There are gradations to crazy.

Look to a certain extent we can’t help living in the crazy years.  Okay, sure, we can’t help living in the crazy years because we’re alive now and the years sure are crazy, but that’s not what I mean.

What I mean is that as a society we can’t help being a little crazy, simply because we have more abundance than any other time before us. We have time for humans to get a little insane.

A wise rabbi once said “man doesn’t live of bread alone” and he was right, of course. But for most of human history the quest for bread was so difficult that it consumed much of human thoughts and resources. And therefore it kept you grounded in reality to an extent.

I grew up in a place where earning your daily living still took a marked amount of time, and required you to have some (at least contact with reality.)  We had crazy.  Of course we had crazy.  Crazy is when the human mind, which thinks in stories, interacts with the world which doesn’t come in stories, and tries to impose the wrong story on the world.  But there are degrees of wrong.

The first level of crazy is barely crazy at all.  You’re actually pretty on point with the world, but you have some quirky habits or some strange ideas about subjects so rare and strange that they rarely show up in your environment. You’re still a decent worker/father/mother, but you have what the regency called “an odd kick in your gallop.”

A lot of us here are like that.  Heck, I was like that growing up.  I went to school, I worked, I did what I had to do at home, but I had this bizarre fascination with science fiction, wanted humans to go off world, and was passionate about things like “future history.”  It was crazy because 90% of people in my society then didn’t give a good goddamn about this stuff, but also because a lot of my ideas back then were sideways and upside down to reality.  But unless you were going to put me in charge of planning trips to other worlds, or a future government, no one had any reason to care.  In fact, unless you wound me up or read my (rather wretched) fiction, you had absolutely no reason to even know about my crazy.  I presented as an awkward girl with remarkably few feminine gifts.  (In the “My daughter has made blah blah for her trousseau” competition, mom must have had a heck of a time.)

Then there is what I’d call crazy-crazy.  A classmate of mine from elementary school went clean out of her head and decided she was the real queen of Portugal (which, btw, is not a monarchy).  That’s not funny and it can be downright embarrassing/distressing for friends and family. Particularly since the family was then trying to marry her off (I’m trying to remember whether they did.  Mom never told me.)

People will gossip, conversation becomes a minefield, and you have to worry “what if it gets worse? what if she decides we kidnapped her?”

Crazy-Crazy is not pretty, but it can be handled.  In this case, the girl thought she was the real queen of Portugal in durance vile and in disguise in a farmer’s household.  She still did her work, pulled her weight, dressed herself, etc.  You might have to call her “your majesty” leading to awkward things like “Has your majesty milked the cows?” but while a tragedy for the person and near relatives, crazy-crazy is not in itself evil and does not in itself create problems for people who don’t have to deal with you personally.

Then there’s insane-crazy.  Insane crazy usually involves complex theories and rather bizarre constructions-in-the-head.  It can be harmless or not, and it usually requires one to be comfortable enough not to need to work.  The local example of this insane crazy was fairly harmless.  He was a well-to-do young man who had been in an engineering degree when his head went askew.  He sat at one of the city coffee shops, drawing up increasingly more elaborate plans for an intercontinental bridge to the Americas.  And it isn’t just that he thought his continuous improvements could now deal with the tides, or that he kept coming up with things like artificial islands to help anchor it, but also to provide hotels and restaurants for rest stops, no.  It’s that if you sat down with him and let him explain his magnificent dream, in the end he’d always explain to you that it could never sink, and wouldn’t dissolve in salt water, because it was… made entirely out of soap.

Long ago people had stopped trying to explain to him stuff like  “Soap still dissolves in salt water, it just doesn’t foam” and structural integrity and… well… anything.  The basics of his insanity weren’t debatable for him, because he was right, you were wrong.

An author that shall not be named, because he’s the last thing we need here, who wrote what is possibly the worst book in the world, and drew the cover himself, suffers from that kind of insane crazy.  He knows his book is the best in the world. He knows he’ll win the Noble (!) and the Oscar (!!!!) for it, and it will be acclaimed as a great book in human history.

His premises are just as crazy as the one about soap and sea water.  You see, h created a character without flaws, and he thinks no one ever did it, and also that it’s going to revolutionize literature.  And you can’t convince him otherwise, so if you try you get screaming about how you’re jealous and you’re trying to bring this book down because of your (atheist, no seriously. Even though the book is not in any way religious) evil agenda.

Why is this more serious than crazy-crazy? Because not only can these fantasies be seductive, and persuasive to people who shouldn’t be that crazy, but they have so many built-in begs and inner explanations that once someone is infected it’s hard to get out.  Marx also tried to build a bridge out of soap, planned in every exact detail, and didn’t listen to things already known to economists in his time including “that’s not how any of this works” and “Good heavens, man, you didn’t account for distribution.” and “the problems you highlight are already getting resolved.”  But his theory had so many begs and excuses and was so infective his bridge made out of soap has put 100 million in their graves over the 20th century and threatens to put more.

Insane crazy is a proof of “idle hands” (and brains) “are the devil’s playground.”

But there is worse.  There is bad-crazy.

Bad crazy often starts as a bridge made out of soap.  Insane-crazy, a theory dreamed by some college professor with too much time on his or these days often her hands and an ax to grind or a pony to ride.

But it’s such a just-so story it spreads and hides.  It hides so well that people don’t realize they’re infected.  But its distorting effects twist society’s processes to the point that something vital stops working.

Yes, the entire myth of “toxic masculinity” is one of these.  It was born of the disappointment of feminists.  Look, in the days when women were actually held back, those that made it were exceptional people.

Since I grew up in pre-history, or rather in Portugal (in some ways, same thing) in the 60s, where sexism was matter of fact and every day, I can tell you that, yes, to have the same grades as a boy you needed to work twice as hard, be brighter, more nimble, and more consistently good.  Any boy started out with a good 20% on me in any teacher’s head, because “boys are smarter” wasn’t disputed, or even questioned.

So I understand that in the early twentieth century, women that made it to positions of prominence, where they became known for professional excellence, had to be GOOD at it.  Amazing, in fact.

And even then, they might hit a glass ceiling, because they were the nail that stuck up. Everything conspired to bring them down.

Female liberation was played against this.  People looked at these women, knew what they’d achieved against what obstacles, and dreamed that “if only women were allowed to be on an even footing with men, they’d be the best at everything. Every woman would be a leader.”

This is a form of insanity, because women are still human, and most humans are… average. That’s why they call it “average.”

But you can see how what they saw would deceive them.

Except that the obstacles were removed and women… were people.  Sure. There are exceptional women, just as there are exceptional men, but in many ways, even with contraceptives, we women are still running with our legs in a biological sack.  Oh, men too. They’re just different sacks.  And men’s impairments, in a way, apply better to business, to creating, to competition.

Look, it’s become “sexist” to refer to PMS and women’s hormonal cycle as being at all different than men’s hormonal gearing up.  Yeah. Any ideology that requires me to ignore my lying eyes in favor of their theory is bad-crazy which can destroy society, so these are my middle fingers.  Reality is what it is.

Having gone the full ride on the hormonal roller coaster, being a woman built mostly by nature to make more humans, let me tell you, it ain’t easy.  The hormonal ramp up of puberty is probably worse for boys, but the monthly ride of women is… interesting.  I had years of having really bad pains, which meant if I had a test on one of those days I had to work DESPITE it.  How bad? well, neither of my giving-birth experiences were worse, and in fact the second was much milder, until they gave me pitosin (the second started out with pitosin) and then with the ramping up of pain of pitosin, and giving birth in one and a half hours (long story. Let’s say they believed the report on the first birth, which had been doctored (ah!) and should never have given me the d*mn thing) was about the same as I used to endure for two or three days straight.  And yes, I studied and took finals under that kind of pain, with no pain killers because most of them just make me more ill and woozy.

Then there were my middle years where I’d get unreasonably angry and borderline-violent for about a week before.  It took a lot of engineering my own brain and knowing “this isn’t real, it’s hormonal” to stop myself being hell to live with.  And sometimes I didn’t manage it.  I’d be in the back of my brain, watching the rest of me rage and go “what the heck? Why am I doing that.”

And then there were various dysfunctions.  We won’t go there, because most women don’t get those.  But menopause… well… it’s special.  I seem to have elided most of it, because I went into it surgically and with a hammer, having everything removed and having to cope, which at least was over in a few months.  But I’ve seen relatives and friends go through it: it can stretch to five years of having NO discernible mind.  You forget everything, lose everything, can’t sleep, can’t keep commitments, etc.  And we still haven’t come up with a replacement that has no bad effects and makes actual sense.  We’re trying.

Anyway, so yeah, women are running with their feet in a sack. But most of them are about average for normal human beings.  So, yeah, they can do jobs and perform well, despite all of that.  What you’re never going to get is “every woman excells”.  Even if you stop the hormonal side effects, most women will lack the drive, the brain or the NEED to excel.

Men’s testosterone makes them more competitive, and so in a way gives them a bit more drive, but most of them are still unfocused/not ambitious enough to SACRIFICE to be the best.  Because, guess what, success always requires sacrifice.  And human beings don’t like to sacrifice.

So, women entered the workforce and most of them became… average.  Which of course they would.

But feminist insanity required every woman to be exceptional.  And so theories to explain it came up, including seeing patriarchy and oppression in ever-smaller things, including “she’s bossy” and “boys will be boys.”

And then we have toxic masculinity.  Is there toxic masculinity? Of course there is.  Well, there is toxic and it can have a masculine expression.  Because of obvious biological differences, the most toxic of women will have issues beating up people or raping them.  It can be done, but it won’t be common.

