Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

One hates to disagree with the late great Margaret Thatcher, and I’m not doing so precisely, so much as expanding/repositioning what she said.

The greatest problem of socialism is not that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money. The greatest problem of socialism, be it the soft pink, dilute kind, or the full on strong red kind that animated the USSR (which remember always called itself socialist. Just like the DDR called itself democratic. Never mind.) is that sooner or later any and all human beings become part of the “debit” column.

I was reminded of this — and that I meant to write on it — today by a friend posting that an ex-student of hers had put up that great old chestnut about “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Let us put aside the fact, that this might be a great motto for a small family or, stretching a point, an order of monks devoted to the greater glory of G-d but that no one, ever, in the history of humanity had the ability to tell what anyone else’s needs or abilities are. Certainly no state known to man, even given the ability to test every subject to exhaustion from cradle to grave can tell what every individual’s needs or abilities are.  And this is because, often, humans don’t know what their needs and abilities are.

We were also talking yesterday, in a group of friends about things that became our lives pursuits, at which we weren’t actually naturally gifted (when i say I made every possible mistake in fiction writing, uphill both ways and as recently as yesterday, I’m not joking. I’ve seen natural effortless talent. It exists. I don’t have it) but which we loved intensely enough to work really hard at.

(The last standardized test for aptitude I took recommended I become a dancer, btw, which is one of those things that make you stare at the results long and hard, because when I took it at seventeen I still tripped on my two feet while standing still and even now I cannot see someone do moves and imitate them. Much less transpose them. When I take aerobic classes, I stand in the last row, so I won’t distract anyone else, when I improvise or do it all backwards and sideways. Also, I can’t imagine enjoying either the grueling effort or the public display. I still have no clue how the test extracted that brilliant conclusion and suspect some prankster in the back office of having said “Gads, she’s useless. Just put down dancer.”)

As for needs…  I often say that Euclid cat was the cat we didn’t know we needed (He’s still alive, but lately he cries a lot. We’re going to get him pain meds and some of the good food tomorrow and see if that fixes it.) Because he was definitely an “unplanned cat.” But after 9/11 when we felt broken he was the constant companion, the completely devoted cat we all cuddled and he helped, though I can’t explain how, get us over the anger and the depression. Also, I have in mind one particular day, when I was scheduled for a business trip. I was very depressed, and didn’t even know I was, and my husband said “Come on” and pushed his work aside.  We spent the day at City Park in Denver, on a beautiful Summer day, and it was one of the best days of my life, completely dissipating the depression.  Did I know I needed that break? No. I was concentrating on getting stuff ready for the trip.  He knew, because he is close to me. Or perhaps he took a guess. Who even knows?

Which means, of course, no government can know either what you’re capable of doing (if you really love something) or what you need. Particularly when what you need has been invented yet. For instance, I get lost in my own living room, and in the eighties I assumed the price of going anywhere was to pull over and study the map every other mile (and my success was indifferent. I’m not a visual thinker.) Of course I needed a GPS. I just didn’t even know they could exist.  And I’m sure there are a million things being developed right now, which if they pan out will become indispensable to me in ten years or so. Only I don’t even know they’re possible.

So when your centralized government takes it upon itself to decide what every person under its purview needs and can do, the results would be hilariously bad, if they didn’t always end in famine, misery and mass graves.

The reason they end in mass graves is easy.  You see, the left mistakes the government for a parental kind of unit: a benevolent, hovering authority who knows you better than you know yourself. It is the result of their bizarre hair raising utterances, like apparently she of the very Occasional Cortex thinking white people don’t need bug out bags. Because, you know, she assumes the government exists to take care of everyone and the only reason she and her family needed bugout bags is because they could tan. Meanwhile that all pervasive entity was looking after it’s favored (white, of course) children.  Or the comments made at the Convention in what 12? “We all must belong to something, so we belong to the government.” Or “Government is the name for the things we choose to do together.” (Well, okay. Whatever. Next time tell the government to use lube. Also, when they were having kitten fits over the righteous killing of Al Suleimani, did anyone think to answer with “Hey, government is the name for the things we choose to do together”?  No? Pity. Someone should meme that.)

But the problem is that the government is not your benevolent, just, all pervasive parent.  Not even under Obama, whom the idiots praised as “kind of a god.” (Oh, light bringer, son of the morning, how has thou fallen….) I think what they are thinking of when they say government is an actual divinity. And don’t get me started on when they imagine that an AI might be the ticket to that. As an old pulp fan I weep. Weep, I tell you.

What the government can be, at least while other people’s money lasts, is an INDULGENT, spoiling parent.  In that Thatcher was correct.  As long as other people’s money is around, the government can give people lots and lots of things.

Now, mostly they will be things people don’t actually want, and which don’t work very well, kind of like if Santa limited his Christmas toy acquisition to the dollar store, and went for bulk.

So, in the case of the idiots currently trying to bribe us with our money, you’d get medicare for all and as efficient as the VA, and you’d get “safe and comfortable housing” or at least housing, but not in single family model. In fact, the old soviet stack a prole apartments built quickly, with insufficiently cured cement which starts crumbling after a year, with a bathroom per four apartment floor, and doors that never close quite right, and of course, no decoration, because well… they’re mass built. But hey, they’re free.

In the same way, socialists start out by being permissive with behavior, which, btw, quickly turns that “housing” into hell on Earth. You can see this with every class now dependent on the government, from school children, to the homeless. If you’re a big enough pain in the ass they leave you alone, since no one wants to risk getting cut to stop some meth head from pooping on the sidewalk, or some feral kid from holding his class hostage with a knife or a violent tantrum.  The less offensive infractions will get severely punished, but the true crazies and bullies will be carefully ignored.  In the same way, while most people who are dependent on government health care, as in the VA, and who are well behaved will wait forever, the illegals and marginal charity cases will clog up the ER because they’re bored, and it’s a bit of a drama. And it’s not like they’ll ever pay, anyway.

Socialist states always start like that. They indulge everyone they are afraid of. This is partly because socialism/communist amid the educated classes is at least a little rooted on the very strange idea that communist revolution is inevitable and also that everyone who is civilized somehow is guilty of offending/mistreating the uncivilized.  Which means they feel guilty and scared of anyone who acts feral or aggressive enough.

So… it starts like that. The people who have for years or about a century idealized the “masses” and thought that once the masses — be they working class, or in the US various “victim” classes of interesting coloration, orientation, or simply in possession of a vagina — got socialism, and the government dolled out its shoddily built, completely inappropriate toys (A doll for every kid, from age one month to 18, regardless of sex! Yes, the doll is weirdly made and falls apart in a day, but you get a doll, for free!) they’d be grateful and behave like perfect angels, get disillusioned.  After all, regardless of their college students assuring them that crime is the result of victimhood, and injustice, and psychosis inheres from the inequality and oppression of capitalism, these people are behaving like savages, are not grateful at all, and don’t respect their betters. They keep demanding more.

This effect is easily observed, in microcosm by putting a sweet spinster lady who “loves children” in charge of a horde of normally behaved children who’ve just been filled with soda and candy. By the end of the day, when you come to collect the kids, she’ll be foaming at the mouth and screaming she wants the little darlings dead.

Which is fine. Because she’d never do it, and she doesn’t have the power to do it. But when the sweet spinster lady is the government, she can.

And usually the intellectuals who have seized control of the government in the name of the people get to that stage just as they run out of other people’s money, because, strangely, the millionaires and billionaires didn’t have that much, once distributed all around. Not even enough to, say, cover everyone’s student loans, let alone to give everyone housing or food.  And those companies you told had to operate on totally green energy which doesn’t in fact exist yet? Yeah, they left. For places where they can work.

And all the cows are dead, and the proles are demanding steak.

How ugly it gets and how fast depends on whether you’re dealing with people who have full control of the government and the populace, as in, hard, full on red, USSR (or Venezuela) style socialism, or pinker, more diluted socialism. Or even with the left side of something like our own country, where you can already see the ugly in potentia, as people refuse to play along with the left’s imaginings, like perfect little proles.

In full on communism, this is when they start killing the wreckers and the hoarders in batch lots, and suddenly you find that you too are a wrecker and a hoarder, even though the “wrecking” is that you failed to guess the job they wanted you to do before they told you, and the hoarding is that you have an extra piece of stale bread.
For the pink socialist, still trying to pretend we’re nice because though we have the ballot box sewn up with fraud, who knows, the populace might get frisky and give us trouble, it comes in the form of rationed health care, of take two aspirin and go home to die, no we won’t give you a CT scan, of your baby isn’t perfect, so we’re going to let him/her die humanely, rather than give him/her a simple surgery that might allow him to live.

Because you see, when you get to that point, human beings are ALWAYS in the debt column.  They aren’t making enough, they aren’t creating new things, and it can’t be your fault, because you’re giving the ungrateful little bastards houses and food and clothes and EVERYTHING. And why aren’t they happy? It can’t be your fault.

The government can’t guess your abilities, and it certainly can’t force you to figure them out on your own, particularly when the choices it gives you are like that test that thought I should be a dancer. And you can’t discover anything, or create anything, because there’s five layers of bureaucracy to get through and, anyway, not one would give you anything extra for working so hard. So you do the minimum.  Which means the government has no clue how to provide for your needs, and since everyone is doing their minimum, to comply with often unreasonable orders from above…. well, sure, you’re entitled to a new pair of shoes a year. And this year all the shoes are size two, because that was the only way the manager could make 3 million pairs, from the supply of leather he had, in the time allotted, and therefore avoid being penalized. So, take your size two shoes, comrade and shut up.

Or in the pink version, the doctors are overworked and get paid the same as school teachers, for years and years of training, and they don’t have access to the diagnostic equipment they need to figure out what you have. You know, CT scans are expensive, and we can only afford to have the machines in certain places.  Here, here is a pain killer (unless we’re all et up about opioids in which case you don’t even get that) and come back in a month, if you’re still alive. If you survive long enough, maybe you’ll be the lucky winner, and maybe the diagnostic will even be in time. Unless, of course, you’re old or we think you’re stupid or useless, in which case, what’s the point? You’re just another mouth to feed.

