It never fails. It’s kind of like, you know, going out side when it’s raining and getting wet. Or being hungry if you don’t eat or sleepy if you don’t sleep.
If you go to a blog in which someone has denounced the crimes of communism, you can expect two things in the comments: one, that there will be idiots saying that what we’re talking about is not communism, because true communism has never been tried. The other is that there will be idiots saying that our system has too many issues NOT to give communism a try: we have discrimination, hatred, crime, poverty, homelessness (at some point on that second one a lot of crazy sh*t will be thrown in, like GMOs, the fact we need vaccines, or the fact we kill animals to eat. I’ve never actually seen anyone throw in the Heartbreak of psoriasis, but let me tell you I also would not be shocked.)
Most of these people are young but not all of them. Many are my age and older, and completely missed — possibly due to being immersed in a leftist ideological soup — the horrors revealed by the fall of the USSR. Or papered over their dissonant feelings with that whole “not real communism” though they might very well have believed that the USSR was “on the way to communism.” At least on odd Mondays.
Part of this is that the USSR was very good at pseudo-logical explanations. The whole of Marxism is, for obvious reasons. Papering over their dissonance and horrors was the only way to continue existing as a regime. For that matter any convinced Marxist has to be able to justify six impossible and mutually contradictory things before breakfast. Which is why the ranks of convinced communists are half and half stupidity and malice. If you meet a convinced communist and he’s obviously not stupid, then he’s malicious. His greed for power over others is such that he’s convinced himself he’s using an “altruistic” philosophy to attain it, and it will, in the end, be for the good of all. The rational, sane part of him might whisper that this is bullshit, because it can never happen, and therefore all they get is power to destroy those they hate and elevate those they like for a time at least, but that rational sane voice is tiny, and the monstrous ego that believes if everyone understood Marxism as the communist does and played its part in the mental play written according to the Marxist exegesis of the communist, then there would be utopia.
It’s a powerful siren song for the maleducted and ambitious, which explains for instance, Obama, who hated Reagan for causing the fall of the USSR and wanted to undo everything Reagan did, because without Reagan’s intervention, we’d already have achieved utopia. Before you laugh, for my entire time in SF/F professional circles, which started about ten years after Reagan’s presidency, I heard people who should be more thoughtful repeat the same inane pap. “If only Carter had had a second term. If only we hadn’t elected Republicans.” Then, in their minds, Utopia would already be here.
The USSR as the genesis of our “progressives” explains much of this, because the USSR was really good at creating Potemkin philosophies and then infecting the west with them viat propagandists and (witting or unwitting) agents in academia and the soft sciences.
For instance, by the seventies, if my (then future) sister in law’s psychology books (required for her MD. All of them coming from America and in English, and, because her English was not great, lingering at our house for my brother to translate (you know the rules. A book came into the house, I read it, even if I had to read it with an English dictionary in the other hand) psychologists tried to explain away mental illness as being the result not of a malfunction that would lead to self-destruction, but a reaction to an unjust environment. They would take things like schizophrenia and glorify it as a reaction to the unbearable burdens of capitalism (ah!). This is at the root of the ambivalence in treating mental illness in the US, and also in the elevating of the homeless (many of them untreated mental patients) into some kind of culture heroes. It’s honestly at the root of a lot of the left’s inversions such as the idea that our speech is violence, their violence is speech, the idea we live in a patriarchy (where males get short shrift in schooling, marriage law, employment and cultural stereotypes, but never mind) and that we live in (this one is new, not coincidentally born with BLM, for obvious reasons) a white supremacy. (Proving they never visited South Africa in the old days, btw.)
The left feels that way because they have a vast number of the maladapted and the mentally ill in their most vocal sectors. And therefore, if they are maladapted and mentally ill, someone must be oppressing them. The game after that is to claim the greatest possible oppression, because that justifies anything you might want to do. Hitting total strangers, whose opinions you misunderstand or distort with bicycle locks is totally an act of heroism, because look how oppressed you are.
Like the end game of the European Kings was to claim they were descended from Jesus Christ, and therefore ultimately from G-d himself, the end game of the devout Marxist is to claim the whole of society is oppressing him or her. Imagine how much leeway you get from that. You can do anything and STILL be a hero.
Anyway, if it were just a few crazies, we could ignore this notion of “a nation must be perfect to criticize any other nation” or “a culture must be perfect to criticize any other culture” (try to criticize a culture that dresses its women like sofas and pitches its sexual non-conformists from roofs or pulls walls on top of them and you’ll get hit with “patriarchy” eating disorders and the elusive and unprovable — or disprovable — “rape culture.”)
But it’s not a few crazies. Our children in our schools — and for this assume I’m talking for the entire west — are taught all the flaws of their own culture, while being dissuaded from examining the flaws of any others. Sooner or later, they’re exposed to the “progressive” (my kids? Middle school, every fricking teacher. Okay, except two one of which was a navy vet) ideals and the idea that it’s supposed to create the perfect society for everyone.
By that time the kids know everything that’s “wrong” with our system, but haven’t been taught to think rationally about history or culture, or to see the flaws in everything human, outside that fabled “arrow of history” in which “progress” (defined as Marxism) has slowly been winning throughout history.
It’s no wonder the poor mites comes screeching onto blog comments yelling that “it wasn’t real communism, and if you give us time, we’ll build utopia.”
A similar process was used on my generation, under the cold war, to convince us communism wasn’t that bad to live under (“I bet it’s really warm in the bear’s belly) and that the systems were roughly equivalent and only opposed in trivial stuff, and only at each other’s throats because capitalism requires imperialism and the stealing of resources from undeveloped countries (hell, I was taught that. Fortunately (?) there were enough refugees from Africa to tell me how the Soviet “liberation” of former colonies was progressing. Don’t ask. And don’t look into what Cuban mercenaries did to the Portuguese parts of Africa unless you have a really strong stomach.
So, you get those too.
But the problem is this: Utopia is impossible for real humans. This applies to communist utopia, to Christian utopia, to just about every kind of utopia imaginable or even guessable at.
And it’s not even because “humans are flawed” — though it is that, too. At least in the darker portions of our society — it’s “Humans are different and bring the baggage of their childhood with them.”
For instance, my mother had — by and large — my best interests at heart. My best interests as she perceived them.
We are actually vaguely similar facially (she’s much prettier, possibly still.) But I have dark eyes, and dad’s dark olive coloring (note if you saw me before, oh, two months ago you might pause here, but trust me. Now that my thyroid is close to balanced, I’m holding pigment again. Hypothyroidism makes you pale and sort of swollen. Even before I started losing weight, my face became less of a moon shape as the thyroid supplements worked.) Mom is pale (well ruddy tan because she spends so much time outside) with light brown hair and green eyes. She is heavy on top and slim on bottom. I’m a pear.
She could not — COULD not — realize this. Even though by profession she picked the best colors and fits for her clients, she kept buying and making me clothes that looked great on her, and insisting on dressing me in greens, browns and what I call “dead reds” (no, not pictures of Che) which made me look ill.
Similarly, having come from a ah…. difficult area, with a culture where women were often the only ones keeping the kids fed (when they weren’t also drinking it away) and where wife beating was a sport everyone took part in, and being unable to fully internalize the culture of dad’s family (granted only my generation of women went to college but all the women in my family, time out of mind were literate and often read for fun, which was still weird when I was a kid, and must have been bizarre centuries earlier.) she tried to prepare me for the world she’d grown up in. This included pushing a lot more house cleaning on me than was sane for me at that age, discouraging complaining, and telling me illness or my schoolwork were no excuses. (Okay, this was partially bolstered by the fact some idiot doctor telling them I was so premature I’d be mentally retarded. My parents have such faith in “learned people” that until I passed the exam that gave access to university prep, they regarded my grades as proof of the sad decay of education, that a poor slow girl could have As. One of my earliest memories is hearing them talk late at night in their room and saying it was okay if I was stupid. Mom would train me to make some man a great wife. Fortunately I was young enough that I remember the words but didn’t internalize them or apply them to me. In fact it took me years to realize they were actually talking about me.) At the same time she did this, she was telling me never to let myself be abused. But she was in fact training me to accept and live through abuse (which has served me very badly in my professional career) because in her back brain this was equivalent to my having a stable and happy future in the horrible world she’d been brought up in.
This is my mother, a smarter than usual individual, who really thought she was doing her best for me.
And she not only had no idea who I was or what I wanted, but if she’d designed a utopia for me it would have been hell. And she’d never realize she’d put me in hell.
As my boys lives are playing out, and their wishes and desires taking turns, I can pretty much tell you I can’t design paradise for them. They have to make their own.
In the same way…
Well, in many ways any of our ancestors, even possibly in the 19th century seeing how we live would think it was utopia. And sure for many people, it is hell.
But you can’t create a utopia, in which there’s no suffering, be it physical mental or emotional. You can’t because no one can know what is best for others. I used mom’s and my example because though biologically related our upbringing and interests are so different (and yet, pursuing from the same impulses. Mom is intellectually curious, rebellious and wildly creative. But he upbringing channeled those another way.)
Now imagine some anonymous bureaucrat with the writing of Marx in his head trying to make a perfect society.
You don’t have to imagine. We have the records of a century of multiple experiments. The result is always death. In the millions. Many argue a hundred million is a low estimate, and I agree. No one was counting in Africa, for instance.
This is because, even given the best intentions — and as explained above those are almost impossible, because smart people can’t help but see the contradictions in Marx — it is impossible to create “perfect communism” or any other utopia, because you don’t know what other people need or want, or what would constitute paradise to them.
I get a lot of push back from people on the right, for instance, because my favorite place to live is (would be. Husband’s is opposite, so we compromise) the center of a large city. I have my reasons for this, including the fact that I’m an introvert and get bored easily. One of my best friends, Dave Freer, lives in a remote Australian island and makes most of his living off the land. He loves it. To him that is Utopia. To me, it would cause me to jump in the sea and swim to the nearest large city. And I can’t swim. And I’m sure the distance is too large. And yes, this is a friend, someone I esteem and respect. And yet, our ideas on where to live are diametrically opposite.
Now imagine a faceless government bureaucrat deciding where each of us would live and work.
“But there wouldn’t be bureaucrats,” says the indoctrinated innocent. “In perfect communism everyone just gets what he needs and works at what he wants.”
Pull the other one, kid, it plays jingle bells. No matter if you come back with superabundance, and everyone being educated the same way by robots — two already big begs that are unlikely to come to pass — humans are too different for this to work. It’s not even two people wanting the same thing when there’s only one of that. It’s that people might not be able to tolerate the way their neighbor lives. Sure, live and let live. But if paradise for your neighbor is beating dogs to death in his backyard, how long will you let it go? And some people feel just as strongly about other things that YOU might consider paradise.
The only way to make everyone act the way some ideologue thinks they should is to have a totalitarian government, a strong police state, a structure of spying on every action, every thought, every idea.
What those utopians are saying is that they want everyone to live in what’s a perfect society FOR THEM. In other words, they want power over your very soul.
I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.
There is no utopia. Some people will be miserable in the wealthiest, cleanest, most considerate society ever. This is also not a conjecture. They are. And they scream about patriarchy and oppression and white supremacy that exist only in their heads.
My solution is to work towards a society that’s even safer and more prosperous. Because then fewer people will fall through the cracks. And more confident, so we give people the tools not to be driven mad by excess wealth (this seems to be a strong correlation throughout history, if you look at the scions of very wealthy families. Maybe because being built on a scavenger frame, man needs to struggle at least somewhat.)
And the way to get there is freedom.
Not the red-throated “freedom” of the lock step masses and the groups of widgets fighting against other groups of widgets, but the true freedom of the individual to — to coin phrase — be all that he/she can be.
It ain’t utopia, but it’s as close as we can get to it in this world.
According To Hoyt 
Socialism/Communism = authoritarianism.
But it gets marketed as the opposite of that.
What annoys me is when communists act like their form of collectivism is somehow better than fascism.
They both stink.
Peel off the labels and it’s damn difficult to tell them apart.
Because during the heyday fascism was nation specific socialism. International socialism was socialism for Russia. Uncle Joe just had a better ad campaign for their empire than Uncle Adolf did.
Hey! The National Socialist German Workers’ Party weren’t stuck up. They were trying to give *everyone* the benefits of modern, enlightened German National Socialism! Not like those backward foreigners who never tried to help anyone else…
Not really. The Soviets did the same export, just didn’t admit that it was to create client states to feed Russia just as France and Poland were intended.
Fascism is just communism with the guns pointed the other direction.
Rez’s quick guide to communist theory:
* Marx: Give me your stuff, or I’ll hate you!
* Lenin: See that guy over there? Everything is his fault. Shoot him and take his stuff.
* Stalin: Never mind, I’ll shoot him myself.
* Hitler: Can I play too? [shoots self in foot]
For fun and games, if one funds the rare “reasonable” leftoid, ask them the differences between fascism, Nazism, socialism, and communism.
Just post the party platform. Even spotting every nationalistic or racial impulse to the reps many more aspects are directly of the 2016 dnc than rnc.
The Nazis have spiffier uniforms. And might allow you some small semblance of a personal life. The Communists want to control everything.
As bad as it sounds, at least ethnic nationalism had some certainty as to your status. It wasn’t as much the minute to minute changes the stack has now.
To make things more confusing, as WWII went on, the Soviets turned more into Russian nationalist, and the Nazis turned internationalist.
“We have BOTH kinds of music. Country AND Western!”
