good.  It will have to be broken, but—”  I realized that Wolfe had risen too, and turned to glare at him.  “I trust I can get full silence on this.  You realize that I—”

His blunt, peasant-stock face looked like he understood this perfectly well, not just as a warning, but as a reminder that his position was tied to the Blythes.  “I would not dream of saying anything, Milord,” he said.  “And not just because it would affect both your position and mine.  I’m just worried that Lady Helen won’t return safely.  I’d–  I’d like to do what I can to help you.”

There was to it more than the normal old and faithful retainer touch, and I was trying to think of a way to depress his pretensions that wouldn’t tear it in terms of our working together on the things we must work together on, such as the manufactories, when repeated poundings on the front door shook the house.

What I mean is, they weren’t pounding with the knocker.  It sounded like multiple, large men, were pounding on the front door with fists and feet.

Through the din, I heard running feet – I’d suspect Harving – and the door opened.  Then the pounding ceased, but there were voices, loud and officious.  I couldn’t understand what they were saying, not through the study door, but someone seemed to be shouting orders and Harving’s voice, in return, went from his normal to an almost shriek.

This had gone far enough.  I opened my desk drawer and took out my pistol.  If there were ruffians forcing their way into the house they must be stopped.  And if they came to give us news of wherever Helen had gone, they must be listened to.

So I opened the door to my study and stood in the doorway.  And froze.

In the hall were two very tall, rough-looking men, in the black uniform of the newly found Witchfinder Police which was overseen by Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater.

The first one turned to Harving and said, “And you said the Earl was not home,” then to me, “Milord Jonathan Savage, Earl of Blythe, you are under arrest at the order of the royal Witchfinder.”

My mouth must have dropped open, and it felt uncommonly dry as I tried to answer.  “What?  Damme, I told Seraphim I’d be there after noon.  Surely this type of unpleasantness isn’t needed?”

They looked at each other.  The one who hadn’t talked till then shrugged.  Then the other one said, “You are under arrest for unwarranted interference in other worlds.”

“I haven’t interfered anywhere,” I said.  I hadn’t even been out of town, except to my country seat, and that not by magical transport, since I ascended.

“That’s all very well, sir, and you can tell it to the Prince.”

“I will tell it to the prince,” I said.  I would tell it to the prince in a way he wouldn’t like.  What I mean is, there are ways in which to ensure your friends keep appointments, and to do it by sending your minions to arrest him is beyond the line of pleasing.  If this was Seraphim’s idea of a joke, I’d make him swallow it.

But something at the back of my head warned that it wasn’t a joke, and that there was something more here than Seraphim’s wish to see me.

I would have to go. There was no doubt of that.  These two were not funning.  On the other hand, I had the matter of Helen on my hands.

I turned and found Wolfe Merritt’s eyes, fixed earnestly on me.  He wasn’t the man I’d choose to deal with this, and bring Helen safely back to me, I thought.  And on the back of that, I realized there was no one I would trust to bring Helen safely back to me, and whom I could command to exert himself in that purpose.

Most of the servants were Papa’s handpicked men and women.  As for my family – well, Mama would faint, the girls were insufficiently trained and the boys – that didn’t even bear thinking about.

So I turned to Wolfe Merritt, as my last hope in the world, and said, “That matter of the… of the hair, Merritt.  I want you to exert yourself in it and… bring it to a safe conclusion as soon as may be.  Find the… er… the missing items and bring them back where they belong, undamaged if at all possible.  You won’t lose by it.”

I then stepped into the hall and said, “I’m at your disposal, gentlemen.”

Moments later, bowling across town in a black carriage with no escutcheon on the doors, I wondered where I was bound and what this could mean.  Most of all I wondered if it was some of Papa’s malfeasance I’d failed to scotch because I hadn’t known it existed, and which was now coming back to crush all my efforts at making our house respectable.

