Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

When our time is looked at in history, future historians — if there are any — will be torn between laughing their heads off and disgust.

Recently fell across someone on FB who thought the West had started the crusades against “peaceful” Islam, just out of how evil and imperialistic we were, just because.

This person has a university degree.

When told how wrong she was, she fell back on how the past is unknowable.

You know these are things she was taught, at great expense and effort.  Further, her teachers inculcated in her the idea she was so smart and special, the culmination of all intelligence and knowledge in the history of man, which prevents this person and her cohorts from ever examining what they were taught in the light of reason.  I mean, they don’t want to come to different conclusions, and thereby become “stupid”.

It’s not official censorship, the “church” of SJW can’t formally excommunicate you, but everyone on twitter knows they do, anyway, and worse, destroy your life, for having just one slightly unapproved thought.

Neither government nor church, they managed to make knowledge and belief into a virtue signal, which keeps their devotees and at this point many who just want to have a job and a life cowed and quiet and unable to read or research the real past.

Thus we have:

-People who attack capitalism with tu quoque fallacies, while never facing the HUNDRED MILLION graves of socialism.  Yes, I know “capitalism is just as bad indirectly.”  (Even though that can never be proven, it’s what they say, as deflection.) Which is why refugees go only in one direction.  Also, socialism is JUST AS BAD INDIRECTLY. But they never think that, or that the world is nowhere a utopia. But capitalism has fed and clothed more people than any other system, ever.

-Attack and destroy the statues of people who made an uneasy peace with slavery, never considering that maybe the future will consider something they cherish — say elective abortion, for instance — just as great an evil, and thereby topple all the “sacred” cows of our time.  Ability to look in a mirror? None.

They believe so intensely in the “arrow of history” of Marxist faith, and the idea that they’re so advanced that it never occurs to them it is not for the future to judge the past.  You weren’t there. Yes, you can say slavery is an evil. (Arguably one of the greatest evils humanity can do.) BUT you can’t say that whatever people did in the past to cope with it/compound with it, invalidated all the good they did.

Slavery appears as evil to us now, starkly so, because it’s uneeded. We have machines for most of the unpleasant/awful labor. In the past, most people knew it was an evil, but couldn’t let go of it.  Oh, and they had their rationalizations, too. Just as we have them for things we know are evil but tolerate or compound with, because how is one single person to stop it?

Being human means you live in the time you live in. And people are not the same across time, nor are their circumstances.

-Make idols of foreigners they don’t understand, or despicable characters — Che Guevara! — whose history they don’t even know.

-Read only the approved tracts, because history is unknowable and knowing the “wrong things” mean you’re “uneducated.”

-Believe there was a perfect, utopia-like matriarchy, which the evil men destroyed (apparently unhappy in paradise, who knew) and men have since then conspired across cultures, languages and possibly time to keep women subjugated. Instead of looking at biology and the reproductive processes of mankind as to why women have by and large not been as influential in public life.

-Ignore the fact that women are probably more influential than men in early childhood education and training. Always were. Will always be. And that this shapes civilizations.

-Only believe in female power when it involves taking male power.

And many, many more outrages you guys can probably conjure up.

It occurs to me that though no cage or bars are visible, they’re as much prisoners as anyone kept in a too small cage and taught to hate freedom.  This applies:

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.

If You Don’t Work, You Die- a Blast from the Past from July 6 2013

I was reading a Nero Wolfe book the other day and there is a man we’re obviously supposed to dislike going on about how it’s stupid to try to feed all the hungry in the world.  It puzzled me how this could be even disputed, much less a bad opinion.  Given the different kleptocratic kakistocracies around the world, trying to feed all the poor is in fact to support dictators and evil men. Trying to feed individual, targeted poor is different, but then you can’t feed “all the poor in the world.”  Of course, this was a time when the power of governmental organization and “scientific governance” were considered forces for good. (This man is also referred to as a Nazi, even though he’s clearly against all forms of socialism, national and otherwise.  Never mind, Rex Stout is dead and his time is not our time. Perhaps he was referring to someone who actually existed and there was stuff about this man I can’t now know.)

My grandmother, who was normally very shrewd had a blind spot a mile wide.  When I was little, we got door-to-door beggars.  (One would like to believe that was stopped by greater prosperity and better programs to help the poor.  One would also like to believe that pigs can fly.  Actually downtown in the city has as many beggars as ever, but the crime rate is so much higher that anyone begging door to door is likely to starve.  People don’t open the door to strangers, anymore.)  Grandma had real trouble not giving to beggars.  Mind you, she rarely gave them money (she rarely had cash money on hand, other than needed to run the house.)  But she’d give them sandwiches, eggs, bread, lengths of fabric.

This drove my mother nuts.  I even understand why, since at the time in Portugal there was an (unofficial) beggars guild and families of hereditary beggars, many of whom mutilated their own children to make them deformed/blind so they could beg.

When we all lived in the same house, more or less (well, mom and dad’s home was a shotgun apartment built out of what used to warehouses along the east side of the house) mom would follow my grandmother to the door when the bell rang “to act as her spine” if the pitch was obviously stupid/false.  Though it will tell you the sort of household I grew up in when you consider that both women agreed you should too give a generous amount to the guy who told the most ingenious, if obviously false story – and also to the guy who could not lie and therefore begged with “Please give me something, for neither my mother nor my father are blind.”  Mom and grandma spent the morning giggling and dissecting his pitch.  “Maybe he means since his parents aren’t blind they see how ugly he is and have cast him out.”  And then people think I’m strange…

Sometime a few days ago, I was reading a book about dinosaurs and it referred to how a dinosaur “probably earned his living.”

Yes, there is a point to all of this.

The other day in this blog, a commenter asked me about the Gods of The Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling.

These are supposed to be the lessons of the fables in copybooks, and you write them at the top of the copy, in your fairest hand, to show you got it.  (I will note I was raised on Aesop’s fables.)

And they are – yes, all of them – true even those I wish weren’t.  Anyway, the Copybook headings are a great way of getting a spine when faced with reasonable begging pitches.

How reasonable?  Well, pitches about feeding all the hungry in the world.  Who wouldn’t want to do that.  As someone who did have times of hunger now and then (which is not the same as times of appetite) I very much would like it if it were possible for us to feed, clothe, house everyone in the world – if that were the base level to work from. It’s not possible.  It will never be possible no matter how much our science advances.  The flaw is not in our science but in ourselves.

Someone at the panel on transhumanism spoke out against extending life because “we already don’t have enough food to feed everyone.”  I couldn’t beat that one down, of course, because it went into politics and policy, into the governments people choose, into how redistribution is always redistribution of famine.  I couldn’t go into it because it had nothing to do with technology of life extension.  It had to do with Old Adam.  Or perhaps Old Cain.

There is no such a thing as a lack of food in the world.  And when there is in a particular region, at a particular time, it is usually the result of a truly craptastic government.  Anyone who looks at the two Koreas can’t but conclude that the fault is not with lack of food but with a government so constituted that it makes it impossible for people to “earn a living.”  (Anyone but our president, who, having been thoroughly indoctrinated in Marxism likely thinks that SK steals from NK.)  Anyone who knows the history of Rhodesia can’t but realize that Zimbabwe is poor because its government chooses not to let its people earn a living.

In fact, it is normally the governments who ignore the gods of the copybook headings and decide everyone must eat, whether they work or not, who bring that sort of ruin and famine to their people.

There is a reason for this.  It is fashionable in the US to talk about people who are on welfare and don’t work.  That is not precisely true.  Yes, there are people on welfare who neither have a regular job nor look for one.  But what might not be understood is that these people are working: they are navigating the labyrinthine bureaucracy and making sure they meet all the guidelines to keep the money flowing.  That is work.  It is just not productive work.  It is a work that is the result of perverse incentives.  These people have become convinced that’s the only thing they can do to survive – so they do it.  And the government functionaries who derive power from their “service” want as many of them as possible under their sway.  So they teach more people how to work at getting money for “free”.  And they put more barriers in the way of those ever wanting to leave that condition.

Then there is minimum income.  We do have the ability to give every adult a certain minimum income, I think.  Or at least we did before we ran the presses at melting speed.  Heinlein in his Fabian socialist days envisioned this as a way to get the economy going.  If every adult has some tiny income, enough to live on if you have three roommates and live on Ramen noodles – say 10k a year – then everything you make above that is in a way disposable.  Not only is there no need, but there is more disposable income to stimulate the economy.  (To understand the appeal of this to Heinlein you have to understand that his most frequent contention with his sister was that they only had a pillow between the two of them.  It’s poverty we now can’t begin to imagine.)  Also, one presumes, since breathing and over eighteen was the criteria, we might spend less on that that on our current welfare system.

And maybe it would be.  Except we hit up on the snag of human nature.  A wise man said “The poor, you shall always have” and He seems likely to be right.  First of all, poverty is relative.  When that man walked in Galilee being poor was usually a fatal condition.  You simply didn’t make enough to eat, or to keep off the cold.  You might not be able to reproduce because you couldn’t support children.  It was a condition of terminal failure.  Unless you somehow clawed up, you’d die of it.

Nowadays, our poor are likely to live in air conditioned houses.  They often – if they’re on assistance particularly – have more children than the very wealthy, and the children have toys and clothes.

Nothing wrong with that, but they’re still considered “poor” – they’re poor in relation to people like me, who are not on assistance, and who live in larger houses and own more stuff and/or who can buy a book just because.  Just like I’m poor in relation to those people who can afford to take European vacations or even who own a mountain cabin to hole up and write in.  (Okay, most people don’t write in mountain cabins.  I don’t know why not.)

The point is that humans are not angels.  This is both good and bad. We’re built on a frame of the great apes, and the great apes are social creatures.  This means they’re also creatures of status.  What we consider poor is a matter of relative status, which means it keeps changing.  If our government doesn’t succeed in Zimbabweing us and we end up in a future where houses clean themselves, where you can have anything you can dream up and order t-d printed, there will still be the “poor”.  They might be those who lack the imagination to have their… replicator create really nifty things, but they’ll still be poor.  They’ll lack status.

The good and bad of the status seeking in humans is envy.  Good?  How can envy be good?  Envy is good when it makes you want what the others have, and instead of this leading to you organizing the community to steal it from them or – alternately – leading a communist revolution, it makes you work harder to “get there”.  Many an Horatio Alger worked so hard they forgot what they were working for and when they got there they couldn’t enjoy it.  BUT many more made it and enjoyed it, and all of them contributed to the wealth of society in general and building that.

There are, however, a group of humans with very low status envy.  Possibly a very large group.  In the seventies, Denver experimented with a minimum guaranteed income scheme.  So did other places.  The results were always the same.  No matter how low you set that income – even if it’s at a level like 10k where you really have to make a crazy effort to survive on it – the majority of people will live on it and stop trying to work or find work.

