Trust and Loathing – Cedar Sanderson

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

Trust and Loathing – Cedar Sanderson

Most of us have a need to trust someone. Man is not meant to dwell alone all of his days, and those who do are usually crippled by internal problems. This is not a bad thing, trust. But taken too far in the other direction, it can be equally as crippling. There must be a balance in one’s trust and loathing.

We all loathe something. It’s most likely not even a conscious decision on your part. For me, it’s the sound of someone chewing with their mouth open. I’d rather listen to fingernails on a chalkboard. The social concern these days is that no one show any sign of loathing another race. The problem is that we trust these voices repeating ‘racism’ too much.

There are not, genetically and anthropologically speaking, discrete human races. Livingstone and Dobzhansky wrote at some length about this in the 1960s. Nothing has changed since then, and in reality, the more we know about genetics, the more obvious it becomes that what is labelled ‘racism’ is in fact culturism. Phenotypical features that appeared in different geological areas were once used to slap handy labels on groups of people, but there it stops. There is one human race, Homo sapiens.

Tishkoff and Kidd wrote for Nature in 2004, “One of the problems with using ‘race’ as an identifier is the lack of a clear definition of race. Historically, ‘race’ has been classified based on both sociocultural and biological characteristics including morphology, skin color, language, culture, religion, ethnicity and geographic origin. Morphology and skin color are not always good indicators of race because they probably result from adaptation to environmental conditions and may have been subject to convergent evolution (e.g., people with dark skin are found in New Guinea, Southern India and Africa, and even within these regions, there can be tremendous variation in skin color). Culture, language, religion and ethnicity have strong sociocultural components and may not always be a good indicator of shared ancestry (e.g., ‘Hispanics’ in the US include individuals of European, Native American and African ancestry in all possible combinations). Nor is geographic origin always adequate for defining ‘race’ because of recent, historical and prehistorical migrations of peoples.”

And yet the current climate of inciting ‘racial’ tensions exists for a reason. I’m going to turn aside for a moment and talk about another movement that exists in parallel and on a microcosmic scale to the vast turmoil over human ‘races’ since that term was coined in 1775. It’s only really been around for three years, a virtual infant in cultural conflicts, and it only rose to true global consciousness (in a mere year!) this year. I’m speaking of those who have been dubbed ‘puppies.’

The Sad Puppy campaign for the Hugo Awards is such a little thing, when you look at it. Run by fans, for fans, and yet… And yet it became a nationally aware movement, with opponents who defamed good men without a second thought in media outlets, even to the point where the media was forced to backpedal as they had gone too far in their snapping, snarling rush to mangle the puppies. In SFF fandom it seems everyone is reeling in disbelief and confusion over what happened and why. Politics in minor scale has been with fandom from the beginning. What is it about now, to bring this over-the-top reaction to something that has been done before?

Why has there been such a backlash of feeling and vituperation against the sad puppy movement? What is it about this relatively small campaign of voting, done legally and very openly, that leads people to scream, stamp their feet, and lie on the floor weeping and pounding their fists against whatever they can reach? Comments on the campaign have ranged from repugnant, to calling for the ‘puppies’ to be interned in concentration camps. (Comment by Patricia Williams-King on Facebook, May 18 “From what I’ve heard about these “Puppies” they ought to be sent to the dog-pound in short order.”)

And that is where I saw the parallel clearly. What is the motivation of those who called for the internment of the Jew in Germany, and the Japanese in the US? Fear. Loathing of the ‘other’ and fear that those others threatened them in some way.

The Sad Puppies threaten the establishment, shake them out of their comfortable delusions that publishing is still business as usual. That the only concern they ought to have is to get more ‘diversity’ into the Hugo Awards, by which they certainly didn’t mean diversity of thought, gender or culture (they showed this by their gleeful disregard of a pool of recommended and nominated puppies who were all three).

Racial tensions in the US? Look behind the news, to see who stirs the pot. What is lurking back there? With the Hugo Awards, it is the few editors who stand to lose the most as they can no longer influence the awards with a mere 40-50 votes. It is the people who are unmasked as the petty tyrants and lickspittle toadies of those who have traded what was once a prestigious award back and forth for the last few years, devaluing it almost past redemption.

And in the larger picture, where those who would declare that skin color matters, we find people who can be legally convicted of only seeking the limelight for money and power. We must look more closely, behind the curtain to see who is twitching the puppet strings, and why. Don’t trust too easily. Don’t snap into loathing without understanding why you recoil in horror. Sometimes it’s not what is being handed to you on a platter, but the hand that is offering it to you that is filthy and unclean.

The problem is, of course, that we are acculturated from childhood to believe what we are told. Some of us (especially we who identify as Odd) have always had trouble with that, and it’s gotten us into trouble. Anecdotally, I can tell you it’s gotten me shunned from a church, separated from my mother at a time I desperately needed her, and then later… well, it’s a long story. Suffice it to say that I’m stubborn. I’m also not inclined to blindly follow along with the narrative.

A friend shared a conversation he’d had with his son while out on a hike. He’d looked at the rings on the stump of a tree with the elementary-school aged lad and was telling his son that you could see the effects of weather, drought, and… the boy interrupted. I know all about that, Dad, he’d informed his father (being of an age where he knew it all) that’s what climate change is. My friend was asking how he could help his son break out of the habit of listening to his teacher without critical evaluation of the pap he was being fed in school.

It’s not easy. Children in school need to listen to their teachers. If not, they get into trouble. If they tell their teacher what teacher wants to hear, they are rewarded. Classic negative/positive re-inforcement. In order to create a mind that is capable of true insight and critical thinking, the art of the critique must first be allowed, and that is a tricky thing to teach, so schools don’t even bother any longer. For my friend, we in the conversation suggested that he offer other materials that could logically refute the theory of anthrophogenic climate changes. Simply learning of the scale and statistics behind what it takes to truly influence the climate on a global scale could be an eye-opener to a smart young man. At this point you’re wondering how I wandered off into the weeds of glowbull warmening from the topic of racism and cultural othering.

Simple. It’s all related. These are big topics our children are being fed by school, by media, and again, there are puppets pulling the strings who have less than honorable intentions. It reminds me of a tale I read once, that a child learns to react with fear and loathing from his mother’s reactions to a snake, even an innocent snake who kills pests and vermin that would infest the mother’s house. There’s a song about it, too, now that I think on it. They must be carefully taught to hate, it goes. We’re being taught to hate. They are hating with every fiber of their being, and that hate has to come out somewhere, usually the internet as that’s safer for them. The last vestiges of empathy, civility, and compassion are declared to be of no use. Decry the other, they are told, and they do, at the top of their voices, using the mirror of their own hatred to paint their foes with familiar visages. Projecting their motivations, they attack without quarter or mercy.

580 thoughts on “Trust and Loathing – Cedar Sanderson”

  1. Dear Sir or Madam,
    I find your thoughts strangely compelling. Please subscribe me to your newsletter comment thread.

                1. the post of mine that got ate was a play on the Spam, Spam ,etc.
                  apparently the spam filter ate it. (it must be Polynesian or something)

            2. In spite of the conclusions which one might draw from the songs he writes, Mr. Coulton is not a horror show fiend. He a very nice gentleman.

                  1. Typical “Bellisario contract negotiation.” Or more usually, it’s a typical cliffhanger for next season. And then Gibbs can be frustrated with disability for drama stuff, and DeNozzo can lead more cases.

                    Of course, it’s also possible that they really will kill off Gibbs, and they’re just ensuring that viewers will tune it next season before the actor gets out. But I haven’t heard that he wants out, or that he’s being recalcitrant about pay; so it’s probably just a Bellisario cliffhanger.

                    1. Yeah, I get the distinct impression that Mark Harmon would be content to play Gibbs until he dies. Why not? It’s a steady paycheck (and, considering the show’s longevity, his status, and the fact that he’s one of the executive producers, I imagine it’s a fairly fat paycheck), he gets summers off to run his cows and build stuff. And he doesn’t have to hustle for roles. 😀

                    3. Oh, my yes. I don’t give a damn that he’s only four years older than my mother, the man is hot.

      2. I’m told they have cookies. That’s why I come here, for the cookies.

  2. It is hardly a novel (pun intended) sentiment to offer that the solution to the indoctrination is our schools is to get your kid out of the school. Homeschool if you can, use a private Classical Core school (N.B.- a very different animal from Common Core) if you can’t. But it’s my Big Drum, and I like to beat it. Then send them off to the military for a spell, then off to Hillsdale if they still want a sheepskin.

    1. Hi, Mark, fomer homeschooled kid, here… Classical education is a great way to teach, I think. When Mom started teaching us at home, there were few resources. Now, there are so many, it’s a great time to think non-traditional when it comes to education.

    2. I returned to school for a STEM degree after 15 years in industry with just a high school diploma. Very nervous about competing with bright shiny faces 18 year olds. Shouldn’t have been. For those kids it was all about the parties and acting like college was just an extension of high school.
      Between a handful of transfer credits and treating school like a real job I finished what was arguably a five year program in two and a half years. Took that engineering degree, got a decent job, and got my masters in two more years of night classes all on my employer’s dime.
      But then I like many here am an odd duck, and non traditional pathways seem to be a better fit.

      1. I also started college 15 years out of high school. The Oil Patch taught me that it is better to hire out you brain than your back. A brain doesn’t break as easily.
        I was not impressed with my fellow freshmen. Too many treated college as 13th grade without parental supervision. Got into an honors program. Was appalled at all of the leftist twaddle. Dropped the honors program and just concentrated on earning my BSEE.

        1. ” better to hire out you brain than your back. A brain doesn’t break as easily.”

          Not so sure about that. There certainly are plenty of people graduating college with either a broken or missing brain.

          1. Lord, if that ain’t the truth. When the process is broken, you get bad product- same in education as in manufacturing.

            That said, skilled trades also can net a good paycheck. Look at what electricians, plumbers, and good millwrights make/hr. It’s not starvation wages.

            1. A drill rig pays well but ages you quickly. Of course, getting through college with a healthy brain is getting harder today.

            2. Gah, no kidding. I’ve been trying to find a different/better job (and one in my actual field) for years now. If only I’d become a mechanic, I could have had a very well-paying job many times over…(Although I would likely not make a good mechanic: I hate getting stuff on my hands. Which also makes being an artist a touch difficult, in some areas…)

              I wonder if 35 is too late to learn to be an electrician…?

              1. I wonder if 35 is too late to learn to be an electrician…?

                I’m 34 and learning how to be an architect. So… no.

              2. Ah yes. I remember stripping down and giving myself a sponge bath in diesel in the middle of a particularly messy day. Clean working conditions were not part of the job description. :o)

              4. Nope. Not too late ay-tall. Also 35, and I’ve been a… lessee… amatuer electrician, plumber, auto mechanic, done the editing thing (badly), loaded trucks, took pictures of ducks, cooked for a living, taught and tutored, built things, tore them down, and am now working in manufacturing (and hoping for a promotion any day now…).

                You can do it. Get to studying, maybe pull some wire for the experience (and hopefully pocket change). I got faith in ya, and all y’all other folks. If one lazy, not-too-bright redneck can get away with doing all the crazy stuff I’ve done, y’all can probably do better. *grin*

              5. no. But if you don’t like getting thin gs on your hands, the skilled trades aren’t for you.

    3. If/when I have children of my own, I don’t really intend for them to *ever* set foot in a public school building. And yes, there are soooo many resources for homeschooling nowadays!

  3. Amazing, isn’t it – the Sad Puppies are still shaking the foundations of the Industrial-Literary Complex (Science Fiction Division.) The management at Tor must have been driven really around the bed, if the Facebook comments by Ms Bello are anything to go by.

      1. Hmm … tried to leave a comment at your place, but Facebook ate half of it … The kind of shocking thing to me is how people who ought to know better — like MS Gallo — seem to have no inhibitions at all about letting it all hang out on Facebook or Twitter. There’s no sense of discretion, or any hint of a thought process that advises “No, maybe best not say that,” or “I should phrase that a bit more diplomatically — and no sense at all that what they post and tweet will come back to bite. That fool who bereted the Chick-Fil-A clerk at the drive through counter last year, the woman who got all hot and bothered over hearing a joke between two guys at a tech conference and went out created a firestorm about it … didn’t these people think for a moment about how it could rebound?
        I had that sense of potential consequence beaten into me through working in military public affairs/broadcasting, and it certainly served me will in blogging. I’d have thought that people who were high up in a major publishing firm would have had the same kind of sense of restraint. Evidently not.

        2. Much as I hate picking on the typos of somebody who writes far better (and types much more accurately) than I, some things cannot be resisted; comes of having one’s brain replaced with Spam.

          “That fool who bereted the Chick-Fil-A clerk at the drive through counter last year,”

          I think we can all agree that putting berets on drive-thru cashiers is the sort of thing no civilization can permit. After all, if we allow that, where does it stop? Cowboy hats? Fedoras??!!!

          1. Cowboy hats are great! I’m going to start tipping drive thru cashiers with cowboy hats. I bet the Chik-fil-a cashiers would be nice and say “thank you.”

            1. At some local festival a couple of months ago, a guy wearing a cowboy hat touched the brim of it as he walked past me and said, “Howdy, ma’am.”

              Just like in the old western movies! I was charmed, immediately.

              1. Still happens in my little mountains, too. *chuckle* Especially at the Bojangles where there’s still a few regulars ride up on horses to the take-out window…

          2. As one who has worn a fedora everyday for 30+ years, I hardily encourage the “re-fedora-ing” of America.

          3. Personally, I find the imposition of the beret to be both a serious fashion faux paus and an act of abuse. To my mind, the former GEN Shinseki ought to have been driven forth from the service after having had his epaulets torn off in some formal ceremony of admonishment.

            Seriously–That black beret was an abomination unto Nuggan. The only reason the Rangers and SF guys loved theirs was because of the transgressional status that headgear once had within the US Army. As a practical bit of headgear, the beret is a total waste. Especially in the Pacific Northwest in the winter–I’d rather use hundred-mile-an-hour tape to fasten a dish sponge to my head than wear one of those abominations.

            1. Amazing, isn’t it, how he talked about the beret while drunk at an AUSA convention, and had to make it happen to save face. And the next CoS wouldn’t take it back, because he couldn’t admit that his fellow general had made a stupid mistake.
              Sometimes I swear they remove the spine when they pin on the first star, and the brain when they pin on the third.

              1. No, no, the brain has been completely removed by the time they reach major. They start filling the brain cavity with cow manure when they pin on the first star.

          1. I suppose tolerance demands we respect her decision to identify as Clippy.

            1. Hi, I’ve noticed that you are posting something you’ll regret to facebook. Would you like help?

              [] Get help setting personal and professional boundaries.
              [] Recognize that actions have consequences.
              [X] Don’t you dare mansplain to me again

              2. Quasi related: the POTUS is in trouble . . . for possible manspreading while in Bavaria. *shakes head* I am sooooo looking forward to three weeks without internet, I really am.

                2. Him manspreading isn’t nearly so annoying as his mansplaining how much better off I am without the insurance policy which I liked even if it offered no coverage for pregnancy (not something I or Beloved Spouse worry about at present dotage ages. Or his mansplaining how he has a plan for defeating ISIS, it’s just the Pentagon that is holding up the works. Or his mansplaining that AGW means I need to turn over control of the economy to bureaucrats who are not elected, are not held responsible for errors or miscalculations and won’t even take concrete achievable steps to reduce their own !@# carbon-footprints in order to delay the rising of the oceans by a measly centimeter over the next century. Or his mansplaining …

                  1. Progsplaining.

                    Although I guess you could make an argument that if Clinton was the first black president, then maybe Obama counts as a man….

