Those Who Fear

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

At times we’re all afraid of the future. Sometimes this is actually rational.

For instance, it’s 2024, and an election year. And we know what the fun, zany “experts” who have infested every institution and bureaucracy cooked up in 2020. The near future looks clown world, with a high possibility of crazy cakes, and the possibility of a squall of kinectic passing through where any of us lives, at any time.

If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention. Or you’re lulled to a false sense of normalcy by the droning of the MSM and haven’t realized they lie with every tooth in their mouths.

This is what’s known as a rational fear.

But there are fears that are not rational. Whether or not you believe the government’s recent “admissions” (Splorch, giggle) that there are aliens and the government has touched the sky seen them, living with a dread fear of being kidnapped by an alien and anal-probed is not rational.

Even if it were possible, even if it had happened here and there, the incidence is so small the chance of it happening to you as you go about your lawful occasions is somewhat less than zero.

And then there is a pervasive, all penetrating fear of things changing.

I’ve noticed, sometime ago, that the left routinely accuses us of fearing change. Of course, the change they identify is not a change anyone is really afraid of, because…. well, it’s not a change. Take the late kerffufle in science fiction, for instance. We were accused of being afraid of “Women and people of color writing science fiction.”

This is outright in your face clown world, when you consider how many of us pissed off at log-rolling within a small clique were either women or minorities. But it’s even more clown world, because the minorities and women have always written science fiction. Or in fact whatever the heck they wanted to.

Look, bub, when I was sending out manuscripts, in the days before the internet, all they knew was my name on the manuscript. Yes, my name — all of them, as it happens — was female. But yes, of course, I experimented with initials. it made no appreciable difference. And anyone reading the story didn’t know if I was blond, or dark-sand-colored (guilty) or in fact purple with tentacles. Also, no one particularly cared. I might have had a leg up if I had a cool truly exotic name Smokes With Clouds Littlebottom or Purple Tentacles Blopfog but not so much because cool name sounded ethnic, but because cool name would be remembered. So if I were sending things in, say, every week, it would be noticed I was trying really hard, and it might have got a slightly more charitable reading. (Unless it were truly stupendously horrific, in which case it would get circular-filed with malice.)

Yes, I know, when one was starting out it felt like the universe was against us. And since it took me about 4 times the average 3 years to break into pro — many reasons, some of them being the fact that I tend to go at things backwards and sideways, which provides a unique perspective, but is not the most efficient method — I KNOW that feeling intimately. From the inside. It didn’t help that sometimes you got your story back (back in the day when printing was expensive, and you had to take it somewhere to daisy-wheel print, because they didn’t accept dot-matrix print outs. Yes, I know they were hard to read, but it was also a socio-economic filter) looking like it had been stepped on multiple times with malice.

I suspect it was easy for someone who — and this was already true in the 80s — had been indoctrinated into victimhood and into thinking that everyone was against him/her due to color or sex or sexual orientation, to assume only he/she/it was this badly treated.

But actually we all were. It was a market with a million would be suppliers and room for maybe ten people per month. To make it worse, as I found out when I was briefly an editor of a bottom wrung magazine, the million submissions had a solid 750 thousand, at least, that were absolutely abysmally bad. Because I was young and stupid, I read the whole thing, instead of quitting at the first couple of horrific paragraphs. And it never got better. Most of them read like a kid retelling a Saturday morning cartoon, or an indistinct dream. Some were pamphlets for some kind of ideology, but you often couldn’t tell what the ideology was even.

However the hardest was the quarter million that were good. Sometimes very good. Here you had six slots, and you were paying nothing. How do you choose? And if you choose you’re using this brilliant story’s first shot at publication. And it’s not like the author will get a credit that is worth much. Might have negative value.

Anyway, so, not only didn’t the editors have a chance of knowing what you were — unless you informed them. A not inconsiderable minority of cover letters told me the author’s race, sex and sexual orientation. Which seems to me would be particularly stupid if they thought themselves discriminated against — but also it didn’t matter, because most stories (including my early ones. Granted not cartoon retellings, but extremely peculiar.) were rejected with extreme prejudice because they sucked. Badly.

The only thing that gave you an advantage was knowing someone on the inside, which is why the field was incestuous. (Still is, as far as trad pub.)

But beyond that, women and minorities had always been in science fiction. If they were less represented, it was for cultural reasons, not because of discrimination. (As a geekling girl, I’d have given my right arm for female friends who were as much into science fiction as I was, but even my friendly geekling girls didn’t read that “weird stuff.” It was all either romances or, for the branier ones, history and philosophy and such. Or “Literary” stuff. Because Science Fiction had no prestige. We were the pimply guy in the corner, while women preferred to run off with the son of the mayor — Literary — or fool around with the bad boy — romance — so there was no chance. I just got used to being part of groups of guys, some much older than I.)

Anyway, there was actually no change happening. To the extent there had been change, with a great courting of female readers and writer, that was in the seventies with wholesale traipsing into fantasy. By the eighties the process was almost complete. By the time I broke in, in the late nineties, the publishing field: writers, editors, publishers, even readers, was primarily female. That it was females screaming that they were being discriminated against for being females was something that none of them found funny, so I never pointed it out. It reminds me of this. It was all very cool and edgy to be a woman in science fiction. If you were 20 or 30 years earlier, that is.

Which is sort of the left’s schtick. It’s much easier to fight battles that are already won, of course. And much more satisfying to speak power to truth than the other way around.

But I started noticing this was being shouted in the face of anyone at all who complained or tried to change anything at all in our crazy, ossified institutions. “You’re just a white male scared because you’re being replaced by superior and more able women and minorities.”

The fact that black female friends got this shouted in their faces is something else, but– leaving that aside: since this is deployed everywhere and at all times, as “you’re afraid of the future,” and since the left projects like an IMAX, I started looking around and going “uh.”

Look, being afraid of the future is natural, particularly when you live in a time of catastrophic change. Catastrophic change is so called because it is so rapid that things change suddenly and unpredictably and is experienced like a flood or a hurricane, destroying the landscape you know. EVEN WHEN THE CHANGE IS FOR THE BETTER.

Humans aren’t geared for a high rate of change, for the simple reason that for most of our evolution when things changed rapidly it was a catastrophe and limited in time duration — war, flood, hurricane, fire — and then things went back to changing very slowly. In fact, cultures and tradition are designed to keep things from changing vertiginously. It’s a minor miracle we’re not all still in the fertile crescent, scratching at the ground with a stick.

But the type of change we’re really not geared to is the type of change that affects your every day life, in every aspect. That’s the kind of thing great mythological sagas were written about. ”And then the world was covered in ice, and–“ because even catastrophes were usually on the macro scale, but not the micro. You still ate about the same thing, cooked over the same fire. You still wrapped your babies the same way, sang them the same songs, rubbed the same salve on their gums for teething issues, etc, even if you were doing it while running away from fire or flood.

Then the 20th century. Boy, howdy!  Innovation came fast and furious. People born in a time when the horse-pulled carriage was the height of transportation might (and most did) have grown up to fly in airplanes in late middle age. The “it’s always been so” suddenly wasn’t. Those very important markers of status and class, that all apes rely on, were suddenly upended, then upended again, and then yet again.

And the 21st century came in roaring like a geek boy who just can’t leave his toys alone without improving them every other week.

While the change in my life has not been as shocking as that in my father’s, it has been, really as total, just in a more close-in, personal scale. Look, when I was young, I had pen pals in America (technically to improve my English. Actually because I could send my mind here, part time.) Getting them was a pain involving several dedicated organizations (probably run by one little old lady in a basement), and continuing the correspondence involved a slow exchange over unreliable mail (on my end at least) and a wait of weeks for a question to be answered. These days, I can and do talk to friends across the world by sitting at my social-media computer and firing up one of many programs that allows me to talk to them more or less instantly, either voice or text, and it costs nothing. (When I was first married, and my parents were anxious, the phone bills on either side of the Atlantic were epic.)