I hoped Wolfe Merritt had taken my hint and would at least try to do something about Helen.  What he could do was anybody’s guess since it might very well involve unauthorized travel to other worlds, at least if the maid Annabel was right.  And I knew he was a good practical magician but didn’t expect his power to be more than what you got in the lower orders, diluted several times in unmagical blood.

But I’d had no choice.  There were no windows in this carriage, and we were trundling along at considerable speed.  It was much like speeding forward in the dark of night, towards an unknown destination.

It occurred to me I’d never asked the arresting officers for magical proof of their origin, and I wondered with alarm where the journey would end.

I’ll try to get it up tomorrow.  For those of you wondering why/what is going on with me this week — I had the opportunity to audit the Superstars writing seminar.  I’ll write about it later but several lectures were very interesting and I’m very grateful to Kevin J. Anderson for letting me audit.

The seminar was only a couple of miles from me, which is good, because we ended up missing about half of it, as I came home to deal with the freezer.

Our 27 cubic feet deep freezer (aka the reason we can afford meat, because I buy it ONLY when on deep discount) gave up the ghost probably about 12 hours before 4 am on Wednesday, when I woke up saying “The freezer stopped.”  Now, this is bizarre unless I have ears like a bat — and a delayed sense of hearing — because a) it had to have stopped way earlier, since half the meat was defrosted.  b) the freezer is in the basement, two floors down from my bedroom AND across the house.  BUT I knew it, and it was a good thing.  Not that I did anything RIGHT then, but as soon as the guys were on the way to their finals and Dan to work, I carried up laundry baskets full of meat, sorted it into three piles: completely frozen (coolers surrounded by ice), mostly defrosted but cool — crammed it into fridge and started cooking what was left out right then — and completely defrosted and warm-ish or what I described as “manky looking” which went in the large trash bag.

Then I left everything cooking and went to the lectures I could not miss.  Then I came back and finished cooking, then I went to more lectures…  You’re seeing the pattern, right?

This went on till yesterday.  Today I woke up what is technically known as dead.  It’s as though the weight of the world JUST fell on me.  Also, I have a short story almost finished, and I’d like to finish it.  It’s grossly late, and probably won’t be used, but if not I have other things I can do with it.

I COULD probably write one chapter of Rogue Magic, but because of the way I’m feeling, that might be the only active writing I got done, and I’d rather finish the short story.  (Today is also what’s know as “a good day to edit” — which I need to do a lot of with Shadow Gods, so that’s fine. — it takes less energy than active writing.)

So, meanwhile, put your links to your indie (or otherwise) published books in the comments, for me to organize into a post tomorrow.  If I have recovered from whatever this is, I might even insti-link (they need a different thing done on the link for that.)

Speaking of which, Peter Grant, husband of our very own Dorothy has his first book Take The Star Road out.  Yes, that’s a quote from me.  Yes, I meant it.  I’m re-reading the book to review.  But I enjoyed it.

Also, I’m giving Never Look Back away free for the next five days.  Get it, get it for you, for your family, for your dog, for your friends, and for total strangers whose email you have.   Spread the word.

I’m hoping to put up another collection or two this weekend, but no promises because the weekend has business of its own.

Also, two questions for you hunnish lot:

1 – Can one of you come up with a Pulpy “human wave” like title for a magazine that hasn’t been used before.  Yes, there’s a reason for it.  I have devious, devious plans.  To clarify: I want it to sound like something that would have been sold around the 30s, 40s, SF/f (it was actually not clearly parted then) and which did NOT exist (so I don’t have to worry about copyrights.)  It should carry the idea humans-good.  Or at least the idea that the future is better than the past.