                    1. All of Clinton’s human ancestors came from Africa, and he is an American, so one could argue he is African-American. (Where his inhuman ancestors came from I shall not speculate.)

                3. Apparently Angela Merkel found it necessary to ‘ma’amsplain’ to a ‘manspreading’ Obama.

                  Kudos to the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow:

                  There’s a photo going around social media of German Chancellor Angela Merkel talking to President Obama. Merkel, arms outstretched, appears to be angry, or at the very least annoyed, about something. Obama, meanwhile, is sitting on a bench, his arms stretched out to his sides along the back of the seat. From what can be seen in the picture, it appears he is “manspreading” — the seating stance of men where they spread their legs.
                  washingtonexaminer[DOT]com/did-angela-merkel-maamsplain-to-a-manspreading-obama/article/2565862

      2. And Tor’s response this morning is: Happy Monday and the views of our employees do not reflect the views of the publisher.
        After all those emails to the media, the multiple statements by senior people at Tor and all the other crap we’ve seen I have to think that unless Tom Doherty makes a statement there’s every reason to believe that Gallo’s statement DOES represent the position of Tor Books.

              1. If the comments are deleted it is exactly the same thing as if they never happened, comrade.

                1. A couple decades back somebody published a book of Soviet pictures as successive subjects got retouched out. I vividly recall descriptions of Stalin asking directions of nobody (local farmer air-brushed out) and a Politburo committee consisting (eventually) solely of Stalin.

                  I never got a chance to look through it in a store and determine if it merited inclusion in my library, ensconced between the The Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America and The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.

                  Sad face.

                  1. Yup. That’s who they wanna be. But if you bring it up to them then you’re godwinning (a term which people misuse anyway, but there’s little point in arguing about that either).

                    1. I have recently been struck by the realization that Godwin’s Law only applies to Usenet discussions.

                      I am likely to recover from this blow.

                  2. I had a copy of that book! It showed successive versions of pictures of Lenin and Stalin making speeches, with the faces of various onlookers being blurred out, changed to other faces, or simply blacked out. I guess it depended if they wanted to simply edit people out of history or if they wanted the memories left behind as a warning.

                    Darned if I remember the title… it went walkabout a few years ago.

                    As someone told me long ago, “Only your friends steal books.”

                1. “WordPress seems to be getting worse lately.”

                  [Insert Simpson’s YouTube clip]
                  That’s unpossible.

          2. Commented to it. I expect the comment to vanish so here it is:

            “So it doesn’t bother you that some of your employees,such as Ms.Gallo, are going on a public forum claiming that some of the authors you publish, such as Kevin Anderson and John Wright, are part of a group ranging from “extreme right wingers to neo Nazis” … ? Doesn’t this reflect badly either on Ms. Gallo’s accuracy, or on your own judgement as to which authors to publish? If the named authors are neo-Nazis, you shouldn’t publish them; if they are not, you should let Ms. Gallo go for publicly maligning them and hence aggressively impairing your own sales!”

        2. That is always the first line of defense of corporate hackery. It is usually followed by “I regret if anybody was offended by my comment.”

          Somebody ought develop the Taxonomy of Bureaucratic Response to gross misstep. It starts with “The views of our employees do not reflect …” and ends with “[The employee] is no longer associated with this company.”

        3. It may also be a “safe response while passing the buck upwards”.

          Whoever is in charge of Tor’s Facebook very likely doesn’t want to get into a fight with Gallo.

          Gallo is likely higher in “Status” inside Tor than the person who responded on Facebook.

          If you were just a “supervisor”, would you want to start a fight with a VP of your company?

          Publically saying Gallo was a fool might endanger the career of the person making the post.

            1. Well with Tom Doherty getting involved, I wonder if somebody at Tor Books handling the Facebook page got a message to him.

    2. Minor nit pick: it is Gallo, not Bello.

      One is defined as to “emit a deep loud roar, typically in pain or anger.”

      The other is a cheap tasteless wine, highly popular among hippies in the late Sixties.

      1. You’re correct – I have another project going, with a person named di Bello in it … elided the two characters in passing.

        It amuses me today to see Gallo going into such high-end wines, though. When I was a teenager, it was the stuff winos drank from bottles covered in a brown-paper bag.

        1. About the best one could say of the Gallo of my youth was that it wasn’t Boone’s Farm.

          Aw gee, which was lower: Gallo, Boone’s or Ripple?*

          Gallo (and its compatriots) were actually just following a path proven effective by the Japanese: churn out a cheap but serviceable product to build cash flow while developing production techniques and staff expertise.

          *I confess: when I was working my way through school as a hotel night auditor I would often visit the hotel bar on a night off and, asked what I’d like, answer “sterno.”

            1. Recent research [I don’t have a saved link] indicates you are sensible in that approach. Blind tests seem to prove that tongues can’t tell from what container a wine was poured.

              1. Wine boxes are vacuum-packed. If quality is maintained and so the wine isn’t oxidized, that’s probably the best taste for newish wine you can get. Probably not so great for aging, but…? It’s great not to have to re-cork wine.

                    1. I don’t actually imbibe adult beverages because, what with sleep apnea and chronic staying up reading, the typical result of such an act is that I nod off.

                      But if you do it intravenously, does it really count as drinking?

                      N.B. — it is not the policy of this blog’s management not of this member of its commentariat to in any way endorse shooting up cheap wine. Readers are advised to shoot up only the highest grades of alcohol.

                    2. The only alt method of consuming wine I’ve ever HEARD OF could only roughly be described as “shooting up,” and it wouldn’t matter in the least what it tasted like.

              2. A bit of looking around indicates that those who are able to tell box wines from bottled or jugged do so by… the boxed wines having a consistent quality (they’re blended from multiple vineyards, so duh), and not tasting oxygenated.

                People not tasting for those tells tend to choose the boxed wines over the equivalent quality traditional wines, and sometimes over “higher quality” wine.

                Me, I have two big tells: do I like the taste? Can I afford it? Turns out that I like “too sweet” reds, so “sweet red roo” or a nice sweet boxed it is.

                1. Then you’ll likely like Franzia’s Chillable Sweet Red of maybe their Sangria. Both are gaggably sweet for me. Have bought them both in error. I had to cut them 50/50 with a cab to keep from wasting them by tossing them out. They are decidedly un$pendy.

                  1. I think that Franzia Fruity Red Sangria is the one my sister and I drink– we have to sneak into the kitchen to refill our glasses, so our wine snob aunt doesn’t waste her expensive stuff on us. (She keeps trying to be nice, and it tastes TERRIBLE….)

                    1. You’ll probably also like the Riesling universe of sweet white wines and dessert wines, Maywine, sweet ports, sweet sherries of all kinds, mead, etc.

                      I like almost everything wine, but I confess to a sweet tooth.

                    2. Unfortunately the first time I tried mead, I got food poisoning. (Along with everyone else at the family reunion who was under 50 and over 5…sad thing is, it HAD to be the salsa, because that’s the only thing we all ate; not sure what this says about my late grandmother’s cooking.)

                      I am looking forward to trying some sherries, though; don’t think I’ve ever heard of maywine.

                    3. We used to have a bottle of mead. Mom started it one year, we kept it for about 15 years until we moved out of that house, and sampled it every year at Christmas.

                      It got better every year, but I don’t know if it ever reached the status of “good”

                    1. De gustibus non est disputandum.. My dislike for sweet wine is rooted in my dislike of all things sweet. There is no virtue where there is no temptation. Cake, candy, ice cream, etc. have no attraction foe me, and I almost never eat them, the exception being a taste at birthday parties to sooth the mob insisting I take a ceremonial bitelet.. Salty, Spicy and Crispy are the Dark Sisters that rule my snacking soul.

                    3. The operative phrase here being “De gustibus non est disputandum.” Discussing sweet vs dry wine is as silly and bootless as arguing ketchup vs mustard on a hamburger.

                    4. “There’s no disputing taste,” only applies when there’s taste at all; and there’s no disputing that anyone putting ketchup on a hamburger entirely lacks it. 😈

                    9. Ketchup is terrible.
                      Mayonnaise, likewise is terrible.

                      Fry sauce, the other hand…. yum.

                      Yes, I know it makes no sense. ^_^

                    10. Well, it’s hardly on the level of sodium+chlorine, but I wouldn’t call it particularly unusual to prefer a mixture of two edible things over eating them separately, either. If I am faced with a piece of dry toast and a pat of butter, for example, I will usually combine them instead of eating them individually.

                    11. Mayonnaise is not terrible.

                      The commercial abomination foisted off on the public in the guise of mayonnaise is terrible (well, would need significant improvement to achieve terrible.)

          3. From what I remember of it from my youth, Boone’s Farms was actually quite tasty. Low brow taste to be sure, but rather than the typical cheap wine taste of improperly cured vinegar, it had sweet fruity flavors, similar to wine coolers.

            1. Pretty easy to do when you keep the alcohol content down, and jack it with a ton of sugar and flavorings post-fermentation. BF wine is only 4-7.5% alcohol. Vella cab is 12%..

              1. Considering the fact that in the days of my youth, the normal drinks were, beer, whiskey, or if you were getting fancy, rum. About the only wines consumed were generally Boone’s or MD 20/20. You drank Mad Dog if you wanted octane, and Boone’s if you didn’t want to burn your taste buds off. As I got a little older I tried some other wines, and while a few whites were pretty good, my general consensus was that Boone’s ranked up there pretty high, heck Mad Dog at least had the virtue of not tasting too bad after you chugged the first bottle. Of course I had a couple friends who made their own wine, and that was another story altogether. Well, except for the lavender wine that my one friend made. As he said, “it is supposed to be an aphrodisiac, but I don’t think anybody could drink enough to have an effect. I certainly can’t drink enough to get any effect out of the alcohol.”

            2. They’re less sticky wine coolers, last time I tried it. The strawberry wasn’t bad, although you do NOT want to drink it at a picnic on a hot day, between the easy-to-drink and the hornets thinking it smelled really good, too.

        2. Well, I kind of suspect that The Gallic Wars makes it easy to associate the words.

          I would translate the name ‘Chicken’, and lead in to jokes about squawking, running around with the head cut off, but maybe not neck wringing.

            1. Also in Latin. Hence the joke ‘no wonder the French are such cocks’.

              But thanks to the wonders of post binary gender, I can ask this: If a good layer pecks the other hens so that they don’t lay, what does a farmwife do?

      2. *sings* Gallo Bello….

        Don’t know what they use to be– other than purveyors of the best self-cooling water jugs ever, when you took one of those big, awesome jugs and wrapped it in several layers of burlap; soak the burlap in the morning, and when you finished a long ride you had something cold to drink– but the last time I tried some of their cute little wine bottles, it wasn’t bad at all.

        They also sell a lot of wine, so they’re actually providing what people want.

        And they don’t call their workers nazis.

        Just a list of ways that they’re not the same…..

      3. Wine? What’s this talk about wine? Give me a good beer instead. [Wink]

        1. Try some Sixth Glass from Boulevard Brewing. Good stuff, comes in a 750ml bottle with a cork and has iirc 10% alky
          Much of Boulevards bottle fermented beer/ales, are tasty
          Then there is Smiths Oatmeal Stout, Taddy Porter and IPA.
          For a nice Chocolate Stout get a Youngs.
          Or a Shiner Birthday Cake.

          1. If you like beer that you need to use a spoon on, try Slow Elk oatmeal stout. But the very best beer IMHO is Black Butte Porter.

            No, I almost never drink, but if I’m going to have beer, I like it the same color as my coffee.

            1. Oooh, yes, but if you get it with a meal, make sure you’re ordering something that reheats well. I had a half a burger with a standard beer glass of that and felt stuffed.

    3. Ironically, Tor has no problem putting “Hugo-nominated series” on the cover of the sequel to The Dark Between the Stars. Guess we’re not quite *that* “reprehensible”.

  4. It would appear to me that Sad Puppies in all its iterations is merely the final straw in the long drawn out experience of the established publishers, editors, and critics to having their tiny empires crash about their heads. And all through no fault of their own. It’s those damnable readers who insist on entertainment rather than the literary masterpieces they are too stupid to know are good for them.
    The vicious and incessant attacks against the Puppy movement and anyone remotely associated with them would seem to be the protracted death rattle of a moribund industry. The played the game as they knew it, cheated fair and square, and along came the internet, e-books, Amazon, and that upstart Baen to ruin their kind and gentle chokehold on what we readers were allowed to see. How dare we! Stupid readers. We should just shut the hell up, take what we’re offered, and thank them kindly the way Mother Nature intended it be.

    Caution, I may have been just a tad sarcastic in the above post, be warned.

    2. I’m not a Sad Puppy because I figured out what was going on too late (but next time I plan to be). But is it so much to ask just to have nice, exciting, well-written stories to read that don’t engage in second rate didactics?

      1. But fiction is about throwing truth bombs. . . .

        Ah, well, we are doing our best.

      2. If only the didactics routinely rose to the level of second rate, the pain would not be so great as it is.

      3. Not if you’re a Sad Puppy. It’s the whole point of the campaign. Nominate and vote for the story(novel) you like best based on the story not on its politics. It is too much to ask for of the wannabe elites. It is your purpose in life to take heed of their “wisdom”.

        1. Having what amount to polemics in many a modern novel is a bad trend (except perhaps in an afterword). But they are often bad not merely for being intrusive, but for being bad in and of themselves. Poorly structured, poorly argued, and aggressively insulting. They do not seek to persuade, they seek to brow-beat and demean those who disagree.

    3. I thought the agreement was that the hugos are for works that people might actually enjoy, with the nebulas reserved for the generally tedious and preachy stuff. They broke the accord!

    4. …and they would’ve gotten away with it if not for those darned kids and that stupid dog!

      …

      Hm, maybe I should’ve gotten more sleep today.

  5. I’ve found a quick aside (with older students) sometimes works to kick the thinking into gear. I was acting as printer moniter one day, and a student grabbed his current events’ article and made a laughing comment about Mitch McConnel blocking anti AGW legislation. I agreed that his efforts wouldn’t make much difference, because the world has not warmed since 1998. He asked if I believed in AGW and I said that so far, the data I’d seen didn’t support it. I left it at that, and I’m sure his teacher disagreed vehemently with me, but I noticed over the next few days some of the other older students asked me about places to get info about AGW.

    1. I suspect that because they are taught to accept everything from teacher without questioning (disrupts the classroom, donchaknow) hearing anything that isn’t the same jogs their brain. We react, all humans, differently to having our minds stimulated and beliefs challenged.

      1. The (home-schooled) Daughtorial Unit aced the GED Socialism Studies portion by always selecting the most Politically Correct option, even though she not only knew better but recognized that none of the offered choices was actually correct.

        Yes, she was home-schooled but she was Odd before that (one reason we went to Home Schooling.)

        Her contempt for PC indoctrination is measured not in yards but in parsecs.

      2. Oh, gods, yes. My youngest brother was labeled a “troublemaker” because he…asked too many questions of the teacher. I believe that was the same teacher who, when another student punched baby brother for no reason, not only refused to discipline the student who did the punching, but told baby brother not to tell his parents. (He, of course, immediately told them. And that the teacher had told him not to.) That was the year he asked to be homeschooled, and didn’t set foot in a public school again until he started high school…

        (And now–as a junior–he’s admitted that he kinda wishes he’d stuck with homeschooling after all. But, y’know, there were girls he was unrelated to available at school…)

    2. That’s deeply sad.

      They’re the Wired Generation. They’ve grown up with a sizeable chunk of all human knowledge just a few clicks away, and they don’t know how to search for it.

