Month: June 2017

So, there are themes that run through people’s work, sometimes without the author realizing.

Now, I’m not the sharpest spoon in the drawer, but I can read print when it’s six feet tall and printed in letters of fire.

I’ve long ago realized that “what is being human” and “how to be human” is one of the main themes of my work.

Not that I set out to do it, mind you.  It just sort of happens.

Perhaps it is part of being an Odd, an Outlier, not a joiner, but one who stands out.

One of my earliest memories of childhood is of the renter kids (all older than I) locking the gate from grandma’s backyard to their yard, as a way to make sure I wasn’t even allowed to be near them when they played.

I remember standing there, hands on the gate, plotting vengeance.  Because that’s who I am, and that’s what I do.  Apparently.  Although frankly, I’m not big on vengeance these days, first because I’m too lazy to be proactive about it, and second because people who are nasty for no particularly reason usually end up being their own worst punishment.  (All of those kids self-screwed, without my having to lift a finger.  It’s a thing of beauty.)

Anyway, perhaps I stood outside groups looking in long enough that I came to the conclusion that maybe I’m not one of them monkeys.  And then I had to think myself back into how I am in fact one of those monkeys, even though their fur is brown and mine seems to be dyed a bright, hot pink.  We still largely behave the same way.  My instinct to belong might be attenuated, but I’m still a social animal, and I still enjoy the company of my kind.

Or to put it another way, I might be different, but no matter how little the rest of the species likes it, I’m still wholly human.

Yet it’s no wonder that my future history revisits the question of “what is it to be human?”

You can see, as the genetic knowledge and ability to manipulate improves in the DST world, they start getting cutesy.  Because THEY have lost track of what the point of humanity is, and so treat humans as just any other animal.  So, yeah, you start seeing things like creating human-animal hybrids that look like things out of mythology (as in, the short story Ariadne’s Skein.) And intentionally handicap children, and–

The thing is, we will.  I mean it’s no use saying it’s bad or it’s unethical.  If the science is there, we will use it.  And if the utilitarian idea of humans being a cog in the societal machine, or people who exist to serve some purpose is there, then creating humans to be show pieces, or intentionally disabled or whatever will be done all over and with gusto.

And the utilitarian idea is already there.  We’ve lost the sense that humans are important because they’re human, and instead, humans are only granted humanity if they’re “wanted” (as though Craigslist weren’t full of pets who were once desperately wanted, but who live to be not wanted at all) or if they’re going to serve some purpose.

Given that, how easy is it for governments to create creatures from human genes who are deliberately made different from normal humans and who are more or less slaves.

And once that is done what is it to prevent us from creating “supermen” to rule us?

Which is how the “Good Men” come into being, though originally they’re not supposed to rule anything, but only to “serve” the state.  It’s just that once you endow them with intelligence, manipulative ability and, well… everything… what is to prevent them taking over?

Absolutely nothing.

And why should people who haven’t been raised as humans, cherished because they’re humans and no more, love or respect humanity?

They won’t/don’t.

Since we’re already raising and indoctrinating kids to be “good for something” instead of “the best human being you can be.” we’re already on that road.

Treating any human as a thing is diminishing humanity as a whole.  And each of us in particular.

 

I’m supposed to be doing a future history for my publisher at Baen, to go into the new edition of Darkship Thieves (I HOPE as an afterword, otherwise there will be spoilers.)

No, correction, I’m supposed to be writing down the future history in a  coherent form.

It has existed as a chart on my office wall, and scribbles in a notebook for twenty one years.  I’m just now trying to collate and correlate it and make it coherent with all the hints that sort of fell out in Darkships.

The problem, of course, is giving too much — getting lost in the weeds.  The plan btw when I’m done is to collate this into an ebook with the DST Bible (I wonder if I could get soemone to make it into game book?) and some drawings, and give it out to subscribers and newsletter subscribers.  Besides sending the future history in 20 page or so to Baen.

I hope you guys don’t mind if I talk future history at you for a few days, to bring it into focus for myself.

First of all there is the massive question of “Why a future history?”  Aren’t future histories a stupid game?

Well, yeah.  Look, making predictions is hard, particularly about the future.  If you absolutely must make predictions, either date them much earlier, or — for a choice — make it so much mumbo jumbo that you can point at anything and say it fulfills your prophecy.  See Nostradamus.

I not only wasn’t that smart, I was really dumb, as originally I had my timeline start in the 2020s.  I’ve been fudging it as hard as I can ever since.

What was I thinking?

Good question.

First, on the future history, I thought any self-respecting science fiction author would have one.  if you showed up in the field without one you’d be pointed at and laughed.  Yes, of course, I’d read a lot of authors, but all the authors that had stuck have at least the outline of one.

Heinlein had an explicit one, with chart and dates, which he hung on the wall of his office.  Simak had, I suspect two, because in one all the fairies and goblins come out of the woodwork, in another not so much.  Well, then there was Why Call Them Back From Heaven, whatever the name was in English, which was a creepy dead end.  Connie Willis has one, with time travel and the death of all pets.

I thought I had to have one.

But I’m still me, so nothing much happened on the future history front, until my writers’ group circa 96 decided we had to get our behinds (or at least our typing fingers) in gear and we should all write a short story a week (HIGHLY recommended as a learning thing.  Sure most of my initial ones were total duds, but the thing was to break me off the idea writing very slowly was best.  And it worked.  it also proved that writing is a skill, like any other skill.  The more you do it, the better you get at it [provided you’re trying for improving.]  Years later, when I started sorting things for indie publication, that year marks the watershed between my writing sort of publishable, and my being in full command of the short story structure.  I need to do the equivalent for novels and do one a month, to command that.  Um… as soon as I get more physically stable.  We’re getting there.)

The problem with a short story a week is the ideas.  I’m not one of those people who ever — much — has issues with ideas, but most of the ideas that attack me out of a clear blue sky are for novels, or, these days, for whole series.  Which means that having to come up with short story ideas was a problem.  Particularly when each short story started spawning a whole world and demanding to be a novel.

I was then (but) thirty five years old, had a five year old and a two year old, and didn’t have time for baby universes coming out of the woodwork and demanding time and attention.

So I wrote the future history, because somewhere in the world there’s always something interesting going on.  Throw a dart at the chart, write a story there.

It was useful.

What it isn’t is in any way claiming to be an accurate prediction.  Though, of course, some of it will happen, at least if my understanding of history holds any water, and a lot of it will happen out of order and backward and sideways.

Note that my future history starts, now, in the late twenty first century.  I have an excuse for confused times, and characters thinking things happened earlier or later, too.  You see, in between our time and Darkships, records were accidentally AND deliberately lost and modified, to obscure the powergrab that led to the world Athena was born into.  This means late twenty first century might end up being early twenty second.  And thank heavens.  Just to spite me someone will come up with life extension, and I don’t want my life time to overtake the time line.

Note also I never say how the war with Islamic terrorists/the attempted Islamic takeover came out.  This is because, of course, I had no idea it was going to happen.  Crystal ball all broken.  I was 35 and green as grass.