This might be an evolutionary trait.  The idiot hunter who went off and felled mammoth after mammoth was not only wasting food because his tribe of fifteen could barely eat a mammoth before it spoiled, much less ten – he was also depleting the mammoth herd and ensuring future starvation for his people.

So, the survival trait we inherit is “get enough to live on with minimal work, and don’t strive for more.”

Some of us are broken.  We were given both envy and high principles.  We can’t even contemplate bringing others down to level things, but instead we work madly to increase our status.  (No, it’s not how I think about it, but it’s probably what’s going on in the back of the monkey brain.)  Most of humanity however is functional.  Give them enough to eat, and a place to live, and no matter how unvaried the diet and how small/terrible the place, most people will stay put.

“But Sarah,” you say “Where are the gods of the copybook headings?  Even you say that it’s possible, if we arranged it that way, to feed most people so they don’t need to work.  Why shouldn’t we?”

We shouldn’t because the gods of the copybook headings in fire and terror return.

Government produces nothing.  It doesn’t build that. It doesn’t build anything.  It can’t.  Government is force.  It can, on threat of that force, seize enough of what someone produced to give to someone else.  Even when it “builds” roads or power plants, it does so with confiscated wealth and at the expense of what the owners might have done with that wealth.  (They wouldn’t have?  How do you know?  Remember status.  Throughout history humans have funded research – often in useless stuff – and paid for innovation.  How do you know left to its own devices private capital wouldn’t have created neighbordhood-sized nuclear plants?  Or who knows what?  The one thing we know is that nothing done by government has ever come in on time or under budget.)

When governments start thinking in terms of “feeding the hungry” which in our day becomes “giving things to the continuously redefined poor” what it is actually doing is reducing the number of people working in the productive sector.  Between the bureaucrats working to redistribute wealth and the people working to keep getting the handouts, a huge contingent of people is removed from the productive sector.

When that number reaches the point where the productive sector can’t keep up, a crash ensues.  An Earth-shaking Kaboom, you might say. The “you” in the poem is collective in this case.  “You” individual might survive for a time, without working, given a very wealthy society.  But no society can remain wealthy when it doesn’t “work” – ie. When it produces nothing.  And eventually the gods of the copybook headings, in fire and terror return.

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Actually this post should be called “there is no difference.”

This weekend there was an unfortunate kerfuffle in one of the private groups I belong to on Facebook between two people who both read this blog and who both are normally level-headed if feisty.

Unfortunately, as you guys know, I decided this was a fine weekend to sand my living room floor, which, courtesy Euclid Cat had two massive stains (it takes a lot to stain four coats of polyurethane, and thank heavens it hadn’t got to the flooring, but we had furniture there while we worked on the dining room floor and, as a result, we couldn’t even see where he was peeing. I knew it was somewhere in there, but I couldn’t reach it. So…) So I wasn’t aware of the flare up till 14 hours later.

I’m not going to go into the details of it, but I’ll say the reader who is Australian was making a perfectly responsible and sane argument FOR AUSTRALIA. Meanwhile the reader who is American and knows the conditions here didn’t even understand what this person was getting so hot about, since there isn’t the slightest resemblance between the two countries, and the culture is different enough too.

This is when something hit me between the eyes and was a bit of a shock.

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t actually acculturated between two countries understands how different cultures can be, deep down, at the bone level and the most basic reactions level, let alone what causes the difference, from inherited influences to just deep built in assumptions about climate/physical plant/fauna.

And some of the people who have acculturated, at that, might not be self-aware enough to see the difference, and just replace one set of assumptions with another and roll with it.  (Or get caught somewhere between. Well, to some extent we all get caught somewhere between.  The question is, what percentage is in the new country.  I’d say for me, after being in Portugal recently, probably 95% American. There are things trained in before the age of 3 which I’ll never let go of, though some got truly weird with the acculturation, like how I react to “shame.”)

That experience this weekend was the “clicking in” of something that’s been bothering me for a long time.  In our writers’ group I used to run across people who projected modern AMERICAN female back into the time of pharaohs.  One of my best friends refused to believe me when I told her there was zero chance of an alien race having the same university system as the US since even Portugal (avowedly human) doesn’t.  There were other things. You guys have heard me rant about several “historical” books that make the past exactly like the future only with different tech.  The fact that they don’t understand that tech affects not just how people live but how they think, feel and react is another of those things I don’t get, as I think even within living memory we should be able to see how different things have gotten.  See for instance not wearing of aprons, because the clothes are cheap enough and abundant enough that ruining a shirt is not a big deal, unless it’s a very good shirt.

Then there is the foreign thing.  No, seriously. I was utterly stunned when in Friends there was a reference to a Portuguese couple as “Swingers.”  Sure, I’m sure there are Portuguese swingers. There were in the seventies.  And sure, it’s possible to find a couple of them in the US, but that reference was the culmination of a lot of references to the Portuguese are free-flowing, open-minded (in a sexual way) people, and it made my jaw drop.  Portuguese are the product of Moorish and British (in the North) cultural influences. They tend to be repressed around sexual stuff, and even if they do it, don’t talk about it in public.  Then at a conference someone said something about one of my stories betraying the “guilt free” (to sex) attitude of Latin culture.

Not all Latin cultures are the same.  Even Romans, the original Latin culture, were somewhat repressed, for their time, it was the things that they were repressed about that were unimaginably weird.  So, you know, hanging a mural of animal-child copulation in the living room? Cute.  Having sex with your wife midday? Shocking.  Eh.

I think people project Brazilian (because of the language) and maybe French onto Portuguese, but seriously, it’s not the same.  There’s more difference than between American and British (for various reasons too long to go into.)

So I’m used to running into this in the US, but this last trip to Portugal was a LONG and frustrating chain of running into this from the Portuguese side.  I’d already had minor run ins with it in the past — the Portuguese refuse to accept that “My God” jeans isn’t a big brand in the US, for instance. — but this time it was all sorts of things and at all levels, probably reflecting the fact that I’ve been here 34 years and therefore even their minor assumptions rub me wrong.

Assumptions? Oh, sure. There are markers of class. And ideas about what brands are “good” and how you should never ever use or wear the others (and a complete lack of understanding some of those brands don’t exist in the US) and and and and…  It had me rolling my eyes and talking about cultural provincialism.

But until this weekend I didn’t realize how prevalent and universal it is, since the clash took place between two people from native anglophone cultures, both of which are denizens of the net and contact people of other countries, regularly.  Okay, one of them didn’t know she was dealing with a foreigner (except maybe Canadian and those, sorry Chris, aren’t real foreigners. Oh, they are, but… Canada is America’s hat. So, closer.)

This weekend I realized people don’t really believe in foreign countries either. They’re willing to accept that some things (and those usually conform to their mental picture of the generic “culture” or “region”) are different, but that the fundamentals and the cherished unexamined assumptions might be different is unthinkable — literally.  And if we can think of them, we still assume the other country is somehow “wrong” or worse “pretending” to be different to be contrary.

This means, ultimately, that even an era of instant all over the world communication, human tribalism still wins.  And with it, I suppose, nationalism.

There might be a limit to the area a “culture” can occupy, and arguably the US is straining that.  I mean, for those of you who haven’t moved across the country (several times) the culture can be really, really different here too.  Which means we’re even more of a puzzle to foreigners than your average country.  (Confusion to our enemies is good, but I think we also confuse our allies.)

There are other implications: since it’s virtually impossible to avoid faster communication and more widespread travel in the future, this is going to make the next couple/three centuries a series of epic clashes, until either some sort of understanding emerges or polarized cultures can immigrate to the stars and far far away from each other.

Mass immigration is a REALLY bad idea (‘mkay) not that this is a surprise to any of you.  People inhabiting enclaves of “their kind” are slow to acculturate (three generations, if it happens at all.)  And the number of people coming over the Southern border is like nothing we’ve ever experienced before. And trust me, in terms of functionality, you do NOT want to import any culture descended from 17th century Spain. There is a reason that the American countries South of us are in crisis on a more or less permanent basis, and that Brazil, screwed up though it is, is more functional than the others.  No, just no.

This is a huge issue, as friends were talking, not really seriously, about the fact that the only way for Mexico to be functional is for Mexico to be occupied by a functional country.

This type of scenario was often posited, even by Heinlein, in which the US had taken over most of the world and made it into cultural copies of the US. Or alternately the other countries had adopted American culture, because it was more functional.

Let me just say that is one more proof of “people don’t really believe in foreigners.”

Sure, a lot of American culture is triumphant and imitated.  Only it’s more “spoofed” because what they imitate is what they see in movies, and proving that humans prefer narrative to lack there of, even when it makes no sense, the bad parts are often picked up first.  And they’re often bad parts only seen in movies, btw. Like certain underclass behaviors being seen as glamorous.

But it’s an overlay. At a deep down level, these people dressing in jeans and t-shirts are still foreign and — THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT — don’t believe Americans software-in-the-head is different, which leads to cargo-cultish attempts to import American successes without getting what brings them about, from innovation, to social mobility to freedom of speech.  Not really, not at a deep level.

Remember that I, as in love with America as I was, still took a good ten years to understand what was under the things I loved and wanted to imitate.  And it was painful and a little like going insane.

Most of all this means that barring a major cataclysm that only leaves the US alive, the dream of a future world-like-America is nonsense. Even if some of our greatest writers believed in it.  So is a world-like-Europe.  Or a world like much of anything.

This means the left’s project of “fighting nationalism” is not just doomed, but it’s stupid as eating rocks, and will cause only unending misery suffering and war.  (So, SOP for Marxists.  In fact, chalk this whole internationalism bullshit as something else Marx was wrong about. workers of the world unite, my little sore feet.)

It’s time to stop dreaming the impossible dream, and to accept humanity as it is, broken monkey brains and all.  It is time to create the future that can be created and stop sacrificing people and cultures to the kumbaya hand-holding no-nations future that can never be.

It’s time to start rebuilding.

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.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER, NOW IN PAPERBACK:  Family Law.

(I’m very proud of the wrap around cover for this print edition, btw.- SAH)

People love easily. Look at most of your relatives or coworkers. How lovable are they? Really? Yet most have mates and children. The vast majority are still invited to family gatherings and their relatives will speak to them.

Many have pets to which they are devoted. Some even call them their fur-babies. Is your dog or cat or parakeet property or family? Not in law but in your heart? Can a pet really love you back? Or is it a different affection? Are you not kind to those who feed and shelter you? But what if your dog could talk back? Would your cat speak to you kindly?

How much more complicated might it be if we meet really intelligent species not human? How would we treat these ‘people’ in feathers or fur? Perhaps a more difficult question is: How would they treat us? Are we that lovable?

When society and the law decide these sort of questions must be answered it is usually because someone disapproves of your choices. Today it may be a cat named in a will or a contest for custody of a dog. People are usually happy living the way they want until conflict is forced upon them.

