Everything is worse, except it isn’t

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

There is a tendency to doomism that annoys me and keeps getting on my nerves. Partly because so many of us who are getting older tend to paint the past in beautiful colors of what we wish it had been, rather than what it was.

There was a post at my friend Kim Du Toit’s blog, and I shared it at insty with something like “This is true, but we have just started to fight back and we have a chance to win this.” Blame it on my having been on the road, and being very tired (road construction and such made this trip almost as difficult as when we used to fly and get routed over half the country) because the post is also not true. I mean, it is, in the sense that our schools have been working overtime on socialist indoctrination, but at the same time they’ve been getting more obvious and therefore easier to fight.

The post is this: Parallel Thinking

And the gist of it is that this isn’t the country of Reagan any longer, because both parties have been converging towards socialism and we’re all doomed. DOOMED I say.

To which I say HOGWASH.

Is there some soft, stupid economics thinking in our ranks. Oh, my dear. When President Trump talks about how he needs to control the oil companies and keeps them from taking “excessive profits” I want to ask him to sit down and let the businessman who actually knows business stand up.

Yes, of course there is a lot of soft socialism in economic thinking and also a lot of “Let the government do it.”

It is the nature of government to run to authoritarian and anti-business solutions. Sure.

I’m not disputing that there’s a lot of stupidity in the nation’s two parties, or that they don’t converge in bizarre and alarming ways.

What I’m saying is: SO HAS IT EVER BEEN. THE DIFFERENCE IS NOW WE THE PEOPLE HAVE A MILLION BULLHORNS TO FIGHT BACK.

Look, popular ideas of the time are popular ideas of the time. No matter how stupid, both parties fall in with bullshit like “progressivist” (meaning the government led “progress”) ideas (We had progressive Democrat AND Republican presidents) and eugenics, and handling the mental health crisis by abolishing madhouses, and– It could go on and on. It is human — and remember people from both parties attend the same school system and all used to read more or less the same newspapers or listen to the same news — to have a bunch of stupid ideas that are the ideas of your time.

And the past — I tell you again and again — wasn’t some golden era of liberty. Sure, sure, both Woodrow Wilson and FDR who in great measure forged these our shackles, were democrats, but a lot of the nonsense they engaged in was supported by Republicans at the time. They could not have done it otherwise. A lot of the opposition and a lot of the people might have disagreed with the specifics, but thought it was right and proper for government to have that level of control.

And people, listen, that we didn’t drop into full communism was probably just a quirk of FDR getting so fascinated by WWII that he let his claws off the throat of the economy. Would it have stuck? Would there have been another American Revolution? I can’t tell and neither can you, but I’m glad I’m not in that time line.

The thing is a lot of that nonsense, from price controls, tot he government sticking its nose into the economic life and stealing the breath of commerce stayed on, until Reagan.

It has been mentioned to me that Maggie Thatcher started the removal of such shackles before Reagan. Perhaps I didn’t pay as much attention to her back then, since the UK was a foreign country, but the US was always my focus of interest, even while I was Portuguese. But I DO remember the shock in in Europe when Reagan started dismantling the edifice of government interference in the economy that was still considered absolutely indisputably right in Europe. Oh, the rending of garments and pouring of ashes on heads. America was going to destroy itself, they said gleefully. Weirdly, the boom afterwards was treated as completely unrelated and having nothing to do with this freeing. (Bah.)

Look, I don’t take anything away from Reagan. In a way he did amazing work, and freed us to an extent that was AT THE TIME undreamed of.

But — and I want to make this very clear — he was working against what we now consider to be LEFTIST consensus of both parties. At the time it was just considered “normative” and “sane.” And oh, yeah “the way things are done.”

Reagan broke that and mind you, to a great extent the left has been on the run ever since. Yesterday on Twitter someone told me there haven’t been Marxists since the eighties, that Marxism was completely discredited. I don’t know where he is, I didn’t look, but I assume it’s a parallel world.

Sure, the Marxist economic measures and ideals were proven wrong and cast down and then went underneath, insidiously, into education, into activism — paid for by USAID, mostly — into studies and papers and into all sorts of crap, till people are learning “Marxist literary analysis” which is kind of like learning “blue fish red fish literary analysis” for all the grip it has on the real world.

Except this stuff has real effects. Combined with maleducation, there’s an entire generation parroting “socialism” and “Marxism” who have no idea how stupid and how ridiculous it is.