      1. I can attest to that. I’m three years into college and almost every class that wants papers with citations takes at least an hour of class lecture time to explain to the students how to find information, and semi-reasonable scholarly sources. They just have no idea, and when I watch students deliver current events assignments with articles drawn from Vox or Slate or HuffPo I just wince and bite my tongue.

        1. Vox is truly beyond pathetic. I once ended up there by accident when looking for sound samples of a Vox Continental vintage electric organ (don’t ask!). Holy. Mother. Of. Pork. I’ve rarely seen such a mixture of smug condescension and stupendous ignorance about basic facts. (I’m not even talking opinions.) Jeff Bezos was right to keep his money.

          1. “I’ve rarely seen such a mixture of smug condescension and stupendous ignorance about basic facts.”

            The frequency with which these appear in combination is somewhat disheartening.

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre
            The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
            Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
            Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
            The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
            The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
            The best lack all conviction, while the worst
            Are full of passionate intensity.

            I salute you, Mr. Yeats, even if (like the Admirable Crichton) you are merely a butler.

              1. I have decided that if I ever win the lottery I will buy the rights to the show, get the graphics updated to modern standards a la Star Trek, remaster it for HD, and put it on Netflix and Amazon.

                Now to find that winning ticket…

                  1. It’s one of the best TV shows ever made. At least up until the end of the Shadow War.

                    2. That was partly to blame on the network: they told ’em they were ending them after the end of Season 4, so they rushed to wrap up all the storylines…and then they got picked up by another network and had to try and flesh things out again. And season 5 isn’t horrible, but it’s definitely my least favorite–although we *did* get an episode penned by Neil Gaiman that was pretty darned good.

                  1. Uh, there’s lens flares all over the 3d stuff… lol

                    btw- the shipboard PPG weapons (i.e. the weapons that fire bursts as opposed to beams) are little lens flares.

                    Every explosion has a lens flare in it.

                    Beam weapons have a lens flare at the source (and usually the destination)
                    😀 (brought to you by your token ex-FI’er)

              2. I never saw any of the original run. A few years ago a friend brought a big box of DVDs and VHS tapes by and twisted my arm until I agreed to watch them. My wife and I watched the whole thing through, two or three episodes per evening.

                I’d put season 1 up against anything. Seasons 2 and 3 were very good. Season 4… not so good. And for the most part, 5 was boring.

                But… the first three seasons didn’t just have a plot in every episode, they usually had at least three, and sometimes more than one story arc tying them to other episodes. That was the first time I’d come across something like that.

                I pity the people who had to watch it on broadcast TV, with pieces chopped out to add extra commercials, episodes not shown in order, and some episodes not shown at all.

                “The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.” – G’Kar

                2. As I understand it Season 4 was the result of being told ‘You know how we told you you had 5 seasons? Yeah. 4 is the end.’ then 5 was the result of getting re-extended. But this is mostly Rumint so… *places bucket of salt here.*

                  1. I like mine with a twist of lime and a shot of tequila.
                    [Insert YouTube “Tequila” link]

                  2. May be Rumint…. but it’s consistent with everything I’ve heard, including from JMS himself.

                3. I pity the people who had to watch it on broadcast TV, with pieces chopped out to add extra commercials, episodes not shown in order, and some episodes not shown at all.

                  The Mentos commercials had an effect, I fear.

      2. They’ve also grown up with an even greater mass of anti-knowledge even fewer clicks away and lacking tools to discern between the two.

        1. It’s winnowing the wheat and chaff that is hard for this crew, given what they are surrounded with on FaceSpace and in the media.

        2. Anti-knowledge is a terrible thing.

          Couple that with the tendency for some people to latch onto the first thing they’ve learned, particularly if they found it difficult, and it can be traumatic.

          I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to explain to bright young engineers that the “ideal” part of the Ideal Gas Laws means “ideal as in a hypothetical perfect gas” and that many real-world gases only roughly obey what they learned were ruled graven in stone. Watch them be moved to tears when they encounter steam tables.

          Some similar things with the laws of thermodynamics. My ancient books taught that stuff in tedious detail; apparently the newer texts just skip over the high spots.

      3. People keep trying to tell me that the internet is going to put librarians out of business, and I keep tryin not to laugh at them.

        Public employee unions might be able to do the trick, however: We’ll see.

        1. Maybe if you use the words “information specialist,” they’ll just nod their little heads and carry on…

          And maybe the halfway bright (but lazy) one will walk three steps and go “Hayyyyy, waitaminute!”

          *chuckle*

          1. That’s what I’ve said all along. The way you get info, or how it’s transmitted and stored may change, but you’ll always need experts in information storage and retrieval.

        2. You know what librarians are supposed to be.

          They’re going off of the librarians as they know them… ie, useless as tits on a chicken, and sometimes actively obstructive.

          (A basic blessed SECRETARY would be an improvement in the case of most I know!)

          1. Which is why it baffles me that so many libraries *still* insist one have a Master’s degree in Library science. …Why? To shelve books? Because that’s about all librarians seem capable of/are allowed to do nowadays.

            If they want librarians to offer knowledge/guides to knowledge again, I would rather think they’d take any useful subject going, or better yet, simply have librarians take a test to gauge the breadth/depth of their knowledge. I’d willingly go up against pretty much anybody with a Masters’ or higher in terms of general, broad knowledge–because I read a *lot*, on lots of different subjects, and retain a goodly chunk of it (provided it was interesting).

            Hmmm. Actually, I think we should just go back to employers offering tests as part of the job application process again. Level the playing field, and none of this “but thou must have ” nonsense…

            1. “Hmmm. Actually, I think we should just go back to employers offering tests as part of the job application process again.”

              But that’s racist… umm, ablest… er, discriminatory.

              1. Worse — it takes away their ability to control who gets jobbed jobs. Who would provide feathers for their nests then?

    3. I am fortunate that my Kindergartener seems natural skeptical (I don’t know if it is genetic or I’ve rubbed off on him). Two incidents with the teacher helped though. One was when I predicted that they would talk about Abraham Lincoln on his birthday and say that he freed the slaves, even though he was killed before 13th Amendment was ratified. People generally prefer to say something nice about the dead and everyone knew he had wanted it, I explained. Sure enough the teacher said exactly that, but my son tried to correct her. He was angry and confused that the teacher wouldn’t take a kindergartener’s word for it. Later when identifying -ink words he offered ‘skink’, and she informed him that wasn’t a word. Only when several other children, who must have seen the same Wild Kratts episode, insisted it was a lizard did she look it up and concede. After that small victory, the aura of ‘The Teacher’ was broken.

      2. To be fair, I thought my mom was teasing me when she said my sister had found a vole in a hole in the ground,

        (Side note, if you do gardening– don’t plant coffee pots in the ground as neat vase thingies. Yes, they work, but when they’re empty, they’re death traps, and the little kid that comes along and picks up the half-dead rodent may not have the animal magic my sister does.)

        1. Side note 2, if you have to deal with voles around ANYTHING you are trying to grow, at least anything with roots, any and all death traps for them are what is known as A GOOD THING.

      3. I seem to recall a few similar incidents with my own elementary school teachers. On the occasion of a “dress up as your desired future career day” (because Halloween was verboten, at least in Texas schools because…pagan? Something.) I arrived in a cowboy hat, boots, and clutching some of my father’s fossil collection. I wanted to be a paleontologist. She didn’t know how to spell that (and assumed ‘cowgirl’), and didn’t believe me when I spelled it for her. (The kid behind me wanted to be a nuclear physicist. She didn’t believe him when he told her how to spell it either. I thought she was going to cry…)

  6. Yes, they are teaching to hate. It will have no consequences for them that matter, precisely because they are WRONG about the kind of people we are. We are civilized. We are easy targets. And we don’t strike back in ways that produce tissue damage.
    This should be a great consolation for all of us: we are not the thing they call us. We are FAR from that thing, because even after slander and libel, not one of us has hit any one of them in the nose.
    I do not believe that they are aware that they are counting on our good behavior, specifically, on the good behavior of the least stable of us. I believe they think they can throw out insults without consequence; and in doing so, they cheapen the value of communication. If it has no consequence, then it is not important; they are making words an unimportant form of communication, at least in the forums they use. I do not know where this will end; but, it will end.

    1. Words are tools to them, intended to harm. However, they disregard the truth, and that is how we can fight back, with truth and standing firm against their slurs.

    2. Sad Puppies was all about using the rules they set up in essentially the same way that they had been doing for years. Of course that pissed them off.
      They slander and lie and accuse, and we respond with reasoned fact based logic. How dare we.
      A senior member of a major publisher makes vile and demonstrably non factual statements in a public forum. Well there, a few folks have submitted polite requests to her employer as to what their official policy is on such statements. This being of course an uncalled for unfair attack against those few innocent remarks and threats against her job.
      So yep, we’ve reached the point where we’re tired of the hate all flowing in one direction. But we’re responding to their noxious rantings with reasoned logic and often quotes of their own published regulations. I wonder who’s going to win.

      1. Ah, you are arguably a better man than I, Uncle. I have gone beyond that point; I simply run the reverse arguments at them.

        Just left a reply over on PV to one idiot, asking him how many pregnant Black women he’s shot in the stomach lately, and how long he laughed after it. The chain of associations between him and Che Guevara being rather less tenuous than the chain between Vox Day and myself.

    3. “It will have no consequences for them that matter, precisely because they are WRONG about the kind of people we are. We are civilized. ”
      In their hearts of hearts, they know that. That is why they attack with such gleeful abandon.

      1. It may come to actual blows as this percolates into attendees at cons. if so i predict the first blow (slap fight!) will be made by the SJWs (albeit they will claim unendurable provocation by puppy microaggressions*).

        I also predict the first actual blow struck will not be against Larry Correia.

        I pity the fool that thinks Sarah is a safe target; he/she/whatever will be fortunate if swarmed by those attendees acting as Sarah’s guards, there not to protect Sarah but to protect twits from Sarah.

        *This is the socially acceptable way of claiming one is childish and unable to control his/her/whatever emotions. Such privilege is available only for the defense of one who “lacks privilege.”

        1. microaggressions

          “Microagression? Tell you what, let me know when I get to a milliagression, then I’ll see if my ways need changing.”

    4. It will have no consequences for them that matter, precisely because they are WRONG about the kind of people we are. We are civilized. We are easy targets. And we don’t strike back in ways that produce tissue damage.

      Until they go beyond words. Significantly beyond, sometimes– it’s bad enough here that we had mobs attack and destroy the signs for peaceful protesters and not only did the cops do nothing, the people being assaulted did nothing. Those attacking-to-silence-speech-they-disagree-with bragged about it on the news. (Seattle, sex-neutralizing marriage.)

      Eventually someone who’s relatively sane is going to take the next, obvious step– and physically harm those with whom they disagree, because they are “haters.” (I clarify relatively sane, because of the SPLC-incited attempted mass shooting at the FRC.)

      And they will die, because they suck at it. Hopefully, it will be more like the Texas cartoon show than something with a victim bodycount.

      1. “One does not assume that you outgun an art show in Texas…” -one of the meme images I’ve seen. Or something like that.

        1. The one I saw was “One does not simply assume that they can outgun an artshow in Texas” but the idea holds.

          1. It was something like that. Filters at work seem to block my searches. Ah well.

          2. …and now as I go through the comments searching on “June 9” I see that you spotted the same image I did sometime after that incident.

            (The “reply via the flashy thing at the top right” doesn’t seem to show images, at least.)

  7. I gotta be at least one generation, maybe two, older than you.There was no such thing in my youth. Primarily because there was no need, hence no demand. Benedictine nuns as a kid, Jesuit priests as a youth. Their methods would get them jailed today, (imagine whacking a child of ten with a ruler!), yet somehow we learned. Despite the fact that rote memorization has been debunked as optimal pedagogy. The science has been settled, donchaknow.

    2. Possibly so on the age (I’m older than I look), and I know from talking to my mother and grandmother that education for them was vastly different than it was for me, or my children. Mom was on the leading edge of the homeschooling movement, with my father’s full support. I’m grateful they took the risks they did.

      1. For the record, I’d never looked at your pic before I said that. While on the subject that pic of me here is (counts on fingers and toes) prolly 36 years old. 🙂 So, I’m most definitely older than I look.

    3. > ruler

      Moving across the states in the 1960s I got exposed to vastly different ideas about education and classroom discipline.

      In the third grade, having just entered school in Tennessee, the teacher apparently felt I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to her and slapped me with a ruler.

      I punched her in the face, prior to making a break for the door. She was obviously insane. However, she ran back to her desk, as shocked and outraged as if a potted plant had suddenly snapped at her. Subhuman meat-puppets weren’t supposed to object to being whacked, I guess.

      That got me expelled, of course. And much furor between my parents and the school, which I wasn’t part of.

      The bad thing was, I got hooked on “Dark Shadows” while I was expelled. And since it was near the end of the school year, I watched it for the rest of the summer, too.

      1. I managed to get a Jesuit, admittedly only a novice, sufficiently infuriated that he hit me with a right cross in class, twice, for cruelly twisting his tail in theology class. I ended up pushing him ass over teakettle over a desk. That got me three days in the cooler. 🙂

          1. Was a figure of speech. I was banished from the school for three days. The principal, who had had me in class before, and knew what an iconoclast I was, called me into his office, and told me his hands were tied. More in sorrow than in anger, and all that rot.

      2. The one time I vividly recall being whacked – and it was the “board of education” – was when I called my first grade teacher a “prune-faced old censored.” (I learned much later that my father agreed completely with the characterization – having her poodles as his patients…)

        Sigh, didn’t take. I still can’t abstain from telling idiot bosses what I think of their nonexistent technical ability, counterproductive management style, and execrable personal habits.

        Which is why I’m now a wannabe indie writer…

      4. and slapped me with a ruler.

        Glory, glory Hallelujah!
        Teacher hit me with a ruler.
        I popped her on the bean
        With a rotten cocoa bean,
        And she ain’t my teacher no more.

        So were you the inspiration for that timeless protest song?

        1. I learned it like this:

          Glory, glory Hallelujah!
          Teacher hit me with a ruler.
          I popped her on the bean
          With a rotten tangerine,
          And teacher don’t hit me no more.

          1. Crikey, what kind of neighborhood did you kids grow up in????
            …
            So I met her at the door
            With my father’s .44
            And now that teacher ain’t a’teaching any more.

            Note the effect of deliberate use of the grammatically incorrect “ain’t” there.

              1. Me too, though we sang, “… with a loaded .44.” Don’t forget the accompanying verse:

                “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school;
                We have tortured every teacher and we’ve broken every rule,
                And we’re gonna hang the principal tomorrow afternoon,
                I wish it were today-ay-ay. Oh!”

                I learned the song in sixth grade, from a classmate, though I, at least, didn’t sincerely wish it were true until middle school, a year later. Elementary school was miserably boring and a waste of time, but not an utter nightmare.

                2. Arslan M(ary) J(ane) was walking home from school imagining natural disasters then thought it would make a better story if…….. Transcends Mary Sue

                3. I learned that one in elementary school, too. More popular, though, probably because we were in the American dependents’ school, was the one that started out, “The Yanks were flying Fortresses at forty thousand feet.”

                4. Heh, we sang that one. And I knew the “with a loaded .44” version of the teacher one, too.

                  Of course, a kid who sings such things nowadays would get expelled, and possibly even arrested. ::facepalm::

        2. The version I learned in fifth grade would get me expelled today:

          Glory, glory Hallelujah!
          Teacher hit me with a ruler.
          Met her at the door
          With a loaded forty-four,
          And that teacher wasn’t mine no more!

