Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I was raised with noblesse oblige, which, as we all know is a kind of almond and mare’s milk pastry made in the mountains of outer Mongolia and eaten at wedding feasts to assure good luck.

Okay, I lie. Noblesse Oblige is literally – as all of you know! However, let me unpack it, because sometimes it’s good to reflect on things we know – the obligations of noblemen.

In a world in which station was dictated by birth (most of the world, most of the time) the way to keep society from becoming completely tyrannical and the burden of those on the lower rungs of society from becoming unbearable was “noblesse oblige” – that is a set of obligations that the noblemen/those in power accepted as a part of their duty to society. Most of these involved some form of moderation of force.

The amount of moderation depended on the culture itself. For instance, in those lands in which the nobleman got first night rights (or claimed them anyway) it might be noblesse oblige to return the bride after that. It might also be nobles oblige to stand godfather to the oldest child, who, after all, might be more than a godchild. And in other cultures, though the first night thing wasn’t there, the godchild thing still applied. A small return for faithful service to closer servants and courtiers, etc.

In the same way, while you might treat your serfs or villains like dirt, you forebore to take their last crumb of bread and left them enough to live on. This might not be because you were smart or merciful or whatever, but because someone had dinged it into you.

Noblesse oblige, by that name or others, appears every time there is a gross imbalance of power in human society. Or that is, it appears if society is to survive.

Perhaps the society that did it with the most style were the English before the world wars, where children were raised in an entire idea of service. The entire White Man’s Burden is about that. In fact, that poem codifies the obligations of “White male privilege” more than any SJW could, and in a more rational way, which is why they scream raciiiiiisssss and sexisssss because like vampires they hate mirrors. (Is it racist? Oh, sure, in a way, in that if you confuse race with culture, it admits that some cultures are inferior to others and that the more functional culture has a duty to the less functional. But to think cultures are race is to believe that behaviors are hard encoded in the human genome to an extent that makes people automatons, and which determines everything you think and do. So, to believe cultures are races, you need to be a stone cold racist, yourself.)

Depending on the amount of Noblesse Oblige as way as the colonizing culture, this worked better or worse for the colonized. Imagine how different Brazil would be if colonized by Britain, and you’ll see what I mean.

But noblesse oblige was not just about nobility or about different cultures with an imbalance of power, like that between colonized and colonizer.

Noblesse oblige applied at all levels of society and between the genders, and in transactions. Every time there was an imbalance, you can bet – in a healthy, functional society at least (and more on that later) – there was a rule, an unspoken law about what you didn’t do, what was beyond the pale.

In financial transactions, this might mean harming yourself a little, not pressing home the last bit of advantage. You find this encoded in a lot of Victorian and Regency novels (written at the time) in which if an “evil businessman” left the desperate person he was trading with “without a cent to bless himself with” he was rightly despised by all right thinking people, even if he had done it wholly within the law and no one could touch him.

This is why the Industrial Revolution wasn’t the Dickensinian hell that Marx and, well, Dickens, described. (My son likes Dickens. I say for a novelist he wasn’t a bad propagandist, and he distorted history of the time more than Marx ever could.) (Yes, it was brutal and horrible, compared to our time, but we’re living in a time of superabundance and everything more than fifty years back seems brutal and horrid. I know. I grew up in a time bubble and sometimes I don’t believe my own childhood.)

In the same way, between men and women…

Men are bigger and stronger than women. We’re talking women on average, of course. I think right now I’m bigger than my husband, though he’s still stronger. And probably Lizzy Lifter is stronger than Geoffrey Geek who spends his entire time playing computer games and never sees the sun. BUT on average, over the population, men are so much stronger/faster/physically able than women that any random man can overpower any given woman.

So, why aren’t ALL women victims of domestic abuse? Why are women even outside, without being raped? (And if you think all women are victims, you must be living in an Arab country, where those two above are the pre-assumptions of the cultural norms.) How is this possible? Why don’t men press home their advantage?

Well, first because men aren’t a group with “group consciousness.” Contrary to what “feminists” seem to think, men are not alien creatures who reproduce by fission. They’re women’s children, friends, brothers, fathers. So of course, being human, they care for some women and they’re decent enough to extrapolate their feelings to strange women. (And Women’s Studies programs make a lot of those.)

But more than that, there’s a built in noblesse oblige that prevents men from pressing home their last advantage. Our society runs with it, and is soaked deep with strains of female privilege.

No?

Well, take your three year old boy to a playground. Have him get in a fight with a girl. At that age, their strengths are equivalent, and the girl might be larger and stronger (girls develop faster.) Have him punch her. What do you do? You pull him back and say “you don’t hit a girl. Ever, ever, ever.”

At which point if the girl is a little sh*t who wasn’t taught her part in the bargain, she will beat him to a pulp, but never mind.

You do it because you have to. This is not some fossilized rule. It’s because if your boy doesn’t have that trained into him REALLY early, he’ll hit thirteen and seriously injure a girl. Worse, in an intimate relationship with a girl (should he turn out to like them) he will lose his cool (we all do) and suddenly become a wife abuser. Because the chances his wife will be smaller and weaker than himself are high.

So you tell your three year old this “arbitrary” rule and establish the boundaries of “female privilege” to stop him from becoming a monster when the imbalance of (physical) power sets in.

Of course, the rule has its opposite. Because women have power too, in the relationship. Oh, sure, not at three, when they’re just annoying, extra-whiney little boys as far as boys are concerned. (Average, statistical girls, that is. Some of us were Vengeance of G-d hellions.)

I tell you as the girl who was often pulled back from these with “girls don’t fight” or “girls don’t hit boys in public” but most often (my being outsized for my time and place) with “you don’t hit people smaller than you. Ever, ever, ever.”

This – ah – female privilege of course established “the way girls fight” usually underhanded, and without the adult noticing. Pinches, kicks to the ankle (my poor male friends in middle school) and also gossip and character destruction and other, less physical means of retaliation.

Because women are still human and will still fight.

But by middle school, we had it well established. A boy understood he would take whatever the girl dished out physically, if a girl were so uncouth as to hit him, and treat it as a joke. (And by that time they were that much stronger – thanks to testosterone – that they could do that, in most cases.) The girl in turn knew if she’d hit a boy, short of self-defense in a dark classroom, where he ambushed her, thereby putting himself beyond the protection of social rules, she’d committed a social sin and broken a major unspoken rule.

This kept fist fights between the sexes from happening. And most girls, though they might character assassinate one another, had learned to keep the boys out of it, because they weren’t adroit in the art and therefore were as vulnerable to that type of war as women to punches.

Or to put it another way, as the good professor says, “Chivalry imposed obligations upon both sexes.” And it can’t continue when one breaks the compact. The same way that other imbalances of power in society can’t continue unless both parts play by the rules.

When one part forgets the rules, they don’t leave the peasants enough to live on, and the peasants chop their necks off.

Look, I’m a libertarian and in the US. I believe all men and women should be equal under the law. But you can’t eliminate imbalances of power unless you stop being human. Communism fails, in large measure, because it wants to eliminate imbalances of power completely by making humans into something different. They believe they can shape a social ape into something more like ants or bees (don’t argue. Yeah, they do want to have rulers. One ruler over faceless millions. Because someone has to enforce equality. Yes, I know about the myth of the vanishing state.) Hence the myth of the homo Sovieticus, the selfless, perfectly acting man who would emerge once the distortions of capitalism were removed from the “natural” man who was of course a Rousseaunian noble savage. No, I don’t believe it. No one should believe it. The rejects of that culling program have filled a hundred million graves and bid fair to fill more. Because Rosseau was wrong and the mythology of communism is a hot and sticky repulsive mess.

Some people will always be taller, larger, stronger. Some will be smarter. Some will, for whatever reason like “my ancestors got here earlier” have the advantage of a better adaption to the society they live in.

I, for instance, got both sides of the noblesse oblige speech because I was taller than most of my male teachers by 13, and probably stronger too. It took. Sort of. I knew how to subdue a badly acting male without hitting him by the time I was 20, and only psychopaths did not respond. (And for those there was hitting, hence the weaponized umbrella.)

Because I WAS a walking imbalance of power, frankly.

Noblesse oblige is needed to keep things from coming to extremes.

Unfortunately for us, starting with Rousseau, someone mistook those rules for “arbitrary and unnecessary.” Now, a lot of them were, of course. Human societies acquire unspoken rules, a lot of them dross, like a dog acquires fleas. And yep, if you follow all the unspoken rules, you’ll reinforce the power of the elites because that’s what the rules are designed to do. (Like, you know “you shouldn’t vote in the Hugos unless you’re a truefen” and “you can’t publish a list of suggestions, like the ones we’ve been passing around behind the scenes for years.” [What, me? Say anything? Nevah.])

But the Rousseau attempt to change those rules started from the idea that all unspoken societal rules were wrong. ALL of them. And that absent them, humans would live in a sort of paradise.

I wish he’d been acquainted with some savages, not the least because then he probably wouldn’t have lived to pen his awfully misguided ideas.

His ideas have been bouncing around society for a while, aided by Marxism (Marx MUST have been Asperger’s. No, I mean that. He looked at society and had no clue why things functioned, and couldn’t see people as people but as widgets belonging to particular groups which MUST of course be opposed to other groups they interacted with) in its feminist and racialist versions, cut the threads of things that were actually important, functional, and so early-set-in that they were never spoken of.