Sounds like our favorite Chinese restaurant. Yeah, we’re rural. 🙂
Fascism doesn’t generally seem to be as soul destroying for the general populace. I suspect that’s because the ideology frequently doesn’t seem to be pushed as hard as it is under Communism. Or in other words, you tend to get the robber baron on top, and not the wannabe do-gooder.
i would like to point out that the form of collectivism some of them are espousing technically *is* fascism and not communism.
Eh, “authoritarianism” gets thrown at anybody who listens to any source the accuser doesn’t like…..
A Socialist is a Communist is a Fascist is a Nazi. The differences are wholly inconsequential, and if a government labeled on or another of these variants hasn’t started mass-produced murder, it will as soon as it can.
I’m bored with these sniveling Utopianists; they are no different from The Old King;
Suffer not The Old King, under ANY name.
A Romanian guy who grew up under socialism had this to say —
Source Link
“First, let’s make something clear, since I can already hear you whining “But…but…you are talking about life in a communist country, we don’t want communism, socialism is different!” Yes it is, you snowflakes. Communism is the final goal in the Marxist philosophy. . . .
IN CONCLUSION: there were never real communist countries anywhere in the world. They were all socialist. They all had socialist economies and they were ruled by communist Parties. The reason the ruling Parties called themselves communist not socialist, was simple: Marxist theory says socialism is just the intermediate phase between capitalism and communism. Because communism is the final goal, it was natural the political Parties blazing the society way toward communism called themselves communist, not socialist.”
There are also parts 2-6 if you go to his “moments” tab at the top of his twitter page and want to read more. It’s a rabbit hole I’m not sorry I fell down. Fascinating reading.
His concluding paragraph from his part 6:
“[The People’s Palace] is destined to always serve as a reminder of what socialism is: central planning, the forced uprooting of the people from the homes they lived in for generations, disregard for private property, unbelievable excess for the ruling class and inhuman living conditions for the rest”
I like what you have written and the info about the thyroid is good as dave is having thyroid issues right now
” Sometimes I sets and thinks, and sometimes I just sets ” W.T. Pooh
Years ago I read a review of a collection of stories about utopias (IIRC how they begin) and the reviewer was extremely bothered by one theme of several of the stories.
The theme was “to get an utopia, you need mind control”. Either via drugs or otherwise.
I don’t think the reviewer realized that “mind control” is the only way for an utopia to work. 😦
Hell, to even WANT Utopia, you have to think of most people as cattle.
They do … and they all think they’re going to be the shepherd.
The other is that there will be idiots saying that our system has too many issues NOT to give communism a try …
Yesterday I was watching the morning news while getting dressed. There was an article about a famous comedian. Although his fame is mostly based on his past body of work, and most of that is of the dumb genera of comedy, he is gaining notoriety now for his politics. I could not help but think that his claim that it was time for Americans to get over it and give in to the glory that is socialism was really just more example of real dumbness. 😉
Socialism is a failure before it even begins. That it has never really been tried yet is an indication of that. That attempts to try it have failed so many times leads me to ask why try it as a replacement for a system that, for all its faults, has yet to produce a Venezuela?
Jim Carey has always been kind of hit or miss as an actor. As a politician, he’s pretty much nothing but a miss.
Should have stayed in the rhino
Thank god he’s no longer a Canadian….
Oh, drat. Who left the cage open?
Damn U.S. immigration policy sucks.
We should have let a thousand more Haitians in before we let Carey in.
But, didn’t he promise to move to Canada if Trump won?
Or did he know Canada wouldn’t take him back?
Perhaps there’s a reason this commedian’s big breakout hit was called “Dumb and Dumber.”
And another was “Liar, Liar” – quite appropriate for a pro-socialist politician.
Consider his past work as an actor. I think he is one of those naive people who really believes it.
The naivety is a given, considering he’s been an anti-vaxxer in the past.
y’all seem to have forgotten The Mask.
Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed The Mask. In some ways it makes things all the worse. All that energy and potential and what did he do? Or maybe it was the fortuitous coming together of a project and script with an unusual role which called for an actor suited to it, but not likely to be repeatable?
Anyway, in this case having that kind of mercurial talent does not translate into political brilliance.
“I just can’t look past the mountain of corpses,” is my phrase about communist societies. Of course there will be “But…” coming back when I say that. The phrase “mountain of corpses” sticks in the mind, though.
Man’s inhumanity to man…
I’ve taken to telling people that socialism/communism are the group project of governmental systems. In order for anything to get done, someone has to care enough to push it through.
I’ve used group projects to explain the problems of freeloading to people before.
I’ve taken to telling people that socialism/communism are the group project of governmental systems. In order for anything to get done, someone has to care enough to push it through.
And that someone is usually the glory/power hog.
Oh, Sarah, don’t you know? The reason the USSR failed is because Stalin was too right-wing!
Stop laughing. That’s what some of these clowns actually think.
thinkbelieveTrue. “Thinking” is too strong a word.
There was a member of Clinton’s Council of Economics Advisers who in the 80s wrote that Ceausescu’s Romania would have had the greatest economy in the world due to the quality of the government if only it had access to western technology.
Why they didn’t use their superior government to duplicate and exceed that technology never crossed her mind apparently.
Clinton’s advisers lauded Ceaușescu? The man was anything but a paragon of women’s rights as viewed by the modern American progressives. His government made divorce extremely difficult to obtain.
He introduced policies that largely eliminated access to birth control. He oversaw the passage of Decree 770 which placed strict restrictions on abortion and provided incentives to women to produce five or more children.
He was a Communist, and that makes everything he did okay.
Want a feel for the difference between a communist leader and a human leader?
Compare Elena Ceaușescu from Romania with the great Margaret Thatcher. Both were chemists, one was evil the other a great human….
Sarah actually posted on that a while back. The trigger was a comment on a thread elsewhere which insisted that Stalin was right-wing because he used his military.
Was there ever a Communist government above the level of a local council that got there without controlling/using most/all of their military?
I was never, ever, not even when I was a teenager and distracted by the usual teenage idiocies and delusions, under the illusion that communism or it’s watered-down cousin, socialism, was a societal good. Because I knew personally just too many people, from kindergarten on up through college, who had escaped from communism, or from a place where communist-led insurgents were making life for ordinary citizens a misery. Indonesia, Cuba, Russia, eastern Europe, Vietnam … some of them had escaped as children with their families, some later as adults. They escaped every which way that one can — by boat, by legal exit visa and legitimate airline flight, on bleeding feet as a war refugee, often with nothing more than the clothing they stood up in, by the skin of their teeth.
Not a damn one of them ever wanted to go back, once they got to the US.
Not sure if it was here or elsewhere I read about an escape from East Germany. Just a simple mad dash. One made it. The west guards had to watch the other all night die from the bullet from the east germans in his gut.
In some cases we have people dying to get opportunity to work here, and a visa is worth tens of thousands of dollars for employers to give emoloyees. Granted our social net is an increasing driver of immigration but there is still a vast difference.
Those places where communism or its close cousin socialism sort of kind of almost works is where some policies are under iron fisted control while a blind eye is turned towards the underground economy. It is that last bit you see that smooths out the rough edges generated by bureaucratic five year plans and mostly sees to it that the people don’t freeze or starve to death.
Invariably, every time an administration cracks down hard on the various black markets in those goods necessary to sustain life they cause people to die.
Yep.
The USSR’s agriculatural plans were apparently drawn up by apparachki whose ideas of farming came from Thoreau or his Russian equivalent. Workers would enjoy the clean air and healthy lifestyle, work diligently, and have hoedowns in the evenings before reading the words of Lenin and Marx to each other.
The fact that farming is hard work, and people generally don’t like to do hard work if they’re not getting anything out of it, apparently zipped right over their heads.
You don’t have to look too hard to find pictures of kolkhoz farmers using wooden hoes and shovels. In a country that had atomic power and spacecraft.
No, you’re not going to meet the latest Five-Year Plan’s quota increase using 16th-century agriculture, no matter how motivated your collective is. Which is why the Russians sucked it up and bought American grain, corn, and soybeans, because their shortfall was so great it couldn’t be made up from the satellite nations or free world sources other than the USA.
Don’t forget that up until Stalin’s demise, the Soviet scientific and agricultural apparat was also subject to the pernicious influence of Lysenkoism.
It is amazing how often the “obviously superior” system needs the “immoral, exploitative system on the wrong side of history” for the former to function.
Strange, isn’t it? *does best to look innocently curious*
If you meet a convinced communist and he’s obviously not stupid, then he’s malicious.
So there are two types of Communist: Dolts and Devils.
Sounds like an evil roleplaying game.
It is. If you are killed in the game… you die for real.
SAO!
SWI-CHU!!!
Has entered family vocab.
Heh. I liked that series of stories.
Or Congress.
I can go with that. Some are both, in various degrees.
A spectrum of Dolts, Devils, Doltish Devils, Devilish Dolts, and assorted Fools and Lying Bastards. All also known as “targets” if things get really bad.
It’s quite significant that there’s never any “real communism”.
A proponent of (e.g.) monarchy will generally admit that there have been good and bad monarchs, while still arguing that monarchy is still best because (reasons). What he won’t do is claim that (e.g.) Ivan the Terrible or John Lackland “weren’t real monarchs”.
Just about any system of government one can name has both successful and unsuccessful examples…except communism. It’s turned into slavery, starvation, and mass murder every single time.
Lacking a successful example, the only option is to claim that “real communism” has “never been tried”.
Of course, that raises the followup question of why, out of dozens of attempts, not one of them has resulted in “real communism”.
It’s not really important at this stage whether “real communism” is slavery, starvation, and mass murder, or whether slavery, starvation, and mass murder are simply the inevitable failure mode of every attempt to institute “real communism”.
The shit don’t work, progs. Time to admit that.
Q: What’s only real difference between a Communist and a Nazi?
A: The Nazi won’t try to tell you that REAL Naziism hasn’t been tried.
(..tick…tick…tick… Hey, I expect ‘antifa’ to do something even more stupid than last time ALL the time. It’s too sure a thing to bet on.)
“Snork!”
The tough bit is breaking down the difference between a homogeneous nation the size of some cities and a nation of 300 million. Yes, some Scandinavian countries are proud of their nets and are not completely negatively affected but there are specific local reasons it works that we will not touch.
None of the Scandinavian countries is pure communism, not really socialism. The have heavy socialist policies that rely on the steering capitalists to pay for. That also have rules and customs that give or leftoids fits. Like Norway requiring you to own/rent a gun in order to visit certain places (polar bears). Also there is some backlash to some of their policies, as well as some financial issues that are getting worse and worse.
I’m just noting that Scandinavia is the go to, as is to a lesser extent canada and uk. But gloss over that part of why things are expensive here is because we pay for their socialist policies. Plus the north sea oil and banking policies are huge money makers that the government doesn’t try and strangle.
As far as the ownership, reminds me of the vapors gotten when DeVos idly wondered if a school should be armed. After a bear had wandered into the grounds and forced lockdown.
They also ignore any sort of bad news about the Scandinavian systems, there are workplaces in the UK that offer private health care to entice people to apply, or that the USA is the fallback that allows the Canadian health ssyste to work.
Yep. One thing I’ll note is just how much seems to be a case of being assigned a dr and having minimal recourse. I’ve tried for years to find a good counselor. If I had been assigned one or had a small coterie I’d have even more difficulty than already do. Here i have dozens of options, from something like five hospital groups. Bit different when its 8 mos to get first appointment.
I wouldn’t mind adopting some Canadian policies. Merit-based immigration and deporting of illegal immigrants seem like great ideas to me.
Since when have we imported the less bad laws from elsewhere.
We borrowed a some good ones in the late 18th Century, and at least one more in the mid 19th.
And most important, homogeneous mono-cultural populations.
NOT ANY MORE!!!!!!
And you’ll notice to keep the social safety net functioning, which they know requires high levels of trust and social cohesion, the Danes are now taking children from immigrant families a significant amount of time each day to train them to be Dutch.
Is it at an authoritarian level? No, but it is some of that “mind control” mentioned above.
I know it’s a typo, but the thought of training people to be viable in another country is amusing. (OTOH, my grandfather would rather they’d have trained the immigrants to be Swedish. Then send them to Stockholm.)
Hmmm…I think Dutch metal artists were oppressing me and caused it.
Seriously, it seems almost every female fronted symphonic metal band is either from the Netherlands (Epica and Within Temptation for example) or has Dutch lead singer (Flor Jensen of Nightwish is Dutch, for example)
Sounds like a first cousin (once removed) to progressive rock, a la Emerson Lake and Palmer or Triumvirat and such.
I sometimes play this for the students before tests. Or “O Fortuna.”
Do they at least recognize Churchill and what so each it is?
And one more, by Night wish. A friend once described them as what happens when metal heads listen to too much Jim Steinman.
Progressive metal is definitely related. Musical joke: What’s the difference between metal/rock and progressive metal/rock? In the latter, the fingers on the left hand move. (Progressive music is related to classical guitar more than rock guitar.)
Make that a third country.
Danish?
Yep. Saw it in the news a week or so ago. The Danes aren’t as bad off as the Swedes, right now.
I actually don’t have as much of an issue with that since I looked into details– but I’m also, due to family history of what exactly the culture of the Indians involved was, don’t have an issue with the “Indian Schools” that were cultural indoctrination. I think it’s a GOOD thing that kids are taught to wash their hands, poop in the toilet, and not torture folks, to death or otherwise….
