So yesterday, for those who haven’t dug through the comments, we suffered an infestation of the troll who speaks in single sentences, doesn’t make much sense, avoids answering questions, misreads everything you said, and responds with unearned superiority.  Oh, yeah, and hails from Boston.  I know, until that last you thought it was a normal troll.  But it’s not.  He distills the essence of trolldom to such an art form it’s like playing chess with a pigeon.

He’s now gone, but his opening gambit was actually interesting.  Should you compromise your principles to stand with your homeland when it is at war?

Now, that’s not how he put it, or what he meant, and when he said he’s loyal to “principles” not a country, it makes me wish very much he’d immigrate to Venezuela already, where his principles are in obvious display.

But are we loyal to the USA or the constitution?  For which would you fight?  Does the land mean anything.

Sigh.

Different order problems.  Yes, I’m a constitutionalist and the Earth and Sky shall pass away before they dim a single letter or punctuation mark of that immortal document.

And of course I will fight for the Constitution.  I took an oath and meant it, and I do keep it.  Part of what this blog and the inevitable hit on my career are all about.  I fight for constitutional principles where it matters: in the land that is already supposed to be devoted to it.

Even there I compromise — more on that later — because politics and culture is not a “I shout the truth and you believe it” but a give and take, a slow turning.  It’s more akin to sailing in a storm than to a race to the finish.

But once you bring in “war against another country” you are in a wholly different territory.

I’ve told you before, and it’s my perennial fear, our internal divisions which are amplified by the fifth column press might encourage a foreign power to attack us.  And that’s a problem.  If it were just us in the world, sure a civil war might be a fine idea to clear forever some of the crud that has crept into the national gears.  (It’s not a fine idea, but never mind that, it might be DOABLE and the result better than worse.)  But the problem is that a continent-sized nation though we are, we are not alone in the world.  If we start going at each other, other nations will start going at us, breaking us up, partitioning us off, and the end result is more likely to be the disappearance of anything vaguely “USA-like” or even capable of bringing back the constitution.  For centuries.

But surely, you say, if our internal regime is utterly despicable, it still behooves us to work for the enemy, right?

I don’t know.  Note the best known case of resistance to the Nazis was not internal, but a country that had been OCCUPIED by another country, and even there I have read that the only effective parts of the resistance were the communists, who were effectively working for yet another foreign power.

BTW if you read first hand accounts in occupied France the “dance with the devil” aspects of survival become very stark, from those who saw the occupation as a means of advancement to those willing to do the most soul crushing things just to keep their loved ones alive another day.

And in the end, whether to support your country “right or wrong” boils down to that.  Those of us who read history know what happens to occupied countries.  It’s not a fate we want for our relatives, friends, or even, frankly, casual acquaintances.

In the US add to that “which polity can I possibly bring about to the founding principles after the storm passes.”

So, say Hillary had won.  By now we’d probably be thinking of Obama’s years as that golden age of respect for civil liberties.  Now imagine that her normal fine-tuned sense of politics got Russia or China to attack.  Nuke a few cities.  Perhaps land troops or get cat’s paws to.

Would you fight for the US in those circumstances?

Look, it’s not even a question.  Hillary as a leader would be utterly despicable, and her rule would probably destroy what remains of the constitution.  But the enemy is equally despicable.  And besides, it would be coming in as a victor.

Okay, okay, so what about if the enemy was semi decent?  Posit a weird universe in which we’re invaded by England.

Uh… still no question.  We won’t go into the fact that the things we object to in the US are more so with boots on in England, from restrictions on free speech to the disarming of the populace.  Instead, let’s just keep in mind even decent nations behave very badly as victors.  And most of us have people we care for, whom we’d not see killed or worse.  Also, most of us want the US kept as a territory where the constitution can be brought back.

So the order of business would be: fight for my country, THEN reform it.  Because trying to reform it in the middle of an existential struggle would be death for the nation, and bringing a nation back from the dead — in the only case we know — takes thousands of years.

But Sarah, you’ll say, this started out as being over Von Braun’s decision to fight for Germany even though his father at least loathed Hitler.  Surely a regime under which they fed people a paste made of cellulose and old clothes as a way to test what people could live from (and killed 98% of the people fed this) not to mention a regime that killed six million of its citizens cannot be something you fight for AGAINST ANYONE.

Uh… True on the regime, except that amid the allies was good old uncle Joe — and talk about making a deal with the devil there — who went on to kill 40 million of his people and whose engineered famine engendered families swapping children FOR EATING in the 20th century.  I’ll note here in passing that Von Braun’s family land was in the East, the part everyone pretty much knew would go to the USSR’s sphere of influence if not outright occupation.

And then there’s being there, at that time, and not having the advantage of hindsight.  One thing it’s obvious from his correspondence was that Von Braun was half in love with America from reading YA adventure stories about it.  But if you’re in the middle of a war and you know your side is despicable, no matter how inclined you are to believe/welcome the invaders, when you realize these countries you THOUGHT you liked, like the US and England, are allied with the horror that is the USSR which is as bad as the regime in your country, but foreign and disposed to hate you (particularly if you’re a nobleman) well… how are you going to fall?

Again, I’m not defending Von Braun’s choices.  I’m not sure he, himself, would, in later life.  I’m just saying his choices were all too human and necessitate neither a grand plot or psychopathy to explain.

Which brings me to what I said above about fighting to bring the constitution back but compromising, even when you hate to.

Look, you’re never given a choice of cake or death.  Choices in life tend to be more “small pox or black plague” particularly in the political realm, for a libertarian.

And then you go “Small pox might not be easily curable, and it might spread from me to the entire area.  Black plague, if they put you on an IV drip is trivial to beat.”