          1. Exactly, except… and she aint my teacher no more.
            It needs that bad grammar, imo.

      2. A real toe tapper, despite the calliope some left running in the background.

  10. We can also see a process similar to the Puppies Effect writ large in the Über-Culture response to the T.E.A. Party, a political movement which needed the full force of modern opinion modeling to discredit it, from manufactured claims of racism (select your own examples, dammit — the selection is too rich) up to deliberate trolling by the Speaker of the House.


    (Ohhhhh, the images I had to scroll through to find that. Boric acid is insufficient to clean my eyeballs.)

    1. I’m up to nitric, RES. Although it took several days of “Caitlyn” photos to get me there…

        1. My most sincere condolences. Is she at least old enough to acknowledge that you didn’t *plan* to ruin her life from birth?

          My mother would have empathized even more. I never knew until I was old enough to understand the concept of death that her real first name was “Ethel.”

          2. She’s 26 and a sharp cookie, so yeah. At the time we gave her that name, nobody had ever heard of it. Little did we know she was the gust front of a tempest of Caitlins and the associated spellings.

              1. Biblical names. I have two, and my many cousins have… (counts.) about thirty, all told and added together.

                I was the only one with my given name when I was growing up, and I was named after my dead great, great uncle the gun-toting circuit preacher. Nowadays, I know of at least five kids named after me (*no* genetic connection there, though), and probably a dozen at least that got the idea from them. It’s gotten weird, it has.

                1. My full name is Paul Stephen Howard.

                  The story goes that somebody my parents knew didn’t like “biblical” names so when they told him what they named their new child (me), he said that he’d call the new child Stephen.

                  The individual didn’t know that Stephen is a biblical name. [Evil Grin]

                    1. Acts of the Apostles. Indeed, his story interacts with Paul’s, back when he still went by Saul.

                    2. The Book of Acts. Saul (later called Paul) assisted in his stoning. IIRC Stephen is considered the first Christian martyr.

                    4. Dear, Book of Acts, New Testament. He was the first Christian martyr, stoned to death while Saul of Tarsus held the cloaks of the rock-throwers.

                    6. I had to go check, too. 😀

                      But yeah, one of the guys who was put in charge of caring for the old-widow-nuns, and AKA the “Proto-martyr.”

                      Probably doesn’t get mentioned much because, as Mary and Paul mentioned, of the interaction with Saint-Paul-When-He-Went-By-Saul.

                      Incidentally, about the whole Saul/Paul thing, I REALLY want to plug this:
                      http://jimmyakin.com/2015/03/how-did-paul-get-his-name.html

                      Because I always thought there was some kind of Big Significance to the Saul/Paul thing, but I never thought it’d involve the phrase “Shake Your Groove Thang.”

                      😀

                      (Inter-language puns; arguably, there was a big difference between Saul and Paul, but it had to do with who the saint in question thought was important.)

                    7. Interesting. I have always thought “Paul” was his Roman name (which the article agrees with) but never thought that “Saul” would be problematic. [Smile]

                    8. Hopefully I’m not the only one getting giggles at the idea of Saint Paul being called something like “Randy” or “Dick.”

                  2. *grin* Dan Lane is a ‘nym, in honor of one of my weirder family members. The first is in Genesis, the other shows up a couple of places, but my nickname that my great grandmother gave me (she was eighty-five when I was born) was “Moses,” shortened to “Mose” and somehow it stuck for a long, long time. She knew it was a biblical one, but with so many great-grandkids, couldn’t quite remember my *actual* name, but that one she always did.

                    It could be worse, though. Her generation had a Constance (who couldn’t sit still for five seconds straight), a Patience (who got married at just-barely fourteen), and a Valiant (who was no prince, let me tell you!). I think we came out okay. After all, we’re not “Moon Unit” or something scatological I saw on one guy’s name tag in Nashville once… *chuckle*

                    I suppose, being Odd, we’d have embraced it anyway, had Himself decided to put any of us there. And maybe have said “it could be worse. I could have been one of those poor sods whose parents named them ‘John,’ ‘James,’ or ‘Jeremiah!’ “

                2. I’ve hardly ever met anyone named “Wayne”, though I understand that there are other regions of the US where it’s considerably more common.

          3. Ronnie Raymond’s wife in the current “Flash” tv show is named Caitlin Snow. I guess they could call her Cait.

      1. lol – I hate them all… However, I save my loathing for beets. 😀 Now I can get behind liver. I really figured that DNA would have put to rest a lot of this stupidity. Anyway I can get behind calling them culturalists… 🙂

        1. A friend went to Australia on a business trip. Between meetings he stopped somewhere and ordered a hamburger “with everything.”

          In that part of Oz, it apparently meant “with pickled beets and fried egg.”

          He said the egg was unusual but okay, but the pickled beets should have had an “industrial waste” warning on them. Pretty much my opinion of any type of beets too.

        2. Liver? My absolute favorite of all time. Really weird to have a six year old nagging his mother in the grocery store “Mom, can we have liver tonight? Please? I’ve been really good!”

          1. Beef or chicken liver? I think that chicken liver tastes better. It’s less stringy.

            1. Beef liver only. Chicken liver is for wimps. Venison liver is for masochists…

              1. (So, if you have a trebuchet in the back yard – why do so many women here think that’s an essential? – you know what to fling my way…)

      2. Have you tried Indian* style beet pickle? They have a real knack with pickles even if they do call them chutney.

        *The subcontinent, not the native Americans

          1. Indian pickles & chutneys are a treasure of one of the world’s great cuisines. I cannot speak authoritatively on it as my knowledge extends little beyond telling the waiter, “Yes, we would very much like the pickle assortment” but if you ever get the chance do not fail to sample lime pickle, ginger pickle or chili pickle.

            I do Chinese cooking (knees permitting) but it is Beloved Spouse who spends the time for proper Indian feasts.

              1. It is a fun experiment to determine which pickles go best with which entrees, taking a little bit of a Mango Chutney with the lamb vindaloo or a bit of lime pickle in combination with the baingan bharta. Ask your Server’s recommendations and don’t be afraid to use raita to assuage your palate.

                Be cautious: Indian Hot is not quite as searing as Thai Hot, but it is not for the novice. (When my brother — whose younger son is living in Thailand — accompanied us to a local Thai restaurant and ordered with proper pronunciation was one of the few times I’ve gotten Thai Hot dishes without having to reassure the server that I did in fact realize what I was asking for. The way I get Indian Hot is by assuring the server I routinely eat Thai Hot.)

                1. “having to reassure the server that I did in fact realize what I was asking for.”

                  Don’t you hate that? They never believe you either. It’s worse up here, Mainers don’t do hot at all.

                  1. Not even horseradish?

                    It is one of my great sorrows that there are so few things with which I can eat horseradish (having eschewed seafood, such as shrimp) these days. I will occasionally fix myself a horseradish on rye with roast beef and swiss.

                    1. Yummm. I have a bed of horse radish. It’s a few years old but I think I need to split the plants to get more. Beetles are eating it this year :o(
                      I have to figure out what to do about them. Too small and quick to catch.

                    2. Fresh grated horseradish and cheddar, preferably on homemade bread. Of course it is even better with roast beef, or hamburger, or on a Polish dog… umm yeah, I tend to like horseradish.

                    3. I have some friends who had a weed they couldn’t kill in the backyard of their previous house. Tried digging it out, various noxious chemicals, and sundry other methods. They regretted the noxious chemicals when I identified it as horseradish.

                    5. You know, anything hot that came from a pepper (ie, jalapenos, etc) about kills me and leaves my stomach in rebellion for weeks after…but I can handle wasabi (in very, very small amounts) just fine. I kind of like wasabi, actually, so long as I don’t get too large a mouthful and lose all my sense of taste…

                      Indian hot, I’ve noticed, is even sneakier than Thai hot. It seems to me that Indian hot creeps up on you three or four bites in, when it’s too late to turn back…

                  2. Yeah, but think about it from their POV: They’ve all probably seen that guy who thinks he’s a big macho guy, who couldn’t eat hot food if his life depended on it.

                    1. Undoubtedly, the challenge is to get them to flavor my food. Then they wait for you to break a sweat and say, “See? I told you,” and you have to explain that sweat is normal. :o)

              1. Yeah, pickle juice is pretty much vinegar plus spices. Saurkraut juice is salt and water that has been used to ferment cabbage. It has a tang like vinegar, plus it’s also good for, erm, stomach issues.

                  1. I defy the label of “hipster” but you take my balsamic vinegar salad dressing from my cold dead hands.

                    Just because a hipster likes a thing doesn’t make it bad. (It does greatly increase the probability.)

                    1. Look, slathering you salad with balsamic is one thing, and a thing I’m in favor of, bur painstakingly measuring out an organic (has to be organic) teaspoon of boutique vinegar from Whole Foods at carefully timed intervals is as hipster as it gets. 🙂

                  2. Figures, my grandma was doing that thirty years ago, and my mom swears it’s what helped her recover from breast cancer with startling speed. (Along with normal treatment, lest anyone get freaked out. It also avoided the “ate a food and now hates it” thing, although she carefully didn’t use her favorite type of vinegar just in case.)

                    For a few years I did the “drink a cup of vinegar before the PRT to avoid getting sick afterwards” thing. I hold it on the same level as drinking flaming shots of whiskey on the “Things To Do” scale, although it did work and I’m one of the few people who was never sick, light headed or having a predictable result to running a Navy PRT in death valley at nearly noon.

                    1. How long ago was this? Even back in my Stone Age times in the Corps, there’d be no max effort physical testing at noon in the desert. (29 Palms, in this case.) I’m assuming from context that’s what a PRT is, as I don’t recognize the acronym.

                    2. Physical Readiness Test, yeah. I think they change the name every few years to make it interesting.

                      Was in about ’03.

                      Yes, it was highly illegal, and dangerous, and frankly I’m amazed nobody was seriously hurt. Our master chief was… a female who gives all other females of a wide range of species a bad name.

                      The CO did figure out what was going on, including that somehow her fat tail was never seen to actually run the PRT. Nothing much came of it, but she did leave, which was enough. (Although I do have a fear because she immediately got a job as the principle of a pre-k to low grade school.)

                    3. If you ever have to do that again, don’t drink plain vinegar. Drink pickle juice or drink vinegar with sugar/fruit (sekanjabin, shrub, whatever we’re calling it this week).

                      Granted, vinegar with sugar isn’t probably a weight loss thing.

                    4. ” I hold it on the same level as drinking flaming shots of whiskey on the “Things To Do” scale, ”

                      Impressive when you’re nineteen, not nearly so appealing with more maturity and less desire to impress the opposite sex (or your buddies)?

                    5. I was thinking more along the lines of “something you only do if there’s some other reason,” which is basically the same thing. 😀

              2. Yes, a guy I used to work with, would get cramps very badly from working and sweating in hot weather. Drinking vinegar is one of the best preventatives (and at times a cure, also) for cramps. Vinegar doesn’t taste all that great though, so he drank pickle juice by the glass. My dad also gets cramps, so I told him about this years ago, and he swears by it. Of course now you go by my parents house in the summer, and look in the fridge and there will invariably be a jar of poor, shriveled, dehydrated pickles. 🙂

                1. Near Beer does a good job, too– it’s about the only way to get a decently priced “small beer” in the US, unless you’re going to make it yourself, and that German “beer is the best way to recover from a workout” thing was actually with small beer. (Second or third run using the same mash– it was more common when water wasn’t safe, and IIRC it’s what kids and women tended to drink a lot of.)

                2. Olives was how I used to do it, when overworked and aching muscles tried to cramp up on me. Also helps for cluster headaches, but not migraines.

                3. For non-crisis versions of the same (such as working a festival in sunshine and 90ish degrees), I’ve had good results with salted tomatoes. Sliced and salted is divine, cherry tomatoes dipped into salt will do in a pinch..

            2. Kimchi is Korean saukraut. Depending on how it’s prepared it can be somewhat hot.

              The local Thai restaurant would occasionally cook Korean food. I got the full-octane stuff from the kitchen, not the stuff on the buffet. But I still think they were messing with me with the Korean dishes.

              “You think eating those habaneros proves something? Let me buy you lunch…”

              1. Did contract work in a small Appalachian community. Some Korean contractors, in line ahead of me, got VERY excited at a local fair when they saw the spicy sauerkraut for sale at a booth. Almost didn’t get a jar for myself.

              2. Had a roommate once who’d spent time in Korea and developed a tast for kimchi. After the first…incident…she was ordered to keep it in a special container away from the rest of the food in the fridge. (I swear, it got out and attacked the other food…) I tried it, and it was all right. A bit stouter than I like my pickled things, though. (Admittedly, it wasn’t the hot kind, either.)

                1. I love kimchee, the non-hot kind is a mistake, though. I have been told by others though that it smells like week old roadkill, in August, and opening a container of it kills their appetite.

          2. I do not like pickles. But my mother, who does not like deviled eggs, uses just a dash of pickle juice in hers and they are amazing.

              1. Hmm! Something like, yes, although I am not sure exactly what kind of pickle juice she uses. No sugar, and she uses paprika but not the hot kind, but it’s a lot closer to that than the fireball ones my friend in Texas makes.

            3. I absolutely hate pickles. *Except* in tuna or potato salad. (More proof to the wife that I am a culinary barbarian…)

        1. Did you make it with sour cream, a baked potato and cut up cucumber? We always had it during Passover.

      3. Applause. From a *long* way away; Sarah’s aim is probably affected by her congestion…

    4. I’ve never understood the loathing for beets, pickled or otherwise. It seems to be almost genetically hard-wired, because I’ve got kin that have never had reason one to loathe the things who do, and then there are the ones like me who should hate them, but absolutely love them. Go figure…

      I really wonder at the causes for these food likes/dislikes. I grew up on a regimen of “It’s on your plate. Eat it. Or, starve. We don’t care…”. As a result, I have very Catholic tastes in foods, and there aren’t too many things I’ll balk at. Conversely, some family members were raised on a “eat what you like” laissez faire plan, and they’re some of the pickiest freakin’ eaters I’ve ever been around.

      Of course, I’m the weird one in the family–I brought in Pho, bulgogi, and a taste for Lebanese lamb marinated in yogurt, and all the picky eaters were glomming onto that stuff like it was some kind of ambrosia.

      Of course, if you put Chef Boy-Ar-Dee ravioli in front of me, I’ll gladly starve to death rather than eat it.

      1. My ex and I warred, well skirmished, on that issue with the Filial Unit. I pointed out the fact that no child in the annals of history had starved to death with food of any sort on a plate in front of it.

        1. So many people have food issues and can’t wait to pass them on to their children.

          1. Funny story.

            My Dad disliked certain foods but ate them without comment when Mom served them for dinner.

            He kept quiet because he didn’t want me or my sister to complain about eating those foods.

            His silence didn’t prevent my sister (to be fair likely myself) from complaining about the same foods that he didn’t like.

            Oh, Mom was surprised when she learned that Dad didn’t like those foods. [Smile]

            1. Mine did much the same, except he didn’t allow liver in the house. His comment was always, “you have an entire cow/deer/elk/horse/etc. to eat, why would you want to start in on the guts?”

              Admittedly he wasn’t as dramatic as the neighbor (possibly because mom was smart enough to never serve liver) who came home to his kids complaining at the table, because his wife was trying to make liver and they didn’t like it. Nick walked in, picked up the four corners of the tablecloth, bundled it up, dishes and all, packed it over to the front door and tossed it in the yard. He told his wife, “I’m not eating liver, and I don’t want it in the house. If I won’t eat it, my kids don’t have to either.”