However, I assume it’s like my brother saying “if they speak English in Star Trek, I guess America won the cold war” which I found a great relief.

There might be Muslims in Darkships.  There PROBABLY are.  However, none of the religions are particularly prominent, and a lot of the land masses are depopulated, and I haven’t come across ANY Muslims yet, in my stories so far. Some Arab names, but no Mohammed.  You do the math, dearies.  I wasn’t deliberately excluding them, but as I tell fledgelings, reviewers and people who read MGC about my writing “the thing isn’t entirely under my control.”  And while not the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I’ve been known to see into the future. Glimpses.  Mostly in dreams.  I blame my subconscious.

And yep, that’s what I’m afraid of, in a way.  If the Darkships future history had a subtitle, it would be “Humanity is negotiable.”  Because what humans are, and what humans become is by design negotiable: created, changed and abolished; designed, destroyed, enhanced, trained, oppressed.

Being human alone will get you no special treatment, because humans can be made on command and gestated in animals or surrogate mothers.  Humans are used for societal purposes.  They exist to serve society and their rulers.

Perhaps that started with a long orgy of genocide, which, yes, is where this is headed if we don’t find some other way to handle it.  I think.  But again, remember my crystal ball is broken.

In my world there was SOMETHING.  In this time period, the US either fell or was reduced to half a dozen states.  There were nuclear bombs exchanged.  Who knows what else there was.

I don’t know because I will never write the fall of the US.  Like Heinlein writing the story of the rise of the first prophet, this would hurt too much for me to be able to write it.  I know America is a thing of humanity and likely will have an end, but I truly don’t want to visit it.

My world starts with Europe mostly an old age home (honestly, it’s getting there) and mostly depopulated having the bright idea they can make people.  But this is Europe, they don’t want to make people and have them count as real people.   So the first mules are made in batch lots and all male.  Because they’re gestated in animals — or at least that’s the story — most of them are retarded.

I will confess I’m not sure this is true, because Angel in flight seems to indicate some of them AREN’T and can pass as normal humans.

Anyway, these shambling brutes are made and raised to do the work natural humans won’t do.

And hence it starts.

Next up, why and how we get supermen.

 

 

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Chicken

 

Da Promo by Freerange Oyster

Allene R. Lowrey

Advent of Ruin

The Qaehl Cycle Volume 1

An age ends in blood and darkness…

For untold generations, the peoples of the Qaehl have prospered—trading and warring as they expanded across the great desert. Mighty city-states rise unassailable above the sands, centers of commerce in a great web of humanity. Messengers and nomads, tradesmen and bandits, cross the burning wastes with each rising of the sun.

A change is coming. Strange creatures have been sighted in the deep desert. Rumors whisper of horrors begotten out of legend. But there is yet hope: a brave courier, an innocent young dancer, a compassionate warrior – each holding a fragment of the truth, each seeking the future. Each adrift in the desert, trying to survive the advent of ruin.

Free today

Amanda S. Green

Nocturnal Origins

Nocturnal Lives Book 1

Some things can never be forgotten, no matter how hard you try.

Detective Sergeant Mackenzie Santos knows that bitter lesson all too well. The day she died changed her life and her perception of the world forever.It doesn’t matter that everyone, even her doctors, believe a miracle occurred when she awoke in the hospital morgue. Mac knows better. It hadn’t been a miracle, at least not a holy one. As far as she’s concerned, that’s the day the dogs of Hell came for her.

Investigating one of the most horrendous murders in recent Dallas history, Mac also has to break in a new partner and deal with nosy reporters who follow her every move and who publish confidential details of the investigation without a qualm.

Complicating matters even more, Mac learns the truth about her family and herself, a truth that forces her to deal with the monster within, as well as those on the outside.But none of this matters as much as discovering the identity of the murderer before he can kill again.

Dagger of Elanna

Sword of the Gods Book 2

Plots form, betrayals are planned and war nears.

Cait Hawkener has come to accept she might never remember her life before that terrible morning almost two years ago when she woke in the slavers’ camp. That life is now behind her, thanks to Fallon Mevarel and the Order of Arelion. Now a member of the Order, Cait has pledged her life to making sure no one else falls victim as she did.

But danger once more grows, not only for Cait but to those she calls friends. Evil no longer hides in the shadows and conspirators grow bold as they move against the Order and those who look to it for protection. When Cait accepts the call to go to the aid of one of the Order’s allies, she does not know she is walking into the middle of conspiracy and betrayal, the roots of which might help answer some of the questions about her own past.

Amie Gibbons

Psychic for Sale (Rent to Own)

SDF Book 3

Don’t make deals you can’t live through…

Psychic Ariana Ryder owes Carvi, vampire king of Miami, five favors, and he’s called in his first marker, so her and her boss Grant fly down to Miami to play security for the first vampire summit on bringing magic and vampires out of the closet.

Ariana isn’t looking forward to this weekend. She can hardly keep Carvi off her with her boyfriend Quil around, and Quil has been banned from the summit, meaning she’s going to spend the entire time fending off the not so unwanted advances, on top of her actual job of watching out for sabotage and attacks on the summit.

After zombie and passion spells wreak havoc on the opening party of the summit, Ariana realizes she’s in way over her head, and that’s before Carvi introduces her to the astral plane and the expansive world of magic she can have access to.

Someone’s gunning for the summit, Carvi, or both, and Ariana has to figure out who and how to stop them, before the plan is set in motion and a spell with deadly reach far beyond the summit takes hold.

I have not yet got the promo post.  And I lost the vignette one.

I haven’t written Grant yet (I need an assistant.  Administrivia is eating my life.)

Until that time, and in honor of father’s day, some pictures of me (and the last one of younger son, aka the clone) with my dad who is still and always the most awesome man in the world after my husband.  (My kids will get there.  They have to grow into the sheer awesome.  They show good signs of it.)  Oh, yeah, the mug with me and dad on the third picture is my very dear brother.  Yes, that’s our age difference.  And he was the youngest of the grandchildren in Portugal, before I was born.

And now I’ll take said husband out to breakfast and maybe something fun, before we both buckle under to a very busy day.

 

I’ll have Grant for you hopefully before midnight, but right now I’m working on Guardian, because I need to send the first fifth or so to Larry, before he thinks I’m a total bum.  The autoimmune delayed things REALLY badly.

Better now, though of course my hair is thin and limp and I gained ten lbs so far on the prednisone.  (Yes, most of it is probably water.  Still looks bloody awful.)

The eczema is sort of still there, but just as a rash and a look of a burn, not open sores (a couple, but they’re scabbed) and only one portion (my thighs) itches.  It’s not like someone poured itch powder all over my body. So, I’m mostly okay.  Okay enough to be able to write, at least.

If you must have a Sarah post, have two.  The third should come out today.  And I really want people to see these posts, because what we’re seeing is an actual tragedy unfolding. No, I don’t expect anyone who MATTERS will read me, but who knows?  When you throw a pebble in a pond, the ripples can shock you.  And I very much wish someone with power will read this.  Because this is a tragedy.  A real one.

