Do Not Engage – Jason Cordova

Sometimes people just need to come with a “Do Not Engage” tattoo plastered large upon their foreheads. People I once liked.

I, for one, dislike the trolls. I enjoy the people who can actually make an argument (coherently and without the use of the words “racist”, “cismale” and “Republitard” because I am only one of those) and form complete and understandable sentences. I cherish these people, for they are not the enemy, no. They are merely rivals, and rivals can be respected. Rivals can be friendly(ish). Hell, rivals can even be welcome (though they’re still not getting some of my Brownies of Doom. I’m not that nice).

But those people are too far and few in between these days. Divide and conquer was Napoleon’s turn of phrase, and politicians, ad writers, producers, network executives, idiots in general have all taken this phrase and used it against their rivals, who in turn use the same techniques back and turn rivals into enemies. Because it’s easier to shout at people than it is to discuss issues.

I watched the election results come in. I watched as the folks on MSNBC had a collective meltdown as the election results turned out far different than they had envisioned it. I watched as Rachel Maddow pretty much lost her sh*t on public television. And quite frankly, I felt bad for them, because somewhere along the line, they had transformed the opponent from “rival” to “enemy” in their minds, and the resulting emotional and psychological breakdown on TV became painful to watch. Okay, I gloated a bit. But still… their reactions were just mindboggling.

For example, let’s look at Mia Love, the newly-elected Representative from Utah. After she was declared the winner, a lot of racist comments were thrown out there. People attacked her because of who she is and her skin color, and pretty much showed just how ugly they really were. They called her things like “race traitor” and was subjected to personal attacks that left even me shaking my head in disgust (and everyone knows that I have a pretty high bar for things that are disgusting). The attacks came from members of the Democratic Party, the so-called party of equality, who continue to claim to be the party of minorities and the oppressed. These people, who were once merely rivals who we could have constructive conversations with, have changed.

These are people who should be reveling at the chance to have an opponent worthy of discussion and argument, and yet… the best they can do is race taunt, something that I thought was something that only “ignorant white people who vote Republican” did. Apparently, I was very wrong.

Somehow rivals turned to enemies, and have been branded (in my eyes) as individuals who shalt not be engaged. Not because I discourage discourse, far from it (oh… crap. I’m getting poetic. Sorry). No, it’s because a lot of people simply don’t want the psychological and emotional commitment to pounding on people who are the enemy because in the end, all you’re doing is feeding the trolls.

Even when you’re “winning” the argument, you’re losing, because the troll is like the pit of Sarlacc and will constantly feed upon every single argument you toss out there and come back for more. All the while, your former rival has turned into an enemy, and is a mere step away from becoming a troll.

That sucks, because they were once a regular human being. I miss that guy.

Ready, Debt, Go

BILL READER

            In honor of the new Republican majority I would like to take today out to discuss— in basic and easily communicated terms— a favorite topic of conservatives everywhere. Today I devote to debt, particularly public debt, and the problems therewith. And while virtually all of Sarah’s readers except for trolls are probably already well-versed in this issue, my goal here is to sum it up in sufficiently plain and direct terms that it can only be misunderstood with great effort. Granted, there are layers of unexplored obtuseness out there that assure no one can get through everyone’s head, but I’m going to give this my best shot.

The thing to bear in mind in the ensuing discussion is this: not only are Democrats not serious about combating public debt, but they are ideologically and structurally interested in its expansion. Understanding that fact makes it very easy to comprehensively predict and contextualize the entire response of the left to debt.

With that said, let us start by discussing the basic dynamics of US debt. Economists generally agree that debt accrued by the United States is different from other debt. Leftist economists try to use that fact to excuse virtually any fiscal behavior— at least, provided they like the politicians doing it. But in the basics, US debt is actually very similar to debt you might owe yourself, to a local business or another person. The difference is largely in scale and inertia. Scale is obvious. Even if you had a vaunted Amex Black, you’d be hard pressed to borrow a trillion-with-a-T dollars. Inertia is a little more complex. It refers to the fact that things that would happen very quickly in dealing with your debt happen quite slowly on the scale of nations. For example, you, individually, as a person, have a credit rating. So does the United States, except that it changes more slowly to reflect the general attitudes of the electorate driving the borrowing rather than the personality of an individual. That’s a driver of inertia. It’s also rated by several independent agencies, rather than one single one, meaning in any scenario that there will always be an agency that reacts first and an agency that reacts last. That’s also part of inertia. And because loans are made government to government, a massive bureaucracy has to request the money and another, probably even more massive bureaucracy has to give it. Signing this vast sea of things in triplicate is yet another contributor to inertia.

