Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Where have all the heroes gone? – Amanda S. Green

I have been sitting here, staring at the computer screen, trying to find the words for my feelings in the aftermath of what happened in Brussels. Oh, the immediate reaction is easy. Disbelief followed by anger mixed with a large dose of concern and sympathy for those impacted by what happened. Then, as the stories continued to roll in, other emotions came. With it all comes the understanding that the time has finally come for us to realize that we can’t continue to play by the rules of civilized warfare because the enemy is using our own ethics, for lack of a better word, against us.

For years, decades even, many in our country and in our government have operated under the belief that war is something that can be waged by following the rules. They want it to be clean, with no collateral damage. That is a grand idea and one I could get behind – if the other side agreed. Unfortunately, as we have seen time and time again, that isn’t the case. We try to use surgical strikes to avoid destroying non-military facilities and avoid civilian casualties. The enemy, knowing this, hides in mosques and churches, homes and schools. They use civilians as their shields, knowing our citizens won’t put up with “unnecessary” civilian deaths.

We have watched as our citizens have been targeted overseas. We have seen in living color the attacks on Paris and now Brussels. How many other attacks have there been? I don’t know. Our media doesn’t report it all. It doesn’t fit the narrative, especially not during an election year. Most especially not when our President is making his so-called historic visit to Cuba.

I cringed when, as news was still coming in on the bombings in Brussels, the media talked about how President Obama was not going to cut his visit to Cuba short. In fact, at that time, he was still scheduled to watch a baseball game between a Cuban team and an American one. I’ll even admit to not knowing if he kept to that schedule. Why? Because the thought of him sitting there watching a baseball game when our allies were under what could only be called attack made me sick to my stomach.

How long are we going to sit back and watch, telling ourselves that the battle isn’t going to come to us? How long will we continue to delude ourselves by saying that all we need to do is listen to why ISIS hates us so much? After all, to hear some of our fellow countrymen talk, the real responsibility for all this ill will falls directly at our own feet. Funny how there are always those singing that song until the shit hits the fan right outside their door. Then they are crying for the rest of us to step up and protect them. That is exactly what will happen here if we don’t find a way to end the war before it gets any worse.

One of the comments I heard in response to the attack came from Donald Trump. Now, as those of you who have read my previous posts here know, I’m not a big Trump fan. Hearing his response to the attack on Brussels had me, initially at least, cringing and telling myself that his comments were exactly why I don’t want him to be president.

“You know, we work within laws. They don’t work within laws — they have no laws. We work within laws. The waterboarding would be fine, and if they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding,” he said.

My first reaction was probably similar to what many of you had to that comment. I cringed and said to myself that we couldn’t allow ourselves to become like the enemy. We are better than them. Just as our Constitution has provisions against cruel and unusual punishment for criminals, those same protections should apply to those who are enemies of our country.

Right?

The good part of me says “right”. But the other part, the part that watches the enemy attack civilian targets without compunction, the part that knows my son and so many other mother’s sons and daughters are in harm’s way because of ISIS and their allies, says maybe not. Maybe that old adage “All’s fair in love and war” is right.

Still, I am conflicted. My brain tells me that is what the enemy is wants. It wants us doubting our approach to them. It wants us second guessing what our government and our military does – or might do. In short, it wants our doubts to hamstring any quick and decisive response we might have to them.

Hell, it is something they have successfully done for years. We did not finish the job with Operation Enduring Freedom. We didn’t finish the job with Operation Desert Storm. We sure as hell aren’t finishing the job now.

Let’s be honest. We haven’t “finished the job” since World War II. I can understand Korea. Our country was exhausted, our resources stretched then by World War II and just a few years after we found ourselves in Korea. Vietnam? I’m not sure we ever had a battle plan for success there. Add in the fact the media was sending daily updates that we could watch at our dinner tables, as well as there had been little down time from Korea and, well, we had a recipe for anything but winning.

Now we are fighting an enemy that won’t be satisfied until we are dead. Not just our leaders. Not just our military. All of us. How long is it going to take us to wrap our heads around the fact there is no negotiation with a zealot? There is fight back, fight hard and fight to win.

But that doesn’t mean I believe we need to round up every person who has come here from a predominantly Islamic country. Nor does it mean we round up every follower of the Islamic faith. That would be just as wrong as it was when, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, our government rounded up the Japanese-Americans and put them in camps.

It does mean, however, tightening our borders – all our borders. It means reviewing our immigration rules and doing a better job at vetting everyone coming in. It means increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and giving them the authority to actually stop and arrest anyone they find coming over illegally.

It also means remembering who our allies are. Kissing up to certain leaders in the Middle East and Africa has done nothing that I can see to help keep our country and its citizens safe. In fact, it has done just the opposite. The enemy has seen our president bowing to those who hate us. They have seen our government turn its back on allies like Israel because a potential ally – pardon me while I laugh hysterically – might be insulted by our continued association with Israel. We have walked the path the enemy has set for us, never really striking back and never finishing what we start.

At least that is how it seems from the outside looking in.

Now I find myself remembering the 1980 presidential election. I had no love lost for President Carter. I’d watched, along with so many others, as he sat on his hands while our people, and our allies, were held hostage by Iran. Oh, I know negotiations were going on behind the scenes but what sort of lesson did that teach the Iranians? The answer is simple – we would rather try to talk our way out of a bad situation even if doing so makes the situation worse in the long run.

Not that I had much more confidence in what Ronald Reagan could do. I’ll admit, I didn’t know much about the former actor turned politician. I knew he had been governor of California. I’ll even admit, I wasn’t that impressed. I’m a Texas girl after all and I knew even then that California was much more liberal than my beloved home state. So could Reagan, even though he was a Republican, be the conservative – or, even better, libertarian – that we needed?

What quickly became apparent was that our allies liked his plain speaking and our enemy quickly came to realize that he meant what he said. We may never know all the discussion that went behind Iranian doors before they decided to release the hostages before Reagan could take action. My gut tells me that they were scared to death about what the Cowboy President might do.

Which brings me to Trump. I’m still not a fan. Far from it. But I have to wonder if he would put the fear of God into the hearts of our enemy. He certainly scares some of our allies – which is not a good thing.

There’s a song by Bonnie Tyler called “I Need a Hero”. Right now, I’m asking myself the same questions she asks in the song but about our national leaders. I know where the real heroes are. They are in our military and serving in other positions that help keep our country safe. Unfortunately, their hands are tied all too often by the “civilized war” requirements the pols and the vocal minority place upon them.

It is time for each of us to wake up and, whether we like it or not, admit that the war has come. It might not be taking place each day on our shores but we are no longer an isolated nation. Technology and advances in transportation have seen to that. What happens in Europe impacts what happens here and vice versa. We can no longer afford to sit back and shake our heads in sorrow as our European allies are attacked. We can no longer extend an olive branch and watch it be batted away, telling ourselves that if we try again maybe, just maybe it will be accepted next time.

As I sit here looking at the framed memorial document hanging on my den wall that recounts my Great-great grandfather’s Civil War battle history, I have to admit that we are at war once again. Our government might not want to admit it. Our President might prefer making his “historical” trek to Cuba rather than deal with the realities of what is happening around us. But the truth is there and it is time we all recognized it.

The question we have to ask ourselves is how we are going to respond. Are we going to sit back and wait until the battle lines are in our own backyards or are we going to demand our government finally stand up and once again prove the United States deserves to be called the Leader of the Free World? I don’t know about you but I’m hoping for the latter. That means making sure we have men and women on Capital Hill after the election who will stand up to whoever our new president is and demand the country no longer sit back, waiting like the lamb to the slaughter.

I confess when listening to Leonard Cohen’s “The Traitor” I love the lines “The dreamers ride against the men of action; oh, watch the men of action falling back.”