That said, I’ve had the song I didn’t know was ironic when I heard it in my head all day:
It is the only way to preserve the safety net if that is the priority, which appears to be the case.
It isn’t that horrific but my point was even the friendly Scandinavian “socialism” requires a degree of enforced conformity.
<<= likes the safety net of "neighbors will not kill my husband, rape me and kidnap the girls."
That’s only because of racism. Woke people tolerate cultural differences. Which is why they accept that it is my culture to kill communists and others whose behavior does not fit inside a narrow set of cultural norms. Oh, wait.
IMO a working society needs a certain level of enforced conformity.
If it’s not done by social pressure, it has to be done by laws.
Agreed but the more the govt does the more the latter seems required.
Nod.
Of course, while most of us here would like less government & laws, there are always assholes who respond to social pressure by saying “there’s no law against it so I’ll do as I please” and society instead of beating the heck out of him passes a law against what the asshole did. 😦
And on the flip side, we need laws against being the heck out of him because…
*points at AntiFa*
True.
Of course, while those people are an extreme example, I’m sure that we could find otherwise nice people who might be tempted to “beat the heck out of us”. 😈
And when we see that Antifa is being allowed to beat people up without consequences from the law……
I’ve heard of plenty of cases of them being charged. Harshly, even. In Seattle. And Portland.
The abuses get pointed out because THEY ARE ABUSES.
And what do they get sentenced to? IF they are arrested and charged and convicted. Remember the DC Inauguration? or Charlottesville?
The ones I’ve heard of from Seattle? Harsher than most of the random vandalism– because it was planned out.
Seeing as how open violent assault of those against redefining marriage wasn’t even worth a warning, since nobody went to the hospital, that suggests the support is even more lacking.
Of course you have what is happening in Europe. The Laws are NOT being enforced against Muslims. The Gov and the Press are refusing to admit or even say that the Muslims are a problem. In fact they are arresting people for telling the truth about what the Muslims are doing.
So what is happening? People are starting to take thing into their own hands. Beating the asshole. It is called Vigilantism. When the Law and Law enforcement is no longer trusted people will act.
What ALL the Do Gooders, Progressive, BLM, etc. forget is that the Police were formed to PROTECT the ACCUSED. NOT the law abiding people.
People need to be reminded of that.
‘The English, The English, The English are best! I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.’
Scandinavia is like a condominium or gated community that provides a lot of in-house services (cleaning, dog walking, clinic, personal trainers, ect), and charges a hefty fee for the services. They’re also able to cover your utilities should you hit a bad patch.
But, the people still own their own stuff, so it’s not real Socialism.
Real Socialism is more like public housing, which like most things with the prefix of public goes downhill right quick.
Just gotta watch for the bait and switch. Even the same nets in US would go much different but because it works in a small, homogeneous community it’ll of course work here.
A few people taking and not giving is okay. If the HOA was to throw open all the empty houses to the homeless for free, the place would go downhill right fast.
Yep.
Oh, you mean like the Swedes did with the Muslims.
Even going so far as to take homes from people who had more than one and then letting Muslims stay there.
It’s totally not slavery if we’re all wearing the same chains, comrade! [pay no attention to the man behind the door]
With uniform moral training that demands selfless behavior and self-imposed correction from tiniest tot upward and severe social correction in adults and emphasis on the moral value of labor we can achieve a more or less uniform and generally prosperous community. It helps a lot if anyone who doesn’t conform believes that they will burn forever in hell. We generally call this “religion”… which comes in a continuum of strictness from extreme conformity to accepting of variation in certain areas and not others. The good ones emphasize love and above all, family, along with the conformity. And at least you usually get a reward afterward, which is nice.
And people who see the oppression in that so very clearly think that socialism or communism can be *free* and that people will happily, selflessly, conform and labor endlessly on what is necessary rather than personally rewarding (or the two will magically be the same) for strangers rather than family and with neither the threat of hell nor promise of heaven.
For reasons.
For those who don’t conform you either have to exile them or kill them. Exile leads to a danger so they are normally killed. This gives a greater push towards to conforming.
“Some people will be miserable in the wealthiest, cleanest, most considerate society ever. This is also not a conjecture. They are. And they scream about patriarchy and oppression and white supremacy that exist only in their heads.”
And some things deserve repeating. 🙂
A friend of mine and I agree that civilization begins at the city limits. We differ, however, as to which side is which. She loves the Bronx and Manhattan – and I say she can have them.
Vic Missy’s Green Acres Theme Song
Green Acres is the place to be.
Farm livin’ is the life for me.
Land spreadin’ out so far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside.
New York is where I’d rather stay.
I get allergic smelling hay.
I just adore a penthouse view.
Dah-ling I love you but give me Park Avenue.
…The chores.
…The stores.
…Fresh air.
…Times Square
You are my wife.
Good bye, city life.
Green Acres we are there.
You are aware that this song strikes a certain unsettling resonance with Our Esteemed Hostess?
Re: The chores … and Fresh air …
Have you ever had to deal with two boys who had followed a dog into a cut packed full of cow manure for the purpose of composting? I have. We resorted to stripping them down, hosing them off, giving them a good brisk scrubbing with a bristle brush, and another hosing down before they were deemed acceptable to enter into the house to take a bath.
Have you ever been a boy who swung from a rope swing attached to a willow branch over an 8 foot tall manure pile that while stable enough to walk on, wouldn’t support you from a 3 or 4 foot drop onto it? Lesson learned on crusts. That has applicability to things like fresh lava flows, and hot spring edges.
I will say that the problem I had with rope swingers was not quite that. It involved a body of water that I was unfamiliar with, but I was surprisingly fortunate, for once again I managed to neither kill or greatly harm my idiot younger self.
This was later somewhat reproduced by The Daughter with a rope swing she found hanging over a stream, initially much to my amusement (by some definitions). Thankfully it was accompanied by no harmful results, a bit of damping, and fun was had by all.
I learned to distrust thick grape vines when I used one to swing across a creek. Well, part of the way, until it dumped me on my back on the rocks in the stream bed.
I doubt that ropes are much more trustworthy.
That is the trick. Want to live in a city? Got plenty of choices. Don’t try and force everyone else to live the same way. Same should go both ways but no more trust either way
Lack of trust is basically a lot of what is going on right now.
Those of us paying attention have had it conclusively proved that we should not trust.
Various parties had been lying about basic matters of cultural consensus.
We are not all on the same page, and know it.
Processes that rely on us being on the same page will not work right now.
We have to hold on, and wait while the false information, the corrupted data, is flushed out or removed from the system. Or finish reconfiguring to function well in the current environment.
Part is that that cultural consensus has also been broken. Once upon a time a memorial for fallen soldiers would have merited appreciation even for deadly enemies. Today unless they were ‘your side’ they are targets.
Problem is I have started seeing Cambodia as a more likely outcome than anything positive.
ESR’s explanation of why the statue toppling is wrong includes the argument that the period most of the statues were put up in was a period when the subcultures finally came to a consensus on peace, put much of the grudges over the war to rest, and peace became de facto, not just de jure. He used different words from that, but I think I retained the sense.
That is the thing. Many of these monuments are generic war dead monuments. Even right after the war there wasn’t a huge amount of “shooting the wounded”. The occupation had some but the armies of the South were treated honorably. Today, with the actions of these mobs, i wouldn’t be surprised if southern cemeteries were disinterred and the southern army dead iust tossed in pits or burned.
What scares me is that their allies do not realize they’ve got feral dogs at their side; get injured and they’ll rip THEM apart as quickly as they do us.
The Elites BELIEVE that they can control the Barbarians. They always HAVE believed this. ALL the different Elites back through history.
They were ALWAYS proved to be complete idiots or course for believing that they could. They NEVER have been able to. Nobody can control the Barbarians. But Today’s Elites have intentionally created the Barbarians, so they THINK they can control them.
That is why the Coming Civil War may not involve the countryside. It may be the Elites and their Barbarians in the Cities fighting it out, when the Elites can no longer pay off their Barbarians.
Wishful thinking. BUT it will be worse in the very leftist cities. It already is.
Surprisingly, civility prevailed post civil war. The people of the South accepted the defeat. I suspect the following letter wasn’t the only one of it’s kind published (Richmond Whig 1 Sep 1865):
MEETING OF CITZENS IN CUMBERLAND
At a meeting of the people of Cumberland county, Virginia, held on the 28th August, 1865, that being Court day, Wm. A. Perkins was called to the Chair, and John A. Lancaster appointed Secretary.
Thomas M. Isbell arose and stated the object of the meeting to be to express the sentiments of the people of the county on the present condition of affairs, and moved that a committee of five be appointed to draft resolutions for the consideration of the meeting. Thos. M. Isbell, Dr. John W. Nash, F. D. Irving, Tarlton H. Woodson, and Dr. Chas. L. Palmore were appointed a committee, who reported the following preamble and resolutions which were unanimously adopted:
Whereas, The immediate re-establishment of civil law in Virginia is an object of vital interest to our people; therefore,
1. Resolved, That in the faithful performance of our duty as good citizens, we unhesitatingly repel and and every insinuation that we do not honestly accept the decisions of the issues, in the late unhappy war, as a finality, and that we regard the question of slavery as one of those issues so decided.
2. Resolved, That we hereby tender our thanks to Governor Peirpoint for the judicious, wise and conciliatory manner in which he has conducted the administration of affairs as Chief Magistrate of Virginia.
On motion, it was further resolved, that a copy of these proceedings be published in the Richmond papers.
The meeting the adjourned.
Wm. A. Perkins, Chairman
John A. Lancaster, Secretary
****************
The committee of 5 were all leading citizens of Cumberland. Dr. Palmore was a union POW in 1863, was interviewed, and the newspaper quotes (in papers throughout the nation) say He further stated that the people of the South believed that the North were so heartily sick of the war, and so anxious to have it cease, that they would end it in the next thirty of sixty days. Methinks Northerners, reading this, were, even if they were so inclined to end the war and be rid of the South, were likely filled with resolve to continue to victory. Brilliant propaganda, publishing the interview.
A few factors led to the relatively rapid reconciliation between the two sides. Grant’s army treated the Army of Northern Virginia with respect at their surrender, and let them travel home with their mules and pack horses. And the fact that the Union only hanged one person, for Andersonville. And Southern soldiers, for the most part, were fighting for their state. The actual Confederate States Army was never a real factor. At their peak, there over 400,000 soldiers fighting for the South. The Confederate Army had an authorized strength of 15,000, which it never met. After the war, they returned to their state. Their state, that they were loyal to, still existed. The confederacy was gone, but they had never really fought for that. Except for the abolition of slavery, everything was pretty much the same as it had been before the war. The people of the South, as the letter illustrates, worked to establish normalcy.
I prefer country like within a certain distance to a major city.
I found that Texas has the most. Sadly, I aren’t there no more. Green Bay ain’t big enough. Milwaukee is too far. But we did just get a Harbor Freight.
Communism works nearly perfectly for ants and bees. Of course it sucks to be a worker ant or bee. And, much like feminism, nobody wants the males around after they’ve done their reproductive duties.
Humans have a lot more brains than ants and bees, or even the entire colony or hive. Even the processing power of the entire colony or hive doesn’t add up to what a newborn human is mentating.
This of course begs the question of what the heck Marx and Engels were thinking in that communism would be the end result of an evolutionary process? No higher order animal engages in communism in the natural world. For humans to do so would be a major leap backwards in evolution. Sorry, I’m not trading in my hands in to get an extra pair of legs just so I can push a mop all day with my teeth.
Schizophrenia was due to an unjust environment? Well, yeah, having to deal with toxoplasmosis is kind of an injustice. But keeping cats doesn’t have a whole lot to do with capitalism; except it’s easier to obtain fresh kitty litter in a capitalistic society.
It’s really too bad we don’t have a mandatory “History and Moral Philosophy” course taught by honorably discharged veterans in all of our public schools. Although I have to admit I wouldn’t want to mandate all the other teachers having to be vets. Can you imagine a biology or health class taught by a combat veteran? Parents might have a cow over the reproduction sections. (Or maybe not, at least kids would usually get a practical view of the process.)
I don’t mind being taught what’s wrong with our culture, as long as we also look at what’s wrong with other cultures; as well as what we got right, and what they got right too. The problem with the right and wrong business is it’s a value judgment, and I think that’s where the schools cause the most trouble in failing to teach how to determine values, or by telling kids that something is a value without explaining how and why.
I’m with Dave Freer. The best neighbors are those you can’t see their property line from your house. (Which means you’re definitely not looking into their bathroom window from your bathroom window, not listening to their bedroom antics through the walls or ceiling!)
We already have a nasty surveillance State in the U.S.; and the ability to surveil increases daily. It’s the lack of effective, public, checks and balances on their use and abuse of those capabilities that gives me the willies.
Marx was a parasite.
Unlike most parasites, all these decades after his death, he is STILL parasitic – and deadly.
So Marx was like a heart worm, which when killed in mass numbers often kill the host due to the disruptions (holes, dead parasites causing strokes) in what had been a functioning host-parasite system? Thus, proper teaching of Western Civilization is like ivermectin every month?
That seems an apt analog. Though needing to re-explain over and over, to the very same people (who often appear to be otherwise fairly intelligent creatures), you might also require Imitrex for yourself.
So we really want a controlled death of the parasites so the body has a chance to heal the holes as they slowly are eliminated.
“Can you imagine a biology or health class taught by a combat veteran?”