What if the furry fellow in question has his own law? And is quite articulate in explaining his choices. Can a Human adopt such an alien? Can such an intelligent alien adopt a human? Should they?

Of course if the furry alien in question is smart enough to fly spaceships, and happens to be similar in size and disposition to a mature Grizzly bear, wisdom calls for a certain delicacy in telling him no…

The “April” series of books works from an earlier time toward merging with the “Family Law” series.

FROM PAM UPHOFF:  Guardsman (Wine of the Gods Book 43)

Lucky Dave has survived, saved his Commander and his brother.

Now he needs to learn how to live a thousand years in the future. How to fit in.
How to continue to keep a Prophet alive in a world where the Prophets are nearly mythical.

And after that . . . he has to keep a new friend alive through a violent presidential race.
And learn more magic.
And fall in love.

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: graceful.

I aten’t ded. I just started on a little home improvement project that SHOULD have taken two hours at 9 am, and have finished the first phase (where the varnish needs to dry) now.
Other discoveries made: I’m too old for this stuff.  Everything hurts. Ow.

Unfreedom of the Press – Pt 1

Or how to drive the mainstream media insane in a few easy steps

By Amanda S. Green

Let’s face it. Mark R. Levin is far from beloved by the MSM. Conservative, a never-Trumper turned into cheerleader for the President. Someone who loves to poke holes in the liberal agenda. Now, compounding his sins against his liberal betters (yes, I almost choked writing that) comes his latest book, Unfreedom of the Press. Let me tell you, Levin holds no punches as he attacks the liberal media.

With the release of the book two weeks ago, a number of media mavens have attacked not only Levin but the premise behind the book. That’s not unexpected. After all, he’s attacked their way of doing business and is unapologetic for it. How dare he point out a bias they try very hard to tell the rest of us isn’t there!

They claim he didn’t visit any newsroom—despite the fact he’s worked for Fox News and had his own syndicated radio show. They claim he didn’t come to them for comments. They condemn him for—gasp—using research and facts gathered by other sources, sources they often use themselves to push their own agenda. His only sin, it seems, is in failing to stick to their narrative.

Bad Levin! Bad!

Before I get to what bothers me about the book, what does Levin have to say? In the opening chapter or two he pretty much lays out the roadmap for the rest of the book. The media has strayed from its origins and no longer just reports the news but is trying to shape the way we, the reading and viewing public, not only see it but believe it.

He admits the news has never really been unbiased but he points out that, in the not-too-distant past, newsrooms at least tried for diversity. This isn’t diversity in the way we think of it today. The editors didn’t worry about what sex or color or religion their reporters happened to be. What they wanted was diversity in opinions and beliefs. They wanted conservative and liberal reporters to balance out one another.

That “diversity”, according to Levin, helped the public have more trust in the media than it does today.

In short, Levin opens the book by claiming that it isn’t attacks from President Trump or any other form of government action that is destroying the freedom of the press in our country. It is, according to Levin, actions by the press itself:

“Indeed, social activism, progressive groupthink, Democratic Party partisanship, opinion and propaganda passed off as news, the staging of pseudo-events, self-censorship, bias by omission, and outright falsehoods are too often substituting for old-fashioned, objective fact gathering and news reporting. A self-perpetuating and reinforcing mindset has replaced independent and impartial thinking. And the American people know it. Thus the credibility of the mass media has never been lower.” (Unfreedom of the Press, pg 6)

That’s not to say opinion hasn’t been present in the news before. It has from day one. After all, many of our earliest “papers” were nothing more than reporting arms for political interests. But everyone knew those were opinion pieces, meant to convince voters to support a certain candidate or issue. Today, however, we get opinion instead of facts, propaganda instead of fair reporting.

If that wasn’t enough of a slap in the faces of all those media mavens who turn purple at the very mention of Levin’s name, he makes sure they understand he isn’t their friend:

“Unlike the early patriot press, today’s newsrooms and journalists are mostly hostile to America’s founding principles, traditions, and institutions. They do not promote free speech and press freedom, despite their self-serving and self-righteous claims. Indeed, they serve as societal filters attempting to enforce uniformity of thought and social and political activism centered on the progressive ideology and agenda. Issues, events, groups, and individuals that do not fit the narrative are dismissed or diminished; those that do fit the narrative are elevated and celebrated.” (Unfreedom of the Press, pg 7)

Part of me sits here as I type this, nodding and drawing comparisons between what Levin says about the media and what we’ve been seeing in book publishing for years, especially when it comes to fiction. But that’s another post for another time.

If you want examples of what Levin is saying, look at some of the coverage from yesterday’s D-Day commemoration in France. How many of the reports started out talking about how Trump thanked those who stormed the beaches at Normandy but ended up taking swings at Trump because, well, Trump? Even in stories that should have been testimonials to the greatness of the human spirit, these so-called reporters had to editorialize and take a swipe at a man they still can’t accept sits in the Oval Office instead of Hillary Clinton.

“It seems ‘the media’ are loath to investigate or explore ‘the media.’ However, when the conduct of the media is questioned as biased, politically partisan, or otherwise irresponsible, they insist that they are of one mission: fidelity to the news and all that stems from it–protecting society from autocratic government, defending freedom of the press, and contributing to societal civility and justice. Moreover, they typically claim to pursue and report the news free from any personal or political agenda.” (Unfreedom of the Press, pp  12-13)

Ain’t it the truth?

Levin goes on in this chapter to cite a number of polls and studies about the media, going back almost half a century. What his research shows is that the general public trusts the media less now than they have in a very long time. Oh, the liberals polled distrust it but not to the degree conservatives do. The reason for that is simple: a liberal media says more what liberal voters want to hear. Those numbers were flipped when the media was more conservative.

Levin notes an interesting possible explanation for why the media is becoming ever more liberal—the ownership of our newspapers and other media outlets. Gone are the days when our major media providers were privately or locally owned. Now, many of the are owned by corporations that are not steeped in journalism. That means they are more focused on the bottom line than they are on reporting the news, much less reporting what local readership is interested in. (Again, it reminds me of what goes on it publishing, specifically in bookstores. Now you have corporate offices in faraway places telling the store in Podunk what to stock instead of stocking items of local interest.)

I could go on, and I will next week, but you get the gist of the first couple of chapters. Levin is no fan of journalism as it stands today. But, to be brutally honest, he is guilty of many of the same sins he condemns his liberal counter-parts of. In this book, he is unashamedly pushing his own political agenda just as he has with his Fox News show and his radio broadcasts. The only difference is he doesn’t make any attempt to say he is being unbiased.

As for the complaints about the book, these first chapters are a bit of a drudge to read. He spends so much time trying to give us all these different sources showing how bad journalism is today that it bogs down. Facts and figures are great, but he needs examples as well. He also needs a good editor to break the chapters into sections—with sub-heads—to make them easier to read.

However, he does point out a real problem in our country right now. A free press is necessary to help protect our Republic. But that press needs to be representative of the people, to be diverse in ideas and not to be working hand-in-hand with a single political party.

The media owners need to step back and take a good, hard look at why their readership has declined. The answers are there, if they would just take a good, hard look at themselves. But that’s not going to happen. It is much easier to blame Trump and conservatives than it is to admit they have gotten to blatant with their propaganda we all recognize it and resent the hell out of it. Since we have alternatives—blogs, podcasts, etc—we don’t have to rely on what the corporations put out. We have other ways of getting to the news without it being fed to us through a liberal viewpoint.

The danger, of course, is that the conservative media is doing the same thing all too often as the liberal media is.

There’s an answer out there, if only the media will stop and start taking a hard look at itself.

(Help Amanda drink enough to keep snarking the unbelievable twaddle that passes for deep political thought these days.  We’ll collect for her liver transplant later. Hit her Pourboir jar now! – SAH)

Lately there has been a baffling revolt on the left against “meritocracy.”

As with almost every one of these crusades the left goes on, it ain’t what they’re saying it is.  And those of us on the right(ish) who think that it’s all part of a master plan to destroy society so the great communist utopia appears automagically aren’t precisely right.  I mean, most people on the left would welcome collapse, because, yes, they believe a communist matriarchy is ONLY waiting for the “oppressors” who create capitalism and patriarchy to vanish (oblivious to the fact that “capitalism” is trading, which seems to be a natural condition of the human monkey and not eradicable by any regime real or imaginary; and that “patriarchy” doesn’t exist in the west.) But that’s not the point, because they don’t think they’re bringing about collapse. They think they’re fighting injustice.

When we say “merit” and “meritocracy” they think we’re using “code words” to say “white males.”  There are reasons for this, besides the fact that the left is heavily into Manichaean thought systems that go something like: identify problem-find a person who MIGHT be responsible for/benefits from the system as it exists-assume that if that person were removed, the problem would be gone.  See, French Revolution.

The initial confusion on the left arises from the fact that they might never, in fact, have witnessed meritocracy in their dealings or those of people around them.

This is because, as part of the long march, and to secure absolute control of all fields and institutions, the left has a mythology (the manichaean thing again) that anyone who disagrees with them is evil. And of course, you don’t hire evil people.

The problem with that type of hiring is that you’re NOT hiring the best.  And most people know they’re not the best. And hire someone less bright than they are.  This in four generations takes you to the level of management/operation that takes monarchies twenty generations of inbreeding to achieve.

Right now, in everything but the hard sciences and STEM (and they’ve gotten into some of those, and can’t always be routed around.) the people in power would consider pouring piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the sole a feat of unachievable genius.

Most of them are so vaccuous they don’t even know they’re incompetent.  Or, like Michelle Obama in her essay on why everyone was mean to her at Harvard, they assume everyone else is just as incompetent.

The reason they get hired, stay hired and continue to get push/accolades/power is that they have the “right picture in head” by which you should understand “the left picture in head.”  They view the world exactly as they were taught to view it by their Marxist teachers and professors.  Reality is Manichean, and if there is any issue at all, you find the person who might be causing it (hint, usually you find the person who is a heretic to the left, even if in a minor thing) and you attack that person.  If the person is not immediately obvious, you look for deviationism or examples of hidden thought crime.

It’s appalling, and in a society with no protection for the individual, it fills mass graves, but it is the way their minds — for lack of a better term — operate. They’ve been trained to operate that way.  Not to look at human nature, or the conditions in the world, or even the limits of engineering and materials (what’s holding us back on batteries, for instance.  They prefer to think oil executives, personally, are holding back the all-electric solar cars we should already have.) No. “Find the culprit” “Eliminate him/her” “Everything is beautiful in the garden.” Seen in this light, the Green Nude Heel makes “perfect sense.” And is a genius work in scope.  Which is why she got all upset at criticism and thought that it only meant people wanted her to find all the little subculprits and work out all the details of the pogroms necessary to make it work.  Not getting that people were saying “Not in this world, not with these humans, not in this REALITY.”

