Month: September 2018

*Sorry — mostly to Amanda — this is so late.  Have been out of house: cabinets. Making apartment downstairs self-sufficient… stuff. -SAH*

Taking on the Culture of Safetyism by Amanda S. Green

I don’t know about the rest of you, but a very large part of me wishes I’d been hiding under a rock, deep in the back of a cave. The media, which long ago forgot it was supposed to report the news and not frame it, much less try to make it (up), worked overtime to help destroy a man willing to step up and serve this country as a member of the Supreme Court. But that’s not what this post is about. More than enough has already been written on what a kangaroo court the Dems tried to make of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. I may have more to say on it later—hell, you know I will—but not this morning.

As I noted in my last post, I’ve been trying to find a book to read and comment on here. I needed a break from the crap I’d been reading. As much as I love snarking most of the books I review here, there comes a time when I have to step back and have a mental cleanse of sorts. I’ll get back to the snarking but even I, the masochistic book reviewer, can take only so much.

So, I’ve been trawling Amazon and other outlets looking for something to read. It needed to be something I could enjoy. It needed to be fairly well-written. It didn’t need to be completely in line with my own political or social beliefs. I’m adult enough to be able to read and consider other ideas. That’s part of learning. But I also didn’t want to be preached to. I can get that Sunday mornings by going to church—or by listening to Michelle Obama, et al.

I think I finally found the book. I’ve seen it mentioned a couple of times by friends but hadn’t had a chance to look at it until this morning. Life this week has been hectic, especially the last few days. That’s why this post is a day late.

Anyway….

The book I’m going to be covering the next couple of weeks is The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The first paragraph of the book’s blurb sold me. I’m hoping the book lives up to the expectation:

First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths are incompatible with basic psychological principles, as well as ancient wisdom from many cultures. They interfere with healthy development. Anyone who embraces these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—is less likely to become an autonomous adult able to navigate the bumpy road of life.

“Culture of safetyism”.

I might call it the “culture of feelz” but, in a way, it is the same thing. Our education system, the vocal minority from Hollywood, too many of our vocal politicians have preached this for years. We have moved away from taking responsibility for our own actions. We have forgotten one of the cornerstones of this nation: innocent until proven guilty.

Instead, it is a rush to judgment. Or, as I’ve said before, trial by innuendo and judgment by media. We’ve seen it with the sexual abuse allegations coming out of Hollywood. We’ve seen it with Judge Kavanaugh. What we haven’t seen is it with the Democrats. If we had, we’d see Keith Ellison under as much fire as Judge Kavanaugh.

And that, perhaps, will be a weakness in the book. Will it discuss the double-standard out there? Only time, and reading, will tell.

One thing is certain, there is that culture of safetyism in our schools and on our college campuses. Free speech areas have been moved from heavily trafficked areas of campus to more remote locations so those who might be upset by what’s said won’t have to listen. We have “safe spaces” for those who don’t want to associate with others who don’t fit their ideal of being the “right kind of person”. Once upon a time, that was called segregation. Today, it’s called safety.

Speakers have been canceled because they don’t pat the little darlings on the heads and tell them they too can grow up to be good socialists. If demanding they not be allowed to speak doesn’t work, the little darlings protest, often violently. Why? Because the speaker might hurt their feelings.

Funny, they don’t seem to give a damn about the feelings—or property—of others.

The why for all this is because there are no longer consequences for their actions. That begins in school. Districts are now disciplining teachers for—gasp—grading homework. Earlier this week, I saw a story about a teacher who lost her job because she refused to give an 80, if I remember correctly, to her students who failed to turn in homework. While I have long condemned the amount of homework many students have, this is ridiculous.

Then there are the districts that let students take tests over and over and over again until they not only pass but get a grade they want. What happened to studying for the damned exam or risking failing? This removal of consequences doesn’t help anyone, not in the long run.

There are other examples. The “every child is a winner” mind set also fails our kids. Yes, every child has his or her own talents but they have to learn that doesn’t mean they can do everything they want whenever they want. Not keeping score in games like softball or kickball because you don’t want to damage poor Johnny’s psyche is another. We need to teach our kids they won’t always win and how to lose with grace.

Schools have done away with titles like valedictorian. Why? Because they don’t want to make anyone feel bad because they didn’t do as well as Susie. As if that isn’t enough, other schools have quit noting placement in a class at all: no Top 10, etc. Only your grade. The problem? Universities are still interested in that sort of thing. So, by trying to insure everyone is equal, you are punishing those who excel.

Reading the free sample of the book, I have to say the authors seem to be hitting the problem square on the head.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. So avoid pain, avoid discomfort, and avoid all potentially bad experiences.”

Sound familiar? It should. It is what’s at the base of the demands for safe spaces and the attempts to keep folks like Milo, Vice President Pence and Ann Coulter from speaking on college campuses.

“Always trust your feelings. Never question them.”

We’ve seen that in full technicolor, to age myself, this week with the Kavanaugh hearings. How many have backed Ford without question because they “feel” her pain? How many of those attacking Judge Kavanaugh are doing so because they “feel” men are inherently evil or prone to doing as Ford has claimed? How many of them have failed to sit back and question their feelings and the so-called evidence against him?

“Life is a battle between good and evil people. . . You can see how bad and wrong some people are. You must call them out! Assemble a coalition of the righteous and shame the evil ones until they change their ways.”

Again, look at the behavior of some of those with regard to the Kavanaugh hearings. Jeff Flake was accosted, not that they would admit it, in the elevator by those wanting him to vote “the right way”. Senator Ted Cruz and his wife were run from a restaurant by so-called protesters who didn’t give a damn about them or the other diners at the restaurant. They had “feelz” and they should take precedence over all.

So, yeah, based on a couple of pages, I think this is the book to do. We’ll see how it goes.