Or as I said “this is how I ended up attending a demonstration in support of the socialists in Portugal.”  I knew what the socialists were.  “On the way to communism” seemed to be their motto “just slower” and I was not under the illusion their leader was anything but a power hungry moron.  HOWEVER they were the most freedom-minded party available while the state was dominated by straight up Maoists.  It was a matter of “surviving to fight another day.”

Which must stand as my excuse for voting for the loathsome McCain.  Because I knew the disaster Obama would be.  (And for those who say he wasn’t, I”ll be surprised if his so called foreign policy doesn’t get us bombed, and I suspect most of us will die of his messing with the health system because it’s so embuggred that no rationality can be restored for decades.)

Sometimes it’s all about preserving as much of the republic as we can, while we fight the culture war and try to bring our country back to the constitution.

Do those choices stain the soul?  Possibly.  I’m just hoping we’re graded on a curve, otherwise which of us will escape a whipping?

While I would prefer the choice between cake and death, because it’s easy, that is not how life works.

And while I would prefer to fight for our principles in splendid isolation, that’s not how the WORLD works.

In the end, all the other sides get a vote, and sometimes the best we can do is fight a rearguard action and not give way.

And sometimes, it’s enough.

 

 

*I DID catch a cold at TVIW, though to be fair I blame the bizarre airplane stuff on the way back which meant no regular meals, no regular thyroid-pill taking, and “fun” temperature variations.  Anyway, I’m much better today and I have a ton to do, and hey, this post seems interesting (and I have no memory of writing it.) – SAH*

An Affair of Honor a blast from the past from April 24 2012

Lately I’ve been thinking about honor.  Maybe because I spent the last couple of months mulling over the musketeers.  Maybe because I’ve gone back to a regency-reading jag as I work on things as far from regency as possible.

Honor has got a bad rep lately.  It’s been dragged through the mud, and its garments are draggled.  Association of its names with such egregious ideas as “honor killings” has done it no good.

It’s particularly unjust since honor killings are more shame-killings.  I grew up in a culture that still shows a lot of Arab influence, (well, they were there almost as long as the Romans, you know?) and I almost understand honor killings – if I squint and look sideways.  I was, after all, raised in a village (so like Miss Marple I’ve seen all there is to see of human wickedness.)  Of course Portuguese – at least civilized ones – don’t honor-kill their daughters.  But we had a case in the village where a father shaved his daughter’s head because she was talking to a strange boy.  And even with my family’s rather odd behavior, since we were all readers and a fair number of us engaged in creative work, I came across that “how could you talk to him when you were alone in the house?  What will people think?  You have shamed us all.”  I came across it more than once, because I have trouble wrapping my mind across the nonsensical.  And to me – particularly when this started, when I was about eight – seeing a little friend who happened to be a boy was no different from seeing a little friend who happened to be a girl.

But the overwrought minds of village spinsters and old women looked at this the way “enlightened” militant “feminists” do.  Like the one who accused my nine year old of sexual harassment for touching a girl’s behind while trying to get her attention.  (He didn’t fondle her.  He reached through a crowd and poked her, to ask if she wanted to play a space exploration game.)  If you’re a male you have lust and evil on your mind, and any woman allowing you near has lost her virtue.  (They must live MUCH more interesting lives than I do.)

Anyway, honor viewed that way is more what the public thinks of you and what you allow the public to know.  You can lose your honor through all sorts of stupid things that have nothing to do with what is in your heart and mind.  You can be “disgraced” the way a regency maiden was disgraced because she tripped in public and fell across a gentleman, and didn’t immediately faint or whatever.  (Well, at least in regency romances.  I believe true society had more leniency.  I mean, even in the village, even with my eccentric behavior and the fact I wore shorts outside the house – oh, the humanity! – only half the people considered me a slut.)

We find this in Shakespeare too.  “I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.”

This type of honor is fun, of course.  Well, fun to write about.  It allows you to get your characters in all sorts of nonsensical situations.  It is a good stand by for making your character marry someone she hates, for instance.  Or for making your male character fight a stupid duel.  Since we sometimes require non-brain-damaged characters to act like idiots, this type of honor can be a good tool.

BUT…

But the honor I want to talk about isn’t that.

It’s not the external, being paid homage, being rendered honor.  It’s the internal honor, in the secret of your heart, in the center of your being.

To explain it: we all live our lives by certain principles.  Yes, even those you think have no principles have stuff they live by, even if it’s just “look out for number one.”

This is very obvious in fiction, because, of course, the characters live only on the page, and their characteristics stand in obvious relief.  Characters live by some principles.  Athena’s in Darkship Thieves, for the longest time, is “survive” but she does have others, which come to the fore when tested.  Things like “I will not return kindness with evil.”  And of course “I will not abandon those who looked after me.”  (Kit.)  This is even more true of Kyrie in the shifter books, whose internal principle is “look after those who can’t look after themselves.  Not because they’re good, or deserve looking after, but because they can’t.”

(Writers live by some principles, too.  For instance, my refusing to write an autobiography, in which I’d have to tell a lot of lies to protect OTHER PEOPLE’s secrets might have cost me promo and a “dahling of literary establishment” career, but it was my internal principle NOT to step on family and friends on the way to success.  To do it would have broken me, and made it impossible for me to be me.  Break that barrier, and nothing stands between me and shooting people who annoy me.  Me as me stops existing.)

Here’s the thing – it’s not that you can’t have a character break one of their inner principles.  You can, but then all hell should break lose internally as well as externally.  And that type of principle, inner principle, can only be broken if it’s either only partially broken, or if it’s something the character can convince him/herself is an exception.  Say, Kyrie COULD leave someone to starve in the dark.  BUT that person had better be a danger to the other people she feels she must protect.  (And even then, frankly, she’d be more likely to kill them cleanly.)

The reason I’m bringing this up is victimhood.  In this case the treatment of victimhood in books.  What do I mean by that?