Given those thought limitations: the fact that they’re privileging people who have a picture in their heads that doesn’t match reality except in trivial aspects (I’m fairly sure, for instance, they see humans as bipedal. Though I would NOT lay a small bet.) and that the results are often unexpected and most of the time disastrous (sometimes due to a lot of other factors, the thing they think they’re doing works, just not the way they expected.) the worlds seems even more chaotic to them than it is.

In a chaotic world, in which results might have nothing to do with input (in their minds) the best you can do is hire morally good (for their definition) people and hope for the best. They think of this as Meritocracy.

But since we oppose their views of hiring by leftist ideology (with bonus points for victimhood experiences according to the Marxist scale) they think we must have an opposite and competing view of who the morally good people are.  So they invert their scale and think we mean we should hire ALL white conservative males.

It’s insane, but not inexplicable.

This is reinforced by the fact that even if they’ve seen merit hiring in the real world, they’ve also seen failures of merit.  Most of us have run into people much better qualified for xyz position than the person currently occupying it.  This is because in the real world, the ability to get a position/job/sale has a component of luck.  It’s not as high as most people think. I mean, look, if you know a field really, really well and know an inexplicably uncessuccessful person (or only mildly succesfull when by ability they should be huge) you often can tell why they’ve never hit the big time, beyond ability.  Hell, I can with my own stuff. (I seem to be attracted to really off beat stuff, that leaves normal human beings scratching their heads.)

But there is still a component of luck. Who you know. Where you are. Even what you expect all go into it.  It’s no use, for instance, to be perfect for a job in Alaska when you live in CA and can’t leave for personal or family reasons. Tough luck.

The left run into as many people who “should be doing better” as the rest of us, only because of their circles, these people tend to be various flavors of Marxist victim. All of which feeds their suspicion there’s a parallel system that favors the opposite of theirs (and also that patriarchal oppression and white supremacy are real.) And since we insist we hire by merit, they go “Ahah! Code word!”

Which leads us to total insanity, of course.

Granting that merit is never absolute — for instance, having been close to people with the power to hire, I know they’ll pass up a fractious genius for an agreeable “smarter than average.” — and that luck and other unfathomables play a role — we have to, since our mental model is NOT Manichean — merit is still the base line and THE BEST model of hiring.

More than that, it is possibly the only one that has allowed the US to get where it got by the mid twentieth century.

I watched with concern as in the late nineties and early oughts hiring devolved to “who you know” in large measure, because nepotism is 99.9% of what keeps Latin countries poor and struggling.

When you hire for any reason other than merit (however weighted by other real-world conditions) you’re corroding the structure of society. You’re introducing weakness into key components, which will either cause it to collapse or shamble into oblivion.

A great part of the death that’s come upon publishing and journalism, and soon to hit teaching and other fields, is not only that tech allows them to be performed outside the system, but that the system has got UNBELIEVABLY bad at doing what it hsould be doing.  There are enough people in there hired for reasons other than competence.  As a result, the few remaining competent people are either hamstrung, or spend their entire lives compensating for the “work” of the dunces.  Sometimes an entire field is aiming in a completely insane direction, anymore.  (Publishing — fiction publishing, specifically — thinks their job is to educate and enlighten the public, not to sell books.)

This is the problem we’re facing.  And everytime I get to know someone in new (to me) fields, I find the rot is much deeper and worse than I thought.

We’re at this point hanging on by a very few competent individuals holding the world aloft.  And yes, Atlas MIGHT shrug at any minute. And if not, in the course of human nature, will die, and the person hired is most likely to be one of the incompetent “morally good” people of the left.

The left, notice, also knows that the system is collapsing. They just don’t know why and can’t understand the failure points.  And since their system of thinking ASSUMES the default of humanity is communist utopia, unless distorted by evil people, their way to deal with this is to fight what they’re sure is JUST our version of “meritocracy.”

To them merit and competence don’t even exist. It’s all a matter of propitiating the right ideas, and removing evil thinkers.

As it becomes more obvious they’re spinning into failure and oblivion, expect them to become even crazier in their attempts to demonize and deplatform us.

Fun times ahead.

Stay aware. Stay as safe as you can. And build under, build over, build around.  Get ready to take the weight, because it WILL fall.  And only you can prevent the misery that will ensue in the place of the communist paradise the left is sure is coming.

*I no longer remember this clash. I gather a young ‘un tried to lecture us on how to write non-binary gender. (Rolls eyes.) Under the impression no one had ever done that, ever, ever until the 2000s.  It’s still relevant, as is the rest of the post. Perhaps more relevant. – SAH*

We Played The Pipe For You, And You Did Not Dance – A Blast From The Past From February 2014

So, apparently the non-binary gender chick (no, it’s not sexist.  I’m very non-binary in that.  Any wimpy, over-educated hot house flower with tender feelings and its head up its own yaya is a chickie.  The ones who happen to have a penis are the worst) wimped out of her crusade and entertained herself with reviewing an eighties book that is about a character with non-standard gender presentation.

As someone who despite DD cups and a face not even her own father would call chiseled or rugged routinely gets addressed as “sir” and was more than once addressed as “sir” and/or treated as a guy even when she was 17 and in a red dress and pumps (no, I don’t get it either.  I’ve encountered people like that, though, when I was working retail.  When I looked away from them to do something I remembered them as the opposite gender. Perhaps I camouflage well) I wish that character should cry me a river.

No, for the record, I don’t want to become a guy. (Nor do I think I’m “really” a guy.) I’m happily, not to say enthusiastically, heterosexual so becoming a guy to go after guys would be stupid.  Also, frankly, some of us have seen the binary categories for what they are.  I.e. some of us have caught on to the fact that “the contents don’t always correspond to label.  Some settling might have occurred during shipping.”  Or in adult terms, there’s the binary polar opposites, and then there is the real world presentation where on average most women have mostly stereotypical girly characteristics (you bastages can have my collection of snazzy shoes when you pry them out of my cold dead hands.  Also, the house must be clean to GIRL standards.  Also, seriously, I throw like a girl.  And my collection of lipstick is second only to my collection of shoes.  Yes, people still call me “sir” while I’m in red high heels and lipstick. [And other clothes, before you ask.  Have some carp!] No, I don’t want to probe that.  Yes, it pisses me off.) and most men still have mostly stereotypical manly characteristics, but in any real world individual distribution is “human and imperfect” not “human stamped pink or human stamped blue.”  This does not mean the classifications are invalid.  The classifications are opposite poles of the statistic distribution of gender characteristics.

IOW only someone who has done most of her growing up in books would mistake “archetype” for “the only ones allowed to exist,” and think that in the real world or in any good books gender is ever “binary” which I assume she thinks means two categories and nothing outside them, in between them or blended from them.  (There are only ten types of people in the world.  The ones who understand binary, and the ones who don’t.)  When in fact, in the real world and in good books the opposite is almost the exact truth.  (Everyone is an individual and some people are more feminine/masculine than others, but no one is “pure” anything — least of all pure stereotype.)

And I don’t know what books she did her growing up in, but it wasn’t the chronicles of our sci-fictional kind.  No, seriously.  For instance, in this particularly book that she’s so impressed with, apparently the final conclusion is that the character is neither male or nor female.  (Rolls eyes so hard they roll on the floor.  Would someone find them please?  I’ll touch type in the meantime.) I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know how it’s done.  There was a book – Waiting for the Mahdi, the name of the author evades me – where it was done very well and the character was truly between the genders.  However, the startled wonder and amazement of the Non Binary Gender Chickie who is convinced this is the first time this was done in SF – Darling, really, Google The World Well Lost by Theodore Sturgeon.  Sheesh, you kids are so cute —  makes me think that she’s not read much sf/f, really. (And hasn’t lived much either.)

Now, I’m not going to say that this is a triumph of education over real life, or that this poor chickie must have led a very sheltered existence, because I don’t know her.  After all, the Aspergers spectrum is rife in our field, and even people who are not technically Aspergers have acquired some of the modes of the spectrum through contact – and one of the characteristics of my Aspergers friends is believing what they’ve been told or read (even the fiction!) over what they see with their lying eyes.  This is part of the whole needing to put things in categories and classify them, something that the real world is notoriously averse to.

It’s entirely possible, if she’s of the kind who’d rather believe classifications and classes than their eyes, that she simply took a degree in one of the various Marxist disciplines that are so good at the classifications and stratification.  Women’s Studies, for instance.  Or Post Modern Involute Reasoning of some description.  In that case, she might have been a perfectly normal human being who has become a “no obvious gender definitions” chickie, hopefully temporarily.

This is, of course, neither here nor there – though if she’s in any way redeemable, we wish her a speedy cure, because going through life confused about the meanings of BOTH “gender” and “binary” is a sad way to exist and also because I suspect she’s very uncomfortable over not EXACTLY fitting what she views as “female” and thinks is mandatory (Darling, it’s like your mother’s shoes.  Even when you grow to the right size, they won’t fit right, because it’s not you.  It’s her.  In the end, growing up is about becoming YOURSELF.  And none of us are archetypes or stereotypes.  This is why we’re individual human beings.  Familiarize yourself with this idea.  Did you know that our Constitution is supposed to maximize INDIVIDUAL liberty?  You don’t have to fit any dead communist’s idea of classes, either) – because what I find amusing about all this incident, including the attempt to Correiarize Correia by a gentleman who brought a knife to an intellectual machine gun fight, is not that she’s limited herself now to writing book reviews, instead of trying to shame people who write… you know… men who are mostly men and women who are mostly women, like what happens in what we mostly call the real world.

No, what I find interesting and amusing is that it has confirmed something I’ve long suspected( as well as my impression that reports of our cultural demise are greatly exaggerated).  I’ve long suspected that the maintenance of the ever-more-divorced-from-reality-victim-classifying- and-rewarding-culture (that is … post-communist, or at least what communism became after it was proven nonviable as an economic system) depends on a monolithic information/entertainment system.  But the monolithic information/entertainment system seeds its own demise.

They fully conquered the system at least two/three decades ago and had it pretty much staffed it with fellow-travelers fifty years ago.  They disseminated truth from above. People who disagreed with them were culturally isolated and shunned.  Meanwhile, the opinion makers lived in the original echo chamber as they spun further and further away from reality.

This is how we come by the spectacle of a very young writer lecturing the rest of us on the need to write non-standard sexual personae and CLEARLY imagining that SF exists circa, oh, the thirties or forties (even in the fifties there were, if you knew how to read, very many non-standard sexual personae in SF/F.)

You see, SF/F is a literature of the weird, the strange and the far fetched.  Even those of us who, should we be more heterosexual would have to be tied down (those who’ve had the first book of Star Cat Chronicles inflicted on them at workshops KNOW what I mean),  are fascinated with non standard identities, which, by definition, extend to sexual personae and feminine/masculine non-standard distribution.  (And which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what the person or character is attracted to.  … In my case, for instance, I’m attracted to mathematicians.  Okay, Mathematician.  I’m deathly monogamous.)