              I believe he slept on the couch for a week or two over that display, but it got the point across.

      2. Part of it is being willing to speak up and say you don’t like a food, too.

        I had a slapstick worthy birthday one time where my mom rattled off food after food that she was sure I liked… every single one was stuff I actively avoid, but don’t make a fuss about. Potato salad, slaw, that purple slaw stuff with raisins….

        1. One of my problems with the elder Bush was that he felt he had to wait until he was President to tell Barbara not to serve broccoli.

        2. You dislike potato salad? Blasphemy!

          Actually, if it is boughten potato salad, or the homemade versions that are runny and taste like store bought, I entirely agree with you. The potato salad my mother makes however, is to die for.

            1. Foxfier, on the subject of food, I recall you saying a while back that you struggle with low iron (due to repeated pregnancies). A friend of mine’s wife is due in a month, for her second child, less than a year and a half after her first. The midwife told her this morning that she is way low on iron (and she is suffering extreme tiredness, probably as a result of that), what was it you were recommending to boost your iron?

          2. “Potato salad” can describe many things. I prefer large chunks of potato, a lot of mustard, perhaps a tiny amount of mayonnaise and chopped pickle.

            My wife’s concept is: 1/2 cup of instant mashed potato flakes, 2 large onions cut into finger-sized pieces, one quart of mayonnaise, and five or six sticks of coarsely chopped celery. Plus random bits of whatever strikes her fancy. There’s no detectable potato in the final muck.

            So we end up making separate his and hers batches. And she’ll chomp on mine before going to hers, which may eventually result in me using a small lockable container in the refrigerator…

        3. I still wonder at the look of surprise on my Mother’s face when I told my daughter at supper not to eat the mashed potatoes, so we would get potato cakes the next day.

            1. Me too. I’d been pulling the same scam since I can remember, and Mom acted like she had never caught on.

      3. It might be genetic – however, my family were the same about if it is on your plate then you will eat it. I do remember eating beets and then losing everything in my stomach. Then –well lets not get into the punishments. Canned peas still gives me the heave-ho as well. Plus fruit cake. I smell something first and then I know if I can eat it or not. Plus I have traveled the world and really like Bulgogi, Thai food, and other international foods.

        1. Yeah, there’s a difference between “dislike because the food isn’t cooked tastily” and “dislike because the food doesn’t agree with me or I’m allergic”.

            1. My mother suffers potato “allergies.” It is, IIRC, a member of the nightshade family and flares her arthritis.

              She made the finest latkes but it became cruel to ask it of her.

              1. Yes – sadly I found out that my fibromyalgia (Rheumatologist thinks my case is a form of arthritis) doesn’t flare as much when I quit eating potatoes… really enjoy latkes too. (I am now one week without potatoes). Corn is also something I shouldn’t eat. *sigh It irritates my digestive system.

                1. Hmmm. Cyn, my wife suffers from both of those; I think I’ll have her mention it to her rheumatologist AND our primary care doctor.

  12. “Comments on the campaign have ranged from repugnant, to calling for the ‘puppies’ to be interned in concentration camps. (Comment by Patricia Williams-King on Facebook, May 18 “From what I’ve heard about these “Puppies” they ought to be sent to the dog-pound in short order.”)”

    Y’know, I’ve been watching the political/social scene with some attention since the mid-1970’s. And in that time matters have gone from The tail end of the Free Speech movement of the ’60’s to the Left desperately trying to silence their opponents now. And one thing that has struck me is, it isn’t a good thing for your faction or your cause to be the establishment. You forget how to argue. you forget how to watch what you think of as a passing witticism.

    I believe I’ve mentioned my (quite literally) sainted Step-mother-in-law’s “Friends Don’t Let Friends Vote Republican” bumper sticker. She honestly didn’t think about the implications. She thought of it solely as a joke, not as a statement. Or the protesters at Kent State; they lived in a Radical echo chamber, and so they thought of setting fire to the ROTC building solely in terms of symbolism. And there was nobody in the right place to tell them “Idiots, a building sized fire is under nobody’s control. Set fire to the ROTC building and there is no reason other than pure dumb lick that you won’t end up roasting a good part of the town.”

    The people attacking Sad Puppies aren’t used to opposition, and have never given though tot the necessity of being respectful of people with whom you disagree. They aren’t used to getting vitriol back for vitriol. And when they do, it shocks them.

      1. Liked your post, but it doesn’t want me to comment and I’m too tired to fight with the Magic Elf Box.

        so:

        The idea that the Intellectuals, the Right People, and The Artists are somehow above sordid consideretions like money is pernicious, and of long standing. Much of it goes back to the Industrial Revolution and the realization by the Upper Classes (and their hangers-on) that they were going to have to Do Something about all these increadibly wealthy fellows In Trade!

        *shudder*

        Not too long later came the idiocy of the Artist as unelected conscience of Society (Paul Johnson goes into this idiocy in THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN, which I strongly recommend). And we see it today in the attacks on Big Business…just not whatever Big Business the speaker depends on. What do these Hollywood twits think the movie industry is? A continuation of the Arts and Crafts Movement (nod to P.J. O’Rourke)?

        But it’s older than that. Primitive Christians denied that the merchant was worthy of his markup. So did Confucius. The idea that the businessman CREATES wealth, whereas the Landowner merely exploits it is new and apparently difficult. It’s much easier to say “We are the Smart Folks, so you should just turn everything over to us and we’lll take care of it.”

        Pity there’s so little evidence of it ever working.

        There’s also the pernicious idea of “service”, which Mencken railed against as largely blah (see his NEWSPAPER DAYS; chapter VI “The Gospel of Service”). Far too many professions see themselves as making Nobel Sacrifices for the Common Good. Doctors are especially bad this way. Look, jack, you’re an organic mechanic. Deal. With. It. I don’t care what you sell. I don’t care what service you provide. unless you are under a vow of poverty and living in a barracks, you F-cking aren’t In Service.

        Such pissants need the hot air let out of them early and often.

        1. In my experience those most vocally decrying the importance of money are generally the ones who most avidly desire the benefits and privileges which come with money but who most resent the imperative of actually earning money by providing services for which their fellow man was willing to pay.

          See: Clinton Foundation, the
          See also: National Action Network

          1. Oh, hell, people are screwy about money on all KINDS of levels.

            I used to work for SUNCOAST (Video branch of Sam Goody). And every month or so we’d get in some guy who wanted to spout off about how the discs only cost a dollar, or 43 cents, or whatever it was, to record. How come the DVDs were so expensive? Rant. Snort.

            Not, BTW “Isn’t it cool that I can own movies? Forty years ago, who would have thought it?”. That was a different kind of customer, and lots more fun.

            It never seemed to occur to the ranters that somebody has to pay for all the discs that DON’T SELL, or quite quickly there will be no discs of any kind.

            or “Why do football players get so much money?”

            Think, chump, how much money would they have to pay YOU to get tackled by those guys?

            Or, “teachers should be the highest paid profession”

            Why? On the basis of the history of education, the work isn’t hard compared to, say, laying railroad track. Or dangerous compared to, say, test piloting. And the vast majority of its practitioners don’t seem to be very good at it, no matter how well they get paid.

            Of course there was a time when the teacher was a valued member of the community, instead of yet one more bureaucratic government stooge. but before that the teacher was a hireling, and got fed with the “hands”.

            So very few people really “get” money. I’m not too sure I do. But I try to question by knee jerk assumptions about it.

            1. Money is how we measure prices. Prices are how the market tells us the relative value all of us put on all of the various goods and services available. That’s why price controls – be they rent ceilings, wage floors, or subsidies – are so deeply evil. They prevent us from accurately knowing where to put our resources.

              1. I’m sure it beats getting stuck with Krugman’s text for Macroeconomics,

    2. I could certainly accept that stuff like “sent to the dog-pound” was mere rhetorical flourish… if they were at all willing to accept similar stuff from Puppy-supporters in the same spirit. But no, they’ll take (or pretend to take) seriously Larry Correia’s clowning about being the International Lord of Hate. And Vox Day can troll them into a frenzy with rather obvious trolls _every time_. (Eric Flint has it wrong; Vox isn’t an absolutely horrible person using rhetorical tricks to get out of responsibility for what he’s saying. Vox is a moderately horrible person using rhetorical tricks to sound like an absolutely horrible person, apparently for the lulz)

      And there’s no way the various veiled and unveiled threats they make of never being able to publish again (check comments on Eric Flint’s blog for some recently examples) are anything but serious (though futile) threats. Claim that if an author supports puppies, they get blacklisted: that’s OK. Call people neo-nazis and say all the work they endorsed sucks, and it’s TOTALLY OUT OF BOUNDS to complain to your employer who published some of the work in question, and who you were promoting in the post where you made this comment.

      1. One of the rhetorical flourishes is to spin the “puppies” motif, hence the “dog pound” or “smack them with a rolled up newspaper,” or “put them down”

        I remain surprised that no-one has called them on any of this: the rescue dog community is usually rather more tetchy. As I don’t care about those awful evol people but WE don’t put dogs down! There are no bad dogs, just irresponsible owners (continue diatribe as needed.)

        Which reminds me: Pedant alert! Pedant alert!

        The Supreme Lord of Evil’s community are the “dread ilk” (similar to the Huns) and are characterized as hellhounds. The “rabid puppies” are the Vox Day slate’s supporters. Those of us who support Brad Torgersen’s reformation movement do so in order to mitigate puppy-related sadness and so are “sad puppy” campaign supporters.

        Thus endeth the lesson. 🙂

              1. You made me look! Bad, badder, baaaadest person…

                Where’s the nitric…

              1. That’s a tricky trade-off; dairy allergies for the original-equipment peanut allergies. For a static display, the purists would frown on it. But if you can’t get the original parts, you make do the best you can for an airworthy PBJ….

            1. PB Hamburger= An Uncle Larry special
              (to my youngest uncles credit, I did see a DD&D show that had a Peanut butter burger on it.)

  14. My friend was asking how he could help his son break out of the habit of listening to his teacher without critical evaluation of the pap he was being fed in school.

    I started all my boys off by making damn sure that for technical and scientific questions, I was the first stop. I never lied or exaggerated anything just to make a political point, and showed them where to independently find information. When they got into high school, I made a point to debate the “earth science” teacher on AGW and made her look foolish and ill tempered. They never trusted her again, or the book after I showed them where it lied repeatedly.

    1. “comment for comments”

      Basically, it’s “I don’t really have anything to add at this time, but I’d like to subscribe to comments on this post”

      1. Thank you sir. My Google-Fu was not strong enough to winnow that out of the bazillion hits I had trying to science that out on my lonesome.

        1. Try the ATH FAQ and BBQ compiled by TXRed up at the top. Has a few other things that may come in handy.

    2. The first few times I saw it after coming here I thought it was some emoticon…. the c’ s being protruding eyes and the 4 a nose. 😉

        1. The Kars4Kids folks sponsored a float in the Celebrate Israel parade last week. Playing that furshlugginer jingle the whole time. 😧

          1. I’m not sure I provided enough specificity to determine my location. I would be rather shocked if the average IQ of the US Senate reached double digits.

            1. Um, *I* would be shocked if the total IQ of the US Senate reached double digits.

              Now, the House might (barely). But that’s a function of a much larger multiplier – and there is a limiting point on the lower end of the scale where respiration stops.

              1. I dunno — some of those Congress Critters are such intellectual black holes that they may be running negative IQs. Rep. Hank “Guam Might Tip Over” Johnson, for example, seems to generate anti-knowledge at a level sufficient to negate at least two conservative representatives, with enough left over to cancel out a moderate.

          1. Good call! Chameleons. They habitually try to blend in with their immediate surroundings, As an example the many accents of HRC. What was it? “Ah don’ in no way feel tahred?”

            1. “Ah don’ feel no ways tired.” It disturbs me that I can remember that…

  16. I honestly thought that this whole thing would have blown over by now. The fact that the SJW’s, TOR, and many others seem to want to take it to ’11’ is just shocking.
    It’s not only still going on, but it is getting worse. The ‘puppy-kickers’ are getting more and more insane in their hate, and in their behavior, and the fact that professional companies like TOR are doing nothing to rein this in, is just bizarre.
    I had been thinking about going to worldcon this year, because it is within driving distance (well, 15 hours), but in all honesty, I’d be concerned about my health and safety if I went. I can just imagine what kinds of stunts these haters are going to pull, and you know that they will.

    1. What? You expect them to compromise their principles while dealing with bad-to-reprehensible neo-Nazis? Backing down would cast an implicit bad light on their prior actions, because if we do not deserve a war of extermination, they were rather over-the-top.

      2. Note that TOR is in real trouble with a boycott. The ones who will boycott them until they declare full-scale jihad against the infidel Puppies.

        (Actually, if next year’s logo is going to be changed – I think the Puppies need Templar Knight outfits. That would be sooo cooool…)

        1. Yeah, it would be… up until the cries of “Christianists” started up.

        2. Nah, Assassins outfits would be better, since their whole schtick is free will and question everything. 😉

    2. I will concede that this year’s worldcon might be dangerous, as I gather that the sort of racists who have recently burned down minority neighborhoods have a great deal of political power there. However, they certainly do not have the same foundation in the place where the worldcon after will be. If the white supremacists have the pull to lynch in that sort of contested territory, we will see it used in the intervening year plus.

      1. Mmmm. Spokane is a lovely city with three gun ranges. The one closest to the con is geared toward the ladies. Washington is an open carry state and Spokane has liberal (original meaning) cc regs. So it’s probably Hun-friendly territory and anybody trying to burn down someone’s neighborhood (of any color) would be metvwith extreme prejudice.. I’ve been to Spokane for several cons, and your biggest worry from the location is going to be sunburn. The local breweries are excellent, there are great restaurants, and the carousel park is nifty.

        SJW = Internet poser, so the odds of them doing anything brave in person seems minuscule. Rude remarks I can tune out (like I do civil ones: I usually have my head buried in a book)

        1. Spokane is also on the side of the state where you are unlikely to run into a lot of cops who do not understand it is an open carry state. (We had a nasty to-do in… I think it was Bellingham… where a cop pulled a gun on a veteran who was open-carrying and had to be talked down by a handful of random people who happened to be walking by; most of the tourist towns will also have at least one idiot cop who will harass you about open carrying, but that’s an effect of coasties moving to small towns and “knowing” what we’re like, so they live down to it.)

        2. The last time I was in spokane my rental car had a couple of 9mm cartridges floating around in it. I thought it was kind of funny.
          I guess the issue is, you know they’re going to pull some kind of stunt, the way gerrold is suddenly behaving after having gone off the rails so publicly makes me suspect he’ll probably do something rather petty and classless. I also suspect there will be others there doing the same as well, and is it really worth paying $250 plus travel and lodging costs to go to a con where you’ll spend half your time worrying about idiots? Plus, as an Indy they’re not going to want to talk to me anyway. I’m the ‘enemy’.

          They SJW’s have spent so much time demonizing all of us, and de-humanizing us, that they will have no compunctions over doing ill to us. Because in their minds we’re no longer people, and so we deserve it.

          I would also suspect also that the con will probably be posted as a ‘gun-free’ zone, so having your ccw probably won’t help.

          1. I wager there will be designated groups of females targeting MHI and other apparently conservative/libertarian/S(R)P supporters by claiming that our presence makes them feel unsafe, and so people will be “asked” to leave. That way the ConCom and WorldCon people have a justifiable excuse for shooing out people they don’t like, or think they won’t like.