As in, two in this case groups of people, thinking they’re doing what they must, which will lead to a genocidal result for one of them, and a very bad one for western civ too.  (If we haven’t yet got over WWI you have no idea what exterminating the Islamic world will do to us.  The first time we got serious and fought back the result was the crusades, which led to an entrenching of religious intolerance, which led to the inquisition, which led to the reformation (okay, the reformation started sort of before, but you know what I mean.  Same mentality and reaction.  Some of these aren’t cause and effect, but they are ripples from the same war against Islam.  Back then, of course, we didn’t have the power to eradicate it. But I’m not sure it would have been any better if we could have.  There’s a good chance it would have been much, much worse ) which led to the 100 year war, and which possibly, by reaction led to the heresy known as communism.  I’d prefer we don’t go for a ride on the carousel again.)

How We’re Losing the War to Save The Islamic World Part I: Saving the West

 

Humans are built on a great Ape frame.  Whether you believe a creator fashioned us from the all-too-lumpy clay of reality, infusing us with a bit of His self; whether you believe we climbed, wrung by wrung [intentional] from the frame of great apes, figured out our own mortality and were so scared we invented consciousness to while away the knowledge, the underlying framework to that voice behind the ears is a great ape.

The form imposes certain limitations.  One of them is that great apes are social creatures.  Creatures of the band.  If you throw a baby ape out in the wilderness it will die, not only because it doesn’t have protection, but because it doesn’t have a band.  We need contact and whatever our version of social grooming is.  For many of us, at least in the more intellectual professions, our social grooming is words.

We meet, we talk, we make fun of shared dislikes, we reinforce our likes.  You can observe it in yourself, whenever you connect to one of your groups.  Say you go to a family reunion.  You make fun of aunt Minnie’s fruitcake, you laugh reminiscently at that one time you guys broke Uncle Joe’s apple tree, then tied it together, so the branch would heal attached and painted the rope with your acrylics so it matched the tree trunk.  (Okay, so maybe you don’t do the later.  Yes, my best friend and I did that to her father’s prized apple tree.  It worked.  He didn’t see it.  He didn’t notice the rope until years later.  By then we were both married and moved away, so we never removed the rope, and the rope made an indentation on the tree trunk and the branch. Years later, when I visited, he was cutting the rope off and muttering about some idiot having tied this rope around the tree.  But the branch had healed on, so meh.  And no, I never confessed.)

You both know you dislike aunt Minnie’s fruitcake, you both feel both guilty and amused about the apple tree incident.  It’s a shared bonding.  It’s things that don’t need to be said.  It’s social grooming.

If anything humans are more dependent on this than great apes.  So many of the things that make us stick out and make us part of a group don’t happen in isolation like speaking and walking upright.

It’s important for us to remember this right now.  It’s important for us to remember that many of us “on the right”, (by which I really mean most of us who oppose the progressivism project, even if on any sane axis some of our beliefs are objectively way to the left of the progressives”), have for whatever reason stood outside or been cast from the primate band. So it’s easier for us to oppose a collective narrative, the same way that it’s easier for someone who’s lost a leg to lose the other.  We’ve been there before.  We know the shock and the horror, but we know there’s healing at the end.  We can endure it.  We see the other end of this.

And in a way we have our own tribe online.  Yeah, Odds.  People who stick out, odd square pegs sitting on top of round holes.  We know each other.  We find comfort in each other.

When I was still in the political closet and didn’t even have the louvered doors that brought in some light, I fell into the world of political blogging like a fish into the sea.  I didn’t have my own blog, but under a nom de blog, I spent a lot of time commenting on others (the weird thing is that I found out years after I’d come out that someone did use that name to blog, and I wonder if we were ever confused.)  After a few years I realized I’d gathered a lot of strange friends and favorite blogs.  My favorite blogs were artists who were conservative or libertarian, gay people who were conservative or libertarian, people in the counseling professions who were conservative or libertarian.  I was a devotee of Gay Patriot and Doctor Sanity, for instance.

On the face of it this made no sense.  I’m not gay.  I’m not a psychiatrist.  I am an artist, sort of, but writing always sits very strangely in the arts, and besides I’m not in the least bit what we consider “artsy.”

My link to all these was that these were people that the left claims for whatever reason, but they’d stood aside from the group and shouted, “not me.”  They were self-dyeing pink monkeys facing down all the brown ones, and sometimes mooning them.  I’d found my tribe, and I belonged, which is why the blogs helped so much.

The thing to understand as you face your leftist friends, people you otherwise thought were sane and even intelligent, is that this is all that’s making them go along to get along: they can’t leave the band.  It’s their band.  They love their band. They’re the NORMAL ones.

I think you needed to be fairly crazy, fairly broken — unless you came from a very strongly conservative family with a very charismatic atmosphere — to become a conservative before the internet, to start doubting the consensus of the band, transmitted by the MSM, by education and by the arts, even, all of which had been taken over by the enemy (the current ethos in these fields is directly traceable to Soviet Agit Prop) and weaponized against us.  These fields propagandize our society with the same techniques and fervor used in WWI propaganda.  Not many people dared stand aside from that, and not many dare stand aside of examine this.  The fact that we’re being propagandized against our own society, our own homeland is causing various weird psychological effects and pathologies all over society, but the propaganda is still hard to resist.  We are animals of the band.  Leaving the band is encoded at the back of our minds as death.

Which is why those of us who left the consensus, even before blogs, (which can now slowly chip away at the consensus now, and introduce doubt) were already fractured, broken, or had had the sort of experience that sets one apart from the band.

You know mine. I voluntarily left everything I knew and the society of my birth, WITH THE INTENT OF NEVER RETURNING, and voluntarily acculturated to a very different culture.  On purpose.  With intent and malice.

Okay, to do that, I was already fairly odd.  Maybe it’s the shocks and countershocks of the seventies, the “decade of the revolutions” in Portugal.  Maybe it all goes back further than that, to being a little girl with severe eczema all around her eyes and mouth and neck, which looked like third degree burns until she was eleven or twelve.  My son tells me that such eczema and the recoil it causes in normal humans leaves psychological scars, back from one was too young to even talk. (I’ve always wondered if it’s responsible for my shaky relationship with my mother, a woman who is devoted to beauty by profession, as well as everything else.  The recoil is instinctive.  it can’t be helped.  I myself have issues for instance when the cats become old and ghastly looking.  I control it, but I can’t stop feeling the recoil. )  Judging by how much my social life improved once the eczema went into remission (for about 15 years) I’d say he might be right. Without the eczema I might have been at the cool-girls table.  Eh.

At any rate, those of us who became conservative, or worse, Libertarian (a less well known option) were already pink monkeys, standing outside the band, used to defending ourselves.

