(Interestingly, this was a blast from the past when it was run in August of 2020, and it seems a good reminder for today, as well. https://accordingtohoyt.com/2020/08/25/the-right-to-go-to-hell-a-blast-from-the-past-from-february-2019/ –Holly the Assistant)
More applicable than ever now when those few of us somewhat at risk are being prevented from taking our chances with a new type of common cold and paying the the price in complete economic destruction and underhanded seizure of private property — what do you think ruining city real estate values and destroying businesses is? — and while maniacs are blaming invisible monsters of oppression for individual actions and wanting to destroy all of society the name of Marxism. It’s time to stop that sh*t. Only individuals have rights, and among individual rights are “to be able to make choices the bien pensant disapprove of.- SAH.
The left is very adamant about charity not coming “with a sermon.” It is most of their excuse for wanting government not churches to preach.
But while I understand the convinced Christian’s need to preach and to save everyone from hell, which if you believe it is an eternal sentence and an awful one is mere human decency, I don’t understand the left’s similar need to ensure that everyone lives “a decent life” by its lights.
They refuse to understand that just as people are entitled to disbelieve and deny eternal salvation (and if you’re a Christian you know they are entitled to that. It’s called free will. Just as they’re entitled to sin. Doesn’t make it right. They’re still entitled to it. You can’t force anyone to be holy) they can refuse to live a middle class life. (Or better. The left keeps imagining that middle class is much further up than it is. Possibly because so many of them these days are spoiled rich kids.)
This came to mind last night, thinking of someone in the comments (sorry, I don’t remember the name) who said that maybe 10% of the homeless were aggressive and dangers to themselves and others. Others simply were mentally ill or caught in the trap of child support but behaved like decent human beings.
The child support thing is iniquitous, and usually on both sides. No, seriously. Women on the make will drive a man to ruin to finance her lifestyle in the name of “the children.” Men on the make still find ways not to pay, and if the woman is decent and doesn’t want to turn her kids’ life into unending strife she ends up living in poverty to provide for the kid. I’ve known this on both sides, partly because it’s impossible for a judge to adjudicate fairly without truly knowing the parties involved. Partly because scammers gonna scam. (It’s almost like no-fault divorce and marriage as a transitory fancy is a bad idea particularly when there are children involved. Never mind.)
The mental health… I’m fairly sure there are still services available should someone need them and know how to look. And perhaps without the noise of the violent it would be easier for those people to find help.
But I still wonder if the mental health issues are such. And I wonder about other things like “but what if people just want to live like that?”
I have learned through rather bitter experience that you can’t help everyone and also that what you want for yourself and your life is not what other people want. Some people will do the absolute minimum to keep a roof over head and food on the table, even if the roof is leaky and substandard, and the food is whatever and they never do any house keeping and live in what can only be described as utter squalor.
I found long ago that given the absolute same income as someone else, we tend to live better. Why? because we work beyond the money we have. I don’t mean just that we work to get out of that level of poverty, I mean that we will trade time for the money we don’t have.
So, when my husband was the sole provider because my writing wasn’t selling yet, I made a lot of my clothes, refinished furniture and, of course, cooked absolutely everything from scratch. Other than our cars, which we always bought used and fully paid for and drove into the ground, we easily kept up with our dual income friends. Why? Well, not child care was part of it, but furniture, clothes and food were the other part. It’s just cheaper to do for yourself.
It was also a massive amount of work. Particularly since I was trying to break into writing, and was getting up every day at five am to write for two hours before the routine with the kids started. I remember years of being short on sleep and going to bed with a long list of work that still needed to be done and I hadn’t got to in my head.
Was it worth it? Well, it was for me. I don’t like living in squalor. I wanted nice furniture and a nice, clean house. And I wanted my kids to have good food.
All of which amounts to: it was for me. It might not be for someone else.
It took me forever to figure this out. Let’s say the dime only dropped in the last ten years. So, I kind of get the left not “getting” it.
Partly because if you come from a background where everyone worked a lot all the time to secure the best lifestyle they could, it’s almost impossible to visualize someone wanting to live in what we’d consider unacceptable circumstances. Or perhaps not even “wanting” as fundamentally not being willing to pay the price to get a better situation.
Look, I’m not even a hundred percent sure of that last one. We tried for decades with someone, and everything you gave that would bring a better life got either broken or ignored or thrown away. Perhaps there is a Petersonian thing there, of people believing they only deserve to live at a certain level and anything above that making them uncomfortable. (Peterson says in terms of people not taking necessary meds, etc, that having seen our own brokenness and that we’re often untruthful and evil — even when we don’t mean to be — we think we don’t deserve to be well, etc.)
Or perhaps it is simply that doing anything, even using the thing that makes it easier is too much effort.