When you lose sense of an internal honor, a moral code, a guiding principle, you tend to misunderstand things like Kyrie’s animating period of “look after those who can’t,” which is one of the animating principles of western civilization.  Instead of its being “look after those who can’t, because you owe it to yourself as a human being” you see it as “look after those who can’t because… victims are special.”

I’m getting very tired of seeing this in books written in the last thirty years or so.  People who are downtrodden are some sort of saints – magical, not really human.  They don’t need anything else to make them magnificent – just that someone be mean to them.  The meaner someone is, the more “saintly” the character is treated as – even if the reader can tell he or she is in fact the twit of the universe.

Let me make it clear for those of you short on understanding: the reason Cinderella deserved the prince was NOT because her step sisters were mean to her, but because she was beautiful and sweet.  The sisters are on their own course and earn their own doom.  HER job was to keep her internal honor, and it is that which earns her the prince.  (And please let’s not argue about older versions, okay – I’m talking about it as it’s known.)

Harry Potter is not the main character because he was mistreated, but because he was the boy who lived.  The mistreatment which reaches almost comic proportions is an (effective) attention getting device, but it is not how Harry Potter earns his position in the world.

If your character is repulsive or totally amorphous, that will show through the victimhood, and make the reader – this reader at least – gag.  More than that, while you might make us root for the underdog – it’s almost a reflex – if the underdog doesn’t prove himself, and is always and perpetually the victim, the story becomes an exercise in sado masochism, and will give off a “sick” feeling.  You will also be contributing to moral confusion that is already too prevalent.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t torture your character (look, if you read the beginning of A Few Good Men) you’ll understand why that’s funny coming from me.

I’m saying you should still develop your character after that and make him/her grow.  Or of course, make him a terrible person, if he/she is the villain.  I mean, why can’t a victim be the villain?  Sometimes the poor bastard in the dungeons DID do enough to deserve it.  (Er… not in AFGM, by and large.  Oh, there’s stuff never talked about but visible between the lines that probably would have earned him a spanking, but not dungeons.  THAT was real politik at work, I think.)  Or perhaps he’s still a twit who needs to grow out of what took him there.  Even if punishment was excessive.

I’m tired of the idea that victim = virtue.  We’re starting to see it seep into politics with the idea that groups who have been excluded have some sort of extra special specialness.  You know that isn’t true.  They’re human.  We’re all human.  I do not approve of people being excluded or looked down on for color of skin or other irrelevant traits, (or even relevant.  There’s more to character than intelligence, for instance) but I also don’t approve of their being sanctified because they were excluded and/or victimized.

“But I was put down” is not a claim to heroism.  “But I was put down and achieved something nonetheless” IS.

So, in the end, it’s the internal honor that counts – at least for me, and by and large in life – and what the old biddies in the village think… not so much.  And if the biddies are the readers in the global village, enough of them will get disgusted with the idea that victim means virtuous.  Also, you’ll be contributing to insanity in society at large.

Make your characters (and as much as you can, yourself) persons (worthy of) honor.  We’ll all win by it.

As you guys know I’ve been reading about von Braun.  Mostly I’ve been reading about Von Braun because I visited Huntsville for TVIW and got curious.  Before that all I’d heard bout him, as a person, was, dropped in a conversation “I figure he was a true psychopath who didn’t care, so long as he got to space.”

After reading four biographies (two for, two against) I regret to tell you that I’m not sure that was true.

I come neither to bury Von Braun not to praise him.  I doubt if he knew, in himself, if he was a villain or a hero.  And I doubt he was a psychopath.  The reason I doubt he was the later is that he didn’t take to a totalitarian regime like a duck to water.  Instead he tried to compromise his soul a little at a time, a vestige of humanity and decency obviously holding him back.

If a man of his intelligence, not to mention charisma, had wanted, he could have been in the “high councils” of the oligarchs, but mostly he seemed to do the minimum necessary to a) not get killed and b) keep the rocket program going.  And before you say the rocket program hurt the allies, he himself admitted “When a country is at war, a man wants his country to win, even if he hates the regime.”  And before you poo poo that, remember that a country is not land or borders. It’s your family, your friends, the places you love.  He also admitted he didn’t feel bad about bombing London because the allies had destroyed Berlin, a city he loved.  All these responses are very human and very normal.  Flawed, painful, morally tarnished, maybe, but human.

I’ll confess my bias up front.  One of the “against” bios (the other just kept repeating “Nazi, so bad.” which is senseless) was specious enough to make me want to come to his defense.  Among other things they quoted his words about milking the golden cow in a context that made it sound like it was about the US.  It wasn’t.  It wasn’t about Hitler’s Germany either.  It was about the Weimar Republic, for whom Von Braun had started the rocket program.

Also, they narrated hearsay about the Americans not treating them well enough “overheard by his driver who didn’t talk about it for 60 years” and then talked to the Nation which might as well be the organ of CPUSA.  I’m here to tell you that criticizing your host country is the first phase of every acculturation/immigration.  I saw it with my fellow exchange students, who were here by choice and who suddenly talked about how much better it was back home.  It’s a group bonding exercise in unstable circumstances.  It means nothing.  (No, I didn’t do it, but I’m fairly weird.)

These things predisposed me to “like” him, but the pro bios were also a little weird.  I find it mendatious to say that the Von Braun attached to Mittelwerk — the labor camp attached to Dachau — must have been his brother.  Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but suggesting it as an excuse is a little goofy since Magnus Von Braun was also imported to the US.

And the “he was a loving father and a good neighbor” doesn’t cut it either.  Because, you know, here’s the thing, Pratchett had it absolutely right when the torturer has a coffee mug with the saying “World’s Best Dad.”

So on the character of Von Braun I’m going to say “I don’t know” and in fact, I doubt he did.