And this seems to make it be “everywhere.” It’s not. It’s on the run. It’s a rump movement. It will not stand.

No, this is not the country of Reagan. It is the one he seeded. it’s grown from that. There is no way Reagan could have defunded USAID (which might not have been so egregious before Clinton and Obama, but I suspect always was) or sent DOGE into the bowels of the deep state. The deep state, and the “uniparty” won a victory against Reagan on immigration too, that I don’t think they could carry now.

So, are things better or worse?

Yes. They are better in that the victories of Reagan gave us a place to stand and fight against the statists. They are better because we’re no longer subjected to the overwhelming megaphone of main stream media and each have our little channels to fight back. They’re little but there’s a lot of them. It’s better because the “experts” have scored a own goal with covidiocy and made it possible for us to question their “benevolent” rule.

It is worse because we have entire generations of people indoctrinated into the idea that socialism will give them everything they want. And we have a vast number of unassimilated foreigners among us.

So?

You want the perfect country? That was sometime before the thing with the serpent and the apple.

Here in the real world, it is the duty of people of good will — and working brains — to fight the “current thing” that enthralls all sides of our political spectrum and which would, to allude to kipling, deliver us bound to our foes.

We’ve escaped the traps of the past, with varying degree of injury and sometimes by the skin of our teeth. The fight goes on.

Government we must have, and government will always be the enemy of individual liberty.

That’s the tension in which we must exist. And the fight isn’t done. It will never be done. The fight isn’t easy. It will never be easy.

But it is not lost, and it is not worse than the fight our ancestors fought.

Now we have more and better ways to fight back (and not just the ultimate, terrible, fourth box way.)

Stop lamenting and go use them.

70 thoughts on “Everything is worse, except it isn’t”

    1. Saw this and immediately thought of you, Sarah!

      A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. -Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate (26 Jun 1892-1973)

      Liked by 1 person

  2. USAID was a growth issue. It was seen as we got this much money out, so they probably won’t notice if we take a few percent more. Keep that going for 70 or so years, and it adds up. And USAID constantly fought the idea that foreign policy should have anything to do with how they spent money.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Most of that ‘foreign aid’ never left D.C. It got funneled into ‘foundations’ and ‘think tanks’ stuffed with useless political hacks, cronies and hangers-on, and then cycled back as ‘political contributions’.

      Liked by 2 people

  3. I think the left (and their Rino allies) have been struggling to implement the kind of power they dream of having ever since Reagan first pushed back against total government control. They’ve had the advantage of the media being largely theirs and control of so much of the education system for years. But I think their grasp is getting steadily weaker, far too much knowledge of what is really happening is getting past their censors. More and more people are fed up with the lies and insanity and the left just keeps doubling down on the lunacy (and the fraud). It’s a dangerous time but we have to keep pushing back against them.

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    2. Unfortunately, Reagan’s direct effect was limited (iirc, he only managed to close three small departments). More important was changing the rules of the debate. Lifting the relentlessly abused equal time rule probably did more in the long-term than his direct attempts to hurt the Federal Leviathan.

      Liked by 2 people

  4. Everything is most decidedly not worse. Except the GOP Senate is exactly who we thought they were, so that idyllic fantasy was “thwown woughwy to da gwound” to paraphrase a Monty Python charecter (Pilate?) in Life of Brian.

    And meanwhile, “I have a cunning plan”!

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Someone posted on FB that west of the Cascades (so includes Rockies and the high plain prairies), that there are 5 seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fire season. Wrong. There are 6 seasons, they forgot “road construction”. To be fair, both road construction and fire seasons overlap summer and fall, but not each other in the same location (road construction dies when fire comes out to play).

    Liked by 1 person

        1. Truth.

          More correct to state, Cascades and East. Which south of Cottage Grove is pretty much Coast Range and East.

          Coast Range hasn’t, in the last 100 years (ish), hasn’t had a big fire. It can. Tillamook Burn is one old one.

          I know better too. I’ve worked (small) fires in Southern Oregon (over 50 years ago).

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    2. Adapted/stolen from a Michigan joke, Flyover County has four seasons:

      Almost Winter

      Winter

      Still Winter

      Fire

      Tonight’s forecast is 34 F, and tomorrow’s is 31, with 35 being the “warmest” low through Wednesday. So far, it hasn’t snowed on the Independence Day parade in Flyover Falls (not since we’ve been here), but legend says it’s happened. OTOH, snow on the peaks? Yep.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. My sister walked into a Vermont city hall looking for our grandparents’ marriage license. She didn’t know the year, but it was Independence Day, and it snowed.