Thoughts on Explorers and Pioneers—
Past and (Possibly) Future – by Hank Davis

Let’s get Columbus out of the way first. But don’t worry, he’ll be back for a curtain call.
Two things: first, Columbus did not decide, against the prevailing thinking of his day, that the Earth was round and go off in three little ships to find a new route to Asia.
(Speaking of which, is there still anyone who thinks that Columbus set off to discover America, or even a new land? In the seventh grade, I actually had a social studies teacher write that on the blackboard and had to correct her–but then she was fresh out of college, this was her first teaching job, and she realized I was right and took it well [in spite of my being a snotty little brat back then], which was a relief since she was certainly the prettiest teacher in the school at the time. Ah, puberty. B ut I digress . . .)
In fact, the Greeks, as usual, were there first. At least as early as the sixth century, B.C., the spherical shape of the world had supporters, and the notion was considered proven fact by the third century, B.C. Plato and his star pupil Aristotle considered the spherical world in the “well, of course” category. (However they were quite sure that the Earth was the center of the “universe” and the Sun, Moon, planets, and “fixed” stars all revolved around it. Can’t win ‘em all . . .)
The second thing about Columbus is that he was very, very lucky that he was ever heard from again. Like most educated people back then, he was sure the world was round, but he had somehow gotten a preposterous figure for its circumference, thinking it was far smaller than was the reality, and if there hadn’t been a continent unknown to Europeans, between him and Asia, he would never have reached land before his supplies of food and drinking water were exhausted. Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone complaining about America being named after Amerigo Vespucci when it should have been named Columbia instead. (Nevertheless, it certainly is the gem of the ocean.) Vespucci concluded, correctly, that the land he had reached was a new, unknown continent while Columbus continued to insist hat he had reached Asia. And unlike Columbus, Vespucci was working from a far superior figure for the circumference of the world that was only fifty miles off. Finally, Vespucci did reach the Americas, as they would later be named, while Columbus, on his first trip, only reached the Bahamas. Sorry, Chris baby, but you were a dope, as someone once put it in a different context.
Of course, I haven’t noticed a national holiday named Vespucci Day . . .
Okay, the long-suffering reader may say, so an explorer’s life (or pioneer’s life—I’ll be using the terms somewhat interchangeably, so sue me!) is not always a success story, and as space exploration of the Solar System continues, hopefully not always by robot probes, and reaches beyond (keeping in mind that the Solar System is a lot bigger and more complicated than we used to think only a few decades ago), maybe history, or a garbled version thereof, may be unfair to real achievers. Got it–but can we get on to space pioneers now?
Well, one more point: before you can go somewhere, you have to know that there’s somewhere to go.
So far, I have referred to “the world,” but haven’t called it a planet. That’s because the word planet comes from a Greek word (yes, we’re back to the Greeks; s’matter, you got something against gyro sandwiches?) for “wanderer,” and Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—the planets visible to the naked eye–were called that because they moved, unlike the “fixed” stars which slowly moved in a mass across the sky with the seasons, but did not change location in the sky with respect to each other. The planets, all five of them that the Greeks couild see, did change location. Some of those wanderers would even come to a halt in the sky, then go backwards from their previous motion. This is easily explained if you know that the Earth is itself a planet/wanderer, going around the sun with the rest of the planets, in the same direction but at different speeds, and the Earth, like a faster race horse, overtakes the slower outer planets so that an observer will think they come to a stop, then go into reverse gear. With the exception of Aristarchus (and maybe a few now-forgotten disciples of his), who argued that the Earth went around the sun, the Greeks bet on all the “fixed” stars being attached to a gigantic crystal sphere around the (spherical but stationary) Earth, while each planet was on a different, separate crystal sphere, each rotating differently from the others and, yes, sometimes stopping, then reversing course.
Since the Greeks came up with this idea, they were doomed to never come up with a pulp like Planet Stories pardon me, Wanderer Stories. Win some, lose some. How can you travel to the Moon if it’s attached to a crystal sphere, and maybe on the other side of the sphere, let alone take a trip to the planets, which must be even farther away because they sometimes are seen to go behind the Moon, and so their crystal spheres must be outside of the Moon’s sphere. Besides, the opinion seems to have been divided on whether those lights in the sky are named after gods, or actually are gods. If a Pegasus knock-off were available, maybe he could be ridden to the moon (they had no idea that the space above the Earh was not filled with air—what a ridiculous notiong the contrary would be!), but remember what happened when Bellerophon (not to be confused with a wrecked starship in Forbidden Planet) tried to drop in on Mt. Olympus and say, “Hey, Zeus, baby, what’s shakin’?” Those gods can be touchy about trespassers on their home turf, and the heavens might be a worse test case than was buzzing Olympus.
Do I hear objections? (I don’t, of course, but it’s a useful rhetorical fiction.) Why all this ancient history, and, even worse, ancient mythology? The Greek gods never existed, and we can reach the planets and even the stars using time dilation at relativistic speeds, or generation ships, if nothing better is available.
Maybe . . . but, on the other hand, are you certain there are no gods, or at least godlike beings out there? If Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quip that “any sufficiently advance technology is indistinguishable from magic” is true, then won’t any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrials be indistinguishable from gods? Suppose they’re touchy about the savages (or worse, the monkeys, or even mice) dropping in on them uninvited.
As for that technology . . . if the speed of light is indeed an absolute limit, with no way to dodge or detour around it, traveling close to that speed to take advantage of time dilation might still be unworkable. Back in the sixties, a card-carrying scientist wrote an essay in a book on interstellar communication, which he thought demonstrated that the propulsion required to travel close to lightspeed required technology that was not only beyond anything we might build, ever, it was impossible by the mathematics of the thing. The essay was quoted at length in a review in Scientific American of the book it appeared in. The magazine’s reviewer cited the article with an unholy glee, writing (I quote from memory) that “this will send the idea of the starship back to the cereal box, where it belongs.” (And this was back when Scientific Amerikan pardon me, American, was worth reading, a situation that ended several years ago!) Other writers with comparable credentials have attacked the premises and reasoning of that article, but even so, we can’t blithely assume that time dilation will give us the stars.
And there have been arguments why a generation ship of less than planetoid size would soon become unlivable, aside from the gene pool of the crew being too small to prevent genetic deterioration; and if the ship were planetoid size, the reaction mass to propel it would be beyond anything we can imagine.
In other words, we don’t have a Pegasus to fly us up to the crystal spheres, and suppose the planet or star or the Moon is on the other side of that crystal sphere. And what if it’s some sort of magic fire (cue Wagner; I don’t care if it’s anachronistic) and there’s nothing to land on. And suppose the aliens, I mean the gods don’t want you there?
Columbus (I told you he’d be back) didn’t know there was a continent in his way to Asia, and also operated with a conception of the size of the Earth that was way off. How do you know we aren’t way off now?
We’ve known about the speed of light and relativistic effects for barely more than a century. Do we know the whole story? What do you mean the Earth goes around the Sun? Next, you’ll be saying the Earth is flat and we’re way beyond that old nonsense now!
Suppose I concede that we can never reach the stars, except maybe by a robot probe that will still be working somehow centuries after it was sent out at a patheticly sublight velocity. Supposed I concede that, as some spoilsports have argued, all stories about starflight are fantasy masquerading as science fiction?
Even if it’s true. Fantasy is fun (“Hey, Conan, get your broadsword and run outside and chase off that dragon before he takes a bite out of the starship’s hyperdrive unit.”) In fact, I don’t concede anything of the kind, but so what? Stories of apace exploration and pioneering are jolly good fun, and even if we’re limited to starships of the mind, I say, keep ‘em coming, and with the fascinatingly strange aliens be handy.
While we’re waiting and hoping for real starships, there’ve been a plenitude of terrific stories written abut flights to worlds beyond the Solar System. And even if they never come true in any way, shape or alien form, remaining as nonexistent as Oz or Middle Earth, they’re still good stories. The space exploration theme is at the very heart of sf, from Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac to whatever Star Trek spinoff is on the telly this week, with stopovers at Doc Smith, van Vogt, Heinlein, Niven and many more in between.
And while we’re happily riding in our paper starships, maybe some new breakthrough in physics, or mathematics. or even sewing machines (read Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe and you’ll get it) will mean that we can go to the stars after all. We can take along a stack of recent issues of Scientific American for ballast. Or maybe give them to aliens we meet, though that might spark the first interstellar war.
But consider Magellan, who was killed by unfriendly natives while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, and though the voyage was finished (successfully) by his second in command, he’s still famous (can you name his second in command?), and has the Straits of Magellan and the Magellanic Clouds named after him. Not bad for a dead guy who didn’t finish the job.
And this time, there’s a job Out There that will likely never be ginished.
Still here, Mr. Columbus? Well, pull up a chair, Chris, and have a cup of Columbian coffee. Show us that party trick with an egg we’ve been hearing about.