I also will confess that I identify with “the dreamers” in those lines, though I’m not sure that’s true anymore.  But as a teen I was very much a dreamer, with my head in books or in the clouds.  Many of the things I dreamed were air-fantasies and impossible and I didn’t even know it.  Many others would be tragedies, not the utopia I imagined.

And in a way I was a “woman of action” in the sense that I walked everywhere in all weathers and I’ve always had a constitutional (not that constitution) tendency to roll up my sleeves and DO when doing is needed. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t see myself as a “dreamer” of “impossible dreams.”

Part of this was my identifying most with dad, who is actually a man of action, but who is also a reader and someone with his head in the clouds half the time.

But–

But even though I identify(ed) with the dreamers, I loved  books with hyper-competent heroes. (Yes, including female ones.  The opening of Friday is riveting because someone is following her and she doesn’t drop and cry for help, but takes care of it.  Efficiently.)

I loved authors who could do what I knew d*mn well I couldn’t: get dropped head first into a situation and control it and come out on top.  Some of my favorites, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, Robin Hood, and of course The World of Tiers and Operation Chaos, Puppet Masters and The Door Into Summer hing exactly on that hyper competent hero doing what he must do.

I love these not because I am like them, but because I’m not.  Because it’s fascinating to watch someone with everything under control.  And it helps me, too, not panic when the excrement hits the rotating object (so many times this year) to think “Okay, there’s another way to handle this, now.)

I’m not saying I don’t love hopelessly neurotic characters as well, though the only one I can think of, early morning and sans caffeine is the main character of Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, (she has reasons to be neurotic) or for a more “dreamer” the main character of Way Station by Simak.  (My husband wouldn’t allow me to name a son Enoch.)

But yesterday as I was falling asleep, I realized why the science fiction establishment keeps saying we only want big bad male action heroes.  You see, they’re hopelessly in love with characters who when the going gets tough curl into the fetal position and scream for mommy.  They think this makes the characters sensitive or special.  They think in fact that dysfunction and the inability to work in the world as it is is a mark of specialness, from intelligence to insight.

I think this is because most people who are attracted to science fiction are “odd” — we stick out.  We tend to think non-standard thoughts.  We work at odd angles. That’s fine, every primate population has its “goats”, it’s “outliers.”  It’s how social species work.

Many if not most of us were bullied or mistreated by our peers as kids.  Most of us, when interacting outside the community, still get the “you’re weird” look.

Some of us — I’d guess about half — figure out that’s the way we are, that’s the way life is going to be, and we derive strength from it and learn to work in this strange world of ours.  (I swear half the reason that book sold was the title.)  Others … curl up and cry and demand accommodations, and say the world should accommodate them.  It’s all so unfair.

Most of the establishment right now is the half that want accommodations, for themselves or others they imagine weak and in need.  I think most of this comes from a decent pity and concern for your fellow humans, and from wanting to help them.  Unfortunately it’s also misguided, as they tend to identify the people needing help by Marxist class and race markers, which actually have bloody nothing to do with who can cope and who can’t.  In fact, the ones less likely to cope are the ones raised in too-easy circumstances, regardless of their skin color or wealth. Because humans are a scavenging animal, reverses and challenges harden and improve the individual. (Of course, it is also possible to have too many of these and break.)

The thing is and what makes no sense is that even those of us who write men (and women) of action don’t write what the other side accuses us of writing: privileged, flawless creatures who stride on the scene and set everything right.

Were there some books like that?  Sure, to an extent.  A lot of World War II wrote World War II veterans.  I was reminded of this when reading The Book Of Ptath recently.  I hadn’t read it in decades, and when I read it I remember the type was familiar, (though I couldn’t tell you the other similar heroes I read.)  I don’t know if Van Vogt was a veteran, and, right now, am too lazy to look up his bio.  But his character has an overlay of a personality that fought in WWII and which has a “can do” attitude towards the world in general.

I vaguely remember reading a lot of those, and they are yep white males (mostly white.  I have a vague idea not all) who had won a difficult war and were men of action not daunted by anything.

My guess is most of those books were written in the 40s and 50s, but even then they weren’t universal.  Theodore Sturgeon tended to write more nuanced, thoughtful characters, as did Heinlein (yes, I know, but they haven’t read the books, have they?) and so did a lot of others.

I, myself, and h*ll very much Larry Correia, not to mention John Ringo and others write people who act out of a deeper trauma.  Yes, they’re men (and women) of action in the sense they try to fix what’s broken in the world and try to take care of themselves and those they feel responsible for.  BUT often the reason they feel responsible and what makes them rise above average is a deep trauma, a deep flaw or some crack within themselves from which flows both insecurity and the ability to get things done.  (I think these characters are far more authentic, anyway.)

So why do these books offend the mavens of the establishment so much?

Having dipped into their offerings, my guess would be because they think the only AUTHENTIC response to being broken is to curl up and stay broken.

Now that is the only valid response to being broken beyond all boundaries, but people like that, though they exist, of course, and excite our compassion, of course, don’t make very good characters.

“And then they were all killed by a flaming meteor” is a lousy ending but it’s vastly preferable to a series of books about people dithering and hesitating and suffering reverses and humiliations from which they can’t escape.

And yet, people read them.  I mean, there is no doubt of that.  I don’t know how big an audience this has, and I don’t know how many of them are influenced by the “great literature” shill, but some amount of people do read it.

It wasn’t until yesterday when one of the commenters insisted if books didn’t show people like you you felt “erased” that I realized what might be the driver there.

Some people ONLY want to read about people like them.  I don’t understand the attraction, but then I am someone who crossed the ocean to live in another culture, so I’m attracted to knew experiences and different situations and tend to assume most SF/F readers are.  But perhaps some just want the validation of knowing no one, not even characters, can hack the world, and therefore the only reasonable thing to do is to be neurotic and ineffective.  I don’t know.  Even when I feel neurotic and ineffective, I don’t want to remain so (like now) and I certainly don’t want o live in other people’s heads when they’re being neurotic and ineffectual.

But maybe it is the attraction of the similar and the “I’m not guilty of doing nothing.”  Perhaps.  In which case there are a lot of broken people out there, and it’s a little scary, because most of them are white, upper-middle-class and have no reason to be that broken.

Anyway, so when they’re complaining about us wanting “White men doing manly things” when our characters are either not white or not men (or various variations of white men, definitely not straight or non-handicapped, for instance) what they’re doing is reflecting inherent racism in their world view.  Because what they actually mean is “Your characters are too competent.” And in their heads, that means white and male.  Which is the ONLY thing that explains why they call competent female characters “men with boobs.”

Anyway, that was my sudden flash of understanding.  And while I don’t care if they want to read about neurotic people being neurotic, and I don’t care if those books are on offer (not my circus, not my monkeys), I neither consider them the highest form of literary expression, nor want them to be the ONLY books on offer.  I don’t think they fit with the tastes of the vast majority of the human race, nor that — frankly — they’re a healthy attitude.

Let them have their books, of course, if they enjoy them, but don’t let them dictate that these are the only “good” books.  And don’t let them close the market to others.

“The dreamers ride against the men of action; oh, watch the men of action falling back” is a great thing for a teen.  Teens don’t have the experience to solve things and identify with similarly paralyzed characters.

But if I wrote the scene now, the dreamers would have enough resources within themselves to REALLY make the men of action fall back and, thereby, become men of action themselves. (And women, duh.  It goes without saying, but I know some people need it said.  In this the human experience is not that bifurcated.)

Because that is the path to maturity and more importantly that is the path to a functioning society.  Neurotics are interesting, but they have to learn to act in the world before their stories are interesting.  Otherwise they’re just neurotic and rather pitiful.

And now I’m going to go pack boxes.  Because– Because when this is done I get to write.