Is masculinity toxic? Not more than femininity.  The latest insistence on doing everything the feminine way has got us “feminine business” and “feminine politics” where everything is run on image, innuendo and gossip: the female version of toxicity.  You’re either with the group or out, and if you’re out we’ll demonize you.

So blaming everything on men is bad-crazy.

I have a friend who has been trying to defend the Gillette add as in “But they’re giving to causes that help raise boys who are fatherless” etc.  I love her to death, but no.  While that might be laudable, the fact is that that add is another brick in the wall of “If you’re a woman and your life isn’t perfect it’s a man’s fault.”

This bad crazy not only destroys marriages, it destroys GIRLS.  You see that thing above “to succeed you must sacrifice?” If you infect females with the idea that they’re owed success and if they don’t get it, it’s men’s fault, you’re both undermining them and turning them into rage-filled screeching monkeys, who are exactly zero use to society.  (Oh, but they vote for Marxists, so I guess there’s that.)

Worse, this bad crazy is riding on other bad crazy.  Which like most bad crazy since the twentieth century has its origins on the insane crazy of Marx.

The question is, WHY was this ad made at all? It certainly doesn’t sell razors. So, why?

Because for decades we’ve taught our children their most important role in life is the crazy cakes “change the world” or “make a difference” and the difference they’re supposed to make is in the class-war (or race war, or sex war now) sense of bringing about the Marxist paradise.  We tell them they’re supposed to speak for the voiceless, then tell them the voiceless are the “designated victim classes” (whom frankly we can’t get to SHUT UP.)  We tell them this is what gives meaning to life.  We tell them through school, through entertainment, through news narratives, through the people who are being lionized.

And this is bad crazy. Really bad crazy. By itself it is a wrench that will take society apart.  We have publishers, writers, journalists, and probably taxi drivers, policemen, engineers and who knows what, increasingly convinced their highest calling is not doing their job, but “educating” or “improving” or “raising the consciousness of” other people.

Even for a credo that worked with humanity — say Christianity — when a society becomes convinced pushing the idea is more important than doing their job, the wheels come off (see Portugal during the discoveries.)  BUT when the credo is neo-Marxism, or actually “increasingly elaborate excuses as for the only thing Marxism brings about is death” it’s exponentially worse.

It’s also the explanation for why the wheels come off every field that gets taken over by the left: because the people in those fields stop understanding what their actual job is.

And it’s everywhere.  At such a deep level that most people — even those mad at Gillette — didn’t see that the actual problem is that no one involved in the damn ad understood it had NOTHING to do with SELLING the product.

It’s bad crazy.  There’s a lot of bad crazy running in the world.  And we must stop it — and build under, build over, build around — or it will kill society.

Seeing it and asking “But what does this have to do with what you’re supposed to do?” is sometimes enough.  And if it isn’t we need to create parallel structures and companies and fields that actually perform that function.

Or we weill sink like a bridge made of soap.

I grew up in a world where there was absolutely no doubt about gender roles, and gender roles were seriously enforced.

I don’t know if I fit in badly because — my being very sickly — my mother dressed me as a boy, because she was convinced my legs being exposed to the air would make me ill.  So, I was wearing pants from the moment I got outside.  And because clothes are important to mom, she didn’t do what other moms did in the situation and put a skirt over it, because “that’s crazy.”

In the same way, I was allergic to gold (still am, though not as much) so I couldn’t wear earrings, even clip ons. Let’s all be glad I had long hair, or the demands I drop trou and prove I’m a woman would be even stronger. (Of course I never obeyed. Like the boy named Sue, I could fight before I could walk. In my defense, being terminally uncoordinated, I think I only walked without falling for no reason by the age of 14.)

So I never fit in properly, but I never fit in backwards and sideways.  And maybe in a way that saved me.

Look, the gender roles were incredibly restrictive.  Women reading regency romances was a bit too intellectual (at least in public.)  Women reading science fiction didn’t have a place to fit.  Same with math, same with…

I hear people talking about how they were discouraged from math, because someone once told them that women couldn’t do math.  Ah!  I think these are women who heard things from their grandmothers, and want to have their own oppression too.

That is not oppression.  Oppression, if you’re a weird woman (me) who likes math and science and history is having it ASSUMED you can’t exist.  Teachers acted like it was a miracle when I spoke up.  And almost everyone gave me various hidden warnings.  Hidden warnings, “Well, dear, that’s very nice, but why don’t you read a nice romance?”  And “What you should do is go to a dance or two.”

Were they wrong?  Kind of. I mean the roles were perhaps too tight.  And it ignored that women can also have intellectual/scientific interests.  But it wasn’t wrong in another way, because you know, women in that society couldn’t really thrive if they insisted in going against everything in the society.

I mean, it was wrong in a … fairness and in a individual freedom and happiness way.  But what people who tried to get me to fall in line were doing was trying to help me, because it was just the way society was.  You can be eccentric — except we weren’t rich enough to.  We were at most weird — but you need to learn to fake it, to keep it at home, to hide it. Because society at large isn’t about you, it’s about working.

I could sort of fake it, but I could never fit in, and of course, I came across the ocean in search of a place I could.

Before I did so, though, the times had achanged and there was another way of fitting in: women were told that what they mostly did in Portuguese society, i.e. dress nicely, be domestic and dream of a family was wrong and bad and to be liberated they had to reject all that.

And women did, partly — I think — because some number were as unhappy as I was, but partly because women are the sex that conforms.  No, this is not a sexist slur.  Women just seem to be brain-and-behavior wise more group oriented and oriented towards conforming.  People have been looking for the way to stop this starting in kindergarten. I’m not sure it should be stopped, but that’s something else, since it doesn’t seem to be working.  Women hit puberty and become more likely to conform to expectations.

To explain this feminists have invented an all-pervading masculinity and have hit the limits of insanity in claiming the US is a patriarchy (someone needs to send them to Saudi-Arabia for a year) but that’s because they don’t read biological studies in other species.

There there have been studies done with fish and birds and some mammals, that if a female sees a male being successful with other women, he’s immediately more attractive.  Or that females are more likely to learn and adopt behaviors, if the whole group learns and adopts them.

This might in fact be a very old part of the hormonally induced changes in brains.  I have in the past tried to explain it with just so stories, since women tended to work while watching kids, and maybe the kids of women in favor with the group would have more chances of survival.  But some of these sexual characteristics and impulses go all the way back, to some forgotten finny (eh) ancestor who nested in groups, who knows? and females needed to get along with other females until the spawn were safe.

No one really knows, but it seems to be true.  From the way all our characteristics, including intelligence seem to cluster in a median, which means most women are “average” (but we have fewer geniuses and morons, so there’s that.) to the way women will enforce social modes and manners on other women, across cultures, it seems like most women just want a “conformity” to conform to.

So when it became fashionable to be liberated, they all became liberated.  It might have been around that time that I developed an interest in embroidery and lace.  Now probably not because I was contrary, but because I THINK I had finally outgrown the sensory issues that made anything like that difficult before around 17. (Girls outgrow them earlier than boys, who usually drag them through 19.)

It baffled me though that all of a sudden the fact I sat down and did crochet (still do) or embroidery while reading was viewed as as bad as the fact I read science fiction (Which was still considered crazy.)  Now I was supposed to conform by smoking (well, I did that to for a year, until my lungs told me it was a bad idea), swearing, reading intellectual books with lots of sex (like putting an urn in a picture makes it art, putting Marxism in a book makes the sex okay) and say I was never going to marry (most of those women still did.  The pose was, like the previous craft magazines and embroidered trousseau just the new way to catch a male.)

I’m obviously one of the few women who are born to be outliers (genius or moron, sometimes it depends on the day) because I could never understand why I had to conform to EITHER stereotype.  I liked wearing jeans. I had an interest in history and science fiction, and science (though for various reasons limited means of studying it) and I liked hanging out with guys who had the same interests.  I smoked, mostly to give myself something to do with my hands. I made off color jokes, because my mind works that way.  But I could control the off color around elderly relatives.  And I liked kids and wanted to have kids some day (though thoroughly convinced no man would ever marry me.)  I also wanted to have a job (even though writing was out of sight as something that would pay the bills. Not then, not in that world.)  And yeah, if I sat down in the evening to watch TV or listen to an audio book, I’d likely be embroidering or doing crochet, or painting cute animals, or… I mean, why not?

I NEVER UNDERSTOOD the “you must conform in all things.  ALL OR NOTHING.”

I still don’t.  But most people seem to function that way.  Women more than men, but people in general.  All or nothing, and adopting the “new way of being”in order to be cool (like everyone else.)

People were very shocked that young women feel COMPELLED to sleep around even if they don’t want it.  I’m not. Because the way it was promoted was “if you’re liberated you’ll sleep around. If you don’t sleep around you’re a slave of the patriarchy” i.e. you’re wrong, and dumb and you’ll stick out.

It’s apparently not working very well.  Because, you know, women in general don’t want to sleep around as much as men (some do, sure, but it’s SOME not the majority.)  Again it seems to be some deep wiring, which makes perfect sense in the days before contraceptives.  The person with two dozen children each with different fathers is going to have a hell of a time rearing them in a world red in tooth and claw where men’s superior strength is needed to hunt and defend the family.  I don’t know if anyone bothered slut shaming as such, but I know in that type of world, I’d totally have slut shamed a daughter.  For the same reason people telling me to conform, back in Portugal, weren’t wrong.

But more than that, this was true when we were apes, moving in ape bands. Without a strong male, the band got taken over by another band and the females got killed or reimpregnated, while all the juveniles were killed.