So women didn’t see the two sides of the bargain and just saw the way their side of it “oppressed” them, which led them to lose the power they did have in society, and now they want it back – see the way they’re racing back to the fainting couch where men can’t touch them or look at them – but since they don’t understand its origins, they’re trying to get it back in all the wrong ways. It’s all “check your privilege” but without ever checking their own privilege, even as it causes white knights to run to their defense.

I don’t know how long a society or a culture can last like this. Every time I know of in history, it ended in tears or guilhoutines.

I do know that humans are hierarchical apes who crave rules. The astonishing number of western converts to Islam (astonishing considering what Islam is as a way of life) particularly the women shows the craving for rules, spoken and unspoken is far stronger than rationality. And the fact that young men aren’t converting en masse to Islam (which gives them a much greater power than any western culture) means some traces of Noblesse Oblige remain. The idea of keeping your women imprisoned and veiled for their protection; the idea that those other men will of course rape them and hurt them; the idea that strange women are fair game, are still revolting and repulsive to men who were told “never hit a girl. Never, ever, ever” as little boys.

Which gives us some time to rebuild.

But rebuild we must. And that doesn’t mean teaching your boy he can’t hit girls, but teaching your girl that she has no obligations because patriarchy and she should go for the throat, every time. It means teaching your girl that what she is and what she can do will reduce most men – even strangers – to mush brains after puberty. And that her greater verbal ability (on average, statistically) doesn’t mean she should eviscerate and character-assassinate the poor bastage.

It also means teaching both sexes not to press home their every advantage in a business deal and not to use inside knowledge to eviscerate the defenseless financially.

It’s much better than “check your privilege” which requires you to apologize for the crimes of people you never met or heard of and then denounce yourself. It’s “Mind your noblesse oblige” which means if you find yourself in a position of overwhelming power over someone else, pull that punch. Because nothing is permanent, what goes around comes around, and guillotines in some form or another have a way of appearing when the imbalance gets too great.

Now eat your noblesse oblige like good boys and girls. Mare’s milk and almonds don’t grow on trees. Except the almonds. In outer Mongolia.*

*Yes, the writer is slap happy having delivered the cursed book. You should deal with it and be noble, for a change.

Le Deluge – David Pascoe

When I was a wee, young creature – not so wee as Wee Dave – shortly after I learned to read, I discovered the world was going to end, and there was nothing I (or any of us, I learned) could do about it. The Coming Ice Age was coming! The world was going to freeze, probably solid, my young (and febrile) mind suggested. Earth would be this glittering ball of ice, with people frozen like Otzi or woolly mammoths.

Either that, or the world would go MAD, and everything would disappear in flashes of nuclear light as Slim Pickins destroyed Moscow. Except for the people who survived and got superpowers and got to enjoy nuclear winter like in that classic of post-apocalyptic literature, The Road.

And then the Berlin Wall came down (I remember that) and the USSR kinda fell apart, and the world wasn’t going to end. For a while. Then Kevin Costner made a movie and suddenly the seas were rising, and the plains baking and everything was going to burn up, because Glow-Ball Worming!! Or something. It was a few years ago, now.

Only, apparently, that just isn’t so, despite pretty heavy coverage from, well, everybody. Our very own, um, Guy in the White House was just down in Florida recently playing golf giving a speech about the fact that the climate changes. (I’m stunned, me. And here I thought climate was static. Always were, always gonna be, kinda thingy. Well, you live and learn, I’m given to understand.) This is bad, we’re told, and it will result in great badness. There were also a few jokes, some laughter, and then His Majesty the Bossman jetted off to Rio for dancing and then Paris to meet up with Al-Gor for a party where they burned barrels of kerosene to propitiate the fire demons. Crazy thing, Earth Day.

So the world’s still going to end. I mean, there were the recently televised (in the same way the Revolution won’t be, Komrade) peaceful demonstrations in Baltimore. And some more in Seattle, celebrating May Day, though I’m given to understand that party got shut down by the local police. Spoilsports.

Speaking of Baltimore, and it’s recently unpleasantness, it seems the insipid hordes of social media were working to inflame the already … flaming … um, to cause greater violence between rioters peaceful protestors and Charm City’s finest. Pictures of dead police (later identified as being from countries other than the US) and inflammatory comments. Looks like Twitter’s good for something, after all.

So the world’s falling apart, again, still. Do we have anything to hope for? Well, the Navy Research Lab has succeeded in creating transparent aluminum. There actually seems to be something to the EmDrive, though nobody seems to understand why the thing produces thrust. (Me? I want my reactionless drive. If it works, we can use it to get off this rock.) More importantly, people are pushing back against the Narrative of the Powers That Be, and the True Believers of same are getting more and more outrageous in their attempts to retain power. Meanwhile, the very causes for which they so stridently campaign are starting to eat them. Witness the restaurants in Seattle closing, the independent stores in San Francisco looking desperately for some way to cut costs.

So, per the title, are we about to get swamped? No, not really. Things are lousy, right now. They’ve been bad before, and they’ll be bad again. Is the singularity about to erupt, propelling humanity to a new, permanent golden age? Maybe, but I doubt it. I’m hoping I get my own personal spaceship before I die. We’ll see what happens. The reality is that civilization is a long, long game. The kind that takes generations to play out. It’s why we work, and why we have children. Why we take such pains in raising them. We do what we can, every damn day, and we do it together, with whom we choose (that’s actually politics, no matter what lie some tired, old baggage tries to peddle you). This game often a slog, and a tiring one. Fortunate, then that we have proof that the Blessed Ichor is going to keep us around long enough to win it.

One of the really interesting things about cleaning up the rest of the other house, to move, is that we’re hitting exactly the sort of things we’d even forgotten had happened/existed.

For instance, we opened a box last packed away in 1990, when we moved from our very first house together.  It would have been exciting if it hadn’t been packed by movers, who don’t seem to have the ability to distinguish between trash and office stuff.  So, we had Dan’s business cards hoard, now with a lot of names and addresses either no longer in the business or no longer at that address/number; we had some sketch pads with funny drawings which back then was his way of dragging me away from writing.  You know exactly what.  We were 27.  There were pictures of cartoon guys with googly eyes and “here’s looking at you kid,” etc.  There were also sheets of paper that from their crumpled look the movers rescued from the trash can.  You know what I meant.  Crumple marks on an old shopping list.

There is a certain factor of “Wow, really” to this, at least when you realize not only have you any idea what the party was you were hosting, but also when the number of apples and cucumbers required must have meant some sort of salad I no longer remember making or having a recipe for.

It is a reminder of both the permanence of who you are and the transience of many things that seem incredibly important at the time.

Take those business cards.  If we’d found them 15 years ago, we’d never have shrugged and shaken the whole mess into the trash bag.  We wouldn’t have done it because, even though we probably would never have contacted any of those people anyway (note we never felt the need to ransack the house for still-unopened boxes) we’d have had the feeling that it might “be important.”

Weirder still is finding evidences of me in that creature I don’t remember.  Like endless miles of rejections, that mean I must have submitted a lot of stories, but I can’t remember any of those titles, and the stories I DO remember I’d rather I didn’t.  (There’s miles and miles — and MILES — of twerpitude on the way to becoming who we are as the late Pterry (pbuh) said.  What he didn’t say is that who we are is marginally less twerpy and our future selves, still a little less twerpy, will laugh at us.)

But then there are other surprise discoveries that have more meaning for both our society and us.

We found Robert’s grade reports from sixth grade, for instance.  And I blinked at the grades.

For background, both our kids are brilliant, which in this case is defined as “sharper than old mom” or to quote PTerry (pbuh) again “So sharp they cut themselves.”  This means they have a ton of idiosyncrasies and that if I’d known what was really going on in elementary/middle school, AND if I’d known I could homeschool (listen bud, I was afraid of missing something essential.  My formation has HOLES) I’d have taken them out in a New York minute, or even a Colorado one.

But one of their idiosyncrasies is that, being very similar, they like to play opposites.  What I mean is, though their basic makeup is close to the same and though they are (like my brother and me) when not in contact likely to be reading the same book at the same time, or playing the same game for the same reason, when they are together they view it as their sworn duty to not be alike.  So, since older son was a straight A student (or close enough) who gave himself an ulcer in high school worrying about grades, younger son studies for what interests him and lets the rest go hang, which makes him an A/D student or an A/F student on rare occasions.  (Mind you almost everything in college at least interests him minimally, so last time I looked he maintained a B average, but he gave me white hairs getting him through K-12.)

So as I looked at the report card I thought “Marshall” but the name was Robert, and I thought “Robert never had an F in math” and “This must be a strange mistake.”

But I remembered, vaguely, being very worried about Robert all through sixth grade, until we moved and changed schools and put him in an advanced program which was not that great in retrospect but which, at least, graded him on what he’d learned and his homework and tests.

Because you see my husband found the sheet explaining that grade.  I.e. the sheet with the checks and points for various things during the semester.