This much is still true, however, and whatever Paul Krugman says about the matter. People who loan you money always do so with an expectation of being paid back. There is no such thing as infinite credit. China does not loan us money out of the goodness of its heart and regular interest checks, sizeable as they are, pale in comparison to the scale of the debt we’ve accrued. If the country is run as Democrats want it to be, with debt run up infinitely, at some point the countries loaning us money realize we have no intention of ever paying back the principal. They realize it partially because credit rating agencies explain it to them in detail, with graphs. When that happens, other countries stop loaning us money. The reason it hasn’t happened yet is because, as I said, this process is considerably slower with countries than with people (though, mark you, we have already had one credit downgrade under Obama). Democrats would like you to believe that, because it happens slowly, we can round up and say it doesn’t happen at all. In the grand scheme of things it’s like swearing the sun doesn’t exist during the nighttime. Tomorrow does eventually come. In fact, I can tell you precisely what it will look like.

If other countries stop loaning us money then we stop being able to cover our debts, whether the people in government like it or not. Likely as not, they’ll blow on the gravy train’s caboose with a huge round of inflation to get a little past that point. That is to say, they’ll print money that isn’t representative of any equivalent creation of value in the world and explicitly hope that the people cashing those checks are fooled into thinking it’s real money. Which they will be, for anywhere between a day and a month. And then after that the currency is devalued and the checks from your favorite entitlement program just stop cold. At around which time the Democrats would blame the collapse of the government on a 0.001% decrease in the budget won by the Republicans after months of bitter arguing a year earlier. And because knowledge of these simple economic facts is shockingly rare, if not actively obscured by the, ahem, media-governmental complex, an embarrassingly large number of US citizens will believe it.

Largely this is done because anywhere that large amounts of money are being thrown around there is opportunity. As we saw with Soylandra, and Obamacare waivers for lobbies, government officials tend to give the money to their friends. And given that an accepted way to make friends with a Senator is to write him a large check, that money is not going only one way. This is one reason Democrats like debt. In directing how the debt is spent they can put away a tidy retirement. They estimate, probably correctly, that no one will ever stick them with the bill for any debt they run up, and in the meantime they can leverage what they make to buy tangible assets that keep their value.

Of course, not all Democrats are planning to loot the stream of income and leave a smoldering ruin. Sometimes their goal in spending money is predicated on a desire to bring the rich low. Particularly in those more versed in the class-warfare doctrine of liberal politics, the theory runs thus: all money, by right of dollar bills being printed by the government, belongs to the government (these are usually the same politicians who are fuzzy on the difference between fiat currency and the value it is meant to directly represent). And the rich are evil, by right of being rich. This is because, in their view, all wealth is accrued by charging someone more than something is actually worth and pocketing the difference. The idea that the value of an item is actually increased when a place like Wal-Mart makes it available in your neighborhood, rather than making you drive to the production plant in Boise, Idaho, usually never occurs to them. (Or, if it does, then they believe there is some other way of measuring the value of the item than the price people are willing to pay for it in a competitive market, usually relying instead on the gas and labor put into moving the item to a new place. That Wal-Mart deserves money for arranging for this gas and labor to be put into moving the item is still totally alien to them. But I digress). Wealth is therefore, to them, an accounting of how many times you’ve ripped off someone (their own wealth, miraculously, always excepted). Consequently they feel that emptying out the rich is a noble end in itself and are fairly unscrupulous in the means. There is a significant contingent of the left that believes in massive spending not in spite of the fact that it will bankrupt the country, but because of it. They hope that, if the country is made sufficiently broke, it will turn in on itself, strip the rich of their property, and use it for the public interest. Usually they believe this is the first step of a larger social transformation into an egalitarian society. As to the opinion of history, that is to say, the track record of reality, while a country can indeed be driven to the point of eating the rich, the promised transformation into an egalitarian utopia has never been seen. Also, as can be very easily proven by anyone wishing to go do the math, the amount you get by robbing rich people is always a tiny blip next to the debt accrued in forcing it.

A cynic might be quick to point out that the United States has one other way of ensuring credit, in the form of its military. Stupid as it sounds, we wouldn’t be the first to try using war to escape debt. We may have an example as recent as World War II. I’ve heard people argue that the construction of Nazi Germany was in part enabled by the sheer scale of the reparations demanded following WWI. The theory goes that one of many perverse incentives set up by this was that it made more sense for Germany to attempt to conquer the world than try to pay down its impossibly large debts. Of course, implicitly that means that when people bid for the US to lean on its military might as a way of securing its debt, they are bidding for the United States to become embroiled in (if not initiate) another World War.