Attaching to a male is very, very deep in the female brain.  Dino brain, maybe fish brain, definitely ape brain.

Telling women they can just have sex with whomever is great, (no seriously, the minority that always wanted to should be able to, and now they don’t have to worry about having kids they don’t want. And it’s their life) but telling women they SHOULD have lots of casual sex isn’t.  It doesn’t really work for most females, but they’ll do it because it is “the new expected.”

So women do it, but hate it, and feel used, and turn against men.  And then all men are suddenly “Toxic” in their masculinity.  And now we must work on men to behave more like women.  Which btw, is going to go over like a lead balloon.  What you’re going to do is create some truly toxic males, because you’re telling them that’s what males ARE.

And we must worry about internalized patriarchy which is so powerful it’s invisible and that’s how we know it exists.

Look, males always thought more about sex than females.  And always interpreted Romance as SEX. It’s what being a man is.

It amused me because a small group of us were talking about flirting, and I loved flirting when I was young.  This is when a male friend I didn’t know at that time, but who was (I’ve seen pictures) very cute told me if I’d shown any attention to him at 17 or 19 he’d have assumed I wanted sex.  Because that’s how his brain interpreted any woman paying attention to him.  At 17 or 19 I might have been interested in him, but I wouldn’t want to SLEEP with him. Not right away. I’d want to have a relationship first.  And in this, I think I was a fairly typical teen female.

In this brave new world, women must accept when a clumsy oaf of a geek thinks that what they want is sex. They must follow through or be shamed for their lack of “liberation.”

But it’s okay because afterwards  when he doesn’t call, because to HIM he gave you what you wanted, then you can accuse him of rape.

The truth is, particularly in their approach to sex males and females are very different.  And maybe it’s a just so story, or the fact that spreading with a wide dispersion tip means a man is more likely to leave descendants while taking her love to town means a woman is less likely to rear her children.

Who knows?

Was the old normal (and for people here that would be probably two generations before me) unfair to some individuals and oppressive.  Oh, hell, yes, with bells on. I experienced it.

Is the new normal unfair and oppressive? Well, you got me there.  Oppressive yes, but at a level where people are afraid of saying they’re not free.

But mostly the new normal is crazy.  Men and women are being told they must act in this new way, which frankly is mostly bad for women and very bad for children. (Are we sure this isn’t a plot by an alien species?)

It comes from bad crazy of thinking humans are infinitely moldable.  This is the tenet at the heart of Marxism. If humans aren’t infinitely moldable, then the New Soviet Man will never emerge, and all the killing will have been in vain.

But humans aren’t infinitely moldable. Which is why no Soviet Man ever emerged from all the crazy.  Which is why what 100 years of social engineering is producing is the streets of Paris burning. And it’s a fire I’m afraid will spread. Which is why this is entirely crazy.

I don’t hanker for the days I had to buy my science fiction (or history) books like people by porn, by stealth and looking embarrassed, or for the days when reading something other than a craft mag in the train was looked at askance.

And no, I don’t think men who don’t want to engage in pissing contests (sometimes literal) should be forced to.

I always think more tolerance for outliers is a good thing. (I would, wouldn’t I? Being one.)

BUT turning society upside down and thinking making the new conformity hinge completely on a rejection of ALL of the old conformity, as though turning something upside down made it better, instead of the bad, just upside down is insane.

Societies don’t long survive by being insane.

For one, whatever the stupid song says, we’re not the world. Most of the world still adheres to the old standards. No, older than that. Yes, the ones where masculinity is indeed toxic and beating your wife on a Saturday night is just a little pleasure a man shouldn’t be denied.  The barbarians are always at the gate.  Craziness doesn’t make us better at defending ourselves.

But beyond that, deep set brain stuff that’s older than dinos will have its day. And after the revolt and the burning I’m afraid we’ll be closer to the barbarians.

That’s not what I want. I’m an outlier. I prefer a society that tolerates outliers.

Will there be one left, after the insanity burns out?

*Sorry about guest post, but I’m trying to finish Alien Curse and release to betas. And I woke up late and have a doctor’s appointment. – SAH*

Do You Kipple?- by Alma Boykin

Asking Huns and Hoydens if they’ve ever heard of Rudyard Kipling is a bit like asking a fish if it knows how to swim. You’d get a blank look (assuming you spoke the right dialect of Fish) and a response along the lines of “Doesn’t everyone?” At some point in our lives, the majority of us were introduced, stumbled into, or discovered Kipling’s poetry, and probably his short stories. I suspect fewer of us have read his novels, with the possible exception of Kim. The Light that Failed is interesting but not as good, in my opinion. The Nauhlahka was co-written with a friend and ahm, er, is pretty terrible. Captains Courageous is pretty good.

He got me through very hard emotional times in Germany, sustained me in grad school, and if I were forced to rebuild civilization from scratch, the Authorized translation of the Bible (aka the KJV) and Rudyard Kipling’s Complete Verse would be on my short list of works to start with. I love some of his poems, I flinch from a few, and a very few make me wonder if he were having an especially bad day, or was under the influence of something especially good.

So, a question: do you recall what your first introduction to Rudyard Kipling’s work was? And what is your favorite poem or story of his?

I first met Kipling when I was five or six and my parents read the Jungle Book and Just-So Stories to me. This came after seeing the TV cartoon of “Rikki-tikki-tavi,” but before the movie of the Jungle Book. I read Kim as a teenager, once I knew enough about the Raj to understand what was going on with the Great Game.

My favorite Kipling is a lot harder to pin down. It changed over time. I locked onto “Baa baa Blacksheep” when I was a teenager and the target-of-choice for jerks in Junior High and High School. “The City of Brass” both appeals to me (when I’m angry at society) and terrifies me (because of society). Most of us know the “Gods of the Copybook Headings” at least in part, and probably mutter under our breaths on occasion, “As surely as water will wet us, as surely as fire will burn/ The Gods of the Copybook Headings/ With terror and slaughter return!”

For the wild excitement and bravado of the story, “The Ballad of East and West” ranks up there with Banjo Patterson’s “Man from Snowy River,” and I can recite large chunks of both from memory. “The Way through the Woods” and “Bridge Guard at the Karoo” both evoke nature and emotion so well, and I’ve used “Way through the Woods” to introduce the Romantic Movement to my history students, even though Kipling is not officially considered a Romantic poet. He did a lot of Romances, in the sense of heroic tales of kings and princes and warriors and last stands, but he’s not Longfellow. On the other hand, soldiers in the US and British armies (and probably others) don’t use Longfellow as teaching tools the way they use “Arithmetic on the Frontier” or “Soldiers of the Queen.” Leslie Fish’s setting of “Puck’s Song” makes me smile every time I sing it, in part because she peels back the history of Sussex in a way I love to do with other places.

Kipling’s verse is finally coming out of copyright and is becoming more available, for which I give great thanks. If you can find a copy of M. M. Kaye’s edition of Kipling, The Moon of Other Days, snatch up a copy. Her notes and the illustrations are absolutely magnificent.

So, do you Kipple?

A friend of mine who might or might have been reading college program application essays felt a need to vent, particularly in the wake of Marshall’s essay yesterday.  Call this “the other side.”

Now keep in mind he works for a prestigious humanities program, which means he attracts a certain type of person, but all the same the essays are worrying him.  He says the problem is how “nice” these kids have been taught to be.  And how the “worrisome thing is when they try to be tolerant.”

I.e. the essay that worried him the most was the one that said we shouldn’t all pile on on people who give offense or hurt others.  It’s when they persist in using hurtful terms or saying things that they know will hurt people that they need to be — kindly — reeducated.

Talking to him, I felt these were the GOOD kids.  In any society there’s always the good kids, the ones who conform and go with the flow.  We’re used to thinking of the leftists as the bad boys, an image they’ve carefully cultivated, but since they’ve been in charge of the culture — well over my age, so sixty or maybe seventy years — it takes a load of rum-gumption and contrariness to not be a default liberal.  The people vaguely repulsed, at some level, by then are often soft liberals who say they don’t care about politics, but still buy all the basic assumptions of what they were taught. I have a lot of friends like that.

But the really good and smart kids, the ones who want the best, and want to fit in at the highest levels, the ones who read the social ethos like a book and want to be thought “smart and caring” go the whole hog and parrot the whole enchilada.  The really good — defined as obedient and wanting to do well — ones believe it too, even if they have to lie to themselves everyday.  They invented a term for it, even “mindkill.”

Yes, Marshall is right that this default leftism becomes harder the more open the left is.  And the crazier it is, openly. More importantly, this becomes harder the more we speak up and it becomes obvious to them that there is an argument, that it’s not all the left’s way and, more importantly, that it can hurt them in the future to go the whole leftist hog (“Good” kids are often ambitious.)

But there is some vast number of them who are or try to be good, but are not calculating or… well, aware of what’s being the words.  People who have a passion, say for math or physics or literature, but who don’t see the politics pounded at them, and just take them for granted.  So and so was a nice teacher, and she told them that liberals were the good people, so she must be right. He or she got a good grade for a paper in which he or she explained how dangerous the republicans were, and therefore, he or she was right, his or her opinions confirmed.

Recently a friend erupted on a facebook thread where someone was saying all the complaints about political correctness were because people wanted to use the f word or the n word and not be called on it.  When she pointed out, no, it was because expressing a “wrong” political opinion got you called racist and sexist and homophobic and smeared in the press, even when the fight — say, apropos nothing, over a plastic rocket — had bloody nothing to do with any of that, the poster deleted the post.  But probably didn’t change her mind.