The State of the writer — I thought you needed an update, so you don’t get alarmed at late posts the next week — is frazzled, her nerves shot, and her time totally fried.

Sorry, I’m trying to finish a book and do final edits on another 2, while moving in what promises to be the first of two moves in three months.

Lest I sound insane(r), here how we got to this point in the plot.

Last January we rented this house and put our house in downtown colorado springs for sale.  We don’t think houses sell very well while living in them, so we thought this was the best thing to do.  In our naive estimation, we could have the house ready for sale by April/May, sell in June and be out of here by 7 or eight months of lease.

We packed the living space, unpacked about half the things, enough to allow me to work and settled in.

This is when the fates decided it was time to start the fun times. You see, my doctor had told me some tests were perfectly fine.  Turns out that wasn’t… precisely the truth, which led to surgery and recovery, as the house was only half empty and nowhere near to go up for sale.  By the time we finished emptying the house was June.

There wasn’t a lot of deferred maintenance, because the house was where our money went for 13 years, but there is always some in a Victorian.  Mostly what we needed to do was paint, clean and refinish the floors (well, some of them.  The living room was its own mess and we more or less left it like that.)

As soon as I could and earlier than I should, I enlisted the boys to help because at that point we had run out of reserves, from paying rent/mortgage the whole time.  But Robert was working an almost full time job while waiting to hear from medschools and Marsh was taking summer classes so he can finish the degrees in another two years.

So, it was slow, and by the time the house went up was September.  We did have an approved offer within a month, but we were already on the ragged edge of what we could afford.  It closed just in time, in November.

The lease ran out in January, so we started exhaustive house search, but our needs are a little odd, what with two and maybe three offices, so we had no luck.  We tried for a foreclosure but we underestimated what they’d take.

On new year’s day we put an offer on what was coincidentally a short sale.  (Though not cheaper for that, which is stupid.)  We went month by month on our lease and I settled in to finish books, as well as I could as my office is full of boxes and dismantled shelves, and I don’t work well in confusion.

In February our landlord decided he wants to sell the house we’re living in, and told us to be out by the end of March.  Since at best the short sale would come through in May, and we have four cats which very few people allow in a rental, we were thrown into a panic.

But thank heavens we’ve found a place that fits us all and will take month by month.  (Yes, it IS one of you.  How did you know?)

So we’re right now in the middle of the first move.  Due to shortness of time, we’re having professional packers, though I still need to do a lot of it.  So for the last week I’ve worked in snatches of five to ten minutes, and usually answered comments here while in the car between the two houses.

Meanwhile short sale came back demanding more money, which the house won’t even appraise at.  I’ve heard enough horror stories to be sure the bank is stringing us along and wants to foreclose.

So this last weekend we did a blitzkrieg house search.  We found one we want and have put an offer on (fingers crossed, because we really loved it) and one we can live with, but would take a second look at before offering for, if the first one doesn’t work.

I still have my current work and my bedroom to pack.

This weekend was enlivened by Greebo who, freaked out with having strangers in the house (He was feral and still loves only me, and tolerates younger son) decided it was time to hide.  We though he’d got out and spent three hideous hours searching for him.  Then we realized we’d need to trap him, as movers are coming Wednesday.

We had now corralled him and put him in a carrier and are taking him and his companions to the vet to board.

We hope to be moved in and the essentials (like my office, the bedroom and the kitchen) unpacked enough by Friday.  If the offers we have extant is accepted, we won’t even unpack anything else, as the move would be in May. And then I’ll hire someone to unpack us, because I MUST get settled and work.

On the work front Darkship Revenge WANTS to be finished, but I’m stuck because dragon isn’t trained enough for it.  Also it freaks the packers out when I dictate about mass death. :D

I really need about three days on it, so G-d willing next week.

I’m entering copyedits into Through Fire (as in from Copy editor.  I REALLY wish Baen would do these electronic.  It’s much faster.)

I’m editing, in car while looking at houses, Sword and Blood which has reverted.  (Historical, vampires, Musketeers.)

As soon as work for Baen is delivered, I’ll enter the changes and bring S & B out, same with the British Empire trilogy, one a month, more or less.

The next in the vampire musketeers, Royal Blood, is almost finished, and I hope to bring it out in June or July.  the last one, Eternal Blood, is only plotted, so maybe August or September, depending on the move dates/visit to Portugal (which I must do.  It’s been 5 years) etc.

So if I’m occasionally late, forgive me.  As you can tell life is complete and utter chaos right now.  Even for a chaos dancer, it’s hard to keep my footing.

I know I never sent out stuff I owe subscribers, and I have a surprise for some of the older/most faithful supporters of this blog (not just money, but comments and encouragement) and that too will have to wait.  All I can say is I am so sorry.  I haven’t been able to stop long enough between crisis to catch my breath.  Keep fingers crossed this stops soon.  (2016 is making me miss 2015, except not on MY health or money front.)

Be patient with me.  We’ll get ‘er done.  Maybe someone/something wants me so busy I don’t think about politics.  (There’s a hope.)

And now I go pack.

A Little Bit of Promo – Free Range Oyster

John Van Stry

The King of Las Vegas

An American college student on holiday in India, Rafael fell afoul of a Rakshasa, an old and very powerful tiger-demon. When he finally manages to escape from his captivity, he is left with two small problems; the first is that he is now a Rakshasa himself, the second is that India is deporting him.

So just where can a shape-shifting tiger-demon find acceptance in America?

Las Vegas of course. But before he can claim his territory, there are a few small problems he’ll have to clean up, like a fifty year old vampire infestation that the church and the government have been failing to control for years.

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Fate’s Door

Secrets, like troubles, come in threes. Nerine, a sea nymph of the ancient world, knows too much about both. Love and coming of age in a mythic Mediterranean where the gods and goddesses of old shape history.

Over the last few days, since Kate published the list of Sad Puppies recommends, we’ve been inundated both in email and in social media by people requesting, clamoring and whining to be removed from the list.  The eructations from these special snow flakes vary in levels of self-delusion and insanity and at least one was very polite.

The prize MUST go to Damien Walter of Grauniad fame for tweeting that he hopes Kate Paulk has deep pockets, to withstand all the lawsuits resultant from putting people on the list without asking their permission.

I know that poor Damien probably was born with rocks for brain (I apologize to any rocks I might be maligning) before he filled it with Marxist excrement, but seriously, kid, DO pull your socks up and try to keep up with those of normal intelligence.  What Kate did was collect recommendations for an AWARD — you know, something that publishers and writers in the past have shown they covet? — from fans of the writer and then use arithmetic — you know, that thing you slept through in first grade while collecting grievances and how people told you to pull your socks up? — to collate a list of recommended reading for those intending to nominate for the award.

If that’s actionable in your world, then your tweet is a walking libel case, and the things you grace the pages of Teh Grauniad with should see you flogged at Charing Cross — at least in more vigorous times.

And no, little Damien, this is not actionable either.  This is merely a statement of your actions and an inference of your intellectual capacity.

When you tell people who have actually been slandered in mainstream media and called racists, sexists and homophobes not only with no evidence but with contrary evidence, that RECOMMENDING SOMEONE FOR AN AWARD without “asking their permission” is actionable, you are suffering levels of delusion that most people are medicated for.  Either that or you lack the intellectual capacity G-d gave a goose.

Speaking of which, all of you, even the polite ones, who send me purple prose about how badly Brad Torgersen ran Sad Puppies IV and how he created an evil slate also make me doubt your mental capacity.  Seriously, guys?  A slate?  If you’d bothered to look at the numbers and had a minimum of arithmetic ability (did you also sleep through it in first grade, while dreaming of little Damien’s slights and grievances?  — Seriously, he really should pull his socks up) you’d have realized the only real slate was “no award.”  Sad puppies nominations and votes were not only not lockstep but all over the place. Because, you know, they were reading what was suggested and making up their own minds, instead of — like the other side — taking marching orders from their betters who told them to not even read and just vote no-award.