I say all this as support of one, single point. When Democrats call for more debt they aren’t really doing it out of the compassion they state. And when Republicans, and conservatives in general, call for austerity, we do not do it out of personal dislike for the people dependent on government programs. Quite the opposite. If (really, when, unless we turn things around) the country suffers bankruptcy, massive inflation, war, or all three, as a result of these benighted fiscal policies, it will be the people most dependent on them that are hardest hit. Reduction in a controlled way is the less painful path. Now yes, I, personally, as a Libertarian, feel these programs should eventually be removed entirely, being wholly outside the federal government’s jobs of representing the United States as a whole to other nations and moderating interactions between states, I appreciate there will never be political capital to make such a move in one fell swoop. Gradual, long-term change is the only way to get such things done, at least in a way that sticks.

Nor is there any way of reforming the debt without cutting back on entitlements. In 2013 we spent a quarter of our budget on Medicare and Medicaid, and almost another quarter of it on social security. Defense, meanwhile, constituted less than a fifth, barely more than the amount we spend in Non-Defense Discretionary spending, which is to say, the government slush fund. Furthermore, defense of the country is explicitly a job of the United States government and an appropriate role of the federal government under the duty of “representing the United States as a whole to other countries”. The entitlement programs, just the two most prominent of which now represent, I must emphasize, almost 50% of the US budget, are not a legitimate role of government under that standard. And indeed, Democrats argue to cut defense not because they have any rational or constitutional reason for it but, once more, almost precisely because they do not. By that I mean that conservatives, who support defense spending because it’s one of the things government is actually supposed to be doing, are therefore loathe to cut it. Democrats hence propose cutting it mostly on a political basis, probably with little or any desire to get what they’re asking for. Rather, they realize that asking for defense cuts incenses Republicans, shuts down discussion by starting arguments, and thereby blocks cuts to the programs that actually are ballooning the budget. Hence, for whichever of the reasons driving their vested interest in expanding the debt, they enable it to continue expanding. The commitment to entitlement programs specifically is another sign that expanding debt is an end in itself. Entitlement programs have been noted since the days of bread and circuses to be notoriously difficult to get rid of, because people grow accustomed to the money and eventually find it impossible to live without. If your goal is creating an institutional debt problem they’re consequently the perfect tool. They also have the added advantage of often being redistributionist in nature, so they feed the doctrinaire Marxists too, by giving them lots of opportunities to draw battle-lines for class warfare. Something for everyone!

Democrats can do this without publically seeming unreasonable, because the army is the part of the federal government’s legitimate roles that is least visible in people’s day-to-day lives. Politically they also get to paint the Republicans as warmongers, which is a tasty bonus (Parenthetically, this is not to say that defense spending is always sane or efficient, or that we do not overspend on defense. It is to say that the Democrats really don’t care about that, except for a couple of died-in-the-wool idiot peaceniks. The rest pay it lip-service because it’s a convenient pretense.).

In the end it really is just this simple: Money has to come from somewhere. The left tells you otherwise only so they can direct the excess to themselves and cronies out of greed, or else act upon irrational ideological vendettas. To this end they work politically to ensure that debt is always being run up, especially in entitlements. Being foolish enough to believe the façade of political correctness overlaying this fact will lead to dire consequences, and indeed there is no world in which the free money does not, eventually, stop. It’s just that in some it stops the “easy” way, through controlled and managed expenditure reductions of the kind conservatives recommend, and in many it stops, well, the other way.

And for the most part, Democrats know it. They just find it more profitable to lie about it.

When I was young I was a liberal.  Well, not by the standards of where I lived, but by the standards of the US.  Impossible not to be a liberal when you’re raised in Europe.

Here are some of the things I believed from an ESR post which you should definitely read in its entirety:

• There is no truth, only competing agendas.
• All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
• There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
• The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
• Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
• The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
• For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
• When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Okay, I never believed that first one.  For some reason I had a burning passion for the truth.  That whole thing about hungering and thirsting for justice?  Well for me, raised in a village, and seeing people’s characters distorted by malicious gossip, the first and almost the only aim of justice was to re-establish the truth.

There is a story I was told as a child — those not raised in Catholicism, please bear with me — of a man who was a murderer, a thief, a blasphemer, and who died.  As he was plunging into hell, a chain caught him by the leg and held him up.  He noticed the chain had beads and, looking up, heard a voice say they were the beads of the rosary.  You see, even though he didn’t believe, in the rosary or in religion at all, he prayed it every night, because his mother had asked him to.  And that single virtue had saved him.

In the same way, what saved me was that single quest for truth.  It’s impossible to look at those statements above and not think “wait a minute.”