Again, the strangeness is not that she presumes to lecture us to “write fewer standard males and females, ya’ll” which would, at best, cause us to smile and pat her on the head.  No, the true bizarreness which has caused us to do a double take, swallow our tongue and not even know how to answer, is that she seems to think she just discovered this.

(Frankly it is as funny and sad as when my boys – and both hit this at around 14 or 15 would make jokes about some sex act they’d just heard of, all you know, implication and nudge nudge, and get shocked half out of their socks when Dan and I caught it, picked it up and took it to the next level.  The priceless look on each of their faces as they realized that their generation did not IN FACT invent sex, not even particularly dirty sex, will warm the cockles of my heart forever. We only had to do this ONCE, too.  After that the untrained puppies realized there were bigger dogs in the pack.)

That strangeness – I am a science fiction writer – has caused me to wonder if she is an alien.  An alien would, of course, believe what it says on the label about “what males are” and “what females are” and then — realizing the discrepancy with real world people — would agitate for us to have other labels.

It would never occur to the alien that the other labels are there all along, not as prescriptive absolutes, but in the form of realistic characters in novels and movies (and yes, yes, plays — Has this sheltered flower of Academia ever watched Twelfth Night, one wonders?  Never mind. “My father had a daughter loved a man, As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship.”…… “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, And all the brothers too: and yet I know not.”)

The thing is that she IS an alien, you know?

The system in which she’s been raised, the authorities she respects, the people who have informed her precarious culture all have told her that we live in a world of binary choices, that capitalism is essentially about making you fit in a mold (Darling, they sold you a bill of goods.  It’s the top down systems that do this.  Think about China, or for that matter Russia.  Out here, in businessman’s land, we don’t care what you think you are.  If you think you’re a fish, we’ll sell you the gills to cosplay.) And that she needs to speak truth to power (Darling, child, oh, sweet innocent one, to find out if you really are speaking (unpleasant) truth to power observe what gets rewarded.  Note that no one has ever gone broke praising Marxism, and think carefully about who “the man” in power really is) against this oppressive system, that exists ONLY in her mentor’s mind.

She’s a good girl.  She’s trying hard to obey the precepts she was taught and the voices in her TV from all the “opinion makers.”  She’s trying to be the voice of the voiceless.  She’s trying to carry aloft the banner against capitalist repression (Darling, we’ll sell you a better banner.  At half price.) She’s trying to give back to the community that exists only in her own mind.

She has no idea why all these evil Haters McHateys came out to yell at her, because she’s only doing what she was taught to make the world a better place.

The world is full of these injustices.  And since the information/entertainment complex is no longer a unified top down voice, we’re going to see a lot more of these moments, these bizarre public confrontations.

You see, until about five years ago, we who laughed behind our hands at this exquisite divorce from reality, would have stayed quiet.  Had to.  Our only hope of publication once we were out politically was Baen and nothing outside it, and we had meals to buy and baby needed shoes.  Now?

Ah!  Outside Baen I wouldn’t CONSENT to work with one of the publishing houses.  I don’t trust them.  They’re aliens.  And not friendly aliens.  And I never hankered for awards beyond the one I won (Prometheus) and I couldn’t be bothered with the accolades of the alien system.

All I ever hoped for out of writing was to make a living, and that’s happening more and more with a lot of work (but I never expected not to work, either.)

They have nothing I want.  They certainly have nothing I need.  And I’m not alone.

To make things worse, for all these years, they’ve been able to go off more and more on their insanity, drinking their own ink (Darling, that’s unhealthy!) and spinning more and more out of contact with reality till to be a “real radical” you had to say completely insane things and demand that everyone follow them. (“PIV is unnatural, because first time hurts!  “PIV” is totally a thing, because I can’t say heterosexual sex, because that would be like hatey mchatey and stuff! Women have mental communication with plants! My head is made of cabbage and I mainlined an entire DVD of Avatar!”)  And we didn’t say anything, because we wanted to eat.

Then suddenly… suddenly it’s all changed, and when they say what is – I want you to understand this – in their circles completely unexceptionable and sensible, the world explodes around them.

They have no explanation for it.  They try to mau-mau those double-plus-ungood thinkers (it works in colleges still!) and call us names, and we laugh in their faces.

We’re seeing that happen more and more.  And it will only accelerate as the preference cascade unrolls.  You can only keep a completely unrealistic system of beliefs in place if you can make sure no one publicly laughs at it.  Not just that most people don’t laugh at it, but that no one laughs at it.  Because once someone shows up laughing at it in public, other would-be-mockers know they’re not alone.  More coherent systems than this and older and more dignified too, have fallen to the pointing finger and the horse laugh.

The Media is hitting the same wall – their attempts to talk up the Summer of Recovery 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and… what is it now? Six? – fall on their faces.  The only power they retain is the power to demonize and I’m going to go out on a limb and say even that will fail them before the end of this year. Because once you see it’s only a painted devil, you’re not afraid anymore.

And then?  And then they run around in circles, confused about why it’s not working.  They pressed the button.  Why didn’t the lever fall?  The racist/sexist capitalists aren’t crying in shame?  Why not?  Dang it.  Is this thing broken?

Hello, hello?  Who is out there?

If any writer had ever written about non standard gender/sexual personae before the mid-eighties, which OF COURSE never happened, we could even quote him to echo their disconsolate and confused cries.  They know who they are, with their little clique, out there in the dark – but who are all you zombies? ;)

When I’m faced with some big choice, particularly one with many alternatives, I tend to become desperately unhappy, end up with analysis paralysis, and ultimately and almost invariably make the worst choice possible.

The prototype for this was when I was in ninth grade and was faced with choosing the “branch” of studies I wanted to go into. For most people this was an easy decision, since they usually were failing either sciences or humanities, but I had about the same grades each side of the tree of knowledge (ah.)  So I cried myself goofy for a summer and then chose humanities on the basis that one of the math teachers in the school had it in for me and if I had her after 9th grade I’d never have the grades to enter college. Of course she had quit (or was fired. She really was dismal) over the summer, but I didn’t know that.  So I spent the next few years being miserable.

Incidentally if have to make a choice on something like what to work at, the best way to do it is to go and try hanging out with people who do that.  I found most of the people studying languages and literature got on my nerves to the point I wanted to set them on fire.  Turns out this was probably an artifact of the place and time. I actually do get pretty well along with people who do translation for a living and their minds are not dissimilar to mine. But most of the people taking my degree were going into high school teaching, which in that place and that time attracted a certain type of mind, which surely wasn’t a thing like mine.

Anyway, this turned out to be a sort of prototype. If you leave me to make a decision on which mover to pick, I’ll invariably pick the one that staffs entirely from recent prison releases and get half of our stuff stolen. If I have to pick from ten roofers, I’ll pick the one that leaves the job half done and disappears.  Etc.

All of this leading to: I’m not unusual.

Okay, I might be unusual in hating to choose so badly that I end up not being able to and then randomly deciding on the first thing and running with it.  Or doing inny minny miney moe.

Note also this only on decisions affecting the rest of my life, or something really important, for which there is a set date, and which I can’t do over.  I’m fine with things like choosing toothpaste, though I’ve been known to set up trials and go through one at a time and make notes. Heck, before kids and a low-carb diet, Dan and I used to move into town, buy sample doughnuts from each shop, then spend a Saturday taste testing to find our favorite for Saturday morning breakfasts.

But I’m not unusual because people like to have a general idea of how their life is going to go. We like a sort of narrative that allows us to see the future. Given a choice we’d rather have that and a rather limited and crappy future than a wide open one, so that we don’t know what will happen in a year, or ten or twenty.

So, recently I’ve been hearing people all over the right pining for the good old days.  The good old days are anything from the 20s to the 50s.

Idiots on the left interpret that as white supremacy because they think people are pining for a time when America was all white, which means… yeah, the white supremacists are on the left. They imagine, you see, that America was once “all white” and “much better” so phrases like “Make America Great Again” MUST mean that the people uttering them want to go back to that all-white-America.

I hate to break leftist hearts (okay, I really don’t) but they’re failing at history, linguistics, (and life, except for the leftist privilege that means they’ll be promoted way beyond any competence.) AGAIN.

America was never all white. It might have been majority white, depending on how you define “white” but that doesn’t mean much.  And the MAGA that the slogan refers to could be as recent as the nineties or as far back as the eighties, which were hotbeds of segregation only in the minds of people for whom history started yesterday.

As for the greatness imagined for the 10s 20s or 30s or 50s… yeah.  Well, it’s like this: it always makes me twitch to hear people on the right speak of that, because in the end what it boils down to for those years was “a unified narrative.”  And the unified narrative was either all left, or “things people who love freedom hate.”

Seriously. Dig beyond the surface you’ve been taught. The things that Woodrow Wilson got away with in terms of destroying personal freedom! The number of people arrested or just lynched with official wink-nod on vague suspicions of their being German (it could be something as stupid as having Mozart sheet music.)  As for the 50s, sure, very prosperous, but I can read print, or in this case old movies.  The veterans of WWII came home and created an extremely conformist, top-down society.

Sure, the suburbs were only prisons in heated boomer minds, but the companies after WWII were run on much more conformist “company man” type of lines than anything since.  My MIL who made her life in the echo of this time, couldn’t understand why when Dan went to interviews the company didn’t want to meet me and approve of me.  Well, because it was no longer that big a deal to conform and fit in to that extent.  In that, at least, the boomers were right, and the looser company structures did help make US business flexible for innovation.  (Of course it also led to companies that create vapor wear, etc. And then came around again, in the name of freedom and diversity to companies like Google wanting to control their employees every thought. Because humans are like that.)

What people are feeling and what’s distressing most people, right and left, is that we can’t see ahead.  We’re metaphorically speaking, driving a twisty mountain road at night, in pissing rain, and we can’t see more than a few feet ahead.  We can’t even guess where we’ll be in a year or two or ten, much less where our kids will be and where all this will end up.

At least, when we had the unified narrative — terrible as it was, since everyone thought the entire world would end up communist, faster or slower — we “knew” where we were headed and could see the road.  And before that, thought the occasional massive turmoil of the Middle ages, people knew their “eternal destiny” after death, and that eventually there was to be an end times and a resurrection.

It is a feature of our brain to make stories out of disparate events.  The human brain might as well be designed to create story out of chaos.  This confers an evolutionary ability since several incidents of big cats jumping from trees on people generate stories about how going berry gathering in the deep forest is dangerous. And more people survive, because stories are internally coherent and make sense and are remembered.  (Things reality fails at. Often.)

The downside is that we want stories of the future too. We want to know where we’re going.

Right now, we’re probably at a uniquely “blind” turning.  No. Let’s revise that to “it feels like we’re in a uniquely blind turning.

Most of us were raised with the old bad certainties, and now nothing is the way we expected.

Which is a glorious thing. But makes everyone feel anxious and afraid.