Also, and btw, if you’d bothered to read the definition of slate, you’d stop thinking it was some uber evil thing:

Slate:
noun
1.
a fine-grained rock formed by the metamorphosis of clay, shale, etc., that tends to split along parallel cleavage planes, usually at an angle to the planes of stratification.
2.
a thin piece or plate of this rock or a similar material, used especially for roofing or as a writing surface.
3.
a dull, dark bluish gray.
4.
a list of candidates, officers, etc., to be considered for nomination, appointment, election, or the like.

A list of candidates TO BE CONSIDERED.  I.e., in book terms, read them and vote for what you like.

In other words, what Locus publishes when it does its list of recommendation?  Slate.  What various names in SF publish every year?  Slate. And by this I don’t mean a dull dark bluish gray, except in the case of the lists published by some writers, which do tend to the grey goo.

So, where is that evil evil “vote lockstep” meaning in it?  Nowhere.  Were you so sure your “thought leaders” (who apparently have your thoughts on a little chain) were correct you never bothered to check the dictionary.com definition?  And you call yourself thinking adults?

Oh, well done.

A list, which Brad also compiled in public from recommendations suddenly became a magical and somehow evil “slate” that must be stopped at all costs, because some loudmouths with vested interests thought so.

And speaking of vested interests darling brainless ones: HOW CAN YOU BELIEVE YOU’RE SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER?

Over and over in the media — much of it the sort of mass media only a mainstream publisher can reach through their contacts — you talked about a cabal of powerful white, straight men trying to keep women and minorities from science fiction or at least from recognition in science fiction.

This took the sort of faith that used to lead people to convince themselves they’d seen street-corner sorcerers perform magic.  Seriously.

First if you’d bother to look at that evil recommends list, you’d have seen plenty of women and some minorities. At least before you browbeat some of them into public denunciations of the list and self-deleting. Most of this in public, btw.  Second, if you’d bothered thinking for two minutes, you’d have realized the Sad Puppies cohort consisted mainly of fairly new writers.  Yes, one is a bestseller, but he’s fairly new. He also publishes only with Baen, the publisher none of you wants into.

I think I’m the longest published there, and I’m a midlister, which in this field means I have no power of any kind, save the power to scream when I’m cut from a publisher’s list.  Also, last I checked I’m a woman and the federal government insists I’m Latina (at least some departments, but even for the census I fall in under Galician since Galicia extends to Portugal and the area my family comes from. And while that’s not a race group but a culture group let me assure you if I am out in the sun and mildly well as opposed to as ill as I’ve been the last few years,  I can still spot melanin to your entire side while remaining darker than average.)

Two other women on our side are INDIE published only (except for short stories) even though one of them makes a living at it. Oh, and while I’ve never looked up close and personal (we’re not that kind of friends) I have it on fairly good authority that they’re both women.  One of them gave birth to a kid, after all.

So tell me by what feat of insanity you think any of us — if we wanted to do that, which none of us do — could keep women or minorities out of the field?

I tell you who could: a major publisher, which can decide who gets published and not, and which can spend to buy memberships for its people so that they can vote lockstep for the awards.  (They probably expense it.  And they probably have some under-secretary deputized to make sure all the ballots are absolutely alike.)

You know, the same people who have been accusing us — people with no power in the field — of distorting and perverting the awards.  Those people.  The people with all the power.

But they told you that you were speaking truth to power and you believed them.  Or perhaps worse, you know they were lying, but you are so desirous of the benefits that power can confer on you that you’ll slander, lie and attack on command, knowing its a lie and wishing only to receive the benefits of that lie commanded by evil and self-interested people.

I can’t tell which is which: whether you’re dumb or conniving.  I’ll leave that for you to decide in front of your mirror every morning of the rest of your life.

I’ll only note you’re worse than the Soviets who condemned the Kulaks during holodomor, worse than the people on the street who mouthed the Nazi lies about Jews during WWII.  Why worse?  Because those people lived in fear of their lives.  They had to say what they did because they feared being next on the kill list.

But you?  You willingly go along with slanders and destroy reputations and attempt to destroy livelihoods for the sake of a plastic rocket.  To coin a phrase:  It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?

One of you I knew to be insane since an unprovoked orchestrated attack years ago, but the rest of you (Damien excepted. Damien is just funny) I had some respect for, ranging from lots of it to residues.  Now I don’t.

Depart from us in peace.  Go lick your chains and cavort before your masters at their command.  Relish the slavery you purchased so dearly.

As for us, we shall make some note you requested removal, in some way that YOU insult the fans who went through so much trouble to nominate you and who up-voted your work enough times to get it on our list.  We won’t insult them for you.

Until Kate returns from Lunacon that’s the only answer I’m willing to give you. And it’s more than courtesy demands, since I know you’ll take no answer but what comes from those who hold your thoughts captive.

Someday maybe you’ll wake up and realize what you’ve done.  On that day may you be able to forgive yourselves.

I was looking through the posts to find a blast from the past and came across the post I wrote shortly after TVIW in November 2014, called Table Settings At the Cannibal Feast.

Most of it, including the (joking?) accusation of my being the creature named Requires Hate and my semi-joking reply and explanation of the only reason they could think we were the same person.

All that is old stuff and I didn’t want to go into it again — though I understand the creature is now again publishing.  Because even the crime of attacking your friends and gaslighting your communities is not enough to keep you out if you’re an interesting enouch color/orientation and have the right (left) beliefs — because it is not particularly topical now.  But from halfway through, the post is topical.

It will always be topical, because it is the mechanics of revolutions that go bad; it is the mechanics of Animal Farm.  It is the mechanics of the cannibal feast where the revolutionaries turn on one of their number over and over again till only the ones at the top are safe (and the rest are terrified peasants as in say Cuba or North Korea.)

The commenter Synova whom I quote below nailed the mechanics perfectly.

It starts with good impulses.  We shouldn’t condemn all on the other side, because most of them are going along to get along and TRYING to be good people.  Our schools, let alone our media and our entertainment in the last 100 years at least have glorified those who care for the poor and downtrodden.

If you’re going to say “That’s Christianity”… sort of — waggles hand — Christianity didn’t overcome normal judgement or common sense, and it didn’t require you to do “good” that actually caused harm.  The Victorians had a very good handle on the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”

But because they weren’t perfect and sometimes excluded true victims who could be helped, or whom the do gooders fancied could be helped, the people who wanted to be better than others, the arbiters of all true charity have been molding society to discard all common sense, until being proclaimed a victim — even on the flimsiest evidence — is power, and until no one can say there’s a difference between deserving and undeserving, and until it is all just “you’re good or bad if the arbiters of what is good or bad” — mostly the media and entertainment — “say you are.”

Humans can’t live like this.  A society worth living in can’t be formed this way.
It is an endless debasement of all the best impulses and the best wishes of people, and turning them into weapons to destroy not just society but individuals themselves.  All for the power of a chosen few who could never get power the healthy way: contributing or creating something that makes the community, the society or even all of humanity better.

Think about it, they can’t even engineer a better can opener or mouse trap, but they would rule us all.

And this is very relevant, given the times we’re living in.

(The rest is a quote from a post in November 2014.)

And of course their problem – as explained in this article – is not that she did all those things, but that she used the tactics against the “wrong people” i.e. fellow “social justice warriors”, people who want to eliminate patriarchy and who are sure white privilege is hiding under their bed, ready to pounce out as soon as they relax — People who think that everyone who doesn’t think like them commits thought crime and should be silenced.

That is, they are upset because tactics they sanction and use against people like us are being used against them.

As is said in the comments, in this Mad Genius post by Dave Freer, the revolutionaries are always surprised when the tumbril stops at their door.