Then there is the nineties, only — checks — 30 years ago. My kids, born in the nineties are now in his thirties, and almost in his 30s. I don’t know how much they remember of our early “family vacations.” In Denver, which to us back then was an hour and a half away. We usually went up for a weekend, stayed two nights at the Embassy Suites in the tech center (Cheap on the weekends, since they catered for business travelers. And listen, the advantages of a single room that allowed you to put the kids in another room with a door that closed should not be underestimated) which our younger kid at one point referred to as “our Denver home.” This happened twice a year or so, three times if we were flush. We’d do the museums, the zoo and, in the early days, hit as many used bookstores as we could, because the used bookstores in the Springs were no great shakes, or were thoroughly mined by us on a regular basis. (Four corners and Poor Richards, downtown.)

Getting to the bookstores, or for that matter any restaurant we’d never been to before, or any attraction we didn’t have a pamphlet for, involved getting out the phone book and the map, and plotting a course. And we took the — hotel’s — phonebook with us in the car, so that if we got lost we could stop at a phone booth and call the place and ask how to get there.

All of this sounds like alien maneuvers to my kids, now. You get in the car, look up the thing in your GPS (only not ours. We have to use the phone. For reasons known only to itself, our GPS is convinced we only want to look up things in Montana. It knows where we are. When you put an address in, it directs you correctly. But obviously if we want to go to Hobby Lobby it’s one in some city in Montana. No, the car has never been in Montana, at least not according to its history. I guess it’s pining for the Fjords altitude.) set the course and go.

There have been myriad such changes, including the fact that applications for jobs are all via applications, some of which seem to be mal-functioning in odd ways. And all of which require “keywords” which, as with publishing, are arcane magic, understood by no one but a minority of marketing brains. (And now increasingly AI, which is why wordpress suggests keywords for my posts that range somewhere between laugh-outloud and WHAT?)

And a lot of occupations have changed and turned upside down since people started, but more so in the last 10 years or so.

I’m not going to argue that the so called “elites” haven’t done dirt to the rest of us. They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, sent jobs abroad, for cheaper labor and fewer regulations. They inflicted regulations on this great land that make it near impossible to start a business or make an honest buck. They are now trying to take away anything that works, from appliances, to food production. And in the name of making it so that the future is female (what the heck crazy slogan is that?) they are destroying our young men and older male teens, not realizing that also destroys females, because humans don’t live in a vacuum. Frankly the fact we still shamble on, even if greatly hampered, is a minor miracle.

But I am going to argue, as justifiable as it is to be scared of whatever the heck they’ll think up to do to us next, we are less fearful than they are, and have less reason to be. The reason is the same one as usual: We, Odds and Nonconformists who hang out on this blog, including the one on this side of the screen, are more flexible and adaptable, and ready to make the best of what we can, while seeing the problems and trying to fix them. I think growing up not fitting anywhere, while uncomfortable, makes it easier to adapt to catastrophic change.

And I’m going to argue part of the reason for the horrible things that are inflicted on us is the left-elite’s panic-fear of the future, of change, of things being different.

First and foremost, they’re terrified of losing their lefty privilege. I’m convinced somewhere, deep inside, beneath the synapses stuck on talking about what brave fighters and allies (most of them aren’t actual minorities — not the vocal ones –) they are, they are very aware of having been given breaks and pushed ahead due to espousing positional-good-leftist-views. They know that most of them are no more qualified for whatever position of power and/or respect they have than my cat. And certainly not more qualified than all the “unpopular” or less sightly people passed over.

And they’re scared the system will be upended. Dry mouth/clenched fists scared. They are all in for “minorities” and “women” taking over, because, of course, that change is predicted in all their “expert” theories and everything they learned from earliest schooling. So, it’s almost reassuring, you know. It’s “according to the prophecies.”

But their job suddenly changing, or going overseas or whatever that is unexpected, and terrifying. So, it’s easier to send other people’s jobs overseas, to be done in the same old way but cheaper, than say to install automation and to have things change completely, and have to learn new skills to manage.

More importantly, they’re terrified of this hypothetical future where all jobs go way, and you just have to deal with all this population, that simply aren’t smart enough to do anything else. This of course, requires that you consider yourself the pinnacle of human evolution and also be dumb enough about history not to figure out that if jobs were ever going to go completely away it would already have happened.

You have to not be aware that once upon a time all humans scratched at the soil from sun to sun to get a bare subsistence and that now only 2% work in agriculture, while the entire multitude of us is fed perhaps too abundantly. (Eyes midriff.)

You have to not be aware that buggy whip makers didn’t starve when horse transportation went away. And that people who did computations by hand didn’t starve when computers came in. But oh, for the plight of the typewriter repairman! Seriously.

Yes, in all the great changes, some people simply can’t adapt, and are unemployed forever, or become depressed and bitter, but they’re by far the minority. Usually people — absent the generous subsidies of a government run by the left who again is sure “surplus humans with no function” are a direct result of innovation — adapt and innovate some more to find a niche. Most of our close personal circle have had three or four completely different skilled jobs in the last 40 years. And many of those have nothing to do with their degrees. Also, some came from a hobby they had while working their first job years ago.

The left can’t conceptualize this. Even when they, themselves, do it, they’re convinced other people (yes, yes, particularly other races, because they’re arrant racists) can’t do it, and therefore must be kept in the dim servitude of the government dole, just enough to keep them quiet, and not enough to give them any freedom, and always having to reapply and go through bureaucracy. Or of course be given “government jobs” many of which are a sort of sinecure like FDRs job corps, which do and undo the same thing over and over.

The truth is that if you don’t do stupid laws and regulations — say, Oregon’s forbidding the pumping of one’s own gas (Will no one think of all the now very old gas station attendants on the corner, with a sign saying “please give” in all other states?) — and don’t swathe the economy in welfare and more welfare, and don’t create make-work jobs, as innovation displaces people, people find other ways and new things to do, or even new ways to do the same job.

I say this as someone who has been assured that AI will write my novels better in the near future (Splorch, giggle. No, do go ahead. Bah) and that this thing I have to do for some reason I don’t even understand can be done better and I’ll be unemployed forevah! Only I can see ways — if I didn’t enjoy the process — how it could make my life easier, or at least stop the long, depressive silences, if nothing else by driving me batty. (Yes, that works. No don’t get any ideas. If clownworld hasn’t done it yet!)

And I say this precisely at the dawn of AI, when the left is convinced their veddy veddy important jobs, all with nose in the air and mysterious and caballistic procedures, like, oh, news reporter, are going away.

They’re losing their minds. If they balk at all sorts of innovation, things that threaten their function — even more than their jobs — directly are even more terrifying.

The people who have made an entire scaremongering movement out of wanting the weather to be exactly as they remember for childhood forever, are not going to allow innovation of any kind. Much less innovation that might free other people to be inventive and foster most innovation. Nooooo.

The only kind of innovation they’re ready for is the one that’s already happened, and that they’re sure people who are not them — those “uneducated white males” they are sure are lurking in the dark and plotting against them, –fear. That “innovation” is fine because it isn’t, and it’s under their control anyway as powerful “allies.”

But real innovation? Things happening that they haven’t foreseen or authorized? Noooo. Don’t you dare move their cheese.

They will go to any lengths, seize as much power as they need to, silence as many voices as they need to, kill as many people as they need to, destroy as many things and nations as they need to so that they remain in control and no changes happen that they dislike.

They have only 3 problems:

1-The current situation is highly unstable, and changes will happen, anyway, and probably rather fast and in the near future.

2- Their attempts to follow their learned script (China, Russia, Cuba) don’t and can’t account for the new and vast territory, or for the fact their end-system never worked and was subsidized by free nations to even subsist.

3- They are so terrified of change that they can never plot second and third order consequences from anything they do or impose from above. And lately –oh, forever, but particularly lately, because they’re exceptionally unqualified, being 4th generation; and because the situation is highly unstable — everything they do tends to turn around and bite them in the fleshy part of the ass, by creating a lot more “unforeseen change” and making things more unstable. (See, lockdowns. Or vaccines. Or installing Brandon. Or–)

Hold on to the side of the boat. Things are going to go very topsy turvy and of necessity, probably dangerous.