Wasn’t that part of the premise of Star Ship Troopers? World wide citizenship. Voting rights only if you were a veteran. Allowed governmental job/position, including all teachers, if you were a veteran.
Not all teachers, at least not stated. But the Moral Philosophy class had to be taught by a vet.
Again NOT all Voters (Federal Service Veterans) were Military veterans.
Federal Service was many things with only PART being Military Service.
If you wanted to serve they would find a job that you could do. Demanding, hard, dirty, etc but it was something that you COULD DO. As said in the book if you were blind and only had on arm your job might be counting the hairs on a caterpillar by feel but they WOULD Find you a job.
My mom kept trying to set me up in high school with a guy I liked, but did not want to date for many reasons. Nice guy, but nope nope nope.
People think they know you…..
The knife of communism is hidden in its creed:
From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”
It is a sentence without spoken noun or verb, but hidden in those omissions are the requirement that someone *takes* from each according to their assessed ability and *distributes* to each according to their assessed need.
Who controls the assessing? Who controls the taking? And who controls the distribution?
Who controls? Scoundrels – if you’re lucky.
As CS Lewis pointed out, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. “
Inevitably, the people charged with taking from one and giving to another will keep the best stuff for themselves.
And since taking stuff from people always involves force, they can also use that force to silence anyone who complains.
utopia = “no place”
Wasn’t one alleged utopia “cleverly” name Erewhon?
Utopia was coined from Greek by Sir Thomas More, while Erewhon was invented by Samuel Butler as a reversed spelling of nowhere (with h and w transposed).
I really should go back and re-read that. But the first time through was deadly dry and boring.
Or ‘we need state terror, secret police, and genuinely institutionalized white supremacism because there are communists wandering around unmurdered.’
We can’t kill all the communists without a problematic level of false positives. And just cause the left says that what we want is a terroristic white supremacist police state does not mean that our goals should be the reality that would fit that description.
On Utopias….I know many people who belong to a small christian sect. They believe that when the end times come (any day now), all true believers will live in an earthly paradise forever, with no dissension, no more tears, no more pain and this will exist forever.
My questions, never asked for long story reasons is, if 1/3 of the angels rebelled before creation and were cast out and Adam and Eve who knew god personally and saw him every day rebelled, why on earth do they think it will not happen again?
This type of thing is why taking religious texts literally is a bad idea.
Doesn’t matter whose text it is, there’s going to be problems with it. These things are allegories, they’re talking about something that doesn’t fit in language. They lead to understanding the way a man leads a horse to the water trough, they aren’t the water itself.
So, you can’t -argue- with people who take texts literally. You have to wait for them to start asking that question themselves. Sometimes, that’s a really long wait.
Communism is a religion. It has a Heaven, a Hell, a God and a Devil, it has priests. Its a really -crappy- religion, and people with half a brain usually grow out of it by the time they’re 30. Personally I think the Priests of Communism would rapidly find other paying work if the government stopped funding Political Science departments at universities, but being a heretic, I don’t get an opinion. ~:D
The book of Revelation, chapter 20 states that after Jesus has ruled on Earth for a thousand years, the Devil will be released to deceive. Those who have been deceived will gather to attack Jerusalem and fire will come down from Heaven to destroy them.
In other words, the answer to your question is yes, it will happen ago.
Man didn’t rebel, he was tricked by a WOMAN.
It is ALL Eve’s fault.
AND She was tricked temped and tricked by a BAD BOY Serpent.
From the FIRST Women chose the Bad Boy over the Good Man.
Poor Theology.
Scripturally, It’s Adam’s Fall and “it’s Eve’s fault” is not mentioned. 😉
(except by Adam; but “responsibility cannot be delegated.”
True and IIRC some theologians may have “blamed Eve” but it’s not scriptural.
The ongoing catastrophe that is Venezuela (last I heard, people were reduced to butchering and eating family pets and zoo animals) is a fascinating example of the “no true socialism” fallacy. I’ve lost count of the number of leftists arguing earnestly that the problems are caused entirely by the country being “not socialist enough”, and that if only the last vestiges of capitalism could be purged from the system, utopia would ensue.
Of course, when said utopia fails to materialize, it will be necessary to find another institution or group of people to blame (and purge), rinse and repeat. A truly appalling delusion.
For why people think Commusocialism should work….the military is sorta kinda socialist (the way socialism is done). OK, it is actually, the archtypical male heirarchy, but socialists think it is socialist. It does not work. The families of enlisted men require foodstamps. The grunts require financial, social and spiritual support from their families. It is sorta socialist and it does not work.
Voluntary socialism, like a church organization, only works because a small handful of people do most of the work, taking their own time and material and investing it. I did that, and so did my parents. Results? We were ostracized.
As someone else said Commusocialism is greed, envy and gibmedats as a tool of obtaining and maintaining political power.
I wonder if those who think that have ever been in the military.
I always love talk about how the military gets free health care, as if it’s a benefit to the servicemembers. The reason it exists is for the benefit of the state- servicemembers need to be healthy to fight. If Seaman W.T. Door had to pay out of pocket to see a medic, how sick would he get before he saw one? How many others would he infect? How many sailors would be out of commission if needed because they didn’t see the doc? And the reason healthcare is provided to dependents? Again, for the benefit of the state. A soldier on the front line worrying about whether of not his wife can pay for treatment for his sick kid is going to be distracted from his duty. It’s kind of bass ackwards. The benefit of free healthcare for soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines goes to the state, not the individuals.
And that so-called free care is kind of a mixed bag, depending on the service, the location, and the doctor. Yes, I did 20 years of “free medical care” as a service member. And some of those stations had … well, it was grim and interesting. Some duty stations had competent, hard-working doctors, PA, nurses and support staff who were wonderful, amazing, everything you could ask for … and there were some…
Gah. I will mention no names, bases, or locations, but yeah – I, or coworkers have experienced horrors of unsympathetic incompetence.
And you see – being in the military, there is NOTHING one can do (beyond complain to the local IG) about bad, or incompetent medical care, even that which includes death of a patient. Because – it’s free! And we should be grateful!
(At this moment, I am grateful, and well-taken care of, medically … since my medical primary-care giver is a doctor at the clinic at Brooke Army Medical center, the show-place of the Army’s medical care system. But that is the luck of the draw. If I were a retiree someplace else, it would be a different case entirely.)
Two stories:
One, I found out I had a dental post when I went to a dentist after leaving and having a new one ripped.
Two, knew a guy who as written up by a doctor because after the doctor declared his wife as having menstrual cramps, dude took his wife to a civie doctor and saved her life. Baby had implanted in the Fallopian tube. They saved her, barely.
Ship’s CO had to draft an admiral (Attached to ship) and lay an epic smackdown to explain no, A-hole psychopath couldn’t do that.
Wait, did you say the doctor wrote up the service member?
Yes.
For not believing the doctor when he was wrong.
Never really had a problem. But, my wife’s longest labor was 45 minutes from bag pop to birth. Child #1. Child#2 was 20 minutes. This was #3. The NP decided to pop the bag. I told her to do it in the delivery room. She didn’t. Popped the bag- and sent all the corpsmen on the labor deck to lunch since none of the women were going to give birth in the next hour. 5 minutes later I said to my wife “You’re ready to have the baby now, aren’t you?” She grunted out something that sounded like yes. I walked to the nursing station and said “Nurse, you need to come look at my wife. She’s ready to have the baby. ” Eyeball roll. “She’s not even 5 CM dilated.” “I really think you need to come look.” “She couldn’t be ready yet.” Nurses and doctors in the Navy are not used to being addressed by rank. “Lieutenant, you really need to come look at my wife (pause) NOW.” That got her attention. Walked to her bed, deliberately slow it seemed. “OMG- The Baby’s Crowned!” Threw the wheels on the bed down, grabbed one end, me the other, and as we wheeled past the nursing station said to the other nurse- “Get the mid-wife!” She grabbed the next 5 corpsmen walking past the delivery room door, pushed them in and said- “You’re helping deliver a baby.” Some going to lunch- some going back to where they worked. Mid wife got there just in time to play catch. They changed the notation on my wife’s medical jacket. Wrote “Ultra” in front of “Fast delivery”.
Oh- I’ll add that for the next 2 children, born in civilian hospitals, the doctors and nurses didn’t believe us either when we told them to just stay after the bag was popped. They knew more than we did about delivering babies you see……
Yeah, doctor with younger son believed biased reports from birth of older son signed by obygyn we should have sued (first son crowned in two hours. Idiot pumped me full of pitosin because — I swear I’m not making this up — I was still coherent. So much that it stopped labor and son stayed crowned for THREE DAYS before being delivered by emergency caesarean. Oh, she also wouldn’t do an episiotomy. Of course, what she put in report that labor just stopped and she didn’t know why.
So, second son’s doctor gives me “just a shot of pitosin to hurry things up” and leaves for work because “you’ll be delivering around 5pm”.
An hour and a half later he delivered son while (doctor) still in street clothes.
Son’s head never CONFORMED. This despite the fact he was face up and it SHOULD have been a slow labor. (and his shoulders ripped parts of my anatomy to shreds.) Oh, he was also born at noon, when every nurse was at lunch.
This btw was civilian doctor, but the crazy is strong…
I thought you couldn’t be born face up?? There’s supposed to be a turn you can make face up. That was why child #1 got stuck for hours and my wife had to have a c-section 22 hours after her water broke at home.
My mother’s deliveries weren’t consistent; I kinda took my time (beginning of a trend, despite being 6 weeks or so early—6 pounds, 1 ounce & wrinkled); my sister was almost born in the car on the way to the hospital.
Sounds like my mom! Brother would be dead if she wasn’t that quick– she popped him out, dad flipped the cord off of the loop it had on his neck, THEN the doctor walked in….he’d run off to use the loo really quick.
(my sister got it; I didn’t)
See, this is where I like the integrated system that Kaiser uses. Always someone on duty, even if it’s not “my” doctor. (My OB was never on shift when I had my kids. Had a certified nurse midwife at two of them, though.)
We were the far end of beyond– they literally close the only hospital in the valley a week before I was born. The paved-over mountain trail to the nearest hospital is only about 25 miles long, though. One doctor.
After that, mom stayed with her folks for the last week or so before giving birth… in the “big” hospital that has THREE doctors!
The military gets health care effectively as part of benefits package. No different than what many “public servants” get, except the military network is smaller and has a body count from neglect.
You forget the most important reason. The Military REQUIRES Doctors and Medical People for War and Fighting. These Doctors, nurses, etc. MUST be under military control, therefore in the Military. What are these people going to DO while in the Military???
They are going to treat the Military and it’s dependents of course.
What ELSE would they DO.
> Then, in their minds, Utopia would already be here.
One wonders what their idea of utopia looks like…
Somehow, I get the idea it looks like a cross between feudalism and academia. The the Right People directing things, of course. For the proletariat’s own good. After all, if they had Right Thinking, they wouldn’t be the proletatiat, now would they?
Yup. I think this is ultimately about having power. Not over yourself, over your neighbor. There are some people who lust after the ability to bully people around.
Such people must never have access to power.
Academia is feudalism. Think of how they get their funds (or did before free money for college), how the professor and administrators act. It is feudalism.
A guild system, still going strong. (I have given up trying to get back into the Ivory Tower.)
I recall you once writing that you were tempted to write a Western, except that your academic fingerprint would give you away in an area you were known for. Does this mean you don’t have to worry about that anymore? *halo*
No. I still write academic articles and give papers at conferences. So I’m “an independent historian” who researches and publishes. Not ivory tower, but still inside the academic loop, so to speak. (It does get rather loopy at the national and international level. State and regional is still somewhat sane.)
I also used to be an academic.
I got better.
Reminds me of that exchange from The Wizard of Speed and Time:
“I don’t work with anyone unless they’re professionally guilded!”
*mutters* “I think you mean gelded.”
Totally, off topic. Hidden Figures. The story about the math woman at NASA was back in the news and I was reminded again.
I have SciFi since I was six (Danny Dunn books). Not once, in all the decades did I read one whisper about them. Now suddenly (in the past few years) they are everywhere.
So, has anyone here every read or heard about them, fiction or nonfiction, before the movie came out?
Never heard of them…and I’m a space buff going back 50 years.
I saw two or three in the late 1960s, and I read them, of course. The high school had some Tom Swift books, which I was because, hey, they were science fiction, but they’re pretty lightweight when you’ve been reading Heinlein and Herbert and Vance.
ditto. And at this point I don’t know if I can trust it.
Supposedly even computers were considered low-status clerical work at first. It would probably have been the same with clerical math at the time, thus the fact that women were doing it at all. I mean, who writes or reports about the secretary?
Someone would have. Yeah, at this point I get suspicious when this stuff crops up.
The book came out in 2016 (hardback date per the ‘Zon.) There have been books about the women in space race and atom bomb race, like _Girls of Atomic City_ (2014 in paper), _Rise of the Rocket Girls_ (2016). I’m not sure about earlier works that are academic monographs in the history of mathematics or other sub-fields.
The involvement of women in the codebreaking and NCR bomba programs was closely held, just like Bletchley Park. Same thing with atomic stuff.
Women computers do show up in old sf.
True, but the role of women in mathematics has never been a secret.
Ada Lovelace
Not a lie. In Portugal math is as much a female degree as languages.