I’ve said before that I think the vast majority of people don’t feel the need to work above a subsistence level and that those of us who do are the mutants. I still believe so. In evolutionary terms, if you continued hunting after you had mammoth in your cave, you were just going to deplete the game and end up starving eventually.
That’s not the way it works now, but the human brain is not a thing of the industrial revolution.
I believe a great number of the people who live in “chronic poverty” are in fact at the level at which they wish to be/the level for which they’re willing to work. The left keeps coming up with increasingly fancier explanations, which are now devolving to “invisible demons” of oppression (seriously, in our society? Besides, if societal disapproval caused you to be poor, then a lot of gay people would be historically poor, instead of statistically at the top.)
It never occurred to me that a lot of people who are “homeless” might fall into the same category. By which I mean the ones who aren’t crazy, addicted or dangerous to others. Maybe what they have and what they do is the level they wish to live at. Or at least it’s comfortable enough they don’t wish to do anything to get out of it. But it makes sense. After all, by the numbers, these people already live better than your average medieval peasant. At which point, honesty, my only problem with their choice is whatever help they get that is non voluntary, i.e. taxation, not private charity. If they’re living like that and it’s their choice, and they’re wholly financed by private charity? Don’t care. None of my business. Everyone has the right to go to hell in the way of their choice.
What disturbs me about the left’s inability to recognize that choice is that those choices end up being financed from my purse, and the purse of the others who choose to work. That they are in fact holding up a gun to the heads of working fathers and mothers and demanding money to keep people who (what was Occasional Cortex’s cutesy phrase, exactly, I can’t remember) “aren’t willing to work” in the level of comfort they are okay with.
And then the fact that those people aren’t living at what the left thinks American middle class level should be, in a decently ecologically approved house, with the car and the organic meals and full health insurance, the left will come back and demand more. More and more money to pour down the hole of trying to change people’s choice on what they consider an acceptable level of comfort and living. What they aren’t willing to work to get out of. What, in fact, they’ll preserve if they get more “help” by doing even less to help themselves.
That’s what I object to. I object to the use of people’s choices to blackmail other people out of theirs.
I object to this holy crusade of the left that turns anyone who has less than you into a de-facto saint who needs to be championed, while you need to be tormented because you worked (or your ancestors did) to get to a level you consider acceptable.
I object to this Christian heresy with no redemption, no hope, no future, and no one being good or holy except those who envy and live at the expense of others.
I don’t think there’s ever been a civilization as rich as ours, but even in rich civilizations of the past, there were people who lived at all levels. And though social motility was smaller or slower or hidden, it was possible. It could happen. It might take multiple generations and grim determination, but it happened. Just the same, there were any number of people who were satisfied once they reached the “we’re not starving” level and went no further.
There still are. In the infinite variety of humanity, what you consider comfortable I consider insupportable. And it’s not just poverty, either. I’d probably die if forced to live the life of a socialite, forever minding what people thought, and having to have the latest styles. I don’t want that. I’m not interested.
In the same way I suspect any number of the “poor” would think I was crazy, keeping the work hours I do, and taking time to refinish furniture, or clean, or… Because they don’t feel the need to it.
And that’s their right. They are entitled to live as they want and to do just the minimum to get there.
And the left is NOT entitled to use holy envy to make everyone who wants better and works for it to feel guilty. Nor are they entitled to rob us to finance the lifestyle of people who don’t want to make any extraordinary effort and feel fine the way they are.
And it’s time we stopped this nonsense.
You choose what you want to sacrifice for what. I will willingly sacrifice time and effort for a clean and decent house. You won’t because you place more value on time on the sofa watching your favorite program? You do you. Just don’t ask me for money to get you a better house.
You see what you want and you pay the price. And the do-gooders can go take a flying leap. As long as your hand isn’t in my pocket, I don’t care.
According To Hoyt 
c4c
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While I certainly do not wish to go to hell, I do not trust the atheists and pagans in our government, the press, or academia to guide anyone to the Blessed Realm. And so, I fully concur with each of us being free to choose our own path. Even if you don’t want to be a Southern Baptist. But we do have better potlucks, in my experience.
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A pastor /friend/tax client of my beloved said that in his experience, the difference between Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists was the Methodists had better potluck and the Baptists had better fried chicken.
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Well, I go to a Korean Baptist church and while they are short on pies and cobblers, the rest of the choices almost make up for it… Had to kinda force-feed the name here because the original reply from my email produced g2-9e70442b19dfdd69fa3c99b15ed67b71 instead of something I could pronounce…
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Catholics seem to have better fish-fries and tamale stands. Not sure about the shrimp-boil, because those I’ve gone to have been secular. Locally, the Eastern Orthodox are the kings of baked goods. Little old Greek ladies, filo pastry, Woooooooowwwwwwwww.