            1. Posted my comment before I saw yours. This. Exactly. Take a recorder and have it on anytime you are in public.

              1. Most(?) smartphones will record audio and video. Or you can get a bodycam for less than $50 and clip it to your shirt.

          2. They SJW’s have spent so much time demonizing all of us, and de-humanizing us, that they will have no compunctions over doing ill to us. Because in their minds we’re no longer people, and so we deserve it.

            I found that out around 2000 when Carlos Yu and Douglas Muir deliberately wrecked my Internet business by posting fraudulent bids on my auctions, using these to get my negative ratings up to the point of knocking me off the site, and have boasted about this (claiming that I was a fraudulent seller) for years thereafter. To them, simply because I disagreed with them, I did not deserve any form of honorable treatment.

        3. I wouldn’t expect anything actually physical; I simply expect semi organized attempts to use the con / local harassment policy/law to get anyone suspected of badthink expelled from the con.

            1. And, on that note, if anybody decides to come to KC in ’16, I’d be happy advise on Missouri’s CCW law – I’ve been teaching that class for 12 or 13 years now. Hint: that sign on the door generally doesn’t mean squat.

          2. While I’ll generally agree that Washington is a communist ____hole, they do actually recognize at least 13* other states ccw permits.

            http://www.usacarry.com/concealed_carry_permit_reciprocity_maps.html

            *The map on the link provided is incorrect, it shows twelve states that Washington honors, and shows that it does NOT recognize Idaho ccw permit holders, which is true for the standard Idaho ccw (as a shall issue state and also one of the few states that will issue to 18 year olds, very few states recognize Idaho’s ccw) Washington does however honor the Idaho Enhanced ccw. Having found one error on that map, I am unsure if there are others.

              1. Small correction. Missouri recognizes permits issued by other states, whether that State recognizes Missouri’s or not. See RSMO 571.030.4: “Subdivisions (1), (8), and (10) of subsection 1 of this section shall not apply to any person who has a valid concealed carry permit issued pursuant to sections 571.101 to 571.121, a valid concealed carry endorsement issued before August 28, 2013, or a valid permit or endorsement to carry concealed firearms issued by another state or political subdivision of another state. “

                Originally there was a clause that Missouri only recognized the permits of other States if the permittee was a resident of the issuing State. That was changed…prior to 2010, IIRC. There is something to be said for a national reciprocity law…

              2. Well, their information about Texas is a little off:

                “Applicants must be at least 21 years of age (unless active duty military)”

                  1. Yes, because it would have been too difficult to only honor those ccw holders that were over 21, from such states. Because you know, it isn’t like the permitee’s age is printed on the permit or anything.

                    1. You did hear about the law that just passed, right?

                      The one that on paper makes it so that if my husband grabs the bag with my concealed carry in it, it’s an illegal transfer because we didn’t use a dealer and pay the record fee?

                      But they promise it won’t be used like that.

      2. I gather that the sort of racists who have recently burned down minority neighborhoods have a great deal of political power there.

        Spokane is on the east side of the state. The majority of the moonbats live on the trans-Cascadian side, and ship their spawn to the east during the school year. They have political power at the state level by virtue of population numbers. Local control is different.

        There haven’t been any organized white supremacists in the Inland Northwest since the Aryan Nation leader died (15+ years ago, FFS!) and their compound was sold to (IIRC) a Christian summer camp.

        1. And there aren’t enough black racists to do much of anything– Seattle has to pool with Portland and various other in-transit-hop-distance places to whip up a good mob that looks right for the recent minority-neighborhood-burnt-down chaos.

          We’ve got a pretty big Mexican community, but other than the drug gangs they don’t want attention on that side of the state, at least last time I checked.

          1. “We’ve got a pretty big Mexican community, but other than the drug gangs they don’t want attention on that side of the state, at least last time I checked.”

            The Mexicans are generally either too busy earning a living, or are selling drugs, neither of which are conducive to wasting a bunch of time trying to garner attention at pointless protests.

            1. Let’s simplify it to “getting money” or “MAKING a living.”

              I’ve got a rather nasty bit of exposure to the dominant not-drug-criminal related culture over there, and am especially bitter about the effect it has on things like parish life and support networks for people who *really do* just need a hand up.

        2. I was specifically thinking of the gun grabbing moonbat sort.

          Looks like I’m way overdue on admitting that I’m wrong here.

    3. I’d love to see a few hundred people wandering around with nametags that say,

      “hi! my name is LARRY CORREIA”

      Yeah, it’s Brad who’s running SP3, but a lot of the APs don’t seem to have read the memo yet.

      Next year, there could be numbers of obviously cismale heteronormal guys with,

      “hi! my name is KATE THE IMPALER”

      1. I’ll be at Sasquan, and I own a badge maker. I hereby volunteer to make badges with “hi my name is Larry Correia” (LAW-totin’ bear optional) or Je Suis Brad or ca ira.

        Drop me a line what you’d like.

    1. Oh yeah, they aren’t acting like the winning side. They got blindsided two years running and there’s not much preventing it happening a third time. I expect things to get even more heated.

      1. With the facts and the rules both against them, they’ve only one recourse: crank up the heat and try to drive everybody else out of the kitchen.

  18. On the current charge of ‘racist’

    Intersectional theory basically says that only “white people” can be racist because only “white people” have “privilege.” That is, advantages that non-white people don’t have. So the charge, “You are a racist” simply means, “You are white,” or at least white-thinking. No, I don’t know entirely what “white-thinking” means, but in essence it means you support racist white people. Or “white white people,” if you break it down.

    Yes, I delved into the swamp and was driven to madness, so much so that I believe myself to be completely and hyperbolically a spork.

    The “feature” of this is that they haven’t generally told anyone about this, because if they did they would be laughed off the planet. So, they call you racist. You and everyone else thinks you are facing a vile, vicious, slanderous charge. This forces most folks to go into “defend” mode, which involves proving they are not, in fact, a racist (an old-fashioned racist or racist-racist, if you will). If you do not successfully do this (and conveniently for the accuser, you can’t), then you have been isolated and are rendered a pariah in your circle. Viva Alinsky!

    This is starting to change. People are figuring out the trick. The vileprogs are working this same magic on many words – misogynist, sexist, homophobic; I’ve seen speculation that ‘fascist’ will be the Next Big Accusation. But do not get me started on ‘rapist’ being on that list. What they’ve done to that word and the sheer evilness of the results…

    1. White-thinking means you think in a way that will make you a productive and useful member of society. That’s why blacks are accused of acting white when they prove it isn’t racism keeping the others down

    2. Personally, I hope toy short circuit the usefulness of the “Fascist” charge by coming back with “I’m not the one who wants to give all power to the central State and regulate everything in sight. You are. Therefore it is YOU who are the Fascist.”

      1. Please tell me when you do this! You will be ‘disqualified’ by some new, creative reason. Which I’m sure can be used as the punch line for a comic 🙂

  19. Well, this is exactly the kind of hate I’d expect from a white Mormon male like Cedar Sanderson! — every File 770 commenter tonight

  20. Interesting related thoughts:
    Liberals Are Apparently Increasing Their Share of the Population, and I’m Not Surprised
    By David French — June 8, 2015

    Over the weekend, Drudge highlighted this Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll analysis showing that liberals are increasing their share of the population, while conservatives seem to be in slight decline:

    In three national polls conducted so far in 2015, the analysis found that 26% of registered voters identified themselves as liberals — up from 23% in 2014. At the same time, the share of voters identifying as conservatives dropped to 33% from 37% in 2014.

    The analysis by GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who looked at survey data from 2010 to 2015, found that the biggest ideological shifts came among women, young people, Latinos and well-educated voters, as well as people in the West and in cities.

    I have multiple thoughts. First, I’ve long wondered if and when the long liberal effort to stigmatize conservatism would bear measurable fruit. Given that the “biggest ideological shifts” occurred where the Left has the most cultural and political control — with young people (pop culture and campus) and in our nation’s largest urban areas — it appears that tribalism may be having a real effect.

    Second — and related — as our political battles increasingly focus around identity groups, demographic status is substituting for independent thought. The Democrats’ core constituencies — including single women and Latinos — are increasing their share of the population, so it stands to reason that identification with liberalism would increase as well.

    Third, I don’t think this shift is nearly as permanent as Democrats hope. Concentrated in their urban and campus enclaves and isolated from dissenting voices, progressives tend to overestimate their power and consistently overreach. Note how quickly the liberal momentum from 2008 and 2012 dissipated (indeed, the WSJ’s own chart shows dips in liberal identification in 2010 and following the 2012 elections). Note how the forces of campus intolerance are beginning to alienate even fellow progressives. Many Americans are more sympathetic to the idea of liberalism than they are to its concrete manifestations.

    The 2016 election will be a test of Americans’ tolerance for progressivism. There is no “moderate” Democrat in the race, and for now it looks like their second-most-popular candidate is an outright socialist. If the Democrats prevail, then perhaps America is in the midst of a longer-term transition — and we’ll have to suffer a bit more before the pendulum swings back to the right.

    1. Part of the drop is the widespread belief that Republican==Conservative. Since Republicans have decided to bravely become what we used to call Blue-Dog Democrats, the drop isn’t that surprising.

      Also, consider the source and that these figures are barely outside the margin-of-error of these sorts of polls (usually around 3%). No, I didn’t delve deep to confirm this. Sheesh, check your privilege 😉

    2. Or is it like England, where people really don’t want pollsters to know their political/social convictions?

    3. Liberalism is in the ascendency only because of what amounts to cooking the books–They’re not really successful, as in “Liberalism works…”, they’re successful because they’ve managed to grab control of the levers of social power that allow them to propagandize without anyone being able to effectively counter their arguments.

      This works only so long as the universe around us continues to go along with the party line. They’re coasting on past accomplishments, and the bills are about to come due, and its going to become abundantly clear in the near future that ninety-nine percent of the bullshit they’ve been spouting has been both wrong, and is not working. The recoil from that becoming apparent is not going to be pretty, at all.

      I’ve got some union acquaintances, who’ve been going along to get along with their bosses in the union. So long as the lies seemed to be working, everything was fine. Now that it’s not? Oh, my friends… What will happen when the sleepers awake, and find out that their cherished union pensions were blown long ago on things that only the leadership benefited from? The rank-and-file guys are starting to wise up, and the results aren’t going to be pretty, at all. I personally think there are going to be a bunch of union leaders whose deaths aren’t going to be natural, and won’t likely be investigated very carefully, either. Some of these guys are frankly flat-out homicidally pissed at the things they’re learning, the more they look into things. The Liberals put themselves into positions of trust, and have been steadily betraying that trust ever since. When the denouement comes, its going to be monumentally ugly.

      I think a lot of these idiots are going to wind up decorating lamp posts, to be honest. Sadly, the ones that do are going to represent only the current generation of swindlers–The originals are going to be long gone.

      1. It ain’t by accident that Union Financial Reports are surprisingly lacking in specifics:

        Dues: $1,000,000,000
        Operating Expenses:
        Recruiting: 25,000,000
        Negotiating: 75,000.000
        Insurance: 100,000.000
        Pensions: 200,000,000
        Operations: 500,000,000
        Reserve: 100,000,000
        ———————————————-
        Net: 0

        Such trivia as the board conferences at five-star resorts, catered meetings with $25 muffins and first class travel are subsumed under a single line-item in the Operations, such as Strategic Planning.

        Kickbacks Commissions Small tokens of appreciation from insurance brokers and pension fund managers are not, of course, receipts or expenses of the union and thus are not reported.

        1. Shucks — so much effort to produce a nice tabular layoout and WP says bollocks! to it.

      2. I also suspect they aren’t taking into account the fact that people’s views/etc can (and do) change over time. I’d hazard that most late teens-early 20s folks tend towards liberal (partly because that’s the age to explore Other Options in Politics/Etc, and partly because universities are indeed an echo chamber for the Left), but I think that many of them eventually drift away from it. (Not most, though, because all those SJWs had to come from *somewhere*…)

    4. Has anybody figured out how to do a study of what people are flatly not responding to various formats of surveys anymore?

      I sure as blazes don’t answer any questions on the phone anymore, light a fire in their ear about my being on every do-not-call list around, and if when I get a second call from that number, I file a complaint with the FCC.

      I know that they’ve established that there are more concealed carry permits being issued, and handguns being bought, than can be accounted for in the number of people surveyed who admit to owning guns…..

      1. When the preference cascade becomes manifest, there are going to be a lot of very surprised people. The activists have been vocal, and because of the echo chamber effect they’ve created by taking over the media, they think they’re in the ascendency. In some ways, they are–But, those ways are highly artificial, and when the lies they’re based on become apparent, guess what? The whole sorry edifice is going to come tumbling down.

        Had an interesting conversation, the other day, in reference to gay marriage and this whole Jenner thing. Young lady said something to the effect that “Well, they’re 25% of the population, why should we deny them the right to marry…?”. The look on her face once she’d verified that gays are only 2-3% of the population on her phone? Priceless. Suddenly, she’s putting the whole issue into perspective, and starting to wonder why they make such a big deal out of it.

        Couple that phenomenon with the actual negative effects of many of these policies that have been pushed, and people are going to start reacting very badly. It’s like the health care deal–Friend of mine was absolutely livid when it was pointed out to her that they really hadn’t changed that much with the uninsured numbers, and since they blew up her long-held and well-liked policy to “fix that problem”, she’s not at all happy to find out that it is not actually fixed. She used to be “Oh, those poor uninsured people…”. Now, it’s “Those free-loading bastards…”.

        The long-term effect of the Obama administration is going to be the conversion of a lot of former fellow-travelers to something other than enthusiastic left-wing believers. The failures are too obvious–I did work for an older couple that retired up here, back in 2007-08. They were vociferous partisans of the Obama line. Now? Dear Lord, I think they’re getting ready to burn effigies of the man come the next election. Ran into the wife the other day, and she made a point of telling me that “…you were right about that ****** bastard…”. And note this well: I’ve never referred to the man as anything other than Mr. Obama or some other equally respectful title/name combination. That epithet came straight out of her subconscious…

        So, he’s accomplished that much: Lifelong Democrats are now referring to their elected president with racial epithets, and they’re saying they were conned. I don’t see that ending well, for the party.

        1. I read that something like 80% of the newly covered under Obamacare have been recipients of Medicaid … it likely would have been more except for the states that refused to follow that plan because Obama, Reid & Pelosi only provided three years funding for the coverage, meaning states are at risk of holding the bag when Uncle Sam’s gravy runs out.

          Medicaid reimbursement rates are routinely sub-par and are victims of significant provider fraud — that’s the kind of service only government can do!

          If the SCOTUS decides that the states are not allowed to provide insurance subsidies a) it is unlikely the Feds will attempt to recoup the subsidies already provided b) most “beneficiaries” of Obamacare will be unaffected because they’re actually on Medicaid and thus haven’t received the subsidies and c) tremendous pressure will be brought to bear on the Republicans in Congress demanding they pass a “clean” bill to enable those subsidies. I doubt anybody here has confidence in McConnell and Boehner standing up to the MSM, White House and astroturf demands.

          1. Remember, their goal is not so much as to win support for their candidates as it is to make the GOP candidates even less acceptable. To borrow the old joke, they don’t need to outrun the bear, they just need to outrun Republicans.

            Which is why we already have the Hillary Campaign denouncing Republicans as racisssss, sexisss homophobes who want to restore Jim Crow and not allow people to vote.