        They found it.

        She gets two reactions: people astounded that it snowed, and people astounded that “it snowed on July 4” identifies a year.

        Liked by 3 people

      2. Today and this weekend. Willamette Valley:

        We don’t see snow. Not particularly cold today, and this weekend, but we are getting rain and hard rain (would say thunder showers, but haven’t seen lightening or heard any thunder, yet). Good/bad. Good, because rain is needed. Too dry, too early (you know the story), especially for the rest of the state. OTOH, tired of rain (whine) coming down from the sky. There is a reason why Stirling’s Emberverse calls Willamette Valley winter weather the black months.

        Yes, have seen snow hiking (misery wet snow) Cascades, Hwy 242 (so, not pass level).

        FWIW. Beartooth Pass, Montana, just opened all the way through, for the season. Still huge drifts off the highway. I don’t think Highway To The Sun (Glacier, Montana) is open, yet.

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        2. We’ve visited Glacier International Park three times and Going to the Sun has never been open. Really enjoy eating lunch at the lodge and last time walked a trail (Trail of Cedars?) that was very pleasant. And we did it the weekend before the wildfires smoke closed in. That was a blessing.

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      3. When I lived in Flyover Falls (late 70s thru early 80s) there was one 4th of July parade that actually had a few snowflakes coming down.

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  9. “THE DIFFERENCE IS NOW WE THE PEOPLE HAVE A MILLION BULLHORNS TO FIGHT BACK.”

    Problem is, the other side has just as many bullhorns. When I randomly surf Facebook it seems like they have more.

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    1. A lot of those are trolls and bots, paid for with our tax money. Shocking how many of them went away when Trump shut down USAID. ☹️

      Now if he’d just shut down about 80% of the rest of the government, we might be getting somewhere.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. There’s a time delay.

        The DSA victories in NY are apparently funded by the German government because of SED having some votes in Germany. Laundering through other ‘sovereign’ nations means that spigots here are not the only ones, and that there is a time delay for natural equilibrium to restore.

        I’m not sure what, if any, point I had.

        Liked by 2 people

          1. East German Communists may be Sparkling Russians.

            The EU is almost literally the Aggressor Nation and the Circle Trigon Party.

            We were larping and the dumbasses seemingly copied us.

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            1. It’s perhaps somewhat ironic that the communists are despised in much of Eastern Europe… but seemingly not so much in the country that was literally split in two because of them. Maybe it’s an after-effect of their attempts to deal with the Nazi past.

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    3. I surf FB daily. I am not getting the other side. Well I am. But it is someone on the right playing devil advocate. Rather, they spout off the flavor of the moment, then flip to show how the flavor of the moment is being twisted. Biggest quickest example is what guns are for and why.

      “Gun owners believe guns are for hunting, target practice, and protection. Because that is what they use them for.”

      “Anti-gun believe guns are for killing people. Because that is what they use them for.”

      “We are not the same.”

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  10. “There is a tendency to doomism that annoys me and keeps getting on my nerves.”

    Oh holy fructose. This is so right. Had someone predict we’d all end up as the fat people in Wall-E yesterday. “AI will make everyone into fat tubs of lard!” They’re not even reasonable in their doom, they just regurgitate bad Hollywood movie crap.

    On the bright side, I’m pleased to have broken out of the mind cage and writing non-conforming stories. A good deal of credit for that goes to The Sad Puppy Campaign. Ripping the sheets off Woke publishing, and watching the Chorfs burn their own house down out of sheer spite was all I needed to move forward.

    Seriously, when the critics mock your efforts, all you need to do is look at the work they pretend to love. All that grey goo they bestow the acme of “Quality!!!” upon.

    Moving forward from here, every black-pill you see from now on, just assume it’s some scrawny bearded weirdo typing on his 2005 Dell laptop in Jakarta. Conjure up that image, and the dreaded black-pill will take on it’s proper form. Horse apples in the gutter.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. I was scrolling through Lamplighter’s list of based romance-fantasy novels and every single one of them had the same plot. It got absolutely mind-numbing.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. “…every single one of them had the same plot.”