Never heard of the NASA women until recently, but I’m familiar with the women who were involved with ENIAC. It’s often said that they didn’t get credit at the time because they were female, which is probably part of it, but also, programming (which in the case of ENIAC involved running patch cords and setting switches) was not yet recognized as a skill/profession: the model seemed to be that the mathematicians would write the equations (for trajectory analysis, for instance) and the work of transforming these into making the machine do something was a purely clerical/mechanical task.
btw, John von Neumann’s wife, Klara, was one of the ENIAC women, and seems to have been quite brilliant and creative. Sad story, though–in the end she committed suicide.
I suspect they were always there just not talked about.
Computer was not a machine prior to 1950ish but a job title (Google “human computer”). It was often filled by women with technical degrees. I can’t find it in a quick search, but somewhere I picked up a quote from a researcher in the 60s who said he “remembered when a computer was young and wore a tight sweater” (or something close to that). It is why a lot of early people in the field were women, just as a lot of early CNC programmers were master machinists. They learned new tools to do their job better.
I suspect the current bubbling up out of history is a mix of needing new sources to mine for books and a need to “prove” women can do the job and were oppressed from doing it which is why you don’t see more women in computing.
The argument that women only “lost” the job because it gained status isn’t entirely without merit.
There’s also the element, as in other “women’s work,” that intelligent and talented women had few approved options so the “average” school teacher or clerical post was held by someone who would, today, choose something else.
Women lost the job because there weren’t enough people to fill the slots that opened up in the late 60s so companies hired obsessives who will work 80 hours weeks, promoting the hacker culture.
The women at the foundation never left. They generation after them was just much more male. No one was driven out.
While I accept, and have made, the argument that the decline in teaching as a profession is because historically we steered all but the most stubborn of intelligent women into it and nursing the “disappearance” of women from computing is a lot less about status and a lot more about explosive growth that was easier to feed with obsessive young men. The Mary Allen Wilkes, Lorinda Cherrys, and Elizabeth Rathers were always there and stayed. There were just more Bill Joys in his and later generations.
That makes sense, too.
There’s a lot in the nature of being a programmer that you have to WANT to be doing it if you’re going to do it at the higher levels. That’s how you get “weirdos” like James Damore being the perfect, sought-after type of programmer/designer for Big Iron computing companies. They’re better at it.
Women (normal ones mind I’m talking about) do not WANT to be doing programming. They -can- do it, they may not -mind- doing it, but they do not hack Linux in their time off for a giggle. They do not install Fiber Channel networks in their houses over the weekend because Fiber Channel is cool. They don’t do that.
The dork with the Fiber Channel in his basement is going to be a better programmer almost every time. He lives for that shit.
There are few women in top programming jobs because there are few women who want those jobs. They want the money, sure, but they don’t want that job.
As one of the insane (though in a different area)– most women are sane.
Guys are more likely to be insane, in pretty much any flavor.
Seeing as how the really hard core insane need a keeper, and “I love you so I won’t kill you” is a thing, this is a good thing.
Women who get as obsessive as guys about anything — says one of them in politics and writing — are not right in the head.
Har!
I (learned) to hate the hardware, OS, & low level stuff. You know the typical hacker stuff. OTOH working with the user, not call center or group training, but programming to give the users what they wanted, defining & delivering it, yes, that was satisfying & fun. One of the reasons I got my first job after finishing my Computer Degree.
They wanted someone with a Forestry (*), Computer Science, & Programming, degrees, with work experience doing all three. As stated on my first day. They shot for the moon figuring they’d have to settle, & then got everything on their wish list. I translated their forestry requirement to computer programs.
My husband’s niece works as the technical translator between technical people & the artistic people in the huge corporate company she works for.
(*) Yes. Irony. Went back to school because one of us had to get out of timber. My first Computer job was for a major timber company. Go figure.
Nerds and technogeeks are better at programing.
At EVERYTHING ELSE, they’re utterly useless. Worse than useless, really. They’ll immediately enrage any normal human/customer/client just by walking into the meeting and sitting down. I’ve seen it. Hell, I’ve been that guy. People hate nerds. Hate ’em.
This is where women can be great in computer companies. Keep the dorks under control, on task and happy, translate from Dorkspeak to Human, keep the client happy by being Normal, etc.
I’ve noticed women can be really great at testing, too. They can find all the annoying crap that makes a product suck, and then yell at the nerds to fix it.
I got my first formal IT gig with a salary and appropriate job title back in 1994.
While I’m assured that there are female programmers *somewhere*, but I’ve never personally encountered one. Tech support, yes. Programming *management*, yes… but they weren’t programmers. For that matter, I’ve never seen a female sysadmin or network tech, either.
Could just be a statistical fluke or a regional thing.
“While I’m assured that there are female programmers *somewhere*, but I’ve never personally encountered one.”
Yeah, that thing right there. The “female programmer” is a unicorn. We’ve all heard about them, but never seen one in the wild.
Programmers are the weird kids. I have one kicking around the family, I know how they are. Weird. They -like- programming.
I have yet to see a girl whose favorite toy at age 4 is Lego, and is doing Mindstorms robots at age 8 voluntarily. Very few boys are like this, but some are. Those ones are your programmers. Three sigma variance from normal.
Four sigmas for females. That’s why they are unicorns.
Computer engineering schools are finding out exactly how hard it is to attract women into the field. Even giving the girls an unfair advantage over the boys for marks, loans, outright grants, advantage in residency, even virtually guaranteed jobs on graduation, they can’t increase the number of women who enter the field and stay in it. Must be the Patriarchy, right?
“Computer engineering schools are finding out exactly how hard it is to attract women into the field. Even giving the girls an unfair advantage over the boys for marks, loans, outright grants, advantage in residency, even virtually guaranteed jobs on graduation”
Really? Myth?
Not in ’85 when I applied for Computer Science. Took my employer’s letter (already working in the field). AND I already had a bacholer’s degree, & a associates in programming with the latter a 3.98 GPA. Plus they wanted me to declare a minor. The minor requirement got squashed. Plus full disclosure, my over all GPA was a 2.99.
Definitely didn’t have jobs lined up on graduation, ’89 (overall GPA when done was up to 3.5). I needed one by then (employer had moved out of state). Nor were they lined up in ’96 (six months search) or ’02 (18 month search).
’89, well okay, maybe, being 8 3/4 pregnant at my last final might have had something to do with it … but still … After my second job left the state (’96), not like employers ever were knocking down my door (regardless of salary) looking for a female programmer. Or that the recruiters were lining up at the door to snatch up the ones getting released when the 2nd one went bankrupt (’02). I know for a fact that the other 3 female programmers didn’t have any better luck & they weren’t limited to the southern Willamette valley … Guys didn’t have any problems …
Right now, this year, at the premiere engineering school in Canada, females are being given a 3-5% break. (I’m not naming names, y’all know who I’m talking about.) To be assured of entry into the most desirable program, Software Engineering, a White (or Indian from India, or Chinese/other Asian) male needs a 98%+ in Grade 12. A female needs 94%+. Females are given precedence over males, there’s no question about it.
Similarly, “POC” male applicants who are not white, Indian or Chinese (meaning they’re black or Canadian Indian, basically) will get a 5-7% break. Females can pretty much get in with an 88+. If there’s a Canadian Indian who wants in, I’m pretty sure they’d take her with a 75.
The current Software Engineering class is ~15% female, more than half Asian overall, I haven’t seen a single black kid in the place yet. That doesn’t mean there are none, but it does mean there aren’t many. Its a big, big school, thousands of students.
Girls are not going for these engineering spots. The ones who do, some of them know they took a seat from a boy who had better marks or was a better candidate, and they feel bad about it. The boys don’t say much, and I’ve seen no mustaches drawn on all the PC “Women In STEM!!!!” posters that are plastered everywhere. Privately I’m told that’s because of cameras. Dark rumors about the fate of mustache artists circulate quietly.
Females are not having trouble getting co-op jobs either.
Its a whole new world out there.
I’ve known a few, but the biggest ‘problem’ is that if you can do that, AND communicate effectively, you’re usually put on diplomat duty instead of doing the work itself.
So they either go where there aren’t any other folks in the department, or if they like communicating they do that instead.
“usually put on diplomat duty”
I think that is what happened with my niece.
Happened in calibration, too.
People behaved better with me, to the point that I’d be tempted to start humming Dick Dead-Eye songs from HMS Pinafore.
Then there were annoyances like that even though I was just as good for speed, and much better about actually doing all the steps, I usually got put on doing paperwork because I could actually make it legible and fill the form out correctly. (That was pretty open malingering for the guys, though. Lazy lead petty officer.)
Hi. Female programmer. For 35 years. Yes. There are others. Next to last job there were 4 of us, almost 50% of the team (4 of 11).
Last job, 10% (okay only female, 1 of 10). In fact that was a huge concern when I was hired, how I would fit in the small group of all males (why? Interaction at work or not was non existent. Whatever.) Reality check. Came from timber, which is worse (or was, now ???). Last job in that field, female ratio was 0.05% (1 of 270).
Female programmers are not a myth.
No, they’re not a myth. They are LEGENDARY!!!! Bwaha!
Do you know Tigercat Industries? I know a kid who had a co-op term there. Worked on all their satellite coms systems. Very extensive implementation of communication with the factory on working machines.
I can think of a number of female programmers I know from work or in fannish circles, but I don’t think I’d need more than two hands. Of course, I do work at an engineering company.
I work at a computer company (~40 years old). We have a relatively large proportion of women programmers, though certainly a smaller number than men. The interesting thing is that the women programmers are in an older cohort. New young hires are men in much greater numbers. Testers, as noted above, have a higher proportion of women. IT seems to be very low in women, DevOps higher – I think because DevOps is a place with a lot of different things going on. I know I like it because I’m a generalist and like working on a variety of different projects rather than a deep dive into one thing.
We got it as part of the history of computers, mid-90s.
They didn’t glorify it, IIRC acted more like it was punch-card weaving than programming.
The author of Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly, did a lovely interview (Sept. 2, ’17) which was broadcast on C-span book TV. Those interested in the subject might care to look it up.
She has posted at her web site:
Head –> desk. Failed to close italics after the book title.
“I have SciFi since I was six (Danny Dunn books). Not once, in all the decades did I read one whisper about them. Now suddenly (in the past few years) they are everywhere.”
You’ve never heard a whisper about them because History, in this dissolute era of lazy shits looking at their cellphones, is a tool of socialism.
NASA employed rooms full of women to do all kinds of calculations. These ladies were extremely adept at doing the adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. That’s why they were called -calculators-. They were NOT mathematicians. They did not do, or even understand probably, the higher maths of predicting orbits etc. They did the calculations.
Here’s the part you never heard: every company of any size in the world had rooms full of women doing calculations. They kept the accounts. Insurance companies had entire buildings full of people doing it, calculating the payouts, the sales, all that stuff.
You know where IBM first made its money? Racetracks. The bottleneck at a racetrack was the room full of ladies that calculated the payouts and the odds. They replaced those people with the first punch-card mechanical calculator systems. In the 1920s. It was a glorified Jacquard loom with Leibniz calculating wheels in it.
Why do I know this? I read a history of computing once upon a time. You find out amazing things when you ask the question: WHY did they build ENIAC?
The “math women” at NASA were office girls doing the same thing office girls all over the world did at the time. Arithmetic.
This is not to say that there were no female mathematicians out there banging on the problems of the universe at NASA. There were. There are now. But the celebration around that particular movie is propaganda.
Here’s the part you never heard: every company of any size in the world had rooms full of women doing calculations. They kept the accounts. Insurance companies had entire buildings full of people doing it, calculating the payouts, the sales, all that stuff.
AKA, “Secretary work.”
See, this is what I expect the truth is, more or less.
My grandma was a reporter.
For her folks’ generation, she was “writing letters.”
For my dad’s generation, she was the local gossip.
For today, she was a local reporter.
The gossip description is utterly unfair, for what it’s worth– she did firsthand reporting on local matters, some of which she had access to by family ties. But that was a female dominated area of reporting, so it was attacked by folks who thought only what dudes did was cool.
It is totally awesome to read reporting done by my grandmother and realize she was basically a rural Lois Lane, complete with taking stupid risks.
Yes, and as in any industry when a labor saving tool came along the smart one realized “learn the tool and be the one kept to run it instead of being replaced by it.” That is why you see a lot of women in early computing, which was all about man.
Hell, the eight bit byte and byte, as opposed to word, addressable memory were many the products of the System 360 to make it as character capable as it was for scientific calculation. Even then it drop 4 bits from its word size from the popular 36 bits for scientific work.
I thought bytes were dictated by Boolean algebra. 2 digits, then 4, 8, 16, 32 etc.
Yes, but why not 4 or 16?
Because 8 is the one that gives a full English character set. However, you don’t care about that if you aren’t doing character stuff.
For scientific work the number is 3.22, which is the number of bits to give one decimal significant figure. You pick your precision and build the word size that fits.
Once you do byte addressing you lose word count for floating point because you need multiple addresses per word.
Only when you want a lot of business processing like names and addresses does byte addressing make sense. Given the 360 was to be the multiple model business architecture it makes sense it first told hold there.
You’d think so, but some computer manufacturers had other ideas, including word sizes that were prime numbers.
Nowadays computers are all pretty much the same. Back in the dawn era, things sometimes got really, seriously weird. Either someone’s doctoral thesis hobbyhorse, or different-for-marketing, or optimized for some specific application, or avoiding patents they didn’t want to license, or because voices from the mothership told them to do it…
I had a sampler, and have a digital synthesizer, that works in 13-bit samples.