Be aware this situation is global, and weirder abroad, because we can’t fully understand the implications of their culture without deep study no one is making.

Stay flexible. Even for those of us who are older, that’s not exactly difficult. Because if you never fit anywhere, you can sort of fit everywhere.

And most of all, be not afraid. Let them be afraid. We have a future to get to.

196 thoughts on “Those Who Fear”

  1. Just an add on since you used a boat in the water metaphor there. One of the things folks who fly around in helicopters over water for a living have to show proficiency in is extracting themselves from the aircraft if it lands in water. The important thing to know first is that the machine tends to be top heavy, so flips over in the water (assuming a relatively gentle landing that does not cause disintegration of the beast). The second thing is that its usually pretty dark underwater, upside down, in a helicopter. So you train to extract yourself blinded upside-down underwater while strapped into a mockup in a large cold pool. Oh yeah, and you really really have to be calm when you do this. I trained a few places, and since I can hold my breath for quite a time (usually much longer than the trainers were comfortable with) and found out its not so hard to be really really calm while the newbies around you are panic stricken, I also found it was best to come out last so there was no one underneath me trying to pull me back down. Plus I got to do it over if the ones in front of me screwed up. I thought it was kinda fun.

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    1. On the USN side the Dilbert Dunker for prospective jet Naval Aviators as was seen in An Officer and a Gentleman – strap in, slide down the track, cockpit goes upside down, one unstraps and gets out observed by divers to make sure one does it right and does not get stuck and die.

      The Helo Dunker for water survival school trainees, so aircrew school and anyone whose job will be flying in helos over water, belted in blindfolded in flight gear, and they dunk the entire simulated fuselage thing and roll it upside down, then one has to unstrap, find the opening, and egress. When Marines do theirs they have rifle shaped object obstacles that float around and get in the way. Here’s a video from Pensacola of what looks like an aircrew school class running through it dated 9 years ago:

      There are various civilian versions developed for training crew flying out to oil rigs and such, which don’t look as expensive as the Navy one.

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        1. The trick was grabbing something solid…like the hole you intended to exit from. Before water entry. :-)

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          1. I suppose, though I just crossed my arms in front of me and waited for local commotion to die down. As a decade previous I had a near drowning experience trying to sail in a small boat alone in 35+MPH winds where it capsized, mast split in two and I found myself underwater, tangled in lines, torn sail and had a fiberglass boat pounding on me as waves crashed about, I survived because I was able to slow down, and calmly extricate myself amid all that chaos, even swim/push the craft to shore after freeing the split mast stuck in the bottom mud. The Dunkers were a piece of cake compared to that.

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            1. How do people swim with their contact lenses? I’d think that they’d tend to float off.

              Personally, I never saw the point of opening my eyes underwater, because I’m both nearsighted and astigmatic to the extreme. I tried it a couple of times in swimming class, but it was usually easier to navigate without looking where I was going, because my other senses worked a ton better. But I understand that this might not be optimum in a non-swimming pool/lake situation.

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  2. “And that people who did computations by hand didn’t starve when computers came in. ”

    Back in the ’80s, Bloom County had a lone strip that ended with the punchline, “Slide-Rule Aid?” After all, it was an entire class of people having their lives upended as their business disappeared. We must help the Slide-Rule manufacturers!

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        1. The Reader’s good slide rule (he has a couple of plastic ones as well) saw the Reader and his father through Ye Olde Land Grant U. It is currently mounted in a glass case with a small sign – ‘In Case Engineering Calculations Are Required After the End of the World, Break Glass’.

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          1. Better include a manual. No one else will know what it is, is for, or how to use it.

            For comparison…

            “Dude, what’s up with the hands on that weird pocket watch?”

            Ouch.. .

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          2. I keep mine at front of my grandfather’s desk top drawer. I’m not into breaking glass. It’s double sided with multiple trigonometry lines as well as the A,B,C and D lines.

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            1. I see your sliderule and raise you a log-log scale.* :) At U of Redacted, there was a constant debate between the wooden ones and those in favor of aluminum. (Picketts are less sticky when it gets humid. OTOH, when it gets cold…)

              When 4 function calculators came out, I managed to use both in the course of exams. Ditched the slipstick (might have sold the older calculator) when the HP45 came out… (I might have been the first customer for that one on campus. A guy in my dorm had an HP35, but finances said to wait a bit.)

              ((*)) I practice by taking 2 to the 3rd power. If I don’t get 8, I know I’m doing it wrong.

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              2. I used slide rule through half way through my junior year. Last 6 quarters, had a TI that we kept around for decades. Littlest sister ended up with my slide rule, when she started college, until she could afford a good engineering calculator. Dad had a few calculators that are supposedly “in a safe place”, he used in his career. Computers were barely just coming in when he had his stroke. We might find them when we have to clean out the house. (Not anytime soon. Mom is still going at 89.)

                No. I could not now use a slide rule without a refresher tutorial even if my life depended on it.

                Why wait until midway through my junior year? Beyond the fact I could not afford the cost of a calculator? If using slide rule then had to only be within 3 decimal places correct. If had a calculator then they had to be correct to within 6 places. By junior & senor year most calculations were financial and projects, someone on the team had a calculator so slide rule advantage disappeared. Plus the home base neighbor won a calculator at his work, that he and his had no use for, so he sold it to my parents for 1/3 what it cost. Still more than parents could afford. That was my one and only Christmas present that year.

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                1. I was lucky (in a way) in college. Expenses were light due to scholarship/tuition waiver, and after my father passed away my Freshman year, I was getting Social Security survivor benefits. Thus a good chunk of summer job money went to discretionary items, like the calculators. The first was bought through a friend’s employee discount. The HP 45 was just after finishing an intern job at an electronics company. FWIW, they had a really nice scientific calculator. Never dreamed I could have afforded it. AFAIK, that company never went for the consumer market. Compcorp, I believe.

                  I had to dress “business normal” for the summer jobs, but at school, a mil-surplus coat and jeans were the order of the day.

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                2. Like many other things, I learned how to use a slide rule from a book by Isaac Asimov.

                  Among other things, it was one of his essays where I learned I had only been taught half of the National Anthem in school.

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      1. I learned to use a sliderule twice: The first time was one of the things we did back in the elementary gifted program. No calculators one could actually afford yet then. I have my dad’s traditional linear slide rule somewhere around here.

        Then later I learned to use the circular slide rule used for flying calculations, commonly called the whiz wheel – I still have various, too many, of those.

        For the flying stuff I still find the whiz wheel faster than glonking through inputting numbers on a keypad, even using one of the dedicated flying calculators.

        Obviously everything now is on iPads. No more paper maps even. Very sad.

        My college calculator was an HP-41C. I still have that around here somewhere as well.

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      3. In junior high, the science teacher had a classroom Pickett slide rule hanging over the blackboard. It was about 3-4 feet long, and he used it to teach sliderule. (At which time, we had plastic slipsticks that cost a few dollars.)

        I thought about finding one of the big ones, but they are rare enough to be expensive collector’s items. OTOH, I still have two Picketts, one a standard size, and the other in a pocket case.

        One of my roommates had a circular slide rule. We’d have races. I don’t recall the results, so I assume he won. :)

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    3. I still remember the Great Holy Wars between Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard; between the acolytes of RPN and algebraic method. ‘Twere a time of great strife and upheaval which left much devastation in its wake. :-P

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        2. Amen! Especially for complex formulas. With RPN, you just jumped in and started solving. Algebraic, you had to work each operation separately.

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      2. For the Reader this was easy. An HP 35 was $350. A TI SR50 was $150 (both in 1974 dollars). And either was a huge upgrade over the Reader’s slide rule. Anytime an RPN zealot would come after the Reader, some reference to $200 for other things got mentioned.

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        1. When our department at Agilent (formerly HP) was being shut down, equipment was walking out the door (mostly from the cleaning staff, but also from soon-to-be former workers). The department secretary had the desktop version of the HP-95 calculator. I was eyeing it, but somebody stole it before I could. Un-intentional virtue, I guess.