The thing that none of the bios seem to take into account is the corrupting power of a tyrannical regime.  This applies with boots on to things like Fascism and Communism but it applies to minor tyrannical regimes too, where behavior you consider unethical is required of you in order to get something you want/need.

Dave Freer commented on the Harvey Weinstein case here — Wiles —and said we writers do things like that too, though usually not sexual (and if you met the average writer you know why.)  He is right.  We’ll get back to that later, just keep in mind that like the Hugos are the Oscars for ugly people so is the book business Hollywood for ugly people.  We’re not (usually, though I’ve had attempts, when I was much younger) required to put out, but we betray ourselves and sell our souls in myriad other ways.

Did Von Braun know that people were being worked to death to build his rockets?  Impossible not to.  Look, guys, seriously, I suspect even the uninvolved unconcerned Germans knew about the Holocaust.  Could he/they do anything about it?

What precisely?

The movies make it seem like everyone rises up at once and overturns a dictatorial regime.  That is not the way real revolutions work.  Time and again, we’ve seen that it’s when a regime softens that it’s overturned.  Before that, attempting an overturn is suicide and often death to all your family and friends too.

He’d started building rockets under Weimar.  He’d come to the Nazis attention.  After that, he’d continue building rockets and like it, and do what he had to do to keep himself and his family alive and well.

One of the biographies claims he tried to/got some prominent scientists out of concentration camps to “help” and live with them and eat what they ate in an attempt to save them.  I haven’t tracked this down to verify, though at least one (French) professor claimed after the war that he was offered just such a position, in an attempt to better his lot.  This professor refused because he didn’t want to aid the Nazi war effort.

In the same way Von Braun was arrested (and let out on probation) twice, for saying that rockets built by slave labor would be defective.

On the other hand, when he came to the states, he brought with him people who were unavoidably more guilty than him, obviously so.  And tried to bring others who were too “dirty” to make it here.

Surely that’s proof he was a villain?

No.  It’s proof that he was human.  You hang around with a group of people long enough, you’re going to like some of them despite despising their opinions or actions.  I didn’t feign my liking for a lot of my liberal or even outright communist colleagues and bosses in NYC.  I can see where they went astray, I despise what they do, but I like them as people, and think some of them are salvageable.

And I’m very glad I’m not the ultimate judge of anyone’s soul, not even mine.

All I’m going to say about Von Braun’s character is that until you withstand his temptations and his fear, you don’t know what you’d do.  It’s very easy for people who are free and at no risk of being killed summarily or having their whole family destroyed, to say “I’d stand above it all.”  But very few people do.  I find it helpful that in the New Testament the man who was chosen to lead the church, in the same circumstances denied the man he believed to be the son of G-d not once but three times.  It’s a good demonstration of frail humanity faced with dictatorship and corruption.

You don’t know what you’d do in the circumstances.

I do, and it doesn’t make me proud.

Sure, I came out politically, when I could afford to, when there was indie and Baen.  But before that, I not only swallowed a lot but said ambiguous “supporting” things when the discussion turned to keeping those undesirable libertarians/conservatives and their “hatred” out.  Because otherwise I’d have lost my sole opportunity to make money with the skill it had taken me almost two decades to acquire, and babies needed shoes.

Looking back it feels a lot like the quote from A Man For All Seasons:
It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?

And yet people do, for far less important reasons than getting man to space, or even winning a war so that your family estates aren’t plundered (and if you don’t think that matters you don’t understand attachment to the land) and your family sent forth, homeless and destitute.

Almost every writer, unless they’re dyed the deepest red, made the same compromises.  It’s a bad thing, even in that scale.  Like the actresses giving up their dubious virtue for a role, we give up a part of ourselves when we do that.

But when a system is corrupt and oligarchic there is no way to go around.  And so we keep doing it.

Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore.  And I had the opportunity to escape.  More or less what Von Braun did.  I’m trying to make good on my second chance, impaired only by stupid health tricks.

But I wouldn’t stand in judgement.  Like the people who escaped the USSR and who were party members, or “little pioneers” or like Pope Benedict being in the Hitler youth, if you stand in judgement of these people, you’ve never experienced even the nano-version of it I and other writers/actors/people in fields where gatekeepers are few and implacable have experienced.

I don’t know if Von Braun sold his soul for a shot at space; I don’t know if he sold it for safety for his family and himself.  I know I sold mine for Wales, metaphorically speaking.  I have no high mountain on which to stand, and my only redeeming realization must be this: that I realized a bad system makes good people bad.

One of the books went on about how evil Von Braun pushed for the Americans to “win” space when the USSR would have done just as well, since it was all for humanity.

Perhaps having experienced the corrupting effects of dictatorship and distorting ideology, he wanted space to be free.  (Yes, I know, he wanted the US to have an orbiting station and bomb any country that misbehaved.  Heinlein modified it and used it in Space Cadet.  It would have gone very badly, particularly if the US gave it over to the UN.  But I can also understand the appeal of the idea for someone who believed in the US.)

People who have sold their souls try to reclaim bits of it in the weirdest ways.

Let that serve as his epitaph.  And our ladder to freedom and redemption for the rest of us.  Do what you can, where and when we can, and may our efforts achieve more than our poor selves can manage.

I enjoyed most of the talks at TVIW, but two were social sciences talks, and somewhat puzzling as most social sciences are these days.  Not because I don’t understand them, but because they make you scratch your head and go “what are they teaching kids in the indoctrination centers these days?”

One of them purported to prepare us for the reaction to new technology by studying the “trajectory of over-enthusiasm about nukes generating the resistance and irrational opposition to them.”

I sat in the audience growing increasingly more baffled.  This man had studied the original sources, at least theoretically, and he had put up some cute posters using “nuclear” as we now use quantum, but he was talking around the elephant in the room.

You see, I had read original sources too, and while there was a period (long before the atomic bomb) when we were convinced (we as a civilization, I wasn’t even born) that radiation cured everything, there never was a period when people thought the atomic bomb was good for you.