I’m fairly sure I never saw that sheet, though I can’t swear.  It might have been at the back of our desire to move which was so intense we picked a house totally unsuited to us by the method of “it’s in another district” and “We can afford it.”  (There were other reasons, like that someone in the neighborhood was killing cats, and we didn’t know who.)  Also, this was the year coming off Dan being unemployed and while he still was suffering from undiagnosed sleep apnea, which meant I was suffering from undiagnosed being kept awake (more than health issues were already doing) by apneaing husband, so heaven knows what I saw or what I made of it. The entire year is a fog.  Which is good as it kept the berserker from descending on the school to create the sort of scene where the police say “the bodies haven’t been found yet.”

Because that check list leading to an F in math read as follows: Items, three, tests, with perfect scores.  Item, “bring in x boxes of kleenex” with zero.  Item, bring in three lightbulbs, with zero.  Item bring in folders of appropriate size and 24 highlighter markers, zero.  Item inspection of locker showing it messy, zero.  Item, failed to organize his notes and use the appropriate colors to take them, zero.  Etc. etc.

Now younger son often managed to have cs in classes where he aced the tests due to an allergy to homework.  As the woman who grew from the kid who wrote her homework in the two seconds before class, whose stories of how her homework had disappeared (it was aliens.  A UFO, I swear. They paralyzed me with their rays and took my long division homework) became preparation for her current career and who, up to her Junior year in college, was known to read essays from a blank sheet, I couldn’t really come down like a ton of bricks on THAT.

But this wasn’t even homework.  It seemed a deranged combination of trying to stock up the school (okay, it’s a small village and I imagine they have trouble, but still, giving grades for it, and for that matter asking the kids for it isn’t cool) and trying to enforce blind compliance.

There were mitigating circumstances, too, that adults could have told the teacher about, but Robert couldn’t or wouldn’t.  First of all BOTH our kids have a marked aversion to spending our money.  Not their own, that they’ve earned, but ours.  And back then the money was all ours, or at least Robert couldn’t drive to the store and buy Kleenex from the money he’d earned helping my friends with gardening projects.  And we were broke.  Dead, flat broke, as we’ve only come close to being since.  Dan had lost his job in the middle of a tech flight from town, and we were scrambling and not sure when he’d find work again.  Now we didn’t discuss this with the kid, but kids know.  So he never even mentioned the shopping list to us, much less take the stuff in.  And btw, since this was the ONLY time (and only because we REALLY were at the end of our rope) our kids have been on free-lunch program (Yes, I know I disapprove of those, but you know what?  Part of the reason we were in the pinch we were in was the massive amount taken from Dan’s severance check.  So it’s not like we weren’t paying into the maw of the government, not-by-choice.  And it’s not like if we hadn’t used it it would have been returned to the tax payer.  It would have been spent in ever more creative ways.  It was, in fact, as the school (the shopping list notwithstanding) had a surplusage they spent on showy but useless equipment.  And when the school more or less forced us into it, we thought that if we didn’t have money to eat, we wanted to make sure the kids did) the teacher could/should easily have known that and SHOULD have understood not only that we couldn’t afford a lot of those items to stock her in-class cupboard, but that it was insensitive and crass to ask the kids to bring this stuff in with no regard for parental circumstances at the time.  (And these are the people who preach sensitivity.)  I’m going to guess if Robert had abased himself before the class and told them we were broke she’d have excused him.  Only, of course, he’d rather take the F and I can’t blame him, since I remember Middle School vividly.

Then there was the blind compliance of “dot this with this particular color” and “take notes in the approved manner.”

When we showed the list to Robert he said “I was near suicidal that year.  Because my mind doesn’t work like other kids’ I guess.  I just couldn’t see where that stuff mattered.  I mean, in college whether you take notes or rely on aural memory no one cares, as long as you KNOW the material, but it seemed in sixth grade knowing the material counted for nothing, and it was all how well I did these pointless tasks.”

This probably wouldn’t disturb me as much if I hadn’t gone through this, in spades, with younger son four years later and if school administrators hadn’t told me that the purpose of middle school is not to teach the kids anything so much as is teaching them “the process.”  And the process as described by these bright souls seems to consist of “Ve hav ways und means to make you OBEY.”  Seriously, with younger son, too the emphasis was on “You will dot all the is and cross all the ts in the color designated!”

Perhaps it’s just my kids (heaven knows where they picked it up, but they have slight problems with arbitrary, shouty authority) or maybe it is why all our friends’ BOYS (not the girls, not even in cases where we saw no difference in IQ between the kids) hit the wall in middle school and started lagging behind their sisters.  Girls (present typist and a lot of readers very much excepted) tend to be more compliant with group mores and authority.

This girl, of course, faced with that course of “study” would not only also have had Fs but would probably have thrown shoes at the teacher’s head and got expelled.  Fortunately her kids turned out calmer.

Anyway, the whole idea that middle-school is supposed to enforce blind compliance and that’s what they’re actually grading on (or was when my kids were involved) makes my gorge rise.  It might be a very good way to raise machine-operators, but it sucks when raising free-thinking citizens in whom (we the people) the power and the legitimacy of the state is supposed to rest.

If I had my time again those kids would never have seen the inside of a classroom till I put them in the dual high school/college program Marshall attended, in 10th and 11th grade.  (And for those in the area, Coronado Highschool.  Yes, they’re a magnet school and take kids even from out of district, though it’s a little harder.  And unless it’s changed all out of recognition in the last 3 years, highly recommended.)  Because colleges still prefer standard high school grades to portfolios.

But it’s past, and it’s past by a long time, and it was just a memory of gritting my teeth and a surge of annoyance at the items on that check list.

However, those of you with kids in school — check what they’re actually being graded on.  Then ask yourself if that’s why you sent them to school and if that’s the formation you want them to have.  Then see if there’s anything you can do, including but not limited to “teaching them at home after school.”

And cut our fellow citizens some slack.  They are the product of this system.  They’ll need to go through conditioning as well as twerpitude before they come out on the other side as free men and women.

And yet, I have faith a number of them will.  Reality tends to beat this sort of programing.

Just don’t pile on with the school and assume the teachers are always right.  This is not the school you went through (or at least I hope not.)  And what your kids are failing on might be things that would hurt them in life and work should they learn them.

There will be book pimpage later.  I’m on the home stage on the cursed book, so I’ll be doing that, now.  Talk quietly amongst yourselves while I kill a gross characters or so.

The other day while I was shopping I was struck with a sudden idea: why don’t I buy a toy for the pretty cats?
(I’m convinced this is caused by feline mind-rays. There is no other explanation.  The impulse strikes randomly and has nothing to do with what they’ve been up to lately.  It’s never “they haven’t broken any good china recently” or “they haven’t played slamlom with my prized glass floats” .)

Like many other bad ideas, this one was fairly irresistible, and once it presented itself, I had to follow through.  Being cheap I bought — for $7.50 a little foldable tent.  I thought “Oh, look, they can cuddle in it or something.”

This shows you how dellusional I can be.  Of course, that is NOT how things worked out.  Once I brought the tent into the house and set it down next to my desk (“They can keep me company while I write,” I thought.  HONESTLY.) I realized I had not in fact bought a cat toy.  Oh no.  What I had bought and brought into my house was the world’s smallest and most fiercely independent country.

Tentistan, population one — D’Artagnan

This would be okay, if D’Artagnan’s possession of the crinkly red and yellow vinyl didn’t inflame envy in the hearts of his neighbors.  Unfortunately it does and therefore, the mighty army of the Miranda attacks:

With a leap across the room, Miranda secures the upper hand.  D’Artagnan’s attempts at defensive positioning overturn tentistan.  Miranda then skates it across the floor with two more leaps.

A surrender ultimatum is issued.  The defense burrows in.

The defense replies “you can’t make me” (and possibly adds “neener neener.”

I couldn’t actually capture the action.  The paw is faster than the camera.  There was a brief intense period of Miranda beating D’Artagnan like an old rug, from outside the tent.  I believe military bloggers cal this type of action “Beating his little pasty white b*tt like a drum.”  The pose captured here was “You won’t even fight?  You DISGUST me.”  After which she stalked away.

catnip mice — the war’s innocent collateral damage.

Tentistan, the world’s smallest and most fiercely independent country is at peace, until action repeats in a few minutes.

(Yep, best entertainment I EVER bought for under ten dollars.)

I thought I’d catch everyone up on what’s going on.  I did a post about the health thing on MGC, and I’ll quote a little bit here:

Here’s what I found so far, since the surgery: I was much more ill than I realized.

It started with them finding a large amount of scar tissue and endometrial tissue binding all my internal organs and filling up my abdominal cavity.  That amount had to be causing pain, but other than some bad nights in the last two years, I kept saying I’d never been in pain.

There were other things.  We’ll spare tender male ears and just say that my Caeserean (first son.  Second son was born the natural way) botched things so badly that some organs were cut almost in half and bound together with a growing ridge of scar tissue.  Which by itself should have caused tooth grinding pain.  Constant.  Except I didn’t have any pain.

Except…

Except that when I took super motrim TM I slept like I hadn’t slept in twenty three years.  Yes, that precise, because I remembered enjoying sleep before having older son, and after that I remembered bed being the place where I tried to sleep and sometimes managed cat naps.

The painkiller (strong) had such an effect I asked my doctor if it was soporific.  She said no, just a painkiller.

Which means my conscious had blocked the pain, but it still didn’t allow me to sleep soundly.  For close to a quarter century.