You have to remember this when you look at your friends and relatives who are still within what still appears to them to be the consensus.  They’ve never questioned.  They never stood outside the band.  They might have twinges and fears, as the MSM drives them down the path to complete insanity, with their (now) wholly baseless lies. But these are the voices of the group, the voices they always trusted.  They can’t step away.  It’s not a thing of reason, not a thing of logic.  It’s a thing of the ape, of the back brain. You can’t argue with it.  And if you manage to break with it, it feels like dying or going insane.

Note, I’m not saying that we should stop sticking to the truth or arguing with those friends of ours (yeah, I still have some) who are leftists and going along with all this nonsense, and self-panicking into unspeakable acts and words.

No. The truth is the truth and ignoring it, as our friends, our institutions, to an extent our (particularly the leftward) politicians have is DANGEROUS.  The gods of the copybook headings eventually come back to bite your ass.  It is important that the man with one eye in the land of the blind keeps sounding the tocsin and telling everyone the meteor they can’t see is coming and we need to change our ways and protect ourselves.

There have always been people like this throughout history.  Usually they get killed.  Fortunately we’re Americans.

Until the sheer dominance of mass Media America was always more fractured than the rest of the world.  We still are.  We’re more… eccentric.  What appealed to me FIRST about the US when I came here is that you didn’t have to wear CURRENT fashion on penalty of being laughed at, you could make silly jokes, etc.

A friend this morning told me that the American system is unique in generating our own “barbarians.”  Right now the city is rotting, the walls crumbling.  Marxism is non-functional, and we’re the barbarians outside the wall, but we’re barbarians armed with the original American values, a respect for the individual and a principle of equality under the law.  It’s a lovely thing.  If we succeed there will be a renewal.

But don’t think too badly about your friends who can’t see outside the band.  They’ve been indoctrinated by the system, they trust the voices telling them craziness, and at the back of their mind is the fear that leaving the band is dying.

Now, mind you, I am afraid their trajectory and ours means there will be blood.  I won’t elaborate on that.  You know it.

But I’m a believing woman, and what I’m praying for is that something happens, something like the miracle that allowed the Soviet Union to fall without a nuclear exchange.

Most of all, though, don’t judge your friends and relatives on the other side too harshly.  They’ve not become monsters or evil.  They are simply acting according to the back brain, the imperatives of instinct.

It is that back brain that allows madness to overtake the crowds, like the craze for black tulips.  It doesn’t mean people who went all in for black tulips were suddenly stupid or crazy.  It was just the will to belong pushing them.

If you’re a believing person, pray very hard the craze breaks before it comes to blood.

But even while they anger you or annoy you, judge your lefty friends and relatives carefully.  They can’t help it.  We’re all just great apes.  And they’re not as broken as we are.  They’re still the same people they ever were.  Attack their ideas, but forgive them.

Except I REALLY need to get back to my real job.  Yesterday kind of took it out of me, leaving me drained, and exhausted.

There was … stuff before, including a potentially lethal situation for one of the kids (it wasn’t but it looked like it, and I’m proud to say my sons seem to have listened to my stories of living in unstable times, because before I texted the instructions to “Collect your things; get out of there; keep situational awareness on the way out” he was already doing it, and texted back “getting.” before he got to the car and a fuller report.  Turned out the noises were from a police stand off some blocks away, but hey.)  Anyway, so yesterday’s horror just made it all worse, and reading page after page of idiots saying “good” or that it was “self defense” or similar twaddle made me sick with the sort of dull rage that has nowhere to go.

It’s not even the idiot’s fault.  Our media has now just resorted to making things up out of whole cloth, and people who have always been mainstream and trusted the news continue buying it all, wholesale. So they think the world is imploding, or something.  The same media that covered up Obama’s … well, I still don’t know if incompetence of malice, and told them every was wonderful is now panicking them and stampeding them towards a confrontation they’re NOT ready for.

I handled it on PJmedia, here, not that Charlie hasn’t handled it also, several times. He’s linked in my article, too.  They don’t seem to realize America is NOT alone in the world, and that the image of us they’re projecting abroad practically guarantees we’ll be attacked.  They’re making us look ripe for the taking.

And under the spirit of making my PJmedia posts do double duty, I’ve been promising you a deeper discussion of how the whole thing with Sad Puppies was a confrontation between different aesthetics, which the left — blinded by politics — made all about good and evil, maybe you should read this:

In the Kingdom of the Blind Marxist.

It’s important for us to understand the disconnect underlaying every dispute in the arts (and many in the sciences) where the left has lost sight of any other objective than bringing about “progressivism” and “social justice.”  They can’t even understand what we say, anymore.  They think we want to destroy them, not just their flawed, blinkered worldview which turns everything it touches to dross and ashes.

And now I’ll go and work on Guardian, if that’s okay.  See you tomorrow.

 

I got up late today and was going to put up a guest post, because it’s my two blog day, when I blog at MGC.  But today, I wanted to blog because of an experience I had last night which shook me to the core.

So I got up, took my meds (because of the current auto-immune attack, finally subsiding under prednisone, this is a chore, not just the little thyroid pill in the morning) and had two cups of coffee while Dan got ready for work.

Then I sat down to write a throw away post in MGC, only it turned out not so throw a way.  Before embarking on this one which I expected to be a difficult, lengthy post, I got a cup of coffee and went over to Facebook.

In a talk with friends, I heard about representative Scalise, who was shot by James T. Hodgkin, whose page was, last I checked, still on Facebook, full of rumor and conspiracy and crazy about Republicans.  If you haven’t seen the story go here.

I am not a prophet.  I swear I’m not a prophet.  But the vague, cold feeling that has been in my stomach for weeks, which got worse after that “discussion” yesterday has coalesced into a clear fear.  I just posted this on Facebook:

A radical from a fringe group, led by insane rumor and innuendo, has shot someone who is not even the leader of the faction he hates.
Is Rep. Scalise’s middle name Ferdinand?
Listen to me now; stop believing crazy people, even those in the media. Yesterday, in a friend’s post someone called me racist/sexist/homophobic or implied it because apparently I want to “suppress voices” in science fiction. NO ONE who knows me can believe that. This woman knows me. And this was over an aesthetic disagreement in fricking tiny, irrelevant science fiction.
LISTEN TO ME NOW, it’s time to believe your lying eyes and accept that people can disagree with you without being evil. It’s time to investigate all news, even the ones you think confirm you bias. It’s time to wake up.
YOU DON’T WANT TO GO DOWN THIS ROAD. There is nothing for you here. It didn’t turn out well in 1914. It won’t turn out well now.

I’ve collected at least one idiot already, who thinks that saying republicans are evil doesn’t prove my post.  What the actually?  What madness is this?  Can it end but in blood?

So that post yesterday now seems utterly irrelevant but it’s not.  It’s the same madness.  So let me tell you about it.