Here’s the thing: the guy who writes the declination blog coined the term “Weaponized empathy.”  The left uses things like pictures of dead babies (staged, pallywood style) or children in cages, or the photogenic poor women in the caravans to make us react with empathy and not think through the consequences of letting streams of unassimilated unassimilable and often hostile people into the country.

But it goes well beyond that.  It starts with weaponized politeness.

Marshall said and he’s right that we taught him to be nice to everyone, no mater race or creed or sexual (or political) orientation.  Usually the people I muttered darkly about boiling in oil, people like Rosseau or Marx had been dead for decades/centuries (the cowards.)  Slurs were not tolerated.  Actually until they were late teens (when they went a little weird) swearing was not tolerated.  Not because of taboos, but because swearing and slurs are short cuts to emotion without thinking. I hate it when some story or song just pounds the F word.  Sometimes it works. Been known to use it myself in certain situations to heighten tension. But if it’s just that over and over again, to show your character is a strong woman or liberated or something, you’re just covering your inadequacies with what you hope will either shock or titillate the audience (and in the case of the f word, or sex in writing, it often no longer does either.)  (This is a particular trap for beginning writers and I often advise they remove the sex or the swearing, or whatever the big “transgressive” thing is and see if the plot/story still holds together.  If it still does, figure out how to be more subtle about the transgressive element, or whatever. I mean, they might still put it back full blown, but the story should stand WITHOUT it, if it’s a decent story.)

Beyond that, as Marshall put it, we taught them not to give UNINTENTIONAL offense.  That qualifier is important.

You see my friend said that over and over in these essays he got the feeling that people feel as though offense, or hurt at words are an automatic thing.  You know, like if you see something headed for your eye, you flinch? Like that. The young people act like you can’t help getting hurt at words.  And not just slurs, but any words who disagree with you, or prove you wrong, or make you feel sad or glad or perhaps a little mad.

Hence all the trigger warnings. Because, if say, you once read a book about someone crammed in a tiny hole and were scared, you’ll relive it all over again when the book mentions tiny holes. (No, really.) So people need to be warned, so they don’t feel all this awful stuff again.

Or you know, if you believed the world was flat and someone insisted it was round it’s just pointless cruelty, because it’s going to hurt, and you’re entitled to “your truth.”

It is this type of Weaponized Politeness that is actually killing society.

Look, sure, being shown you’re wrong, or having an unpleasant experience HURTS. Of course it does. You’re human. But in a scale of pains it’s almost inconsequential. And sometimes it’s needed.

Being called pointless and vile slurs isn’t needed. But I grew up in a time and place where the line “when a madman follows you and calls you names in the street” was included in an “I’ll be there” type song, because it was so common.  The number of times this happened would probably give the good kids a meltdown.  And no, there was no point to the names they called me. Being called a whore when you’re a shy 14 yo in oversized sweaters and baggy jeans doesn’t even compute.  These people were abusive in public because it was tolerated.

I’m not for tolerating that, of course. I’m not for tolerating any form of harassment. No sane person is. We don’t like t against ourselves, so we don’t like it against others.

But that impulse is being used to extend it to a ridiculous point: “you can’t say socialism doesn’t work. It’s my truth.” Or “you can’t tell me I’m not a wingless dragon and an ornate building. That hurts.”

Humans are built for strife. Just because things hurt it doesn’t mean they’re bad for you. Or as my dad would say when using iodine on my cuts “the hurt heals.”  And very often it does. If nothing else, it grows. It convinces kids that they have control over their emotions. On the good ones — truly good, not just “good” kids —  it makes them start analyzing “why did I get hurt? Why am I so defensive about that” and leads them to either stronger, better reasoned opinions, or to changing their mind. But even the not so good ones learn they have control over their emotions.

Because here is the problem, if people have no control over what they feel, and if pain or offense must be avoided at all costs, they’re making each of us responsible for what’s in EVERYONE’s head.

As a writer I risk that. Yes, the last Shifters has rape (weird rape, but rape) and if the series ever reverts and I continue it, the shakes from it will reflect for a good five books.  I know some of you were upset at me because they thought I wrote it “too easy” and it was a cop out. (It wasn’t, but part of a series plan.) Because I can’t be responsible for all the other writers who’ve done it, often badly or in an androphobic way. I knew some people would be upset, but I trusted they’d get over it and see what I was trying to say.  Which is what sane readers do (yes, I also have insane ones. Nothing to do about that, though.)

The people who decided that Heinlein was misogynistic for depicting a rape scene in which a TRAINED SECRET AGENT is manipulating the people raping her for instance, are more the type of person that weaponized politeness is trying to get society to appease.

So we get hemmed in “No, you can’t say that, because it will hurt zyr.” “No, you can’t talk about that, because it will trigger xer.” till the most mundane statements are forbidden.

At the end of this, because people still need to communicate and work, is a central authority that determines what is offensive, and what you’re not allowed to say, or if you persist you’ll go to “reeducation camp.”

Europe and Canada are already on the way to that.

Hold on to the first amendment, my peeps, and stay frosty.

Offense is the problem of the person taking offense, particularly if you meant none. And amateur psychologists finding reasons why you’re evil should be shown to the right about.  If you give unintentional offense a “Sorry. That’s not what I meant.” is appropriate.  But if the fool persists, pointing and laughing is indicated.  Heck, if no other human being would take offense (say, mistaking a state department acronym for a racial slur, which btw, doesn’t even apply to one’s race, and taking offense on behalf of the great and important race of communists) then you START with pointing a finger and laughing. (GIFs are optional.)

Because we can’t be held hostage of other people’s feelings, reasonable or unreasonable.  And because there’s no such thing as “my truth” and “your truth.”  Reality is reality and that which bites you in the ass when you’re not looking.

Civilization depends on people not being mollycoddled infants. And for people to stop being mollycoddled infants we need to stop treating them as such.

Because the other option is a giant baby stepping on your face, forever.

The Mind is Mightier than The Progressive – by Marshall Hoyt

On paper, I have a pretty simple political background. Both my parents are pretty conservative. They are against abortion, for gun rights, and will always vote towards lessened government control. These are views I share, and I obviously grew up in the same household as them. To most of the left- that’s all they really need to know, or care about. I’m a conservative, indoctrinated with right-wing politics by my parents, and my opinion is unimportant because I just follow the politics set by them.

But that’s not really true, at all.

I never discussed politics with my parents growing up, not on a single policy, social issue or ethical dilemma. There were certainly things they taught me- they were my parents after all. They taught me about how important it is to give a helping hand, to offer kindness and respect to others. They taught me that stealing is wrong, that violence should not be the first step in a confrontation, and that you should be careful what you say, as to not unintentionally offend or hurt others. They taught me to respect others, regardless of their skin color, or their sex. They taught me many things, but not a single political talking point was enforced.

I’m certain most hardcore leftists believe these lessons to be a taboo in conservative households, that two right-winger parents whip their children, making them read the bible and repeat the second amendment before bed. They likely believe that all those aforementioned lessons would never be taught to a child of conservative parents. But, it is in fact the norm in most households (Regardless of politics) to convey these basic life lessons, to teach children how to be a reasonable person.

I also should note that neither parent came to their politics naturally. My father grew up in a liberal household, and my mother grew up in socialist Portugal. Their upbringings, and environment, are what lead them away from the ideals of liberalism and made them more conservative. But, to stop there would be to ignore the fact that my mother leans more libertarian, and my father more socially liberal in many ways- or at least has a greater tolerance for liberal narrative than my mother.

And what about me?  By the time I was in my 20’s and started having political discussions with my mother, I found I aligned with her views pretty closely, by pure coincidence. My parents didn’t even know my political stances until a few short years ago.  They had no clue where I stood on basically every issue. To some extent they thought I might even be liberal, just because we discussed politics so little. I came to my beliefs on my own, through research, evaluation and discussion with friends.

I also came to my politics as a response to my environment, much like my parents before me.

The world around me, growing up, was subtly liberal in almost every sense. From my school throwing fascism on to the far-right in an already troublesome left-right spectrum of beliefs to the immersion ruining lines that would often be thrown into TV shows and movies to make a statement, my world was surrounded with progressive talking points. Despite the fact that the two regimes that are most often associated with fascism share their worst aspects with their neighbors in the developing USSR, or that often characters became mouthpieces and did little to develop the plot or show any solid character development, I had nary a person in my immediate environment to point out the obvious. Complaints about Bush, fear mongering over weapons and global warming, lessons about the “positive” morality of abortions, anti-war discussions, the inherent evilness of men, and the demonization of republicans and their allies was what filled the world around me. Anyone who didn’t agree with the talking points thrown out on screen, on paper and through the mouths of people who are supposed to be guiding voices was ignored and often made fun of. Without talking to my parents, my environment was almost exclusively liberal.

I hated it.

I hated it not because I was taught to, or was expected to, but because I took to heart of the most important lesson my parents taught me growing up: Question everything.