Almost from the very beginning, the relief that it ended the war was coupled with “it can kill the world.” and in fact early on we got all the opposition, the demonstrations, the insistence on unilateral disarmament.  Heck, Heinlein himself was convinced early on that having nuclear arsenals would eventually lead to mutual destruction.  (Though he was never an idiot who asked for unilateral disarmament.)

Almost from the beginning anything “nuclear” was subjected to a process of demonization we have since come to see in “anything the left opposes.” Including but not limited to stopping illegal immigration or the importation of Muslim “refugees” or guns… or…

In fact, as this man pointed out, nuclear anything was so perfectly demonized that we don’t have the perfectly safe and effective nuclear power plants we could have.  Of course we still have the bombs, because again not all of us are zany enough to believe in one-sided disarmament.

Afterwards I approached and pointed out to him that most of the overreaction was not because people had been crazy about nuclear everything,b ut because — and yes, we DO know this — the soviet union was deploying its not inconsiderable propaganda machine to oppose nukes and try to convince the US to unilaterally disarm.

He told me, yes, some documents (like all of them, never mind) pointed that way.  But how could you convince people if you just told them that was the truth.  Wouldn’t it be easier to get them to understand nuclear power was safe if you painted it as an over reaction.

Uh. No.  On account of it’s not the truth.  You don’t actually cure a lie by telling another lie.  You don’t cure a misconception by creating another misconception and trying to activate a wholly imaginary mechanism.

You tell people “Yes, you were taken in.  Almost everyone was taken in.  BUT it was not the truth, it was enemy action.  Look, France wasn’t subjected to that kind of propaganda and gets most of its energy from nuclear power.  And it hasn’t imploded.”

You don’t tell them “yes, but your reaction is an over-reaction to to the enthusiasm people first felt.”  Because frankly it doesn’t take much digging to realize there was never crazy enthusiasm for nuclear bombs/power.

This is akin to what I call “diagnosing mental problems people don’t have” which was a very popular entertainment in the seventies.  Take me, for instance, I’m afraid of driving.  I know perfectly well why: my eyes suck and are getting increasingly sucky with age.  And my reflexes have always sucked.  Also I was raised in a culture where only the exceptionally coordinated people were supposed to drive.  If you tell me those, I can at least try to deal with them (no marked success so far.)  But if — as people did with everything in the 70s — you tell me “you are afraid to drive, because you’re afraid of orgasms” I’m going to roll my eyes, laugh and ignore you.

But beyond its being really easy to debunk, there’s something worse with making up this theory, so people can more easily buy into nuclear power or nuclear powered rockets, or whatever: it’s a lie.

I don’t care if it’s a lie for useful purposes.  I don’t care if it’s a lie for a good cause.  It’s a lie.  It’s as much of a lie as “if you don’t make war on the Soviet union they’ll be peaceful.”

Lies internalize the wrong idea of the world in your head, and make it impossible for you to react to the real world.  Step by step, they diminish your chances of surviving…. anything.

This is why you shouldn’t lie.  This is particularly why you shouldn’t lie to the young.  If you invent wholly non-existent social mechanisms and psychological movements to explain something that you know happened for other reasons, you’re making it impossible for people to find the truth and function in reality.

Sure, it’s a tough pill to swallow to know that entire on the whole well-intentioned movements of people protesting nuclear war were not the humanitarians they thought they were, but mere USSR stooges.

It’s particularly tough if you or someone you loved was one of those people.

But it’s also the truth, and as such something people must know to inoculate against future agit-prop of that kind.

Sometimes the truth is unpalatable, and telling it will get people mad at you.  And yet, you must still tell it, because without the truth you have nothing but a growing fog of lies that will kill you as surely as any bomb or any enemy.

There are enough wrong guesses and misguided theories whose authors don’t know they’re not telling the truth.  Don’t add to them with intentional lies and misguided theories in the name of saving someone’s feelings.

Feelings be d*mned.  The truth can save their lives.  Or humanity.

So, we don’t have a promo post.  I might have to talk to the oyster, as I think our wires got crossed somewhere.  It’s also possible he’s really busy and as you know — Bob — he’s doing this as volunteer work.  So, cutting his salary in half would be wholly ineffective.

We didn’t quite encounter the same luck flying back as flying out, as only one plane was late and ONLY 2 hours.  We’ve more or less decided next time if we don’t have money to go earlier and stay later, we’ll just go earlier and leave Friday night.  The horrible trip out left us kind of useless the entire conference, particularly since for whatever reason we didn’t sleep very well while there.

The conference was fascinating and there will be primary posts reporting on it for PJMedia (and my visit to NASA-Marshall) and several secondary order posts for here.  Yes, some might be on “what it profit a man to lose his soul if he gains space.”… particularly if the soul is lost for other reasons.  I think no one alive today who does not — like some crazy people including me — do extensive reading on the world wars fully understands those generations.  Not saying those generations were immaculate (not even the “greatest generation” an encomium the boomers think makes up for under-appreciating their parents when they were young) rather that they were harder than we — much less the generations after — can dream of being.

Right now, though, I came home to an embuggered (totally a word) automated cat box, which also led to secondary order effects (though in general they were way better than I expected) and to house keeping by medical-student-in-clinical-year, which is to say worse (far worse) than none. (I could write a book: “Places NOT to put dirty silverware/dishes.”)

So I’m going to do a lick-and-promise version of my weekly cleaning, then work on Guardian, and then write a few articles, since I missed most of a week.

And now, put your hands together for:

Sunday 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: virus free

I’m kind of out of it.  For various reasons, we slept really badly every night here, which is why I got absolutely nothing done beyond attend the lectures.

There will be posts about that (and interviews) for PJMedia and here, but since I’m in Huntsville — bear with me — this led to my reading about the original rocketry work and the “stealing” of German scientists after the war.