          2. “If the SCOTUS decides that the states Federal exchange is not allowed to provide insurance subsidies”

            King v Burwell is about this. The whole point originally was to force the states to buy in, as the drafters admitted up until last year. When that didn’t happen, Obama simply rewrote the law.

          3. A great number of the people newly ‘covered under Obamacare’ that are new MediCaid recipients are people who were eligible for it in the first place, pre-Obamacare, and simply didn’t know it.

      2. Maybe a “said ‘go away'” or “walked away” or “hung up before I could ask a question” should be a category in all polling results.

  21. Related:
    As ISIS brutalizes women, a pathetic feminist silence
    By Phyllis Chesler

    [SNIP]
    What is going on?

    Feminists are, typically, leftists who view “Amerika” and white Christian men as their most dangerous enemies, while remaining silent about Islamist barbarians such as ISIS.

    Feminists strongly criticize Christianity and Judaism, but they’re strangely reluctant to oppose Islam — as if doing so would be “racist.” They fail to understand that a religion is a belief or an ideology, not a skin color.

    The new pseudo-feminists are more concerned with racism than with sexism, and disproportionately focused on Western imperialism, colonialism and capitalism than on Islam’s long and ongoing history of imperialism, colonialism, anti-black racism, slavery, forced conversion and gender and religious apartheid.

    And why? They are terrified of being seen as “politically incorrect” and then demonized and shunned for it.

    The Middle East and Western Africa are burning; Iran is raping female civilians and torturing political prisoners; the Pakistani Taliban are shooting young girls in the head for trying to get an education and disfiguring them with acid if their veils are askew — and yet, NOW passed no resolution opposing this.

    Twenty-first century feminists need to oppose misogynistic, totalitarian movements. They need to reassess the global threats to liberty, and rekindle our original passion for universal justice and freedom.

    1. It is easier for them to oppose people who simply disagree with them here because there is no risk to it. Opposing the Taliban or ISIS might cost them something. It’s like how a lot of girls will slap and punch at guys that they know fully well would never hit them back. It makes them feel tough, even if they are anything but.

  22. Mockery is confounded by their self-beclowning:
    Questions Nobody Is Asking
    By Kevin D. Williamson — June 8, 2015

    But if you were wondering who the silliest special snowflake at Harvard is, consult the New York Times [nytimes[DOT]com/2015/06/08/opinion/campus-activism-views-of-a-teacher-and-a-student.html].

    Best paragraph:

    College students are volatile, and if our “safe spaces” seem more for hiding from ideas than for shelter from oppression, it is because we occasionally confound structural injustice (which hurts, badly) with being-in-the-world (also hurts). We are obliged as social individuals to fight the first and weather the second, and also to help others do the same.

    The Ivy League is overpriced.

    Also, if you are wondering what “structural injustice” means in this context, I’m pretty sure it is: “I WANTED A PONY!”

    1. Nah, “structural injustice” means “I’m a member of the Special Tribe, I should be treated better than those not of the Special Tribe”.

      Of course, if somebody said “I’m White, I should be treated better than non-Whites”, they’d be called bigots.

      1. Nah, it’s “the rules don’t get the result I want! Change the rules so they always get the result that I WANT!”

  24. Always remember:
    Hitler was a progressive,
    Hitler was a socialist,
    Hitler was a disciple of genocidal racist Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood)

  25. “It reminds me of a tale I read once, that a child learns to react with fear and loathing from his mother’s reactions to a snake”

    And that’s just that, a tale with little relation to truth. “Williams Syndrome”, a lack of fear, is life threatening for children. The ordinary child is hard-wired to fear the different, and like the same. It’s a necessary survival skill. Forget where I read the examples, but if all the men in your village had beards, hiding from clean shaved Cossacks was a good idea. Getting along with dogs surrounding you is natural- fearing the big cat in the road is a good thing.

    Strange/different is bad, familiar/same is good. It’s hard wired in, and until a child reaches the age of reason, stays that way. Now if mother screams and panics at the sight of a snake rather then just explaining- snake, leave it alone… the child will scream and panic. (My daughter is a prime example of learning scream and panic mode from mom…) If a normal everyday child has never seen a snake before, fear and avoidance will be the normal hard wired reaction to seeing one.

    It is, BTW, why schools today are succeeding in teaching children to be racist, as they think they are doing otherwise. I’m pushing 60- and within a few years either way of my age the Church, in Sunday School, the Schools, and community organizations like Scouts, all taught the same thing- all people were the same. And most parents went along with it, realizing that the prejudices they grew up with needed to go away. We all bled red. We all worshipped the same God. We all want the same things out of life… we were the same. And I’ll argue that within that age group you have the least prejudiced people in America.

    Now, schools, Sunday School, Sesame Street, and everything else teach children everyone is different- and that that difference must be celebrated and embraced. Guess what? As soon as you tell a child someone is different- the hard wiring kicks in. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT THAT. To children- different is bad. If you’ve had them, you can remember trying to introduce them to new food groups. Isn’t fun, is it? Unless, of course, you like wearing creamed peas.

    I could go on with examples, but the gist is, to children- same is good, different is bad. And as a general rule, for children, that’s a good thing.

  26. There is one human race, Homo sapiens.

    Dang it, down side of having an errands filled morning is that I can be pretty sure someone already did the Neanderthal nit….

    On the upside, I get to read it!

      2. It’d just end up being something more like “nu-uh, we’re pretty sure we have genetics from other groups like Neanderthals and Devons or however it’s spelled!”

        Which would feed into the whole “wolf/red wolf/coyote” thing. (Short version, genetics indicates they cross pretty dang well; the point in the opposite direction is that the behavior difference is so big that when I hear about the more-wolf coyotes, I can’t recognize their behavior from the coyotes I grew up around, and even cattle will treat the wolf-blood coyotes differently, more like how they treat dogs.)

        1. Denisovan.

          The genetic remnants are the result of the “Beautiful Denisovan Girls at the Central Asian Spring Break and Mammoth Roast this year! Don’t Miss It!” flyers pasted all over the prehistoric watering holes along the migration routes.

          1. Someone once mentioned that he had read about the Denisovan remains and the possibility that the mutation that allowed Nepalers and Tibetans to live at high altitudes was from the Denisovan geneome; and re-read Genesis by H. Beam Piper at the same time and figured that if a load of colonists were coming from a cold thin-atmosphered planet where the oceans were turning into brackish lakes and the ecology was collapsing into barren scrub, there were few better places to colonize than in Central Asia in the rainshadow of the Himalayas… Far, far away from the scary oceans and the lush jungles teaming with dangerous fauna.

    2. Well, since they’ve found Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, I consider Neanderthals to be homo sapiens.

      Note, I believe the scientists consider modern humans as homo sapiens sapiens and Neanderthal as homo sapiens Neanderthal. [Smile]

      1. Often, yes, but I think that it also depends upon whether they are lumpers or splitters, and to what extent. Species can be a nebulous concept at times.

    3. Thank you! And I’ve been working my way down the comments to see if anyone pointed out to Cedar, that whatever the social construct people are doing these days (I have little interest in anthropology, so I’m always a day late and a dollar short at that party) the biologists will tell you that human race is a real thing. It’s a members of a species (H. Sap. sap.) which can and does interbreed (duh.) but which (usually due to geographic isolation) has developed distinct characteristics.

      In other words, we can predict Tay-Sachs in Azkenazi (sp?) Jews, and the recent research into vascularlization is revealing why members of the “black” races predominate in heart-attack wards and athletic fields. It’s just that the isolation was never terribly isolated for most of us, so there aren’t that many true races (sub-species) of human bean. And cultural capital of a population is usually a better predictor of nearly any trait you like than is genetics.

      1. Oooh, and there’s the part where as best we can tell, we’ve had some incredibly restricted breeding populations at various times– so the possible range of variation is even smaller.

        1. I’ve read recently that at one point during a massive basalt flood eruption, the female breeding population, the only one that matters, was down to a mere 40 individuals.

          1. Quibble: short term, a large number of females is more important than a large number of males, but long term, both can destroy you. It happens a lot in even cattle herds that stick to registered ____ bulls on an initially “anything cheap” cow population, if they select replacements from their calves, even if whoever’s managing the genetics is careful to avoid breeding fathers to daughters or even picking bulls that share a grandfather.

            Obviously you can’t get to the point of insufficient Y variation causing issues unless you have enough females, though.

            Pet peeve, sorry– been thrown out of a few too many scifi stories because they go the “you only need one male” route. Even if we weren’t talking about humans…. :shudder:

            1. Valid points. Given a remaining “herd” of 1,000, if they’re split 960/40, would you rather have the 40 be males or females? Nobody contests that intensive line-breeding has severe effects on line-bred population, but if you’re playing say, a realistic civ/sim for mortal stakes, does the vaster population with greater rates of defectives overwhelm the more healthy but outnumbered? How can you say this screwed up population won’t, due to this line-breeding, reinforce beneficial traits to outpace the losses from the “culls?” I don’t think anyone can say; certainly not me. Animal husbandry experts are not reluctant to use it.

              Other than maybe making for an interesting game to play, it’s all moot. Nobody I know postulates skewed gender ratios, and the fact we’re here is evidence we did in fact scrape by.

              So far as “Incest! Eeew, icky!” arguments, Mama Gaia could care less.

              Without a doubt above my pay grade. 🙂

              1. Given the nastiness that pops up in the Y so easily, and the issue of providing for the offspring, I’d rather have a more even split. Stupid animals are a lot less dangerous than stupid humans.

              2. Actually I think Mama Gaia considers incest a “feature.”
                Her methodology would seem to be to produce zygotes with as many genetic variations as possible. Some combinations are successful, ie the zygote survives long enough to reproduce, others not so much ranging from non viable to unable to fend for themselves and so die early before passing that failed genetic material on.
                I cannot help but tell myself whenever some tree hugger waxes poetic about Mama Gaia, Mother Nature, that they have no idea what a cold and heartless bitch she truly is. Her entire modus operandi is make lots and lots of them, cull the failures and let the successes breed.

      2. There is no doubt that there are populations of humans that have different distributions of genetics than other populations. However, these populations map only crudely to the social construct of race.

    4. This is one of my Peeves. They like to exercise, and come when called. This one is a calico, with splotches of color from black, through various shades of brown, to white. 🙂

      Geneticists have proven that there are no human races in exactly the same way that they have proven that there are no breeds of dogs. In fact, there is no such thing as a dog – there are only wolves. After all, they can all interbreed, and there is only a miniscule amount of genetic variance between them.

      And yet, I can tell a Dachshund from a Doberman and a Wolf from a Chihuahua.

      And different breeds are known for different behaviors (within the baseline of ‘dog’). Some are aggressive, while others are cowardly. Some are quite bright (for dogs), while others are dumb as stumps (for dogs). Some are rather stoic, others are over-emotional.

      Naturally, each dog is an individual, with their own quirks and foibles. And of course a lot of their personality is from how they were raised. But you can generally match them to their breed fairly reliably, especially when averaging over a group.

      1. Two big problems, though:
        the variation inside of the human species is still smaller than inside of most dog breeds, and dogs can only get that specialized because of a very long-term, focused breeding program, complete with stern culling of those examples that fall short.

        As with dogs, you can identify tendencies inside of, oh, the Irish “race”– but they’re on par with what you’d get from a specific bloodline, not a breed.

        1. Oh, I get that. I understand. My peeve runs out to bark at the concept that there is no such thing as genetic differences between separated groups, and that genetics doesn’t affect human behavior.

          I’ve seen too much of the world, and too many different people, families and tribes, to believe otherwise. I can tell a native of Thailand from a native of Sweden from a native of Ethiopia, for example. With modern travel and intermarriage, that’s changing these days. But it still holds broadly true.

          For example, one of my aunts is seriously into genealogy, and what she found about our family is fascinating. It seems that we’re an entire family of crooks and thieves, running back as far as she could trace (more than 12 generations). Mine is the first generation where not every single male went to prison at some point. Is this genetics or culture? Over the short term, does it matter? They’re both passed down from your parents, and unlikely to alter much in a single generation. (Long term, both of them are likely to change, unless you get into some seriously exclusionary inbreeding.)

          1. Heck, barring some… regrettable … situations, it’s easy to tell Japanese from Korean from majority Chinese. (I can’t remember the correct group name, and I am vaguely able to recognize different groups of Chinese, but didn’t get a lot of exposure.)

            Basically, we’re noticing the “largely shared ancestry” tendency; the race theory people are expecting a difference on par with pure coyotes vs pure wolves!

    1. So what he is saying is that when Tor’s employees deride their customers and authors and threaten that those authors and any supporters in publishing will not be working in the business, that is only their employees’ personal opinions, but they get to keep their jobs that would enable them to carry out those threats in multiple ways, even after going with a slander like that of Ms Gallo.
      classy Tor, really classy

      1. Give Tom Doherty time. He made it clear that the “slanders” were “slanders”. I suspect this is only his “opening shot” at the idiots at his company.

        1. “Give Tom Doherty time. He made it clear that the “slanders” were “slanders”. I suspect this is only his “opening shot” at the idiots at his company.”

          Why bother, with giving him time, that is? If he is really in charge of ‘his’ company, he has no need for an “opening shot”, if he is in charge he can make decisions, whatever those decisions might be, not have to construct a campaign to influence someone else to make a decision in his favor.

          I suspect that is exactly what he has done, made a decision.

          1. Well “making a decision” is one thing. Giving commands may require a campaign to make sure his commands are followed.

            I forget which of Harry Turtledove’s “Worldwar” novels it was but the Lizard Fleetlord gave a command (forbidden the use of ginger) and assumed that his command would be followed without question.

            Readers of that series know what happened. [Wink]

            Tom Doherty may be in charge but still have problems “rooting out” his idiots.

      2. He also repeated the canard that Sad Puppies was done to vote in a slate of authors.

        1. Well, “slate voting” for Hugos has been done before and Mr. Doherty might not have see anything wrong *if* the Sad Puppies had did the same.

        2. That is likely as much as he’s been informed. I doubt he was even aware of the Sad Puppies campaign before this; I haven’t the impression of Doherty being as close to fandom as was Jim Baen.

      3. Yes. At least so far, this is of a piece with the “neutrality” of David Gerrold – who has publicly hoped that the influx of supporting memberships after the nominations signal a coming “smackdown” of the Puppies. (I noted that it is a good thing he isn’t *against* us – the blood would run hip deep if he were, although it probably wouldn’t be any of ours…)

    2. My favorite comment:

      “No, Irene Gallo’s comments do not represent official TOR policies. Neither do Moshe Feder’s, Patrick Hayden’s, or Teresa Hayden’s.

      It’s merely coincidence that every TOR editor who has weighed in on this issue is rabidly anti-Puppy.”

      As I said at MGC, you’d have to be an idiot — or a File 770 commenter — not to see a pattern emerging here.

      1. The TOR staffers who are not in favor of puppy sadness probably are smart enough to keep their mouths shut, stay out of unnecessary squables and focus on doing their @!#$& jobs.

        You know — adults.

        There’s no need to tar them with the brush of their co-workers; even assuming they agree with those dolts they know better than to cause needless aggravation. (One of the most important tasks of any employee or underling is: avoid causing the boss needless aggravation. The truly valuable employees are those who can recognize when the aggravation is needed. The valuable beyond measure can tell when it is necessary and can manage it so it can be resolved with minimal disruption.)

        1. I’d “love” to be a fly on the wall of the Tor Books meeting rooms. Somehow I’m getting the idea that Tom Doherty will be laying down the Law in the next few days. [Evil Grin]

          1. I wouldn’t be surprised to see TOR buy big industry ads congratulating the winners after Worldcon, especially if the list includes Wright, Anderson and any other of the TOR published works.