All of the symptoms getting worse as they went on, so in the last five years I’ve almost stopped sleeping altogether.  Which has its own host of problems.

I really am feeling much better, which is weird because when I went to the doctor for supposed checkout, I was told I’m not healing on schedule, or barely at all, so I needed to take what my son calls a “big hammer” antibiotic.  Which I’m now taking, and which makes me feel like the coyote when the roadrunner drops an anvil on him.  Which is a problem as I REALLY am almost done with Through Fire (which means this book REALLY is cursed.)  However I’m hoping to have at least a rough to Baen by tomorrow, then edited by Monday.

It’s a very odd book, but the people who’ve seen it so far tell me it’s good.

And I really AM feeling better, despite the dire faces my doctor pulled.  Which might just mean I was really, really, really — really? — ill before.  people kept telling me I was, but I had become adjusted to it as “normal” so I didn’t know it and thought it was all psychological.

So — here’s what’s going on — as soon as book from h*ll is delivered, I’ll spend three/four days painting at the house we’re going to put up for sale.  And then I’ll sit down and finish Darkship Revenge which is practically written in my head.  Right now my top wordage for a day is 10k, so I’ll assume if it doesn’t get better I need about a week to finish DSR.

And then it’s dragons.

Somewhere along the line, hopefully by the middle of May there will be a short story collection.

Also — somewhere there I’ll edit Rogue Magic and continue it (I’m hoping next week, but we’ll see what the antibiotic does to me!) and also Elf Blood.

Meanwhile, I’ll be attending Denver Comicon, though I don’t have a schedule yet, and ya’ll can find me at the Wordfire booth.

HOPEFULLY healing will actually happen and I’ll be even better, after the ten days with antibiotics.  We’ll see.  Keep me in your thoughts.

For now, just remember I’m feeling better, and stuff is actually moving forward, but more importantly, I’m reading again.  Reading new stuff.  Reading because it’s there.  I don’t have to force myself to read new stuff (as opposed to old favorites) for the first time in years.

Now the problem is not trying to do everything at once.

It is trite to talk about the law of unintended consequences because at this point — I think — everyone knows everything they do has unintended consequences, that is consequences other than the ones they were looking for.  Well, almost everyone.  I still hear people say things like “We should outlaw x” and never thinking of what that will mean for x, y and z.  More interestingly, I heard people saying “we should compel x” and never think of the consequences of evading that particular law.

But the really funny thing about unintended consequences (and by this I don’t mean funny ah ah) is what I call the third ending problem.

What third ending problem?

Well, when we were starting out in writing, we were told to reach for the third ending.  When you’re reading a novel or a short story, you expect one of two endings (the good and the bad.)  Depending on your level of sophistication, or the book’s accuracy of foreshadowing, you might anticipate the ending in precise and exquisite detail.  You just have to see which of the endings.  (For instance in the book I’m reading now all the characters seem to be mentally impaired, and I’ve guessed the ending and the little surprises all along all the way.  Yeah, it’s a disposable romance [not all romance is like this] because that’s what came to hand when I reached for a book.  Yeah, I have better things to read, but this sort of works because it’s almost at the Disney comics level.)

So we were encouraged to reach for the third ending.  Not precisely a surprise ending, but one that will close the book with a bang.

I’m not sure this is right, btw.  It is appropriate for a certain time in the history of the field, and for a certain level.  And yep, in mystery it’s a good idea to at least partially surprise the reader.  This is not necessary in science fiction.  Or not necessarily necessary.  There are science fiction books that are mysteries.  At the end you find out who was behind it all, say.  But still in the main, we want to know sort of how it will end, and are reading for the details.

Take Witchfinder (please.  I could use the cash) the ending I’m sure surprises no one except for one minor, personal detail.

But anyway, that’s a digression and I know you’re shocked.  The thing is that in real life, even those of us who know that actions have consequences and that the broader the action, the more general the up to down push, the more likely that the consequence will be the third ending, as it were.

For instance, take solar panels.  The intended consequence is to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.  The unintended consequence is to roast birds on the go.  The third ending consequence is that it convinces people who know nothing about energy or its storage that it would be a good idea to artificially burden fossil fuels with taxes and to make mining for them impossible, in order to make people go “solar.”  Because it exists, they imagine it could supply all our energy needs.  (I’m sorry, I’d say “he” but I’m not sure it’s all or even mostly his idea.)  There are other third ending consequences (there always are) like the flushing of public money down the unending rat hole of charlatans promising better and more abundant solar energy.

Or take the boondoogle the consolidated after many mergers publishing houses thought of: we can deal with the big conglomerate bookstores and tell them what to carry.  They’ll have sensible business men who don’t read the books and argue with us, and this will make the public buy the “correct” books — or at least those we want to push.

The intended consequence was the ability to manufacture bestsellers on command; to pick who would be a best seller (mind you, it wasn’t even political at first, or at least it’s unlikely it was just political.  Creatives are hard to work with.  They often have trouble working with themselves.  Being able to pick the “sensible” creatives for success would be enough of an enticement.  The fact those aren’t usually VERY creative is something that would never occur to the publishers.)   The unintended consequence was the spiraling down of print runs.  For decades publishers had been allowed to think they were in tune with the readers’ tastes, and later that they could form them without consequence.

But for decades, stuff had become hits that the publishers didn’t anticipate.  Under the old, chaotic system, enough small bookshop owners reading your book and hand-selling it to enough clients could make you a bestseller that no one had seen coming.

The new system closed that loophole and controlled completely which books even got seen, and certainly which got “buzz” and which got bought.

As I said, the unintended consequence was a lot of power readers (me!) retreating to other genres or to their libraries to read their old stuff.

The third ending consequences are … well, the least hard to see is Bezos.

But there are others.  The most important was the hardening of thought and belief in the small and incestuous publishing industry, by self-feeding loops.

If they can make whatever they want sell a bazillion copies, then they have an unerring ability to pick what’s good and what people will read, right?  This means that they are that in tune with the public taste that clearly what they favor and think is wonderful must be what everyone wants.  Even though they are the result of maybe a handful of colleges and the culture of one or two big cities, they can pick for everyone in the country.

End result, more bleeding of readership which is never attributed to their taste — because after all, look how well they “predict” what will sell (after they close off every other avenue, of course, but never mind)  and what won’t — so it must be people aren’t reading anymore.  People are watching TV and playing games.  That must be it.

And then the third solution walks in wearing the name Bezos.  And they’re so shocked all they can do is boo.

But there are other third solution consequences they never even thought of.  The very system encouraged conformity and anodyne writing.  They didn’t notice it because the conformity was to their beliefs, and the anodyne writing involved “shocking” non existent old ladies in Podunk whom they thought should be shocked.  For the last several years the problem with most “pushed” fiction is not that it’s shocking, or distasteful, or human-hating (though it usually is human-hating) but that it’s predictable and boring.

And then there’s the third solution consequence of that consequence, so far off they couldn’t anticipate it.

I’ll do them the courtesy of thinking that they knew they would be wasting a lot of talent.  I.e. that they realized that they would be cutting short the careers of people they plain didn’t like (for political or other reasons) and therefore destroying talent before it developed.

What I don’t think they realized is that those of us who managed to escape the scythe for years despite refusing to sing in the choir of their thoughts and beliefs would be versatile, able, and very, very resilient. Or that, if we found a way to bypass their rigged system and get to the public, the public would like us better.

Sometimes third ending solutions are a right b*tch.

So, when you’re tempted to despair or to think we’re ruled by evil geniuses, think of the third ending solution.  They’re not geniuses (though they might be evil) and they usually don’t think beyond the obvious solution.

Take importing millions of unskilled laborers into a high tech economy.  They do think that they can tax those of us already here and give them benefits and it’s a way to compensate for being richer than other countries.  They might take as an unintended consequence that it will displace our own unskilled workers, and therefore create an aggrieved proletariat which they can incite against “the rich”.  It’s an unintended consequence but not one they dislike.

What they don’t think of are the third ending consequences: that it will also fatally damage the economy, that rich people will leave the country and shelter their income (for some reason this always takes communists/socialists by surprise.  Every d*mn time.); that the reduced economy/benefits will cause those immigrants to go back to their homeland; that the stagnant economy will cause our best and brightest to go elsewhere looking for jobs; that the only businesses who can survive are massive corporations; that the discrimination they see everywhere will actually make a come back.

In the same way when they create ever higher minimum-wage, they can see that those who remain employed will have more money; they might see that it will cause a lot of people to be let go, but they think “generous welfare benefits.”  What they don’t see is that it will bias towards big companies who can pay that sort of beginning wage and deal with the paperwork for ever increasing regulations will be the only ones surviving.  And if they saw it they might think “well, they will deal better with the government, so that’s fine.”

What they don’t see is that choking off small business, not only chokes off innovation but results in a slow throttling of the economy.  They don’t see this because they believe in fixed pie economics.  They can’t be grown, and they can’t be shrunk.

They can look at Europe and see their future, but  the third ending consequence is always a shock.

And that is why top down control, in publishing or in business or in government is always ruinous.

The third ending consequences multiply and by being surprises they are inherently unanticipated.

Reading older science fiction, I come across government by “smart men” sometimes aided by “large computers” who anticipate everything.