        Same plot, same character design, same world-building. I mean, does the robot HAVE to be Frankenstein and destroy humanity every single time? They certainly think so.

        I thought about this back when I wrote Unfair Advantage. If you build a robot to protect people from aliens, and you’re a competent designer, that’s what they’ll do. Isn’t it? I mean, do our current robot cars throw off their programming and deliberately attack humans? They don’t. It actually seems stupid when you say it out loud.

        But then, if the robot became an independent sentient being through the power of Handwavium, THEN wouldn’t it become Frankenstein/Skynet and deliberately attack humans?

        So I thought about that, and it seemed to me that being a chrome skeleton wandering the dead, blasted wastelands of the formerly green Earth would be fantastically boring. Is an independent sentient being going to seek out boredom and solitude? Particularly when it doesn’t have any biology or built-in imperatives? And isn’t it smart enough to figure out the humans and their innate human imperatives?

        How about aliens? Are they going to be traveling hundreds of light years for the express purpose of coming to Earth and pushing the monkeys around? Why are they even traveling in the first place?

        Earth is the holiday fun planet. It has BILLIONS of charming locals who are happy to hang out and play human biology stuff with anybody who comes around. Book your visit now! ~:D

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        1. How about aliens? Are they going to be traveling hundreds of light years for the express purpose of coming to Earth and pushing the monkeys around? Why are they even traveling in the first place?

          Phantom, that’s a plot I’ve literally never seen in 40+ years. Everything I’ve read breaks down into three categories:

          1, humans are simply something that happened to be where something aliens wanted was located: a natural resource, a passage point, something that humans happened to be in the same place as.

          2, the aliens hated everything that wasn’t them, you know, sort of like Islam but with stardrive. The Berserkers, the aliens in the Dahak books, Taylor and Ringo’s Dreen, even the Eddorians, they weren’t dominating humans as humans, they were dominating anything non-Eddorian.

          3. The aliens… weren’t aliens, they were humans, whether ancestors, descendents, or from another human colony, and they came for reasons 1 and 2.

          Liked by 2 people

          2. “…that’s a plot I’ve literally never seen in 40+ years.”

            Well hot damn. ~:D I actually came up with something new. Sweet!

            Stands to reason though, or so I think. Interstellar travel is going to be idiotically expensive. The energy cost alone would rival the sun’s total output for a non-trivial length of time.

            There’s only two reasons you’d ever do it. One, you’re poor. You’ve gobbled up every free rock in your solar system, and there’s nothing left. You must leave and visit another system.

            Two, you’re rich and you’re bored. You want to meet new people and hang out, and you want it bad enough to spend the money.

            Kind of unlikely in both cases, right? Not going to be a common occurrence.

            I added a third reason, because this is FICTION and I can do that. What if there’s a threat that only a distributed interstellar civilization can guard against?

            That gives me a reason for machine empires to be jetting around the cosmos looking for trouble, a reason we wouldn’t have seen them, AND a reason they’d leave the crazy monkeys on Earth alone. They’re working. No time to spare for the squashy biocreatures. We’re a charming side-show that they watch while they cruise by.

            Upcoming book, what if there’s a neighboring plane of existence where things aren’t going so well, and the threat is growing? ~:D

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Upcoming book, what if there’s a neighboring plane of existence where things aren’t going so well, and the threat is growing? ~:D

              If you remember, the Eddorians were from another universe. I wouldn’t want them as neighbors….

              Liked by 1 person

      3. I never looked that that. Suppose I might as well…. what criteria were they using to select them as “based”? Or was it self-selected?

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        1. Check out the “love story” section. That’s where they are subplots and the like. Also, that’s where mine is.

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  11. “And people, listen, that we didn’t drop into full communism was probably just a quirk of FDR getting so fascinated by WWII that he let his claws off the throat of the economy.”

    FDR’s focus on World War 2 appears to have been the result of two different factors. The first was his unusual hatred of Germany. This isn’t a hatred of Nazis in particular. He just flat out didn’t like Germany. I’m not sure why. If Germany had somehow been a democratic nation on the side of the Allies, I suspect FDR would have tried to help whomever was on the other.

    The second factor was Wilkie calling attention to the deplorable state of the US Army (including the Army Air Corp) during the 1940 Presidential Campaign, and the fact that we were likely going to be involved in a war shortly. FDR decided the best way to take that issue from Wilkie would be to incorporate it into his own platform. Which he did.