I read the Gulag Archipelago at 14 and I thought “no, you can’t say the anomie of capitalism or the heart break of the downtrodden in capitalist societies is like that.” Yes, they can sort of, compare Dickensenian England (and having read other stuff, Dickens was just another left partisan selling us a bill of goods, sorry) to the communist system, but that wasn’t even capitalism as such.  That was capitalism under a monarchy in a time when the technology was just efficient enough to be brutal.  Capitalism had moved on from the early twentieth century.  It was communism that hadn’t. And worse, they kept pretending the happy people of Brutopia were all happy and stuff.

I couldn’t stand it, and that set me on a quest to figure out the truth of all these received shibboleths so deeply embedded in the culture by the late sixties that they seemed to be divinely ordained.

There were things  that looked at in the light of day were laugh-inducing.  No, seriously.  Like America being just as bad as any place else, while multitudes were going broke trying to get here.  Just get here.  And not always for the money, either.  I knew a high school teacher who was trying to get here (legally.  She’s probably still waiting) just for the chances to be and become and learn.

And that one about Europe being rich because the third world was poor?  A neighbor tried this one on me.  He was communist, see.  And what he used instead of the third world was Portugal.  He must have got hold of the wrong leg of the lizard at some point, because “Portugal doesn’t create its own computer, because America won’t let them compete with IBM.”  Well, I was fourteen, and I wasn’t stupid.  America couldn’t make laws in Portugal, and Portugal had — in fact — expropriated the property of American citizens during the revolution.  So that was not what he meant.  If he meant because IBM was there already, that’s nice, but given how Portuguese patent and copyright laws are about as enforced as China, that too didn’t make sense. So what was the difference?  Well, Portugal had the highest number of national holidays in Europe at the time.  It averaged to two or three a month.  And I knew that — sheer application — was part of the issue.  But not all of it.  Portuguese are clearly not lazy, because those who emigrate work like mad. So I came to the conclusion it was the combination of a dysfunctional culture where you were treated with derision for doing something outside your class and where work was not ennobling and so being seen to work was a bad thing.  (While among foreigners you could do it.) Add to it a tradition bound teaching system as reliant on memorization as China or the Arab countries, and a built in respect for “the way things are done” which extends to the regulations, and even geniuses ended up just working for the government because it was easier.  (From what I hear of writers in Portugal, it still is.)  What all this had to do with America was beyond me, except that America was easy to blame and that kept Portugal from doing the incredibly hard and perhaps impossible (these things are very difficult) work of retooling its culture into something more functional.  It could go on being proud of its history and saying it was the best ever, and not examining itself in the critical light of day, beyond the “revolution” (actually a series of them) that changed the old boss for the new boss and made some adjustments (some of them very beneficial) but did not unleash Portuguese productivity or creativity.  (Just made them into another tired Euro country.)  I can’t imagine that the third world is any better.  In fact, having family in several of these “downtrodden” countries, I knew they were, on all counts, far, far worse.

Yes, America propped up some dictators now and then.  FORTUNATELY I’d read history which means I knew two things: the dictators that America propped up were no matter how bad superior to the communist ones*.  And in a cold war all nations do that sort of thing.  It’s not moral from an outsider, floating above point of view. But it is moral from the point of view of protecting your own people and allowing them to survive.

As for criminals being victims of society — pfui.  I was fortunate (!) to spend fifth and sixth grade in a school where a lot of what we’ll call for lack of a better word the “feral underclass” attended.  There was no virtue.  They were not victims.  They were enjoying themselves terrorizing the law abiding.  I could spew this stuff on command in essays for Portuguese class, but it was not true and I knew it was not true. One of my own cousins belonged — by choice — to the feral underclass. He was still in sixth grade at 14 and his parents asked me to tutor him.  Tutor him?  He hadn’t any problems learning, but he was having so much fun beating up teachers after school and stealing money from little girls who wouldn’t fight back.

Was he a victim?  Sure he was.  He was a victim of doting parents, so enthralled of the fact they’d finally produced a son that he could do no wrong (in terms of the deep culture that we talked about here before, that passes in families, there might have been reinforcement since her mother — from place of birth and names in family– came from moorish traditions.)  They’d failed to instill in his the virtues that would have allowed him to thrive in a free society.  So he was a victim all right.  Of his family.  What the rest of society had to do with this is beyond me.

But though he came to grief later, particularly after his father died, yeah, he was having a good time.  He was nobody’s victim.

Those two years also were the ones I got put in “coventry.” For social and political reasons no one at that school spoke to me in public.  (I did have a friend, but she was on afternoon classes, while I was on morning classes.) Well, no one till I accrued a cottery of real victims. They were the deformed and the small, the poor and the despised.  I’d beat up their tormentors and they clung to me.  That was fine, (and some of them learned to fight back.  Beware the frightened rabbit in a pack) but they weren’t especially virtuous.  Some were very nice people, but some weren’t (being ostracized for that long twists you) and none of them would have benefited from staying victims.  That’s just stupid talk.