The book I’m reading is of suspect moral standing, since it likes to rail against “the madness of the cold war paranoia.” Apparently the author is unable to understand that when a form of government — international socialism, soviet brand — sets out to conquer the Earth, (and needs to, because its non-functional economy can’t really feed its citizens for any amount of time without tribute from conquered (or afraid to be conquered) lands) to suspect that you might be on the menu soon is not paranoia, it’s survival.

Because of this, the hand wringing over importing “convinced Nazis” induces a lot of eye rolling on this side of the screen.  The more so for two other reasons:

1- it seems to me that the Nazi philosophy being based on the idea of inherent racial superiority kind of collapsed and fell apart for MOST PEOPLE the minute they were defeated.

2- because the ideas of racial superiority the Nazis espoused were widespread and “everybody knows” on both sides of the war at the time.

One of the giggle lines of this book was when they said that “Hygiene” appeared to be a code word for the extermination of “inferior” races.  Well, yes and no.  Hygiene was one of the touchstones of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and got applied in ways that can’t help but puzzle us now.  Call it the ‘quantum’ of its age.  But you can’t really read any primary source documents without coming across the idea of “hygiene” meaning you don’t let “inferior” people breed.

Among the people supporting that sort of hygiene was none other than H. G. Wells, a socialist of the internationalist variety.

Now am I saying everyone that the US recruited was a kind of angel who only went along with the Nazi program out of a love for science.  Pfui.  No, I’d bet most of them were a shade of rather dark dingy grey, who took advantage of things like slave labor or worse.  Why?  Because under totalitarian regimes, the pure angels get killed (Or run.)  Everyone who lives any time, even under a much milder regime than Nazi Germany, ends up at least paying lip service, and often — if they want to survive as most people do — doing morally reprehensible things.  Depending on how long it goes on, and how bad the regime is, those things can be outright evil, even if the people started out no worse than most of us.

What we did when the Soviet Union fell was arguably far worse than what we did when the Nazis fell, as we held no trials, drew no line, didn’t say “you are dingy grey and we don’t approve, but we’ll let you live if you behave and serve a decent cause.” or even “You went beyond the pale, and must die for your crimes.”  No, we pretended that communism had descended upon an unwary people, and all were happy to see it lifted, and all deserved to go about their normal lives.

But communism instills evil patterns of thought (its cardinal virtue is envy, after all) that practically guaranteed its return under “this time we’ll do it right.”

At any rate, I’m not going to pronounce on the moral value of the men who started the American rocket program.  I don’t know enough.  which is part of the reason I bought three books yesterday and have been reading them (even with the rolling of eyes.)

But thinking about how widespread the inherently evil idea of “lives not worthy of living” (a trap we seem to be falling into once again) and how widespread it was, I thought of how the left is banning and silencing people who espouse this idea.

And I’m troubled.

I disapprove of the idea of “superior races” mostly because race in humans really is fluid, (as opposed to sex, which really isn’t) and at least partly what we think of as “races” are cultures.  So the idea is utterly poisonous.

It was also an idea of its time, the early twentieth century when our knowledge of biology was…. not that advanced, and the idea of treating people as something between machines and farm animals seemed perfectly logical.

The site that was banned by no one carrying its IP?  No person with a modicum of understanding of history or genetics could take it seriously.  I once happened onto it by accident, chasing a detail of Portuguese history, read three paragraphs and started laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

One of the claims was that the Portuguese used to be tall and blond until the import and interbreeding with slaves made Portuguese one of the “inferior races.’

As proof of this they used the…. Portraits of kings of Portugal.  Apparently, they’d missed on the memo that royal families are mostly related to other royal families.  Yeah, for a while in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a lot of German blood sneaked into the Portuguese royal line, in the same way that it sneaked into every royal line.  The Portuguese monarch that got deposed by the republic was, of course, a close relation of Queen Victoria, probably several times over.

This does not mean, as the dingbats assumed that all Portuguese were tall, blond and blue eyed.  Sure there were distinctly Celtic-looking villages in the mountains, but mostly Portuguese looked like their ancestry: Roman, Greek, Phoenician with a leavening of what fell in the pot.  The rise and fall of the Portuguese empire has much to do with the inherent strengths and weaknesses of Portuguese culture and bloody nothing to do with whether the hand holding the sextant or the whip happened to be able to tan.

It is the inherent sad silliness of the remnant of Live Action Reich Players that makes me worry that the left finds them worthy of going after and suppressing.

Even if I felt like washing with turpentine after even a few seconds on their page, it never even occurred to me to warn my kids about the site, much less to want it suppressed so other people’s children don’t see it.

At the time I stumbled on it, my kids were ten and six, and I trusted possessed of functioning minds and a sense of history so they wouldn’t fall for that nonsense.  And if they came to me and asked questions, that type of lie is not all difficult to debunk.

How much less danger would it be to adults?  If crazy, rather sad people who failed to internalize the fact that if the Germans could not conquer the world, they self-evidently weren’t the “Master Race” want to write rants about it?  Let them. (Actually Germans buying their way into the financier of Europe’s folly might indicate they’re the “crazy race” if one believed that race not culture is the determinant of how nations behave.)   They’ll get the inevitable percentage of misfits, but the idea itself has long been defanged.

So, and this is what worries me — why is the left worried about these ideas being out there?  Do they find them so persuasive that they must be silenced?

Note that I don’t even care if the left’s crazy ideas are out there, and they’re far more dangerous because not only haven’t they been defanged, as the continuous push from our educational establishment makes them seem more plausible, or at least preps people for them.