It always ends like that.

You can already guess it in the eructations of our left who, with no power, yet, with no ability to make their vacuous dreams come true, can say, in public and unashamed that if the Wuhan flu kills a lot of people, won’t it be a great thing for the environment?

These people, who among the thousands of them lack the financial know-how to run a lemonade stand, imagine that wealth is something that exists independent of humans. Their vision of the world is like that creepy book I loved as a little kid, where ice cream grew on trees and fried chickens ran around with forks on their backs for convenient consumption.

They think with fewer people there will be less debit. They don’t realize people do things, and make things, and without people there is also no credit.

Making and building and creating is not part of their mental map. They are eternal children, hands raised and mouths open waiting for someone to distribute the candy.  Sure, they want to be in charge of distributing the candy. But they have no idea that someone needs to make it, or even invent new candy.  They are, in fact, like the insufferable little kids running for president of the first grade class and saying that everyone will get recess all day and ice cream for lunch.

The kids have no idea this is impossible. And one gets the impression neither do the socialists. Because they have about equivalent ideas of the world.

But the socialists are aware that one way or another there’s  a limited supply of goodies.  And therefore, already, before they even have any power to put their hands in your pocket, they dream of gulags and eliminating people they don’t like. Because people have no inherent value. They’re just items in the debit column. They’re units to whom “Stuff” must be dispensed. And therefore, the fewer of them, the better.

After all, if all the wrong thinkers, and all those stupid people who actually do things with their hands just vanished, you and your friends could have a great party, forever, right? You and people like you. People who think right, know how to live and would never do anything to upset you or demand what you can’t give.

That club, unfortunately, in the end, tends to shrink.  The cannibal feast of socialists is always on, in many places and times literally.

Which is why for their own good we must — must — make sure they never get the power they want so much. Because they don’t see people. They see debits.

Like most of you I grew up as the weird one in any group. Which is weird, as this blog seems to attract a lot of those who never fit very well elsewhere.

Now, not fitting in is not necessarily wrong. I’m not one of those people who think that most human beings live lives of quiet desperation. I’ve grown up around a lot of “normal” people, and though they bitch as much as the rest of us (nosotros from the Spanish is such a useful word. Oh, you’re served notice, I don’t think I took my Adderal. I was talking to someone while taking pills, and I think I forgot it, but I don’t know (yes, marked pill box) so my thoughts tend to dig in like matryoshka dolls.) Nosotros would be a great name for a blog shared by the regulars here.) most people are pretty content with their lives. Because those who aren’t fight to build something different, and most people don’t.  I think what Thoreau meant by that was that most people didn’t experience the ecstatic joy of an infant on the mother’s breast, which is what I think he equated with happiness. That’s fine. Most of us — I think — don’t really want that, either.

However a substantial portion of us were rejected before we had the tools to analyze what was causing it. Hell, most of us still don’t know what caused it. Our first experience of a large group of kids, we just found out they didn’t want much to do with us.  I know that was the case with me, though eventually I used my imagination and extensive reading and basically invented LARPing, which made me very popular second through fourth grade in our tiny little school. Then I went to the larger school, and found out I was rejected and couldn’t convince them to spend their time off LARPing whatever I’d just read. Those two years, 5th and 6th grade were the hardest, mostly because I was totally isolated. I spent my days walking around the playground, trying to balance on a ledge, or reading books.  By the time I entered seventh grade, well…. people didn’t play, which is perhaps the phase at which we more resemble the monkey band. And I found a group of weirdos to talk to and was eventually (because the school had no clue what to do with us) shunted to a form made up of all the forms where people had been the best students in their form the year before. Which was great eighth and ninth grade. And then I chose liberal arts (long story. It wasn’t exactly chose/chose.) Most of my form went into sciences (most of them are now doctors, with a few biologists thrown in) and  there were only three of us in liberal arts, which means we couldn’t be a form as such, and so I was thrown in the middle of the normies again. And rejected again, as 10th and 11th grade was all about clothes and makeup. For various reasons (eh. I could tell you, but it’s a box I really don’t want to open) I didn’t dress the way it was expected, and didn’t really wear makeup except on weekends. And my dating was non-existent (Though I had a crush on this guy and wrote him 200 and some sonnets between 14 and 18. Stop me when this sounds familiar to many of you.  And no, we’d never have suited, and dear Lord, if I’d known how to gain his attention and had got it, we’d have made each other extravagantly miserable.)

And btw, I’m not implying not fitting in was a matter of being smarter than the rest. In a way, sideways, I probably was but I’m impaired in various ways that made showing that intelligence a struggle. One was ADHD and to until I got medicated recently, I had NO idea how much of a foot-in-a-cement bucket that was, doing anything from studying to writing.  Another is that I’m morally sure I had my younger son’s sensory impairment.  Not diagnosable, at the time, natch, but I had trouble writing on a line till almost eighteen, couldn’t color between the lines, and the slightest sound at the back of the class sounded as loud as the teacher’s. (I suspect in fact that that sensory impairment has affected almost everyone who became a carpenter or a mechanic in my family line because “they’re no good at school.”  It often correlates with what I call “the engineer brain” in the family.) And, more importantly I lived too much inside my own head, and read too much (yes, it was harder than for the normal kids whose eyes worked together, but I pushed, and therewere psychological reasons for that, never mind.)  So the smart might not even have come through.

And we know little kids reject other kids for all sorts of reasons: being outsize (which I was. Not fat. Till about 28 I had times of being too skinny more than times of being fat. But I was very tall. Enough that in the big school in the city, in the early grades, people assumed I’d been held back more than once because I stuck out too much)  dressing funny (mom liked making me clothes. They were lovely clothes just not… what you expected.) speaking funny, either in terms of voice or vocabulary (I talked like I’d swallowed a dictionary.)

As I said, kids and their playgroups are the closest we get to the ape band. By the time I was 7 or 8 I was aware that I was not only the pink dyed monkey, which might be excusable (since kids don’t kill those who don’t fit in, mostly because adults don’t let them) but I was the yellow monkey with big pink pokadots.

Yes, the “gifted” classes in two formative grades helped. I knew there were other weirdos out there, who didn’t fit in nowhere nohow.

BUT fundamentally? You see, the problem is that at the center of it, ape bands want everyone to fit in and nosotros (lit. We Others) get the sharp end of social and sometimes physical stick because we don’t. And we can’t, at some fundamental level. (I find it interesting most of my friends have WAY more Neanderthal than the average human being, btw.)

However, the most dangerous thing is that all of us want to have a band. We need a band. It’s part of being built on an ape frame. (I have an SUV built on a truck frame. It rides harder than those of the same size — and larger — built on a car frame.  My SUV is not a truck, but it has parts.  In the same way, we’re not quite apes. (Oh, we are philologically, but that’s not the point) but we have parts.)

This is a big existential thing, a brokenness inside our emotional selves, that can’t really be assuaged. It lasts our whole lives.

I’ve been lucky to find groups I fit into, these days a lot of them virtual, and to have married someone who is similarly broken, so “You’ll never walk alone” and to have found my profession (such as it is) among other people who ROUGHLY (if not precisely) match me.  Among a band of purple striped monkeys, the pink pokadots pass unnoticed, right?

And immigrating probably helped too, because though that’s not the cause, a lot of people assume the weirdness is because of that and discount it.

However, relating to others and belonging is a struggle most of us will have, all our lives, world without end. We both want it and tend to suffer when we try it.

Which brings us to when I was about 15 and had to face “laugh or cry?”  Though it is, more appropriately “love or hate” but …. not in a way that’s immediately obvious.

I had by then come to terms with my issue with groups, just not the why of it (as evidenced above, I still struggle with the why and “because that’s how humans are” is a great answer, but doesn’t help.)

I.e. I knew I’d never fit in with most groups and frankly I didn’t want to. What normal people thought and did was somewhere between infuriating and puzzling. I  didn’t want to be them. I just wanted to belong the necessary amount not to go insane and I had a small group of friends, so that was okay. But I still had to rub elbows with everyone else, physically and metaphorically to make my way through life.

Which is where the choice came in “laugh or cry?”  I honestly I think I made it subconsciously, because I tend to laugh at everything that annoys me. It’s a coping mechanism. But also because I could usually with thought figure out why people were acting the way they were and, look, humans are ridiculous.

But at the same time I saw a lot of nosotros (those I’d been in a form with) make different choices.  Some, the ones who could completely understand the “normal” people, learned to pass. I suspect most of them today don’t clearly remember not fitting in.  (My dad is to some extent like that.)

Those who didn’t, bifurcated.  None of us could take being immersed exclusively in a “normal” group. All of us still needed friends. Well, I had some. Usually no more than three.

But those groups, and the individuals can develop a self-defeating mechanic. We’ll call it the “cry” strategy. Though it’s really the “hate” strategy.  You hate all those “normal” people who fit in without struggle and never have to think about it. And you cry over your status as outsider.

A lot of people go on from that to become collectivists and authoritarians. They want a “teacher”, a government who will make others play nice with them. And failing that, or those who realize they can’t have that, they hate humans and want them killed in batch lots.  This is where you get the Bernie bros extolling the beauties of the Gulag.

The problem with that strategy is that at the heart of it, deep inside, you come to hate yourself. Because some part of you knows your foibles and impulses are just as irrational if different from those monkeys out there.  And also the hurt because they rejected you and forced you to hate them remains. (You find a lot of these people making comments against hate in general while hating practically everyone. Because, you know, at the heart of it what they’re saying is “don’t hate me. Why do you hate me? What have I done to deserve this?) And then they hate themselves for being hateful, though they’d never admit it.

OR those individuals or groups (it’s harder but not impossible for groups) learn to laugh.  What, all your classmates in this rigorous, difficult language program are obsessed with dressing up and wearing makeup and maybe snagging some wealthy ambassador? Well, that’s funny, isn’t it? Using not inconsiderable intellectual power in the service of a Mrs. degree.  And then other things become funny: the makeup they like. Or how silly fashion is or the mean girls games they can’t help playing. (And you know, I went to an all girls’ school from 7th to 11th grade.)