2- There are a lot of lawyers either, and at least one non fiction medieval researcher.  Can one of you come up with a form of words VAGUELY signifying “Magical Britain” that sounds good as a series title?  See, Witchfinder and Rogue Magic are part of the Magical British Empire universe and have the same feel.  Once I er… clean MBE I’d like to put them all up and link them by a series name.  Since AFAICT all of these are set in Britain or have British citizens and span anywhere from regency to Victorian England in feel (some are in our time, their history just went different) Magical Britain sounds appropriate, but if I just use it straight it sounds like a travel/non fic book.  If we put it in Latin, it’s immediately fantasy.  Of course, if you guys think up other names that might work for the series like “Secret mages” or whatever, go for it.  Just shoot stuff at the wall, we’ll see if anything sticks.  (This is how I got the title Darkship Thieves.  I honestly had no idea what to call the book before.)

I don’t normally put up posts that get partisan, but this one comes d*mn close, because it has to.

I’ve been watching the scandals unfolding in this administration with slack-jawed shock.  I keep feeling like Jill (?) in Stranger in A Strange Land (despite the quotes I’m sure I’m paraphrasing.  Stranger is not one of my favorites and not in heavy re-read rotation.  It must be… ten years since I read it) “there are things you don’t do.  You don’t do them.  You don’t have to tell children not to eat their little friends.”

It’s not even the scandals but the “tip of the iceberg” feel to them, because, well, people who don’t know it’s not okay to spy on journalists – JOURNALISTS – might also be missing other basic social graces.  People who think it’s okay to invent an “it’s all about a video” and talk about putting a filmmaker in jail (and yes, I know it’s technically for “parole violation” but that was not why Hillary promised to put him in jail FOR THE MOVIE) might not have the best grasp of the first amendment.  (Throw them out, lawyers all!)  People who think it’s okay to strong arm medical companies for squeeze to promote a government scam (let’s call a thing used to dig in the Earth a thing used to dig in the Earth, shall we?) that will destroy them (and all medical advances) probably are uncertain on the boundaries of government according to the constitution.  People who think it’s fine and dandy to bug the cloak room in the house of representatives might have other moral flaws.  People who think it’s okay to use the IRS against their political opponents might be using the levers of power in wrong ways in other areas too.  (And btw, I’d be a lot more inclined to believe they knew nothing, if the anti-terrorism guidelines hadn’t been redesigned to TARGET the same groups the IRS targeted.)

And that’s not getting to the instructions given to our anti-terrorist groups rendering them unable to find and stop the very people likely to commit terrorism.  Stopping a crime before it happens is always difficult for the official authorities, anyway.  They’re best at punishing.  But removing the identifiers of those most likely to do it from the list of things to watch for borders on clinical insanity.

And yet the press as a whole isn’t baying for blood.  There are outbreaks here and there, but most of them aren’t even reporting ANY of this.

Part of it of course is the Progressive code of honor, which could be written (on a stamp) as “We watch out for our peeps” – this is philosophically tied to the idea that a Marxist society is inevitable and such hoary chestnuts which MUST at all costs be kicked to the ash heap of history – and also, of course with the fact that for the last thirty years “progressivism” has been a club identifier for “high class” and that a lot of people (in leftist controlled professions like mine) got (sometimes undeserved) wealth and respect based on their adherence to both parroting the “truths” of Marxism, and to this deranged form of Omerta.

But it’s more than that, and it goes deeper.

It goes all the way to the monkey brain, where loyalty to a bad hominid band leader, and being able to stay with the band increased your survival (and particularly your kids’ survival) chances over going off into the wilds on your own, in search of a better band.  (All of us immigrants are immediately weird.)

During a particular dark time in my life (yes, pre-Dan.  Also, I was a teenager and brain damaged in the peculiar way teens are.) Rod Stewart’s “A Reason To Believe” became my favorite song.  Particularly the lines:

If I listened long enough to you
I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true
Knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried
Still I look to find a reason to believe

And last night, while catching up on the news, after a day spent in workshop classes and – in the one and two hour intervals between, when I got to come home – because our freezer died, cooking the world, (okay, only that part of the world that constituted 1/3 of our frozen food.  It was defrosted but not warm, so it got cooked.  The stuff that was defrosted and room temperature got thrown out.  The stuff that was frozen solid got transferred to the loaner freezer.  Our freezer is waiting on a part that should arrive sometime next week.) that song started going through my head for the first time in years.