This is stupid. In all these “models” of the future, usually ideologically driven, no one really knew what was coming. They were as blind as we are, they just made up stuff.

It’s amazed me for some time that the sf/f generation that grew up with the “everything is sh*t in the future” that was the reaction to leftists in sf/f freaking out at Reagan’s election (they usually dated the collapse to his presidency) are now frantically trying to create just that future, usually through ridiculous crap like “let people poo in public” and “let the homeless camp everywhere.”  But they’d rather have “known” the future than not known, even if the “not known” could be wonderful.

They’re also — not aware the crap they were fed was ideologically prompted — cranking out miles and miles of post apocalyptic. This is a problem, guys, because I can’t stand the stuff. I’ve never come close to living in it, but I’ve lived with shortages and street fights. I don’t LIKE to read that.  And 90% of new releases in sf are post apocalyptic. (Also keep in mind you’re programing ANOTHER generation to recreate those conditions.)

People prefer anticipating a really bad future to not knowing the story ahead.

But the fact is, no one ever knew.  We’re no worse off than any other generation.

Now get out thee and dream futures worth having. And then work, so that if we only get 1/10th of it, it’s still worth having.

Go.

We, Not Us

by

Bill Reader

As I believe I’ve said before in various ways, I’m a big believer in the idea that a problem can’t be solved if you don’t properly understand it. I’ve thought a lot about the current political situation in the United States, because it feels like a perilous time in history, and I don’t think merely acting on instinct or taking our best guess is a good move. Trump’s election changed the calculus significantly. In so many ways, in fact, that many things I thought I understood well about the Republican party I know and—well, certainly know at any rate— changed with them. There’s a sense that the party itself has changed, and even for me—and I am a bit stodgy, and was more sympathetic to the GOP establishment than perhaps they frankly deserved— it strikes me as for the better. The GOP establishment had, at best, a case of terminal depression. They weren’t playing to win, nor were they playing not to lose, but playing to lose slowly. There is a different flavor to the GOP now, and I think the base is enjoying that. I certainly am.

At the same time, I’ve had to have a good think about things I took for granted. I didn’t see 2016 coming, putting me in the exclusive club of virtually everybody. Nevertheless I’ve been a political cynic for a very long time. Just from those two words—”political cynic”—you can guess, likely accurately, what my old model therefore predicted regarding events in France, Britain, and Australia. Namely, I saw Le Pen’s loss coming, but I did not see the yellow vests coming, even though on reflection, I think that A indirectly begat B. I certainly didn’t see her list coming back to cream Macron’s in the EU election. I didn’t see Brexit coming. I did see the eventual attempted murder of same by a thousand bureaucratic cuts coming—but then didn’t see the BREXIT party coming. Congratulations to Farage on now having the largest number of MPs from a single party, and I hope he gives the EU Parliament Hell. At the same time, the story of whether Britain will indeed find the gumption to leave is still partially untold, and I don’t have the confidence to venture an opinion on it. I hear starkly conflicting and well-argued positions on why Brexit as an issue can still go various ways. I’d prefer to see what happens and learn from it. And finally, I didn’t see Australia’s recent election coming.

If your interest is finding a way to defeat the Left without us ending up in a civil war on the way, as is mine, this is all simultaneously encouraging and frightening. Under Obama I had a model of the world that worked very well for what was mostly the post-war order and certainly seems to have been the post-Reagan GOP. To put it succinctly, it was a system that did not work in our favor, but at least did so by grimly well-tabulated mechanics. Despite the cold war, too many people on our own side felt the socialists had the moral high ground and ought eventually to win. Given the horrors of the USSR, that’s impressive. It borders on humorous— in the same way that a man having his beheading scheduled for a day he had previously reserved on his calendar for a haircut is humorous.

Just recently we’ve had a system that works more in our favor, but by extremely unpredictable if not mostly unknown mechanics. Most commentators I read haven’t got a solid explanation for these. A lot of the pseudo-explanations are more poetic than practical—”we’ve finally woken up”, etc. Maybe that’s partially been because solid evidence of anything has been so difficult to get. Indeed, a feature of this political moment is that we are flying by instruments, and they aren’t very good instruments, as Sarah and I have both noted. But I think I have at least a minor insight into one mechanic. It doesn’t explain everything, but it is my attempt at a more complete explanation for why polls are suddenly so very unreliable. In explaining this, I have to account for two things—one is that people’s behavior has not merely changed, but done so suddenly, because otherwise polls would have adapted to it in their old baseline. And the other is that it seems inescapable that people are lying to pollsters to some degree, which I had previously discarded out of hand. But why? And why now?

Well, I’ve been incubating a lot of thoughts on the subject, and I’m at last ready to at least venture an opinion on what I think is going on.  Paradoxically, I think that to do the question justice, I need to start by recontextualizing the Left in term of a strategy that’s been so omnipresent, it’s been invisible to me up until now. I’m adapting some of my old frameworks and I’m doing it imperfectly, but I think this is necessary work.  There are hints here, which I will close with, as to how larger and more important questions can be answered. After all, what we don’t understand, we cannot reliably ask to keep working. What we cannot reliably keep working—given the precarious position of civilization just now—may well be the very thing we rely on to peacefully resolve our current situation.

So with that in mind, I want to approach two things. First, how does the Left think now? That question deserves re-analysis, because the Left now is not the Left I was analyzing half a decade ago. For one thing, they have gone from quietly, grindingly, passively malevolent, to rather aggressively domineering and insane. Actually, it’s something of an improvement, by my lights. They still tell me they’re going to ruin my life for my own good, but now they do it with such poor credibility that it borders on refreshing. And yet I think you will find, after this journey with me, that they didn’t really change so very much—they just took new opportunities.

Second, rather obviously, how does the Right think now? Is it the same? The results certainly aren’t. You can tell the Left gets that something has changed, because when the left is in pain, instead of shouting “ouch”, or swear words like normal people, they shout “Nazi” and various words ending in “-ism”. It would be endearing, if they weren’t trying to destroy western civilization.

Let’s go back to basics. I started, in my thinking, from the premise that the Left is more generally communitarian in their approach than the right. That’s not really a shock to anyone here, I would guess. The Left focuses on groups, the Right generally focuses on individuals. I suppose I’ve never really asked myself before, though—why is the Left more interested in groups? And does that have anything to do with their marked decrease in sanity? Well, yes, I think it does.

I think that Leftists tend to defer to groups, and operate by preference in groups as much for strategic as ideological reasons. Indeed, once I realized how they tend to address things, I began to wonder if maybe the ideology came as an excuse for the strategy. I’m still undecided on that point. As you’ll see there are many practical synergies between the method by which a rank-and-file Leftist operates and their larger strategy, so arguments for development in either order could be formulated. It is therefore a chicken-or-egg problem I will lay aside for the moment.

Let us round back briefly to ensure our terms are clearly defined. What do I mean by saying they defer to groups? In essence, if you are arguing with a Leftist, they will—as quickly as they are able—try to involve additional people in the argument beyond the arguers. More specifically that takes two forms. They will either bring in a more powerful friendly entity with power over a large group—the equivalent of running to Mommy when overwhelmed—or they will directly appeal to the group, or both.     And this is not merely a one-on-one phenomenon. At virtually every level of society, you can find examples where the Left appeals to the crowd at least one level of scale immediately above the scope of the current argument. This strategy is effective because it operates semi-independently of the argument being made. You could argue anything at all—including patently untrue and easily observed falsehoods, such as that the sky is entirely pink and green zigzags— and by strategically expanding the number of people in the argument to include more people than yourself, you can at the very least prevent yourself from being outright disproven.

“Strategically” deserves emphasis here. Yes, the Left prefers to appeal specifically to either like-minded crowds or friendly authorities in lieu of an argument. In the main they will try to do so. However, it is not strictly necessary that they have clear advantage in either case, merely that the number of arguers grows, and there are cases where the more subtle benefits of this approach are exploited. I will lay out the broad strokes— what it essentially does is transform things into a rhetorical ratchet. Even in a one-on-one debate, the opinion on who won usually varies, but outright loss is a lot more possible, especially if you’re walking around with the kind of beliefs and arguments the Left uses. But as soon as you involve a large group of people, the outcome of virtually any argument becomes impossible to tabulate. And even for the most clear-cut losses, because large numbers of people are involved who don’t want to “let the side down”, people will still support each other and refuse to admit it. An acknowledged loss is next to impossible.
You might think that this effect would be symmetrically true, but there’s a simple reason it isn’t. The Right historically is not willing to use groups in the dangerous, forceful, or aggressive ways that the Left does. The Left can always force a tie if they would otherwise lose. The right is spotty even about elevating arguments from small to large, and doing the same— although it has gotten much, much better under Trump, who I think understands all of this on some level. One dividend of a president who personally tweets about newsworthy things is that he drags the rest of the party into the fight. Even if large numbers of establishment members then turn around and bash him for doing so, as the midterms showed, that can provide helpful info to Republican voters—and meanwhile people who aren’t diehard establishment Republicans having a definite reason to get involved in the fight is to the good. But anything more than expanding the scale of an argument, Republicans tend to treat as strictly off-limits. There are excellent reasons for that, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the profound downside— namely, there are many situations where the groups invoked by the Left can force a “win” for them by destroying the target’s life, over-riding their opinion with improper use of power, et cetera. This is the mechanism of the ratchet. They have set it up such that they can’t really lose arguments—at worst they can have a bitter tie— and the tactic often opens opportunities to win in ways other than the boring traditional way of making a solid argument. Allow me to dive into some examples. In each of these I will attempt to highlight the two key elements—the escalation of the argument to the “crowd”, by which I mean at least the next-largest entity beyond the core arguers, and the strategic advantage of doing it in one particular way or another.

As is probably self-obvious, arguing with a Leftist one-on-one has become a dicey proposition. Now, certainly, the sides have relative parity as regards friends to pile on, and I acknowledge that most people on the Left and Right will use this relatively mild form of appeal to the crowd. What the Right almost uniformly will not do is adopt other, nastier, forms of escalation to parties beyond the immediate argument. At present these take on three different forms, which I have ranked in order of the level of personal threat they are to the individual. All of them should be familiar, but we will consider them from the perspective of the escalation-to-the-crowd framework.