There is a lot of talk about evil corporations.  But enough about google.

On the other hand, maybe not, because google is part and parcel of what is going on.  Its pattern is disturbingly the pattern of how wheels are coming off American businesses.  And the failure mode is more and more the failure mode I’ve been observing for my own industry, or at least my own industry as it was.

First a clarification: I was born in late 62.  I never considered myself a boomer.  And before you scream that boomers go to 64, let me explain: I swear to you they didn’t use to.  My brother, born in early 54 was considered one of the youngest boomers.  And if you look at the ethos of the generation and what formed it, and how its public image was created and also when they came of age, you’ll understand that makes a ton more sense.

The boomers were the baby boom after WWII. By the time I hit school, the classrooms were half empty, the trailers that they’d added the decade before were being used for craft classes or gym or something that required tons of space.

It would take a long time to come home if you were still being born in 62. (And I’d been due in 63.)

This is important simply because I want to make it clear when I came of age it wasn’t with the boomer ethos of “each generation is going to be bigger than the last and we’re going to remake the world in our image.”  That expectation is still obvious in books of the fifties and sixties, as well as the attached Malthusian panic.

The boomers, like now the millenials, are a much maligned generation.  The public image is almost not at all that of the people in the generation I actually know, with a very few exceptions.

The people the media chose to highlight were the ones they wanted the boomers to be, not who they were.

But something about the boomers is true — ironically the reason that caused them to hate my generation before they decided to aggregate us, because it gave them more power to still be considered young and marketable-to — and that is that they were raised in the expectation they would make the world a better place, and that they could because of sheer numbers, and because they’d been brought up to be better than their parents.

Look, I’ve never bought into the “greatest generation” stuff.  I saw it as a Jungian appeasement of the boomers towards their aging fathers whom they’d “sacrificed” in more ways than one.  I’m at heart — or at back brain — very Roman.  To explain why would take more uncomfortable biographical revelations than I have time for, including “because that’s what I was brought up to be.”

I get this dance very well.  First comes the sacrifice, then the deification.

Did the World War II generation rise to the challenge?  Yes, they did.  But in a way they’d been brought up for it: a generation grown to continue Europe’s long war, because the previous generation had been eaten in the fields of WWII.

And can anyone blame the veterans, coming back from yet another European abattoir for wanting to put an end to the cycle?

Obviously something had gone wrong in Western civilization and it needed to be stopped.  The next generation were going to be a brand new beginning.  They were going to make it all better.

Did I mention the serpent in the garden? You can’t make the garden without the serpent.

A lot of the crazy of the sixties, and the unmaking of society was what the boomers were explicitly raised to do.  A lot of the poison in our cultural waters was the rebellion of the veterans of WWII.  An understandable rebellion, but one that threw the baby out with the bath water nonetheless.

However, even the boomers who weren’t raised on utopian ideals, who weren’t told the world was theirs to remake, even the ones who didn’t protest (or fought in) the war, even the ones who were and are decent human beings were raised with the idea that it was theirs to change Western Civ to be more… humane.  Or at least not to self-destruct in battlefields.

This created an ur-programming, a back brain thing.  Even responsible boomers who cut their hair, got jobs and raised families had the idea that they were supposed to transform everything.

But Sarah, you say, you have that too.  How else are you supposed to fight in the trenches of the culture war?

Waggles hand.  In a way.  Maybe.  But it’s more that I’m at the forefront of admitting that we went very wrong somewhere, that utopia doesn’t exist, and that it’s time to go back to a more realistic approach to society.

That kind of looks like remaking the world if you squint really hard.  In fact it is the thing that got my brother’s generation to hate mine when we were young.  We were as reviled as millenials are now but for different reasons: we weren’t idealistic. We didn’t want to make things fairer.  We were materialistic. We just wanted to make money.

It wasn’t precisely true.  But coming to adulthood in the late seventies and early eighties, when Europe and the US had run off their legs economically, and with leftist governments restricting growth so that there were no jobs and houses were unaffordable, we were forced to be more realistic.  We took jobs, any jobs.  And we worked our asses off.  And yes, we aimed to climb.  And we put up with all sorts of unreasonable demands (which might not have helped the corporations stay connected to reality.)

So, back to the corporations.

There is a lot of talk about how corporations are evil.  There has always been, as far as I’ve been alive.

It’s a little stupid and ignores the fact that corporations are people.  (Yes, like soylent green.) Most corporations are quite small.  Yeh family publishing business is a corporation, because it makes everything easier, including having a single publisher, and eventually inheritance of copyrights.

But the view of business as inimical, and the military as inimical was imbibed by the boomers with mother’s milk.  To an extent business and the military (rather than ideologies divorced from the real world, facilitated by a society rich enough to be out of touch) were blamed for the European long war.

So when they finally joined business, it was viewed as a sell out, and it was almost immediately followed by a determination to change it from the within.

Almost all the hyper-politically-correct and, yes, often evil mega corps now had their origin with idealistic kids founding them or changing them to be more caring.

The problem is that business and social justice don’t mesh.  Business wasn’t to blame for WWII.  Business was just business.  The wars weren’t a ploy of arms manufacturers.  That’s not how this works.  That’s not how any of this works.

It was easy after WWII to look around and thing “who got rich” and then blame the whole thing on the armaments industry.

But the war was the result of too much technological change too fast.  It’s possible that it can’t happen without causing social convulsion and war.  (And that’s what makes me shudder for where we are now.) The two always happen together.

And armaments manufacturers got rich because the weapons were needed.

There is no great conspiracy of business to cause war (unless it’s in the sense that wealth causes crazy ideologies, which cause war.)

The people who went into business, built it or took over went in with the exactly upside down idea.

“We’re going to create a just world through business.”

That’s not what commerce is.  Commerce doesn’t have that kind of power.  Yes, I’ve read all the crap about advertising causing needs.  It’s crap.

It ignores all the new products that fail: most of them.  Regardless of advertisement, you can’t make the dogs want the food.

It was great for assuaging the conscience pangs of the people who pushed for war in service of their crazy ideologies and their wish for power: we’re the good guys.  It is business and the greed for money that creates war.  Business can create any need it wants, let’s create a wonderful world.

Again, that’s not how it works.  That’s not how any of this works.

To coin a phrase, business is the term for what we do together (eh.)  It is a way to weld individuals into working for a mutual or collective purpose, that doesn’t involve the coercion of every one, or enslavement of every one.