So I came to doubt all of those shibboleths, which is a good thing because it turns out, as ESR explains in the article, that we have proof all of these were dreamed up by soviet operatives (Stalinist) and implanted in our culture amid the idiot fellow travelers, in order to corrupt and destroy the west.

In that sense it is literally malware uploaded to a healthy culture, to destroy it from within.

Those of you who are computer programmers know what must be done with malware — it must be uprooted, root and branch.

Now, the problem is that it resides in everyone’s heads by now, even our own, having been propagated by our art, our culture, our news, even, which we trusted to be neutral.

And we don’t want to trash the infected sectors, i.e. get rid of the people running the zombie program of dead Stalinists.  We can’t, because all of us are infected, to an extent.

It might come to a blood bath, but if it does the system will be permanently crippled and diminished — and because we’re humans, not bits and bites, it’s worth mentioning some of the more infected bits are our friends, our neighbors, our family members.  So it might come to a blood bath.  In fact, I’m very afraid that’s the path we’re on, but we as free men and men of good will, owe it to ourselves to do what we can to avoid it.

So, our path is more difficult.

For years, my husband has despaired of watching movies with me, because I have that truth-checking program in my head.  Hit three or more of those pat “everybody knows” above, and I leave the room, no matter how engaging the romance wrapped around it.  You see I grew up, literally, in a socialist country, surrounded by propaganda at all times.  It was so heavy handed you couldn’t help but see through it.  And I did.  Which means like someone who’s been immunized, I’m sensitive to the virus and anti-bodies deploy.

The funny thing is in the age of Obama, he’s started seeing some of it too, with the result that his favorite romcoms right now are Japanese and Korean.

For years, to, it qualified my enjoyment of books.  I can stand more in a book than in a movie, but hit me too many times with the “everybody knows” or the mini-truths being propagated from above (like “Obama care rescued us all from death, hallelujah” which I’ve been seeing in movies and some books. Or “everyone who opposes Obama is racist”) and the book takes flying lessons.  The same for the horrible oppression of women, and how all women in the regency were secretly suffragettes and PROBABLY hankered for abortions.  (Okay, it’s not that bad, but I’m tired of how in regency romances every female runs a shelter for abused women — rolls eyes.  Yes, there was a lot of that, but not THAT much.)

Look at those points above that ESR was so kind as to compile for us.  Memorize them.  Part of fighting the malware is knowing its code.  When you find it in your own head, eradicate it.

And write books that mirror how the world really works (to an extent.  You can’t do exactly because stories have to be more plausible and cohesive than reality) and propagate them.  If you can, homeschool your kids.  If you can’t, teach them to see through that propaganda in our culture.  Tell them the truth.  The enemy died of its dysfunctional culture, but these errors it “uploaded” in our system are designed to kill us.  Don’t let them.

It took over 1oo years to come to this.  We can’t recover in a year.  We’re going to have to take incremental steps, with infinite patience.

Fortunately we’re now at the point that the people most outright running this malware have gone a little nuts, to the point everyone else can see it, and there are pockets of resistance and of just ignoring and cutting off the diseased parts (like gamergate, or what we’re doing in science fiction and fantasy which is go around them with a brief pause to laugh and point.) (Note that second link has a lot of  antisemitism and outright racism in the comments, which I am in no way endorsing.  Note also that there is a lot of this, because when you realize your society is running on lies, you’re going to turn the absolute other way.  And not realize that’s just different lies. Our rescue efforts for society have to fight both the ones running malware and the ones trying to rid themselves of it by flipping the code.)

So it’s come to this.  It won’t be easy.  I think it’s doable, because their worldview in no way reflects reality and is collapsing in shards all around them.  But it won’t be easy and it won’t be fast and a lot of it will feel like, in Dave Freer’s colorful phrase “Taking on hell with a bucket.”

But then easy battles have no glory.  Go forth.  Fight the lies in your head, so you can fight them in others’ heads.  Write compelling stories and teach your children well.

Our culture can be saved. And we’re the only ones who can do it.

Now go.  In the end, we win, they lose. Make it so.