• This is simple enough. You appeal to a larger external group, in this case the website or host institution, to enter the argument on your behalf. This institution is the proverbial “Mommy”. The institution or website then simply disallows your opponent from continuing the argument. Deeply intellectually dishonest? Certainly. But that doesn’t matter. You “win”.
• 2- The Ragemob, which is a sort of extension of a mere pile on, where you denounce someone to as wide a portion of your ideological comrades as possible. It’s differentiated from a mere pile-on because you don’t personally know many—if not the majority—of the people you are calling into the fight. The tactic actually does have some unique synergistic benefits with current Leftist ideology. Leftist arguments tend to be very emotion-forward—to the New Left especially, the mere perception that something is wrong is a self-encapsulated argument (I might discuss this in detail soon, but it’s beyond the scope of this article). And, in general, seeing someone you side with ideologically attacked tends to make you feel something is wrong. The New Left also emphasizes “activism”, “education” and “raising awareness” as a sort of holy trinity of political activities, all of which manifest as being on a hair trigger to intervene when they perceive something is wrong. Consequently large, ideologically uniform groups can be invoked with virtually no effort, and with much less internal dissention and discussion than would happen if conservatives were to try the same thing. As Nick Sandmann can attest, it also has far more serious results than a simple internet pile-on. It can result in a permanently destroyed reputation, end professional careers if the person is a big enough lightning rod, and get them death-threats (including from enemy-of-the-people journalists!). If you destroy the life of your opponent, you “win”. 3- Doxxing, where one involves the entire internet in your argument, but this time instead of asking for direct help, you’re putting out a casting call specifically for the few unstable, dangerous, and similarly aligned nutballs who will attack your opponent in person for disagreeing with you. As far as I’m concerned legal accuracy would dictate that doxxing carry a penalty on par with attempted murder, and be counted as accessory to assault or manslaughter if it results in harm or death. It’s fairly obvious why this is effective at protecting a Leftist from serious argument—their opponent is fearing for their life and their family. If your opponent cannot argue anymore because they are busy hiring a private security firm or moving, you “win”. If your opponent actually ends up dead, maimed, or permanently scarred, you “win”. All told, three ways to “win” an argument on the personal level by forcing your opponent to withdraw from the argument, and none of them required a functional or even an existing counter-argument to execute.

Initially I was going to gloss over the city level. While the domineering attitude of the Left is on display in numerous states, over-riding the opinions of various cities to some extent (In California, for example), it’s hard to demonstrate when it is an escalation from the city level. The reasons are twofold. First, in my experience at least, most cities have some level of political self-segregation and are usually a stronghold for one side or the other, most commonly the Left. While I have seen occasional contentious issues in cities I’ve lived in, they’ve been much less frequent and less reliably divided on party lines than national or state issues. Secondly, the logistics of appealing things from the city to the state level inherently mask the activity. If you’re a Leftist mayor who wants to supersede a local discussion by addressing it at the state level—the city equivalent of running to Mommy— you need a Leftist governor and/or legislature to be able to have a place to kick things up to. Conservative legislatures aren’t usually big enough patsies to help you. Moreover, any arguable advantages of having the battle anyway simply to have the advantage of the talking point—an approach sometimes employed at the national level—are neutered in direct proportion to how local the issue truly is (though there are exceptions, as I’ll mention). To whit, often nobody else cares. But let’s say for the sake of argument that the state government does intervene, only we in this example are not experts on the local politics of the state and are watching from the outside. In that case, it may well be that a Leftist governor or legislature would act in a similar manner regardless of whether someone appealed to them from a city, or whether they took notice of the issue themselves. Indeed, even the people who were part of the initial argument may not know, since it’s hard to tell the difference between certain local issues that expand and state-level issues that are argued within cities of that state. Thus it’s broadly hard to differentiate the escalation of city-level politics from primary leftist policy-making at the state level. And even when general expansion of the issue—in a direct appeal to the crowd— is tenable, it’s not usually very helpful. For an example, take New York’s soda ban as an example of how that goes. Sure, initially the press did pick up and amplify this issue to the masses as a (primarily in the role of “educating” on the subject), and as a result, people who aren’t from the city did have one-on-one political arguments, in and out of New York state, about another city’s policies. But as they aren’t personally effected by the outcome those are simply personal political arguments, and likely be resolved by the methods laid out above.

One thing deserves dishonorable mention before I move on, and has been brought to my attention by Sarah. This is more a case of bypassing the people of the state entirely in something that concerns them. There wasn’t even a discussion that this was an escalation from, except possibly exclusively by swamp-things on the far Left. Governor Jared Polis, without bothering to consult the people of Colorado first, signed a national popular vote compact which will give Colorado’s votes to the winner of the national popular vote if states with a total of 270 electoral votes join it. Because he is, and let me try to be diplomatic here, a craven self-styled-aristocratic coward who is just so very committed to the Democratic principles that I remind you his party is actually named after, that he couldn’t even be bothered to actually allow Coloradans a democratic vote on whether they wanted to sign an accord that may lead to their disenfranchisement, is why. I understand Coloradans are now having to petition for the opportunity to fix this. Most of the tactics I describe here are for the plebeians who actually wait for an argument to start before flagrantly abusing power to end it. As Mr. Polis would tell you— if he wasn’t busy screwing Colorado over— he is no plebian. Plebeians have consciences.

Moving to the subject of state-level escalation, the most obvious manifestation is something my previous readers will be well familiar with: debate of things that should be state level issues at a national level. I am referring here to winner-take-all policy battles over things like abortion, drug legislation, health care legislation, et cetera, noted by both sides for the fact that they are bitter and polarizing. Now, this abuse in particular has been happening for so long I think it’s invisible to the average person. I myself had always assumed up until now that its occurrence resulted from a very poor understanding of civics on the part of the left. I am forced to revise that opinion, as I believe I was mistaken. Under this framework it’s a strategic choice. It’s the execution of an escalate-to-the-crowd strategy, and both of the manifestations we are coming to be familiar with are played out as a result of it.

On the one hand is a state level issue being raised to the level of a national issue and resulting in a successfully passed bill in the federal government. As the federal government then imposes it on the states one level of power down, this is a particularly in-your-face example of the run-to-Mommy variant of escalating-to-the-crowd. And while the power of the passed bill itself is obvious, it should be noted that even the drafting of a bill has benefits, and better still, is easier for Democrats.

This is another example of a unique synergy between Leftist ideology and this strategy. Leftists, being much, much more comfortable with violating the structure of the Republic to draft wholly inappropriate bills that commission centralized plans, also gain the advantage that national bills function very differently from state bills. People elected to be state representatives can actually largely free themselves from representing the interests of their states and focus on the interests of the party generally by doing so. This is because in national-level bills, and this is specifically true of those inappropriately drafted to interfere with the affairs of states for no compelling constitutional reason, it is assumed that the bill is a compromise between the state any one person lives in and the other forty-nine states. Any given representative has an airtight alibi for supporting such bills unless the violations of the state’s interests are truly egregious. Of course, such bills are reliably non-functional, the complexity of handling the special cases for each state being well beyond the practical abilities of any bill drafter whether they admit it or not. But interestingly, that sheer complexity hints at the other political advantage of drafting national bills for state issues—opacity. Even if the bills are single issue bills, once all the complexities have been grappled with, or an attempt has been made to do so at any rate, they have sprawled into dense, impenetrable monsters full of legalese. And this is not only necessary, it is expected. Nobody reasonably thinks that an omnibus bill could be written in a way that’s readable. In fact, to the extent that length and technicality will be equated with thoroughness in approaching the issue, transparency, clarity, or brevity would likely be regarded as naiveté or incompetence by the electorate. The result is bills that virtually nobody, including the congressmen whose job it is to do so, has the time or inclination to actually read it—and voters themselves enforce this. So, instead, drafters provide their heavily politically biased summary of what the bill does, uninformed by important issues like potential unintended consequences or sheer feasibility. Moreover, your opponent will have a difficult time refuting it. Even if we posit that he is an absolute savant, and can deconstruct and point out all the logical flaws in your bill in a reasonable period of time, it is likely that he, and he alone, will have the patience or attention span to understand it. Complex bills require complex debunking. The odds are, the electorate will not listen to it. Your summary, therefore, will be the only functional explanation of the bill on the field, and that puts your opponent in the uncomfortable position not of opposing your bill, but of opposing – in effect— your canned, slanted summary of the bill. The result, if you have any ability at writing canned summaries, is that he will look like the devil incarnate. These things both work to the advantage of people drafting these omnibus bills.

But suppose optimistically that the issue in question is so egregious that you will never get a bill passed on it. What has a state representative gotten by taking what was supposed to be a dialogue between him and his constituents, and expanding it out to the crowd of all the other representatives in congress? The answer is, they get an irresolvable argument. What benefit does that have? Well, we highlighted some of the most prominent in the introduction. He functionally can no longer lose. But additionally, it allows the politician in question to be constantly fighting against Republicans, and during this fight they get to pretend that the issue is the bill itself rather than the fact they’re trying to pass it in an inappropriate context. Republicans are famously bad at countering this gambit without sounding evasive. These bills are especially useful in draft form, because it means in addition to the traditional merits of an omnibus bill, any provisions that Republicans manage to gain traction on “could be changed, if only Republicans would just compromise”. Lost entirely in the discussion is the fact that the omnibus bill shouldn’t be considered at all. If you get lucky you might actually wheedle the Republicans into being stupid enough to take you up on it helping change it. Better yet, they might draft their own competing legislation. Either way, the perversion of the power structure in the United States is codified by mutual agreement, but in the latter case, they’ll also take the blame if the inevitably non-functional omnibus bill passes. And if they stand firm, you have solid evidence Republicans are not just heartless monsters, they are stubborn heartless monsters.

You might look at this and say—”but surely, if they can pass it at home, they should just do that”. The argument has benefits, but not ones that outweigh passed legislation (to the extent they consider the legislation intrinsically desirable). And you are correct—if they can pass it at home. But all that really says is, if there is no argument there’s no reason to escalate. Consider more contentious situations— this strategy is particularly good for bills that might be unpopular if passed just within the state. Omnibus bills are, in a sense, nothing personal. Also, as with large internet arguments, it’s harder to lose an issue in a serious way in congress. Sure, you can lose repeatedly. If you lose very publically you might even start having to put the things you want as part of the pork on other bills, or focus on other things for a decade or so. But even that might not be necessary. So your personal bill went down—there are lots of other people who could introduce a similar one in a few news cycles. If anyone catches onto the similarity, you can always say “at least we’re doing something”. Nobody needs to know it’s something you should never have been doing at all. There are a few times Republicans have managed to roll back sweeping legislation supported by the Democrats—prohibition, slavery— but those are landmark moments in a sea of statutes. For comparison, look how fast we went from the failure of Hillarycare, to a fully armed and operational Obamacare. As for your constituents, you don’t need to do anything to your home district except wait for them to stop paying attention. No costly campaigns, just patience.

And what about national level disputes? Well, if this wasn’t already clear from the open borders zeitgeist of the New Left, and from the fact that the nascent one-world-government types in the EU would rather see Britain destroyed than let it govern itself again, even at the national level, Leftists reflexively find a larger entity or party to try to bully the nation with. These strategies are perhaps the most sickening. It’s transparently obvious at this point that the Democrats oppose border control out of an entirely personal interest in importing voters from outside the country. There’s no coherent way to sell it as good for the national interest given the harm unchecked immigration has done abroad and is doing here. You could think of this as appealing to the undifferentiated crowd abroad—it is harder for Germany, England, or US to put up an argument on issues regarding their sovereignty or national identity while being overrun by “migrants” who are fleeing poverty first and foremost. Grinding and horrible as that poverty surely is, the dysfunctional cultures these people live in, perpetuate, and now try to propagate, are its source and sustenance— not some vague theory of colonial exploitation or inappropriate intervention.