It was that comment, and other comments in that post (which you absolutely should read) particularly the ones about how RH/Winterfox caused real suffering and about how some people are suffering from PTSD after being exposed to her tactics, and WHY her tactics worked with them, when they don’t work with us, that got me thinking about this post.

I quote Synova’s comment below on how pernicious accusations of thought-crime are, because she is absolutely right, and because it makes clear why communist societies (starting arguably with the French revolution as a pre-Marxist, but proto-communist attempt) eat themselves. It explains why the SJWs are inevitably headed for this same cannibal feast, why even if Marx’s cooky theories of economics worked – they don’t – the crazy attempt to build a “new man” free from the “capitalist taint” (they can’t – capitalism is inherent in being human. You can make it illegal and drive it underground, or you can allow it to lift all boats, but creating and trading, buying and selling is being human.) with its attendant tendency to criminalize thought crimes would still end in mass graves and mass misery.

Synova:

Some of the comments by people who had been subject to the full treatment just made me want to cry. I didn’t think it was funny because the guilty parties and enablers aren’t the ones who are hurt. Yes, we can scoff at Scalzi when he makes a rational counter-argument and is made, ultimately, to retract and abase himself and agree in public and start proselytizing in public that no… you really can’t trust your own brain and if something seems wrong to you or you feel like defending yourself it is simply proof that you’re guilty.

But there were people who reported rather severe PTSD type reactions to even sitting down at a keyboard to write because they were so terrified of offending… again. Because *rationally* they’d done nothing wrong the first time, but they were forced to an irrational acceptance of their guilt. So now they’ve “accepted their privilege” and “checked it” and confessed and repented (they could come to the Dark Side and be welcomed, but they don’t know that, and have been taught that the Dark Side is evil, and that’s why shunning is so very evil within closed communities… being exiled is a horrific punishment) but since they had NO IDEA how they could have done something wrong in the first place, they also have no idea how to avoid it the next time.

Imagine doing this to a child.

The kid is walking through a room doing nothing much and suddenly POW… and then you tell the kid… well that was YOUR fault. You screwed up. You stepped on that spot on the floor.

So the kid looks at the spot and it looks like every other spot. But the kid is told that, no, the fact that she can’t even SEE the spot is what the problem is. You can’t SEE the spot… that’s why it is YOUR fault. Also, a good child will try to learn. You’re a good child, aren’t you?

So the kid says, yes… it was my fault. I could not SEE the spot. Not seeing the spot makes this my fault.

Afterward, it’s still impossible to see the spots, and walking across the room becomes fraught with danger. Sitting down at the keyboard gives this very “good” person the shakes and panic attacks… where are the spots? She still can’t see the spots but she MUST agree and believe that those spots exist.

I have a LOT of sympathy for those who were hurt, just like I have sympathy for any abused person.

For reasons and in circumstances I’m not going to get into here, I often found myself EXACTLY in the position of that child, growing up. It’s crazy making and it took me years (20 and a good marriage) to recover from it.

Which is why it’s a particularly evil thing to do to a single person.

But in a greater sense, it is literally what certain kinds of revolutionary doctrines, be they religious or political can do to a human being.

Note, these are usually doctrines (again, religious or political) that not only think they can remake humans, but think they can remake them into flawless creatures. I was going to say they can come from the right or the left, but only if you accept that all religious extremism is from the right, which I don’t think makes much sense.

There is a certain tendency in conservative/libertarian circles (if that’s what we’re calling “right” this week) to assume that humans come with some natural flaws, one of them being a thirst for power, another being a need for recognition. There is also an understanding that life isn’t fair.

It is only certain feverish religious states (well, the sects call themselves Christian, I have issues with them, and no, I’m not talking about any recognizable mainstream Christian sects, though there were certainly some interesting heresies in that direction in past centuries) that partake the illusions of the left (itself a fevered religion, albeit a godless one) that you can infinitely remake humans and use that change to create a paradise.

Here is the thing: every society has rules by which its members are judged. Some are sensible rules and we can applaud them. Some are batsh*t insane rules, and we’re jaw-dropped about them. And some are indecipherable to our current mentality.

Some of the things that bring condemnation on characters in Jane Austen’s novels, for instance, I only understand are “bad” because I studied the period. I’m sure blundering into it, I’d make a million gaffes. I find the morality police that whips the ankles of women who show them in Saudi-Arabia repulsive, but it is a rule and the women know about it. I understand rules about things like not eating from other people’s plates, not insulting strangers, etc.

BUT and this is very important, the point is not that those rules are fair. The point is that if you grow up in those societies, you have a reasonable expectation of knowing WHAT the rules are. I.e. if I’m strolling in a mini-skirt in a Saudi Arabian souk and get whipped, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It can come as an outrage, but not a surprise.

Revolutions like the US, which changed governance but didn’t presume to change the way people worked, in their minds and hearts, don’t turn into cannibal feasts. OTOH revolutions like the French, where people descended/aspired to changing the names of the weekdays and the months, in order to construct a completely different humanity, inevitably end up in a pile of blood-soaked corpses.

So do revolutions like the Russian and the Chinese, and others.

The difference is this: these revolutions make functioning as a normal human a crime. This requires changing your very thoughts and the way you process reality. And they presume to divine from your smallest actions, your most casual lapses, that you have commited a thought-crime.

This, of course, requires special people who can look into the actions and every day assumptions of others and tell them where they went wrong.

The process is bad enough when done by a minister or another nominally trained person. (I am not talking here of ministers in normal denominations, who are usually trained and don’t want to remake humanity, just get it to behave a little better.) In extreme cases, it creates Jim Jones. It is nightmarish when done by the left, which means it is done by people given power and authority to do this by the grace of totally arbitrary characteristics: where they were born/when/what pigmentation their skin has/what happens to be between their legs/whom they like to sleep with. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you an idea that none of these attributes is magical, and none of them should confer the authority to discern and judge the secrets of other’s hearts.

But the SJWs believe it does. They believe someone who is born with more victim cards, even if the person was in fact born very wealthy and never experienced a day’s hardship, immediately can judge them and tell them when they’re exhibiting “privilege” which is a taint that attaches to other seemingly arbitrary characteristics, no matter how poor or downtrodden people born with them are.

This sets them up to be abused in exactly the way that Synova describes. Worse, it sets them up to join the mob and wail for the blood of innocent people in whom one of these “anointed ones” discerned guilt. Not to do so, might mean they were tainted with the guilt themselves, after all.

By this process, they saddle themselves with psychopaths as leaders (yeah, some of the anointed ones are merely true believers, but that kind of power inevitably attracts psychopaths and sadists) and make any organization, place, country or government they take over into hell on Earth, instead of the utopia they imagine.

The state of irrationality is demonstrated by the commenter who thought I was RH because of our “similar rhetoric.” There are in fact not even mild similarities between an extreme leftist and myself. BUT both of us made him feel pain. So, therefore we are similar and possibly the same.

That means the commenter had the ability to think/react/avoid pain of a nematode, if that high.

I would enjoin those people caught in the vortex of accusation/appeasement/abasement to take a good look at what they’re doing.

A society where the rules have to be divined by special individuals (no? Would any rational human being think of “lady” as an insult, till the SJWs declared it so?) is not conducive to liberty. It’s not conducive to kindness. It’s damaging to the ability to think.

In the end it makes you animals, joining a mob to avoid being killed.

I suggest if you are caught in it, or suspect you might be, that you re-read Animal Farm. And then evaluate the goals of your movement. You can demand that women be given opportunities in business and art. You can’t get into anyone’s heads and demand that they never have a bad thought or that all women have to have good results in business and art.

You can establish that pinching a woman’s butt against her will is bad. You can’t establish that men shouldn’t be allowed to look at naked women or wear art showing a naked woman. And you have to decide whether female nudity is empowering or demeaning, btw.