A friend of mine who has kept his public persona and his blog persona completely separate, made a thread announcing his politics.  I was glad.  You live better when you don’t live a double life.  Most of his liberal friends said something like “and this is news?” and joked.  A piece of fecal matter with mental problems came onto the thread to scream that Republicans are inherently violent.  Our words are violent, because we want to hurt him.  So our words are the same as attacks.  He couldn’t really cite any Republican violence in the last few decades, except by assuming killers of abortionists are “Republican” or that anyone who has ever supported state violence (but protesters were tear gassed!) is Republican.  He didn’t seem to know that, at least in terms of the US, the right is for the REDUCTION of governmental power.  It was like Thunderdumb.  One idiot goes in, none come out.

But there was another commenter who demanded proof that there was any reason to hide our political opinions because proclaiming them might hurt our careers.

I wasn’t the first to give my story.  But I did give it, pointing out that during Sad Puppies things were said about me that NO ONE WHO KNOWS ME CAN BELIEVE.

This is when Rose Beteem, program coordinator for MileHi con came on the thread, to rave incoherently about apparently (it was hard to decipher, honest, it was a spew) my wanting to suppress voices in Science Fiction.  At any rate, there is no bias in SF, none at all.  She said this.

Now, some of you might have noted my home con, my don’t miss con is Liberty con in Chattanooga.  And you might have wondered why in the last five years or so I haven’t been to MileHi.

The funny thing is it’s not for the reasons you think.  I haven’t been to MileHi because I got put in strange panels, my reading was up against the masquerade, fifteen years after breaking in I was still on beginning writers’ panels (and that’s a problem because when I give my list of publications, either the newbies shut up or try to one-up me.  It makes for a bad panel.  Besides the field has changed so much that I don’t KNOW how people should break in.)  I found it tiresome and annoying, and frankly the last five years I’ve either been ill, moving or away from the state at that time.  It sort of dropped unnoticed.  I do Cosine in the Springs and Liberty con.  If other cons in the Denver area invited me, I’d go, as a matter of good will, but I’ll be honest and for real, cons don’t seem to do much for my readership.  Posting at instapundit and the occasional free short story here do.

It wasn’t until I read Rose Beteem’s post it occurred to me that perhaps there had been bias in my panel assignments.  Yeah.  I am that naive.

You see, I don’t judge people by their politics.  I CAN’T.  I grew up in a country where the right-most party was Social Democrat.  I grew up reading Heinlein.  Early on I formed the idea that good people could believe crazy shit, and I fought the ideas, not the people.

Some of my favorite writers growing up were either hard core leftist, or worse, reflexive ones.  I discounted it because I knew in their time socialism was considered “scientific” and hey, which of us doesn’t have illusions.  I still fought their ideas.

This is the first time I have mentioned someone (who hadn’t directly attacked me or called me names) in a post, by name, and it’s done deliberately, because it’s time to name and shame.  And the reason to do that is this: THIS WOMAN KNOWS ME.  She’s known me since I’ve been a young writer, green as grass and completely naive.  She knows or should know that on sight no one can identify me as any race.  She knows or should know not only a lot of my friends, but my characters are gay.  (The thing isn’t entirely under my control.  See madgeniusclub.com today.)  So to think I would WANT to suppress any “voices” is crazy.

But let’s say I had the power?  Which publishing house do I own that can discriminate against those voices?

Goldport press and soon Inkstain?  you got me.  BUT which MAJOR publishing house do I own that can discriminate against those voices?  WHAT MAJOR PUBLISHING HOUSE does anyone to the right of Lenin control?  Baen?  Bah.  Baen is agnostic on politics, not right wing, as anyone who follows the writers on FB knows.

So how can someone who knows me, knows me personally, saw my kids grow up, knows my kids, believe that Sad Puppies was about suppressing women, minorities, or ANYONE?  HOW CAN ANYONE BELIEVE I WANT THAT?  HOW CAN ANYONE BELIEVE I HAVE THE POWER TO DO THAT?

But she’s “heard” you know.  She’s heard through the rumor mill I’m conservative, probably before I even came out as a constitutional libertarian (which is not exactly conservative but never mind) which probably explains leaving me stuck in breaking in writers panels, and the truly horrible hour allocations.  It probably explains why (at least twice) before I came out politically she asked me if I’d now given up on writing.  Because of course, when they told her I was conservative, it was a given I was a bad writer.  (There’s actually logic in this.  And I’ll explain.  Logic from THEIR point of view, not ours.)

And then Sad Puppies happened and she was told (hell, national media was told) it was because we were evil conservatives, bent on suppressing “marginalized” voices.  (If those voices are marginalized, who marginalizes them?  The leftists who own traditional publishing?  Then what does it have to do with those of us who aren’t leftists?)  And she believed it.

Knowing me, knowing how almost disablingly polite I am in person, knowing I am a first generation immigrant with an accent you can cut with a knife, knowing that my race ID on sight depends on how I wear my hair and if I’ve seen the sun the last couple of months, she believed the entire goal of a group I was involved in was marginalizing “the different.”

All mind you, while she marginalized the different in thought.  Because she’d been told she SHOULD.

In fact, I have a different view of how to get “diverse” voices.  Let them flow.  So long as the story is good, I don’t care what any of the writers look like.  I don’t care what their politics are.  I care about the story.  If the politics get in the way of the story, that’s when I stop.

The problem is that the left thinks “good” means “Changes society” and “fights social injustice.”  This is because what they were taught in school (I know, I was too) is Marxist aesthetics.  They juged the story on how Marxist it is.  New Marxism, btw, a thing of academics and protected groups, NOT the lumpen proletariat.  (Which explains the award to If You Were A Dinosaur My Love.)

They are incapable of imagining different aesthetics, because they were TOLD theirs were right.  So if we want different aesthetics — perhaps because from knowing history of literature we know what is read is what survives, and this stuff isn’t being read.) we MUST oppose, not the aesthetics but their INTENTIONS.

And since their intentions, however unsuccessful are GOOD, our intentions are evil.

(Actually, I think we shouldn’t give pity-awards or contracts or anything.  Minorities — trust me, I ARE one — don’t need them.  You can do them more good by treating them as equals.  They’re as capable as anyone else.)

None of this is new, but what shocked me was that this was someone who knew me PERSONALLY. Someone who knew my family and my friends for years.

More importantly, we found out in the ensuing discussion that my friend Charlie Martin, who grew up with Rose Beteem in a small town in Colorado and who was an old friend had been blocked by her on facebook.  This happened with no contact, no fight.  It shocked him.  And the only reason HAS to be because he disagrees politically with her and people tell her those people are EVIL.  Not wrong, not misguided.  They don’t simply have a different opinion.  No, they are evil.

Now, keep in mind this woman while well known to me is not… Um… I’d say her understanding is moderate and average.  Which is what scares me.  Her understanding is average.  And yet she can believe the narrative over her lying eyes.  She can believe somehow the right marginalizes people in SF/F where the right controls pretty much bloody nothing.  Other than Larry who is a bestseller, the SP were midlisters, indies and fans.  That’s it.  Midlisters, indies and fans with a different aesthetic sensibility.  But we were treated like the devil.  AND THEY BELIEVE WE ARE EVIL.