Real life is more difficult.  There are too many intersecting plot threads, too many intersecting individuals and goals.

No one can know when their great scheme of controlling distribution will result in a Bezos and their ruin… metaphorically speaking.  And nobody can know how their wish to work with “sensible” creatives can destroy the very field they work in… metaphorically speaking.

The horror of this is that people who never think of the third plot solution will continue to pile their top down “remedies” on us and that we’ll also have to suffer the consequences.

The good news is that in an era when technology and creativity are key, there is a good chance we can survive and thrive.

Build under, build around, build over.  Create your own systems around theirs.

Be the unintended third ending consequence.

Be not afraid.

“Selective Outrage” – Jeb Kinnison

What I call “outrage porn” is stories designed to stoke outrage and make you feel passionately that your group (us) is righteous and some other group (them) are not just misguided or ignorant, but actively evil and out to get the Children of Light (us.) The “porn” in the phrase means something that irresistibly attracts you by appeal to your baser needs, but is ultimately bad for you and false.

I’ve been mostly a spectator to the storm of media and blog posts about Sad Puppies (abbreviated herein as “SP”) and the Hugos. Old-line insiders resent barbarian hordes seen as uncouth, and probably evil, who have attracted a large number of science fiction readers who never realized they could nominate and vote for the Hugos by buying non-attending memberships to the Worldcons. The media consult with the winners under the current in-group system, and not surprisingly most of them clutch their Hugos while seeing little that needs fixing in how they got them.

But what I’m going to highlight is the cherry-picking of extreme views and quotes used by each side to discredit the other. When you have tribes of highly-emotional partisans competing to support the side of Goodness, it should be no surprise that some of their words, taken out of context, can be used to discredit their fellows. The Insiders have their less-good eggs, and so do the Puppies; but *of course* these extremes do not fairly represent the views of either side. I’m not going to go over the controversy itself here, but point out one of the mechanisms that drives this kind of religious war online.

The Internet brings traffic to those who write something unusual and passionate that confirms the beliefs of (or frightens) the readers. Those passionate if less accurate writings are more noticed and more clicked on, and a whole raft of flash media have sprung up the feed the attention beast through “clickbaity” headlines hinting at threat or emotional payoff if the reader clicks through (and drops a few ad cents into the site’s coffers.) Underpaid young grads are employed to read the news (both real and faked) and generate parasitic stories with no original reporting effort which are designed to drive profitable traffic to the site.

Within that species of site you have even more specialized sites that cater to a single tribe, and offer up only stories that confirm the righteousness of that tribe and the evil of others. Partisans will subscribe to a selection of the sites that provide them with the most ego-satisfying stories that confirm their existing beliefs, and so see a world where most good news about people cooperating to do good things is blocked and the news about their enemies and activists is nearly all they see. Where once such sites filled a need to see news on topics not being covered at all in the mainstream, now they isolate and infuriate partisans, who are then easily manipulated by anger and a sense of grievance to give more power to the professional grievance mongers.

Once you recognize this syndrome, it is everywhere you look. Entrepreneurial activists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson figured out how to fund their organizations through extortion, subtly picking corporate targets to demonize when they weren’t supportive, and ignoring those who were; eventually their faction edged into power and arranged for settlements in Justice Dept. suits against major lenders to include large grants to their affiliate organizations, which actively assist candidates of one party in elections. This is political corruption, and rarely even noticed by mainstream media.

But this is not a phenomenon limited to leftist activists. When Hillary Clinton blamed the “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the real and imagined slanders against the first Clinton administration, she was not entirely wrong. While her complaint had the flavor of a Scooby Doo villain’s speech (“We would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those kids and their dog!”), a new media complex was already mining their real scandals and imagined crimes for material to satisfy readers and listeners, with ever-more-extreme allegations being rewarded by True Believer traffic and dollars. Similarly, a complex of organizations dedicated to stoking anti-gay beliefs and stopping gay rights laws mined the ample material provided by gay organizations for the most outrageous and thoughtless material, suitable for ginning up passions in social conservatives and traditionalists, and the more extreme organizations simply made things up as necessary to demonize all gay people.

After many years of being subjected to this kind of abuse, some gay people were permanently polarized to see all religion and all traditional ways of living as their enemies. Specialized sites now feed their prejudices with every possible instance of unfair or ignorant abuse any gay person anywhere receives. So programmed, many gay people are both unforgiving and happy to assume any religious person is out to get them, and happy to see the newly-Progressive state crush grandmotherly florists and cake decorators to punish any trace of badthink.

If you want to see what this filtering does to a worldview (and don’t mind some NSFW and NSFSanity content) take a look at Joe My God and especially its commenters, where you’ll find the harshest partisans of gay rights (and gay revenge.) Also worth a glance are Gay Star News, Queerty, and The Gaily Grind. For the feminist-victim complex, there’s Jezebel, Feministe, Feministing… and much of the Huffington Post.

Here’s an example of the kind of unconscious prejudice this leads to, where a friend of mine cites a deadly brawl between a religious family and the police as evidence that all religion leads to evil and should be suppressed:

Clearly, these religious nuts don’t need any help showing the world exactly who they are and what they stand for. But, we should continue to share these and other stories widely, so we can keep the pressure on. More and more Americans are becoming aware of the hideous, unconscionable actions perpetuated in the name of religion. Sharing the actions of the evil-doers are the most powerful weapons we have against religion.

Video captures chaotic brawl in Walmart parking lot

The Cottonwood, Arizona police department released a video that appears to show an officer shooting a man. Police say a chaotic brawl broke out between police and members of the [Christian] Gaver family that soon turned deadly..

This assertion of guilt-by-tribal-association is invisible to a partisan. One technique to get them to see the fallacy is to replace the religion with Islam, currently protected from the harsh judgement of Progressives by its status as the religion of “victims of Western imperialism.” If the group fighting with the police had been Muslim-affiliated, you can be quite sure that no progressive would think to tar all Muslims as sharing in the blame for the crimes.

For a second example from yesterday, I’ll turn back to Sad Puppies and the Establishment reaction to their success. Author Jack Dann, who by all accounts is a decent, right-thinking fellow in Australia, picked up and promoted a post citing selected quotes from your typical testosterone-laden exchange as representative of all Sad Puppies:

I’ve been told, repeatedly by one pleasant person, and by a few others, that Brad Torgersen, and the Pups are not horrible people, and that they can be worked with and that really they want a good outcome, and I try to see that, and then they show me otherwise. Here are a few quotes from the Pups over on Brad’s blog that I glanced at this evening.

• If you think for one nano-second that we won’t burn this mother fucker to the ground and roast marshmellows over the corpses…. you’re dead wrong… And if you think we give a tanker’s damn about your appeal for civility…. you’re also dead wrong.
• Hell… We may nuke the Nebulas too… just because.
• We will burn it to the ground, plow the ground, and salt it. You fuckwads don’t understand war. We do.
• in my opinion, Theresa Hayden’s parents were both: a.) circus people; and b.) first cousins.
• Try to come up with something better, turdnugget.
• I really don’t care about the Hugos, qua Hugos, to any measurable degree. I don’t care if I ever get one and I don’t really care if anyone else ever gets one, either. Rather, I care about the war in which they are just another front.
• Scuttle back underneath the kitchen sink, and rejoin the rest of your chitinous cohorts.
• The endgame, besides using your guts to grease our tanks,
• Heeerrrrreee pussypussypussypussypussy.
• Vox isn’t a side show, he’s just the warm up act.

And then the following, made by a lead Pup, in response to a person, who without profanity or insult, disagreed. The comments were made while the Pup was claiming to be tracking down the home of the person who disagreed:

• Hey, anyone know who that pussy is in real life?
• You’re a pussy, boy. You don’t even have the guts to be an asshole
• Pussy, you’re not worth a discussion. You’re a cockroach. Roaches are only to be stepped on.
• Or you can come here, to Blacksburg, Virginia. Why, I’ll even loan you a decent gun. Pussy.
• I’ll keep you posted on my progress in identifying you, pussy.
• I cna [sic] only agree that you’re a pussy. A coward. A liar. A piece of crawling shit.

So, that’s the people we are dealing with. Key group members, chatting along with Brad. I like the trying to find someone’s home and the gun threat. It just really dots the i nicely.

I read the entire exchange, and in context this schoolyard callout effort was a little over-the-top, but in response to challenge and evasions by a trolling poster. As I said in the beginning of this piece, both “sides” have their outrageous affiliates — Requires Hate and K. Tempest Bradford (with her “I Challenge You to Stop Reading White, Straight, Cis Male Authors for One Year” piece, for example, ruling out Neil Gaiman as too white-cis-male to expand her mind.) On the Puppies side, anti-Puppies cite Vox Day as representative (he’s not), and John C. Wright, who’s made a number of statements that I personally would object to, as a homophobic and racist devil (which I’m pretty sure he’s not.) None of us are responsible for every single bad thing some other person in a coalition says or does, and when you observe selective examples used to discredit others and make a comfortable establishment happy that they are deserving of their high position in a stagnant hierarchy under threat, you should immediately find a more thoughtful and independent source to help form your own opinion. Sites that highlight the worst of people you already disdain only feed anger and self-righteousness, which is the enemy of understanding and empathy. When you actively select the items that outrage you and pass them on, you are only increasing the width of the gulf between the tribes.