But the truth is, the more they talk, the less plausible they sound.  So, I understand — or flatter myself — their shadow-banning sites like instapundit, because we make sense and are “normal/credible” but the fact that they also feel the need to ban Live Action Reich Players makes me believe these people just have no filter at all for crazy ideas.  They are incapable of reasoning their way our of a paper bag and going “Oh, that can’t be true, because this this and this contradicts it.”  Instead they’ll believe whatever they’re exposed to that is loud enough.  And so they must ban everything that is “bad think” because it might drown out what they’ve been told is “good think” and which they ALSO can’t evaluate at all.

What a sad way of existing, above and beyond the danger that they banning will take a slippery slope, or that by becoming mysterious these ideas will become more attractive.

I don’t suppose we could convince them to use a modicum of reason, instead?

And if now, what can we do with them, in the end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So tonight we all went to a public talk on the subject of the search for alien life.  Yes, Tabby’s planet was mentioned.  And another 11 (or was it thirteen) odd “objects” that might be alien life.

The talk itself was pretty good, though I confess that while at one time I had Seti@home on my computer, and of course I keep an ear out for such things (being a geek) aliens are something “I don’t believe in.”

This begs explaining, of course.  I mean, rationally I’ll concede it’s possible there’s tons of alien life.  It is perhaps likely.  It’s even likely there’s tons of sentient life.

I’ll admit, rationally, too, that the chances are that alien life is way too distant from us in space or time to make any difference.  Of all the billions and billions (eh) of planets in the universe, the chances are that if there are sentient civilizations they’re too far away from us to make contact in our lifetime or indeed in the lifetime of our civilization even if we last for thousands of years more.

Now, this doesn’t mean I should have this blank spot in my inner compass that says “Aliens, nothing there.”

After all I routinely write about things that objectively don’t exist, such as dragons and mermaids.  And about half the things that I write about aren’t supposed to exist even in my great great great grandkids’ lifetime.

So WHY is there a blank space under aliens?  A “I don’t believe in them enough to even play along” spot?

I don’t know.  It’s probably some quirk of how I’m put together.  Curiously and bizarrely, if we landed on Mars tomorrow and found men just like us living in underground cities, either colonists from our own world or some other, I”d just go “Oh, okay.”  It’s more the non-human extra terrestrials that I find weird.  And no, don’t tell me that non-human extra-terrestrials are likely, while human ones, without a time machine, are well nigh impossible.  I know that.  It’s my subconscious that doesn’t and subconscious(es) are weird beasties who make no sense whatsoever.

Anyway, accounting for the fact I find the whole thing very unlikely at a gut level, it was an interesting talk and all.  And of course I’d be interested if we did find aliens, because at a rational level it would answer tons of questions, like, you know, is there a pathway that life might follow at a basic molecular level?  Is life perhaps all related, as Hoyle suspected, etc.

But after the talk the audience got to ask questions.

There was the question about what do we think it would do to society if watchers/listeners found unmistakable signs of alien life.  I confess I didn’t even GET that.  And Laura Montgomery, who sat nest to me whispered “We’d all go maaaaaad Maaaad.”

This was probably payback for my having told her earlier that the only message we should send to the stars was “Only hoomans allowed here, no aliens.  Stay off our lawn.  Go away.  This means you.”  Which had made her laugh.

But at the same time she’s right.  So imagine that astronomers or whatever detected unmistakable signs of intelligent alien life…  Why should it do anything to our society?

If it was 100 light years or so way, maybe my grandkids might make contact, maybe.  BUT if it was — as is more probable — 10k or more light years away… well… we wouldn’t even know if whatever sent those signals would still be there.  I mean, ten thousand years ago, humans’ most civilized activity was digging in the dirt.  And you know what?  we might be doing that again in ten thousand years.

The presenter seemed rather puzzled by the question too and said something like “Well, we’d have more funding.”

I suspect the question was an attempt at “gotcha”.  There is a very silly type of atheist who thinks that people of faith would lose all faith if we found He had also create aliens.

This always seemed rather odd to me.  I mean, sure, He created us in his image and semblance, but that’s assumed to be our spirit, right?  Why shouldn’t His infinite spirit have other images and semblances?  Who are we to tell Him who He can create or even who He can adopt?

I don’t FEEL we’ll find aliens, but honestly, it will be more suspicious if we don’t find them.  Then we’d sort of have to start quirking an eyebrow and try to figure out what is going on here.  Is this a joke?  Is it aimed at us?

If I were writing this, we’d find humans.  They’d have been flung back in time by accidental time travel, or they’d have evolved in parallel or they and us would be seeds of an ancient, ancient race.

I’m not going to ask.  I might write it someday, mind.  But it’s possible that Himself doesn’t have my twisted sense of humor.  After all, I’m the plucky comic relief.

Oh, I’d also plump for little green aliens with a twisted sense of humor (Read Martians Go Home.)

But I confess most of all, as much as finding aliens would be interesting, because it would allow us to know ourselves better by comparison, it disturbs me how some people (thank heavens no one at this talk, but some famous tv-scientists, and you know exactly who I mean) look to potential aliens as a source of ethical guidance.

This I don’t get, even if they are more technologically advanced than us.  Aliens would still be aliens, and while they might not have the same blind spots we do (perhaps, after all, you know, it might be baked into sentient species) they will have blind spots.  It strikes me as the same as taking ethical and spiritual guidance from your cat.  “Partaketh thou of the Tuna”  “Chase the mousie.”  Seriously?

In that sense, the idea of finding aliens worries me.  Doubtless it’s saner to seek guidance from aliens than from crystals (at least assuming the crystals aren’t aliens) but it’s still insane.  It would be another thing for some number of humans to hang all their world view upon, which doubtless would irk me.

Fortunately it’s unlikely to happen, as I’m thinking as hard as I can “Only hoomans allowed.  Get off our lawn.  Go home.  This means you.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’d say I was being kept in durance vile, but sitting around listening to lectures on how we might go step by step to the stars qualifies neither as durance or vile.