You don’t laugh at them in a mean fashion, you laugh because you see the mechanisms and they’re so absurd.

And eventually you find you love these apes. Because it is human to love that which amuses you.

You still don’t want to be subjected to their authority or their political “bright” ideas, but if you choose to laugh you’re likely to be able to forgive them (and you) their strange (and your strange) foibles.

None of us are ideal. This is harder on the pink polka dot ( Polka will never die!) monkeys (Yes, I do know we’re achually apes, but monkeys is funnier), than on the rest of us, but even “normal” people aren’t as they’d wish to be, and they have their own struggles.

Laughing will get you through the hard times without hatred.  And might make you more likely to love Liberty.

Which is why as sons hit that age when all they did as complain about their “stupid” classmates, I taught them to laugh instead.

The good thing is that you can always make the choice. The bad thing is that you’ll sometimes relapse into the cry/hate mode. It happens to me, and I have to redirect.

But laugh is healthier than crying.

And what if those others who chose crying/hate put us all in the Gulags?

Well, I don’t think it’s that easy, or that simple. This is not a novel (one of the downsides of our people is that they for good and ill consume more “story” than anyone else, which means internally we expect things to work like in a novel or a movie.) and I think if we are yoten upon, the yeeting will get…. sportive.

But sure, it could happen. At least in certain places.

And then what you have to ask yourself is: Do you want to die laughing or crying?

Because laughing, and seeing humans as funny (even if the humor is very dark sometimes) might even have your survival. Because it gives you hope, rather than paint everyone and everything else in dark colors that mean they or you must die, and life isn’t worth living, anyway.

We do know those who survived horrible things throughout history and went on to live productive/happy lives had hope and retained a sense that life was worth it.

Laugh or cry, the choice is yours.  But which you choose might determine your end result.

First of all, I must apologize for no vignettes. I am sure the vignette team have given me the word but my hotmail is more gifted than usual.
In fact all of my communication means are more gifted than usual this week, up to and including the actual snailmail.  More on that in the forces of evil.

But for now the promo post.

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. That helps defray my time cost of about 2 hours a day on the blog, time probably better spent on fiction. ;)*

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL:  The Shadow of a Dead God.

While investigating an ancient ruin in a distant star system, archeology student Liu Shang discovers a mysterious pendant. When she examines it, she sees the past through the eyes of a woman whose choices will change a world.

FROM MARY CATELLI:  Curses And Wonders.

A collection of tales of wonder and magic. A prince sets out to win his way to the dragon’s lair. A woman fights a curse on her lands. A man returns to his castle, bringing a magical sword, and worse things. And more tales. Includes “Dragon Slayer”, “The Book of Bone”, “Mermaids’ Song”, “Witch-Prince Ways”, “Sword and Shadow”, “Eyes of the Sorceress”, “Fever and Snow” — and “The Emperor’s Clothes”, which is not sold separately.

ANOTHER EXCITING EPISODE OF THE WRITER AGAINST THE FORCES OF EVIL

The Forces of evil were exceptionally strong this week.  They came to my life with a vengeance starting Monday, with what we will call “The round of doctor’s appointments.”

Not only is it really hard to manage your time when you’re continuously being interrupted and having to wait and ….

Well, let’s just say The Writer lost an entire day, and on Friday was convinced it was still Thursday.
Which — let me tell you — was a moment of sheer horror, since I still had three short stories to deliver, and nothing had been done on the novels.

So there the writer was with the devil to pay and no pitch hot.  And she thought “never mind, I’ll just fight the forces of evil really hard, and get at least one story out today!

The writer did get one short story out and a good way towards finishing the next one, and she was determined to work all weekend.  And then…

News came that The Writer and The Mathmatician would have to pick up some mail at our remote, auxiliary office.  They immediately saddled up!

But the forces of evil were truly unusually active, and every possible trick, plus some, was deployed to delay and derail their (relatively short) journey.

To make things worse, the things that were supposed to be there and The Writer and The Mathematician were told were there…. were not in fact there!

So next week, The Writer and The Mathematician will have to track down a package and a check, AND they have another doctors round, though only one day (two days probably, with tracking down stuff thrown in.)

But The Writer and The Mathematician are united in this, and ready to face the challenges. Right now The Writer is going to get off the net and go finish a short story, and maybe even another, as well as do some work on Other Rhodes.

Wish them luck until next week!

More Prizes For Good Girls or a Letter from Sarah to the Political Goldfish – A Blast From The Past From March 2017

Yesterday I kind of lost my temper.  It was Facebook.  I got just one too many reminders that we were celebrating International Women’s Day.  And didn’t I want to show solidarity?  And celebrate women?

Look, it’s not my fault.  I was bit by a rabid International Socialism as a child and it’s the sort of thing that causes an allergy for life.  Oh, yeah, and International ANYTHING day is a socialist thing, because they never fully realized that they didn’t control the whole world.  Or they didn’t care and just wanted to make their rubes believe they were worldwide.  The Happy People of Brutopia celebrated whatever day they were ordered, and they marched in orderly ranks past the red draped stands, and Socialism would Conquer the WORLD.

Right.  So that was part of why I blew up.  I hate “International” this and that, and the idea behind it.  Whatever good it is supposed to do never actually works where needed, and it does very bad things everywhere else.

Bad things?  How can a day celebrating women be a bad thing?

It is a bad thing in many, many ways: first, what in particular are we celebrating about women?  That they’re women?  Woo Hoo, women exist! Great prizes for good little girls for existing.

Yes, I know what gets accreted to it: women who fought for equality.  women who still fight for equality in dangerous places (like say Afghanistan), women who’ve invented things, women who’ve done special things.

And that’s fine and dandy, but WHY are we celebrating IN PARTICULAR women who did these things?  It is impossible to avoid the feeling that it’s not normal for women to do these things, and that’s why they need to be PARTICULARLY celebrated for having done them.

I mean, I want to make clear that I do admire people who do admirable things.  I just find the implication that doing admirable things while female is not that unusual; that we are not, in fact, impaired children who need to be given special prizes for existing.  Why else would you celebrate WOMEN who do special things more than anyone else who does special things, unless it is because women are naturally inferior and can’t do special things.

So eventually I boiled over, and posted this on the book of faces:

“Women’s Day” is how you know we’re speshull. Or at least that society at large considers us short bus speshull. Treating any group of people as though they need special recognition is like saying “Well done! We didn’t expect you lot to do anything. We’re so proud of you.”
I’m human and I partake of human achievement. What actually is between the legs of the people being celebrated couldn’t matter less to me. Or what they like to do with said equipment.
Unless we’re celebrating sex gods or goddesses, this is just nonsense and giving the impression some animals are more equal than others.
I’m celebrating by hoisting both middle fingers aloft. Lookit my matched set!

I confess I didn’t follow all the answers, partly because I’m trying to finish a book, but two of the answers I got were sadly illustrative.

One was the inevitable man asking me if I’d give the finger to all the women who fought for equality and bringing up the inevitable example of the  young woman in Afghanistan who got shot for fighting for female education, and saying that “She should just have told those women they were whiners and should shut up.”

Need I say that admire everyone who fought for equality under the law, and still fights.  And need I also say that International Women’s Day does nothing to advance that fight?  Thinking that declaring an International Women’s Day will make the barbarians of Isis realize that women should have equal rights is typical of the Disney generation, who thinks everything bad is just a big misunderstanding and can be resolved with a song and dance or a big demonstration of some sort, with painless virtue signaling from “enlightened” people.

And yet, the lowest US infantryman sent to Afghanistan did more to advance the cause of freedom and human dignity, and, yes, female equality before the law than all of the “International Women’s Day”s of the world.

This man’s posturing made me think of pouty Michelle Obama holding up a sign saying #bringbackourgirls, which of course did not do anything, and certainly earned no respect from the Boko Harum who went on, selling and raping and destroying the women they’d taken, completely unimpressed by Michelle Obama’s twitter posturing.  As they should be, since they come from a world of force and barbarism, where, to be fair, they never watched Disney movies, and were therefore never exposed to the awesome power of the photogenic pose.

Then there was the woman who informed me that she taught self defense to children and women (Good for her.  But why ONLY to children and women?) and that International Women’s Day was needed till the body count dropped.

That statement confused me, because it’s so stupid it’s not even wrong.

First of all, I’m fairly sure that anywhere not currently under active invasion by military-age refugees bent on treating their hosts like occupied people, the body count IS falling.  All body counts.  At least in the US and other Western lands, violent crimes have been falling.

However, pardon me if I ask WHOSE body count?  I presume from her statement that she teaches women and children to defend themselves that she thinks women and children die in disproportionate numbers from violence?

Look, one person, any sex, any race, any age, dead by violence is one too many, but in point of fact, most of the people who die by violence are men.  Always were.  Always will be.  Yep, they are more physically aggressive than females.  It’s the testosterone thing.  They are stronger than us, period.  They are also by nature protective.  Which means many is the man old and young who dies protecting his family. And the young men who have died protecting their tribe are countless, from tribal warriors to men who die in combat today.

That’s who men are.  And no, it doesn’t mean that if we got rid of men we’d get rid of violence.  I went to an all girls’ school.  Women are as capable of violence.  Different violence.  Women are more likely to hurt children (look at crime statistics) and women are more likely to kill by stealth and by poison.  We are by nature weaker, and our thought is less direct, but deeper, more interconnected and lending itself better to plotting and convoluted plans.

It’s who women are.  And it’s not all bad.  Throughout history women have plotted and connived and worked to keep their tribe safe.  Not just people like Elizabeth the First, many of whose actions were of necessity what a man would do, just with a different slant, but people like the legendary Portuguese baker who attracted the enemy one by one into her bakery (by baking bread, when both besieged and besiegers were dying of starvation) and killing them one by one with the oven shovel.

And it’s not all bad.  And those women who fought for equality, be it equality for themselves because women were despised, or equality for their sons and husbands, who were slaves at the time, were and are awesome and should be celebrated, no matter if they use their own means to do it.