          (I wish the thieves had waited until we finished one experiment before they stole the hardware. Sigh.)

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      3. I bought a TI calculator when N-cells were getting hard to find for the HP-41C, but haven’t warmed to it. My go to calculators are an HP-15 I used for work (before the 41 was recommended for some circuits classes) and Kcalc on the desktop.

        The HP-45 died several years ago.

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    1. Oh, that’s because Obama thought when he was elected South Africa would ensue. (Yes, he’s that stupid.)
      When that didn’t happen, he decided it’s because we don’t have enough “minorities.” Who are, of course, all alike, and all will act like people kept down by apartheid. And meanwhile, the American people will just roll over and act like isolated, massively outnumbered South African white farmers.
      No, seriously. The left are that stupid. They don’t get what they’re doing or what will come next.

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      1. Reading a history of the post-American Revolution British Empire (written by an Anglophile American, and completely politically incorrect). I was startled to learn the origin of the term, “commando,” was Boer Dutch farmers conducting raids on black villages in retaliation for things like cattle theft. Does not in the least excuse what the black majority is doing now. But still,disturbing.

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        1. No. But the raids by black tribesmen, particularly Zulus were also horrific, so it’s like the history of the west. Horrible on both sides, but over 100 years ago.
          OTOH yeah, there’s a lot of history there. That history isn’t here, nor are we going to roll over and die on command.

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          1. Also, the Boers apparently made your average Southerner look like a liberal.
            Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Border Patrol can remove Texas razor wire. Barrett was with the majority. I’ve seen people on both sides citing different parts of the Constitution. Oh joy unspeakable.

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              2. Texas needs to go to the wall to protect THEIR border.

                They need to absolutely reject anything but them being able to reject illegal immigrants.

                They may even need to threaten secession.

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                1. Secession?

                  No.

                  Hand Biden an excuse? Not smart. Really? Just hand the Left an excuse to go full jackboot? Wow.

                  Besides, we settled the possibility of secession in the 19th century. So no, let’s not repeat that fiasco, eh?

                  We will enforce the US Constitution, not abrogate it.

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                  1. Right. They are losing. Slowly and incrementally. So all they need is an excuse. Mind you I think they’d also lose anything kinetic, the price we’d pay would be worse than this. As a nation.

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                  2. Texas needs to join everyone else by suing for Not Enforcing the Law. Every sanctuary city needs to be sued by it’s citizens affected by the invaders these cities are enabling/enticing for the activities taken because sanctuary city.

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      2. On a partial tangent, on YouTube I’ve been listening to a series of linquistic analysis of the biblical texts by the Metatron.

        One of the recent ones I watched was where he was going through the biblical descriptions of demons the the root words. Apparently the root of Lucifer is “light bringer” and all I could think was “Ok, who was the galaxy-brain at campaign headquarters who thought that would totally be the right branding for the Obama campaign?”

        You just can’t make this stuff up…

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        1. I seem to recall the name being “the Lightworker” rather than “the Lightbringer,” and then memetic mutation changing it. Or the change might have gone in the other direction. It’s all kind of fuzzy, as one might expect of a time that felt like multiple daily kicks to the head.

          Anyone else? Is this just me?

          Republica restituendae
          et
          Hamas delenda est

          Liked by 1 person

            2. My favorite is her explaining why Saul went as Paul:

              comment to this very bloog here with link to quote because she gave the specific word.
              “You should go listen to that guy preaching the new religion.”

              “Oh, yeah? What’s his name?”

              “Shake Your Groove Thang.”

              Liked by 3 people

        3. Frankly, I’m not so sure the similarity is an accident. I find it very easy to believe that someone thought it was a funny way to mock Christians, and that it would fly right over the heads of the clueless rubes who make up the masses.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. It might not be an accident in another way. If you’re a believer, you know for centuries people argued about what the “restoration of Israel” meant. Apparently it meant, checks notes, the restoration of Israel.
            Sometimes the thing just tells you what it is, in accordance with prophecy.
            Obama’s ability to attract flies and his demand crosses be covered when he spoke anywhere?
            Sure, that was just a coincidence, right? RIGHT?
            Note I’m not one who reads portents everywhere. But–

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          2. Well, like the quote he put in the monument for the Twin Towers. Everybody I talked to thought it was an accident that he would use a quote from an incident where the Jews were mocking God and saying His decrees were nothing. “Cut down the sycamoes, and we will change them into cedars.”

            Accident? Mocking?

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      3. Twelve Point One Percent. That’s what Black/African American total populations were in the 2020 Census results. They go up to 13.4% if they include “in combination” with other definitions.

        Caucasians (note with Hispanic respondents artificially split off) were 57.8%, or 61.5% including “in combination”. If you correctly add caucasian plus hispanic it’s 76.5% (80.2% combo).

        And completely setting aside the reality that none of these are at all monolithic or as biddable as TPTB want them to be, the question, posed completely within the constraints of their worldview, must be: “Guess what happens if you throw a machete party where 12.1% goes after 57.8%?”

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Destroy the morale of the opponent, remove their willingness to fight, remove their ready access to arms, then strike with surprise and ruthlessness, and ones dmfighters’ blades needs only dispatch five to win.

          Communism is never a mass movement. It’s a small self-selected elite that first demoralizes a population, then lies its way to massacre.

          And they have repeatedly succeeded with that formula. Which is why they must be exposed and ridiculed constantly.

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          1. But that assumes they get 100% swinging machetes. When you only convince some fraction to grab those machetes and drop to 1:10 or 1:20 or 1:50, those arms are going to get tired.

            But your first point is the most important – unless you’ve slammed the designated-machete-target-population’s morale to the point they cower in their house hoping the machete mob passes them by, you get ex-breakup Yugoslavia instead, with everybody killing everybody.

            Their Marxian dirt-goddess religion has no idea what it is actually doing.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. They’re trying everything that worked so well in countries with long histories of autocratic rule by privileged elites. We’ve only had that for a few generations, and still remember the traditions of liberty. Our wanna-be masters have to pay lip service to our rights even while seeking to destroy them.
              ———————————
              ‘Progressives’ suppress free speech because they don’t have the means to suppress free thought.

              Yet.

              Liked by 1 person

            2. Doomer? Me? (Braying like a crazed hyena on -really- good Weed)

              My humor may be the dark of Pluto’s farside, but I see Victory in our grasp, although I also see how it can be F-ed up by so called “allies”.

              I note the Enemy’s method (historically proven workable on 100 million victims) so it can be F-ed up by the Good Guys. Don’t embrace despair. Don’t give up the hardware of Liberty. Laugh at the boogers.

              Like

  4. I’ve noticed, sometime ago, that the left routinely accuses us of fearing change.

    This, from the people who think there is such a things a “global temperature” and act like the world is ending every time the weather changes.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Honestly, part of me would love to get the weather back I recall from when I was kid…
      2-3ft of snow by Christmas, several snow days from school…
      Of course, this was ALSO when everyone was predicting the new ice age would be any day now…

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Honestly? Move back to where you grew up (if you’re not there already) and wait 10 years.

        My sister was bitching about climate change and how where she lives is suddenly warm and sunny after she moved there because it’s always overcast. She had no response when I told her “Well, just wait another 10 years and it’ll be cloudy again because that’s how climate cycles work.”

        I catch myself sometimes thinking wistfully of the deep snow of my childhood, and then I have to remind myself that I was a lot shorter then, and that kind of storm happens every few years anyway. It’s just memorable because it’s unusual.

        … although I will admit that I’ve never seen anyone ski to school like my dad said he did(? Or saw someone else do?) when he was in high school here.

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        1. Roads are also cleared off a LOT faster/better/cleaner than they were 40/30/20/10 years or more ago. I remember when the trucks didn’t go out until the end of the storm at the earliest, not during.

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          1. I suspect part of that is because the cars are so much lighter.

            The Tank can handle snow way better than my husband’s commuter rollerskate.

            There’s also the pre-treatment for roads, which helps.

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            1. In this state, the state government asks businesses and schools to close before large snowstorms. It makes the cleanup much easier if they don’t have to deal with stranded motorists.