But you can’t create a utopia, in which there’s no suffering, be it physical mental or emotional.
Just listening to a lot of contemporary progressives (or having any knowledge of Che) tells you a utopia for them involves a lot of suffering, physical, mental, and especially emotional, of others.
Hell, just listening to the attacks on the Sad Puppies or comic books pros on the current comics kerfuffles tells you they are sadists through and through.
And not “happy, fun let’s all get off at the end (for some value of get off)” sadists.
Or even, “I want to display my free will by defying all of God’s laws” sadists after their namesake.
I mean the truly evil, deriving pleasure, often their only pleasure, from the suffering of others sadists.
They pretend to be the first to, but I know the first pretty well and have, I think, a bit of knowledge of the second and their words fit neither.
They are the words of those who exist to destroy and degrade simply to destroy and degrade.
I think I’d rather live in the Christian Hell than their utopia. At least Satan is honest about what he desires (at least in Milton).
This. Reminds me of a “meme” I saw about dogs being able to chase squirrels in “dog heaven”. Somebody commented that that sucked for the squirrels to which someone else replied “Dog heaven is squirrel hell. It’s a very efficient system.”
One person’s utopia will be many another’s hell. That will remain so for as long as humans remain recognizably human.
Truth!
c4c
A guy named Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov served as Deputy Manager of a Stalin-era Soviet factory, and wrote an interesting book about his experiences. His greatest frustration was obtaining sufficient raw materials, which for this plant meant wood. The frustration was amplified because Gennady’s father had been in the lumber trade, back before the revolution:
“The free and “unplanned” and therefore ostensibly chaotic character of lumber production before the revolution in reality possessed a definite order. As the season approached, hundreds of thousands of forest workers gathered in small artels of loggers, rafters, and floaters, hired themselves out to entrepreneurs through their foremen, and got all the work done. The Bolsheviks, concerned with “putting order” into life and organizing it according to their single scheme, destroyed that order and introduced their own–and arrived at complete chaos in lumbering.”
As Gennady says:
“Such in the immutable law. The forceful subordination of life’s variety into a single mold will be avenged by that variety’s becoming nothing but chaos and disorder.”
The drive toward excessive top-down planning is characteristic of Marxists, but is not limited to them. Plenty of American business execs, who have no interest in “equality”, hurt their own businesses through excessive centralization and “planning.” The current vogue for “Big Data” will almost certainly amplify this tendency.
I reviewed Gennady’s very worthwhile book here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/31715.html
I’m having SO much fun sabotaging and f-ing over Central Planning in my books, it is just amazing. The whole basis of The Enemy in the book is that its a diffuse threat. It can grow from a little seed into an army in weeks. How do you fight that?
Everybody on Earth keeps their eyes open for seeds, that’s how. Next problem, how do you get everybody to do that? Not by central planning, that’s for sure.
Mockery is better than grey goo!
I was in my mid-teens when the Berlin wall fell. I remember watching all the news reports from Reagan’s speech to the fall of the wall and then all the repercussions as Europe reorganized. I don’t remember the commentary. I remember the speech. I don’t remember the discussions about borders and whether it was smart or not for the Hungarians to let people cross their border, but I remember the images of the guards letting people through and the long lines of cars coming from East Germany through Hungary into Austria and back up into West Germany. I remember the other Eastern European countries easing travel restrictions too. I remember the mistaken announcement about unrestricted travel and the huge party near the Brandenburg Gate and the west side of the wall. The overwhelmed guards who just started letting people through in cars and then the flooding of the demilitarized zone with people on foot so they could get to the west wall. The people reaching down and pulling people up and over. The governments that fell and the changes that were made so quickly (no, not all changes were good and there were missteps). That much joy and happiness at being allowed to visit some other place, that much desire to have thing be different told me as much as I needed to know about what people would really prefer to live under. Sure some people are thinking back to the good ole’ days when they didn’t have to worry about all the choices and the “guarantees” the government made in the ordinary things of life. They are forgetting the constant crushing fear and depression that also came with that old government. But, you can’t deny the emotions shown by the participants and felt by the watchers during those pivotal days. That tells me what I would prefer.
I was in my mid-20s. And for someone who spent his teen years worrying about the Soviet nuclear advantage, it was a glad, wonderful day.
I was in my mid-teens as well and remember it well. Years later, I got a bit more of an inside look at how the wall fell when I read Barbara van der Heydt’s _Candles Behind the Wall_ in a college history class. It’s well worth the read if you can find a copy.
I was also in my late teens. To this day I can’t talk about it without choking up. The more time I spend in Eastern Europe, the more amazed I become that so many people survived and remained decent humans despite the systems there. And I shake my head at everyone who insists that “we had it easy. Those guys [in next country]? Different story.”
Late twenties. The next time I went to Portugal, the road sides were choked with trabants. People drove till they could drive no more, then walked.
Yes. But at least those people still had a common culture and wanted to be westerners. Unlike the current unrestricted crowd of ME and African immigrants.
It’s been noted before that it’s quite rare to see a family leaving Miami for Havana on a raft they’ve made of garbage bags full of styrofoam packing peanuts.
To hear the Usual Suspects talk, the water down there should be full of them.
That’s how we know they’re -lying-.
Apparently the “free health care” isn’t quite as attractive as Michael Moore and his fellow travelers would like to pretend that it is.
Me, I learned everything I needed to know about Cuba’s “free health care” when it was announced that Castro was being treated by doctors flown in from Spain.
It’s free, and you get less than you paid for.
It’s free. And worth every penny you paid.
Our first born met the sun on the 20th anniversary of when the wall came crumblin’ tumblin’ down.
I’m not one for omens, but that is one heck of a symbol.
An extrovert’s heaven would be an introvert’s hell, and vice versa.
That alone rules out any kind of utopia.
Re hypothydroidism, I recently read an article in which a doctor standing in line diagnosed the Mona Lisa as hypothyroid … apparently it’s still common in that region due to dietary deficiencies … so you are in good company with a super model.
I’m so glad you’re feeling better and seeing objective improvement!
I’d never looked at it that way. Older son told us that there is a recognizable hypothyroidal mask, and he couldn’t figure out why no one PURSUED it.
Looks like Combustible Flatulence has taken note of us again.
Oh, and per comments, Sarah is “targeting ethnic groups like the Romani”.
http://archive.is/mdCVr
If his cause is righteous, why does he lie?
That question is purely rhetorical, of course.
I don’t like giving him attention, but since this is circulating among the Usual Suspects, I thought Sarah should get a head’s up.
Honestly, I don’t give a fuck. I wasn’t thinking of any ethnic groups. I was thinking of people who kill gays by pulling walls on them. Do the Romani do that, or care?
The other side is crazy. Next they’re going to claim I’m bigoted against crabs or something.
You can’t cure stupid.
Given cultural probabilities, I’d guess yes, but given relative range of damage vs escapability and such who cares?
Right?
Problem: If the Progs win, where do you escape TO??????
They can’t win.
They can have victories, and they do have them; but to win, they’d have to wipe out the ability to even think of opposing them.
Not happening.
More importantly, the subject was a small, highly mobile tribe’s treatment of homosexuals. Nothing about the progs.
It’s a pet obsession of his. A few months back he tried to engage me over alleged anti-Romani comments on the blog, instead of the person who supposedly made them. He thinks because I occasionally notice him, it means I want to go play with him.
the actual f*ck? Seriously. They’re not even a large enough annoyance to care about.
I was fascinated by them some years ago, in terms of history and culture, and this might come out in something some day. But other than that? I don’t care.
He lies because he’s breathing.
As reasonable an explanation as any.
For f sake. contemptible fungus.
But Chis, I can BEAT you for unbelievable stupidity today. First time in a long time, there IS somebody worse than floppy camel dung.
I give you Alis Franklin! http://phantomsoapbox.blogspot.com/2018/09/everything-wrong-with-sff-in-one-post.html
Another idiot trying to make a name for herself by literally pissing on the graves of those who came before her. This is the opening shot in a campaign to under-bus John W. Campbell, and get his name taken off the award.
From Oz too. They must be putting something bad in the water down there.
They just can’t deal with the past, can they?
The purity spiral is accelerating. The closer they get to the drain, the faster it goes.
The heroes of by-gone days did not cling sufficiently closely to That Which Is Holy This Week, therefore they must be expunged and their works cast down.
They’ll be slandering the memory of Hugo Gernsback by this time next year. Wait and see.
I’m well supplied with popcorn. ~:D
Given enough time and idiocy, they’ll be attacking Ursula K Le Guin eventually. Hell, they like to brag that Mary Shelly created SF, but I suspect they’d hate her guts if she were around today.
“Shelley”
Very nicely put.
…meant to refer to “The Purity Spiral” and “The Drain”
They’re circling the drain, approaching maximum velocity.
You look at the article I was referring to, there’s a list of Campbell Award winners from the last 10 years. The author is comparing RAH to this years winner, Rebecca Rowanhorse, and saying RAH is the lesser. That she deserves better than to be compared to the books of a RAAAACIST!!!! like Campbell’s goon, RAH.
That’s quite a statement.
Everybody talks about the “Silent Majority” at WorldCon. You know, those Nice People who only like to go and have fun, dress up for the costume contest, like to talk about stories, attend the author panels, get autographs from their favorites. The Nice People. The ones who are “bewildered” by all the politics. Guys like China Mike. He’s one of the Nice People, we’re told.
If, as I expect, the Bogi Tackacs and floppy camel turds of the world gin up a campaign to rename the Campbell Award because racism, how many of those ancient, mobility-scooter riding blue-hairs are going to quietly stop bothering with the air fare and the hotel bills? I bet you most of them will.
They REMEMBER John W. Campbell, some of them. They actually met that guy. They hung out with him at fricking WorldCon! They all watched as the Twitter-Apparat chastised Robert Silverberg this year and screwed over the WorldCon program. None of them -said- anything, because they were afraid to.
How many people are going to pay to go to something where they’re afraid to talk?
None of them -said- anything, because they were afraid to.
Or they don’t twitter, at least not first hand.
They just hear about the howling mobs going after Our John…and stop showing up.
That’s the inevitable end of this game. Most of the WorldCon crowd is well over 50 from what I can see. You don’t tell an Old Guy that John W. Campbell was a Deplorable and expect him to keep paying money. He’s going to stop. Too old to really care that much, a little sad to see it all go, but really not going to take a chance of getting beat up to keep it alive. No way.
Especially when it won’t work.
The SMOFs don’t *care*. Those oldsters are wrongpeople having wrongfun. If they could be run off, so much the better. They probably creep out the TrueFans anyway.
The last WorldCon will be held in a Dennys in San Francisco, where the last two paying members will each try to vote the other one out of the club.
In five years.
Old people usually have more freedom to travel and sometimes have more funds than when they were younger.
The next two years of Worldcon are out of the country. We’ll see how much of the crazy crosses the ocean.
“The last WorldCon will be held in a Dennys in San Francisco, where the last two paying members will each try to vote the other one out of the club.”
It will probably be Glyer and Mary three names No Awarding each other.
“From Oz too. They must be putting something bad in the water down there.”
Residue from all the dodgy recycling vending machines in NSW is my guess.
Somebody ate a particularly bad batch of Vegemite, apparently . . .
Vegamite. That’s the next step beyond vegetarian and vegan, right?
Could be a lack of Vegemite. They’re probably eating some trendy Eco-friendly, soy based “good for you” slop that’s causing some sort of brain deficiency.
I suspect a lack of bacon as well.
Excuse me? I’m targeting WHAT?
I can honestly say I haven’t thought of gypsies since I saw their encampment near mom’s. (And then it was “oh, it’s still there.”)
a) we don’t like Three Names, who apparently claims that sort of ancestry b) There was that discussion we had here about Finland, Socialism, and the Roma. When Phantom first posted about Dung Field bleating about it, I argued that my own words could be justly interpreted as support for killing Roma, citing words I had left unstated. Though I think in that discussion with Phantom I ended up saying it’d probably be best for the Finns to ditch socialism instead.
c) I would have been fine with exterminating the Japanese had WWII ended differently. There are quite a few Indian tribes about whom I have similar sentiments. If the Roma had significant presence here, or military access, and there was a state of war, I would have similar sentiment.
d) Failure to ban me is obviously complete endorsement of my every position. Only someone who has never really been here could be so ignorant of our many disagreements as to honestly conclude this.
Mostly I find you insane, and occasionally bizarrely on point, but you know… still interesting. you haven’t descended to screaming names at us or twisting our words… much. so…
Think more “fight for survival” and it makes sense.
Note on bias, I grew up with the relatives of guys whose blood was still on the floor of buildings in town, after California’s last known Indian Raid. (They knew they got the right band because one of the murdered ranchers had an epic handlebar mustache, he asked neighbors to help him catch the animals attacking his sheep*. It was in the pocket of one of the guys they killed.)
*he thought they had four legs
Yeah. Like many of us here, I subscribe to the Jacksonian school, of Meade’s four schools of American foreign policy. The big difference is, I think, that I’m a bit more fixated on drawing lessons from Roman and Mongol policy, and that I follow things like our differences with the French or with the Germans to the point of ‘what if we had no other choice?’ Rather than just sticking to the obvious case of our differences with Salafi Islam, where it is clearer that our other options have been decreasing.
I’m fairly happy with this description.
Face to face, people don’t bring up the crazy so much, so there’s a sense of ‘at least some people see the full person, the real me’. Which is a little nutty of me, because in person I try not to advertise my weirder sides to strangers, and the people I know well in person do call me out when my thinking is particularly defective.