But… where does International Women’s Day do that?

Where does it even keep a single woman or child in a perilous situation or an unjust land safe?

Teaching women and children self defense is admirable.  Getting them guns is even more admirable, because no matter how much you scream “equal” women and children are NOT physically as strong as men.  And so the very few bad men among the whole of them find them easy prey.  It’s impossible to make them equal.  But Mr. Colt did so.

What didn’t do so were soviet style strikes and calls for an International Women’s Day.

In a free society, in the west, all that does is allow the mean girls’ club to try to elevate themselves at the expense of other people, be it men or women who disagree with the mean girls.  That too is part of what women are, the social schemers and social climbers at other’s expense.  Oh, not all women.  Just the women who are the fair counterpart of the men who would abuse their strength to enslave the weaker.  (I tell you, those two sets deserve each other.)

And all it does is make men look at it — yes, and women too — and wonder why, if women really aren’t inferior we make such a big deal of acts of heroism and strength performed by women specifically.  I mean, if women are equally capable, shouldn’t we celebrate HUMAN achievement, male and female?

I do.  I salute those who worked for freedom, for justice, for equal laws for themselves or others: male or female.  I salute those who freed us from brutality and bestiality.  I ache for my brothers and sisters in societies where women are chattel, because even the boys and men are wounded.  You can’t separate the human species in two halves and hate one and love the other and not hurt all.  And that’s why I ache for boys raised in this lunacy where they’re blamed for crimes that not only they never committed but crimes that their ancestors haven’t committed, generations out of mind.  I ache for American boys held responsible for the crimes of barbarians living under Islamic  dictatorship, as though all men and all boys were interchangeable widgets.

And the goldfish?

Well, some friends of ours had a goldfish, in a bowl.  And every time the goldfish swam from one end of the bowl to the next, he’d look SURPRISED as though he’d never been there before and it were all utterly new.

The thing is, we’ve seen all this “international day for this and that” “Solidarity march for this thing and the other.”

Sure, it can work, properly targeted.  Notice that the Polish solidarity was not for political freedom for Poland “and everyone else in the world because we’re all equally oppressed.”  No, by directing the light of world outrage at a particular place, with a particular regime, it worked.  Or at least it helped the real fight on the ground.

So, you want to fight for the equality of women?  Shine the spotlight on Iran, on Afghanistan, on all the places in the world where a woman can get killed for talking back.  Name, shame, denounce.  Strip the mask for those who apologize for those regimes even among us — many of them “liberal” — and make them own the horrible things they’re allowing to be done.  Be ready for resistance from the victims you’re trying to save, too.  This is all they know, and our ways are foreign.  Yes, one or two will get it, but not all.  But fight there, where the fight is.  Be relentless.

But don’t say “And all the women in the west who are equally oppressed” because that’s bullsh*t and you know it.  Even the country I grew up in, which is objectively sexist (or was when I grew up there) in that every woman is considered inferior to every man, is not EVEN CLOSE to the hells where women get slaughtered for talking back, for learning to read, for being seen with a man not their husband.

As to the imaginary “micro-aggression” of American feminists, those are more often than not the excuse of power hungry females who have nothing else to recommend them, as to why they should be at a the top of the pile.  They have neither beauty, grace nor brains, but they have vaunting ambition, and use the plight of other women — real women, in other lands — as a springboard to arrogate to themselves unmerited accolades and power.

The only thing they have in common with true female heroes is that they have a vagina, and that’s not enough.  Heroic women, though methods tend to be different, have more in common with heroic men than with loudmouth, pampered women who give themselves airs, because they have a vagina.

And it is to those political goldfish I wish to speak: We don’t care what you were born with.  In fact your displays and tantrums, more and more, make the rest of society view you as inconsiderate brats who refuse to grow up. And yes, the rest of society includes grown up women doing grown up things.  But what you are doing is very dangerous.  In your effort to seize unmerited power and acclaim, you’re putting down every other woman, reducing us to a powerless and inferior group, at the same time that — frankly — you make sure no one wants to hear another word from you.  And they will think you’re typical women.

This is how real oppression returns.

Women in the west wouldn’t be where we are without many determined women.  We also wouldn’t be where we are without many determined men.  And without men agreeing with us that equality before the law is right and just.

Convince them otherwise, and you lose everything.  Your posturing and mewling of victimhood will win nothing.  And it could lose us all.

It is said that at least one Catholic saint spoke to the fish, and the fish listened.  I have no such hope with the political goldfish, locked in their blinkered “Wants” and who believe life is a Disney movie.

Fortunately they are a minority.  Most women, like most men, are decent human beings.

It’s type to stop listening to the loud mouths, and get to work.

One of the strange things about the left, born of their ideological overlay on the world, is that they are so often right in all the wrong ways.

Take diversity, for instance.  (I’m not using it.)

They are forever complaining about the lack of diversity here or there or that other place, as well as trying to advance diversity by law, by dictating the “correct” proportions of people in any position or organization.

For instance I understand that new directives insist on a certain number of women on the director’s board of any corporation.  We’ll revisit this.

As someone from Yale (rebellion, in the belly of the beast. I’m sorry I couldn’t find the link just now) the “diversity” the left likes to emphasize is a diversity of skin colors. To be fair to the left, though, he did them an injustice: any external characteristic will do.  Look at any show they get a free hand to cast — even historicals where it makes absolutely no sense, but never mind — and you’ll find people of all skin colors, all sexual orientations, all sexual organs, (Well, I don’t know. It’s not like I ask strangers to drop trou. I presume that they haven’t yet demanded to examine sexual organs for deformations or warts as a means of making sure they have all of those, too, but I could be wrong) and if they can get them, with handicaps proportional to their existence in the population.

What they can’t seem to get is the actually important (to improved functioning of an enterprise)  “diversity of thought and life experience.”

Are those really that important?  Yes, within reason, and as applying to the enterprise at hand, which the left’s autistic concentration on diversity of groups only, and their belief that individuals in those groups are interchangeable widgets fails to grasp. Though perhaps it is also because real diversity that applies to the enterprise at hand is almost impossible to head-count and enforce, which means it is not amenable to their favorite top down solutions. It is more, honestly, the sort of thing you write “company management” books about, and perhaps tests to identify people who come up with different and creative solutions.

To make this a little more concrete, before I dip into the enterprise/industry I know best, and where diversity is perhaps the least well understood:

Both my grandfathers were carpenters: one of them a cabinet maker, the other a specialized carpenter who had made a study of woodwork throughout the centuries, and how to restore it. Both were very good at their jobs, and remunerated accordingly.

The first, my dad’s dad, was the one around whose workshop I grew up.  He was retired –no, really, seriously — which means he only worked about normal hours (until his lungs became too bad to work at all) and usually only for people he liked.  From hanging out with him, I retained a love of really good wood which served me well in buying incredibly cheap but good furniture at garage sales in the Carolinas in the late eighties.  And though I never learned — the things we later recriminate ourselves for — his formulas for varnish and wood filler, which he mixed himself, or even how to use all the hand tools he owned (someday I’d like to learn, but time is growing short, now) I did know enough to refinish things so you never knew how cheap I was or that, for instance, the little colonial-village cherry desk that now holds my publishing computer (as far as I can tell built and carved in Pennsylvania sometime in the late eighteenth century) cost me $5 (And was covered in fifteen layers of paint, including the inevitable 2 metallic layers.)

I never saw my other grandfather at work — though he had a workshop, by the time I remember it, he mostly used it to hide in and read when the family was over and he didn’t want company. I did work with him on setting out my parents new vegetable garden and flower garden, after we moved, and he taught me math, and spent a lot of time telling me stories of his misspent youth — but I have visited castles, palaces and churches where he restored dry-rotted and/or broken woodwork.  As you can imagine there was a lot of work of that sort in Portugal, where there’s a castle or palace every ten miles, and it was difficult, intricate and well paid. (Though he spent most of that on loose women and crazy writers. We all have our vices.)

Anyway, my paternal grandfather was a one-man enterprise at least in retirement, but I’m given to understand maternal grandfather at one time had a couple of dozen workers in his “company” (it wasn’t that, but it’s hard to explain.)

I have no clue how he arranged it, except to know being smart and a perfectionist, he probably had a diversity of specialists: People who could remove the affected portions, people who would do the rough-in, and detail carvers and guilders. For various reasons, I know he was capable of doing them all, but I’ve seen the scope of some of his jobs. One palace would have taken him most of his work life. And few people were as …. universally curious as he was about the various facets of the work.

Now, the reason I’m sure there was a diversity of specialties is because I’ve done that sort of work (where it’s too massive for one person, so each is responsible for a portion) and outside of the very roughest sort (and sometimes even then) you specialize.  If you are, say, cooking 500 rissoles for a party, you have someone make the dough, pass it along to the woman who rolls it out, pass it along to the woman who puts the filling in, pass it to the woman who cuts them out, then to the woman who rolls them in egg, then to the one who rolls them in bred crumbs, and finally to one or two frying-specialists.  You do not give the most clumsy and slapdash woman in the group the job of rolling out the dough, because it would be all uneven and some would burst. The same for the cutting. So you put her on the fryer and pray.  (I have a long scar up my arm for failing to control the temperature properly and getting an explosion of oil up my arm, but the rissoles turned out all right and in time, so no big.)

So, grandad had specialists in various things, we can assume.  But let’s say for the sake of diversity of knowledge and experience, that he considered hiring someone completely different.  Say, for instance, a lawyer, or perhaps a professor of classics (which grandad who had taught himself Greek and Latin would have loved, actually, for the conversation) would that have added to their efficiency and their output?

Well…. uh…. no, because in those terms those people were basically untrained apprentices, no matter how smart or how great their knowledge. It would be like putting me in charge of rolling out the dough.

In that sense “diversity” is as absolute bollocks as the “diversity” the left preens on.  Sure, it’s diverse, but it has nothing to do with the diversity needed for the actual work.