Suddenly, it occurred to me the backbrain had it.  It’s not just progressive Omerta.  It’s not just progressive faith they’ll win in the end.  It’s actually not progressivism at all.  It’s human.  (But is it art?)

People want to believe figures of authority are right.  Constitutional monarchies give the people a figure head to believe in, while they can jump on and kick the actual government five ways from Monday.  We don’t have that.  (And no, I don’t want that.  Yes, I was a monarchist before after I was an anarchist, but that was Portugal and in Portugal you can’t wring the idea some people are better than others by virtue of their birth out of the culture.  It’s something I don’t want to install itself in minds here.)  The president was SORTA supposed to be like that.  But it was long ago (and besides, the wench is as dead as the Portuguese monarchist I once was.)

But still, we want to believe people in power, people at the head of any field, any company, any institution can be trusted.  It’s the monkey brain.  Of course in the US it’s very important for our ideas of ourselves to think that government respects the constitution even though that train left the track visibly and madly mid-20^th century, and since then it’s been driving in the weeds, to the point this administration tells us the Constitution is “old” and “outdated” and “Only protects negative liberties” and are trying to replace it WITHOUT a new constitutional convention.  (Which since we’re a nation created by that paper, damn skippy would be needed.)

There is a tendency even in America to believe the successful did “something right.”

For the most successful (I’m not sure he’s the most powerful any longer, and no I don’t mean the scandals, I mean by his own hand.  Foreign leaders have taken the measure of the man, even if the press hasn’t) man in the world, the ultimate check is the press.  The ONLY check is the press.

Only there the Progressive Omerta comes in.

If there were no other reason to (usually) vote Republican, the fact that the press crawls up THEIR butts like ants on a lump of sugar would be enough.  Power corrupts.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  People who ignore the constitution and lie with a straight face and whom the press doesn’t check are, ultimately, in absolute power.  Even if they were angels before (and, children, in this case, Chicago politics) they won’t be after.

I have the advantage of hating most authority and only submitting to a limited amount of it when absolutely needed (but I resent it.)  This means, yes, that I DID look crosseyed at George Bush – though usually not for the reasons the progressives did.  (Younger son, when enjoined to write a letter to the president in fourth grade (with strong suggestions it should be about stopping the war) wrote about tariffs and general impediment to international commerce because that was what frosted his cookies (no, I hadn’t put him up to it, though I’m sure that’s what the teacher thought.  This is my kid whom I’d always thought wasn’t political.  He doesn’t talk much, and when he does it’s usually about ancient Greek history; Space flight; something a classmate did.  But I started discovering when he was around 10 he reads a lot of the same blogs I do, he has a thing for economics and he might in fact be my male clone.)  Sometimes he made me mad as fire, and the only reason I ever defended him was the “crazy charges” and BDS.  If they’d been going after him for ineffective and intrusive anti-terrorism measures, I’d have been on the street with all the old hippies on oxygen.

But here is where the right – my type of right.  Yes, there’s another – and the left are different.  People like me start from the principles and pick the person least likely to HURT them.  (We unfortunately never expect them to support them.)  The left, at least since the fall of the USSR and the revelation that stuff just don’t work, are looking for the perfect individual to carry the flag on and MAGICALLY make this stuff work.  They are by nature communitarian and because their system (in reality if not in theory) always depends on strong leaders, they want to believe their leaders are special.

It’s really hard to doubt the person on whose existence you’ve reposed all the hopes of a better society AND your social standing, too.  They have to be perfect or magical, else everything you believe in is a sham.

Everything they believe in is a sham.  And if they don’t wake up right quick, what my grandmother said about bad situations “The one who comes after will make me seem good” applies. (“Miss me, yet?”)