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And the Latter-Day Saints are famous for “funeral potatoes”, aka potato casserole.
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I resemble that remark
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Memory from my childhood says that the Swedish (and Swede-descended) ladies in the (late, lamented LCA) did some mean baking. Cookies and cakes, oh my!
We went to an ALC church for a while, but Mom might have been the only Scandinavian (Danish) descent person there. For unknown to me reasons, potlucks were nonexistent at that church. (Last I looked, the building and grounds were up for sale. Come to think of it, it was the only church I ever knew that had no kitchen. Yeah, I was an urban/suburban kid. Tiny churches with no fellowship rooms weren’t a thing for me.)
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“You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great”
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I mentioned in the prior post that the courts, and family courts in particular have fallen under the penumbra of Hell. Part of the reason is they only effectively weight the value of money; they cannot assign a value to a child crying herself to sleep every night. So in a conflict, whichever party cares more about money wins, even if it means the other happens as well.
So if you want to take care of the kids, you give up the money. Because the system weighs them without value compared to the dollars involved.
Which is why I say it is in the penumbra: it bends every effort to make you focus on what is not important, and to abandon what is.
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In the very deep important ™ sci fi, there is the thing of the flying city of elites, and the other people living in the garbage dump.
Fantasy sometimes does the sailing ships flying in clouds. Isekai has of course the flying islands in the sky as a way to establish alien.
Sky islands have a lot of the same opportunities and challenges of real islands. They can potentially borrow from orbital mechanics, which I do not understand. I think realistic orbital mechanics are probably not that good a match to most flying islands in fantasy.
My feeling is that I could have situations where I want several different ‘common’ freight systems, and where I want it to be possible but not common for people to jump between them. A flying island freight trade could be one element of this, where I can somewhat justify not having much transhipment /yet/.
A problem that I am trying to work is having three or more interstellar transport methods, without making the spaceports shared in common and routine transshipment between carriers. Three is easy to come up with, and make sound plausible. It is the larger numbers where the challenge develops, I think.
The plains indians made some de facto garbage dumps by stampeding buffalo off cliffs, and taking what they had use for. I don’t think they would have hung around and kept using after the spoilage time.
Basically, this can interact with multiple transport networks, and the way that fewer people want to live on/exploit land that is less economically valuable. Places don’t have to be actually dumped to remain a little more annoying to work with. And one can make an economic profit without a ton of waste.
Buffalo to cattle was arguably much less wasteful because fewer deliberate cliff stampedes. Drive the intended harvest from Texas to Kansas, butcher in Kansas, ship east by rail.
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I’d expect anything that can make flying cities can make flying cargo ships just as easily. Or flying cargo cities.
Can you imagine a caravan city? It cycles from port to port docking for trade and the biggest carnival ever.
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James Blish, “Cities in Flight” series — although his “spindizzy” drive is almost out of the realm of hard SF (and yes, you could do ‘flying islands’ with that one), the stories are quite interesting.
It’s not quite true that “everything has been done” but it’s rather annoyingly close. Although the city landing (at the Fairgrounds?) for grand carnival day story might not have been done, after all.
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I would imagine that pretty much uses up the available bottom-of-a-suitable-cliff for a while, maybe the year, until the scavengers and decay do their thing. It also illustrates the very low human population density, so the could amble along following the herds of (mammoth or bison, since that method is documented for both) and not worry about the huge stinking pile of dead critters.
The thing that always seemed weird to me is that this method does not seem to be documented in Africa. Plenty of wildebeest and other herd herbivores, and I assume there are also sufficient cliffs. Maybe the density of predators and scavengers means you’d never be able to stay on the pile long enough to make the effort worth it, which then raises the question about the run-em-off-a-cliff method use in North America before the great die off there, when there were still plenty of predators and scavengers roaming about the place.
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The first thing I would look at would be difference in prey behavior. North America has no large predators. Some mid-sized ones like wolves, but bears, coyotes, and mountain lions are little better than annoyances to large herd animals.
On the other hand, in Africa even herd animals can be dangerous. Rhinos, hippos, elephants, cape buffalo… most of them will fight rather than run.
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But after when humans got to North American in numbers and were hunting mammoth, and before the die off event whatever it was, there were in fact large predators, Sabertooth Tigers and such, roaming about in numbers, as well as many more herbivores in more numbers, enough to support that diverse ecosystem. And since there are mammoth-off-a-cliff sites, they were doing that back when there were a lot more predators around. So why the difference?
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I’d probably die if forced to live the life of a socialite, forever minding what people thought, and having to have the latest styles.
An old saying my father used to mention every once in a while (likely current in his Depression / World War II younger days) has it:
Small people think about people; larger people think about things; big people think about ideas.