That’s what gave me the cold feeling in my stomach.  The news this morning only solidified it.  Watching what has gone on, and the crazy crap the media is doing with sensational “revelations” that they know are lies, but they never disclaim of if they do do it in small print, so their people never know, is like watching SP all over again.  The people who thought they had all the power and could never be challenged are throwing a vast, ugly, bizarre psychotic tantrum in public.  They’re telling lies about how withdrawing from the Paris accord and refusing to give money to actual polluter nations is going to KILL US ALL.

As in the establishment in science fiction, they’re doing it because they’re sure of their own righteousness and goodness.  They’re doing it because those “stupid” people are challenging them, and how dare they.  They’re doing it because it feels good.

I’d like to say that they don’t know the crazy they’re driving in their fringe, and they don’t understand the harm they could do to people who ONLY disagree with them.

I’d like to say that, but a semi-closeted friend in the arts just posted this in a private group:

My feed is full of “well, they really do deserve our hate, and oh darn, maybe they’ll think before doing those evil things they do”….bullshit.

It’s not just a fringe, and the people at the top know very well what they’re doing.  They might be deluded, because in Marxist exegesis the “oppressed” always win and they THINK they’re the oppressed.  To that extent they might think victory is inevitable.

But I think it’s more of a primal thing: we dared defy them, resistance to the narrative is building on all fronts, and they want blood.  They really want blood.

Remember when I said when they silence dissenting voices, it’s like tamping down a powder barrel?  Well, now they’re running around flicking matches at random around the powder barrel.

Are they capable of stopping and examining their premises and seeing they’re impossible and someone is lying to them?  Or are they too attached to the narrative and being part of the “in group” to think?

On that hinges how ugly this will get.  And what will emerge on the other side.

They’re lost in a fun house of distorted reflections, unable to see the real people they KNOW.

May G-d have mercy on their souls.

 

 

 

So, this is not the worst of times.  It’s not the best of times either.  Oh, sure, there are indications both ways, but neither is the way to bet.

We are better off, have more material wealth and abundance than ever before in the history of humanity.  That by itself is probably setting off all sorts of alarms.  You see, it seems that whatever else we were or are, we are built on the framework of a scavenging ape species. This is sort of like one of those kit cars that help with building a model T on top of a VW structure.  It will look like a model T and it will impress people, but it’s all fiberglass and trickery atop the old VW.

Same thing.  We look like it’s all rational and we’re the thinking/reasoning dominant species in this world (Greebo-cat, at my feet, would laugh if he could laugh) but underneath we still have all the impulses and signals that run at an instinctive level: the ones of the old beast underneath it all.

And the old beast was a scavenger.  Oh, it might or might not have killed its own meat sometimes.  NOTE sometimes.  Most of the time, it would be eating the leavings of lions and hyenas.

If a scavenger hits really GOOD times two things happen: its population explodes; and if it has a brain above the old chassis, it worries.

Why worries?  Well, think about it.  There probably was a glut for the (tiny) scavenging mammals when all the dinosaurs died.  BUT that meant famine was around the corner.

It’s probably that sort of mechanism that seems to make human populations collapse when people stop struggling.  Sensible, in the Savannah.  Annoying now.  But it also gives us the feeling that things are coming unglued, and we’re about to be in big trouble.

Which is okay, because we sort of are.

No, it’s not the worst of times.  Not even politically.  There is a tendency to enshrine the first half of the twentieth century as either a golden age (conservatives) or a fascist hell (leftists.)

It was neither.  But it was no paradise for lovers of liberty.  I read about the persecutions and purges of people who were three generations removed from Germany.  I read of instigator corps disseminated among the population by luminaries like Woodrow Wilson.  I read of lynchings and of people spying on people with a fervor worthy of the communist republics.

On the other hand, yes, we could build big things.  If we lifted the regulations that cripple us we could build them now too, probably bigger and better and done by private business.

The regulations, and the people screaming for more of them are a manifestation of the scavenger’s fear, too.  Oh, sure, they’re a manifestation of a greed for power in some, but the reason they get away with them is that the rest of the people are scared.  The hind brain is reading that something wicked this way comes, and the regulations are an attempt to slow change, to keep things static, to be safe “until I run out the clock.”  I’ve heard this phrase from a number of boomers.

It’s nonsense, of course.  You can’t stop the clock.  You can go too fast or you can die.  And it’s easier to go too fast, because when you close avenues of development with regulation, other avenues open, unexpected.  Statists more or less closed the avenue of space, perhaps having realized it would be harder to control all of humanity?  Or perhaps out of an atavistic desire to stop everything that scares them.  Who knows?  It doesn’t matter.  They closed that, and the engineers slipped away into cyberspace, which has had side effects like destroying the big narrative of mass media, which the left had spent a century positioning to control completely.  Evil will oft evil mar and all that.

But it’s not the worst of times, no matter what your back brain is telling you.  There have been much worse ones.  And there will be again, more the pity.

Lately a lot of people including some of my friends have been posting some variation of “Do you want a civil war? Because that’s how you get a civil war.”

It is of course nonsense.  We’ve been in a civil war my whole life.  A cold civil war, between the forces of Western civilization and the enemy (encouraged, if not started by the now defunct Soviet Union) within.  And the forces of freedom have been losing badly.  Until about 15 years ago or so, when we started fighting back.  Not in the political realm, or not effectively enough yet, but increasingly so.  Mostly we were fighting back in the news, the perception, the culture realm.  Which is where we had to start.  Politics comes after.  About 25 years after, because it needs awareness of who we are, and some form of organization (yes, even for individualists.)

The good news — ah! — is that the same thing that is making you nervous, the fast technological change, is also on our side.  Why on our side?  Because we’re the ones who thought ourselves to dissidence in the days of the single, unified narrative blared by news, movies, novels, art.  We have resources to navigate with imperfect, incomplete information, and arrive somewhere sane.

These times of fast change are worse for those who simply memorized/swallowed a narrative.  They want someone to tell them what to do.  They are having a visible, audible, scary breakdown in front of the world and everyone.

Which makes them and the world very dangerous right now.  People who are that desperate to be ruled will find a ruler.  And they’ll try to take us with them.

I didn’t realize how stupid things had got until I hit weather.com last night, and they had a thing about how by leaving the Paris accord Trump had endangered his own properties.

Let’s count the insanity, shall we?

1- I’d come there to look up when it would be cool enough to open my office window.

2- I’m used to the clickbait, but politics, right there, in the front page.  Ooh boy, someone was very sure all their users agree with them and that — wow — everyone will buy this narrative.

3- I don’t buy the narrative.  You see, I have looked into the Paris accord.  It really has nothing to do with stopping carbon emissions — even if carbon were proven to be causing global warming, which it isn’t. Chances are it’s a trailing indicator — because it if it did, it would have to impose limits on China and India.  All it is is a way of transferring money from the West — mostly the US — to China and India, which will of course, be used in more “dirty” development, which if ANTHROPOCENTRIC global warming were a thing, would just back us faster. (Is it a thing?  I don’t know. The data is corrupted, the researchers are corrupted, the programs don’t even predict what already happened, and the whole mess needs to be swept away and investigated by someone whose only solution to EVERY problem isn’t “Socialism!”