Take nothing for granted, look deeper into every opinion, every line, and every belief. What I did with that deeper look, they left up to me. But when I took a deeper look into these things, I found the ugly beast that was under the surface. I found what years of quiet leftist take-over did. What happened when companies did discriminate on political lines. When teachers, screenwriters, and authors were all hired or heard because they had the correct politics. And now the “wrong” politics ARE grounds for firing. I observed how over the years, what started as a character dismissing another for a right-wing political belief, or a teacher omitting important details about economics or history, became characters with conservative viewpoints being the antagonists exactly because of their political beliefs, and teachers making everyone watch Obama’s inauguration because it was a “Historic Event” [Well, it was. Fourth generation red diaper baby as American president was novel. Horrifying, too. But yes, point taken they never made you guys watch ANY OTHER inauguration.  And though I don’t have kids in high school now, I’d bet you teachers would rather chew their own legs off than make kids watch Trump’s inauguration.- SAH]

Over time I only saw this get worse. A kid getting in trouble for having a pop-tart shaped like a gun, a woman claiming to a trans-species cat and people defending her, Stanford proudly holding a separate graduation for black students under the guise of being good for the black students, and so much worse. Crazy events that in all honesty, I could not have predicted when I was in high school a decade ago, sneaking away from class during that “historic event” of Obama’s inauguration. [You made me pick you up after you sneaked out of the school, you wretch! You were skulking around downtown like a really large skulker.– SAH]

Frankly, I never knew how much of a death grip liberalism, and in particular radical progressivism had on our culture until it was drowning me, and I had to fight the current to escape. A culture so infatuated with progressive leanings, that many things conservatives warned as potentially dangerous outcomes of poorly thought out progressive legislation, were not only buried under the rug, [yeah. I’m more afraid of being buried-buried, like you know 100 million before us. – SAH] but when those things did come to pass, the progressive left started to act like it wasn’t predictable. Even worse, sometimes they started to defends that crazy outcome and act like they supported it all along. The culture and many people in it, moved from questionable to insane in the course of my own lifetime. For every libertarian or conservative classmate I had until I was of legal drinking age, I had 10 more liberals telling me how anything but leftist beliefs were wrong.

In a lot of ways, like most humans, the prospect of being told something was awful and dangerous in my formative years only drew me closer to it. The fact that so many old high school classmates fell into the traps that were set for them, and are now out-right socialists sometimes keeps me up at night. Having at least a basic command of history, this didn’t push me from the leftist culture to an extreme endpoint on the even further left, like it did far too people I knew. Rather, it pushed me further right. But everyone ended up on pretty divided lines, with little overlap of core beliefs. Today, I have more political beliefs in common with Nancy Pelosi than I do most of my old classmates from the high school I attended for two years. [What? I’ve talked to you. What are your beliefs in common with NP? “Standing upright is best?” or perhaps “If I don’t breathe, I’ll die?” I know you don’t drink anywhere close to Nancy Dypsomaniac Pelosi.  Or do you mean you have more in common with her than occasional Cortex?  – SAH]  I share even less with the classmates of my older brother, a mere 4 years older. [A generation Occasionally Cortexing right enough.-SAH]

For a long time, I thought the culture war was over. Progressivism had won. Progressive voices seeped into every conceivable industry, and what would have been called out as biased or overly-political by most people on both sides of the political spectrum, within a few short years became the norm. Over the presidency of Obama, people got crazier, bolder, and a startling amount of people popped out to forgive and support them. By 2015, there didn’t seem to be a way to move the public opinion away from the bright blue tidal waves that were crashing against the shores of our very culture.

But, as many of you know, I was wrong.

Perhaps I was just ahead of the curve, being as I saw the subtle attempts at indoctrination and moved away from them. I didn’t merely accept what was being thrown at me, and I looked into those damned political beliefs I was told to stay away from. Political beliefs that I discovered to be far more common than I was told they were. Perhaps it was an indication of things to come.

One man became the wrench in the progressive machine. Trump.

He was a raging bull in the carefully arranged china shop of progressive beliefs; he was destroying the very foundation that the left had built the culture up on. He showed that there wasn’t a way to simply slowly move the culture way from progressivism, that you couldn’t be subtle or even kind; you couldn’t stop the machine by asking or by throwing a switch. You needed to make progressives go mad, make them furious that you’ve even dared show your face in public, make them destroy themselves in uncontrollable fits of rage and disbelief. What do they destroy themselves over, you might ask? Usually things that honestly have no effect on anything. Whether or not Trump thanks someone for holding an umbrella has literally no effect on how heavily you’re taxed, and his wife’s clothing choices certainly don’t determine the healthcare system. Yet the media, teachers, and screenwriters started blowing these things out a proportion. Speeches, not policies, were proof of a fascist agenda and everything was scrutinized regardless of its impact.

Progressives stopped being subtle, in any sense. They got pushed too far, and they started pushing people away. People started thinking for themselves. Instead of aligning themselves with the “LGBTQ+ Revision DUM.8, 9^th Edition” community, they started to question why being gay instantly meant they had to approve of transgenderism. People asked why despising racism meant you should approve of affirmative action. Why did simply *watching* a person like Ben Shapiro mean you were personally comparable to actual Nazis who detained and murdered people? Why was there an expectation of absolute progressive beliefs, and anything out of line instantly made you the enemy?

I’ve heard many people call the upcoming generation, that being the one that’ll be hitting voting age by the time the next presidential election rolls around (Or arguably already did back in 2016), the most conservative generation to date. I wouldn’t say that’s strictly true. While yes, a fairly large number ranging around 59% of the upcoming generation leans more conservative or moderate (As of 2+ years ago), I’d argue that this generation is instead anti-progressive. Children, who saw progressivism at its worst, grew up not only being drowned by liberalism but being dragged into the depths by progressivism and its insanity, having to learn to fight back and pull themselves up above the waves. They’re not all necessarily conservative, but for every liberal golden boy and girl sacrificed at the altar for saying one thing wrong, or having one wrong opinion, another person is moved away from the progressive left.

For a long time I thought the culture was lost. But I suppose I should have had more faith that others would do as I did. That they would be attracted to the forbidden fruit of conservatism, just because they were told it was poison. I should have realized that the culture would start moving away from the ramping up craziness, and not only highlight it, but mock it. I should have seen that a culture under such progressivism couldn’t survive for long. Regardless of their upbringing, the world around them, and the indoctrination attempts, they moved away from the progressive world surrounding of them. They started to dominate the internet, tear down “safe spaces”, and utilize the world around them in a way the older generation could never do nearly as efficiently.

They took the pen, the keyboard, the power of voice itself, and told the progressive left to fuck off.

For the most part I can be at peace with this. I do have a concern about the amount of actual Nazis that the left it creating, both within their own ranks, and by imprinting on the impressionable and rebellious youth on the idea Nazism is bad [and all powerful, that’s the dangerous lie- SAH]. Which is obviously true, Nazism is bad. But when approving of border security or questioning the Russian conspiracy is enough to make you a full scale Nazi, some kids will just mindlessly embrace that title since it’s so meaningless now anyway. But I’ll leave Nazi-creation on the progressives’ conscience.  Frankly that’s a discussion for another time.

What’s clear is that society fought back at that culture, in a way none of us could really expect it to. It fought back in big waves, and in small ones. From the reaction to the … ah… problematic director of The Last Jedi, to the immediate mocking of Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer being racist, this past year alone has shown an increased scrutiny of the progressive agenda shoved down our throats at every turn. Though the progressive left is sometimes deaf this change, to the waves tearing their ship apart, they will notice when it starts sinking.  They’ll eventually come to realize that they’re in a world that’s against them now. We are the waves now, an ocean of people that are spitting progressivism out.

From a political ideology that’s been quiet — out sometimes of mere curtesy — for the past few decades, the loud and obnoxious progressives are now meeting a growing (conservative and libertarian) force that has been finally pushed too far. A force they don’t know how to deal with, except by being more elitist, more exclusionary [more stone-cold insane- SAH] and pushing more people into opposing them.

We’ve all started to become that wrench in the machine, and the left is ripping out the cogs to try and fix it.

SUNDAY BOOK PROMO:

FROM ALMA BOYKIN: Merchant and Empire: Merchant and Empire Book Four.

Do Not Waken the Gods…

Tycho Rhonarida spent his life blending in and staying out of notice. Now he travels with the Great Northern Emperor’s Progress, the only southerner in the company. The farther from the Free Cities they travel, the more and more corruption, warped magic, and unrest the emperor discovers. Tycho senses something very wrong, something coming from the kingdom of Liambruu, something only he can recognize. What has King Sanchohaakon done, that even the gods take heed?

Tycho Spellbreaker the emperor named him. Now, Tycho must balance his duty to the emperor and his desire for commercial success. He who has avoided notice for so long, the only man without magic, may be the only person who can see the truth and stop Liambruu.

When the gods of the north walk, the world trembles.

FROM DAVID BURKHEAD:  The Unmasking (Dhampyre the Hunter Book 1).

No sane person believes in vampires.

And that’s exactly the way the vampires want it. For centuries vampires have existed among us, hiding solitary in the shadows, preying on an unsuspecting humanity. Secrecy is their weapon and their security. In times past when humanity discovered them, vampires relied on their other weapon–fear–keeping humans too terrified to use their superior numbers and ability to walk the day to exterminate the vampires.

Dani Herzeg is a dhampyre, born to a vampire mother for the express purpose of serving as an aid and daytime guard. Instead, she hunts vampires. Only now some vampires are no longer hunting alone. Combining into gangs and going on bloody killing sprees, almost uncaring of keeping the secret of their existence from the larger world.

With Indianapolis police detective James Ware her only ally, Dani must try to stop the bloodshed before humanity learns the Secret and vampires launch a campaign of terror against the human world.

Or is it already too late?

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: winter

Because of a post on FB yesterday (not mine) I remembered that almost forty years ago, when I was an exchange student in Ohio, the history books said something like “the American dream is dead, if in fact it even ever existed.”  Not those words, but that was the general thought.

Even back then this annoyed me no end. I saw things like my thoroughly middle class host family going out and buying a TV for the kitchen, so mom could watch TV while cooking.  They did this on the spur of the moment, one day.  In Portugal at the time (now I swear mom has a TV in every room, and being the woman who listens to audio books while doing household chores, I’m out of stones to throw) such a purchase would take weeks if not months of planning and preparing.