And, yeah, if I had to occupy myself with the thoughts (real or imagined) of others, about me or mine, to the near-exclusion of all else, that would all be a cost instead of a benefit for me, too. It seems I’m simply not cut out to “think that small” and be a social butterfly, a competitive socialite (and there’s no non-competitive such), or even “merely” an obsessive fitter-inner.
Maybe it’s like the definition of an introvert vs. extravert (or extrovert in the popular spelling). It’s not whether you like social interaction vs. being with one or a few or “only” yourself; it’s whether that social-interaction thing gives you energy or takes energy from you.
Maybe we really are all born with a set of “vital inner powers” — and exercising them is the only thing that really, truly, deeply makes our life satisfying and fun. Or ever could.
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—————
But I still wonder if the mental health issues are such. And I wonder about other things like “but what if people just want to live like that?”
—————
All evidence from here in California is that it really is mental illness among most of the homeless. However, a good-sized chunk of the mental illness is self-inflicted, i.e. people frying their brains on drugs. The mentally ill *can* get committed involuntarily in certain situations. But my understanding is that treatment and basic medications quickly make them lucid enough to the point where they can’t be involuntarily held. So they’re released to a halfway house with their medication… and quickly leave the halfway house and stop taking their medication. They prefer the more illegal kinds of “medication”, which are often the reason why they’re mentally screwed up to begin with.
Make of that what you will.
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Unrelated to the subject at hand –
I just learned that in 2023, Xi Jinping ordered that new Chinese maps were to use the Chinese names for places in the Russian Far East.
For those who don’t know, China gave up the region that includes Vladivostok as part of one of the “unequal treaties”. According to what I’ve read, the Russians offered to help the Qing Dynasty negotiate with the European powers in exchange for the region (the Russians desperately wanted a good access point to the Pacific, and found it in what would become Vladivostok). But reportedly once the Russians took control of the region, they ignored their own responsibilities under the treaty. The area was sparsely populated at the time, and the Qing Dynasty had more important things to worry about (the Opium War had been two decades earlier, and the European nations had suddenly realized just how much of a paper tiger China really was), so nothing was done. But China has never forgotten that, according to them, the region should belong to China.
And now the leader of China has directed that all maps made in China use the Chinese names of places instead of Russian names.
Hmm…
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Can they both lose? Please? 🤣
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A century ago the Imperial Japan put forth a claim on that territory, and only relinquished it after catastrophically losing a war with a much larger country they should have left alone. However, it was once Japanese by right of conquest, and just because they temporarily lost control of it doesn’t mean they have to give it up forever.
At least, that’s the way it works in Europe…
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China also lays claim to the western hemisphere, based on IIRC a 4th century expedition that “only” failed because a hurricane made them turn back. So Europeans stole their property.
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Yep. Everyone stole someone else’s land, all the way back to before H. Sapiens differentiated itself from its competitors.
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Oh hey, I recognize that artwork! Or, if it’s AI-generated, I know what the AI took inspiration from. Google for “White Temple”; there’s some spectacular sculpture there. All done by one guy, who wanted to build a beautiful structure to honor Buddha. (Much like the cathedrals all over Europe were, for the most part, built to honor Christ). The Wikipedia article has a bunch of pictures, one of which is a bunch of grasping hands, very very similar to the image on this post. So if this image wasn’t a photo from the White Temple, then it was definitely created by an AI that has trained on photos from the White Temple.
The grasping hands, for anyone not familiar with the concepts of Buddhism, represent desire and attachment; Buddhism’s ideal is to detach oneself from worldly desires, because desire leads to suffering. (“The path to the Dark Side are these”. Yes, Lucas took a lot of inspiration from Buddhism when creating Star Wars). As a Christian myself, I can say that Buddhism gets some things right and some things wrong. There are some desires that one should try to detach oneself from, such as addictions. But where Buddhism gets it wrong is telling you that you have to do it yourself; the Bible teaches that we cannot do it ourselves, and we need God’s help to free ourself from harmful desires — but that with God’s help, it is possible. We just need to humbly and gratefully accept the help that God offers.
That’s about as far as I should go without crossing the line into religious debate; I’ve tried to stay on the “explaining the teaching” side of the line. But if anyone wants to discuss this further or argue about anything, I’m happy to do so by email — you can reach me at my first name, dot, my last name, courtesy of Google’s email service.
And definitely, if you haven’t seen it before, Google (or DDG) for “White Temple” and click over to the images section. It’s spectacular. And most of it is just simple plaster over stone (or in many cases concrete), done by a really really skilled sculptor and artist.
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Envy is a deadly sin. We can see why. But what of those who not only tempt but encourage others into envy, lionize the envious, and raise envy to a crowning virtue? Are they truly diabolical?
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OT: Peter Cullen died today.
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I found this. I love all the voices.
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