The rules need to be clear and well established. They can be changed, but if they are, they need to be proclaimed so everyone in the society/group/cult knows them.

And no one should be condemned by inference/whispers/accusation without a fair chance to defend him/her/dragon self and confront his/her/gerbil’s accusers.

That is how you stop cannibal feasts. You start by admitting humans aren’t infinitely perfectible, and that even the “anointed ones” can have flaws like a search for power.

The alternative is that you tuck your napkin under your chin and dig in.

Forever.

I spent my first year of marriage terrified.  (Sees readers look at title and glares.  Nothing off color you ‘orrible people.  Have a carp.) You see, I’d moved away from all family support structure to a country where — still to this day — things work so differently I have trouble explaining them to my parents.

We were living on very little and to make things more interesting, were making up for the dating we hadn’t done prior to marriage, so there were movies and dinners out.  For various reasons Dan also could count on no help from his family, most of it being that he was an adult and determined to make his own way.

So here we were, two 22 year old kids, who often got to the end of the month with $6 in the bank, and no safety net whatsoever.

The culture I came from was centered around a big tribe, and of course you could fail, but your family was there to cushion the fall.  When I didn’t have a tutoring job in college (some semesters I didn’t find any students) I had to save a bit on luxuries, but I wasn’t going to go without a roof over my head or food.

The realization that there was nothing between us and utter destitution but Dan’s job (and later my jobs, sometimes, but I never made much) made me very scared.  Particularly because this was the mid-eighties, time of sudden layoffs.

Where I came from the government was there to provide health care and education and in extreme cases if you managed to piss off your entire tribe, money for food. This is something that didn’t change through the revolution and shocks in the 70s — since the 40s or so, the government was a big old safety net.  National or international, socialists are socialists.

I thought the US was very hard, very cold, and there was no one to help should we fail.

I don’t remember when I stopped thinking that.  We hit rock bottom on money a few times, one of them while paying for the complete cluster… er… mess that was my older son’s delivery while both of us were unemployed. That was the time we actually considered going to a soup kitchen.  CONSIDERED, mind, but we never could get ourselves to go in.  Yeah, we were hungry and broke, but it seemed like that was something reserved for other people, people in REAL trouble.  We went to bed hungry that night, and the next day something happened and we got a small payment and got rice and frozen veggies which lasted us a week, and then Dan found a job…

And we were okay if very tight for a few years, and then he got a raise.  And until he was unemployed years later, we were okay provided we were frugal.

The last two rock-bottoms we hit were both while paying double mortgage or mortgage and rent while selling houses.  Our “Rock bottom” seems to be getting shallower.  We were very tight last year because rent and mortgage, and the house took forever to get ready to sell (it actually sold very quickly) but the “tight” was a matter of foregoing all luxuries and some necessities like car repairs, not of foregoing meals.  (Though of picking cheaper meals, yes.)

But even in those rock bottom times, I wasn’t as scared as that first year.  The feeling no one was there to look after me if I did something stupid was terrifying.

I don’t remember when I stopped being scared, or when I traded it for “we can handle it.” Yes, a lot of it was getting a bit of a cushion in the bank, but even when that is gone, like last year, I wasn’t as terrified as that year.

I think the greater part of it was having friends who are like family, and knowing that if worst came to worst, I could show up at Amanda’s or Kate’s or half a dozen other people, hungry and with only the clothes on my body and they wouldn’t even ask a question, just tell me to come in and make up a bed.

Look, we’re humans.  We’re built on a great ape frame.  All of us want the tribe to be there, to care for us.  We might never need it, but we want to know someone gives a damn if a lion leaps out of a bush and mauls us, metaphorically speaking.  And a nuclear family is not big enough to give that sense of protection.

Yet our economics, and in the US our demographics, conspire to make the nuclear family about the biggest unit most of us can count on, and a lot of people not even that.

Is it any wonder that the left (and those on the right who turn their hopeful eyes to Trump) want the government to be a daddy who steps in and saves them if things get too scary?

Both views of government are valid, in a way.  The “let us alone and let us do” and the “look after me.”  And both have trade offs.

I wasn’t wrong in being scared.  The situation we placed ourselves in when we moved away from kith and kin and faced the world without a safety net but each other was terrifying.  We scraped by okay, but we might not have.  If one or the other of us had got seriously ill, we had no one to turn to but charity, which we were both too proud to take.

If we’d decided when we got married to move to Portugal instead, we’d never have faced that.  Because in layoffs, or even while selling a house, we could have punted back to living with my family for a few months (or years.  Or forever.  No one bats an eye at that there, and several households hold more than one family.) And we wouldn’t have worried about how to pay for the boys’ schooling, or surgery when I needed it.

Without those dips, we’d have been able to take nice vacations and do a lot of other things we’ve never done. (Look guys, our idea of a vacation is a long weekend at Embassy Suites in Denver.  One time we were able to afford five days in a row.  We still talk about this as the most fun, EVER.)

So, am I sorry we didn’t do that?  Not only no, but h*ll no.  Why not?

Because being looked after has a price, whether it is by your family or the government.  Oh, my parents would have looked after us, and counted it as nothing, but the return is to do what they deem fit.  I.e. Mom has this thing about my wearing jeans.  If I were in her house, under her roof, it would be skirt suits all the way.  And then there’s this writing thing.  While dad would secretly approve of it, both of them would have told me to stick with teaching (which I would have done had I stayed there) because it’s steady income.  And if I were dependent on them when my income failed, I couldn’t say no.  I mean, how could I take risks with other people’s money.

So, you say, what about the government safety net?  They can’t tell you how to dress or what to do.

Sure.  Well, they can, but it hasn’t got to that point (yet.)

I don’t know what the safety net is there now — I haven’t been back for more than a couple of weeks at a time for 30 years — but let’s suppose they have — not unusual in the EU — unlimited and generous unemployment benefits.

Let’s suppose I’d started out teaching school and was so bad at it I got laid off.  (Bad? No. Mouthy?  Yes.  Comes to the same in the end.)

Let’s suppose they had those unlimited unemployment benefits.  If I were living in a place where family contributed, it might be enough I had no reason to find another job.  So, instead, I’d decide to write.

Here’s the thing: there would be no reason to try to finish something or even to start something “saleable”.  I could be an artist working for immortal glory.

Which is to say, there would never have been a need to grow up and live in the real world.

In the same way there would never have been a need to depend on friends, which means there would never have been a need to be dependable friends, when we’re needed.

And in the end the “hard” countries that don’t smooth out that curve for you seem to result in more freedom and prosperity and greater innovation.

Is it the result of less regulations?  Who knows?  Perhaps it’s the result of something in the brain that only wakes up when under stress.

Or perhaps it’s the fact they’re more in tune with the gods of the copybook headings:  “If you don’t work, you die.”

Even in a, at worst, medium soft country like the US, there is an incentive to get out there and work.  And half of success is showing up and rolling up your sleeves.  So by definition there will more successful people than in a soft-soft country where you have no incentive to get up and do something.

The truth is as much as we want others to take care of us, humans are not designed to live soft.  We thrive on adversity.  We adapt to the strangest circumstances.  Only infants and children get taken care of unconditionally.  And it’s fine for them.  It’s fine for the elderly too.  They’ve made their contribution and now can’t, it’s up to family/friends/us to look after them.

BUT the price of being taken care of all your life is being a child all your life.  No one who hasn’t faced that abyss without a net and made the changes needed to survive knows what being grown up means.

It’s hard growing up in a soft world, because you have to kick your own behind into it, and most of us aren’t good at that.

So in the end, the soft countries even with all the nets end up with a worse standard of life and probably a lower standard of happiness too.  (If your struggles don’t matter, nothing matters.)