But meanwhile people were moaning and bitching the American dream was dead, and if you weren’t born elite, you’d never become elite.

It’s all in how you talk about it. All in what you consider elite and the American dream and a good life, I guess.  And yes, the time I was in the US as an exchange student was… depressing.  We had Carter and Malaise. There was a feeling of the closing of opportunity mostly because the “environmentalists”had convinced us all that we were about to run out of oil.  Or at least they’d convinced those of us who were young enough.

Then there was Reagan.

In the eighties we knew America was becoming haves and have nots, the early version of the one percenters, and media preached how you know, a few would be riding private jets while the rest of us watched from our thatched cottages, if we were so lucky,or our mud holes, otherwise.

Science fiction magazines were filled with dystopian stories about how the decline of America had started under Reagan and now it was all feudal techno overlords and the struggling, starving peasants.

This continued into the Clinton years.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s still the mental picture of our “elites” who are struggling so hard to stay on top, because you know…

But anyway, my point here was that we’ve been packed full of idiocy in American schools, probably forever. Mostly because academics like theories, and therefore tend to jump on the theory bandwagon.

And yet America continues to succeed.  And the scales continue falling from people’s eyes.

Years ago my son’s then 11th grade class attacked my blog at the command of the English teacher who took offense at my not “respecting” her by making fun of an assignment that confused culture and race.

What was notable about that was how incoherent and agrammatical these people were (who were getting As, mind you. Son was getting Bs because he used PRONOUNS. The idiot teacher apparently didn’t know the difference between that and adverbs. I finally got the attack to stop by telling her that if one more of the idiots came to my blog I was going to post my son’s “corrected” assignments, after scanning them in.  It stopped, cold.)

People from abroad were horrified and said “but how can America succeed if this is how they educate their children” (in an elite program, mind.)

My reaction was “It don’t make no nevermind. They’ll learn.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald was always wrong when he said “there are no second acts in American life.” (He meant there was no time for appreciating the fruits of your labor before the inevitable decline of old age. And no, I also don’t know what he was drinking. I’d guess turpentine, but I’m mean.)  He is particularly wrong today.

We are such a wealthy country we can afford to fill our kids heads full of shiite and the economy and society don’t collapse.  They don’t collapse because there are second and third, and sometimes fourth acts in American life.  We live longer and more healthy than (the mostly socialized medicine) rest of the world. At sixty or so, when our grandparents wound down to elderly we’re often starting our second (or third) career.

But more importantly we can learn, and never more than now when online learning for whatever fascinates you is available.

I used to be amazed that every American had a hobby, but even more amazed with people well past thirty (and fifty, and sixty) going out and taking classes and trying to learn things.

By human standards, we’re more neurotic than shaved monkeys, that’s true. Compared to the rest of humanity, we seem to value not at all sitting back and chewing our gums by the fireside while pondering where we’ve been and what we’ve done. We value looking forward and doing and creating more.

Well, a portion of us do. The rest like talking about how they’ve been hard done by and sitting back and enjoying being victims.

But they’re not a majority.  And in the end they’re not important.

What gives America its tempo, its abilities, is the going forward and doing other things.

Yeah, my generation (all over the world, really) was spectacularly maleducated, but not as much as our children.  But we got better.  And they will too. Unless we coddle them and are afraid to tell them the hard truths.

Don’t do that.  Growing up hurts. But it leads to spectacular third acts.

And keeps America playing at the center of the world, as the engine of civilization.

Let’s get on that.

Kamala Harris’ The Truths We Hold: More Smoke and Mirrors  – by Amanda S. Green

I’m baaaaack.

Whether that means you should run and hide or I should fear for my liver, I’m not sure. Probably both. But maybe not. After all, we’ve already discussed books by Clinton, Sanders and Lenin. Surely, I couldn’t find something to drive me to drink even more than those or you to worry about my sanity. Well, I’ve never been one to back away from a challenge and I think I’ve met it.

I give you The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris.

Yes, that Kamala Harris. The current sitting senator from California who is making every impression that she’s going to run for president but who refuses to actually say so.

Oh the things I do to help Sarah keep your guys entertained. VBEG

On the surface, Harris should be the picture of the American Dream. The daughter of immigrants—her mother immigrated from India in 1960 and her father from Jamaica in 1961. Until her parents divorced when she was seven, Harris grew up in Berkley. And that is where, if you really look closely, the “dream” diverges from the path. Her mother, a breast cancer scientist, received custody of Harris and her younger sister. She then accepted a job in Canada and Harris grew up there. She graduated from a Montreal high school. That is when she returned to the US to attend college.

Not that you’d know that by reading the description of the book on Amazon:

From one of America’s most inspiring political leaders, a book about the core truths that unite us, and the long struggle to discern what those truths are and how best to act upon them, in her own life and across the life of our country.

Senator Kamala Harris’s commitment to speaking truth is informed by her upbringing. The daughter of immigrants, she was raised in an Oakland, California community that cared deeply about social justice; her parents–an esteemed economist from Jamaica and an admired cancer researcher from India–met as activists in the civil rights movement when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Growing up, Harris herself never hid her passion for justice, and when she became a prosecutor out of law school, a deputy district attorney, she quickly established herself as one of the most innovative change agents in American law enforcement. . . .

So what does she mean by the title of her book? Will we know—and will we be able to stomach it—by the time we finish the book? Only time will tell.

The book opens with Harris recalling election night 2016. She talks about her husband and how he makes certain noises when he reads the paper that warn her he’s seen something she’s not going to like. So you can just imagine the noises he made as they wound their way toward the election night watch party as the media began showing her dear Hillary Clinton wasn’t going to win.

It quickly becomes clear where Harris stands when it comes to the current president—as if any of us needed any clarification. She even manages to throw in a reference to her children’s book as she relates the events of Election Night 2016.

Like any “good” politician, Harris had everything in place for her victory party. The venue had been secured. Decorations in place, including balloons ready to drop from the ceiling. Food and drink and who knows what else (it is the People’s Republic of California, after all). Everything was perfect, especially since the polls had her winning without any real problem.

Except for this one little blight on her evening. Her pal Hillary wasn’t doing so good.

Yet even as we prepared for that hard-earned celebration, all eyes were on our screens as state after state came back with numbers that told a troubling story. (The Truths We Hold, Kindle Edition, loc. 84)

I guess “troubling” is one way to put it. The majority of people outside of certain Democratic enclaves like San Francisco and NYC felt otherwise.

And I’m still trying to figure out which “truths” she refers to in the book’s title and who this “we” is. While I might not always agree with what Trump does, I still prefer him to Hillary or Bernie.

But, as you’ll see as we move further into the book, Harris knows how to manipulate her audience. Instead of describing why the results were so “troubling” to her, she pulls her 9-year-old godson into the story. According to her, this young boy came up to her table, tears in his eyes. Being the good godmother that she is, she wanted to make sure none of the other kids had been picking on him. Oh no, it hadn’t been anything like this. It was far worse (yes, irony is high in that statement).

Alexander looked up and locked eyes with mine. His voice was trembling. “Auntie Kamala, that man can’t win. He’s not going to win, is he?” Alexander’s worry broke my heart. I didn’t want anyone making a child feel that way. Eight years earlier, many of us had cried tears of joy when Barack Obama was elected president. And now, to see Alexander’s fear. .. (The Truths We Hold, location 88).

My first question: why was he afraid? Your average 9-year-old doesn’t know diddly about politics and certainly doesn’t follow what candidates say. So what had his loving godmother and the other adults in his life been telling him? [DEAR G-D it’s another woke 9 year old. Points for not being 6 or 8, but other than that, if the kid exists at all he’s being made a puppet of his older relatives, and the left’s need to believe the hoary legend that children speak with the voice of G-d. Of course, it helps that so few of them have or spend any time with their kids when they chance not to have aborted them. They really have no clue what the real little blighters are.  I award Kamala Harris no points and may G-d have mercy on her soul. -SAH]

More importantly, why?

Then there’s the follow up of why hadn’t they explained to him about the checks and balances of Congress and the courts? Oh, because he’s nine and that doesn’t fit the narrative maybe? You can’t do anything to take away from the boogeyman image of Trump they’ve been doing their best to build not only for the media but for everyone who will listen.

So how did “Auntie Kamala” respond?

She and the boy’s father took him outside to talk about what was happening.

“Alexander, you know how sometimes superheroes are facing a big challenge because a villain is coming for them? What do they do when that happens?”

“They fight back,” he whimpered.

“That’s right. And they fight back with emotion, because all the best superheroes have big emotions just like you. But they always fight back, right? So that’s what we’re going to do.” (The Truths We Hold, location 92)

And that, my friends, is our first indication of how Harris and others of her ilk think and plot and plan. They don’t fight with facts and figures. They fight with emotions. They appeal to the emotions of their constituents, often without regard to the facts or the cost or the consequences of what they propose. It’s all about the feelz and has little, if anything, to do with reality.

Oh, by the way, that was also a none-too-subtle plug for her children’s book. I won’t link to it. If you’re interested, just look her up on Amazon.

But consider her comment to Alexander. Superheroes fight back with emotion. Now exchange “superhero” with Democrat and you have what is happening now. We saw it in Texas with Beto O’Rourke, we’re seeing it on the Hill over the shutdown, we see it every time the ACA or iterations of it are put forth by the Dems. It is all emotion—no, it is all emotional manipulation—and not what will happen if we let emotion rule.

Consequences? There won’t be any consequences, at least that’s what they’d have us believe.