As for the EU, I suspect no institution has ever earned the title of “globalist” more transparently than them. I add further that Britain’s Remainers have shamed themselves and their forebearers deeply by quietly acquiescing to be bullied by them. Given how little they care for their nation’s sovereignty, I can’t understand why they even bother calling themselves Brits, frankly. They see themselves as citizens of Europe, they should at least be honest and say so. While I would hesitate to refer to the EU as a tool of a strategy— since at this point it’s acting more like an empire than a trade union— Remainers are still using it as one. They are leveraging the fact that the rest of Europe has been swallowed by globalist progressivism to try to force that ideology—which they themselves agree with—on their fellow countrymen, rather than have an honest debate with them over it. It is just another variant of Run to Mommy, by people who are, by any reasonable definition, traitors, and traitors for the same reason traitors have always been traitors—because it was, in their minds, in their country’s ultimate interest to be sold out.

Okay. So that’s what the Democrats and their Leftist compatriots abroad are up to. But what are we on the Right up to? How have we been beating them and how will we keep beating them?

Well, there are two major weaknesses in the endemic Democratic strategy. The most obvious one is that it is socially repressive, which naturally leads to a backlash. And if that backlash is not allowed publically, it will happen privately, in the form of preference falsification. That is, people will keep saying they agree with you, but will start to vote differently. That’s a familiar theory, but it has a critical flaw that I’ve been stuck on for a while. I’ve always been a bit hazy for me is why people would suddenly, en masse, begin to lie to anonymous pollsters, as their main form of protest. Sure, I personally do, because I want to throw off their poll numbers and every little bit helps. But this societal shift was comparatively fast. And for most large group analysis, if your explanation even involves the words “suddenly, en masse”, you need a solid explanation to back it up.

The 2016 elections in the US were not enough to convince me preference falsification was happening at appreciable rates. There were far too many variables in play, but most prominently, overall vote turnout was low and the Democrats spent most of the year presenting Hillary as inevitable. That seemed a reasonable enough explanation to serve as Occam’s Razor. For this reason, I still didn’t quite believe it was a prominent social phenomenon until Australia happened. But Australia is harder for me to explain away, because they have mandatory voting. For the polls to be significantly wrong in a society where there is enforced voting, either A) the pollsters have to be incompetent or B) they have to be intentionally doing push-polling, or C) people have to be providing them inaccurate information. I have no reason to believe the competence of pollsters has decreased significantly and suddenly, nor have I seen anything to suggest they’ve changed their methodology much. That leaves preference falsification. I think that lends the theory some of its more solid recent evidence. And, yes, you can still say that Australia is a different country, and caution against equating our politics too closely, and fair enough, but the resonance with 2016 is hard to ignore. Call it, if you want to be completely fair, merely the best evidence we have.

(I’m not as moved by the EU elections, since you ask. I’m most familiar with England, and while from closely following I know that the BREXIT party overall mildly outperformed expectations by a seat or two, leading up to the elections it was little in doubt that BREXIT would do very well. I’m less familiar with how poorly predicted other EU elections that went to nationalist parties were, in part because I haven’t had much time or inclination to review foreign language press for these countries. I welcome comment on it.)

So if we take the theory seriously, how large a portion of the population do we have to assume is engaging in this behavior? Well, the election results were “merely” flipped from what pollsters expected—that is, the Liberal party took 51%, Labor took 49%. That is a huge difference statistically, but it isn’t a landslide victory. That might be a clue. It doesn’t take a large number of people lying to pollsters to cause this change, just a large enough number to throw off statistics in a big way. A simplistic way to look at it (and not entirely accurate, but good enough for the general point), is that out of the full 100% of voters, only about 2%, or 1/50 people have to lie to pollsters for that to make a change. Already, that’s a lot more plausible. In most contexts, if only 1/50 people do something, that makes them outliers.

Outliers, but outliers in significant quantities. Why would 1/50 people, relatively suddenly, change their behavior in this way? Well, go back and look at the tactics the Left uses, and in particular, note which ones are relatively new. While I think that the Left’s escalate-to-the-crowd strategy is very old, so old it’s part of their political DNA in a fundamental way, it wasn’t until recently that rank-and-file party members had the power to use it on an interpersonal basis so easily. Something all three of the dishonest ways to “win” an argument have in common is that social media was to their execution what railroads were to cross-continental logistics.

The suddenness could very well be accounted for by that. The speed of the two social movements mirror each other relatively well. I propose that average Democrats brought the party’s repressive tendencies down to the level of the personal. When individual consequences for thinking the wrong thing become dramatically more widespread, it makes perfect sense that individuals become much more paranoid about revealing their true beliefs, while simultaneously being presented with some very good, in-your-face reasons to change your beliefs if you’d previously aligned with the current witch-hunters. From that perspective it’s startling that it’s only 1/50.

The unilaterality of the shift is probably because the use of these tactics overwhelmingly favors one side, so the backlash cleanly favors the other. It’s enough to make me suspect that it’s one of the fundamental party divides, because beyond mere pile-ons, it doesn’t seem to me that Republicans responded in a similar way to the potential malignant power of social media. That of know of, we have no Covington-like victims of our own. AOC cosplayed as a ragemob victim over an old dance video to the absolutely uniform confusion and utterly nonexistent outrage of any conservatives I know or follow. I know of no doxxings, which actually surprises me because I expected the first one from the Democrats to absolutely open the floodgates. We certainly haven’t managed to get anyone banned from anything, not that we realistically could. I suspect part of why the response is so different is that Democrats re-adapted a pattern they were used to using for thinking about politics, but had only just been freed to apply in their own lives in a noticeable way—the same pattern we have just analyzed in depth. I genuinely don’t think the vast majority of conservatives had a similar thought pattern in their brain predisposing them to force people to comply— the thought of which makes me a bit proud of my own side. (Still unexplored but implied in that idea—I wonder what these people are like in offices. If a person complains to your boss or spreads rumors about you over a personal argument, rather than confront you about it, are those people more likely to be Leftist? My partisan heart says yes, but I doubt anyone would have the chutzpa to actually have done a large formal study of it.)

That, at last, is what lead me to the title of the post. “We” and “Us” are both ways of referring to a group that you are part of. The difference is, “We” is a subject. “Us” is an object. “We” act, and they act upon “Us”. It seems to me that we, conservatives, act directly and as our own agents, even when we act as groups. Leftists by predisposition seek an “Us” to act as their agent and on their behalf. They hide behind a mob, a legislature, or a multinational committee that they invoke. They can’t simply face you on your own level. If we on the right speak up, it is not we, but a huge, faceless “us” on the Left who will be called in to silence you; if we in the US protect our national interest it is an us in the UN who will be invoked to denounce you; if a we in Britain stands up for the country’s sovereign rights it is an us in the EU that is conjured to put them in your place—everywhere and always, there is a mob called up at the behest of the person who rightfully should have the argument, a group that they use to bully and dominate, seemingly at every level and in every place. Moreso as the years roll by.

Now, I do not think this is the be-all and end-all, just a critical differentiating factor between the sides. For example, I would say that while the above might be helping the Right fox the Left in the polls—which in turn helps make it difficult for the Left to allocate their campaign resources (and cheating) correctly—I think that the real staying power of the Right is in the Left’s destruction of its own credibility. Because sure, people on both sides can be wrong, but the Left has a lot more to lose as the dominant force in the news media. And thanks to a toxic mixture of rampant, unacknowledged bias, nonexistent journalistic ethics, and huge bets on stupid stories, they’re doing exactly that. A friend joked to me that for many people the Game of Thrones finale was the second most disappointing finale to a long-running series this year—the most disappointing finale was to the Meuller investigation (I have to disagree, I found it highly entertaining). Good on AG Barr for standing firm even as Meuller tries to convince people that he totally would have made a call on obstruction but those darned rules prevented it—and all the best as he tries to keep Mueller from getting the spin-off show the Democrats desperately want. At all events, there is something much, much more serious under the surface there.

I mentioned the Left had two critical weaknesses from this strategy. What’s the other? Well, something you’ll have noticed, and that I have highlighted about this strategy, is that in it’s general form (ignoring morals, and when not exercised at levels that depend on a centralized view of government), it does not immediately require a particular ideology. It certainly does not require any particular skill at argumentation. And this is because this is a system evolved, like the shell on a sea-creature, to insulate the user. And with good reason. I suppose I’ve always realized how fragile the Leftist viewpoint is, but the degree and thoroughness (down to rank and file members) with which they have adapted and adopted a strategy designed, at its core, to “win” without actually engaging in an argument reinforces the fragility of the Democratic party in a way I don’t think I’ve ever fully appreciated. Moreover it’s immediately obvious that this is a feed-forward system—the more effectively Democrats insulate themselves, the weaker and the worse for wear they become when the insulation cracks.

Years ago—and I won’t get the quote exactly right—I watched a video by a commentator, I think it was Bill Whittle, where the commentator said of speaking on college campuses that it didn’t actually take much to change the minds of college students. He went on to say it was like taking a candle into a pitch black auditorium—certainly, a light may be tiny, but it can light some of the darkness, whereas there will never be so much darkness that the light will fail to shine.

Here’s why I make that little digression. Fundamentally, it strikes me that the Democrats are working frantically to protect themselves from even the smallest amount of real knowledge. If an animal has evolved a thick shell, I have a good idea what happens to it in its environment without one. If a party has evolved to carefully block all aspects of non-approved reality, it gives me a pretty good idea what even a small amount of real knowledge can do to their ideological integrity, if you can slip it past their defenses. Moreover, the strategy is dependent on an iron grip on the institutions. They need to have a mommy to run to. They need a media, and friendly social media platforms, to use as a megaphone to the masses. Take that away from them and—as long as you can keep their mobs out of your hair— they’re just scared, ignorant children, crying because they’ve run out of ways to bully you.

So don’t give up. They’re not an impregnable juggernaut. They’re a kraken made of glass—dangerous to anyone who gets in their jaws, seemingly harbingers of the apocalypse, even— but fragile, ripe to be torn apart by the mechanics of the sandpile. The moment even a little bit of reality seeps in, a crack forms in that shell, and once it’s lost its integrity, it’s all downhill for it. So keep lying to them. Keep making them miss their estimates and projections. More importantly, stay out of the way of their jaws. Your opposition is needed too much. We need you, to help us slowly lop off the tentacles they use to bully and force those around them into compliance. Cut them down until they are once again just a we, with no “us” to hide behind, standing face to face with the Right.

And on a level playing field, we will win, and they will lose, for one simple reason— we who have faced the world as just ourselves know that it takes quite a lot of practice.