If you have a choice, choose the hard path. You grow the calluses to deal with it. And in the end, you and your surroundings will be better for it.

Down With Godwin -Kate Paulk

If I could eliminate one thing about the Internet, it would be Godwin’s law. Why? It’s made it next to impossible to make actual comparisons about what is probably the best documented instance of the rise of a populist dictator. The instant the magic words come out, any semblance of rational discussion gets defenestrated and the next thing you know people are shouting past each other and the whole thing dies.

Consider: a nation whose people were known for hard work, for pride in their achievements, who – not without justification – saw themselves as having been betrayed by wealthy elites. Their savings were wiped out by what appeared to them to be a combination of malice on the part of the same wealthy elites who claimed they were shameful warmongers and financial mismanagement. Despite what they were being told, they could see themselves losing ground and becoming less well-off than their parents and grandparents had been.

Simply put, these people were immensely vulnerable to a charismatic populist willing to tell them that they had every right to feel betrayed; that they had been betrayed; and that he was going to change all this and make them a great people and a great nation again.

Sound familiar? It should: there are two populist demagogues spinning their separate flavors of this particular scenario through the USA right now. One of them has deployed rioters against the other, although it’s not impossible that the whole thing was staged the way the early NSDAP supporters would pretend to be opponents of the party to set off violence that made the NSDAP look like the victim. It made for good copy, and gave their leader some really good material for those crowd-pleasing speeches he became famous for… before he became a synonym for evil.

It’s worth remembering the man was an idealist. He had a vision of a once-great nation becoming great again, and he wanted – at least as far as all the documents available suggest – to bring that dream to life. He was also more than a little narcissistic and barking mad as well, something that leads to nightmarish alt-history scenarios in which he’s not so utterly insane the British don’t stop trying to kill him because his grandiose plans do more damage to his side of the war than theirs.

None of this means that any of the current crop of wannabe US Presidents are going to be like that. It’s a warning sign. Middle and working class Americans do feel betrayed by both national leaders and the big multinational corporations (particularly the ones outsourcing their jobs despite this actually being more costly in the long run because said outsourcing causes a drop in quality which in turn drives customers away; customers who are unable to make their opinions known because the customer service has also been outsourced and just try to get through those phone menus and speak to someone who understands what you’re saying and whom you can understand – of course by then the decision-makers have claimed their golden parachute and are long gone).

They know they’re being lied to. They know the only place the economy is ‘booming’ is the artificial hothouses where the government of the day is directing funds to its favored supporters. They know their life is worse than their parents in many ways. They know their kids have it harder, despite the plethora of gadgets (bread and circuses?) to distract them. They’re sick of being told they’re the source of all evil in the world, even places where they’ve never been and evils that existed long before they were born.

Is it any wonder they’re angry? Is it any wonder they’re rushing to support someone who’s telling them they’ve been lied to and cheated? Is it any wonder they’re not seeing past this to where the vision they’re being sold could take them?

If I were fifteen or so years younger and less cynical, I probably wouldn’t see it either. But now…

The angry dragon awakens. The populist demagogue who betrays it will pay dearly – and he will betray it because he (both options) are making promises which are impossible to fulfill.

My role in all this is to do my best to keep the ideals of the Constitution going through the mess so that what emerges on the other side is a freer, more just USA. I believe it will: I can’t define why, but since the financial crash of 2008 I’ve had an unshakeable sense that we will win, that the USA – and perhaps more importantly, the principles endorsed by its founders – will prevail no matter how dark the future appears. I don’t understand it, and if I try to examine it, it slips from my grasp and my mind turns away. But it’s there. It’s solid. There are times when it’s the only light I can see.

But in the end, we win. The darkness is dispelled. We do not fall to dictatorship or the bleak emptiness of Communism. That is enough.

Years ago, when I joined my first writers group, I met a woman — probably younger than I’m now — who was writing HER book.  (Warning, almost all new writers have a book.  It is only when that one is finished and published that we feel we might have more. Of course, some don’t.  I’ve always been of the opinion that lady was one, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Being older than my at the time 30 years, and having more money — not exactly difficult, you know, since at the time we were living on rice and huge economy bags of frozen veggies and if we bought a paperback book we had to eat pancakes for a week — she had gone to Brazil to research her book.

And yet, there in the middle of the first chapter, she had someone call out “Mio Dios.”  I pointed out to her that was Spanish (and I think the order inverted to look like Portuguese.)  the Portuguese is eu instead of i in the words.  I grant you the pronunciation is similar.  eu would seem to be pronounced ew like io, but it’s not, it’s more like eh ooo. I could understand her saying that she heard it that way — which she did.  Your ear hears familiar sounds, when faced with unfamiliar ones — but she then went on to dispute with me that the words should NOT be written Meu Deus, because she had been in Brazil, and she’d HEARD it, and had I ever been in Brazil?

Think on this for a moment.  She was disputing with me the spelling — and ultimately the existence, since she really seemed to think it was a dialect of Spanish — of my native language, a language I had used both written and spoken for the first 22 years of my life. (And before anyone says anything stupid, yeah, I read books printed in Brazil, had an uncle and cousins there, and knew for a fact they didn’t spell it the Spanish way.)
But this writer had learned Spanish in school, it sounded like Spanish to her and THEREFORE it must be true and I must be wrong.

After all she’d spent a lot of money to go and research her book in its native land.

I was reminded of this recently while reading one of my favorite writers.  I’ve run out of his series I really like and the offshoot of that series too, and being slightly depressed (look, bub, if your plans for housing and what is going to happen in the next six months were changing as fast as mine, while packing keeps you from writing books that are not only overdue, but which WANT to be written, you’d be slightly depressed, too) I’m attracted to his work like moth to flame.  So I bought the first of his first series.

His character has been working in Portugal for years, in a small village in the south.  And the fisherman he works for is … Sanchez.

Later in the chapter he tells us the locals don’t accept strangers, but he must be wrong, since this person in their midst is obviously a Spaniard.

Or to put it another way, if I didn’t already love this writer’s works, the book would have been walled with force (walled in this case meaning to throw against the wall) and I’d never, ever, ever have read him again.  Because Sanchez is a name that doesn’t exist in Portuguese.

For various reasons I suspect he either visited Portugal or was in touch with a Portuguese colony in the US.  If the later, I suppose one of the people might have had a Spanish father.  Or they might have learned to write and spell their name the Spanish way, because it is what the locals EXPECT.

On the other hand if he went to Portugal and heard the nearest equivalent Sanches (pronounced Sanshesh), a relatively rare name, he would have to believe he was hearing Sanchez.  And after my first experience with an American writer hearing Portuguese, I’m willing to believe.

There are other, weirder misapprehensions of the culture. Later in a different writers’ group I ran into a woman who had also set her book in Brazil (maybe this was a trend) and in her book she killed all the men (with an engineered virus) to free all the women, because it was the only way to fix the culture and blah blah blah (rolls eyes.)

However the fascinating thing was a detail in her setup.  She was absolutely convinced that the women in Brazil only went to church because the men made them (being naturally pagan — giggle) and the idea was given her by her father who had lived in Brazil for some time.  I couldn’t convince her otherwise.  Men made the women go to church.  Without men the women were natural pagans.

While I will confess that at least the part of the for lack of a better word “woman culture” in Brazil that comes from Portugal (as opposed to from Africa, where I’m not on firm ground or from Italy which might or might not be like Portugal in this) would give a nervous breakdown any person not familiar with how schizophrenic traditional cultures can be, what the man thought he was seeing makes no sense whatsoever.