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          2. Tires are much better now. Living in the mountains, you used to need chains in the winter because snow tires didn’t exist. Ditto all wheel drive vehicles. 4×4 trucks were not a thing and neither was front wheel drive.

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            1. But the old Blue Whale used to go wherever it was pointed. Not 4×4, not front wheel drive, no snow tires of any type, no chains. That tank went where the new fancy 4×4’s got stuck (we should have gotten pictures). ’58 Plymouth Power Wagon.

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          3. George Stewart wrote a book published in 1941 named “Storm”, fiction, but it takes you in a time capsule to the late 30’s, and how modern they were. The focus is on the impact on California, almost 100 years ago. They were dedicated to keeping Highway 40 (now Interstate 80) open over the Sierras, and had plows, and stupid drivers then.

            Fiction, but more real than any non-fiction description. A great read. He also wrote “Fire”. So nothing new under the sun. Nature keeps trying to kill us, we object. He also wrote one of the first of the end of the world epidemic books. “Earth Abides” (1949). All great reads if you can find them.

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        2. The last major snowstorm here was in the early ’90s. I do remember some really nasty ice storms in the early 70s. Don’t really miss those.
          Given how the country water company has handled the current episode, maybe it’s just as well. We now have some water back, but it’s mostly yellow and the, “Boil it all,” is in effect.

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            1. I remember my brothers diving off the roof into 10 foot snowdrifts. I believe that was the year downtown Salt Lake was a river after the thaw.

              I remember walking to school with snow piled over my head on either side. I also remember laughing as we pushed a police car out of what we fondly referred to as Waters Lake, easily up to my hips.

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        3. I can’t remember the name of it, but there was a known weather cycle that helped set folks off to thinking an ice age was coming. My dad skied to school on his dad’s old Army cross-country skis.

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        4. Well, I could, yes, and granted some of the snow would’ve been lake effect snow as well. Looking at a live cam from the town, looks like they got a pretty decent snowfall recently, so…

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  5. Back in the oughts, I was editing the Libertarian Futurist Society’s (print) newsletter. I made it a practice to review self-publisher (printed) books one issue each year. So I got to look at a fair number of such books. There was one of them that had a clever premise—Communists as vampires and Nazis as werewolves (inspired by some of what Ceausescu pulled off)—but was not well written. Other than that, they were uniformly dreadful. And many of them weren’t even vaguely libertarian . . .

    On a different topic, when C and I moved from southern California to Kansas, AT&T assured us that we could suspend our Internet service and have it restarted at our new location, with the same account and addresses. So we got into the new apartment and called them up. They scheduled a startup—and it didn’t work. I called them up about it, and they said they would fix it. After several repeats, we got a call from an actual AT&T technician who was out to look at our connection and get it working, and wanted to check our address. In Lawrence, California (we didn’t even realize there WAS a Lawrence, California). So I called up the local cable/Internet company, and we were in business in less time than AT&T had kept us waiting. Apparently AT&T’s assignment system could not grok the idea that we could have moved out of California. (I could have dealt with their getting messed up. But every single person I talked with assured me that the problem was fixed and the correct address had been put into their system. I think this was a case of “send them the bedbug letter.”)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Indie books are better now. Mostly because the people who aren’t good publish a short or a book, and give up.
      BUT the interesting thing is that I think most of the no-hopers are seeking trad pub.
      Indie back then didn’t really have a hope of making money, unless you were a super-salesman, so it tended to select for the gullible who didn’t want their masterpiece edited or thought that self-publishing or small press was some kind of short cut to fame and fortune.
      Now, I’ll admit that most indie books are not to my taste. But then most trad pub is not to my taste.
      I miss going up and down the book store isles sampling first pages and deciding what to put in the basket. BUT I do the same now, late at night, from bed, and buying or return is easy.
      The biggest advantage is finding old favorites without having to initiate a rare book search and paying the fees for it.
      Right now I’m deep in the World of Tiers, because I wanted to look up something….
      Anyone remember who wrote The Book of Ptah? Was it Van Vogt? (I think it’s Ptah? The Egyptian artificer god.)

      Like

    2. I’ve been reading a lot of LitRPG, lately. It’s an interesting genre because it’s only indie. The quality is all over the place – both in terms of writing/craftsmanship and creativity/plotting. It’s also prolific; series go on and on and new writers are always popping up. It’s not quite a slushpile, but obviously not curated.

      FWIW, I mostly skim over the “RPG” elements. They’re the ultimate in infodump crutches. A surprising number of books would be better if they ditched that part, but genre conventions must be followed.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I can’t feel the urge to try that genre. I run two actual TTRPG sessions a month and play in one; it accustoms me to thinking of the mechanics to be seen as a means, to be kept in the background so it doesn’t hinder the character interaction. Trying to replicate the actual flow of an RPG in prose narrative makes about as much sense as trying to replicate the expository passages in a novel in a video. Different forms and media have different ways of handling the same themes and premises.

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        1. They do indeed; (cough) Dune (cough). The third-worst movie-with-a-halfway-decent-cast I’ve ever seen (“The Sorceress” and “Highlander II” beat it for worst and next worst, but it was the only one of the three that exhibited the particular idiocy you noted). I believe I’ve heard of a remake; good luck with that, Dune (the book) was probably 90% non-visual.

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          1. Dune remake, which was split into at least 2 parts. I’ve only seen the first half (don’t know if second half got made). First half stopped after Paul and Jessica get picked up by the Freemen, not long after the fight where Paul survives the challenge for their lives. The movie follows the books dialog, and good visuals, better than the original. But it also has a lot of over visual narrative, including the intro, and starts not on Dune but the planet Paul’s ancestors ruled for generations, because the book was non-visual with a lot of subtext history and non-conversation political consequences. Not a movie critic anyone would listen to. But I liked it better.

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            1. Yeah, that was (sort of) my point; some books simply don’t lend themselves to visual media without narrative overlay. Best to stick to better ones for movies.

              Liked by 1 person

        2. Very much so. I have an entire tag’s worth of meditations on that very subject

          https://marycatelli.dreamwidth.org/tag/the+dm+vs+the+writer

          One easy way to see that is the isekai where the heroine is thrown into the role of the villainess of a dating Sim and must save herself from CERTAIN DOOM.

          Actual games seldom have villainesses, and those that do generally have a route by which the heroine can befriend her, so there’s an escape built in, but in a narrative, the rare game case works well.

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      2. Baen actually put out a LitRPG novel last year: “Time Trials,” by M.A. Rothman and D.J. Butler. I expect that one was curated better than average. I don’t remember much info-dumping, for one. It might be up your alley, and I believe it just came out in trade paperback.

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        1. Okay, that’s just rude. The English version of the book isn’t on KU, but the German version is?!

          Like

      3. If you haven’t already found them here are some of my faves from the LitRPG genre:

        The Iron Prince (book two just dropped, but they are super huge)

        Silver Fox and the Western Hero (I think this is up to 8)

        Primal Hunter (up to 8-9)

        Battle Mage: Farmer (6+)

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  6.  And in the name of making it so that the future is female (what the heck crazy slogan is that?) they are destroying our young men and older male teens, not realizing that also destroys females, because humans don’t live in a vacuum. 

    Or not caring, because any woman with a healthy relationship or open to such is a threat as more successful– the only possible way must be as miserable as the destroyers.

    Liked by 2 people

  7. Luckily for me, I’ve never had an image to uphold and being the target of bullies in my youth gave me a healthy disregard for the opinion of the high and mighty.

    I would imagine it would be very hard to turn against your tribe if you had to do that.

    Not everyone knows that you can go out and find a tribe that is a good fit for you rather than cut pieces of yourself off to fit the tribe you find yourself in. And I think a good amount of fear that is out there is from people can sense that their tribe might lose out. Then what do they do if they’ve compromised their internal integrity to stay in with the good crowd? Many people fear loss of face above all else. And how do they cope when it turns out the Conspiracy Nut they always made fun of is looking at them with the contempt they know they deserve?