    Mind you, the increase in the size of the US Navy after the collapse of the naval treaties in 1936 was something he did without encouragement. This was likely because he’d formerly been Secretary of the Navy, and knew how much the country relied on a strong navy.

    On an unrelated note, I have a sneaking suspicion that the immigration enforcement agenda that we enjoy under Trump would be a lot less popular if it weren’t for the Reagan amnesty. The right negotiated in good faith, and the left then promptly spent three decades doing everything that they could to undermine the enforcement mechanisms of the agreement. People noticed, and their attitudes hardened as a result.

    Liked by 4 people

  12. Think of it this way. In 1980 only a handful of states had a policy shall issue concealed carry permits. Only Vermont had constitutional carry and many states prohibited concealed carry outright. Today 40 states have shall issue and 29 constitutional carry.

    Or in 1980 most people believed Walther Cronkite when he said ‘That’s the way it is’. There was hardly any alternative media to country the mainstream narrative. If you didn’t agree with Cronkite your only recourse was to shout at the tv. Today we have things like social media, blogs and the internet generally to call out the mainstream media.

    Things are getting better

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Part of the change from may-issue to shall-issue was it being weaponized against those it was supposed to protect, and then people actually hearing about that.

      You can’t abuse the law to hurt folks if people know it’s hurting a lot of people, and folks like the NRA got the news about the places where you were maaaaaagically acceptable if you donated enough to the guy approving it.

      Knowledge drives out demons. ^.^

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      1. Also, because of how much easier it is to spread knowledge, the gun laws, particularly the new ones (SCOTUS shutdown of Hawaii’s and other state’s magazine capacity limits, for example) are getting to SCOTUS a lot faster, and shutdown. To the point that the lower appeals courts are starting to shut them down, even the usual suspect courts (while there are still defiant courts, the lower courts really despise being overruled). In 1980 gun owners would just be criminals.

        The ability to gather initiative signatures has expanded. Or at least the process has been exposed. New initiative here in Oregon killing (fine! Appealing.) with the *Death/Vampire tax. I was able to download and print individual signature page copies, for the 3 of us to each sign. Then mail them in to the initiative PO Box.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The lag between a law being proposed and for people to find out it was also around three months, at least for magazines. When the gun control act of 1986 (falsely named a “protection act”) was passed, the first most people heard about it was the headlines on the magazine stand, and it was already in force. “Too bad, so sad. Suckazz…”

          Now the Web watches that sort of thing in realtime.

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          1. Oh. Yes. Real time it. Or why everyone widely knew about Oregon 114 (still passed) but years later, still mostly stalled. Being whittled one small piece at a time.

            How the Oregon fuel tax increases got stomped on, by 83%, in an off (nonpresidential) election year.

            We’ll see what happens with the Death Tax Elimination initiative.

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  13. Think of it this way. In 1980 only a handful of states had a policy shall issue concealed carry permits. Only Vermont had constitutional carry and many states prohibited concealed carry outright. Today 40 states have shall issue and 29 constitutional carry.

    Or in 1980 most people believed Walther Cronkite when he said ‘That’s the way it is’. There was hardly any alternative media to country the mainstream narrative. If you didn’t agree with Cronkite your only recourse was to shout at the tv. Today we have things like social media, blogs and the internet generally to call out the mainstream media.

    Things are getting better

    Like

  14. Think of it this way. In 1980 only a handful of states had a policy shall issue concealed carry permits. Only Vermont had constitutional carry and many states prohibited concealed carry outright. Today 40 states have shall issue and 29 constitutional carry.

    Or in 1980 most people believed Walther Cronkite when he said ‘That’s the way it is’. There was hardly any alternative media to country the mainstream narrative. If you didn’t agree with Cronkite your only recourse was to shout at the tv. Today we have things like social media, blogs and the internet generally to call out the mainstream media.

    Things are getting better

    Like

  15. I was sitting in a bar the other night when a young kid came up to me and started talking about universal healthcare. I simply asked him if he trusted the government? Did he trust the government running things? He said no. If that is the case why would you trust them to run healthcare? he shut right up. It wasn’t the shutting him up, it was the part where I made him think. Once they start thinking, really thinking about topics they start to abandon socialism as a functional truth. Don’t yell at the brain washed, just make them think.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Except that a lot of them, when they feel heretical ideas start to intrude, become angry and violent.
      ———————————
      “Do you want the same government that runs schools, prisons and the DMV to run the hospitals?”