*This is because all communist dictators in fact became puppet viceroys of Russia.  But, you say, weren’t their counterparts American puppets?  Well, usually no, because America is REALLY bad at it.  It wins a war, it gives the country tons of money, but allows the enemy free rein to talk and subvert the peace.  No.  But even if it were, the problem is that the  Soviet Union, which, btw, ultimately meant the Russian Empire, was incapable of producing most of what its people need.  So when they acquired these new territories, they became places to be exploited, their people slave labor and their product sent to Russia at a loss.  When America acquired sway over a country they wanted to sell them stuff and develop factories there while the cost of living was lower.  (No, that’s not the same as Russian slavery, because it allows the country thus “occupied” to catch up, see Japan and to an extent — hampered by its stupid communist/fascist regime, China — which of course brings up the anomie of capitalism which is literally worse than the gulags.  (If you think that think shame on yourself.))  If you want to know how much worse it was for a country to fall under the sway of Russia than of America, talk to Peter Grant who saw the destruction of the Portuguese colonies in Africa.  Be prepared.  He’s a GOOD man but not always a nice one.  Particularly to morons.

At one time, when I was very young – probably early teens – I came across an interview from someone or other in the French glitterati circles talking about how it was a shame that until the Asterix comics little French kids knew more of the history of the little Jesus than about their ancestors the Gauls.

To this day I’m not a 100 percent sure about why this is a bad thing, precisely. I mean, you have to think there is some sort of virtue to what is linked by blood over what is transmitted by choice.

It is in a way – or was, since this must have been in the middle seventies, in embryonic form – the argument of the multiculturalists: all cultures are the same, and all cultures being the same, one should be true to the culture of one’s ancestors.

Of course later the multiculturalists get confused and decide that culture is transmitted from one’s ancestors, somehow, in the blood. Which then leads to calling anyone who criticizes any culture “racist,” something that makes no sense whatsoever in any other terms.

So, are all cultures the same, in some ethic sense?

Depends. How are you going to judge them? I propose the only way to judge a culture is how comfortable its people are and how successful it is in raising the humans who participate in it from the brutish/short lived/nasty state of humans on their own.

Note that this is not the only way to evaluate a culture. A lot of the multiculturalists seem to evaluate a culture on a scale of “quaint” – “quaint dress/clothes/custom/religion” – in which quaint means “not like the native culture I actually know.” They often know nothing more than those externalities, but even so declare every other culture vastly superior to their own. (And if you’re going to say this is not true, I’m going to counter with every freaking multi-culti warrior who, knowing nothing more about Portugal than a vague sound that might mean South America and that I came from there informed me that it was vastly superior to everything in the US.)

There is also the way to evaluate a culture by SJW standards, in which “highly advanced culture” means “would have a distinguished place for people like me who can do nothing but generate blather at a high rate and explain how Marx keeps my breath minty fresh.”

I prefer to evaluate it my way, because if you evaluate a culture under “makes the greater number of people well fed/materially secure and (relatively) health” then culture, with some disgusting hiccups, behaves as an organism, in which the overtaking culture is always superior to the previous one.

This is sometimes masked by the fact that when two cultures clash the one that prevails by force of arms is not the one that imposes its culture and by the fact that, like anything pertaining to humans, it’s not always a straight progression, but there is the occasional disgusting hiccup.

For instance, take the barbarians taking over Rome. Did it make the Roman colonies (largely) less comfortable and secure? Sure. But for the barbarians, whose culture largely became subsumed in Rome, it was a huge step up.

But beyond all that, what drives me nuts about all this is what Richard Fernandez talked about in his column two(?) days ago.

To put it bluntly, there is no reason that little kids should know more about their Gaulish ancestors than about the early Christian church.

Leaving aside morality and a religion that freed people from the terrors of vending machine gods, there is how the past culture is passed to the future.

It’s not in any way a straightforward thing, not even in these days when we have written communication and more time to spend telling each other stories.

My husband was surprised recently to find his maternal grandmother had lived in Chicago as a young woman. I only discovered about three years ago that my mother is not the middle daughter, as I always assumed, but the oldest one. You see, everything from their little-girl pictures to my memory of my aunts led me to believe my aunt was older than mom. Turns out no, she’s just the blond and tall sheep of the family. These are all people I’ve known my whole life, and yet I had that startlingly wrong.

In the same way, my older son thought I was the youngest of three, like his dad, because my cousin who was raised with us is treated as a sister and called “aunt” by them.

These are small things, practically irrelevant, but bigger things are lost too. It doesn’t even take a lot of time.

We’ve talked here about how my kids simply can’t read an analog watch. They learned to, but they never used it, and the knowledge was shed.

In the same way, my Portuguese is – to put it mildly – a mess. I still understand it, but can no longer speak it with any semblance of fluency. Because I don’t use it.

How about the every day actions and rituals that constitute a culture?

Well, mom might still know how to cook a full meal over a wood fire, as she did when she was young, but I very much doubt it. In the same way I’m sure that many of the things she did/thought about every day as a young woman have passed from her memory. I know many have passed from mine.