Hatred and prejudice harm real people, but the harm echoes on through the generations as the original victims teach and promote an us-vs-them worldview that harms everyone. The people who are less wrong learn to understand where the hateful emotions come from, and start to cut off the sources of funds and fury that feed the continuing conflicts. Understanding the backgrounds of the partisans and arguing toward acceptance of others’ right to be wrong is the beginning of reconciliation and cooperation. I think we can get most reasonable people to agree that an award that supposedly recognizes the best SFF should be more broadly representative of the readers, including the vast majority who can’t take time out from busy lives or afford to go to conventions. Having a tiny in-group select award winners from their friends and people they know leaves out most of the writers, and almost all of the readers.

—

[author]

Jeb Kinnison writes on attachment issues at his blog JebKinnison.com, and about science fiction and his Substrate Wars series at SubstrateWars.com. He asks (tongue-in-cheekily) that you consider his latest novel Nemo’s World for nomination in 2015’s Hugo competition.

This is not a blog about writing. This will only sound like a blog about writing at the beginning.

Here’s the thing: fiction is not real. I know, I know, this was my exam in my last year of Theory of Literature, and I spun a whole lot of cr*p on fiction being the reality and the reality we think we know just the shadows on Plato’s cave wall. Sue me. I’m good at spinning fiction after all, and that’s what the teacher wanted to read, and I could serve it up. (The second question about the use of punctuation in a poem was more worrisome, since I missed the classes on the use of punctuation in every language I learned. That’s my story. So I had to ace the first.)

That was a piece of fiction, yes, but it served the essential purpose of fiction: to cut reality into a logical fragment of action-reaction the reader can understand (in this case the action being I flattered the teacher and the reaction being I got the degree.)

Seriously now, in real life any event has way more than an origin. Those of you who are war gamers know that. Those of you who are historians, too.

On my shelves sit several books entitled “the causes of WWI” or words to that effect. They agree on say 80% of material, but the rest will be different, and the chain of sequence will be different.

Yes, some of this is for the same reason I wove the nonsense about Plato. You need an original thought for a thesis, so you extrude one no matter how unlikely.

But the other is because in the real world complex events – not even wars, but things like “why did this meeting happen at this time” – involving several people can be interpreted from several angles. It’s a big like a puzzle. Was it the shooting of the archduke? Was it the theory of war the colleges had been teaching? Was it the machine gun? Was it a million other big and small events: the lack of access to a warm port; Germany’s ascendant industrialism; the family politics of England. Etc. etc. There is no definitive answer, no clear chain of events.

Fiction is satisfying because it presents you with a clear chain of events. If the horse hadn’t thrown a shoe, the battle would have been won. Or, if the tyrant hadn’t ordered the arrest of the revolutionary, then everything would have gone smoother. Or—

Humans like clear chain of events. It’s entirely possible that it is what led to our ascent to primacy as a species (after grass. Everything in this world is designed for the comfort and convenience of grass.) But the events we’re supposed to chain in a sequence are simpler chains. They usually involve an individual.

It’s sort of like they say our brain is rigged to relate to maybe 100 people and civilization and population growth have outstripped our ability to connect? Also, we tend to think people we see routinely, even on television, (not me. I don’t see television routinely) are friends, so people overestimate the size of their circle? Like that.

Our brain is supposed to be able to chain action reaction on a simple scale: Ogg went hunting tiger alone, Ogg got digested. Bad idea, don’t be Ogg.

Our simplest stories, which formed the base of learning in pre-literate society, run along those lines. The moral is clear, the story short (sagas served a different purpose, usually the binding of a human tribe together or the impressing of the neighbors) and the chain of action clear.

I was born into a very old culture. Some of the stories I learned were Roman and probably come from older cultures than that. Like the one with the mother asking the goddess to grant her boys the greatest boon possible. She struck them both dead. Grim people, the Romans. But what it meant is that you have to be sure what you ask for is clear to the other part. And the chain of action/reaction is clear.

That is the root of our fiction. Well, that and the sagas. Those fit the way our brain works. Because our brains, let’s face it, were designed for things other than the world we created with them. Even the sagas have simple chains of causation.

Even the Illiad. … “the son of Peleus was furious, and his heart within his shaggy breast was divided whether to draw his sword, push the others aside, and kill the son of Atreus, or to restrain himself and check his anger.”

The beginning of the chain of events that ends in grim classic fashion.

And that – THAT – is how our brain works. It’s also why we tend to get frustrated with grey goo fiction where you pull the strings and nothing happens.

But this is not a blog about writing.

We’re living in a world saturated with fiction. Novels, games, movies, tv-series. It could be reasonably argued that the common person, in the day to day, has never had more fictional narratives pushed at them. We’re fed stories from the moment we’re born.

But, you say, wasn’t it always like that? Grannies told stories, didn’t they?

Sure, grannies taught them. But grannies had limited time, and so did kids. Read sometime about 5 year old colonial kids minding the cows.

We have more leisure than any other humans at any other time. And we have more fiction.

This in itself is not bad, and you won’t hear me complain. I labor in that vine.

To an extent, even novels aren’t that bad. They allow a chaining of events that has more than one source. Well, the best ones hint at it, sometime. For all the complaints about Heinlein he did that.

But our favored sort of fiction, the action/reaction is in control of the hero. We want a minimal of elephants falling from the ceiling. And that’s what good writers give us. Successful writers.

This is not a blog about writing.

This is a blog about the human brain, about its preference for simple stories, about having its stories fed back to it in the form it prefers.

This is a blog about how it’s important for us to check ourselves. I consume as much fiction as anyone else. Maybe more. So I have to check myself. Particularly when an idea sounds seductive.

Lately there has been talk about “how long America has” and about “America having an amicable divorce.”

I’m told the talk is on both sides of the fence. I have been sick/busy lately (getting much better, thank you, and finally reading and writing. I think for several reasons – not just one cause – my brain has been shutting down from the top down, and it’s now recovering from the bottom up. Eh.) and haven’t checked lefty blogs. But I’ve seen this on the right.

“Amicable divorce” for a country the size of ours.

What a pleasant dream. No more engaging in the culture war, nor trying to change the political equation which, yes, is down stream from the culture. What an alluring wonderful dream.

In a country the size of ours.

The fight over the assets alone would turn hot in a New York minute. The division of people by belief? How do you even accomplish that? How many of you are in politically mixed marriages or have kids or parents who don’t agree with you and who, for some reason, can’t be moved away from you? How many of you work in an industry/are trained in a skill in a field where most of your colleagues, let alone your boss, is to the left of Lenin?

How can grown people, humans who are otherwise smart, talk about this, as though it were even an option, something on the table?

I know they’re thinking the USSR broke up into multiple nations without major blood shed (so far. Nations collapsing/empires collapsing is something that involves decades. Never mind.)

But that was an ersatz empire formed of ancient nations/entities. It was a conglomeration of tribes. When pressure comes, humans return to their basic tribal affiliation (which is why Europe is going to get very ugly in the next few decades.)

The US isn’t tribal. The Marxists (I first typed this Marxissss. We should start hissing it back at them as they hiss other words ending in ist at us – mostly mistakenly. Only we won’t be mistaken) have managed to convince some of the more begnited that they’re a tribe, but even they aren’t, and when pressure comes they’ll fall apart.

We’re a nation of belief, and our division lines are along belief lines. Individual versus group; state power versus individual action; free association versus regimentation; distributed benefits versus earning your way.

There are shadings to beliefs. There are shadings to tribes, too, but people can believe they belong even when fractionally related. It’s harder with beliefs.

Into how many groupings do you break this country? How do you make people move? What happens when they don’t want to?

Could it happen? Peacefully? It could be argued it’s happening. People tend to move where they feel safe and can thrive. Hence the benighted being left in control of the wrecked cities.

BUT such a natural process, to happen peacefully (and peaceful is relative. There will be incidents) will happen over centuries. It’s not over night. This is not a story. This is not a made-for-tv movie. There is no Kobayashi Maru trick that hands us the keys to a safe “divorce.”

When dealing with millions of people and a nation the size of a continent, fast isn’t peaceful and peaceful is glacial.

Because it’s not a story.

In the stories we’re steeped in from childhood the chain of events has to be clear to be satisfying. In the real world, when dealing with more than 10 people, chains of events and decisions get muddled. Dealing with millions, you have a chaotic system and those are dicey to maneuver.

I was puzzled how anyone could even suggest that. Intelligent people.

I’m used to the left side of the isle coming up with this stuff, at least in their fringe elements. They also thought they could levitate the Denver Mint. But… rational people? Rational people who know history?

And then I looked from the other side. It’s a wonderful dream. And our culture is fraught right now. It’s fraught because we’re fighting back. So there is a “war in heaven” or at least a war in haven, from our hobbies to our work place, to our very families.

It would be easier, it would be oh, so appealing, to be able to say “depart from us in peace. You do your thing, we do ours.”

Unfortunately that’s fiction. That’s not something we can cram into the lifetimes we have allotted in reality.

In reality the best we can do is to continue the dirty, tiring, slogging fight in the cultural trenches.

Remember the left screams loudest and gets more unhinged when they’re losing. When they’re winning they can pass for reasonable. And remember we conceded this fight before, and that’s how we got here. We conceded it because we thought culture didn’t matter, only political decisions did. We were wrong.