4- Even if the Paris accord had actually done anything about global warming, even if global warming were a danger (humans usually do well in warm periods, but there’s indications we’re just in a long break on an ice age.  If you page back, you’ll see a post by Stephanie Osborn explaining what is going on with the sun and the likelihood things are about to get a whole lot cooler.)it would take a LONG time for any coastal cities to be underwater.  To melt all of Greenland’s ice, my friend Charlie Martin, estimated somewhere around 6500 years. This means that for Trump’s properties to be affected, they must still be around in 6500 years.  And for him to be affected by his properties being under water, Trump must be immortal.

To put this in perspective, it’s quite likely at least one and (because there weren’t that many people in the world then, you’re probably descended from the same few over and more) probably more of your ancestors were scratching the dirt of the fertile crescent 6500 years ago for a meager living.

Yeah, it is “ironic” that Trump just arranged for “his properties” to be underwater 6500 years from now.  All hail Donald Trump, Immortal! (Maybe it is the worst of times.  We’re living in a bad sci fi flic.)

5- Weather.com, an enterprise run by the weather channel is a multi-million dollar thing, an investment, a company presumably run by SOME adults.

But they not only thought it was okay to splash cockamamie political propaganda on their front page, never considering some of their users might know better/just disagree, but they think we’re ALL SO STUPID they can do some photoshop and we’ll buy this crap lock, stock and barrel.

…  Which is why I realized the people saying the cold civil war will go hot are right… in part.

Remember, months ago, when I told you that the left thought they couldn’t lose the election?  Because their way is the “future” and history comes with an arrow and moves only in one direction?

To be fair, this is human, not just leftist.  We all impose a narrative on chaos, so we can predict the future.  It’s often imperfect, but also somewhat useful.  For instance, if you know communism in all its forms has killed 100 million people, it’s stupid to try it again, this time with more eggs broken.  There is still no proof it can make an omelet.

It is however a good thing to keep a flexible mind about it.  What happened before, and what we can extrapolate is a guide.  History is not predictable, malgre the various dreams of the various science fiction writers in the middle of the last century.  It’s influence by humans and how they react to their environment, and humans are deplorably — eh — unpredictable.

The problem is the left has bought into Marxism and its pseudo-scientific lies.  And the system despite many past failures to predict anything, purports to predict our emergence into a paradisaical “perfect communist state”.  Everything, from leftist “science” to leftist “art” (that is to say the establishment versions of those, since our establishment is solid left) is designed to hasten the coming of that ah, eschatological result. According to Marxist/leftist/progressive exegesis, of course.

But the predictive powers of that system are somewhat less reliable than Michael Mann’s cooked up hokey stick, which fails to predict the weather now, fed data from the eighties.

So they were sucker punched by the election.  Inf act, they’ve been sucker punched by a whole lot of things the last ten years.  Mostly the fact people are exiting their modes of information/propaganda at speed and forming a different picture of the world than that fed to them by the industrial education-entertainment-arts-“scientific” complex.

Because their minds were not trained in flexibility and they’re something of a cult, they are having a nervous breakdown.

In cults, this usually ends up in koolaid.  In nations, too, when a paradigm (yes, sorry, but it’s the right word) breaks in a way perceived as sudden.

So– is the cold civil war about to be hot?

Um… Stasis has an inertia of its own.  And our populations are too emulsified for something like the ACW.  If what you’re visualizing is armies taking the field and shooting at each other, this is unlikely at least for the next 20 years or so.  Why?  Because it would take the two sides in the ideological and conceptual civil war separating first.

The bad sign is that this is happening.  Or the good sign.  Depends on how you look at it, okay?  For decades, we who didn’t sing the choir chafed at the narrative or parts of it, but there was only one source for news and entertainment (yes, I know, many publishers, many channels.  BUT the differences in their POV were negligible.)

There were (there still are) penalties for not endorsing the “reality of consensus” which was leftist.  You didn’t get HEARD.  If you deviated you were boycotted.  This didn’t create consensus, but it created the APPEARANCE of consensus.

Now you can get heard, at a lower level, but heard.  And people are listening.  This means instead of the left just boycotting the right, it’s now mutual.  (For instance, I’m using Wunderground.com) Which means, given twenty or thirty years, it’s possible we’ll largely separate into two mutually hostile groups.  It’s even possible we’ll slowly separate geographically.  I’m one of those odd libertarians who loves big cities.  I have conservative and libertarian friends in the heart of the big coastal cities.  But in the last five years, they’ve started saying things like “My time here is coming to an end.” And “I’m getting tired of living in enemy territory.”

Will that happen?

My gut instinct is to say no.  The true-believers are not… Um… how to put this?  I don’t think they can survive on their own, unattended.  I don’t think they’re a long-term viable movement.  A friend once told me “the left screams their defiance loudest when they’re dying.”  And I think he’s right.  I think their collapse will be sudden and shocking like the fall of the Berlin wall.

So, everything is clear?  Everything fine ahead?

Ah, I didn’t say that.  When — at a guess, and for true believers, not the dupes, unthinking endorsers and people to young to have shed educational indoctrination — one quarter of the population goes stark raving nutters, like disappointed cult members when their prophet fails to take them to paradise, we’re in for — at best — very choppy water.

And the left for all their mealy mouthed talk of peace, has ALWAYS been startlingly and unrepentantly violent.

So, will there be a civil war?

This is a very big country.  Conditions are very different in different states, cities, locales.

There will be… a distributed heating up of the cold civil war.  In spots.  This is tricky business, as, for instance, the unrest of the last five years has touched me not at all, despite living (now) in a fairly large city.  OTOH I missed some unrest, once, because we went to a museum a different day than we’d originally planned.  (No real reason, we were just not feeling it that day.)

We’re in for a more noisy, larger version of the unrest I grew up through, where in a normal day, on the way to school, I’d turn the corner and find myself in the midst of a pitched street battle.

Keep your eyes open.  Keep your powder dry.  Stay armed in any way you can stay armed.  If by occupation, place of residence, whatever, you can’t carry, make sure you have something you can use to defend yourself.  Be imaginative.  An ornamental walking stick can be a mace with the appropriate weighting.  So can an umbrella.

Get in as good a shape as you can.  Sometimes your feet are your best defense.  No, I don’t mean kicking, though I did my share of that, but running away when outnumbered or outgunned.  There is no shame in escaping to fight another day.

Most of all, stay alert, and do not buckle.

This too shall pass, and we’re more likely to adapt to the place tech is taking us, and to emerge victorious in the end.  Freedom is always more adaptable, and therefore, in the end, more survival enhancing.

This is not the best of times, but it is not the worst of times.  And though doubtless there is an ending in the future, it is nowhere in sight.

Be not afraid.

 

 

You could say I have a contrary disposition.  You could also say water is wet.