Advertising is not a magical force.  You can, yes, for a moment, briefly, make a product without purpose “popular” but all you’re creating is a bubble.  And the next bubble will be harder, and the next harder.

Mostly advertising works to show people things they can use or which will improve their lives.  As an early tech adopter, I can tell you we don’t jump on every new trend, just on the ones we have a good expectation will help us.

Which brings us again back to corporations.

Doing good by doing well is how google started with “don’t be evil” and ended up partnering with Chinese totalitarians and claiming it will be YUGE.  (It won’t, but that’s what we’re going into next.)  AND what led them to create a crazy authoritarian company in which if you’re the wrong political color you’ll be destroyed.

Because they think they serve something bigger than SIMPLY serving people by making money.

And we see this everywhere else.

Recently I gave up on Team Viewer which I used to connect to the home computers (three) when I travel.

It started manufacturing insanity, accusing me of using it for “commercial purposes” and demanding I pay a subscription as a company.

Now, at first I thought it was due to the number of my computers, but the first one they bricked was the one I almost never used.

It turned out that it was random.  They’d pick an account to yell at, and a random computer to brick (brick in the sense that you couldn’t connect to other computers from it using team viewer.) saying you’d used it the maximum number of hours that month.

I’m using this example, because I wasn’t alone.  It was ALL OVER the net.  Apparently someone at corporate decided this was a good move.  Perhaps they didn’t have enough subscribers.  I can well believe that.  I can also tell you as someone who found the program incredibly useful that if they’d offered something like $5 a month, subscribe, we can keep track of all your stuff better, and you’ll have access to customer service, I’d have gone for it.  I couldn’t afford corporate rates, but I could afford “individual subscription” or “Small business” rates.

Considering it was the most popular program for this purpose, I suspect they’d have done well, on small subscriptions but many of them.  And it’s the sane thing to do if you think of business as a way to transact with people who aren’t FORCED to work with you, and to make money while providing something people need.

But that’s not the ethos of business, when the people running it think they’re in charge of changing the world and that advertising can do anything and “create needs.”

So instead they treated us as a crazy ideology treats its adherents or a government treats subjects.  It made life uncomfortable and difficult and hampered the purpose we used it for, in the serene belief this would bring money flowing in.

Instead it brought us to researching alternatives and finding one that’s better than Team Viewer.  And I bet we’re not the only ones.

It’s becoming a familiar failure mode, similar to what publishing did and to an extent still does, bringing the price of ebooks very high, so we’ll go back to buying paperbacks.  (At the same time propagandizing us with “paperbacks take 100k to create, which means we’re losing money on everyone but mega bestsellers.”  If they really believe that they need to fire their accountants and their entire offices, because they’re being taken for a ride.)

That’s not how this works.  That’s not how any of this works.  Business and advertising are not tools to herd the public.  They’re tools to woo the public.

And business is not the dark force that moves the world.  That is human nature, particularly when channeled through authoritarian institutions.

Businesses that try to remake the world don’t only fail.  They take entire industries with them.  And they create misery.

Build under, build over, build around.

The remorse of the veterans of WWII is coming home to roost in the person of their aging children.

And this is going to hurt like a mother, because the crazy is not just in tech or publishing.  It’s everywhere and corrupting everything.

But life and business which is part of life must go on.

And we’re the lucky ones who see the need.  So it’s up to us to keep civilization going when the rest falls.

 

 

I am very sorry to be dissing Rodgers and Hammerstein and South Pacific, but they were out of their raving minds when they wrote “You’ve got to be carefully taught.”

I woke up with the son running through my head and my thought superimposed on it “That’s not how this works.  That’s not how any of this works.”

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught

[Verse 2]
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade
You’ve got to be carefully taught

[Verse 3]
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You’ve got to be carefully taught

This would be how things would work, if humans were born like onto angels, without an animal side.  If we were pure souls, tossed down to this workaday world, with no stain of creation, yeah, maybe.  Maybe.  The workaday world would work its magic, anyway, without the ape body.

Ah, but we do have the ape body.  One of the greatest — and arguably most harmful — delusions of the last hundred years or so, at least among the intelligentsia is the idea that we’re not animals.  It is actually kind of funny, honestly, because these are the same devoted Darwinists (BAD Darwinists, making the poor man rotate in in his grave hard enough to generate electricity that would power all of Great Britain if they only knew) that would often finish their books about how terrible humans were with “you’re just animals, stop looking at the stars.”

Of course the books were incoherent anyway, often claiming that humans were the only animal who would “wage war” or kill its own species (these people obviously never had a fighting tom cat for a pet.  Calimero killed every other male cat in the village, which is why half of the village ferals look siamese.) and at the same time claiming that we’re taught war and violence.  On second thought maybe this is not incoherent, since humans are the only ones with the capacity to learn abstract concepts.

It’s still insane and stupid.  The only place this “you have to be taught violence” could take root is among humans so divorced of nature that they can idealize it and not see that animals are arguably more violent than humans, and that animals play at fighting and dominance days after they’re born.

Even the humble chicken is a stone cold killer.  And don’t get me started on mother rabbits who eat their litters.  (No, not through some deficiency.  Some just acquire a taste for it.)

Count among Peterson’s amazing achievement of speaking the known, the things we’ve all always known, but keep forgetting when we’re propagandized with crazy day in day out, that disciplining your child doesn’t teach him or her violence.  It curbs their violence.  Because every animal is born knowing violence.  Life on Earth, from very early on has played dominance games and violence, often against its own species. It is one of the great achievements of humanity. learning to curb that violence and that natural hatred of the “different” (and this has nothing to do with race.  I am one of those people who have ridiculously early childhood memories.  I’m also one of those people who until much older could not remember faces or indeed anything visual — as far as being born premature, etc. damaged my brain, I think it whacked the visual area, which only started coming back around 14 — so I remember not liking people who smelled differently from my family.  And in the village at that time, it could very well mean they only washed once a month with home made soap.  Our laundress thought our clothes smelled wonderful even dirty, because we used “perfumy”– i.e. bought — soap.)

Those idiots who came up with the idea humans were racist as babies need their heads examined. Baby humans fear the stranger, because strangers are dangerous.  For how dangerous I refer you to our closest relatives, the chimps, who tear chimp babies limb from limb and eat them.  Usually when the babies are from another troop… but sometimes when they belong to a low-dominance female in their own troop.

It is teaching humans to overcome that so we can live in more than familial groups that makes humans strange and wondrous, not that we still have fights between groups (bigger groups, now more loosely defined) or between individuals in our groups.

And even then, if you want to train your little ape to fit in any group, you have to curb his aggression, and yes, that sometimes means a couple of swats to the behind.  You’re not teaching them violence.  You’re teaching them violence is unacceptable.  (BTW I was gratified that Peterson pretty much confirmed my approach, which was all non-violent means first, then the swat as last recourse. He also made me feel better by pointing out higher-dominance individuals will need the swat more.  This explains why one of my kids was not “spanked nearly enough” which is my way of putting it, when what I mean is “He could usually be distracted or bribed, and once we figured out taking his computer cord away worked better — when he was about 3 — we just used that, for an hour, a day, or in very bad circumstances, a week. The other… made me feel I was the worst mother in the world.  Let’s put it that way.)