If I gave you time to change my mind I’d find a way just to leave the past behind Knowing that you lied straight-faced while I cried Still I look to find a reason to believe.

And that’s how we’ve come to this labyrinthine knot of tied-together snafus that only CAN’T be a conspiracy theory because a) it’s proven fact and b) conspiracy theories, even those about Loch Ness, are less insane.

Yes, I think that the tech will eventually and of itself limit the power of government over the individual.  What we’re fighting about is how rough the transition will be and how long it will take.

For it to be as short as possible (I’m afraid there isn’t a “painless” option) and for the future to be as good as possible we must give up on wanting to believe that just because someone is powerful he is somehow anointed with goodness.

We must not look for a reason to believe.

Welcome Instapundit Readers and thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link!

For those unfamiliar with According To Hoyt, I’m a working novelist who started this blog at her agent’s instigation, as a “platform” — this was in the days when I was trying to hide my politics so as to make it in the traditional publishing world.  But it’s impossible to write everyday and not reveal yourself a little, and then more.  This seeped into my novels which resulted in the space opera series whose covers you find linked on the side of the blog.  Darkship Thieves won the 2011 award from the Libertarian Futurist Society and the second book, Darkship Renegades is a finalist for the award this year.  I’m very pleased since it’s the only award I ever aspired to receiving.  That said, this is a working writer’s blog and a considerable investment in time and effort, which detracts somewhat from my fiction writing.  If you enjoy my work here, consider donating, subscribing or even if you enjoy science fiction, buying one of the books on the side bar.  (I also write mystery, historical mystery and fantasy, but having forced the houses to disgorge the copyrights I’m going to bring them back later.)

When I was twelve or fourteen I had an explanation for the evil in the world.

Anyone who murdered, tortured, destroyed another human being (while I understand the evils of property damage/theft, it still most of the time falls short of totally destroying someone) only did it because he was a victim of society.

It wasn’t an original explanation.  By which I don’t even mean that I wasn’t the first to come up with it.  Of course, I wasn’t.  However, I didn’t come up with it at all.  I imported it wholesale from my brother who, though he was only ten years older than I, was very much involved in the whole sixties ethos.  It was all society’s fault [man] and if we got rid of capitalism and like put flowers in our hair [man], it would all be so groovy and stuff.

I never fully bought into the “if we just got rid of capitalism” – it didn’t compute.  I was an history geek, and I knew how the other systems stacked up.  BUT I wanted to believe the “it’s all society’s fault” at least society writ small.  “It’s all his family’s fault.”  “His mom spanked him when he was little.”  “He probably has a complex.”

This was fed in part by the fact that villains in books – the interesting ones, at least – do tend to have reasons for what they do.  They were abused or they suffered horribly or…

The human brain likes imposing patterns on the natural world, including very (un)natural human beings.  And we wish to think no one would do ill on purpose.  Or for no reason.  Certainly it doesn’t make a very interesting story.

My son has been reading a(n accurate) biography of Che Guevara.  When it gets to be too much for him, he comes to me and talks about it and says “I just can’t understand how anyone gets to be like that.”

At the same time I’ve been reading – malgre moi – bits and pieces of the freak show that was the Gosnell operation.  I mean, I try not to read details, but pieces of the whole thing will catch my eye even as I’m avoiding reading it (I’m avoiding reading it, because if I get so angry I burn a hole in space/time it won’t be good for anyone.)  Baby feet in jars?  Blind (because too young) babies left to die in pain and cold?  WHAT?

Then there is that whole thing in Ohio – three brothers who, as far as we know, had lived fairly normal lives till then, in middle age decide to kidnap young teenagers (one of whom was the friend of one of their daughters) and keep them as sex slaves?