Now, if grandad had found say an archeologist or chemist who had either unearthed a workshop from the 14th century and made a study of tools and paints, or investigated bits of woodwork for “what they actually used” and been able to afford to hire him, I expect that “diversity” would have been welcomed and probably improve both their techniques and their proficiency.

From which I turn to the industry I know best.

The left is correct that diversity is preferable to a mono-culture where you have people of the same background who have all been taught the same.

And I’m absolutely sure this would be best demonstrated with some branch of science (though there the challenge usually comes from foreigners or those differently trained and on the fringes) but I know nothing about this, so we’ll go with the arts and literature.

The arts first, because where I was writing this, it occurred to me part of the issue the left has is SEEING past their training in a certain model.

At one time we lived in Colorado Springs within (if I didn’t have the car for some reason, as back then my eyes weren’t changing so fast as to make it near impossible for me to drive) walking distance of Bemis school of art.  We were also doing well enough, relatively, for me to splurge on a couple of art classes a semester.  Which meant sometimes there were no art classes center with my interests, or that didn’t require expensive material fees. Which means that I took everything from “how to draw naturally” to “Drawing from sculpture models.”

That later is the method taught in The French Academic period.  For me, it was just, really, a way to get some practice. But at one time this was the passport to proper art.  You drew classical sculptures, chosen for the proper proportions, so you learned TO SEE things that way. Which meant that if you got in someone whose features were less than perfect, your eye and hand would automatically correct.

This was of course great except for the fact that after a while the result of that school all looked the same.  Van Gogh was one of people who went against that rigid frame of “seeing” (After trying to conform. Apparently he got the worst possible views of the statues, because the teachers didn’t think much of his effort) and I think we’ll all agree that we’re better for his efforts. (Well, I’ve learned to love his work because one of my sons is a rabid fan. And it has enriched family outings and discussions.)

So diversity was absolutely needed (otherwise I expect the art would have got more and more repetitive and irrelevant [though one is tempted to wonder how much more irrelevant it would get that what happened to art in the post-modern world, but that’s something else again.]) but the establishment protected itself against it.

Which is one of those unfortunate characteristics of the human ape. We’re tribal. We tend to tribe up.  And tribing up is almost always a function of  how alike we are.

The funny thing is for any intellectual enterprise we identify as tribe more those who think exactly like us than those who look exactly like us.

So, take traditional publishing — please, I’m not using it — which is staffed almost exclusively and increasingly by females who have all gone through the best schools, be they ivies or ivy-adjacent.

There is a trained perspective that comes with this, a way of looking at the world, a way of interpreting what you see. The fact that this is mostly the Marxist model merely reflects the academic fashion of our times.  (The Marxist model enthralls universities because it’s a just-so tale that sounds profound and can be used to discover ever finer nuances in the society, which only the academic can correct (or even see) and which therefore confer a great sense of unearned superiority.)

The more this tribe controls/ed the decision makers on what gets published, be it as analysis or entertainment, the more the writers who are allowed past the gate/given large advances and vast rewards, are those who echo the characteristics and training of the ones doing the gatekeeping.

This would be fine and dandy, if — in fact– the vast majority of the American book-buying public were the same. If we’d all gone through the same ivy league schools AND BEEN CONVINCED of the same model (instead of doing barely enough pretending to “pass” while internally making rude faces and flinging bits of chewed paper at the lecturers. Not that anyone here — coff — would do that.)

Just as if all consumers of art had been trained in the Academie’s way of seeing, the art would have been right on target. But, alas, people hadn’t.

And most people who consume most reading, particularly genre books in the US (as I’ve described many times, and am not revisiting) found themselves increasingly allienated by what was being marketed to them as science fiction or fantasy or mystery.  Not even, to be honest, because of the political interspersion, (for those too young to remember, even those of us who knew the game was rigged rolled our eyes at those, and took them as the price to read anything at all) but because those works often had nothing to do with what attracted us to the genre to begin with.  As I’ve said before, I might love reading planet colonization stories, but they shouldn’t be a long, long, description of growing tomatoes in another planet, with very little else holding it together.  And I might love fantasy, but there’s only so much I can take of magical battered wife or daughter, or whatever before I grow bored.  As for mystery, is it too much to ask not to be able to guess from page one that the guilty person is the one who is rich or has conservative views? Because that’s not what mysteries are supposed to be.

And so, the vast majority of readers slow or fast wandered off.

At which point the tribe holding the offices of gatekeepers tribed up MORE and held it firmly that the only reason to reject their product (Other than low-brow preference for movies or video games, or whatever) was the LACK OF EDUCATION of all those people out there.  And the next phase was to imagine themselves as martyrs for the “faith” of Marxism, seeking to “educate” the public.  Like so many — far less interesting — Joan of Arcs, they clutched their hammer and sickle to their inconsequential breasts and stepped into the flames of not selling at all, FOR A GOOD CAUSE.  The cause, of course being virtue signaling for their fellows from exactly the same background (no matter how diverse the external characteristics.)

And this is why indie publishing/Amazon/etc is making such a huge dent in the industry.  Why? Because the industry lacked all diversity where it mattered: diversity of thought.

Had they got in a crass and brash businessman/woman (though more likely a man, since women have a different style) who would want to make money at any cost, the establishment would have resisted this very real diversity of thought, and done all they could to sabotage him into giving up, rather than changing and preserving their jobs and their industry.

So…. yep, human enterprises need diversity.  Diversity of skin color? Who really cares? Unless you think with your skin, in which case you are a curious species of alien, no one really SHOULD care.  Unless, of course, the job is having various sunblock systems tested on you.  Or serving as models to advertise something.

BUT barring that, what you need is diversity of thought. All human enterprises, arts, schools, government…. everything periodically needs fresh blood, and a new perspective.
And because of the human ape’s tribal inclinations, all will resist it.

Which means…

Nothing. It certainly doesn’t mean that the problem can be solved from top down regulation and supervision, and certainly not governmental prescription.

Why not? Well, because it would take an intimate knowledge of how EVERY field operates, which ways it’s going wrong, and what it needs. And let’s face it, the people who know the field are part of the tribe and blind to its blindspots.  And the ones who don’t are likely as not to dictate that a publishing house should hire a classical violinist to oversee its Science Fiction line, or a carpentry outfit must hire a French chef.

So…. the left has a point that diversity is needed and valuable, in practically every human endeavor.  What they’re wrong about is what diversity is, what type of diversity actually helps and how to fix it.

Other than that? Yeah, completely right.

What do we do about it? Nothing.  See, the thing is that the narrow minded tribalism of places completely “eaten” by the Marxist left brings on their own demise.

It doesn’t matter how hard you wear the skin of the freshly-killed enterprise/area of endeavor, and demand respect; if you are unable to make it function, it will disappear and something else will arise to fulfill that function.

Which — in our day and age — given how widespread the rot is, means we have to get ready to take the impact when things start failing.

Build under, build over, build around.

Because what can’t go on won’t. But civilization must go on. Those who can must do. No matter what the establishment thinks of us.

Give Me My Smelling Salts, Ho! A Blast From The Past From April 2015

[And stop calling me Ho – SAH 2020]

I don’t make much secret of the fact that I grew up in an actual honest to goodness sexist society. And by sexist I mean one that believed that women were sort of second best when it came to human beings.

No, this wasn’t micro-aggression, but the actual, stated opinion of most people in the society, including women. Teachers thought nothing of saying in front of a class “this might be a little more difficult for you ladies, since it requires logical reasoning.” They expected, in a co-ed class, that men would be better than the women at just about anything involving academics. In craft class, women were shunted to sewing and such, and I was told that no, I couldn’t do carpentry because that was weird and unnatural.

I don’t think it’s the same now. EEC, and a determined campaign to make women “equal” – which is probably… Never mind. We’ll get to that.

Fortunately or unfortunately I have a really hard time staying told. What I mean is, the more they told me I was inferior and had to defer to the better male brains, the more I set out to prove to the guys that I could run circles around them, mentally speaking.

It always gave me great pleasure when, by the end of the year, the teachers looked to me, and not to whichever boy they’d decided was the prodigy when they asked a difficult question.

This wasn’t always easy, particularly since by culture I was expected to take a great deal of the housekeeping off mom’s hands, while most boys went home and had no other duties than to study. But I studied harder; I read more; and by gum I worked to be better.

So – is this an extended whine about discrimination?

Shrug. No. I don’t know if I would be me – pig headed and stubborn as some species of weed – if it weren’t for those “handicaps” thrown in my way. I don’t know if I’d ever have learned to work hard, either. You see, if I had been handed things on a plate, I don’t know if I’d ever have made an effort. I’m very lazy, after all.

And if I hadn’t fought to be admitted to the confraternity of “the best” in each class, I’d never have understood the strange comradery that can flourish between men and women, when the men know a woman has bested them at their game and earned her position among them, they – at least the decent ones – tend to treat her as an equal.

Now, there are downsides to this, and we’ll talk about it in a moment.

I imagine, though I have absolutely no backing for this, that I resemble, in spirit and experiences the feminists of the 40s and 50s, when the point was to prove you could be as good as a man, and when the sort of work required and (perhaps in the fifties) effective contraception made it possible for women to have equivalent professional lives.

At least what I’ve read from those time periods, women’s attitude seemed to be “We can do it. We can be better than men, work harder than men, take knocks like men. And we ain’t no wall flowers.”

There was the inherent belief that, yes, the world was biased, but it was up to us to prove we could make it despite the bias. This was my belief when I lived in Portugal too.

I realized things were different in the US – very different – when my American literature teacher, fresh off the plane, used “he” to refer to indeterminate gender in a class full of females, in my third year in college and then started apologizing and ritually abasing himself for his “sexism.” The class of 20 some budding linguists blinked at him and said “but that is the default pronoun for indeterminate gender in English!”

I’ve never seen a man so astonished. Which prepared me for what I call “the feminist war on language” through the late eighties and nineties in this country.

Though I might say nothing prepared me for the piece of strangeness that was “Herstory.” Seriously, women, learn philology and stop embarrassing people with vaginas. It was as stupid as when preachers use English to decide that there is some arcane meaning in the Bible. It’s as though they don’t realize languages evolve. Which begs the question of whether they understand societies change, or whether they live in an eternal now, but that’s a question for another time.