I understand the military has to train humans to kill, but people who think that’s because humans are born pure and innocent also need their heads examined. It’s because you’re contravening really early training, and that can be near-impossible to break. It’s not the only early training that’s hard to break.  I remember seeing a study somewhere showing that the earliest you were potty trained the hardest to break, even when absolutely necessary.  (I’m one of those people who can’t use bedpans.  In a situation where getting up might kill me, I still had to because it was that or burst.)

We are born animals.  Each generation is born as really smart apes.  No, I’m not saying you don’t have a divine-formed soul (would I say that?)only that early on, without training, it’s subsumed to your animal nature.

Your animal brain is very old, arguably from before there were vertebrates on Earth, though it’s possible there’s more of reptilian than that. Your animal brain doesn’t care about your projected utopia.  Heck, as I’m finding out, day by day, my animal brain doesn’t give much of a hang for what my higher, rational brain wants it to do.  “We’ll have more money if you write 8 hours a day” doesn’t motivate it, because it has a warm cave and a full belly.  Yeah.  I’ll figure out a way around it. But it’s hard even working with those parts when they’re part of you.

Your animal brain will make you play violence and dominance games, unless it’s broken of it early.  Which probably explains why people raised as pacifists are the most violent and dirtiest fighters in the world and also why the left which thinks that humans have to be “taught to hate” are usually the side that goes to brass knuckles, or bicycle locks, first, and overwhelmingly.  It’s also why every regime that assumes humans are tabula rasa, and born perfect has filled mass graves.  After all, if you are born a certain way and can’t change it, you have to kill vast portions of  humanity to get to perfection.

It’s also of course because the people in charge are violent and denying that part of their nature. Psychologists have a term something like “the return of the repressed.”  When you deny what’s a natural part of you (the left applies that only to sex, which can actually return as art, but never mind…) it will come back in a weird, deformed and often lethal way.

I’m not saying — do I look like a hippie?  Okay, so I need to dye my hair.  Shut up, wretch — that humans should give in to their baser impulses and have sex with everyone like bonobos, and kill everyone or fight among themselves like chimps.

I’m saying that learning to repress those impulses and only let them out when absolutely needed IS civilization.  And civilization is a good thing.  But you need to be aware humans have to be trained NOT to act like apes.  And that the impulses are always there, even in the most civilized of humans.

And this is a good thing.  Those sublimated impulses are what gave us art and science, besides allowing us to live in cities populated by millions.

But they’re not unnatural.  And you don’t have to learn them.  And swatting your kid’s butt won’t make him a killer.  It might rather prevent him from going feral and being a maimed thing all his life, visiting violence, real or metaphorical, on innocents.

To put it in metaphorical terms: the serpent was always in the garden. It was Adam and Eve’s innocence that allowed it to do its work.

It’s when you ignore the serpent in yourself that you allow it to corrupt you.  Or your kids.

We’ve seen the serpent and it is us.  And it’s only by staring it in the face and telling it “yes, you’re part of me, but if I let you influence me you’ll destroy me” that we can save civilization.

Every day.

 

*Sorry to do a blast from the past.  There’s stuff going on.  Nothing bad.  Well, mildly bad as apparently minor-surgery-the-saga will have to be repeated in six months.  But mostly stuff I have to get done/finished/written that is getting in the way of even having a blog idea.  And, well, this seems apropos. – SAH*

The Myth That Kills – A Blast From The Past from October 2012

I’m very afraid this is another of those posts that will get me accused of being a “gender traitor.”

That’s just fine.  If you think a gender – the fact that you were born with one piece of physical equipment – demands your loyalty and forces your opinions to be the same as those people with the same piece of equipment, call me a traitor.  Guilty as charged.

You see, I tend to think of people as people.  This has largely been a handicap in writing fiction in the current age, because I’m expected to view women as saints-and-martyrs and men as oppressors-and-satyrs.

Have I met some examples of those?  Oh, heck yes.  Hasn’t everyone?  But I’ve met the opposite too.  Hasn’t everyone?  So why is only one of those the “correct” thing to put in a novel?

Ah, but you’re going to tell me that pushing women as victims, as saints, as nurturers is the way to go, so we can carry on with the feminist victory and equality of the sexes.

(Looks across the computer at you)  I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

Equality means, in this as in anything else, equality before the law not equality of results.  This is something that we keep forgetting.  Look, that was the ultimate difference between the American and the French revolutions.  Americans wanted equality before the law.  The French wanted equality of results.

They had justifications, too. They were dealing with an historically beaten-down peasantry, starved, uneducated (though not nearly so much – the revolution happened because education had started to spread.  Never mind. We’re going with how they viewed themselves) used to being deferential.  They needed more than just equality before the law, they said.  They needed to redistribute some of those advantages, to enforce equality of results for a while.

We all know how that ended up, right?

It always ends up that way.  Humans are individuals, not groups.  When you empower the groups, you empower the worst in any group. The power-thirsty, the aggrieved, those who want to manipulate group-outrage for their own purposes.

It is the same with women.  It’s lots of fun to read the more sentimental writers of centuries past (and the not so sentimental and totally un-ironic feminists of the last century) go on until your eyes bleed about women being kinder, gentler, softer, nicer.

Poppycock.  Poppycock with powdered speciousness.  Yes, women presented that way.  This was the result of centuries where women had the subservient position.

The first one of you to open her mouth about how this is the injustice feminism needed to correct is going to go to the corner with the dunce cap, so help me bog.

The reason women were “oppressed” for “six thousand years” (longer, for certain values of women) had NOTHING to do with men dethroning the goddess myth and destroying the perfect matriarchal society because they’re evil or any other re-writings of the Judeo-Christian myth of Eden.  Marija Gymbutas was – yes, I’m crossing Godwin, and I have a reason – as much of a fabulist as Hitler, and about as good a scientist.  She didn’t have armies at her disposal, but those who believe in her might in the end bring down civilization as effectively as the Nazis would have done, so I do not apologize for using the analogy.  (If you don’t think convincing women that all men are their enemies, handicapping boys in school, running men out of the teaching profession, and generally making men guilty-until-proven-innocent is a civilization-killing meme, you need to go out and meet some real men and some real women.)

Women were subservient in society due to that horrible oppressor: biology.  When you were going to have to be a celibate or spend half of your life pregnant, you missed out on other aspects of life.  Yes, I love those of you who had no problems in pregnancy.  I had to diametrically opposite experiences: the first pregnancy would have killed me without strict bed rest, for the second I kept forgetting I was pregnant.  HOWEVER in both of them in retrospect, not at the time, I missed vast chunks of intellectual function.  There is an hormone cocktail that is supposed to make you fat, happy and dumb during pregnancy.  It is what it is.

Worse, even for women who never get pregnant, until modern hormonal treatment, we women were prisoners of our hormones.  Even now I have more than a friend who hit menopause and… became someone else.  In very rare instances, the change is for the best.  Most of the time it’s a “What on Earth happened to your brain?”