Now we must fight to take culture back: inch by inch, hobby by hobby, profession by profession, discipline by discipline.

I doubt we’ll finish in our time, though we might get lucky. It might flip suddenly. But it won’t flip cleanly. It won’t flip without a fight.

You can choose to fight mano-a-mano with words and thoughts, or you can have your divorce. But it won’t be amicable, it won’t be easy or fast, and people like me will probably end up with nowhere to go. Heck, most people will. After unimaginable devastation most of us will end up without a homeland of the heart.

Or we can stay together and fight for our culture. The only way out is through.

In the end, we win, they lose. But we must keep fighting.

Be not afraid.

*So I’m an idiot and set this for the wrong date and just noticed.  Sorry Caitlin! Note I only noticed because I wondered why you weren’t getting comments.  DERP – SAH*

Signposts on the Way to Oblivion
by Caitlin Woods

From what I can tell, a lot of us here at AtH have had a lot of the same experiences when it’s come to reading Science Fiction and Fantasy.

When we’re young, everything is pretty awesome–we’re reading everything we can get our hands on, and our brains are exploding outward with new ideas and stories and fights. A lot of you cite Heinlein and LeGuin and Simak–I’ll be honest, here’s where I was head-over-heels obsessed with KA Applegate and Margaret Weiss & Tracy Hickman.

But after a time, our passion faded, and we found ourselves wandering to other genres or other media entirely. Of course we wandered back–once we discovered the issue wasn’t with us, and there still were books worth reading, even if our betters didn’t want us to read them. (Much better to push the fake memoirs of a drug addict or whatever, I guess.)

We’ve all heard that part, though. We all know each others’ tales of how we found indie and life was improved and sci-fi/fantasy regained its meaning.

I want to talk about the other side.

The road to oblivion is rarely smooth, a gradual descent into nothingness. No, it’s littered with debris of previous fights, of sudden descents where someone makes a Big Change or small climbs when someone reworks the formula.

And, of course, there are signposts–individual books that tell you, whether or not you realize it at the time, where all of this is going. And that it’s not going well.

Those books are the ones I want to talk about.

My signposts were in middle school. Because middle school was a little bit of a magical time for me.

I mean, it was kind of terrible in some ways–due to Things, Weird-as-hell me (I?) was living with my sister and my mom, mom’s biker boyfriend, his wannabe gangster brother, and their traditional Mormon parents, which resulted in all kinds of multigenerational misunderstandings that would probably make a decent sitcom. School was miserable, I had few friends, no privacy, and no understanding of just how big a sacrifice everyone was making to make sure my sister and I were doing more or less okay.

But, in a very real way, none of that really mattered.

Because I had a bookshelf.

I suspect it was Biker Boyfriend’s sister’s, who by this point was married and on mission in… Czechoslovakia? Unsure. But it seems like she was a giant sci-fi/fantasy geek, and had left behind a treasure trove of books for me to read at my leisure, without even ever taking a book out of the house. (I… lose things.)

It was amazing. I fell in love with so many books at this point–Steven Brust’s Taltos series (I need to catch up with that one, I fell off around Orca), Steven R. Boyett’s Ariel, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman’s The Darksword Trilogy and Death Gate Cycle…

But with the good (or, at least, enjoyable to middle-school me) was a lot of… less enjoyable. And stuff that, looking back, I realize was kind of emblemic for what I hear folks complaining about now.

(It all also came out around when I was born. But I figure it doesn’t really matter when you come to a thing, if it still describes the situation.)

Signpost #1: Delan the Mislaid (Laurie J. Marks) (1989) has the honor of being the first book I ever, in my life, consciously decided not to finish.

It was a hard decision, even so. I defined myself, at that point, by being a reader–the sort of person who, if nothing else was available, would read ingredients lists and the backs of movies. (I never quite pressed myself to reading the phonebook–which is sort of a pity; creating interesting names is something I still have trouble with.) If I started a book, I was going to finish it.

But… I just couldn’t.

Delan, you see, is Different. Delan doesn’t look like anybody else in Delan’s poor, oppressive and mean village; Delan has strange, sensitive lumps on Delan’s back, and while it’s presumed that Delan is a girl because Delan doesn’t have a penis, Delan also never grows breasts or any other markers of sex.

But it turns out that Delan is a member of a wonderful, winged, hermaphroditic race that can never be really understood by the poor, awful creatures who walk the ground. We get a quick lesson in proper pronounology from another creature of Delan’s race who comes to have a quick sex scene and talk about how Delan was beautiful and special even if Delan had always thought that Delan was ugly…

…and anyway, what really killed it for me was when I was partway through the book, and Delan was chained up in some evil ground-guy’s basement, being tortured and pissed upon daily for some damn reason, and… I just didn’t give a shit.

And usually, someone being tied up and treated poorly is something that pulls at my strings enough to make me forgive a number of literary sins. But… oh my god, the sheer amount of this poor perfect enlightened darling being tortured beyond any reasonability for no other reason than his being special… just made me want to kill people.

I believe I did launch this book. Which is another habit I’m happy to generally avoid.

So, yeah. Special Post-Gender Snowflake Abused By the Masses. I’ll call that a signpost.

Signpost #2: Refugee: Bio of a Space Tyrant #1 by Piers Anthony (1983).

Reading reviews on this, the reason I don’t care for this one is more or less the opposite of why everyone else hates it.

The basic premise is that you’ve got a refugee Hispanic family from one of Jupiter’s moons taking a boat to Jupiter, having gotten on the shitlist of one of the local ruling families (’cause one of their members tried to rape the main character’s sister, and MC hurt (killed?) the guy.). Along the way, they’re boarded by every space pirate in existence, all of whom beat and rape and poison (or whatever) the refugees before going on their merry way, often either taking folk with them when they go or leaving behind a massive body count.

The reviews I read about this dislike it due to its sexism. Women only exist to be beaten and raped, and it happens often enough that it seems like blatant titilation to the author. For goodness sake, give us women who aren’t solely victims.

My problem, however, was that… everyone in the world appears to want to torture and rape our poor Hispanic refugee barge, because humanity is scum. (Well, Jupiter’s forces don’t want to do any of that. They just want this unauthorized shipment to go somewhere else.) It’s just an entire exploitation film on the fact that people trying to do nothing more than get by will be tromped on and abused by absolutely everybody in the universe.

(There’s also an extensive side-note at the beginning that it’s unfair that Initial Rape Threatened Sister is only desired because she looks really White, and shouldn’t every culture have its own beauty standards? Which makes me think that it’s Trying to be sensitive. Kinda. And hell, one of the rapists IS a woman, so… I suspect that’s one non-victim?)

Which doesn’t sound that different than the other thing, but I think it is. Either way. I didn’t go on to read the other books in the series. Because characters aren’t compelling because they’re abused. And… what do you know. A lot of the Right Literature is marked by characters whose sole (supposedly) compelling feature is… being abused. Signpost.

So, yeah! Those are mine. (Minus Sea of Glass, which I remember hating and… very little else about it.) But this… this is just the tale of a partial reading of a single bookshelf, where the trend was in fact genre-wide. Tell me about yours?

*This post is unusually typo-ey because author is finishing novel.  Deal.  And say a prayer for my copyeditors.*

In yesterday’s post, Jason didn’t openly point out what was absolutely weird about the fisked post. Yes, it was part of invoking Zombie Heinlein to come scold us.  (They are so wrong.  Even as a Zombie the man would get what’s going on better than they do.)

I’m going to post the two/three points of weirdness below.  The first, is the normal accusation of what the Sad Puppies want is a return to the pulps (forget that no one on the sad puppies side said that, ever) this time with a side of “pulps just like Heinlein wrote.”

Finally, let’s consider one of the deities the Puppies claim to idolize: Robert Heinlein, who wrote a lot of terrific pulpy action adventure back in the day. One of the Puppies’ major goals is to get more of that kind of stuff and less preachy message fiction in the Hugos, after all.

Hello.  There it is.  Apparently Heinlein wrote a lot of terrific “pulpy” action adventure back in the day.  And our goal is to get more of that kind of stuff.  (That would be nice on that kind of stuff.  Does anyone know how to find someone of Heinlein’s caliber?  No?  Yeah, me neither.  Because we’ve been eating our seed corn and giving the benes to the PREACHY* Message fiction.)  As to the claim that Heinlein didn’t write message fiction, this is when they bring Heinlein out to scold us:

Except the Puppies are kind of forgetting something. Heinlein was no stranger to “preachy message fiction” himself. In fact, he had some pretty harsh words for critics who wanted all adventure and no message:

He will permit any speculation at all” as long as it is about gadgets only and doesn’ touch people. He doesn’t care what mayhem you commit on physics, astronomy, or chemistry with your gadgets but the people must be the same plain old wonderful jerks that live in his Home Town. Give him a good ole adventure story any time, with lots of Gee-Whiz in it and space ships blasting off and maybe the Good Guys (in white space ships) chasing the Bad Guys (in black space ships) but, brother, don’t you say anything about the Methodist Church, or the Flag, or incest, or homosexuality, or teleology, or theology, or the sacredness of marriage, or anything philosophical! Because you are just an entertainer, see? That sort of Heavy Thinking is reserved for C. P. Snow or Graham Greene. You are a pulp writer, Bud, and you will always be a pulp writer even though your trivia is now bound in boards and sells for just as much as Grace Metalious stories and you are not permitted to have Heavy Thoughts. Space Ships and Heavy Thinking do not mix ” so shut up and sit down!