And then things got ever weirder. One started getting dinged for not using his/her in any correspondence of non-fiction.

It made me a little …. Uncomfortable. Both as a linguist and as a human being. Look, language is language. Language isn’t sexist because language isn’t anything. Yes, there are fossilized meanings and fossilized attitudes in language, but they don’t “intend” or “mean” anything beyond well, the explicit meaning.

This is hard to explain, but suffice it to say half of my teaching career (teaching ESL mostly, but also French and briefly German) was spent saying “there is no why in language.” I.e. don’t ask me why “bread” is “bread” in English but “pao” in Portuguese. I don’t mean there is no explanation of how those words came to be used. Of course there is. Different invading people, different pervading cultures, etc. That’s what philology does and it’s fun for a winter’s night. (Okay, so I have a weird idea of fun.) BUT it’s not a LOGICAL reason. A lot of my students would say stuff like “but bread makes no sense. It doesn’t sound like the thing.”

I think the war on “he” as the default for indeterminate is the same kind of thought. “But it could be a he or a she. So we should mention both. Even if it just makes sentences really awkward.”

That was only part of what made me uncomfortable, though. What really bothered me was this sense that the woman (and it was always women) enforcing the he/she had this need to be noticed, even in a sentence that didn’t refer to them. It was as though they were saying “AND a WOMAN too.” (There are any number of oral story telling techniques that do just this, so you’ll say something like “Five hundred men, three elephants, and the flea in the captain’s beard.” That was sort of the feeling I got.)

Still, you know, language evolves with culture, and I figure this was part of it and just wished they’d settled for something other than he/she or a “they” that broke the number concordance. (Yes, I know Shakespeare did it. He did all manner of foolish things, as well as brilliant ones.) I thought even “it” would be better.

But the disturbing trend continued to grow. Bookstores started labeling history sections “herstory” with no irony whatsoever. College educated women honest to goodness thought there had been as many female medieval fighters as male and there was a vast conspiracy to hide this. (Where women were supposed to come up with the upper body strength for those weapons I don’t know. Yeah, some managed it. Maybe one in a thousand.) A vast conspiracy involving millions of people through the ages. A conspiracy of which we had no record. A conspiracy that never once broke ranks.

Then there was the sisterhood thing. You know, where every and any woman is supposed to understand me better than a man. That was jaw-dropping. I mean, I’m supposed to have more in common with Mary who does tatting for a living in some little village in England than with, oh, Larry, say, who writes for the same house I do in America.

And there was the “men are afraid of you” thing that was brought up as to why I didn’t get along with my boss when I was a lecturer in college. (It probably had more to do with the fact I didn’t intend to make a career of it, and wasn’t going to jump through his hoops. Oh, also, I was a smart-mouthed kid with no social sense.) This is used to explain any man not liking any woman nowadays and particularly any man criticizing a woman’s performance of her job.

But when I first realized things had gone off the rails was when a professor, in a well reported snit, ran out of a lecture hall, crying and threatening to throw up because a college president mentioned statistics and the relative, statistical position of women in intellectual fields and said it was the same as the relative IQ curve. That is, that women mostly occupy the middle ranks, while men claim more geniuses and more morons. This is a statistical fact. It doesn’t mean any woman is or isn’t a genius or a moron (you have to test the woman for that) but as a statistical fact it explains some of the distribution of women we see in intellectual and STEM work. (It also tends to mean those women at the top are good, as they fought all sorts of assumptions to get there.)

THIS – this statistical fact – caused an educated woman to feel personally insulted.

I thought this was insane, and perhaps she was off her meds. But the incidents just kept coming; too many for me to remember much less mention.

The ones that come to mind, though, are the dongle thing and the shirtstorm.

The dongle thing is where a woman heard two geeks talk about dongles and assumed a sexual meaning. Now, the descriptions of the actual event are so muddled, I don’t know which was true. It is entirely possible that the guys were just talking about dongles, and she read a dirty meaning into their words. Or it’s possible that they were making veiled dirty jokes.

Here is the thing: neither of them was about her. What I mean is, men have a different sense of humor than women. Any woman who’s fought her way to the top of a male dominated field, who finds herself considered one of the guys learns this very quickly. And the wise woman – you know, one of those that JUST wants to prove she’s good enough? – turns a deaf ear to it. (Or joins in, depending on personality. But if you want to continue pretending to yourself and others that you’re a lady, you just don’t hear those things. You learn to filter them out.) Guys do the same in a female intensive grouping. Trust me, the things we think are funny and joke about are just as shockingly bizarre and offensive to normal males. Both my gay and straight male friends have on occasion, hearing me talk to a female friend, said the equivalent of “stop. You’re tearing my illusions apart.”

However, the woman who overheard the talk knew it was all about her. (Even though I haven’t found anything saying that it was directed at or even referring to her.) She overheard this talk, and it was bad talk, and it made her feel uncomfortable. And so she set out to destroy the men’s careers. Because every place should be made safe for a gentlewoman of delicate sensibilities to wander through with impunity and without some word – even one she misunderstood – sullying her virgin-like ears.

Shirtstorm was more of the same. Rose Eveleth, Vagina Vigilante, might not know much about probes or comets, or have much interest in them. One gets a feeling in her mind aerospace is that icky thing that sweaty, nerdy boys do. So, forced to cover it (or snatching it up as a prize assignment) for her paper, she paid attention to the one important thing in the world: herself. And since she’s female, she projected her prejudices onto all other females, and decided women everywhere would be put off science by a man’s shirt decorated with “space pinups.” A shirt made by a woman. A shirt worn amid a team whose leader was a woman who saw nothing wrong with it. But Vagina Vigilante was on the job! One gets the feeling she didn’t do very well at science, and now she had a REASON. It was the sexism of the field, manifest in a shirt.

Which totally justified making a rocket scientist cry on the day of his greatest triumph. After all, people like him had ruined her life, right?

But it gets worse than that – there was an entire campus filled with supposedly educated (ah!) women terrorized by the statue of a sleep walking man.

And then there’s the ever-elastic definition of “sexual assault” which – I’m not making this up – can now be ratcheted down to “Looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable” or, for that matter “failed to sexually assault me.” Oh, sorry, that last was the definition of racism. Some Palestinian woman looked at rape statistics and found that Israeli women are raped by Palestinian men in much higher numbers than Palestinian women are raped by Israeli men, and immediately concluded this is because Israelis are racist. It beggars the mind.

Another thing that beggars the mind is the progressive image of women as great warriors. You know, in all the movies and half the books (often without supernatural explanation) a 90 lb chick can beat 300 lb men. And women were always great fighters throughout the ages. And, and, and…

And yet, women are peaceful – peaceful, d*mn it. This is why “peaceful planet of women” is a trope on tv tropes. Not just a trope, but a dead horse one.

Attempts to square that circle have included the explanation that women are only violent because patriarchy. There needs be nothing else said because in this context, and with apologies to the ponies, Patriarchy Is Magic. Honorable mention on trying to square the circle must go to Law and Order’s attempted episode on Gamer Gate where the game the woman designer had written was about Peaceful Amazon Warriors.

An episode in which my younger son accidentally touched a girl on the behind – in 3^rd grade, when Mr. Hormone hadn’t visited yet and he had no clue behinds had anything to do with sex or being sexy – and the school tried to charge him with sexual harassment (Which stopped cold when I threatened to write about it for various mags and make them a laughing stock) gave me some insight into why women are reacting this way.

It’s not all their fault, no.

That little girl had it far worse than my son. Because you see, for having been touched by a rather innocent little boy, who was reaching into a group and trying to get her attention (to play “the space game” which was sort of a LARP in which they were in a spaceship in an alien planet. Hey, he’s mine.) this girl was put in COUNSELING sessions and was told that her life would never be the same, because she’d been – gasp – sexually assaulted.

I lost touch with the kids from that class, and don’t know if she still thinks she was victimized, but let’s say she was a little strange for months after the incident.

Of course, she was actually bureaucratically assaulted.

You see, the directive to make the sexes equal is being applied top down by a thousand little bureaucracies, none of them very sure how to accomplish this. They’re also in general trying to force the sexes to be equal, which is impossible, instead of equal before the law, which is desirable. This further muddles their attempts, particularly when you throw in the lovely academic theory most of them imbibe that “gender is a construct.” And gender might be, but whether your genes are xx or xy still affects your upper body strength (men have more), your endurance of pain (women have more) and several other things you can’t make equal by declaring it so.

The problem is bureaucracies are stupid. They can’t see finer shades such as “allow exceptional individuals to be wherever they belong” or “just let people be people.” No, they hear “make women and men equal and by gum, they’re going to do it if it requires being at war with reality. It’s kind of like performing brain surgery on your sofa, using a rusty saw and a soup spoon. Even with the best of intentions, you’re going to do more harm than good.

Now, do I think it was okay for the culture to be as it was in Portugal, where I was assumed to be an idiot because I lacked 250grams between my legs? Oh, heck no. But I also don’t want a culture where little girls are mollycoddled and little boys berated both in compensation/punishment for things that happened before their grandparents were born.

For one, it makes girls into sissies. For another it makes a lot of men give up on society.

And the girls into sissies thing is dangerous. Women who’ve been mollycoddled all their lives will think that anything is an attack or an aggression. Like, you know, being called Ladies. Or pinup shirts.

This means, more and more, as the younger generations come in, professional and academic environments with women become mine fields for men and histrionic opportunities for women.

And sooner or later, looking at our throwing up, swooning, crying, trigger-warned, peaceful amazon warriors, someone is going to say “you know, women are too fragile for the workaday world. Let’s put them in burkas and lock them up in purdah.” And then it will all be needed to do over again, the fight to let those women who can and will compete do so.

On behalf of my future great great great granddaughter whom I don’t want to have to endure that kind of things, stop this feminist charging forward to the fainting couch and the smelling salts, like some Victorian maiden that never actually existed.