I thought I had dementia for a long while – I literally couldn’t remember the names of my characters or what had happened from a chapter to the next.  And if I wrote it down, I’d have to go look at the notes, and then when I came back to the book I’d forgotten what I’d looked up.  For a while (most notably the last Musketeers mystery) I had to have a friend check my work because I’d forget what I was doing and had tons of internal inconsistencies.

Turned out it was an hormonal problem, not dementia and not menopause, as I thought.

Now, that’s an extreme case, mind you.  But it’s not unusual.  And though men, too, can have this type of issue, it is considerably more common in women.  What makes us women — the ability to generate new life – also makes us cyclical creatures, both in the monthly sense and in the life-cycle sense.  And if you think your hormones don’t affect the way you think, let me tell you the only reason you think that is that you’re inside your skull and being affected.  Until my experiences with hormonal insanity I too thought I was impervious.

Anyway, the point is until modern medicine with contraception and hormonal supplements, women were swimming with an iron vest strapped on.  Add to that that only women can be sure that their children are theirs.  This made men – of course – wish to make sure women were controlled, to make sure the kids they were providing for were their own.  It made for a society where women were somewhere between children and chattel and men had all the responsible positions. (Though even then some women managed to break through.  Individuals are… individual.  It’s one of their characteristics.)

Does any of that still apply?  No.  Thanks to modern medicine, we even can figure out whose daddy is whose without keeping women in purdah.

And though it took a little while, society changed. Women started taking the place of equals in society.  Like the French peasantry, which would have come along once barriers to their equality under the law were removed, we have started taking intellectual callings and sometimes physically intensive callings.

We are now, if we want to be, equals.

The problem is that most of us don’t want to be equals.  And the reason for that is that most of us have been sold on the feminist creation myth of the great mother and the perfect society with men as the spoiler of paradise and the villain.  And most of us are stupid enough to buy it.  (Yes, I know men worshiped goddesses.  If you think that made the society feminist, you have birds in your brain and you probably also believe there’s some magical herbs that are as effective as the pill and have no bad side effects.  (No.  There aren’t.  There was a bush that had similar properties, but it went extinct in Roman times).  Societies that worshiped goddesses often demanded the most control over women and engaged in temple prostitution.  They also had a marked tendency to child sacrifice.  On the other hand, most societies worshiped both.)

Also, most men are of course bigger than us.  Stronger. And there’s the whole historical inequity.  Just like the French peasants.  So we demand laws that favor us and more importantly we demand the blood of our enemies.  And we demand to be treated with a respect and a care that would have scared Victorian maidens.  We use the slightest thing as a weapon.  Because only when the oppressors are gone, will we be free.

This was bad enough when it was the French peasantry.  But men are not some aliens dropped on the Earth from afar – they’re our fathers, brothers, sons and husbands.  They’re an integral part of what makes humans humans.  They’re not a monolithic group, just like women aren’t, but statistically they’re better abstract-and-visual thinkers and the people who are more likely to think outside the box, just like statistically we’re the socially-oriented people, more detail-specialized and better at cooperating.

Society – a civilized society – needs both to survive and go forward.

But women have been sold on males-as-the-boogeyman and therefore they see evil intention and coordination and conspiracy behind males’ being people.  Meet one abusive male, and you’ll go through life convinced that all men are like that.  Does anyone do the same when meeting an abusive woman?  I don’t know about you, but I’ve had bosses from hell in both genders.  So, why is only one accused of being “oppressive”?

Because it’s the myth.  And it’s a myth the power-hungry people who took charge of the feminist movement (one that initially only wanted equality under the law) are happy to perpetuate.  It’s a myth every college, every entertainment gatekeeper cherishes.

It’s a poisonous myth.  It’s also a stupid one.  No one in their right mind would talk about “War on women” for instance.  Are you insane?  Why would normal men – yes, your husband, your brother, your son – want to make war on women?  And yes, that means you, your sister, your mother.  Hell, even my gay male friends like women and have mothers and women friends.  And yes, for those of you about to be stupid, even males on the opposite side in politics have all of those, and no, none of them hate women.  (Except perhaps the occasional pathological case.)

(If you bought that wanting to not pay for contraceptives out of the public purse and at the expense of other people’s religious conscience is a “War on women” you might want to inform yourself.  Not giving you something for free is NOT restricting access.  Otherwise, people are restricting your access to food, housing and entertainment.  Is that a war on humans?)

I’ve watched the rise of this myth with slack-jawed amazement.  HOW can you even think that.  Guys, my men – and I live with three of them, husband and two sons – couldn’t “conspire” to keep chocolate hidden from me (they’ve tried.) And they’re all three of them brighter than the average bear.  WHY would you think men in general would want to conspire to keep you in submission?  Most modern guys wouldn’t know what to do with a truly submissive woman.

Oh, I know.  It’s the myth you heard, from Gimbutas and her sisters in school all the way to the latest movie you watched.  Males want power over you.

Well, some males maybe.  Those who belong to a religion that dresses women like upholstered furniture.  But it’s just one culture and there’s reasons for that (including but not limited to a culture of scarcity and a tradition of bride kidnapping.)  It’s not all men, and it’s certainly not MOST men of the western world.

Like the women who no longer remember why women were “historically oppressed” the men alive now were never in a society where men had the upper hand.

I have a friend who believes that it’s a pendulum.  Men had the upper hand, now women do, then it will swing back.

Unless science has some sort of pendulum too, I don’t see where she’s right.

What I see is women who were freed by tech advances and who THINK they were freed by marching shoulder to shoulder and taking permanent offense.  These women live in a state of paranoia, dreaming up male privilege that is invisible to anyone but them, and taking offense at ever more ridiculous things – even things that have nothing to do with gender – because they’re so terrified of men taking the upper hand again.

I look at them going to war with spelling: Womyn, Herstory.  I look at them dancing around dressed as vaginas (!) because apparently the most important thing in these women’s lives is their sexual organs. I look at them acting as a pack and attacking whoever they’re told to attack because “so and so is anti-woman” and I think… these are humans?  These are civilized people?  Don’t they see they’re being tools of the Marxist divide-and-conquer strategy?  Don’t they see the end of this is either societal destruction or TRUE backlash for the sake of saving civilization?

Apparently not.  So… carry on.  Dance around in your little fabric vaginas.  Think that all men are out to get you.  Refuse to have children, because some of them might be male.  And scream, scream, scream about made-up outrage.

That’s the way to bring civilization down and destroy the technological advances that brought us equality.  If that’s what you want, DO carry on.

Apres nous, le deluge.

Yesterday someone posted a meme with — I suspect she’s an actress, from some of the comments, but you know, I wouldn’t know actors/actresses (honestly, changing it all to the masculine word in a profession where you use your body and appearance is f*cking insane, and I’m done with the corruption of language) if one bit me on the flesh part of the behind — with a woman with a quote from her saying something about how it’s a good thing if the current climate makes every man afraid of every woman because women have been afraid of men for six thousand years.