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Perhaps it is time to just lock up any Feds who interfere. Or perhaps all the Feds. What has the evidence of the last few years shown but that our Federal government is a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization, under the nominal control of Criminal-in-Chief Biden? Perhaps the time has come to make a mass citizens arrest of the Federal executive.

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          1. So what happens if Abbott ignores the actual border, and sets up a barrier (concertina razor wire, since minefields would bring the Feds into it) a mile or so inside Texas? Internal structures, unlike those on the border, are in the purview of the state, not the Feds, right? Probably impractical, since it would have to be patrolled to keep invaders from cutting it, but worth looking into.

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        2. Ah yes, that’s why there’s been multiple whistle blowers, they keep having to screw around with moving offices and investigations, and generally act like they can’t even trust the entire offices in places they DO control– because they have control over all the Fed employees.

          Makes perfect sense.

          Note this would include the military and border patrol…..

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          1. Well, all they have to do is not show up. They were happy to slow-walk and obstruct the President when it was Trump. What’s the (D)iff?

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            1. Ah yes, once again your glorious lazy man punishment streak is on display.

              Anything that fits your desire to destroy for today will work, so pretend that those doing the work you couldn’t be bothered with are The Problem.

              I guess this keeps you from demanding the execution of a mom for not using Theraflu on her kid while accused of BadThink… this week, anyways.

              Who knows, maybe next week you’ll be back to that.

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              1. I wouldn’t expect you to understand allowing your fellow citizens to be imprisoned falsely, or ruining lives with false charges. or gutting the Constitution, or any of the other crimes we’ve seen, no.

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                1. Demanding. Execution. For not using Theraflu. When you heard a rumor she might be anti-vaxx.

                  Which was when you started getting shy about giving any kind of information so I could go look up if your interpretation was accurate, or “creative.”

                  And at one point, you flatly stated you didn’t like making that information available, exactly BECAUSE people came to conclusions which did not align with yours.

                  When they had information.

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            1. Same reason your reoccurring calls to kill them all– whoever “them” is this week– are a bad idea.

              The irony of violating due process in the name of protecting constitutional rights is just a cherry on top.

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    2. The worst and best thing for the preaumed next Trump administration to do is to investigate the hell out of the federal bureaucracy and publish it all, with names and addressss. Tell the truth and shame the devil. Don’t bother prosecuting them. Fire them and take away their pensions. (In exchange for not prosecuting. Good for rhe deficit, don’t you know.) Then open the door to lawsuits (class action for J6 prosecutions with exculpatory evidence suppressed?) and state prosecution.

      And make sure that includes what the journo-filth knew and when they knew it.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. Texas needs to disobey. This is a constitutional crisis. It’s time to tell them “fuck your institutions, you’re full of fucking shit, we’re sending the illegals back”. The next step after losing respect for the “institutions” is to tell the institutions to fuck off.

      Now’s the time. Also keep the buses to the sanctuary cities flowing. FLOOD them with all the people they proclaim to WANT.

      This Civil War has already started, we’re just doing the nicer things first, and followed by the fuck you, No’s that we’re starting to deliver now.

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      1. “we’re sending the illegals back”

        Texas CANNOT do this. It’s a power that’s exclusively granted to the Federal government by the US Constitution. The fact that the Feds are derelict in that duty doesn’t change that.

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        1. See, junior, that’s the problem. The federal government has a duty, outlined in the Constitution, and is maliciously refusing to carry it out. That refusal is directly harming the United States. Just how much dereliction should Americans ignore?

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              1. Yes, that’s the biggest problem of the many confronting the country. Fix that issue, and a number of other issues immediately become resolved.

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                  1. And that’s a problem…why?

                    At least with today’s Democrat party. Being tossed out of their cushy offices wholesale might just be enough to force some much-needed reforms. ‘Cause the Republicans ain’t perfect neither.

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                  2. Plenty still will, though likely not as many. I’ve had plenty of conversations with people who vote Democrat, and aren’t likely to change their vote.

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            2. We tried that already. They cheated. Biden needs to be impeached for even bringing this case before the Supreme Court to decide.

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      2. @ jw > “Texas needs to disobey.”
        Much as I would emotionally like to agree with you, I have to disagree for long-term practical reasons.
        Conservatives must not be the ones to destroy the remaining legitimacy of the Supreme Court as perceived by the Right, no matter how much we object to its rulings (and I have a list). Disobeying decisions we disagree with makes us no different from the Marxists & their fellow travelers. Any short-term gains will not outweigh the long-term benefits of retaining our moral authority to support the decisions we DO agree with.
        This doesn’t mean rolling over and covering our heads with our blankies.
        Texans should re-craft their border policies (such as the fence) to answer the problems identified by this decision, try additional new ideas not yet adjudicated (the buses to Sanctuary Cities were brilliant), and use every legal & constitutional avenue they can find.
        I’m not a lawyer, but there may even be a loop-hole in this one that can be exploited.
        Let the Democrats solely own any outright defiance of SCOTUS.
        It’s something they are used to doing.

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        1. “Disobeying decisions we disagree with makes us no different from the Marxists & their fellow travelers. ”

          But it’s not that we want to disobey “decisions we disagree with”. It’s that we are want to disobey decisions that contravene the very document that defines the United States.

          Disobeying unlawful interpretations of the laws that we are all supposed to be operating under is the duty of all citizens of the United States. The people whoa re pushing the unlawful interpretations are in the wrong, and it would be wrong of us to comply with their wrong-doing.

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          1. :nod:

            Disobeying authority because it says something we don’t like is one thing; disobeying authority because it has exceeded its authority is another.

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      3. No. We are not in a “Civil War” and you are not instigating anyone to start one, Fred.

        Go fish.

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      4. No, they need to obey the implications of The Supremes vacating the injunction that stopped the Feds from cutting the razor wire so they could “access the border they are required to patrol”.

        As I noted over on Insty, the Supreme Court’s deciding that the order to stop the Feds from continuing to cut and remove the razor wire implies that the State of Texas would be stringing more razor wire, basically continuously. Daily. Maybe hourly.

        Otherwise any authorization for the Feds to continue removing it makes no sense.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I looked at it this way.

          The Border Patrol are allowed to cut wire, yes. But they have to get to it first. Pretty sure we’d be hearing all about it if Texas law enforcement let the Border Patrol in the park to get to the wire.
          Agree. Nothing in the order said Texas can’t string the wire.
          Nothing that says the Border Control can remove the wire. Just Border Control can cut the wire.
          Nothing about Texas not filming the Border Control cutting the wire.
          Implied Texas can repair wire right behind Border Control cutting it. Or reinstall.
          Nothing in the order that Texas has to make it easy.

          Also by Texas officials installing the wire on public property, doesn’t that imply private owners who are having problems with trespassers can’t string barbwire rolls with security warning systems? It is their property.

          Malicious Compliance.

          Liked by 1 person

  9. The Left has started to go crazy when the Soviet Union fell. The great shining beacon on the hill of The Future…turned out to be a cheap, tawdry carnival sideshow attraction.

    And the more they try to make the rest of world into what they dream it could be…the more the People they claim to be “doing this for” push back and push back hard.

    It doesn’t help that you’re hearing the rumbles of a Romanian Christmas coming up, even if everything goes perfectly with this election. Perhaps especially if everything “goes perfectly” in some ways.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. We knew they were nuts before-hand, especially when there were people that escaped from the Soviet Union (including some very privileged people like fighter pilots and senior KGB officials), but the Left kept denying that it was “all bad like they said it was.”

        Then, for about two to four years in the 1990s, we had proof that it wasn’t as bad as people said it was.

        It was worse.