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        1. I’m sorry Canada.

          Bad enough here in the US where it is corporations running it. Corporations that are supposedly “not for profit”. Note, “not for profit” does not mean that the ones running operations don’t get rich off of health care (called salaries and benefits). Just the corporation does not show a profit.

          Liked by 1 person

  16. Heh. “No Marxists since the eighties.” Except they all use the vocabulary and embrace the premises. But yeah, no Marxians around here, nope, no siree. Not a one. Not even the Chinese Communist Party operatives infiltrating everything, nor the mobs of crew cut military aged males that crossed the southern border during the Autopen Interregnum – just a bunch of Marxian cosplayers, those silly Chinese.

    But Nazis! They’re Everywhere!!!

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  17. Anyone else getting weird vibes from the Right’s reaction to the Dem primaries in New York? To hear X say it, we’re personally responsible for 3 socialists being elected in the Democrat primary in Democrat districts of a Democrat city, with large immigrant voting blocs, low voter turnout, and the endorsement of a celebrity mayor who’s still in his honeymoon phase.

    Come again?

    What exactly was the Right supposed to do to stop that? Run our own candidate in the Dem primary against the Dem machine? Move to New York en masse to vote? Go back in time to prevent the Dems from having such an atrocious slate for NYC mayor?

    We’re winning nationally, enacting our agenda, and winning over the middle, but because we don’t have the godlike power to stop Dems from doing Dem things to other Dems in Dem strongholds, we’re somehow losing.

    I get that this is a step towards normalizing communism. I get that emboldened communists are more openly violent. But the Left has been pulling leftward since the Obama era. This is a known trend. Last week’s results don’t change the forecast in the slightest.

    It’s been disturbing seeing so many accounts flip a switch overnight and start posting, “It’s all over! The commies have their foot in the door,” with the implication that it’s the Right’s fault for not swinging a Dem primary nobody even talked about before it was over.

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    1. Yes, it is weird.

      Kind of makes sense in that a lot of us predicted the Dems would go absolutely insane in roughly this manner– but that’s accurate predictive power, not making it happen.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. It’s like no one on the right jumped up and down screaming “Don’t be stupid!!!!”

        Oh. Wait.

        Maybe not that graphic. But it isn’t like nothing was mentioned.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. “It’s been disturbing seeing so many accounts flip a switch overnight and start posting, “It’s all over! The commies have their foot in the door,”

      When they flip that easy, safer to assume that’s Achmed in Islamabad. Bro is not on our side.

      Refuse the black pill. It’s a scam.

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        1. There’s basically two elements to this.

          As a recap, Republican Party member, republican principles of government, Democrat Party member, democratic principles of politics (lynching, etc), Libertarian card carrier, and libertarian ideas. There are almost no Fascists left because the membership cards were no longer validly issued, but in principle one can be a fascist by adopting Benito’s ideas.

          The Communist element is formerly card carrying Party Members, but is now merely people who understand that they are labeled communists, and understand that they are doing communist revolutionary and perhaps murderous things. The long marchers knew what they were, but they also knew that official membership documentation could be a deficit.

          The communist element is basically half a dozen or more decades of university trained intellectuals who are neither well trained enough, nor intelligent, nor informed, and not thoughtful enough to see the hooey in certain ideas that they value. In principle we could maybe break 100 down into 90 small c communists who are ignorant of how their ideas have failed to classing them as communists, 9 ignorant that they are maybe fascists, and 1 ignorant of implications of other stupidities. But we can maybe just label that group of 100 midwit intellectuals as communists because the finer details of taxonomy might not be needed for a shorthand analysis.

          Today I have looked at someone’s dataset of work visas for US schools. Some of which were primary/secondary, and some of which were tertiary. I looked at one tertiary school, and like all of the entry level positions with visas were ‘assistant professor’. I don’t have a problem with that, some commentators claim to. This is a national scale statistical just-so story, that some people have a strong opinion about. Basically, this is maybe a superset of small c communists, and I cannot currently word a theory distinguishing communists from some of the ‘muh american jobs’ protectionists.

          Anyway, the other half of the problem is folks navigating a sea of communist ideas unequipped to navigate out, or to distinguish communism from the alternatives. They may not knowingly have murderous intentions, but their instinctual behaviors can contribute to a lot of substantial problems.

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