There are some statements so completely insane that the only answer to them is “I don’t know what planet you came from, woman, but I personally have never been afraid of every man.  Also, you look remarkably well-preserved for six thousand years.

So, it starts with that.  From the mention of six thousand years, this woman is assuming that Maria Gimbutas was correct and that men overturned the peaceful matriarchal society which worshiped goddesses about that long ago.  She might not even know that’s what she’s buying into, having been taught this bullshit as fact.

So, to go to the beginning of this mess: if you’re not six thousand years, you haven’t been “in fear”that long, and as for other women being in fear… You don’t know.  You only know what you’ve been told.  And if you’re ignorant that you think there was some big reversal six thousand years ago, you haven’t really looked for scientific proof, or frankly given it much thought.

So far as we know there was never ANY large scale matriarchal society.  EVER.  Not over six thousand years ago, not ever.  Granted, that is the pre-history, and there are no clear narratives.  But absent Gimbutas dreaming that bull’s heads were uteri, there really is not even a glimmer of a trace of a guess that women were ever in charge.  Those vaunted amazons of the steppes turn out to be teen boys, not women at all (now we can analyze DNA from old bones.)

Yes, there have been female fighters throughout history.  They are outliers.  Most “female military” is either honor guard or largely ornamental until the 20th century and the existence of weapons that don’t rely on upper body strength alone.

Which brings us to the reason large scale (there were isolated tribe, yes, in special circumstances) matriarchies are unlikely in the extreme in our past or our future: women aren’t as strong as men.  They just aren’t.

Over the weekend, I watched a weedy teen male whose waist I could encircle with ONE arm lift a cabinet I couldn’t budge.

Sure I’m middle aged, and would have at least lifted it somewhat 30 years ago.  BUT moving it around like it was nothing?  No.

Because 99.9% of men are stronger than all but 1% of women.  Period.  (Barring illness or other impairment.)

So, how was it possible that in prehistory, with no other improvement to human strength, women would rule?

It wasn’t.  The only way women can rule is to convince men to use their muscles on THEIR behalf, which honestly, one way or another, history shows we’ve managed.

So no, we haven’t been afraid of men for six thousand years.  We’ve cooperated in an unstable but so far successful project called civilization. As long as some men will defend women, the bad men who’d make us afraid are kept under control.

But that requires that women don’t go bad en masse, and don’t use the apparatus of a bloated state to oppress all men.

Actress (I think) chickie wants to have all men afraid of every woman.  That’s because her head is stuffed with fecaliths and she doesn’t realize that women can only have power in society by consent of men.  That women’s violence is outsourced to the apparatus of the state.

Make every man afraid of every woman, and the apparatus comes apart.  The center does not hold.  Those big burly men you want to arrest random men on your behalf?  They will instead beat you to near death, tell you to put a burka on and cook them dinner.

This is where this ends.  Using the apparatus of state violence for “advantage” and “to make men afraid has only one end.  The society these idiots want is not even possible, let alone stable.

The end is a return to barbarism, and in barbarism, women are prisoners and chattels, as they’ve always been.

 

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: standing

Or the next best thing.
This week has to end.  Actually the whole month can end already.

Bob Woodward’s “Fire” is more like smoke and fractured mirrors by  Amanda S. Green

This has been a week. Between personal and professional demands on my time, not to mention the circus that’s been happening in D.C, finding a topic to blog about shouldn’t be difficult. The problem is that anything I chose would see my electronics be put in danger. The accusations against Judge Kavanaugh drive me up a wall. I’m tired of trial by innuendo and conviction by media. I’m sick of watching the DNC sending Beto O’Rourke around the country to build his image for future, nationwide office. The thought of him becoming my Senator scares me shitless. I could continue.

So, when Sarah pinged me this morning to ask where my blog post was, I almost told her there wouldn’t be one. I’d been dealing with a forest fire of the metaphorical kind since I woke. There isn’t enough coffee in the world to get me going this morning, and that includes the Death Wish coffee I’ve been guzzling for the last few hours.

However, I made a promise to her some months ago that I’d do a post a week for her. I’ve let her down a couple of times and she’s been gracious enough to let me change the day I blog on. So, I sat my butt down in my chair and tried to figure out what I could do that wouldn’t send my MacBook Air through the wall.

Mind you, what I decided to do might not accomplish that last. But it should be entertaining. At least I hope it will be for you. I have a feeling I’m going to be looking for booze, much much booze.

To prove I will take one for the team, this morning I downloaded the free sample for Fear: Trump in the White House. No, I won’t give Bob Woodward a dime of my money. Especially after reading the sample.

Okay, buckle up and here we go.

You know you’re in for a hit job—let’s call it what it really is, a hatchet job—when you see the title. But it gets better, for relative terms of better, when you open the book and you get to the epigraph.

“Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”

Woodward attributes the quote to President Trump. Of course, being the “good” journalist he is, he doesn’t give the context for the quote. He only gives time and location. After all, it is soooo much better to start off showing what a power-hungry and, shall we go ahead and say it now, evil man Trump is. (yes, tongue is firmly planted in cheek as I type that.)

One thing about it, Woodward does set the tone for the book and he doesn’t disappoint—assuming that is the sort of book you want to read.

Next up is the “Author’s Personal Note”. The tenor begun with the title and the epigraph continues.

President Trump presents a particular hurdle because of the deep emotions and passions he brings out in supporters and critics. (Fear, Kindle location 45-46)

Wow, he’s written five books about four presidents: Nixon, Obama, Clinton and Bush. Yet it is only Trump he seems to think brings out “deep emotions and passions: in his supporters and critics. I guess he slept through the Obama administration, not to mention Bush’s. Or could it be he has something personal against Trump? Or is he, like so many journalists today, falling back to the age of “yellow journalism” seen in the battles between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer?

But let’s see what else he has to say.

Hmm, we might not get to much of the book with this preview. We have the “Author’s Personal Note”. Then we have his “Note to Readers”. Couldn’t these have been combined or is he padding the book? I know. He had a word count from the publisher that he failed to fill and this was the only way he could do it. Or maybe the publishers wanted to make sure there wasn’t much of a preview of the actual book available—could they be worried readers wouldn’t want to buy it if they saw what the book actually contained—and chose this way to pad the beginning? Oh well, those are questions we’ll never have answers to. So let’s see what good ole Bob has to say to his readers.

Ah, here we have Woodward’s own admission that this is a hatchet job on the President and his administration. He tries to dress it up but he fails. When you have an author, especially someone who is supposedly a well-respected investigative journalist, saying that the book is based on interviews conducted as “deep background”, you know it means he is going to play fast and loose. There will be no specific quotes and no specific context given. Here’s what Woodward himself writes:

This means that all the information could be used but I would not say who provided it. (Fear, Kindle location 59-60)

I don’t know about you, but that alone takes this book from non-fiction to fiction. It is also where I would be sending the book back to Amazon and asking for a refund. Which is why I didn’t buy it in the first place. I have no respect for a writer, especially a journalist, who writes this sort of bullshit and doesn’t have the balls to demand his sources go on the record. Hmmm, could Woodward be the one who wrote the Deep State memo to the Times? I doubt it but that anonymous memo is the same sort of hit job as this book appears to be. Trial by innuendo and conviction by media.