The rule is: Science Fiction by its nature must be trivial.

This of course rules out a large fraction of my work” and all my future work, I think.

Now, read those two quotes.  Consider they were in close proximity in the essay.  He tells us that Heinlein wrote some terrific pulpy stuff in the day, but also that Heinlein wrote message fic.

This has been happening all month, for those keeping score at home.  The indoctrinated drones of the establishment have been spinning by here in high dudgeon and sure they have a killing argument and telling us both that we want “pulpy stuff like Heinlein” and that Heinlein was often “preachy.  And messagy.”

They’re d*mn right Heinlein had message in his fiction.  Or at least he had a purpose, which isn’t the same as a message. I can’t right now — look to where I’m actually working again — find his quote on the reasons he wrote, but I know at the very bottom of those reasons, after “to feed my family” was “to make the reader think” though that was qualified with something like “if I can.”

A lot of the EXPLICIT (aka preachy) messages these people think they see in his books are not really the message of the book, but a way to make you think.  Again, if Starship Troopers world were an utopia, they wouldn’t be so desperate to send out colonies.  (Yes, yes, population pressure, but weirdly this is one of those books where it’s not really shown.)

A lot of his other “messages” are not really.  They’re the way he saw the world and the way his characters acted.  Some of them are dead wrong, but were thought rational and logical at the time, and are still believed on the left side of the tree.  This includes the “we’re all going to die from overpopulation” which is normal in all the juveniles.  It includes “put not your faith in princes” (and priests and shamans)  from a lot of his characters.

But each book ponders at least one serious question, which usually relates not to “tech, wow!” which a lot of people before him wrote, but to “how will this tech change us” which is of course the important question.  Simak labored in the same vine, though he was less transgressive.  Because Heinlein was transgressive.  Not as offensive if you think about what material he was dealing with and what he was doing, but in a way he predicted stuff like “A superabundant society will become obsessed with sex and gender” which we are seeing in the West right now.  And for those who are going to bleat “but incest” — do you have any idea how you’d feel if you time traveled to see your mother when you were a few thousand years old?  Do you have any idea how it would work?

Here is the thing — he wanted to shock people into thinking, not give them answers.  And most of the time he succeeded brilliantly which is why we still have panels in conventions that could be headed Robert A. Heinlein, Threat or Menace.  Curiously, even those on the left side of the isle that claim to admire him hate those later books.  They claim to hate them because of politics (perhaps because in things like Friday he shows the silliness of their schemes — women’s bathroom?  Are you discriminating — because honestly, where does he show the perfect libertarian society anywhere in the last books?  Nowhere) and “rampant sex” but given what they write (and also that any romance has way more sex, way more explicit) I’m going to guess they hate it for that itch at the back of the brain that makes them think.

And thinking is their enemy.

Look at those quotes above.  Heinlein wrote some “terrific pulpy” stuff.  Yeah.  Even his juveniles — arguably particularly his juveniles, at a level, before he got into “how will man change himself” — have such terrific pulpy action as in Red Planet pondering the utility of the right to bear arms/submission to authority versus rebellion/that man might not be the big boy in space, and that some species might be so unimaginably more advanced than us, we don’t even comprehend them/colonialism versus the rights of the original inhabitants/what is “maturity” in a political sense.

Wonderful action pulpy stuff, innit?  It’s like Tarzan of the Apes or something.  (Which in itself had a subtext, but to be fair had a lot more emphasis on the action and pulpy adventure — I have a theory Burroughs prospered by plugging directly into the collective unconscious, or the favored myths of mankind, or something but that’s a post for another time.)

They know it.  If they didn’t know it, they wouldn’t bring the quote from Zombie Heinlein saying he wrote message or at least meaning to scold us.

However, the party line requires them to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time: that the sad puppies side wants “meaningless” action adventure**. AND Heinlein, whom we “idolize” (guys, you do know that “genuflect” and PBOH are sort of fond jokes on our side, right?  No, never mind.  you don’t.  Humor ablated when you went over to the cool kids’ table.  You only laugh on command anymore.) wrote some “wonderful pulpy stuff” but Heinlein also wrote message.

It’s not just this post, it’s the seminar poster after seminar poster in my comments going on about how “Heinlein was preachy” and “Heinlein wrote message” while at the same time claiming Heinlein was pulp and “all manly men doing manly things.”

How is it possible to even hold those two thoughts in your head at the same time?  Even if you have never read Heinlein?  (And I have reason to believe the author of that post has at least HEARD about Heinlein from non adversarial people.)

This is not the only place their views do this, either.  You also get the “Peaceful planet of women” and “we have always fought.”  (Which is it going to be, guys?  Women are inherently peaceful, or women have always been warriors?  And no special begging about women only fighting against men.  If women are such awesome warriors, there’s native aggressiveness there.)

Then there is the super wonderful super state, and their dislike of “authority” (unless it’s them, but that’s a long story.)

I think since the fall of the USSR, and since it became obvious just how busted and corrupt that country was despite its appearance of success, the left has not only been running scared of itself (which is why they continue to deny the real conditions in places like Cuba) but has also become — like all messianic beliefs under attack by reality — a bit cultish.

Because they had already captured the bullhorns of culture when the USSR fell, they’ve managed to hide just the extent of the debacle communism was in the one country that managed superpower status despite it.  (China is a more complex question.)

But the people at the top know.  And they will take no lackeys they can’t trust.  And so, like all doomsday cults, they require that their followers perform acts of self-abasement, so the top can be sure of their loyalty.

We should be lucky it’s not something like cutting out their mother’s hearts.  It’s more the proclaiming of contradictory ideas in the same breath with seeming lack of awareness they are contradictory, even though no one capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time could fail to see the lack of logic.

This ritual self-abasement earns many a place on the left side of the table.

But I have to believe — because I believe in humanity — they get up in the morning and look in the mirror and see what they’ve become.

And now you know why the nomination of a counter-slate to their “already sure to win” (and yes, they were proclaiming on blogs last year that Ancillary Sword was sure to win this year — even though most of them can’t have read it yet, and certainly hadn’t read the competition) whispered slate caused such unbridled fury that they descend to character assassination, to baseless twitter-calumny, to a storm of false comments on books they haven’t read.

Those who sold their soul for a place at the cool table, and now see the coolness of the table threatened, must fight with all their strength to keep it the cool table.  Even to the point of descending to despicable, unimaginable vileness.

Why not?  They already knowingly contradicted themselves, and refused to think about it for coolness and status, demonstrating in public there’s nothing they won’t do for a positional good.

Status is all they have.

Not excellence, not craft, not ability.  Just status.

And we’re threatening that.

Put on your seat belts.  this is going to get rough.  But you know how it ends.

In the end, we win, they lose.

In the end we win, they lose because we can read everything and think everything, and enjoy and not enjoy whatever we want, while they’ve restricted themselves to approved thoughts, approved ideas, the narrow path of those books and thoughts that are “safe” and “not hateful.***”  And thereby they’ve become (yes, you knew that) Heinlein’s definition of unfree men, shackled to a tyranny:

I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy…censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything — you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. -RAH

We are free men (and yes, women, for those philologically challenged) and you can’t take that from us, and arguably even if we all die, we still win.  Because we will never be controlled.  You can’t have us.  You can only have the loneliness of your shriveled and forfeited souls.

*I don’t even object to preachy message as such, though if the story can’t carry it, then to heck with it.  I’ve read and enjoyed some relatively preachy stuff (what you think Left Hand of Darkness isn’t?  How quaint of you.)  I just object to preachy message that reinforces the same “accepted” establishment messages that we’ve been getting all along since elementary, at least if we’re fifty or younger.  You know things like “Men violent, women peaceful” and “women are better than men” and “a non-capitalist society would be better and more equitable” “a career for women is more important than a family” and other preachiness that I’m sure was daring and mind-breaking at the dawn of the twentieth century, but which is now old and in many cases busted (you can’t argue that a non-capitalist society is better at anything unless you’re ignorant of history.) Science fiction, if it is anything is a literature of thought.  You take some big idea/thought and explore it and extrapolate its future.  You don’t just read from the hymnal.

**Which means they’ve read precisely zero of Larry, or Brad, or for that matter me.  I don’t blame them so much for not having read other people on our side, like Kate, or Amanda, or Cedar but oh, yes h*ll I do.  If you’re going to war against someone, the least you can do is read them.  At least Larry.

*** Not only has the other side publicly declared they wouldn’t read anyone nominated by Sad Puppies because they have bad-thought cooties, but those who claim to have read Larry have CLEARLY not done it (like, they missed all the women in the book: strong, and powerful women at that) and they certainly haven’t read Brad.  And then there was, (and I wish I had the link but no time to look, and doubtless one of you can find it), the precious flower having hysterics, because what if one of us wrote a book under a pen name and she unknowingly read it and became tainted with wrong-thought?  This is a very real worry, and the buttercups SHOULD be worried.  Because some of us have plans.