        And the denial runs so deep…

        Liked by 1 person

  10. In my experience (67 years above ground and counting …) it is the Left that fears real change … when they claim they “want to change the world” all too often what they mean is “do things they way the movie in my head says do things” … its only because they don’t have to scratch the earth for food everyday that they don’t realize that the movie in their head is a fiction that they are allowed to live in modern society because modern society puts up with ALOT of CRAZY behavior …
    behavior that got you shunned, banned, beat-up, hung or burned 200 years ago …
    In the end I believe that the Left as a whole is incapable of problem solving …
    and the reason for that is step one in solving a problem is truly understanding what the problem is …
    AND THEY REFUSE to do that …
    they jump straight to THROW MORE MONEY AT IT …
    they think people are poor because they don’t have enough money …
    i.e. throw money, no more poor …
    but people have NEVER been poor due too a lack of money …
    you are poor because you lack the skills to make more money … (and I’m talking normal, non-disabled people, not the exceptions … you can’t fix the exceptions from the top down)
    now of course the REASON people lacks skills covers a wide spectrum …
    Some are just too stupid to learn, some are too lazy to learn , some don’t have anyone to teach them (maybe 5%) …
    of course not everyone that is considered poor TODAY is lazy … they may just be in the process of gaining enough skills to rise up out of poverty … maybe last month they where really, really poor … this month just poor, next month barely poor, next year lower middle class …
    so MAYBE throwing money at #3 could improve it on a CASE by CASE basis …
    but the Left just says 1) someone is not being trained 2) Create dozens of training programs (which hire too many unqualified teachers i.e. xxx “studies” graduates, and waste what money could do some good) …
    but guess what ? if you are too lazy to learn all the training “programs” in the world won’t help …
    the only cure for lazy is pain, like in the “good Olden Days” when lazy = starving = dead …
    so there where very few lazy (or not for long) …

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  11. Funny how the burden of all those taxes and regulations falls disproportionately on small businesses, ain’t it? Giant soulless mega-corporations just raise their prices and hire a few extra accountants and ‘compliance officers’, but small businesses can’t afford that.

    Couldn’t have anything to do with how much more efficient it is to hit up a few mega-corps for $millions in bribes contributions than going around to hundreds or thousands of small outfits for $hundreds each, naw, no way.
    ———————————
    It surely is a wonderment how the heads of ‘non-profit charity organizations’ get richer than the directors of Eeevul Big Businesses.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Actually, Leftists think all employers are giant soulless mega-corporations whose sole concern is increasing their short-term profits, and therefore have to be compelled by regulators to do anything that benefits the public. It’s part of the same syndrome as their notion that most voters are prejudiced and gullible; so much easier to impute stupidity and evil motives to anyone who disagrees with you, than to defend your brilliant selfless plans on the merits!

      Sure, some Lefties might have figured out that a market sector dominated by a few giant firms is easier to bully into compliance than one with thousands of small competitors, but most of them aren’t smart enough to recognize second-order effects like “elaborate regulations favor large firms”. Corporations as high-functioning sociopaths is a theme of Left rhetoric – and an unacknowledged result of Leftist government.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. In other words, a perfect circle-jerk. Intrusive regulations crush small business, eliminating competition that would keep the mega-corps honest. Leftroids point and wail at the resulting corruption and abuse and demand still more regulations while collecting $millions in bribes contributions from those same mega-corps. Then ‘retire from government service’ to become high-paid lobbyists…
        ———————————
        Why do so many idiots believe that our problems will be solved by the same shitheads that caused them?

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  12. One of the things that struck me reading “They Thought They Were Free” was while most people were able to adapt to the new order, the ones who were least able to, and generally ended up in poverty were also the ones who were most vigorous and closely wedded to the fallen reigh.

    While the average buggy whip maker will be fine, the owner of the factory, or stock holder who went all in on medalions is going to get wiped out of they don’t adapt. So they will fight hardest to keep things as they are, and have (or at least had) quite a lot of money to throw at it.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. As for the buggy-whip manufacturers, blindsided by the rise of the automobile … I had read somewhere, ages ago, a theory that the buggy-whip manufacturers assumed that they were in the business of buggy-whip manufacturing … what they were really in was the manufacture of accessories for a transportation system. Those handful of manufacturers thinking along those lines made the leap from making accessories for buggies to accessories for horseless carriages handily enough, but those who tied their assumptions to horse-drawn transport went under when they couldn’t adapt.
      I think the corollary for us as writers is … we’re in the business of entertaining people for the price of an artisan beer or a good cup of coffee.

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      2. @ Celia > “I had read somewhere, ages ago, a theory that the buggy-whip manufacturers assumed that they were in the business of buggy-whip manufacturing … what they were really in was the manufacture of accessories for a transportation system.”

        The same explanation has been advanced for the decline of passenger rail travel after its great heyday of cross-country dominance. Sure, the development of better automobiles and the associated infrastructure took some of their customers, and airplanes took the rest, but the root problem was the same perception on the part of the RR magnates: that they were in the railroad business, rather than the transportation business.
        Volumes have been written about the disdained policies and options that could have kept the RR passengers coming at a much higher rate than the actual situation.
        Trains would definitely be my choice, if they had done anything to make riding them as convenient as road and air (although, if there were any hope of a renaissance now, the airline implosions and EV mandates are making the tracks look increasingly attractive).

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        1. Trains are very efficient at hauling large loads over long distances. The problem with passenger service is finding a large enough number of people wanting to travel from one place to the same other place at the same time to make it practical. If the train has to make a dozen stops in between, efficiency goes out the window and the trip takes an inconveniently long time.

          It’s the main reason the A380 flopped. There have to be 600 people wanting to travel from airport A to airport B at least 2,000 miles away at the same time, and then another 600 people wanting to travel from airport B to airport C right when the plane is ready to make the trip, and then another 600 people traveling from airport C…and so on. Keeping the planes full and flying was a constant logistics nightmare for the airlines. It also took an unreasonably long time to get 600 people out of the plane, and another 600 in.

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          1. I think you nailed it; rail transport is similar to ocean transport in that both are the most economical way to move large, heavy loads long distances. And neither is particularly economical when it comes to moving small, light loads; it takes the same (or nearly the same) amount of energy and time to move a million tons of freight as 100 tons of passengers. When we looked at rail for cross-country back in ’09 it was at least twice as expensive as any other way; it has the disadvantages of both auto (long trip time and multiple [expensive, by rail] meals over the trip) and air (need for rented local transportation at destination). We drove, and saw a lot of the country over the 6-week loop. And the whole thing cost around $8k.

            Liked by 1 person

      3. I read the back bio of a company that had been in buggy whip manufacturing. What did they do after that? High-test braided fishing line for sports fishermen.

        Braided buggy whips to braided cord, smart move.

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  13. Speaking of exotic names that catch attention and are remembered… I was browsing through KU and came across Kamikazi Potato. I gave the first book a try on the strength of a cool/silly pen name.

    As for adapting… that’s just living life. My sister just lost her job to petty office politics (and since it looks like a clear case of retaliation, there may be a court case in their future). We’re adapting and while looking for another job, also looking at alternative sources of revenue. (HorrorCon in June and we’ve got a few ideas that we’re hoping fly off the tables we’ve already paid for.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. SIL said she just gave her two week notice where she works, and starts a new job in two weeks. While she getting more pay, but less sure of days off. Not that if she decides she just wants to quit, she can’t. She’s 70, for crying out loud. (Bored. She and BIL live in their 5th wheel in her mom’s backyard. Was suppose to be base for between snowbird and summer camp host gigs. But her, now 93 year old, mother broke her hip 5 years back, so plans changed. If just her mother, no problem. But her brothers moved back into the house with mom. BIL ignores them. SIL can’t. Working is an escape.) She quit the other job because there is a minority employee who she has reported, repeatably up the management. Doing stuff that if reported to the correct enforcement agency (suspect that will happen after quitting). That doesn’t count the harassment by the other employee against SIL, because (remember age 70) SIL lets the employee know what they are doing is wrong (and dangerous. Let’s just say I’m not shopping there since I now know what to look for.) Management will not fire said employee for fear of discrimination lawsuit. SIL should file discrimination safety lawsuit, she won’t (don’t blame her). SIL decided she wasn’t going to be in the middle of it.