And the stories, passed from generation to generation? People mishear, misconstrue, and think their parents surely meant x because y made no sense.

I like this both in the sense of building a world when you write, and in the sense of just liking it. Like a polished fragment of a seashell found on the beach, you can’t tell what the whole thing looked like, but there’s a beauty all its own in the fragment. And being a writer I tend to make up stories about what these things are/look like and why.

For instance one of the songs with which I was rocked to sleep is the sad story of a single algae left behind by the tide, while its sisters dance back to sea. A fisherman captures it, and of course it turns into a beautiful woman whom he marries. If you go by his hut, you’ll hear her singing sad songs about the sea.

Wait, what? She started out as a piece of SEAWEED?

My theory is that this song is very, very old and comes from a language that in the translation to what is Portuguese now changed seal to seaweed. (Aided by the fact that in medieval times no one in the working class in Portugal would have heard of a seal.)

I could of course be totally wrong. This could be a song heard from British sailors and when a translation was asked for, that mistake was made. Or mom could have learned it from the radio, where someone wrote it because they thought it sounded cool.

Culture? What culture?

And this is now, when we’re living longer, and we can ask our parents (I did. Her answer was “I don’t remember.”)

In the days when people died while their children were barely pubescent, what got passed? What got explained? How many of the customs involved the equivalent of breaking the roast in two because it had always been done, when it turned out it’s because great grandma only had two small pans and not a large one?

And then a new religion, a coherent and cohesive narrative comes along… people will latch on to the narrative.

Culture is not genetically inherited. It’s only partially intellectually inherited in day to day life. It’s transmissible through the narrative that allows us to see ourselves and our place in the world.

Christianity provided such a narrative, and therefore displaced less successful stories.

Unfortunately for us, right now, due to its internal consistency (even if lack of reference to anything external) Marxism is overtaking our cultural narrative. It’s taught at schools, and it’s such an easy narrative to insert oneself into and it “explains everything.”

It also has the virtue of assigning guilt and merit by things like gender and skin color, so you don’t have to make complex moral judgments.

It’s also completely drawers and at odds with reality. And in the end it spells doom for the societies it infects. In “societal software” sense, it’s malware.

Yes, I know what I said above, but remember the thing about “disgusting intervals”? I’d much rather our society didn’t go down into one of those.

So, what can we do?

I think in the end the “superior software” – i.e. the set of stories that better manipulates reality and allows humans to survive in it – wins.

What can we do?

We can come up with compelling narratives about who we are as humans, and what the future holds. Not just religious – though religious ones are permissible. The reason they are in retreat is that they became too opaque to outsiders, too hard to interpret, unlike, you know, the idiotic simplicity of Marxism – but moral and situational and… well… stories of all kinds.

We need to write a song of freedom.

Because it would indeed be sad if the descendants of Americans knew everything about Marx and nothing about their ancestors’ liberty.

So, go forth and dream coherent and vivid dreams.

In the end we win, they lose. I’d rather cut out some thousand years in the mud, though.

Dream, create, tell stories. Don’t worry about authenticity, worry about their being compelling.

Be not afraid.

So I’m sitting here,looking at the reports, and so far it’s hard to tell if Colorado got its miracle or not.

Oh, sure, we got rid of Mark Uterus, but after O’Keefe exposed their scams in CO, it was hard to steal a national race and not be in trouble.  The local one, though…

Perhaps my readers will correct me.  Perhaps there IS somehow, reason for someone to vote for Cory Gardner but not for Beauprez.  I can’t find one. Last I checked Hickenloper, aka Bloombug’s love child, was slightly less popular than foot fungus locally, and running about neck and neck with psoriasis.

Unless you guys know of some counties where he’s loved because… I got nothing… I think we’ve found the margin of fraud in Colorado.  It’s the space between Gardner’s Victory and (so far at least) Hickenloper’s not losing.  Which is what?  5%?  Or exactly the number of people who “no longer remember voting for Obama.”

And there hinges the problem.  With Hickenloper in place the new “voting rules” stay, which means this victory is transitory.  (Again, correct me if my reasoning is wrong.)  It means that in 16 we’re back to being “Chicago of the West” or “New California” or something.

So, Sarah Dear, what do you propose to do about it?

A quixotic idea comes to mind: in Colorado we have the right to petition for the inclusion of amendments (that’s not precisely it, but it’s too early to look up the right terminology.)

I propose we start a petition to have the Colorado constitution amended with the Franchise and Anti-Fraud act.