And bizarrely on point is a way of describing one of my actual goals. I enjoy making a persuasive argument that relies on an unusual train of logic that might not occur to another party. Especially if it points out an oversight a person has made, that they would never have noticed in a thousand years of the thought processes that are natural to them.
Few people make actual arguments anymore and even when they haven’t made an argument it is often (as we so clearly see) twisted into an endorsement, when even arguments laying out support for something shouldn’t automatically be seen as an expression of a person’s desires.
This is what I think will happen and why, is not a statement of a person’s desires.
But I do often like to hear actual points made supporting something that I disagree with, often disagree with strongly, because we ought to understand why we hold the opinions we hold and have examined ideas we don’t agree with AND should have the moral character and strength to disagree when someone seems to have made a strong case. Sometimes it’s “I know there is something wrong with this, I just don’t know *what* is wrong with it,” because sometimes it takes more time and discussion to suss out the error that a person knows instinctively must be there. Sometimes the discussion involves other people who will point out something that you haven’t thought of and will lend clarity. Sometimes it’s years later when you realize what you were missing.
The other day I was skimming through a Twitter thread where people were claiming that a person and what they’d said was racist. No one seemed to question the “racism” part but it seemed to me that what had been said was factual from a couple of different angles. It wasn’t pleasant or flattering, but no one made any attempt to claim it was wrong. Perhaps it was mind-reading about motivation or something. And yet, bringing up a factual thing to support an opinion contrary to what all the “good” people think is not racism either. My opinion of the “what good people think” in the particular example is that what they *wanted* was objectively toxic and destructive and promotes the perpetuation of racism. In which case who’re the racists?
But I’d like to talk about that, or hear actual and real arguments in support of various points of view, but it’s gotten so the mere *conversation* is enough to bring on condemnations. We aren’t supposed to talk about anything or certainly not attempt to examine the factual support for a point of view we don’t hold or find awful. And no one did. No one engaged it. No one pointed out where the error occurred. They just made pronouncements.
It seems that in order to be “good” we’re supposed to be stupid, purposefully keeping our minds pure of problematic thoughts and proclaiming that we can’t even, if someone suggests an actual examination of factual support for the other point of view.
Sometimes it’s “I know there is something wrong with this, I just don’t know *what* is wrong with it,”
That’s the part I really value about here– I can sometimes feel that there is something off, and actually TALK long enough to figure out if it’s my assumptions, their assumptions, saying the same thing but meaning different things, or different values/knowledge/history.
” Sometimes it’s “I know there is something wrong with this, I just don’t know *what* is wrong with it,”
That’s the part I really value about here– I can sometimes feel that there is something off, and actually TALK long enough to figure out if it’s my assumptions, their assumptions, saying the same thing but meaning different things, or different values/knowledge/history.”
Have not seen it happen on Sarah’s blog here yet. But I would add to Foxfier’s statement, which to be clear, I took as individuals using the same words to argue different points of view on a topic based on their assumptions/values/knowledge/history. Adding — arguments back & forth that are using different words & very obviously approaching from different presumptions/values/knowledge/history, but arguing the exact same point, and not seeing that they are. FWIW. It is so much fun when a 3rd party chimes in telling them they are arguing for the same side.
we don’t like Three Names, who apparently claims that sort of ancestry
*eyeroll*
Of course, it’s currently cool.
That said, anybody who had an ancestor with temptation to be less than loyal likely has it. That’s part of WHY they’re not loved.
Not to be taken as a slight against those who escaped the tribal life. If it isn’t your own parents who pulled it, not likely to have much effect– and if your parents DID mange to break out of a tribal life, can I buy them a drink?
So does/has Colonel Kratman. And I ALSO wasn’t attacking him. (We disagree on a ton of things, but I like him.)
And I ALSO wasn’t attacking him
*sage nod* A sound survival strategy.
I recall a discussion about the Roma and thinking that a whole bunch of people were going to mess their Pampers.
It’s sort of funny (not) all the ways that the average multiculturalist denies that there are any cultural differences between people groups that go beyond funny hats and food. And one of those differences is how people treat the difference between “me” and “not me”. So they’ll carry on as if there are no differences, but that the differences are the most important thing evar, except for no one has their own (and different) norms about the moral treatment of “me” and “not me” and at the same time “othering” is so very dangerous, but we solve “othering” by pretending no one is different, except that they are and we really really hate anyone who’s willing to talk about it.
The answer to “can you actually imagine a different and foreign moral framework that is not compatible with your own” and the answer is NO. That there is no moral framework incompatible with whatever the “woke” view as normal or right or true.
Something comes with the extreme enforcement of silence on those issues and it’s an extreme entropy of the imagination.
And dumb ass Western idiots bike through Afghanistan and die.
THIS.
Unfortunately I can’t be that stupid. I have lived abroad, even if i more western-like countries. And even there the differences are glaring.
And of course there’s the foreign nature of time… and looking backward at those foreign countries with ideas that don’t even scan anymore, that we can’t even comprehend.
Someone recently brought up the idea of Duty as primary motivation and while everyone was going on about how important duty is, we’re just not there any more. Duty is important but not the most. Or Fealty! Do we even get the concept? Or Judgement by Combat as a way to determine actual and real “truth” of who is right and who is wrong? Or the notion that one would be better dead than defiled. If we don’t understand the concept of “defiled” we *can’t* understand why death would be better. That men in some cultures are not *men* without respect, so much so that they’d commit an honor killing (with the help and assistance of the women in their family) in order to regain respect, it almost has to be denied because it breaks our sense of reality. Or the purpose of sepuku, because why? Why is that better than just being sad and ashamed for a while?
I was working on Highlander fanfic and the idea of ritualized honor based combat… you’d *have* to have a person hundreds of years old to do that because the most moral, upright, dutiful, honorable, warrior from 2018 would say, “F*ck that sh*t, if I f*ck around and lose, I’m a moral coward who allowed others to die.” We’d see that “trial by combat” element as the worst sort of selfish pointlessness. That doesn’t mean that we can’t understand it, if we’re willing to explore and examine it.
Talk about it.
But “understanding” is automatically “approval and agreement” anymore, so we’re all just sort of screwed.
Like I keep saying– because it’s such a strange concept it needs to be refreshed– the Christian idea of repentance, forgiveness, mercy as inherent goods is revolutionary
We can’t see it like a fish doesn’t notice water.
And humility has become ritualized exaggerated near humble-bragging and contests to see who can claim to be on the very very bottom.
floppy dung ball is just lying about what’s said here to feed his little clique of idiots. Sarah could say the sun rises in the east, he’d say she’s a Nazi. No doubt he has hopes for next year’s soon-to-be-renamed plastic rocket award.
You and I had an actual discussion, which was both interesting and thought provoking. Leftists dislike thinking, they find it uncomfortable and scary so they don’t do it much. When they see other people doing it, they get very upset.
Well, Cammy reads these comments, so he knows what you said, then and now. But I suspect he’ll just keep trying to call me out instead.
What’s strange is that he’s accusing of you stuff, but for some reason he’s talking to me instead of the target of his accusations.
“Do you not think it even more strange that Sarah Hoyt had forgotten a follow up post where she attempted to justify the discussion of mass-murder of an ethnic group, also in May?”
Hey, Contentious Flummadiddle, why don’t you talk to Sarah instead of trying to call me out on your blog?
Because it wasn’t a discussion of mass-murder as in “we intend to do it”but in “It might come to that.” WHY in fuck would I “attempt” to justify that.
Okay, I’m going to give Cammy actual fodder: All communists like his idiot self should be taken on half way helicopter rides. I used to despise Pinochet, but you know what? People who are perpetually enraged and don’t understand … well, anything, but it starts with their native language, are better off dead.
And yeah, I’m an idiot, because I still don’t want to do THAT. But it might very well come to it. If they don’t take a chill powder and connect with reality. Or at least send it a postcard.
He’s been hiding my comments, so I post them on my own blog. I’ll post this one here as well:
“A reply to cacophonous fornication.”
“It seems that the floppy camel turd blog has decided it is not enough to slander Dave Freer and Sarah Hoyt, he’s inviting comment on said slander.
I will not be linking to the floppy camel turd, because I might get some on me. But, for the record, this is my comment, which he has no-doubt blocked.
Since you asked so nicely:
“On that, don’t you think there’s something a bit weird about that defence given that it is literally an admission?”
An admission of what?
That the Europeans have a long, long history of pointless wars and random genocides? They do.
That the Romani (and the Travelers, and lots of other wankers) commonly abuse and steal from welfare systems across Europe? They do! (Go on, tell me they don’t floppy. I’ve got a whole bag of popcorn here for that show.)
That the European welfare states will be looking for scapegoats as soon as the checks bounce?
Dear floppy, Greece is already doing that. Everybody is to blame but them. A whole war was fought the last time Germany did it, you might recall the Great Unpleasantness of 1939. Migrants are already being force-marched through Hungary, there’s pics of it on my blog. Sweden just took a hard Right turn at the voting booth on Sunday. Britain voted itself out of Europe.
Who are the very first people that are going to be targeted by frantic bureaucrats when everything goes wrong? People who everybody knows are crooked and steal from Welfare, followed shortly by those of mere bad reputation, and proceeding to people who wear funny clothes in public and/or are the wrong colour. Oh, and the Jews. Can’t forget them. Nothing is going to save those guys except Israel, poor bastards.
Because when you’ve decided that it is morally acceptable to purge undesirables, (as WorldCon did, I remind y’all Puppy kickers, love rubbing that in!) forced deportation vs. just killing them all is the next discussion. And it will be the Left which makes that decision, the same as they always, always do, when they inevitably run out of money. The difference between a National Socialist and a Communist is the uniform.
All of the above is why I like personal freedom, smaller governments and tax cuts. Because bureaucrats are cowardly murdering assholes waiting for their chance to shine. Don’t matter what flag they do their murdering under, even lily white Canada has done its share. We are better off with fewer of them.
So, floppy, now I want you to show me where Sarah Hoyt said deporting/murdering all the Romani was a great idea, and Europe should get on with doing that. Popcorn’s ready, take your best shot.”
I should add that floppy commenter Bonnie McDaniel (Hi Bonnie! We can SEE you!) is now calling us all “genocide enablers” based on the fact that Bob the registered fool has not been PURGED with extreme prejudice from these hallowed halls. Bonnie has of course twisted Sarah’s response to Bob’s comment into her agreeing with him.
New fan for ya, Bob. Good job! ~:D
Of course Bonnie doesn’t realize that I don’t see all that much difference between Roma culture Roma, and socialist Europeans of whatever nationality. One practical difference is that the Roma don’t have the resources to effectively declare war on the United States, and the Europeans do. Should the Europeans man up and fight it out, how do we prevent them from ever making that mistake again? Killing them all down to the last suckling babe is one option.
While I find all indiscriminate genocide repulsive. Also, Europeans don’t fight. They don’t have enough young to fight.
Why don’t I ban you? Well, I don’t remember your insulting us (other than calling me a leftist, and that’s just crazy.)
And if we ignore you, you don’t keep insisting on every thread that we answer you.
When y’all ignore me, that’s valuable feedback on my writing. Okay, sometimes it is just because other people make a lot of better comments, and mine get lost in the noise. Even when I’m ignored, this place has helped my writing a lot, especially during years when I didn’t have the brains to improve it in other ways.
Sarah said: “Because it wasn’t a discussion of mass-murder as in “we intend to do it”but in “It might come to that.” WHY in fuck would I “attempt” to justify that.”
I’ve been saying this for years. The EuroTrash are actually moving a lot slower than I expected them to. It speaks to the grip of the elite on the public in European countries that there aren’t mass car burnings and hangings all over Sweden, Italy, Spain and Germany already.
I suppose the commoners haven’t had a famine yet. As long as the welfare checks keep coming and the supermarket still has Twinkies, things will keep bumbling along as they are now. Let the underclasses miss a couple of meals though, that’ll be different.
Me mentioning this historical pattern naturally makes me a Genocide Enabler, because of magic or something, I guess. Hi, Bonnie! [waves]
But just for a moment, if we could all put our thinking caps on, or in Bonnie’s case take hers out of the plastic wrapper it came in, could we just consider that there might be a distinction between predicting a war and wanting it to happen? You know, maybe? Could be/might be a difference between those two things?
The strain appears to have been too much for dear Bonnie, I fear her head has exploded. 😦
Bonnie might be one of those foreigners that hasn’t realized that the American experience is the successful acquisition of peace by resolving wars with other cultures by carrying the wars through to the end of that culture. Perhaps you don’t need to extinguish the culture every time. Perhaps the enemy can be made to learn to live in peace with you. But my culture, as an American, tells me that a mortal enemy with fight in them means that I have been holding back too much.
War is not pointless.
War of limited means for limited ends may be pointless.
Historically, America’s problematic neighbors have either stopped being problematic or stopped being neighbors. Now we have the whole world for neighbors. Lots of peoples have not figured out the implications of that. We Americans have done them an immense disfavor in not bringing them to a realistic understanding.
And yet we didn’t destroy either Germany nor Japan. And most people consider the treatment of Germany after WW1 to be the base reason for WW2.
I understand the criticism of “nation building” but building after defeat is a necessary step and I was very disappointed that we lost our sense of National Will after the war in Iraq was “won” and did not dare to assert that our intent and definition of “now we’re done” was when a military assignment to our bases in Iraq were “accompanied” tours.