After “reassuring” her godson, Harris had something else to do. It was time to give her victory speech. Of course, boo-hoo, it couldn’t be the speech she wanted to give. After all, her beloved Hillary had lost and her speech had been written with the idea that the opposite would have been true. So she winged it (if you believe that, I have some property I want to discuss with you).

I told the crowd we had a task in front of us. I said the stakes were high. We had to be committed to bringing our country together, to doing what was required to protect our fundamental values and ideals. (The Truths We Hold, location 110)

Once again, I find myself asking who she’s referring to. Her liberal California supporters? What about the rest of the nation? Then there’s the very important question of what these so-called “fundamental values and ideals” happen to be. I can take a pretty damned good guess and so can you. Just as we know who will pay for it all, not that Harris or her cronies will admit it. They will happily appeal to our emotions and tell us the government will pay for it, praying as they do that we forget that we are the ones paying for the government.

Bastards.

What we have to remember is that Harris sees this as a battle for “the soul of our nation.” (TTWH, location 118). She probably sees herself fighting on the side of angels. I don’t know about you, but I have her on another side. But that’s just me.

Just in case there’s any doubt about how she feels, she makes it clear here:

[Referring to President Trump] we’ve seen an administration align itself with white supremacists at home and cozy up to dictators abroad; rip babies from their mothers’ arms in grotesque violation of their human rights; give corporations and the wealthy huge tax cuts while ignoring the middle class; derail our fight against climate change; sabotage health care and imperil a woman’s right to control her own body; all while lashing out at seemingly everything and everyone, including the very idea of a free and independent press. (TTWH, location 119)

Say what? It would take more time than I have this morning to note all the times her beloved Obama aligned himself with anti-white activists, anti-American or anti-Jewish dictators. Oh, and let’s not forget about how ICE under Obama did exactly what the Democrats are so upset with now. Where was the outrage then? I could keep going but won’t.

Oh, to hell with that. I will at least for a bit longer, at least where it comes to the idea of Trump trying to do away with a “free and independent press”. In one way, she’s right. He has been on the attack where the media is concerned. But he isn’t trying to shut down honest reporting. What he has been railing again, as we all should be, is the biased reporting in the media. I’m not saying the media hasn’t always had bias. It has. But never has it been so apparent as it is now. Never has the media been so intent on making and creating the news than it is now. That isn’t reporting. That is propaganda and I, for one, and tired of it.

I believe there is no more important and consequential antidote for these times than a reciprocal relationship of trust. You give and you receive trust. And one of the most important ingredients in a relationship of trust is that we speak truth. It matters what we say. What we mean. . . We need to speak truth: that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and anti-Semitism are real in this country, and we need to confront those forces. . . We must speak truth about our mass incarceration crisis—that we put more people in prison than any country on earth, for no good reason. We must speak truth about police brutality, about racial bias, about the killing of unarmed black men. (TTWH, locations 129-140)

Yep, she’s doing it again. She’s appealing to emotion without supporting fact. She’s hitting all the talking points of the Democratic platform. Note, if you will, who the common “bad guy” happens to be. The white guy (or gal) who isn’t getting on the bandwagon with her. Apparently only “unarmed” black men are being killed by cops. No discussion about the number of cops being targeted by the community-at-large. Racial bias only flows against blacks and no one else. At least that’s the implication.

It is, as with so much from the dems, all smoke and mirrors without substance.

Does that mean everything she says is wrong? No. We do have problems in this country that need to be addressed. But the ploy of playing to emotions to drive a further wedge between different segments of society isn’t going to do anything except make things worse.

In other words, she is doing exactly what she claims Trump does.

What sort of superhero does that make her?

This book is not meant to be a policy platform, much less a fifty-point plan. (TTWH, location 144)

Really? We aren’t through the preface and we’ve already gotten the basis for her future presidential run. If this really was merely a “collection of ideas and viewpoints and stories” from Harris and others, would it have begun with such a clear attack on Trump and conservatives across the nation? If it wasn’t her launching platform for a presidential bid, would it have come out just this month, at a time when she is visiting Iowa and other key states?

I think it’s obvious the book is meant to help drum up interest and support for her in 2020. The liberals can’t have their beloved Obama back in the Oval Office as president. Many are looking to Harris as the next best thing. Of course, there are those who want Michelle Obama. Others who love them some Bernie or Fauxcahantus.

Of them all, Harris is potentially the most dangerous. She knows how to manipulate a crowd. As she said, her “superheroes” are emotional and fight with big emotions. It is up to us to figure out how best to combat her and those like her.

Now to find something to take the bad taste out of my mouth. I’ll continue the running commentary on the book next week.

(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)

*I finally slept (so well I didn’t move till 5 am or so, when a cat jumped on my stomach) and I need to finish a novel, so it can come out this month. So excuse not writing a new post.  And in case you wonder, this post is mostly a sermon to myself today, yes.  I must take my own medicine at last – SAH.*

Hope and Change a Blast From The Past From August 2016

I was very confused, back in 08 to hear the mindless chants of “hope, change.”  They sounded so gleeful.  Also hope and change are not two things you normally put together.

Yes, yes, I KNOW what they thought they meant.  In the media narrative, the GWB times were hopeless and with no jobs and (and we hadn’t seen anything yet!) so change would bring us hope.

They were out of their rocking minds, obviously.

Look, I’m a libertarian. That means, compared to our current system of having the government play helicopter parent to you from cradle to grave, I advocate change.  DRASTIC change.

To get where I want to be, there would be massive dislocation of money and human resources.  Think of the unemployment crisis as bureaucrats without number got run off their jobs. (Okay, now wipe that grin off your face.)  Think of all the genuine scientific research that would have to find a new way to fund itself.  Think of the children.  No, really, think of the children.

I think what we have for a department of Children Services is inefficient, stupid and possibly harmful, but we’d still need to retool and find another way to perform the job of making sure most kids are mostly safe, without giving it all to the government.  That means some truly horrible things would happen on the way there.  (Whether they’d be better or worse than the horrible things happening now is something else again.)

Ditto when it comes to schooling.  Most of our schools are rather inefficient day cares, but without even that, some kids would fall through the cracks, until local government steps up.

(Yes, for those following along at home, libertarians aren’t necessarily AGAINST government, they just believe on keeping most things small, local, and as close to individual as possible.  The guys who want no government?  That’s Anarchists.  And no, Somalia is not a Libertarian society.  Or an anarchist one.  Somalia is a tribal war with borders.  Its dysfunction has much to do with where and what it is, not with the system of its government, which is “totalitarians trained in left wing politics in western universities trying to speak insanity to tribes who are trying to stay alive.” I swear to fricken bob the next idiot who tells me “Libertarianism would cause Somalia” gets hit on the head with the nearest object.  Do these people swallow whole whatever some progressive twit says, without the slightest effort at verification? Without a modicum of thought?)

The point I’m trying to make is that change hurts.  It always hurts, whether it’s an individual or a society; whether it’s ULTIMATELY change for better or for worse.  Whom it hurts and how much is directly proportional to what systems are being changed and how many people they involve.

Truly massive technological change that affects the whole human race takes millenia to process through.  Some anthropologists, seriously, think we’re not through processing all the consequences of the switch between hunting-gathering and agriculture.  It’s undeniable (no, seriously) that it was good for the species as a whole, over time.  I mean, our sheer numbers and populations prove that.  But it was neither painless nor cost free, and right when it happened it was wrenching, the wrench being recorded in our oldest legends and racial memories.  War between those who had settled and those who hadn’t, changes in ways of life (this idea of working every day, instead of when the meat runs out is still painful and still hasn’t worked itself into the way the species as a whole works.)

There is considerable and plausible evidence we’re still too close to the industrial revolution and the French revolution to process it.

At the rate we’re accelerating the changes to our own environment, it is quite possible we won’t (as a whole) be done processing the change to mass production before small-run individual production becomes the norm.

Which brings us to: the most normal result of change is the opposite of hope: it is destruction, blood, often the burning of a generation’s patrimony, as what they learned and what they’ve spent a lifetime becoming no longer has any application to the new reality.

Take the twentieth century.  (Please.  Almost as bad as the fourteenth.)  It was a time of massive, unrelenting change.  And we have the piles of corpses to prove it.

But as an individual — even as president of the US — you really don’t get to “create change.”  Every time I hear “be the change you want to see” or its equivalent, I want to beat someone over the head with a wet sock until I brain them.  (It’s slow and satisfying.)

I think I know what they’re trying to say, but that is not what they’re saying.  I think what they’re trying to say is that you can only change yourself.  And that’s correct.  What they’re actually saying is something on a par with “be a thought leader.”  I.e. be someone who changes society around you by just being a certain way.

Does that ever happen.  Oh, sure.  Most founders of major religions, some kings and rulers, a few other powerful men and women changed society at least for a time (mostly for the bad, taken in whole, though of course there are exceptions.)

But for most human beings, modeling the change you want to see in society can get you either marginalized or killed, depending on how severe that change is. (Major religious figures aren’t exempt on either, btw.)

Is it worth it to buck society?  Sometimes.  It also sometimes — if you judge the moment right — joins with a lot of other people to create a preference cascade.  If I didn’t believe in that, I’d not be writing this.

On the other hand, that’s in matters of principle, and urgent matters.  If the change you want to see is being allowed to wear white after labor day, is it really worth it getting strange stares, or having to continually clean your white clothes that got muddy and dirty in winter?  Or if the matter you’re bucking, if you fail will destroy you and if you win will… make no big difference to most people?

This is when the “change” needed is mostly internal, in yourself.

It still hurts.  It hurts like hell.  But without changing yourself, you’ll never achieve anything.