            I wouldn’t be surprised if the price for those ads came from the bonuses (salaries) of certain specific editorial staffers who probably need not be named.

            I would be surprised if that became public before Doherty’s retirement, although I suspect there would be rumours (especially now that I’ve started one.)

      2. I can deal with people having free speech. Some of the non-TOR people (or so I assume) over there are quite rich, too – *they* are going to boycott TOR until Tom Doherty calls for the full scale Jihad Against Puppies.

        I can deal with employees of a company having free speech. With appropriate caution. When I began to post to blogs several years ago, I made sure to use an alias, and an e-mail address, that were in no way associated with my persona as an employee of my then company (although I never had anything but praise for their products then, and still do now even though they laid me off). Short of a hacking attack, that ensured that my personal views would not be associated with them in any way. (Note, I still use that same alias/e-mail, to keep my comments connected, and avoid problems with accusations of being a “troll.” Reminder to self: still need to update my Baen profile to associate real name with alias, stop being lazy!)

        What I cannot deal with is an employee of a company, identifying himself or herself as an employee of that company, making any public comment that casts a very bad light on the employer. Particularly when that comment is made in the course of promoting a product of the employer. Sorry, but that permanently associates the comment with the employer, unless they immediately cease to be the employer.

        That was the problem with the Chik-Fil-A kerfluffle here in my city. The idiot released the video of him harassing the drive-through employee under his own name – which was immediately and easily linked to his employer. Who became, the next day, his ex-employer.

    3. So, stage #3 of the Taxonomy of Bureaucratic Response is corporate distancing: not our views, guilty party has apologised, and reiteration of corporate distancing with assertion of appropriate core company values. Not firing the offending party is appropriate (although review of resumes of possible replacements is likely started.)

      Doherty is undoubtedly sincere and this is a good ameliorative step, Reassuring insulted parties that the organization values and appreciates them is a necessary step. It remains to be seen if it is sufficient.

      Were we opponents of sadness in puppies like the SJWs this would be blood in the water, invoking wrath but I think we are better than that. It is not our goal to drive our opponents from the marketplace, simply to force them to compete on semi-even playing field.

      I expect there should be personal written apologies from Ms Winey Gallo, and they need to be more than the anodyne banality of, “Gee, I am sorry if being called an extreme right-wing to neo-Nazi unrepentant racist, misogynist, homophobic hack writer of bad to reprehensible stuff offended you; I thought you already knew that and had been trying for it.”

      OTOH, TOR still has a problem of a promotion staffer who thinks touting a book as likely to piss off a significant fraction of the potential audience is a good marketing idea.

      1. Can we at least make them wear Hawaiian shirts with cartoon women on them when they apologize? To balance out the comet injustice in the universe?

        1. Make them buy the material and sew the shirts themselves and wear the results with full shots of them from waist up as they record an appology, might be a start on that balance.

          1. I think the designs are copyrighted. And the guy’s girlfriend should get the money, since they arguably slandered her even more than they did him.

            1. The design of the material is someone else’s, and she just likes sewing, and used an off the shelf pattern. There were similar shirts with the alternate designs (one a different background, the other different women) being sold by other before the blow up and demand. But yeah, that too would be nice if the lady would be willing.

      2. “OTOH, TOR still has a problem of a promotion staffer who thinks touting a book as likely to piss off a significant fraction of the potential audience is a good marketing idea.”

        Remember what book she was touting. I do not think we are in the target audience.

    1. Down boy, she’s spoken for.
      Slipped that one in before Sanford got to it.
      That said, I most thoroughly agree, she very much is a sweetie.

  29. the same people who would have us be numerous races, divide up oh say Coho Salmon by what stream they swim up and call them separate species so that they can make the case that even though there’s a ton of the things swimming up this river, that stream is sadly lacking so that run is an “endangered species” and you must let me control everything you do on your land, so that I may “save” the species… The operative word here is, of course, CONTROL.

    1. A species isn’t a race. And our feddle bureaucrats aren’t scientists. But yes, the operative word is “control” and they’ll use scientific-y sounding’ words if it helps the project along.

  30. I have to say that I have not been able to read the title of this post without hearing it set to the theme music from “Married With Children”.

  31. Steve Sailer has a great definition of a race–along the lines of A large, somewhat inbred, extended family. this combines, of course, geographical closeness and culture.

  32. To the original article:

    “Comments on the campaign have ranged from repugnant, to calling for the ‘puppies’ to be interned in concentration camps. (Comment by Patricia Williams-King on Facebook, May 18 “From what I’ve heard about these “Puppies” they ought to be sent to the dog-pound in short order.”)”

    As I read this, one Williams-King did not call for anyone to be placed in concentration camps. She instead suggested that they should be sent to “the dog pound”.

    Imprecision in language causes several problems. The most obvious is that an opponent of the SP’s can claim that supporters of the SP’s are misquoting Williams-King and presenting an extreme position on her part which she did not take. Thereby tarring the SP’s and their supporters as liars and fabricators. And extending the narrative of the racist, homophobic, sexist, climate change denying, fascist and so on — puppies.

    Similarly, the term “dog pound” is an expression used somewhat in the vein of “dog house” — a place or position of disfavor or punishment — based upon unacceptable behavior. Were I defending Williams-King, which I am not, I would assert that she was just suggesting, in a somewhat humorous manner, that the SP’s be rejected by the larger and more inclusive and all-round commendable body of SF fandom — until they learn how to behave. After all, no one could believe that she would really want to put people in a dog pound.

    My comment is offered solely to suggest that one should not provide folks who live by writhing around in victimhood an opportunity to claim more victimization. They’ll take it.

    1. To use an expression in the vein of “dog house” it would have been much wiser to use “dog house” rather than a location notorious for the number of dogs it puts down.

        1. When I was a wee bookworm, I was the only one I knew named Emily (named after Judge Cardozo’s sister), Today there are tons of Emilys around. If I’d chosen my name then it would have been Randi.

            1. “Captain, you have permission to go weapons hot on location 1” (Blackburn residence.)

              “Ma’am one orbital carpstrike coming up..”

        3. And I suspect there are ticked people on soap boxes (still catching up on comments.) So we have ticked boxes as well. 🙂

          1. So I’ve heard.

            You can burn my house
            You can cut my hair
            You can make me wrestle naked
            With a grizzly bear

            You can poison my cat
            Baby I don’t care
            But if you talk in the movies
            I’ll kill you right there

            It’s the little things
            It’s just the little things
            Aw it’s the little things
            It’s just the little things
            Yeah it’s the little things
            That drive me wild

  34. The Road Not Taken
    Robert Frost, 1874 – 1963

    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
    And sorry I could not travel both
    And be one traveler, long I stood
    And looked down one as far as I could
    To where it bent in the undergrowth;

    Then took the other, as just as fair,
    And having perhaps the better claim,
    Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
    Though as for that the passing there
    Had worn them really about the same,

    And both that morning equally lay
    In leaves no step had trodden black.
    Oh, I kept the first for another day!
    Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
    I doubted if I should ever come back.

    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.

  35. Has anyone suggested that Ms. Sanderson debate Vox Day regarding the genetics of Homo Sapiens? That would make for an enlightening post.

      1. Not at all.
        My understanding of VD’s beliefs regarding Homo Sapien genetics is that he believes there are subgroups within Homo Sapiens.
        My take on Ms. Sanderson’s post is that she believes there are no distinct differences or markers between any members of Homo Sapiens and that all noted differences are cultural.
        Did I get that right or did I misread?

        2. Not to put words in Cedar’s mouth, but “subgroups” within humans are obvious but often involve “genetic lines” not “race”.

          Subgroups most often involve “who is related to me” and also “who is more commonly seen by me”.

          Of course, cultural differences are another marker for “subgroups”.

          As for what Vox Day may have said, I haven’t read enough of him to know if he was talking about “cultural” subgroups or “genetic” subgroups.

          Quite frankly, IMO the “cultural differences” are the most important marker for human subgroups but certain people have been known to ignore “cultural differences” and are quick to cry “racist” when you point out cultural differences that might be problematic when dealing with a different culture.

          IE it’s not racist to say that the Aztec practice of human sacrifices would make them bad neighbors. [Evil Grin]

        3. My reading of VD’s post on the matter is slightly different. He posits that the moment you divide a population (including humans) into subgroups, you will find that those subgroups will on average perform differently on any metric you care to name and that, if one is silly enough to use melanin content as a meaningful divider, then you will find that those groups do differently. I would point out that nowhere (at least that i have seen) does he advocate using melanin content as such, except when demonstrating a hypothetical.

          At least that’s what I get out of his post on the topic:

          ====
          I don’t have any reason to believe any one human population sub-group is intrinsically superior to any other population sub-group. That being said, both science and logic quite clearly indicate that no two population sub-groups are identical, and therefore every population sub-group is either superior or inferior to another sub-group on the basis of any chosen metric.

          “It makes no more difference that you like or dislike this fact than if you disapprove of the speed of light or the rate of Earth gravity.

          “I assert that an unborn female black child with a missing chromosome and an inclination to homosexuality is equal in human value and human dignity and unalienable, God-given rights to a straight white male in the prime of his life and a +4 SD IQ. How many of my dishonest critics will do the same?

          “That doesn’t mean that I think it is wise to ask that particular child, when she is grown, to design the next plane on which I intend to fly. Or even to work in the air traffic control tower.
          ====

          http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2015/04/mailvox-racism-lens.html

          http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2015/04/mailvox-refuting-rhetorical.html

          He also points out somewhere (can’t find the link) that European groups tend to have an infusion of Neanderthal DNA, while Africans are almost pure homo sap, but declines to say what effects (if any) that may have.

              1. That is a very leading question. NO, based on what he said, even though the terms are in the above quote, he does not believe that one group is superior or inferior to another. Merely that measurements of individual qualities will be statistically different.

                That question was way too much like a “have you stopped beating your wife” question, and would be ignored, except for the implications it carried.

                1. Power Line’s Scott Johnson has been developing this concept in an ongoing series of posts, the most recent of which makes (indirectly) a point that is critical: we often mistake causal factors.

                  For example, the much higher rate of criminal prosecutions of African-Americans is (contrary to Proglodyte theory) due to a significantly higher incidence of criminal activity in this sub-population.

                  Contrary to racist assumption, this is not because African-Americans are inherently less law abiding. (Although Proglodyte assertions that laws are imposed by a racist White establishment would certainly seem likely to encourage law-breaking in the “oppressed” sub-population.)

                  Nor is this higher level of criminal behaviour due to, as the Liberals would have it, a consequence of material poverty. (A causal relationship which begs the question and likely inverts the causality; I suspect a carefully crafted study would find lawlessness encourages poverty rather than the other way ’round*.)

                  Mostly the evidence supports the common sense explanation put forth by Daniel Moynihan some fifty years ago: a breakdown in the family unit which leads to an increased incidence of single-parent families (generally female headed) has resulted in the increase in anti-social and criminal behaviour. If you look at populations not by race but by family structure this relationship becomes quite clear. To blame it on race is akin to blame illiteracy on poor reading instruction while ignoring vitamin deficiency based blindness; no matter how much you improve the reading instruction your results will improve little until you address the root cause.

                  Consider families. Though for many years, some sociologists urged us to believe that single-parent families were an “alternative” to two-parent ones, hardly anybody believes that any more. The evidence shows that single-parent families are a major source of misconduct. A federal survey of the families of sixty thousand American children found that at every income level except the highest (over $50,000 a year) and for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, children living with a never-married or a divorced mother were much worse off than those living in two-parent families. A survey of all the leading studies shows that both poverty and living in a single-parent family contribute to children’s problems. When William Comanor and Llad Phillips examined data in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), they found that “the most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home.” Another look at the NLSY data suggests that African American boys without fathers were 68 percent more likely to be in jail than those with a father. Fatherless Latino boys were nearly three times as likely to be in jail than those with fathers; fatherless white Anglo boys were over four times as likely to be in jail than those with fathers.
                  [SNIP]
                  If crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character; if weak character is more likely among the children of unmarried mothers; if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods; if boys become young men with no preparation for work; if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having “sold out” to a dominant white culture; if powerful gangs replace weak families—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing by plan and in the near future the crime rate of low-income blacks are slim. In many cities there are programs, some public, many private, that improve matters for some people. But the possibility that these programs can overcome the immense burdens confronting poor, badly educated, fatherless children is remote.

                  James Q. Wilson, in Beyond the Color Line: New Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom, eds.

                  One can think whatever one wants about the policies which encourage and support single-parent households — cynical exploitation by a Poverty-Bureaucracy Complex, conformation to a social imperative to support women’s independence (aka, transferance of dependence on a man to dependence on the state), well intentioned band-aids on society’s skinned knees — but the effect is deniable only by the determinedly blindfolded.

                  *From John Diiulio, cited in Power Line’s essay:

                  “Yes, there are ways in which the justice system is failing all Americans, including black Americans. But to the extent that the justice system hurts, rather than helps, blacks more than it does whites, it is not by incarcerating a ‘disproportionate’ number of young black men. Rather, it is by ignoring poor black victims and letting convicted violent and repeat black criminals, both adult and juvenile, continue to victimize and demoralize the black communities that suffer most of their depredations.”

                  Sorry ’bout the length, I ran out of pith with which to shorten this.

                  1. Sorry ’bout the length, I ran out of pith with which to shorten this.

                    Well, I suggest you go and get pithed, then. (You were serving that one up for me, right?)

                  2. Okay. This matches with what I’ve read about only a small percentage of population being responsible for the majority of violent crime.

                    1. Consider, also, that by mis-directing our efforts — e.g., at the 90+% of males on campus who would never dream of sexually assaulting a woman* — we often ignore the repeat offenders who are the true major perpetrators of the cause for concern. This is especially so if we are unwilling to “profile” such perpetrators because of characteristics including but not limited to ethnicity, economic status or religious affiliation**.

                      *at a guess. If you prefer, consider the TSA screening procedures as an alternate example.

                      **for example, a faith that teaches hatred of “white devils” might, just possibly, correlate to a higher incident of physical attacks on honkies.

                  3. One notes that the Progs are capable of grasping the importance of subgroups’ differences when you point at that, actually, whites report they have been victimized by a black only 20% — slightly more than their representation in the population. The people who really claim blacks are crooks are the blacks, who report 80% of the time that they were victimized by blacks.

                2. Excuse my poor phrasing. I’m aware he does not believe in “superiority” based on race. You summarized what I was trying to say a lot better than I did.

                  1. Ah. No problem. I just couldn’t remember how long I’ve seen your name here, and I’ve seen that kind of question used to “prove” a point about someone.

            2. You seem awfully insistent in tying Cedar’s opinions to Vox Day’s. If your intent is honest conversation you might look to the way you’re wording things.

          2. There is, I think, ample experimental data (this ain’t an academic journal, I don’t gotta cite a da** thing) as well as simple knowledge of human behaviour to allow us (actually just me; the rest of you are drafted unless you object) to acknowledge that the simple act of dividing a population into subgroups will engender different characteristics in those subgroups.

            It often is our perception of difference that creates differences. That and a proclivity to conform to expectations.

  36. Well, yeah, “genetic lines” or “race”, I believe social environment or behavior can impact genes and that impact can be passed to future generations. It’d be nice to see an in-depth discussion.

    1. Epigenetics.

      Not only do the children of Dutch women pregnant during the Hunger winter show the effects, so do their children — and their children’s children.

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