How does this even happen?  If you say “they were horribly abused as children” or “their mothers twisted them” or whatever the h*ll you want to, I’m going to tell you that yeah, but it’s not enough.  And besides you’re spitting on everyone who underwent equal trauma or worse and grew up to be a decent person.

This is akin to excusing terrorism with “they’re poor”.  First of all, no, the heck they aren’t.  Most of the 9/11 attackers were quite well off, thank you.  And second, you’re spitting on all the poor people who never brought down planes and towers.

There was a time in the seventies when every trial was resolved with “he was abused as a child.”  By which they meant anything from sexual abuse to “he once didn’t get the lollipop he wanted.”

At some level or another, we ALL were thwarted or traumatized or “abused”  It’s impossible to go through life without doing it.  The only way to avoid it would be not to have a body.  Even to have all our wishes instantly gratified is a peculiar form of abuse, since it doesn’t prepare us for the inevitable buffets of the world.  Whether you are G-d’s special snow flake or not, sometimes it will rain on your picnic.

Are the communists perhaps right?  Is the capitalist system prone to creating this type of thing?

Well, not more than anywhere else.  In the Soviet Union, perhaps – perhaps – there were fewer free lance mass murderers, but that’s only because the state hated competition.

There were (possibly more – in some perspectives we’ve been taming ourselves over the centuries) the same sort of cases under monarchies.  There are these sorts of cases under strong man governments.

They are right of course, to an extent, the same way they are right about madness.  But that’s only because ANY society is going to be oppressive.  If you’re not floating in a bodiless place where your every wish is gratified – human meeting human causes trouble and pain and inconvenience for everyone.  If two people meet they won’t always agree.  There will be strife.  That is because Earth is not paradise.  And it will never be.

On the other hand, the madness thing – in a way all humans are mad, caught between intellectual vision and desire and the animal body.  If we didn’t force the animal body to do things it doesn’t want to do (like dance, or write, or the really difficult work, like digging ditches of building skyscrapers–)  there would be no civilization.

But few of us even murder one person, much less groups.

These days the official explanation is “they’re born evil.”  But are they?  We all have potential for great evil.  Trust me, even those who haven’t read my books, be assured that I can dream up horrible scenarios.

So what is the solution?  What explains humans being willing to go out and eliminate vast numbers of innocents?  Or to kidnap young girls as sex slaves?

They think they can get away with it.

I’d say that’s the sum of the thing.

All humans have these thoughts and temptations.  But once you give in… well, once you give in, its effect on you makes it easier to do it again, and again, and bigger.

Once you consider other humans outside the human scope.  Once you stop respecting them for the sake of common humanity, you’re going to end up thinking what you do doesn’t matter.  And you’re going to feel (a little) invincible.  You’re going to kill more, better, bigger.  You’re going to kidnap another young woman.  You’re going to think you’re like onto the gods…

The beginning can be as simple as being fairly sure no one will catch you.

But wait, there’s more.  When the culture promotes the idea that “we belong to the government”; when the culture promotes the idea that it’s perfectly all right to kill the very young, the suffering old, the mentally afflicted, the bodily deformed…  Once you accept the idea that common humanity or not, there are people who aren’t “people” as such…

You let the monster out.  Whether you do it yourself or you vote to have people “whose lives aren’t worth living” put to death, it’s the same.

You’ve stopped respecting humanity and therefore rendered yourself less than human.

Treating people as units, instead of bringing about Earthly paradise always brings about mass graves.  Perhaps because it mimics the thought processes of a psychopath who views others as means to his end.

And the only true victims are the dead, the maimed and the coerced.

UPDATE:  Post on writing technique over at Mad Genius Club: Expose It Yourself

Whenever I write anything about the insufficient attachment in society today to the documents that made us Americans – the constitution and the Declaration of Independence – I get half a dozen people who say that no, this isn’t true.