Look, I remember — and I found while unpacking, a sheaf of these — when I sent out for magazines, ranging from fanzines to Analog, and read them to know what I should be aiming for.  My most immediate reaction was “OMG, these are nothing like what I write.”  And by that I don’t mean political bend.  I mean I hadn’t figured out writing in scenes, yet, so what I wrote bore a strange resemblance to “disembodied ramblings from a world you never saw.”

You’d think changing that wouldn’t hurt, right?

Bah.  You’d be wrong.  Changing that involved changing my habits of mind, the way of working I’d gotten used to, “breaking” the way I thought of story, and endless hours of practicing the new way, till it stopped “hurting.”  It felt a little like going insane.

And what’s more, everytime I “tool up” I go through this again.  Having identified something I do wrong in writing, I have to “break my head” and then fall into a new pattern.

This involves a lot of work (A LOT OF WORK) and forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do.  90% of the people who approach me as fledgelings (or as colleagues seeking help for stalled careers) and to whom I tell stuff like “Okay, so you need to write in a different world, or come up with three new worlds, then write proposals and–”  OR “You need to write four  books a year” or “You need to learn to plot” or “you need to learn characters” go away saying “BUT I CAN’T DO THAT.”  Some of my favorite people in the world do that rather than try it.  I remember a friend telling me she couldn’t possibly write four new proposals in a year, when I’d just written 17 over summer.  (2003, career stopped, and a bitch of a year all around.)

It’s not fun, it’s not comfortable, it’s a lot of work, but if where you want to go is worth it, you do it.

And almost always, unless you were born to a comfortable fortune and your life is pottering ONLY with what pleases you, you need to change to get ANYWHERE, much less where you want to go.  You need to get out of your comfort zone and force yourself to do things that feel unnatural or that you despise.

This is whether or not the world is “right”.  A lot of the way I had to learn to write wasn’t “right” for selling.  It was the more literary way that shorts had been going.  In fact, I later had to unlearn some of it, to sell more in novels.  BUT it was the way it was and if I wanted to publish in shorts (heaven knows why) I had to learn it.

And because we’re extra special lucky, we do live in interesting times.  Times of intense change.  That means we need to work hard as hell to stay standing in the changing maelstrom, and to hopefully achieve something, anything, in the time we’re given.

A lot of this involves changing ourselves: the way we work, and mostly the way we think.

My entire field is turning upside down and inside out, and I NEED to figure out new ways of working, new ways of thinking.

I’m not alone in my field.  Some of you might not have noticed the change in your profession but I guarantee it’s coming for you.

Those new ways of thinking, those clever tricks to stay afloat, are nasty.  They break your comfortable idea of how things ought to work and be.

But no one asked our opinion.  And internal change is our only chance at hope.

For various reasons, mostly because of something that caused a loud continuous noise all night and we couldn’t fix till yesterday, I’ve been sleeping like heck.

Yesterday was spent in solving the situation so I can maybe finally write. (Seriously, not sleeping gives me terminal ADHD. I was forgetting what I was doing in the middle of doing it, and just wandering off aimlessly.  Of course, we then had a lousy night because of two amber alerts in the middle of the night. I get the need for amber alerts, but why do they think sending it to everyone who owns that phone at 1 am and then 1:30 will do anything but rouse half the population in an area code? Never mind.)

So come dinner time I was in that enviable position between too sleepy to eat and too hungry to sleep.  As in such situations, we went out to eat before it got worse. (Once, after a flight that sent me all over for 24 hours and didn’t give me a chance to leave the embarkation lounge to EAT I was so bad off I literally told the poor husband who picked me up and wanted to take me to dinner (I’d been away almost a month) “Never mind. Just stop by a convenience store and get me milk. I can drink, but I don’t think I can chew.”  I then drank the milk in the car, got to the hotel room (I told him if he drove me home an hour and a half away he’d have to carry me in from the car) fell on the bed unwashed and dressed, and was asleep before head touched pillow. I slept six hours, got up, showered, put on a nighty, had some food and went back to bed for 12.)

We went to a rather cheap Mexican restaurant (very good too) because it’s closer to us, via the highway than Pete’s (or at least is not in an area of such high traffic, so it’s shorter getting to.  They’re actually not far from each other.)  Also it’s cheaper than Pete’s (Pete’s Kitchen, on Colfax.)

And I came across a bit of crazy I’ve seen elsewhere, with other things.  And it never stops shocking me.

Keep in mind that this is a CHEAP restaurant. Mostly working families. Staffed by people who still have accents.  But as she brought us our drinks, the waitress looked guilty and said, “Do you… do you want straws?” like she was offering us drugs in a back alley.

This is not the first time we’ve come across this, though the other instances have been in at least semi-trendy places like cafes and “natural” restaurants.

Here’s the thing: two years ago, they gave you the straws, no questions, no idiocy.

And there’s nothing wrong with straws, whatever California thinks. There’s nothing wrong with plastic bags either.  First, if there really are vast rafts of plastics in the sea, why are there no PICTURES (yes, there are pictures of little ones, and they’re mostly in ponds and such, and also, no. That’s not what they’re claiming.) Second most of the plastics in the actual sea causing actual pollution come from places like China and India.  Banning them in the US where the bags are made to be degradable, the straws are mostly disposed of properly, is nothing but a piece of crazy cakes virtue-signaling.  It makes life unsanitary and inconvenient to many, including the disabled, but hey, you gots to virtue signal.

What always shocks me is how this bit of crazy then transmits to society and everyone becomes afraid they’re doing something wrong by using the perfectly legal, no issues until the left got crazy product.

The last time I saw this bit of crazy was over the pill.

NO ONE EVER WANTED TO BAN THE PILL. (Maybe the Vatican, but I think their business is more telling women it’s a sin, not telling us that laws should forbid it in countries they have no control over like the US.) The only fight about it was whether employers would have to pay for it, or whether it should be subsidized. ONLY FIGHT.

And because the pill is not that expensive — no, really, the basic one is like $9 per month — people had to bring up crazy cake situations to make not paying for it the equivalent of banning.

So you got stuff like “Some women can’t have that expense, or their husbands will see!”

Now keep in mind I know a LOT of women. I know exactly zero who are on the pill without their husband’s or boyfriend’s or casual hook up’s enthusiastic consent. Are there some? There is some of everything in a country of 300 million. There are probably some few thousand people who subsist entirely on clay sandwiches.  Doesn’t mean it’s a common or likely situation. (Or that there aren’t organizations and people, including friends, who’ll help people in those situations, by paying for the meds.)

To make this plausible, the left and the media (BIRM) had to make it sound like all men run around wanting to impregnate every woman.  I know nothing less likely in the current world. In fact most women are the ones want kids in a relationship. There are exceptions. My husband kept us going through extremely expensive infertility because he REALLY wanted kids, while I mostly wanted them (it bothered me more that I was failing.)  Both of us love them to death, but his drive to parenthood was stronger than mine.  And yet, he’d have stopped if I told him I REALLY didn’t want it. Because his drive was to have awesome kids with this woman he loved, not to run around impregnating people against their will.  (Who really wants to do that, unless they’re touched? Sounds like a weird fetish.)

Now, I’ve been on the pill as a young woman (serious cycle deregulation) and as a perimenopausal (and probably bad for me to get pregnant. Also my hormones were so screwed up my doctor joked I might be more likely to get pregnant while on the pill from about 40 on. Not joking and in fact it happened) woman.  Both times medically indicated and needed.

In a Latin country (and in the US when newlywed before we started going through active trying because, yeah. It’s really that bad) where the pill was frowned upon for religious reasons, the prescription was treated matter of factly.  I was told “here is your prescription for the pill”.  Same as perimenopausal.  Same in the pharmacy when they gave me the dang packages.

But after the crazy campaign of “all men will abuse all women for being on the pill” suddenly my doctor was dropping her voice to a whisper when saying “this is a prescription for the pill” and the pharmacy was acting like they were giving me contraband.  Of course being me, I usually answered in autistic-levels shout “Thank you for my prescription for the pill.”

What worries me about this mechanic is that there seems to be some mechanism whereby the media could invent something like “people with green eyes are afraid of being killed” and suddenly people with green eyes WOULD be afraid of being killed, everywhere.

Nothing else explains the crazy representative who wore tampons as earrings because the media decided that the right was going to ban them or something (I don’t even.)

This horrifies the hell out of me.  No matter how crazy the lie — say that one in five women in college get raped, or that our straws are killing fish — people seem to run with it and it propagates through society as UNQUESTIONED fact.

This would all be easier if it weren’t for the fact that there are organizations if not devoted to at least willing to make up the most outrageous and crazy shit.  Like apparently PETA is now making people afraid/ashamed to wear wool because the complete idiots have decided you SKIN THE LAMB to get the wool.

Of course this is not even vaguely true as those of us with rural upbringing know. You give the lamb (or sheep)a haircut to get the wool.  In fact, not doing it is animal abuse, as they will die, or get tangled in bushes trying to get the wool off themselves.

I wonder if it’s purposeful mendacity or stupidity that started this. It reminds me of the first incarnation of minecraft where you killed the chickens to get the eggs.

BUT it’s impossible to ignore that soon there will be a substantial portion of society maybe not even sure why “knowing” that wool is bad and kills animals.

How do you treat this crazy?  I don’t know.  I treat it by being loud and responding to it as to a dog that just went on the floor.  “What the heck is wrong with you? There was never any problem with this.”

Maybe it’s not the most effective thing. But I don’t know anything else that can be done.  Sometimes the only way to treat infection is blunt measures.  And those are the only one I know.