My brother who is almost ten years older than I, loved to tease me.  When I started taking languages and literature and emerged as one of the better students and therefore likely to have a career in diplomacy, he once spent a summer night making up a mock-newspaper of my adventures 20 years in the future, when I’d have been declared persona non grata in most of the world’s countries, and sometimes offered money to go away.

It was funny.  What it wasn’t, by then, was really true.

You see, I’ve always had a contrary disposition, and will stick like a Spanish mule, and put my four hooves down as if set in cement, if you try to push me – personally – in any direction.

But by the time he did that I was in college.  And I wasn’t stupid.  At least not stupid in the social-reading sense.

I knew where the power was, even if all the Marxists who wielded power at every institution of learning insisted they were the underdog.  I’d learned in high school that I had to toe the political line or be punished.

And I’m an introvert.  I don’t like scenes.

And I’m human.  I want to be liked and accepted by the group, at least superficially.

And then there was the fact that I thought I’d spend the rest of my life in Portugal where, as a young man from there said on FB yesterday “There are only different kinds of socialists.”  So, there was no point being the voice that cries in the desert.  We remember what happened to such voices, right?

So I went along to go along, and yes, I’m smart enough to pretend.  Also, I’ll be honest, their ideology is a very simple lens.  It’s easy to fake.

I don’t know what changed or when.  I would think it was 9/11, but before that I’d become a fire eating, don’t tread on me Libertarian, the kind who thinks we really can get along without any government.

It was, you know, that a lot of my assumptions about the things the Leftists were right on had started collapsing as I read and understood more: the dangers of overpopulation; ecological disaster looming; the problems of child labor in developing countries.

I’d started reading Sowell on economics, and suddenly it made sense as Marxist economics never did.  And then someone, maybe for a prank, sent me a subscription to Reason then under Virginia Postrel’s editorship.  I fell headlong into “everything the Marxists ever taught me was wrong”  — which is true – but went all the way to the other side of no borders and no government.

I came back with a shock on 9/11.  I think my mind was already laboring at it, because my story Traveling, Traveling is about the dangers of bringing disparate cultures together too fast, and about the fact some people will want their isolation and kill to maintain it.

I still stayed quiet in my public life.  Well, quiet on politics, that is.  Through my thirties and forties, I kept my mouth zipped.  I even tried to pretend. And heaven help me, I must have been very bad at it.

Call it being out of practice in pretending, since in the years of working towards publication I only had to please myself.  I must have been better in Portugal.  Or maybe in Portugal they weren’t on the constant lookout for heresy as progressives have been here, in the last ten years, when their monopoly on information got threatened.

It became obvious, from whispers caught (and my kids heard more, and of course told me.  My kids being darker than I, most people didn’t realize they were mine.  And Kate also heard things) that my career was being curtailed anyway.  They weren’t SURE so I’d be allowed to keep working at a low level, and they watched me all the time.  But I was given no opportunities (hell, I wasn’t allowed to have even chance opportunities) for career advancement just in case I was evil and “conservative” (which in this context means “to the right of Lenin.”)

I still couldn’t come out of the closet and continue being employed.  I did consider just quitting, but Dan asked me to hold on another year.  And besides, the other house ate money by the handfuls, which means though Dan makes enough to support us, the house would suddenly swallow 14 or 15k because a kid fell in the shower and supported himself on the tiled wall.  (Which is when we found out the idiots who flipped the house before we bought it hadn’t put green board behind.  That was…. Er… fun.  When we were done rebuilding walls and putting in mold abatement, my entire earnings for that year had gone to it and taxes.)

So.  I kept my trap zipped and continued working.  I didn’t want to be persona non grata.

I still don’t want to be persona non-grata.  I only started talking about politics, because my (then) agent told me I had to blog every day.  And it’s impossible to blog every day without writing about what matters to you, which – given that I have this wound from the cold war, and it only hurts when I laugh – sooner or later the anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-Marxism, anti-statism would come pouring out like vitriol.  It just would.

And you’d think in the USA in the twenty first century being against those things would not make you persona non grata.  Except of course it does.

Just the other day there was another announcement for a new magazine for marginalized voices: women, people of color, people of different sexual orientations. And my head kind of twisted.  If they’re marginalized, that means most publishing slots are for conservative white males, right?  This idiot actually went out of her way to say she was opposing the Sad Puppies and promoting marginalized voices.

Will one of you tell me what major publishing house we control?  Baen books is just agnostic on politics, certainly not a “right wing house” and even if it were, it’s not one of the big four.  So, what other major publishing house runs itself by the principles of Sad Puppies?  Much less the principles the idiots think Sad Puppies followed?

And if we’re not in control of any major house, any magazine, why are these people they want to make a new magazine for “marginalized”?  WHO “marginalizes” them?  H*ll most of the editors, publishers and writers in my field seem to be women. It reminds me of being in an all girls’ school in middle school.  And H*ll, if you throw in romance, women vastly outnumber men in all publishing.  As for race, you know, there was never a time ANYONE asked me to state my race or paintchip color (Home depot Spun Gold, thank you) on a submission.  And no one can hear my accent in writing.  So if I was discriminated against, it wasn’t race!

In the end it was this, the screaming like you’re hurt while hitting other people: the active marginalization of conservatives and libertarians and even traditional democrats (even Hamilton would be read out of the current Democratic Party, I think.  And the man was a monarchist who believed in a powerful central government) while screaming that the leftists, communists, socialists and assorted proponents of the ideas that killed 100 million people were the downtrodden ones that sent me running out of the political closet.

Do I like it?  Not much.

The visions of myself, refracted, like mirrors, go echoing through the net.  On the right I get called a happy warrior.  On the left I get called crazier names, including “politically insane.”  Or “fascist.”  Or of course, the old standby “racist, sexist, homophobic” because I refuse to bow to their aesthetics of “good art is that done in the service of the eventual Marxist state.”  (Most of them don’t even remember how that came about, but yeah, that’s it.)

And even those on our side sometimes say you know, I talk too much, I talk too loudly.

I know it loses me readership.  Several people on the left were fans of Darkships before they found out my real politics.

And I never wanted to be persona non grata, whatever Alvarim thought.

But what else can I do?  The more we stay silent and let lies go around the world again and again and again, the greater the chance Western Civ dies.

And for all its faults, western civ, the notion of individual liberty, the power of only semi-fettered markets, have lifted more humans out of poverty than ever before.  They have almost eliminated famines not caused by bloody stupid kleptocracies. They’ve proven the best for avoiding those dystopian outcomes: overpopulation, pollution, famine.

I know which world I want my children and grandchildren to live in.

And if I must be persona non grata, so be it.  I’m human. Like all humans I want to be liked, to belong, to be accepted in the dominant culture of my time.  But when the dominant culture of my time is a poisonous and undermining lie, there are more important things than being liked.  There are more important things than personal success.

At another time, in another place, I’d have stayed quiet in my library, writing my fiction.

But this is not another time.  And we’re not given a choice.

I’m not a happy warrior.  I fight because I must.

Because everything I believe in depends on it.