Sorry.  It is true.  If it weren’t true, I wouldn’t have reviews on A Few Good Men complaining that it’s “too libertarian.”  In fact, while I suspect it is that, or at least some of the characters are that, because the dang thing tends to leak into my work, the animating motive for the revolution in the book is the U.S. declaration of independence and a religious attachment to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

How can any American, born American, under the aegis of those great documents, have a problem with a book that makes the Constitution central to its principles? (And that was the problem in the reviews, not the characters’ peculiarity.)  Unless, of course, we’re so far gone that those words are revolutionary again.

And then there is the other side of this, those of you who are, at heart, constitutionalists, but who say “it’s all over, give up, they’ve won.  I’m just going to—“ and then follows a totally impractical decision: “fight it out on my own”, “go down fighting,” “Stock up for the civil war.”

You can’t fight it out on your own, and any attempts to do so will just give the opposition a chance to crush you and to say that, see, more supervision and policing is needed.  No?  Anyone remember Ruby Ridge?  These people were survivalist loons and, to be honest, weird White-Supremacy cultists – unless their family lied about them, which heaven knows isn’t even unlikely – but from these isolated nuts – who were entrapped, and yes, murdered by the forces of government – an entire “militia movement” was spun and a boogeyman made of all those who thought to restrict government.  Fighting it out on your own?  Bad for you, bad for us, bad for liberty.

“I’ll go down fighting” – if it comes to that, and I hope very much it doesn’t, I hope you do, and I hope I do.  It beats the way that most victims of over-reaching government went in the twentieth century: in the middle of the night, in silence and solitude, with a bullet to the back of the head, buried anonymously in mass graves.  But there’s a reason that happened, and a reason that’s more likely than brave lion going down in a blaze of glory in full view.   I’m not saying the last one can’t happen, but I know how to bet.  Yes, our being armed makes the bet more even, but what government does REALLY well is violence and suppression of dissent.  It’s hard for individuals to even come close.

As for civil war… I’ve written about what civil war would actually mean.  We’re not alone in the world.  While we duke it out, do you believe our enemies will be playing tiddly wink?

Civil war is the preferable scenario to the two above – but not by much and only because the others lead to unimaginable horror.

And right now you’re going “It’s all done, we’re done, we—”

Get up off the floor.  First, if you’re a believer, despair is a sin.  And if you’re not a believer, despair is spitting on the graves of all the men and women who fought in much worse conditions than you face.  The ghosts of Tiananmen Square rise up against you.  The men who in the Gulags carried a hope of freedom accuse you. The victims of communism point fingers at you.  The millions of dead at the hands of marching statism would like to remind you that to give up is to die. And that’s when you should give up.  Not a second earlier.

But worse than that – despair is a sin and an insult on the brave dead…  And it might be stupid too.

You’re going to point to the fact that the left – Marxists – control education and that even in Europe, even in countries that suffered under communism, they think socialism is great.  This is because the left has education and the history books have been revised.  I can tell you having been raised in Europe that people are taught to equate capitalism and monarchy, and all the crimes of monarchy are ascribed to capitalism, and socialism/communism is opposed to this.

Here is the problem for them, though – socialism doesn’t work.  As Thatcher said, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.  They are.  Yes, there will be fire and blood, but at the end of it there just might be sanity.  Voices that point out that communism/socialism in their end result are much closer to monarchy than capitalism ever was are needed.  People who hold aloft the ideals of individual liberty are needed. It’s not time to fall on your sword, yet.  It might never be, because…

Yes they control the education system in most of the world.  But education is already getting hit with the same sort of catastrophic change that hit publishing.  I’ve seen the signs.  I’ve seen the middle class kids who are home/online schooled up to the last two years, then go to school the last two years, just to establish records for college entrance.  In ten years we’ve come this far.  In another three or four, things will come tumbling down.  And it will be sudden, as it’s been for publishing.