Yes, women in Brazil as in Portugal are the keepers of certain traditional knowledge which to the uninitiated might appearl “pagan” in the American sense.  It ranges from healing, which can run to brief incantations using fire or a knife (only for cold sores, I swear.  Well, at least it’s the only one I know) to various rituals to appease wild spirits (putting Maias — a wild yellow flower — on all of your house openings the first of May, say) or performing the proper rites for the dead, before or after the church gets involved.  However this is not viewed as a religion or even a separate tradition.  It is treated as “practical knowledge you don’t need to bother learned people with.”  It comes from the same school of thought which until recently put spiderwebs on wounds to staunch bleeding, a practice it turns out works.

This is completely independent from religion.  Religion in almost any Latin country (I think.  Though it might be different in those converted by Spaniards in fire and blood) is the province of women.  Women tend to attend church life long, while the only men you tend to find in church are very young and very old.  A family who loses their mother often stops attending church.  Women tend to chase the men around and make them dress properly for church.

But from this, somehow, this American man intuited “women go to church because the men make them.”

If you look at the framework he brought to the situation, this makes perfect sense.  He knew — like any protestant in the twentieth century — that the Catholic church oppresses women, so therefore they must not like it.  And then he must have seen enough hints of practices that protestant ministers in northern European countries are rather more vigorous about stopping than the Catholic church, which tends to turn a blind eye (these days) if its nose is not rubbed in it.  Ergo, presto, the women were pagans, kept reluctant prisoners by the Catholic faith.  It fit his preconceptions, it made “sense” and therefore it was.  I’m going to guess he wasn’t close enough to any Brazilian family to watch mom chase the guys around and line them up for church every morning, or even herd them out the door like ducklings.

Btw, that sight would have gone a long way to disabuse his daughter of the idea that anything wrong with a Latin culture could be fixed by killing all the men.  Mostly what is wrong with Latin cultures is wrong with the POLITICAL culture, and I’m not sure how that would get fixed.  But as in any culture, mothers are the first exposure of the children to what you do and what you fail to do.  And when there is blatant sexism (eh.  In American terms all Latin cultures are sexist.  They still work fairly well, provided you don’t happen to be an outlier as a woman who really wants to compete with the men.  Yeah, these days women work (thanks to high taxation) but few really try to compete, even when they can) it is transmitted by the women first.  Even in the Arab world it has been said that to get rid of the idea women are somewhere between second class humans and objects, you need not get rid of the men, but of the mothers in law, aka the matriarchs who finally rule the household and who will both do anything and everything to keep their daughters in law in check and to dish out a measure of what THEY got from their mothers in law.

This is not the post for this — or perhaps it is – but having been deformed by generations of “feminist” culture, American women (and men!) tend to only see power in masculine terms.  I ran into this once at a con panel in which women were talking about “powerful women” of the past and everyone they brought up was a woman who had functioned as a man, be it Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great.  There were no mentions of people like Isabella of Castille who could lead armies, yes, but whose very real power was in the children she raised and seeded around Europe.  (Same for Victoria, of course.)  No, their idea of a powerful woman was someone who had more or less buried her feminine nature in order to function as a man manque, in a man’s world.  (While to me those women, even the ones I admire for what they accomplished, are always a little sad.)

However most college educated American women can’t even PERCEIVE female power, no matter how real.  And it is very real.  I don’t come from a household like that.  Dad never used (well, now he does, as in the last phone call, but that is because he wanted an excuse to call) “You’re worrying your mother.”  Much less did he ever use “You’re breaking your mother’s heart.”  Mom is an outlier too, and if you broke her heart you’d learn it from her first, as she broke your head with the nearest object.

BUT my grandmother was the matriarch of the family, and though I don’t remember anyone EVER saying “you’re going to break your grandmother’s heart” I really tried very hard not to.  (And did, inevitably, when I married and moved away.)

And I can’t think of any of my generation who wouldn’t rather saw off their own legs with a butter knife than DISAPPOINT grandma.  (A hard bar, as she was infinitely forgiving, but possible.)  The fear of disappointing us kept us, no matter how eccentric (raises hand) within the bounds of acceptable public behavior for the culture, and even managed to get me to learn at least some embroidery and crochet.

That is power.  And for a strong and determined woman, it can be immense power.  In almost every culture (even in the US where it works) it is women who hold the family together and who, for lack of a better word, set a “tone” for it.  And the tone can make all the difference in terms of success not only for the parents but for the children as well.

However this immense female power — the ability to be the glue that holds civilization — is quite lost on the eye trained on the ideas of STATE power and of societal forms.

Powerful women who are powerful AS WOMEN and not as men manque are invisible to feminists, just like that troublesome final s of Portuguese (almost always pronounced sh) is inaudible to ears trained in Spanish in the US.  And just like the real structure of a society is invisible to those trained to expect something.

When we get people here who describe the last eight years as an halcyon epoch of peace and prosperity, it is easy to roll our eyes. I mean, fast and furious, Benghazi, racial tensions, drones, our troops involved in more and more tenuously connected ventures.  And as for prosperity — yeah, most of us have not gone more than a few months without being worried sick about job/money/ability to make it in the last eight years.

But I’m going to guess these people are in protected areas of the economy, perhaps the only growth one — government — and read and believe mostly the mainstream press which, like Germany’s, has proven it is far more bound to the government (at least a leftist government) than we ever believed.

In other words, they had the framework set up to interpret what they saw as peace and prosperity, and so they do, by ignoring all disparate information.  (Easier if you live in a bubble.)

They can’t believe their lying eyes, because their eyes are literally lying: spectacled with expectations they formed before they ever looked.

This is extremely hard to keep out of science even with committed and impartial scientists, and without taking in account funding and what strange opinions would do to your grants.  And scientists TRY to stay objective.

How much harder is it for those of us who are not scientists and who are trying to understand the entire panoply of human endeavor, where results are often unclear?

The only guide I can give you is to note and pick at the inconsistencies.  And assume no source is above reproach or too vetted to fail.  I remember reading a book on the post war period in England and finding, in the same chapter, that they talked about how poor the working class was, how industrialization had made it poorer, and then lamented that the working class had now so much money they were building over old estates and buying household machinery like vacuums.

It is amazing the writers’ head didn’t explode, but then I expect she had been exceedingly well schooled in Marxism which has somehow always retained the idea that industrialization is bad for workers (an idea belied by the industrialization we see in developing countries, but they refuse to see that) and in romanticism, where rapid building and electrical stuff in the house is always a blight.  She was seeing the world through two contradictory frames and didn’t even notice it.

So, to see clearly, pick at inconsistencies, try to find primary sources and, most of all, never trust your mind.

Stay awake.

Oh, the Humanity!  A Blast From the Past Post-7-3-2007

I’ve been thinking a lot about humanity, recently. Partly, I think, due to an ongoing and profoundly disturbing thread in my conference in Baen’s Bar (Sarah’s Diner) where someone suggested “feeding” humans to unspecified dark shadows. The thread (which is a fantasy thread, in which regular posters imagine themselves as shape shifters or what-have you, in a reinventing of their lives in the e-space of the diner. Think second life, without the props) has progressed, with some people objecting, to now saying that these people being pedophiles, who therefore “deserve” to be fed to the shadows.

I will confess this still makes me uneasy — vaguely nauseous too — and it’s not due to compassion for pedophiles. It’s more the fact that I like humans in general and humans in particular. This is something I often discuss with Son #1 who is going through his “I hate people” phase. And the whole thing has just been fermenting (festering) in my mind, while I go about cleaning and cooking and finishing my much overdue novel for Bantam (I’m on it, Anne, I swear) all of which was delayed by illness (to be explained later, perhaps.) The illness also prevented my posting here. And it also, at some fundamental level, seems to have changed me. I’m doing a lot more thinking about principles I’ve accepted, unexamined. I suppose this is good for a writer. And I promise I won’t be larding my books with long philosophical passages. (I adhere to the Heinlein code of WHY to write and making people think is way down the list. Though for the record, it is there.)

So — to stop rambling — Humanity, my friends. Are you pro or con?