As are military tours to Germany and Japan.
Bob has a unique view of history.
Both Germany and Japan were as thoroughly destroyed as any historical destruction with the possible exception of the Mongols. As for Germany after WWI, Pershing had the right idea: march to Berlin, thrashing German armies along the way, and taking it. The German Army never considered itself defeated…. and therefore wanted a rematch.
I’m thinking more of the continued economic punishment after the loss in WW1.
That was the case of “stopped being problematic”. Meanwhile the both Naziism and to some extent the idea of emporer as god both were killed as the nations were stood up.
In addition there wasn’t continuing resistance that kept being told to the public as was in Iraq.
Well, it could be argued that we didn’t denazify Germany harshly enough, because here we are again with them and Merkel. Of course, we could have killed every man, woman, and child in West Germany and still not have been fully effective at making the East Germans hesitant to cross us.
Here it is almost 2020, and we haven’t yet had the rematch with Japan. Which isn’t a completely terrible track record, by most historical standards.
But we did fundamentally change both countries. Germany by exposing the perfidies of the Nazis to the world and shaming those citizens who failed to stop them, and as I recall did we not insist that the Japanese Emperor renounce his godhood? We invoked significant changes to their societies in a best effort attempt to eliminate their ability if not the underlying reasons that lead to war in the first place.
Nation building, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and demanding unconditional surrender from the Japanese so that we could change them by force without a murderously expensive occupation, are all ways of resolving problem neighbor status that are short of complete extermination.
All were ultimately successful for the United States, maybe up until the Cold War.
” People who are perpetually enraged and don’t understand … well, anything, but it starts with their native language, are better off dead.
And yeah, I’m an idiot, because I still don’t want to do THAT.”
Sarah, I don’t know anyone, including me, who does…. but they WON’T leave us alone unless we do. They have absolutely proven that.
And I’d rather do it myself than leave it for the next generation(s)…. who will have their own troubles.
Because he’s chickenshit, obviously.
He also knows that Sarah will never read his blog. Ever. He needs you to tell her he’s slagging her over imaginary bullshit. Otherwise she’d never know.
Dear floppy, please grow a tiny pair would you? Cowardice is unseemly.
Cowardice is all he knows.
I want to emphasize I see no reason to have him attack me with made up bullshit here. He’s already proven not only lying but insanity by extracting something from the post that has not even a vague resemblance to reality.
I don’t want to explain moon ferrets. I just want to know why he needs to read my blog and attack when I never read his.
WTF is he so devoted to destroying me for?
What’s wrong with HIS head?
If you got upset with the flopster due to my comments, please accept my apologies. Writing time is precious, it would be a shame to have you waste any of it worrying about that guy. Truly not worth the effort.
If you like, I can keep my floppy comments on my own blog and not sully yours.
I just don’t want him here, because he doesn’t argue in good faith, and it’s not worth my time.
However remember he reads my comments religiously, so if there’s anything you want to say TO HIM you can say it here. I just won’t respond, because, bah. He’s an headpussian and not worth spending time with.
Thanks, Sarah. I think I’ll resume taunting him in his own spam filter, burn up his bandwith a little.
Are you asking me to comment here? I’m more than happy to ask those questions here but I’m confident your host does not want me to.
So I have a question for you: I was ever better than midlister, and I’m now going to go indie.
You know you don’t agree with me politically. Why do you scry my blog for bad think EVERY FUCKING DAY?
Is it to assuage your guilt over picking on a female, Latin immigrant? OR are you afraid people will read me and discover I’m not the painted devil you’ve made me?
I don’t read your blogs. I discarded the lies you believe in very early. I certainly would never make you out as being the opposite of what you proclaim — say, anti-authoritarian, instead of the authoritarian you proclaim yourself — because you’re not that important.
TO ME, to my life and my opinions, you mean nothing.
So — why are all of you obsessed with me? What the pock do I matter to you?
Also, how come I never banned you, when you’ve proven yourself an ill-intentioned and thoroughly disingenuous pseudo intellectual?
No. I don’t want you to comment. I want you to stop being a slanderer. But probably that is against you intrinsic nature. Too bad.
Bye, Mr. Meadows.
Don’t especially want you to make false accusations here, and we’ll point out when you do– and point and laugh when you say silly stuff and expect us to take it seriously.
I wouldn’t lay cash on you being able to stay inside the fairly low bar of decent behavior, either, though I’d be delighted to be wrong in that.
I banned him. He proved in MGC that he just makes shit up and keeps screaming louder and louder.
Again, I just want to know WHY the obsession with me. I’m a tiny writer. Why are they so bent on slandering me?
Is it the totalitarian instinct of “everyone must agree with me?”
I’d guess personality. You’re a geek. You care about accuracy.
They need to replace the chips on their shoulder with a kitten, they’d feel better. Well, as long as they stopped trying to knock it off of their own shoulder… kittens have SHARP claws!
You’re midlist, so you’re “small” enough in his eyes that he can get away with attacking you.
But he’s only showing how small he is.
Sure, he can get away with it. BUT what does it win me. They’ve already made me into double plus ungood. I’m going indie. I don’t need their approval. I don’t attend their cons, including the lefty con in Denver.
This is roughly the equivalent of running around screaming at people on the street.
Are they there, yet?
It’s simple – if they can’t beat down a midlister, then they need to admit they can’t beat down anybody. And that is not to be borne
I’m going indie. Under many, many names. So good luck to them on that.
The other day someone who I won’t drag into this posted a statement about “concerned” people who were trying to pre-shame and pre-control her associations. Now she’s *small*. Beyond small. Won an award or two, sold some shorts, and published a book or two and has some friends.
A normal human being wouldn’t consider that a crime and would certainly consider her the smallest fry of the small fry. And yet people felt the need to express *concern* that she was opening herself to the sort of black-listing and harassment likely to come her way by not having the *proper* friends and associations.
At the end of the day, this tells me what I need to know. It tells me who has the moral high ground and who infests a septic pit. To those reading along at home, this means YOU ARE NOT THE GOOD SIDE OF THIS.
I know that you think that you are. And that’s really sad.
Part of the reason I came out of the political closet, and part of the reason I’m going indie is that I won’t be held responsible for everyone else’s perceptions or moods or desire to attack me, or whatever.
They can go to H*LL. I’ll own my own soul.
Most likely what that all meant was that this small author’s “concerned friends” knew that THEY would be subject to social backlash by their association with *her* if she was ever noticed.
What a sad, pathetic, toxic dynamic.
And YOU being out of the closet, Sarah, is probably one reason why this other author chose to make a strong statement repudiating the pressure, denouncing it in no uncertain terms. Maybe not *just* you, but while it can’t have been easy (and still attracts the crazies who can’t stand to be denied power over you) it makes it that much easier for the next person and the next and for THAT you have my gratitude, and no doubt the gratitude of many many more.
He’s got nothing to talk about since the Sad Puppies departed the scene, same as China Mike. You used to be Puppy Queen, so its his last tiny thread of attachment to relevance.
Its funny how he never picks on Larry or Brad. I think he fears one of them might buy a plane ticket for a “visit.” Because that’s the type of thing he’d do, if he had actual cojones. He’s like Moldy Locks, gonna git him some Nazi scalps!
Not worth the brain cycles to pay attention.
Except they also attack Larry Correia too and he’s big enough that he bought a mountain and is building his supervillain lair on it.
Yeah, but that’s when something big happens. This is petty harassment against someone who barely notices Cammy exists. Also, they know they can’t seriously hurt Larry, but they think they can maybe make Sarah’s life miserable if they try hard enough.
Hard to do. Unless they’re responsible for water infiltration via back porch, honestly.
“Why are they so bent on slandering me?”
Social capital.
That might not explain why *you* but it explains the whole septic culture of searching for and identifying and then publicly calling out or condemning any wrong-think. There are few real monsters anymore so the sieve with which to strain them out of the general population has to become ever more fine until we’re sorting gnats and proclaiming ourselves to have killed dragons.
…for social capital.
The mindset of “my beliefs prove I’m a good person” requires constant confirmation. When people disagree it’s not just having a different opinion, what they’re saying is, “you are not a good person”. But if BAD people disagree with you, then you get to be a good person again. So it’s necessary that those who disagree are BAD.
Thus, slander.
because he thinks he can get away with it.
He can’t. For instance in the wake of the Missus being in our fair land (apparently we let the strangest people in) his IP has changed to St. Petersburg. That is, it’s a common mask.
There is only one reason for him to mask, and it makes me giggle.
The mental dysfunction is … ALMOST endearing. If he weren’t so ridiculous.
Well — dusts hands — good riddance to bad rubbish. I have a thousand problems and none of them is a fapping camel.
There you did it again calling them GYPSIES! You Racist.
Yeah, because words make you racist. Okay, fine, I’ll give them the name I learned Ciganos. There’s a never end of fados about Ciganos (romanticizing them) and my mom sang them all.
Listen to Chamava-se Carmencita (My mom’s name is Carmen and dad used to sing her that.)
Or “nao a maior desengano nem vida que tem mais pena do que a vida dum cigano, atravesando a fronteira para ser atravessado por um bala certeira.”
The point is they were vaguely romantic figures in my childhood. Then the village started hosting an encampment, but honestly, regulators are more of a problem.
I don’t actually care about them one way or the other, and the posts I wrote had bloody nothing to do with them. Not even a passing reference.
I’m not going to justify the moon ferrets. They’re the left’s moon ferrets. Let them justify them.
Why should I listen to someone who doesn’t know the difference between a hyperbole and a tautology?
Synchronicity. George Orwell on Utopias:
http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/socialists/english/e_fun
Reminds me of CS Lewis’ intro to “The Screwtape Letters”, where he notes that while writing diabolical advice is easy, the writing of angelic words is nearly impossible.
However, of all the authors, he seems the most able to make Heaven attractive.
Every Utopian dream, for the believers, is an attempt to recreate the Earthly Paradise. That we can return to Eden again, and have an innocent, perfect world that nothing ever hurts, nothing ever goes wrong, nothing ever goes bad.
But, Eden is a dream of childhood, the ideal childhood. But, we grow up and we ultimately change into adults-confused but with so much potential.
Give me liberty or give me death. The government here in America wasn’t established to dictate our utopia for us… but rather protect our liberties to construct our own happiness .. the pursuit of happiness. On the road toward this happiness, there is a matter of conduct that will require discipline to get there though, you have to explore the opportunities….
Elsewhere, some twit on twitter was posting how great Cuba is because they took a big house from a single rich family, and gave it to six families! Isn’t that wonderful!
But if you really think about it, sharing a single house with six different families would utterly and totally suck. For one, rare is the house that can comfortably accommodate that many families without the need to share bedrooms. And what if most of the families are slobs? What if one has a creeper who likes small kids? What if some of the folks like to party on into the night?
People always treat public property with respect. After all, you never see bus stops with all the windows completely smashed, do you? Or public washrooms filled with unspeakable messes, right?
related to absolutely nothing:
Pretty and fun.
This video is open to a lot of interpretation: both are obviously planned out, but dang do the Holland guys pull off casual better.
c4c
The Left can never reach Utopia because they are incapable of finding satisfaction. They know not gratitude and are incapable of recognizing the insatiability of human “needs.” They will always promise more than can be delivered and react in the same way to complaints and critics.
There’s also satisfaction in the struggle to get something. A teenager with a junker he saved and paid for himself tends to have more satisfaction with it than the spoiled kid just given a new car.
The kind of utopia where there is no struggle and everything is free would be horrifically boring
*musing* This may be the appeal to “shopping.”
I can’t shop for clothes or similar, but I can shop the heck out of secondhand stores for household goods, or for food.
We are…well prepared for a hurricane, let’s say. 😀
Supposedly shopping does help satisfy the hunter/gatherer instinct.
I also shop thrift stores, for savings as well as fun, because you never know what you’ll find.
If you find something you weren’t looking for, is it still saving? ~:D
Well, I got a brand new fold-out couch for less than the futon frame my husband had asked me to keep an eye open for…. major upgrade for less than the “replace a broken” would’ve cost.
I went in to look at replacement faucets.
An adorable 7-year-old sized digi-cammie shirt for…. a dollar. The sets go for more like $75.
The Baron was over the moon, and we dang near had to dose him to get it off to clean!
yeah, i would been the same way.
Secondhand FOOD?????
There’s discount and discontinued food. Entire stores of it (canned, sauces, etc.) and always Big Lots.
The food modified “shop the heck out of,” not “secondhand stores.”
That said, I am still in mourning for the discount grocery back in Washington which got the stuff other stores couldn’t sell, and don’t get me started on the bakery overages….I’d spend $20 and walk out with a shopping cart full of baked goods.
This isn’t right! Forget you ever read that name. WP Delenda Est.
“Like the end game of the European Kings was to claim they were descended from Jesus Christ…”
????????
No European King ever claimed this. All of them were professing orthodox Christians, and all orthodox branches of Christianity state that Jesus was completely celibate and chaste all his life. Legends of Jesus marrying and begetting children were found only in heretical cults such as the Cathars.
The “divine right of kings” was the idea that the king was the king because God willed it so – therefore, the king was God’s deputy, and must be obeyed. It had nothing to do with the king’s putative descent.
It’s not at all unusual, though, for European monarchs to make – or acquiesce to – claims they were descended from King David. Considering what some of his other descendants were like, I’m not sure I’d want the comparison.
THANK you, Joel.