Stop trusting what the bureaucracy tells you. Men are not the enemy. Most men welcome women who can work with them as equals. Yeah, they’ll still try to protect you and avenge you, because they, the same as you, have instincts. An unfortunate side effect of having physical bodies.

Accept them as they are so they can accept you as you are. Demand their best behavior, but don’t demand they stop being men. And don’t make them walk on eggshells around you. The power might feel good but in the end it betrays you, because it means you’ll never belong as a co-worker.

Oh, and fight the war for equality on the cultural level.

If we took over a Middle Eastern country tomorrow we could (and should) fix the laws, so women are the same as men before the law. But we couldn’t fix the culture the same way. If we made laws giving women job preferences, or telling men what they could or couldn’t do around women, what we’d do in the end is what’s happening here: women who are used to being protected/infantilized/subjugated by men transfer that relationship of power by putting all their trust to government.

And since government is force, it’s more abusive than any husband. And the end result will be subjugation.

Fight the culture war now. So your descendants don’t have to fight worse ones. Humans are not widgets and bureaucracy is stupid.

Make your own judgements, and tell bureaucrats and their fainting maidens coterie to go smell some salts.

I mentioned D’Haut en Bas as a political strategy here sometime ago, and caused considerable confusion. So I promised to revisit it.

Of course the confusion was probably greater amid those readers who are fluent in French, who were going “what the heck does Sarah mean? Condescension is not a form of government, though I dare say our self proclaimed elites wish it were.”

Right. Look, I haven’t done any serious study of French in… 34, going on 35 years, so I can’t swear this is a fact, but I suspect “condescension” in French as in English only came to have a bad denotation in the last century or so, and before that you would praise someone’s “great condescension” as a positive quality, in that they consented to interact with their social inferiors.

What I do know for a fact is that when I was doing a deep dive into the French revolution (bad idea. It’s depressing. Also, you’ll never get the bloodstains out of your mind) I heard the king’s strategy described as D’Haut en Bas.

And it clicked with what I knew of Louis the XIV who arguably set the patterns of the ancien regime, which still subsisted at the time of the revolution.

You see, in the days of Louis XIV he had problems with the great noblemen.  This wasn’t unusual for France which for vast portions of its history was a set of borders in search of a country. At various times several portions of France showed themselves ungovernable, usually because under the control of a nobleman who saw no reason to obey the nominal king.

But Louis the XIV settled their hash. He constructed his court in such a way and build and arranged things in such a way that most noblemen couldn’t afford not to dance attendance on him, and yet dancing attendance on him was financially ruinous, which meant they need to dance attendance on him more than ever. (In case you wonder where the “they’ll turn us all into beggars, because beggars are easy to please” strategy of the left came from.

At the same time the king advanced (at least some, until, of course they got to big) members of the new French middle class, and raised them up in importance, creating a pincer movement on the big noblemen.

Louis XVI, who was nowhere near as adept, at least for a time trusted the same maneuver would work for him against the nascent and increasingly more rebellious middle class.  He tried to make himself into the protector of the dispossessed, the little people in order to crush the middle class between the royalty and the masses.

It didn’t work. I did say he wasn’t nearly as adept, right. In fact, in many ways Obama reminded me of him.  And in the end, he lost his head.

Of course, Obama’s issue was … slightly different.  We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let me point out that d’haut en bas as a pincer movement has worked in practically every communist country.  It worked, for that matter, for the middle class during the French revolution. Yes, the middle class used it against the rest of the middle class (and small nobility) by convincing the poor and dispossessed that they were being taken care of by whatever portion of the middle class was in power at the moment.  (Yes, the French revolution will give you a headache, which still beats … well, not precisely living through it.)

But take Venezuela for instance (going, going, gone.) The commies got in power by convincing the very poor that the commies would take care of them.  And kept this going for a long long time.  They might still be doing it for all I know. No matter how bad things are, they can always tell the poor that the commies are doing what they can to improve their lives.

But you see, Obama tried the strategy. And I think he still doesn’t understand why it failed.  I know the left alternates between not knowing why the strategy doesn’t work, and desperately trying to create a new underclass so maybe with them it will work.

Part of the reason the strategy didn’t work for Obama is that he is in fact pretty terrible at reading the country. This is because like all Marxists he only admits of reality in order to segment it into proper Marxist constructs.  And if something he sees doesn’t fit into Marxism, he by gum will make it fit, somehow.

So — I swear to you, having met and studied and worked with his kind I’d put my hands in the fire this is true — when he aided abetted (if not suggested that someone start it) and cheered on the Occupy Wall Street movement (the embodiment of his threat to have the mob come for the bankers, after all) he expected that the “underclass” would immediately rise up and cover his astroturf in a verdant coat of grassroots.

I suspect he’s still puzzled it didn’t work and that instead the Tea Party rose up to tell him they were taxed enough already.  You must excuse him, the man has no clue what America is like. Regardless of where he was born, he didn’t grow up here, but worse, he’s never made any effort to be of us.  He probably (like Hillary and her supporters) is probably still spinning over why precisely the people went for the man who promised to bring jobs back over the woman who promised to give them all better and larger welfare.

In nine countries out of ten, the promise of money for nothing (with or without their chicks for free) would have beat the offer of remunerated work.

So, am I saying d’haut en bas can’t work in America?

Well, it doesn’t work as well as it does in the rest of the world. And honestly, thankfully, it works less than it did in the seventies.

BUT, and this is an important but, it sort of works on a very regional basis.  There is a reason that democratic controlled cities — as I was reminded of when visiting Pete’s the other day, as the “homeless” problem has started spreading from downtown — are indulging the “homeless” with all sorts of rules and suspension of laws supposed to accommodate them.

The city government counts on people not realizing that in fact the homeless are not the dispossessed needing more money and city services, but drug addicted, mentally ill, often dangerous individuals in need of far more than money or city services. They also count on people — finding themselves accosted on the streets and sometimes even assaulted by people who aren’t even responding to reality (the homeless in this case, not Marxists. Making Marxists homeless is a laudable goal, though) — demanding that something be done, which allows the city to do more things that bring in more homeless.  And then raising the taxes, to do more things…

The end state of this is Detroit, I think. Or another of the American cities destroyed by socialists. And meanwhile, at the top, the leftists responsible for the debacle, get themselves a permanent position and become royalty.

Thing is, I think the mood is changing.  Only six months ago, I swear every cozy mystery released genuflected towards the homeless, who were always laid off computer programmers, or something.  Now… not so much.  I’ve yet to see a new one where the homeless provide the villain, but… I sense it’s not very far off.

Because here’s the thing with the strategy of d’haut en bas: unless played by a master, sooner or later the bas realize they’re being kept down on purpose to provide shock troops to en haut.  And then there’s hell to pay.

And most of our left aren’t masters. Most of them (partly, granted through an excellent education that tainted their world view with a dirty patina of Marx) aren’t competent to find their own *sses with two hands, a seeing eye dog and the latest model GPS.

And their idea of “the people” is — to put it mildly — deluded.

In these conditions, and with the media no longer serving as a shield, fooling some of us some of the time is a stretch goal. Mostly they hope to convince us to stay quiet and play along. Which is why the latest incarnation of d’haut en bas is a reach for the eternally unemployable malcontents cosplaying at “heroes” and heroines of social justice.

That is working as bizarrely as you’d expect, because of course these poeple have to step ever more to the left and demand ever more radical solutions.  You see, they aren’t poor, and they want to feel important and radical. Hence, their leader, Occasional Cortex.

Don’t let the chorus of ignoramuses silence you. Our would be rulers think they’re playing three-d chess, but in reality, they’re just a pigeon, sh*tting all over the board and declaring victory.

In the end we win, they lose. Because we wouldn’t know bas even if we were it, and as for haut, the bastage ain’t been born whom we’d consider above us.  And they don’t know what to do with that.

But we do.

I think it was fifteen years ago now that Classical Values coined the term “Cold Civil war.”

At the time I read it, it immediately clicked in my brain as “oh. Precisely. This is what it is.”

I could see immediately the same patterns as we saw it in Europe in the seventies and eighties, as the Soviets — through puppets — had taken over the schools, publishing, and all instruments of culture, and all those of us who opposed communism had as options was keeping our heads down, shutting up, and seething internally.  Oh, there was also and increasingly the option of malicious compliance.  Which we engaged in with much vigor and enthusiasm.

The victories of the Soviet Union were everywhere.  Partly because everything that happened was treated as a victory.  And the bad things that the Soviets did were never reported in the press.  You might know the Soviets — via their Cuban mercenaries — were beating Africa like a rented mule, raping it like the wife of the defeated and despoiling it like a jewelry store in a riot zone, but you couldn’t say it in public. For one it would be as uncouth as farting in church. For another, because farting in church would probably be forgiven, but telling the truth about the Soviets in social, professional or academic circles, would never ever ever be forgiven. And anyone who heard you mention the unmentionable would do their best to destroy you. Because the alternate option would be for THEM to step away from the herd and become a target.

In addition, the Soviet Union used violence unapologetically, and quickly, which the US, on whom we must pin our hopes for freedom, apologized and begged forgiveness for any even half-hearted attempt to oppose Soviet aggression. Even under Reagan — who at least tried to make public stands and not apologize — the US was never the bold strider that the Soviet Union was.  From the perspective of the nations in Europe, the Soviets were the strong horse. They were the way to bet. All the news of the world that we got to read said the result was foreordained.

This meant that a lot more of the cognoscenti, the people in the “best” classes and the “best” jobs claimed to be communist (or socialist) than the ones actually naturally attracted to this poisonous philosophy.  You see, it gave you a patina of virtue, made you unfirable, and at the very least made you cool.

And yet, through all this grinding misery, the sense kept leaking — and people said I was crazy there too. And yes, sometimes I doubted myself, too — that all was not good, all was not sound on the Soviet side.  The sense kept leaking in through that maybe, just maybe, there was no way for the US to lose. There was no way for freedom to lose.