To which I call bullshit.

When I have attributed exact quotations, thoughts or conclusions to the participants, that information comes from the person, a colleague with direct knowledge, or from meeting notes, personal diaries, files and government or personal documents. (Fear, Kindle location 61-63)

I don’t know about you, but that statement says to me that he not only accepted but embraced gossip and innuendo more than he did direct knowledge of the situation inside the White House. Frankly, the one thing echoing in my mind—said in a perfect imitation of Governor Ann Richards—is, “Poor Bob, he’s still looking for his next Deep Throat but this isn’t it.”

OMG, we still don’t get to the meat of the book. Now we have a Prologue. Damn but I’m glad I didn’t pay good money for this.

I have to admit, he sets a pretty stage. He paints a scene that could have come out of National Treasure or any entertaining political thriller. It opens with Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic advisor, walking into the Oval Office and crossing to the Resolute Desk. There he sees a one-page letter drafted by Trump to the South Korean president. Cohn then reads the letter and decides he knows better than the President. So he steals the letter. He is, by innuendo, protecting us and the world from our president.

Did Cohn steal the letter or not? No one really knows except Cohn and possibly other members of the Administration. However, if you check the media, you would see no question about it. If you do a Google search, you have to go 7 pages deep before finding anything that might cast doubt on Woodward’s allegation. After all, they have to keep with the narrative, one Woodward is so happy to embrace and do all he can to push.

Does Woodward say Cohn told him about the incident? No. This is one of those “deep cover” interviews apparently. So we don’t know who he talked with. Oh but, Amanda, what about the copy of the letter that good ole Bob released to the media to support his allegations? Again, there is no proof, no attribution of where the letter came from—at least not to my knowledge.

Again, trial by innuendo, conviction by media.

“I stole it off his desk,” he later told an associate. “I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.” (Fear, Kindle location 91-93)

Now we get a bit of a clearer picture. Some “associate”, and who knows who that might be and how far removed from the alleged event, told Woodward about this. Where is the fact-checking? Where is the accountability for the source or for the alleged facts? There is none and I doubt we will see much accountability in the rest of the book.

In the anarchy and disorder of the White House, and Trump’s mind, the president never noticed the missing letter. (Fear, Kindle location 93-94)

Holy hell, talk about bias.

We aren’t even into the meat of the book—hell, we aren’t even into the first frigging chapter of the book—and we get author intrusion so hard and fast it is jarring. We have one incident alleged to have happened but this is enough to prove “anarchy and disorder”. Better yet, Woodward reveals he is also apparently a mind reader. Wow. I guess he gained that power after Watergate. Otherwise, he would have revealed who Deep Throat was, maybe. Who knows what this yellow journalist would have done.

I give up. I’ve never before thrown in the towel on a book for ATH before getting to the first chapter. This is a first. There really isn’t enough booze in the world to get me to read all the Prologue, much less the rest of the book.

Woodward might have once been a good investigative journalist. Now? In my opinion, he’s a hack and I’m probably insulting hacks. This book appears to be nothing but a hit job, violating so many journalistic principles it makes my head spin. No, it makes my stomach turn. My great-grandfather who was a newspaper editor and my uncle after him who was a reporter would have publicly disowned Woodward for this piece of fiction.

Don’t waste your time or your money on this. Seriously, don’t. Unless you want to use it for kindling or target practice. All Fire is is confirmation the liberals are in control of most of mainstream publishing and are doing all they can to push their agenda of making sure there is a Blue Wave come the mid-term election. I won’t even talk about the fact this piece of crap (and I’m insulting crap) came out on 9/11. That is simply the ultimate insult to our country and to our intelligence.

Gawd, where’s the booze? I need booze.

*Get the woman some booze – SAH*

 

It’s probably as impossible for me to explain to you young’uns what it was like to talk or think about computers in the seventies, as it is to explain what it was like growing up during the cold war “waiting for the hammer to fall.” (Or how convinced everyone was that the communists would win because they were more efficient.)

I grew up reading stuff like Martin Cadin’s God Machine, and RUR’s robots, so of course I knew that machines could achieve full consciousness and rule us all.

It wasn’t till computers started being bought by private companies in Portugal in the seventies, and the excuse “it was a computer error” came in, that my brother (an electrical engineer) pulled me aside and explained how insane this all was.

But people my age and older than I fail to get it, still.  I was jaw-dropped when one of the luminaries of science fiction, on a panel, said we should have kids raised by robots to eliminate bias in their upbringing.  There walks someone who has never heard of Garbage In, Garbage out.  The bias would be baked in.

Some — many — of the younger people fail to get it too, aided along by the insane depictions of AI in movies and media, and expect computers/robots to be our saviors, to bring about that famed post-scarcity society.

Others think that machines will run people out of their jobs in droves, and we must therefore stop the machines before they make humans obsolete.

In regard to machines, particularly “thinking” ones (they’re not.  Actually “thinking” still eludes us.  What we have is a very sophisticated version of arranging virtual gears and things) I like to misquote Shakespeare “neither a Luddite nor a credulous acolyte be.”

Sure, computers will become more sophisticated and better, in the next 100 years or so. There might be a limit, sure, but we’re clever monkeys, and always get around those.

Will they ever be truly sentient, or define themselves as opposed to us?  I kind of doubt it.  Heck, some people doubt WE are sentient.  But even if they did, they’d be our “children” i.e. human in all but externals.  Because they would be built like us, who else would they reflect?  So they’d be about as troublesome as humans always are to each other.  Rule us?  Maybe.  But how much worse could they be than what we’ve done to ourselves in the past?

Then there’s the dream of the pure “planning” and “thinking” machine, which was part of the attraction of communism.  The dream shall always be with us, and always unattainable.  Not only would the machines be in our image and semblance, but who can believe planning everything and ruling over chaotic humans would create a better society?  Ultimately planned societies/economies, MIGHT work great for some alien, but I’d trust our chaotic nature and the improvisational smarts of the cleaver and tinkering monkeys we are against all the planning in the universe.

As for running humans out of jobs, bah.  Humans are really good at inventing new jobs for themselves, which is why almost no one these days does our original jobs of hunting and gathering.

For the same reason there will never be post-scarcity.  Why?  Because we’re better at inventing new “needs.”  Get sent to the middle ages — or my childhood in the sixties — and you’ll find out how many things you “need” don’t exist.

By medieval terms we’re already post-scarcity.  You notice any of us lying down and letting the grapes fall in our mouths? (well, some.  Even our welfare recipients live better than medieval man, but that’s a talk for another day.)

And this is good, because humans are also striving monkeys.  We were born for strife, and without it we wither and corrupt.  Which is why “no demands” charity destroys people.

So, be not afraid of the machines, but use them as we use a ladder: to reach somewhere we couldn’t get before, and learn new and interesting things, and discover even more, bigger and more confusing problems.

Here’s to humans.  The chaotic rebels they are.  May they always be so.