What it does qualify as is very little time at my computer to even get hold of one of the waiting guest posts.

For instance, right now I am typing g this on my phone which by a quick of screen won’t show me what I’m typing, which means I’m feeling lucky indeed.

If I can’t get the time tonight, I promise to be back on on Sunday.

Do try not to use the time machine again. Let me remind you that while it might be fun for you to have tea with the heinleins, they have/had/ will have work to do.

I’ll go back to learning how to take us to the stars, which some would argue is the only sane place for this blog.

Sorry, guys I am at TVIW.  I meant to write a post early morning, but I took from 4 am to 9 pm to get here yesterday (plane delays, rebooking, etc.)
So, by the time I got to where I could write a post, I was a zombie.  And I failed to get up early enough this morning.  Better tomorrow.
Amuse yourselves!

Yesterday I came across one of the silliest memes I’ve ever seen — and most political memes border on the idiotic — about, of course, the second amendment and protection from tyranny.

It said (only in pictures, you know, since memes are politics for the illiterate) that in 200 years guns had killed neighbors, pets, family members and innocent bystanders but had done nothing to avert tyranny.

Will someone find my eyes?  They seem to have rolled so hard that if I weren’t writing this from the airport, the cats would be batting them under furniture.

We won’t go into the other things guns have killed in 200 years, starting with deer and ending with criminals, burglars, would-be-murderers and people attempting home invasion.  (Apparently these people’s neighbors pets and family members include a great number of gang members and criminals.  Hey, I don’t judge.)

Rather, we’re going to ask “How do you know it didn’t prevent tyranny?”

And they’re going to sputter back something about armed rebellion.  But that’s not the point of allowing the populace to be armed.

Oh, sure, it’s part of the point.  If things get that bad that midnight arrest squads are going door to door and kicking doors down and trying to arrest you, sure, that’s when you need your guns to resist.  We’ve never got there.  That’s because when an armed populace is working properly to resist tyranny, it never gets to the point of midnight arrest squads.  Why not?  Because they know you’ll shoot their traitorous asses, that’s why.

How do we know tyranny is being prevented or at least curtailed?  Well, how would you know if there is no tyranny?

I think a pretty good indication is how would-be tyrants and statists hate despise and try to do an end run around the second amendment.

They know as well as you do that higher gun ownership correlates to lower crime, and they don’t even try to bring that up most of the time.  Instead, they try to ride the emotion wave, whenever there’s a mass murder.  From Sandy Hook to Las Vegas, they’re there, standing on top of barely cold corpses, demanding that guns be taken from everyone, even though objectively in every one of those cases, no regulation would have prevented the crime.

No, not even if you forbid guns utterly.  Why not?  Well, first because laws aren’t magical.  Just because you write something down, it doesn’t magically happen. Even in countries where guns are forbidden, guns still get in.  They get in through criminal connections, hostile country smuggling and myriad other means.  It’s just that it’s only the criminals who are armed.  Because law abiding people try to abide by the laws.

And honestly, even if someone like the Las Vegas shooter were unable to find a single gun, he could have done worse and thrown explosives down into the crowd.  If you think the death toll is bad now…

But the whole point is that asking us to show you when tyranny was prevented is the same as us telling you that socialism has prevented the existence of squid farms on Mars.  You can’t prove it, unless there’s a machine that shows a parallel world where different conditions obtained.

Or you can use your brain and think logically, something these particular meme=makers seemed unable to do.

You can read American history and the very real abuses of civil liberties under such would-be-tyrants as Wilson and FDR and realize they never got as bad as in other countries at the same time, because, well… because an armed populace might not put up with it.

Or you can look now, at the fact that most attacks take place in gun free zones or gun free cities.  Or in this case from enough distance to render that moot.

That might give you some indication that some attacks, domestic or government, are being thwarted.

You can also study the statistics.  There are remarkably few gun-killings by accident, despite all the crying you hear from the gun-grabbers.  Sure, there is any number of children shooting children, but those statistics, to be meaningful, had to be inflated by calling 19 year old gang-bangers “children.”  The truly accidental child shooting child incidents are probably about as many as tragic lawn mower accidents or child-pulls-pan-of-boiling water on head.

And there are a remarkably large number of times guns saved lives.  Or I should say saved innocent lives.  A number of those won’t show up except as a blip in local news, stuff like “local widow scares away burglar by pulling gun.”  In other cases, they swell the “gun deaths” statistics, because the homeowner or accosted passer bye shot the evil doer.

In those cases, it’s a squid farms situation all the way down.  Yeah, I know, I can hear the left wail about “murdering” criminals who could be rehabilitated.  But listen, okay, there’s something we’ve learned over the 20th century by virtue of keeping statistics: a) it’s almost impossible to rehabilitate criminals.  While it might be meritorious to try, it’s still an almost impossible task.  Particularly criminals who have progressed to breaking and entering on an occupied house or perhaps armed robbery.  b) most of the crime is committed by habitual criminals.

So when someone kills a criminal in self defense, there’s a good chance they didn’t just save their own life, but the lives of everyone that criminal would go on to attack.

It’s a squid farm situation, again.  You can weep over the poor dead criminal, but you don’t see how many of the victims who didn’t die were spared.

The problem of socialism is that it hides both the benefits of the policies it detests, and the injury of the policies it promotes.  Perhaps if we didn’t spend all our money paying people not to be productive or creative or industrious, and therefore had a completely different type of society, we would have those squid farms on Mars.

But for now I’ll settle for the equally impossible tyranny that was never established over these United States.

240 some years and no sign of tyranny.  Obviously the armed populace is working.  Give yourselves a pat in the back, and go forth in liberty.  And don’t let the idiots and the power-hungry tell you it would be better if you abdicated your responsibilities to governmental and impersonal forces.

Your liberties are yours to guard.  Keep it up.