They have mass media.  Yes, indeed they do.  But we have a million voices rising up in protest. We might each be tiny pebbles in an endless lake, but we ripple… More importantly, we have the ability to tell stories that subtly propagate different world views.  The uniform lie has broken.  There is no “what everybody thinks.”  They’re shouting really loudly through the remaining channels to give the impression they’re winning.  But the mirror has cracked from side to side and their doom has come upon them.  They know it.  That’s why they try to sound so confident and secure.

They are not.  Hollywood has the money and the great effects, but it is running out of ideas, and it shows in the endless remakes.  And the tech will catch up with them too.  They’re next, after education.

They have vote fraud – yes, they do – but even in Wisconsin where they had instituted the same rules they’re putting in in Colorado, if the people get riled enough, there isn’t enough fraud to wash that away.  Let’s get the recall going, and if that fails volunteer to watch the polls.  If nothing else, be vocal about what happened afterwards.  Daylight is a disinfectant.

They have the government.  I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, that’s a booby prize. The new technologies are personalized, individualized, mobile.  And more so every year. Their model works best on a unified society where the technologies are best used to serve/talk to/control millions.  When they try it on a modern society, not only doesn’t it work, it fails spectacularly.

They belong to the past.  We? We’re from liberty and we carry it with us. We’re from the future, and we’re headed there.  And despite brief disgusting localized intervals where it goes the other way, the future is always better than the past.

Besides, in the long run?  Guess who is reproducing?  Oh, yes, we’re buying a lot of low-skill, low-ability-to-survive babies.  But low ability to survive is low ability to survive.  Remove the support system, and that population will either break out of learned helplessness (my bet) or become much smaller.

Meanwhile, the responsible people who have strong beliefs about individual freedom (many of whom are religious) are having more kids than just about anyone else and, more importantly, raising them to be responsible people with strong beliefs about individual freedom.  This is because these people have hope for the future.  Thinking we’re all going to die screaming doesn’t encourage anyone to make babies.  And thinking you need someone to hold your hand all through life doesn’t either.

[Yes, you’re going to bring out Islam.  And you’re going to be wrong.  Even in our country, with the cleanest statistics/data collection in the world (okay, maybe Sweden and Norway are cleaner, I don’t know.  But Socialism also ALMOST works there.  Those aren’t – or until recently weren’t – so much countries as tribes with borders.  Things can fly there that don’t fly anywhere else) we guesstimate a lot of our population.  If you believe the birth figures coming out of Muslim countries, you probably also believed the figures coming out of the old Soviet Union.  Remember who benefits from reporting more births: the country which is a net aid receiver, per capita. I tend to believe the rumors that filter out about women finding enough information on the net to control/reduce their own fertility.  In their position, wouldn’t you?]

In the long run this story can only have two endings.

In one of them the entire world succumbs to the unreason of “equality” and controlled economies.  This is the end in which humans go down ululating into madness.

The only way communist systems can survive is the one of the aliens in Independence Day, “They’re like locusts, they destroy each place and they move on.”

If we fall, the rest of the world falls.  And we have no other world.  After the apocalypse (what do you call it, precisely?  It even collapses birth rates to way below replacement) there might or might not be enough to rebuild.  Perhaps it happened before.

But if it did, they didn’t go the way we have, with all this distributed, individually-centered tech.

I think the sun is setting on their world – which is why they bay so loudly, to convince us that the night is coming and they have all the power – and rising on ours.

I think in the end we win, they lose.

Get up off the floor.  This is no time to give up.

*A bit of business — the subscriber space will be updated, hopefully tomorrow morning.  However this is an odd week and there are a lot of appointments and things, so bear with me.  It will come.*

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit Readers and thank you Glenn for the link! (I am at a workshop this weekend and opportunities to connect are intermittent, so I didn’t get a chance to do this earlier.

Update: for my regular readers — remember this is not my regular job.  What I do for a living is writing novels.  I’m taking about an hour a day and a considerable amount of though away from that for these posts.  If you can, consider Donating or even Subscribing, so I feel less guilty about writing for free!