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  14. Remember how few they are, how localized they are, how brittle they are, and thus, just how vulnerable they are. Strip it down and you’re looking at 150,000 people living in NY and SF with a few outposts. DC is nowhere without NY and Cali, it’s where the drones sit. The ruling group is even smaller. Hell, Cali comes down to 4 families in SF. New York isn’t actually that much more, maybe a dozen. They make a lot of noise and there’s always the margin of fraud, but the core is very small, and very, very vulnerable. Should the facade crack, the margin at fraud will crack too. There’s no loyalty there, only power,

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Jesus stated that “…the gates of hell shall not prevail against [the church]”, meaning people bringing His Gospel. (see Matthew 16:17-19 for context)

    I think that’s worth a thought. As the gates of our southern borders are all welded open, we probably need all the assistance we can find…

    As always, in America you’re (currently) free to bring your own religion, philosophy, soft drinks, and snacks. Also, popcorn is on sale at Sam’s Club.

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  16. “We were accused of being afraid of “Women and people of color writing science fiction.””

    Since Oct. 7th I have not checked the Usual Suspects. In fact since the Farce of Chengdu I haven’t paid them any attention.

    But in the larger world, I haven’t heard much about this particular subject in quite some time. YA had a witch burning every week for a while there, but now that Sarah has mentioned it I feel the woods have gone very quiet out there.

    Could be that I have merely removed myself from the noise engines sufficiently far that I don’t hear them anymore, or could be that this particular cause celebre has lost its shine and been tossed on the trash heap?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. “They,” i,e. The rainbow mafia and their “allies,” are still all in on persecuting Rowling for being, “transphobic.” She’s still all in on laughing all the way to the bank.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. Current kerfuffle with the Hugos is that several works were declared ineligible for no stated reason, including one that won the Nebula and Locus awards. Said author has posted a statement saying while they don’t understand the reasoning behind the ineligibility, if it’s for content reasons rather than actual bylaw reasons, oh well. Too bad. Moving on.

      (Seriously, that was the tone. “Well, that happened. I’m curious but I don’t actually care.”)

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Uh… that was the Chengdu Hugos, for clarity. The first time I heard there was an issue, I thought it was with this year’s nominees. Nope, they released their stats for last year and they didn’t actually continue counting past the third pass on at least one tight race as well as the “randomly declared ineligible” works.

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          1. I did find the actual statement.

            I initially planned to say nothing about Babel’s inexplicable disqualification from the Hugo Awards. But I believe that these cases thrive on ambiguities, the lingering question marks, the answers that aren’t answers. I wish to clarify that no reason for Babel’s ineligibility was given to me or my team. I did not decline a nomination, as no nomination was offered.

            Until one is provided that explains why the book was eligible for the Nebula and Locus awards, which it won, and not the Hugos, I assume this was a matter of undesirability rather than ineligibility. Excluding “undesirable” work is not only embarrassing for all involved parties, but renders the entire process and organization illegitimate. Pity.

            That’s all from me. I have books to write.

            I love the whole tone of this.

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        2. More seriously… well, Sad Puppies freaking warned them. And they didn’t listen.

          I guess I missed the part where the SMOFs decided that the Worldcon Committee had “signaled” that the awards had been censored (by releasing the obviously bad data), as opposed to canceling the Hugos or canceling Chengdu in response.

          And apparently the same people who were okay with awarding insult plaques, are nice and quiet when they are actually oppressed.

          Cowards. But we knew that.

          If you can’t love art enough to be honest about it, you can’t love that art enough to defend it or keep it free. You’ve already announced that you have a price; you just didn’t anticipate the CCP picking you up at the street corner.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. I have already seen one comment that said “Sad Puppies again? (edit: I guess not.)”

            Seriously, dude, it’s been the better part of a decade, move on.

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        3. Oh… and in conclusion, I think we can assume that the CCP has pictures and video of Worldcon members in compromising positions. Which surprises me, honestly, because I thought they would have just been happy dupes of the CCP, whatever they were asked to do.

          In a way, the feeling that they were threatened or blackmailed does give me a tad bit of respect for them, because it would appear that they at least said one thing in protest, because otherwise the threat wouldn’t have been revealed.

          OTOH, it’s possible that the threat was just openly announced as part of business, or that somebody has a hostage in China and the others were just appalled enough to go along.

          If the latter possibility is true, we should probably pray for the Worldcon Committee, because a single-use hostage would probably be allowed to go home, but a multiple-use-potential hostage might not.

          (And honestly, blackmail is pretty terrible even when people have done wrong; and in a world with Photoshop and roofies, compromising pictures probably don’t require one to do wrong.)

          Liked by 1 person

          1. There has been a statement put out that the Hugo Awards are administered by each site committee, which means they didn’t have to threaten anybody. By winning the site selection, they had control.

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            1. Okay… apparently there was a Worldcon committee meeting report saying that stuff that won the Hugos would have to be locally legal and approved.

              And apparently nobody drew attention to this, until now.

              Sandman has ghosts in it, which is notoriously a big reason for Chinese censorship. (Also religion that works, time travel within Chinese history, and so on.)

              On the bright side, apparently Ursula Vernon is threatening/promising/investigating awarding Hugo rockets to everybody.

              Liked by 1 person

      2. What? They’re still passing those things out? Why?

        I mean, the late Mr. Gernsback reduced his coffin to splinters years ago…

        And Gurgle is still telling me Sad Puppies was a ‘Right-Wing Anti-Diversity Campaign’

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  17. The current AI constantly makes things up and lies. So since all the fucking journalists can do is make shit up and lie, yeah they’re in danger of being replaced.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. In practical terms, how we would we even notice the difference if AI replaced presstitutes?

      Better grammar?

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      1. “presstitutes” Oh, I love that one!

        And to address your question, probably. It (and spelling, and general knowledge) couldn’t be much worse.

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    2. This. AI will be very good at generating Marxist drivel and socialist boilerplate because there’s no thought involved in its creation and no information content in the result.

      The people who grind out this junk now will be the first on the redundancy list.

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  18. …had been indoctrinated into victimhood and into thinking that everyone was against him/her…

    Reading this I realized the real thing so many are afraid of is not what they say they are afraid of: They claim that they fear being the victim of discrimination based on their unique and special characteristics, but what they really fear is that they won’t be picked out of the crowd of unique snowflakes, because they are simply being ignored.

    If they are being held down, someone noticed them enough to discriminate against their specialness.

    So the special groups keep proliferating, fissioning like amoeba to enable yet a smaller subset of snowflakes to claim yet more unique uniqueness, because the alternative is they just never really amounted to anything enough to even get noticed.

    Liked by 1 person

      2. Dang. Broken brain.

        I read that hearing Roark spoken by Ricardo Montalbán.

        “His fantasy, Tatoo? Socialism that works.”

        “Good and hard, boss?”

        “Indeed. “

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          1. No, not “even if”. Someone is really out to get you is not a delusion, BY DEFINITION of delusion. We can debate degree of threat all day, but it’s real.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Nonsense. It’s the lack of paranoia, not the presence of enemies, that makes a person not delusional.

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        2. The question is not ‘Are you paranoid?’ — it’s ‘Are you paranoid enough?’
          ———————————
          I used to be afraid I was paranoid for thinking people were out to get me.
          Now I know the truth – they ARE out to get me!
          I feel so much better.

          Liked by 1 person

  19. “they are destroying our young men and older male teens”

    In the last 5 years, I have personally known 5 boys or men who passed away from suicide: a 12 year old, 15 year old (my grandson), 17 year old, 20 year old, and 30-something year old.
    In the preceding 67 years of my life I have known of NONE (nor females either).
    I don’t think my friendship with them is the common denominator.

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    1. No. I had my son hit the wall and barely find his feet three years later. I thought he’d live in our basement, in the dark, the rest of his life.
      And it made me aware of all the quiet tragedies mothers of sons are facing. We tend not to talk because we think it’s ours or our children’s failing. But it’s not. It’s society wide. We’re throwing males away and grinding them underfoot. This ends in tears.

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  20. Speak of the app/gps knows best. The Winn Dixie (Supermarket) app on my work machine swears I live in Florida. This is after repeated times of Deleting the whole page and using a search engine to find the app. Then telling the app my store is only 2 miles away. The good thing is if I forget I don;t live in Florida the prices are the same except for the booze.

    Liked by 1 person

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