Even I didn’t expect how fast, how peacefully the Soviet Union came apart. It came apart because it never worked, and it could only keep going by this massive pretense, this Potemkin appearance of power and prosperity. Because they needed to keep conquering and despoiling new lands to be able to keep going.

Once it became obvious that they would need to pay a price, they came apart.

Remember we did not have the internet.  Remember also the dismount on the cold war was, to put it mildly, NOT well handled. And part of the reason it wasn’t well handled was the problem we’re now dealing with: the left had also penetrated the, for lack of a better term, culture-manufacturing sectors of America.  So, the true bizarre horror that was the Soviet union was never heard of here. Oh, we heard bits and pieces. Most of the books about it STILL are either too dry or grim for me to read. And I’m an interested party.

And so, by fifteen years ago, I felt much like I was living in Europe in the seventies.  Which is why the term fit.

Since then … since then things have gone more so, but at the same something happened that didn’t happen in the international cold war: They lost control of the information stream.

The USSR never lost control of that, arguably even as it collapsed internally and officially stopped existing.  Or as we say around here, the snake is dead but the tail twitches.

But the tail has lot access to the levers of power, to overstretch the metaphor. It’s twitching madly trying to regain them, but they can’t.

Thing is though that one of the things they thoroughly infested is our democracy, from our bureaucracy to our voting mechanisms, to the point that they have power over us.

And they’re terrified. They’re so terrified that I’m wondering how deep the sewer is, and how dirty everyone involved in this is. I know in a couple of places they can’t reform. They’ll die first, because the alternative is they’re dead anyway, or worse, they have to part with everything they’ve been and everything they believe.

Which means they’re trying to regain control by all means possible and being increasingly aggressive and stupid about their aggression.  Which, in retrospect, is another parallel with the USSR before the fall.

As a parenthetical comment, the reason they’re collapsing is partly the reason the USSR collapsed. Turns out when what you’re choosing for is compliance and ideological conformity, you don’t choose people who can keep the lights on in civilization.  When you value fake science that confirms your prejudices over real science, you end up not being able to run a technological civilization.

But it is the snake flopping around and looking for levers and trying for a desperate win after it’s defanged….

There are several reasons I wish actual violence would wait until we had time to do more work on the “back panel” of the culture.  We have — despite everything — been turning the culture around. Which is part of the reason they are desperate.

The problem is that with the disarray in the culture, a lot of the people just have the gut feeling (and experience) that everything the left pushes is wrong. But they have nothing to replace it with, and therefore just turn whatever the left says on its head and says the opposite is true.

This is just as effective a method to destroy civilization, or at least a civilization of free individuals. The left is a tumor on western civilization, but it is of our DNA. If you reject our DNA, we merely die (instead of the chemotherapy approach of merely going through very bad times by rejecting the tumor and isolating it, but living in the end.)

I’ve prayed this moment not come for at least another four years (our rebuilding of the culture is much faster than it looks, honest. Partly because it’s been 20 years in the making.)

Maybe we’ll get lucky. It looked impossible the cold war would end without major blood, particularly as the USSR lost the plot and flailed around.

But I would lie if I said I’m not nervous about Virginia.  Tap dancing on a powder barrel is dangerous, particularly when the powder barrel has connections all over the world — everyone, everywhere is fed up with the left. If the signal goes up, I’m afraid it all blows at once — and when the people who might replace it don’t even understand the values of Western civilization.  Or at least no more than the left does.  (Not their fault. They got no real education, but still…)

What I’m hoping against hope is that the anti-left side doesn’t fire the first shot. (If they do, it’s entirely possible the left can put them down in public opinion and destroy all opposition, in which case say hello to president Bernie.)

Which means I’m hoping that the people there are alert to infiltrators and agents provocateurs.  I’m going to say right now that if a pregnant woman gets shot, it will be infiltrator/communist action. (It became almost a joke in Europe in the seventies. If someone opposed leftists with violence, a pregnant woman was ALWAYS shot, and then waved like a bloody shirt.  It is one of the reasons I’m 90% sure that Kent State was an action by communist agent provocateurs.)

Perhaps this too shall pass. And we’ll get a few years to turn the culture around. Because this can’t continue, and the left can’t retain a state of hysteria that long.

Also because I think if Trump gets a second term, the stuff that comes out will discredit the left forever.  Honestly — for those of you who are going to bay at me that we need to shoot NOW — before we start the music, we should consider how HARD the left has been trying to stampede us into initiating violence. I think they might — correctly — believe that’s their last hope.

It is always a bad idea to do what the enemy is trying to — openly — get you to do.

Because if the left gets us to start this, they will almost certainly will. We’ll have played into their hands with “unhinged right wingers.” To the extent they still have any power it is the emotive power of the news/entertainment complex and the people who believe in it.

And what comes next will turns us inside out, to non-functional and irrecoverable.

So, keep cool, keep thinking. Sure, self defense is a thing. And if it comes to that, well, it comes to that.

But keep your booger hook off the bangstick until and unless they start it.

Because–

They’re not engaging in provocations because they’re winning. They’re not screaming and trying to cancel you because they’re strong. They’re not letting the masks drop because they’re confident of victory.

If we can keep going through the squalls the left creates, we will win, they lose.

But I never promised you a rose garden, or that there would be no flare ups.

Heck, the international cold war was full of them.

I’m writing this on the night of the 19th. And I’ll be praying for Virginia, and praying that however it turns out, the cause of liberty comes through.

And it’s all I can do right now.

*Sorry to be so late. Yes, I actually slept last night. OTOH this morning I had a bunch of errands to do which I’ve been putting off because going to the grocery store (say) while sleepy enough to walk into walls is a bad thing.
Fortunately I don’t have to feel terrible about not promoting people on time, since I have no books to promote today.  I guess like me everyone was overcome by the forces of evil in the new year.
Okay, now I go finish short stories. – SAH*

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Whispering.

When last we saw our heroine, in her battle against the forces of evil, understood as “things that prevent her from writing fiction”, she had made the valiant resolution of writing a lot.

To such purpose she’d enlisted The Mathematician (A figure of mythical dread — also hotness (it might be inferred she plied him with her wiles!))

— whose principal power is super-human abilities of scheduling and organization) and he’d deployed the near-mythical (in our heroine’s world at least) …. spreadsheet.

The very name causes our heroine to shudder, since the idea of caging THE Writing is almost sacrilegious. Also, it doesn’t work very well.

However, given the fifty some novels in her head and if she doesn’t get them out, she’s probably going to forget which of the voices behind her eyes is her actual own voice. Which would be a bad thing. A very bad thing.

So after The Mathematiciann deployed some wiles on HER, the writer agreed that she could do this. She could defeat the forces of evil in 2020. She would even use the dread (shudder) spreadsheet and keep to a calendar and everything.

But haha, the force of evil never sleep (in which they have some resemblance to our heroine these days. More anon.)

No more had our heroine got in two good days of work, or so, than the forces of evil deployed:

Euclid cat, whose life story could be written as “Euclid Cat, Enter The Derp.”  Or since he’s 21, “Euclid Cat, the Path of the Geezer.”

In this case right after new years he fell of a cliff health-wise. Since our heroine is an idiot who doesn’t like putting down cats who can still walk into the doctor’s office under their own power, and also since when she took him to the doctor Euclid was charming, sociable and cosplayed at being at least 10 years younger, our heroine has spent a bunch of money she doesn’t have, and time she has even less of stabilizing the cat (the model for Peesgrass in the Dyce books) who is now eating, and more alert than he was and has stopped screaming in the middle of the night.

So, that crisis averted, our heroine was ready to resume her course and deploy the spreadsheet:

But the forces of evil never sleep….

And being awake made them really really upset, so… they deployed:

Stomach flu….

Which ate about a week and a bit, until our heroine started getting better and thought: Spreadsheet!

Only the forces of evil weren’t done!  These last three days they have deployed:

Sleeplessness.  No, our heroine has no idea whatsoever why. Okay, it might have to do with the fact she’s pretty much forgotten to take her ADD meds every afternoon, and for some reason not taking the meds means she not only doesn’t sleep at night, but she doesn’t get much done. (Though she’s rendered some pretty images she will eventually use in her (now being revamped) author website. Which will have a non political probably three times a week blog.

Images like this, which will ge used for a click to go through to a page talking about our heroine’s space opera:

It might also end up being the cover for a novel. Maybe.)

It’s also a vicious cycle, because the more tired she is, the less effect the meds have on ADD, causing her to behave like a very strange squirrel:

And then she gets stressed because she hasn’t been writing and is now late on two novels and two short stories, and then…. everything gets worse, including the lack of sleep.

And then… Well, these last two weeks the forces of evil have scored a major win.

Needless to say this can’t go on.  The Mathematician is looking at our heroine like this:

(Only hotter.)  And after all, our heroine is armed with the mighty spreadsheet!

(Even if she’s managed to screw up one of its functions — it’s like a superpower. not a good one –)

Now, there are hints that other distractions might loom, including perhaps at least a part time job in non-fiction again.

Which is good and bad, because while non-fiction isn’t fiction, it does help pay the bills, and has some not-irrelevant effect on publicity.  (And they’re not paying the heroine in Euros, because, just no. Stupid image.)

However, the heroine thinks she can keep the non fic under control, so it doesn’t eat all her time.

If that confinement is effective, then she will do it. If not…. well, she’s all grown up, even if she’s forgotten how to sleep. (I’ve slept successfully in the past, I swear.)

So The Writer (our heroine) and The Mathematician (very hot. Also good with numbers and organization) have vowed to join forces

And this time truly defeat the forces of evil so our heroine can finish two short stories and at least one of the novels (Other Rhodes) this week.

Tune in next week for another episode of The Writer Against the Forces of Evil!

Will our heroine figure out how to sleep again?

Will Derpish cats figure out a new trick to thwart her?

Will non fiction prove too much for her?

Will Greebo-cat, freelance editor stop glowering at her for being so late?

(Okay, that last one is unlikely.)

All these answers and more wait next week!  Same place, same blog, same overcrowded writer’s mind.  Watch as our heroine does battle against the forces of evil!