It should stipulate the following: voting should take place in even-numbered years on the first Tuesday of November. Voting shall be in person unless individual can show just cause (impairment or hardship) why this can’t take place, for which purpose vote-by-mail and early voting (no more than a week early) may be used. For voting, citizen will present photo ID and proof of citizenship, be it passport, birth certificate or citizenship certificate. The DMV shall be directed to issue voting cards for those who wish for them, showing both citizenship and identity.  After voting the citizen’s index finger of the right hand shall be stained with wash-resistant ink which will take at least a week to fade.  If the citizen is missing that finger, the next one will be stained.  If all fingers in the right hand are missing, the corresponding fingers on the left shall be stained.

I know that’s not legal language, and I have no clue what the process is to do this, but I’m sure some of you do.  I’m sure the lawyers in this crowd can re-write that.  And I’m sure some of you (besides telling me its crazy) know how to go about collecting signatures to put it on the ballot.

Quixotic?  Surely.  Unless we can get a special election of some sort called for it (is that even possible) they will use the same machinery they’ll use to deliver CO to the Democrat machine in 16 to defeat it.

But at the very least it will call attention to what is going on and what is wrong.  And who knows?  Maybe like O’Keefe’s exploits it will make them scared of cheating on at least some races?  It’s a hope.

We can’t call it the “Clean up Colorado so Sarah doesn’t have to move” but that’s what it is.

And meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen, we have a mad duck president (a lame duck who is mad as h*ll at us. Neo-neocon coined the usage on her blog) and who, to be fair, never liked us overmuch, and we have elected a bunch of squishes whose feet have to be held to the fire.

Put down the champagne and hold on to the sides of the boat.  This is no time to get wobbly.

I voted for the first time at the age of eighteen, in Portugal, after I went back from being an exchange student.

I voted a lot.  You see, Portugal had a lot of parties and at the time for whatever reason governments were always falling and special elections being called.

I was a snooty kid (well, I was) and made mine a protest vote for the only party that had no chance of ever winning an election: the monarchists.

Note that going in, they had someone inspecting however many yards away to make sure that no one was wearing campaign anything.  Also, they made you show your ID card, and sign a card, which they compared to your signature on file.  Note also that this was the village and EVERYONE KNEW ME and even if they had been alone all my life and didn’t know me personally, they’d have figured who I was by resemblance to my grandmother, my father, my aunt.  They still made me show the ID card and carefully compared it to the signature.

Also, though the socialists always won (well, they controlled all the media) I know the vote counting was correct because the local votes always showed two monarchist votes, my own and that of my best friend’s older brother.  (Whom I probably would have married, if I could only have stopped thinking of him as a brother, as well.)

Okay, so at the time the village was pretty monolithic racially, so no one could have accused voter ID of being racist.  (There was one mulatto lady in the entire village.  She was known as “the black woman.”  Nothing racist really, because the protestant family were known as “The protestants.”  In the village they just tended to nickname you by the most visible characteristic.  And it stuck.  I don’t doubt that woman’s son, who is blond, is called “Son of the black woman.” My family is still known as The Potato Sellers, because my great great grandmother had a potato-buying-reselling business.  When friends from America came to visit, they got lost in the village (which took talent, let me tell you.  Yeah, nothing was marked, but there was ONE main street and a bunch of warren like alleys.  My parents lived in the only large street to the left coming into the village on the main street.  (The large street to the right led to another village and eventually if you kept on walking, to the city of Porto.)  Furthermore, we’d told them my parents street ended at the train station.  Never mind.) and went around asking for me by name or for my dad — Antonio de Almeida — by name.  Note that my family on dad’s side had lived in the village at least 150 years and maybe more.  NO ONE KNEW us by surname.  When they finally made it to the house, they reported this odd fact and dad laughed “You should have asked for Tone, the Potato Seller.”  “But you don’t sell potatoes.” “Yeah, but my great grandmother did.”  You should have seen the expressions.)

But there were poor people.  Very poor people.  And there were illiterate people (A ton of them.)  I don’t know if all had ID cards.  They sort of needed them to collect anything government or go to the doctor or whatever, but I suspect my grandmother only got one because her sons made her, and I very much doubt the farmhands had one.  However, they probably had some picture ID: church card, or whatever.  And their signatures got compared, or if they made “a mark” they had to be vouched for by someone of importance/well known in the community. And those who REALLY wanted to vote made an effort and got an ID card.

What I mean is, there would be more reason in Portugal to protest ID cards than here, where it’s almost impossible to live without ID.  Okay, this is Colorado, and I could imagine someone lost in the hills for forty years and without an active driver’s license.  But if that person was that invested in coming down and voting, they could make efforts in advance.  Also, most of those people would be white, or at most have a little Latino admixture.

Also, elections in Portugal are on Sunday, but NO ONE demands to vote by mail/in advance.  The one time I had to vote because I was leaving the country before the election (mom insisted I vote, even though all I did was my little protest vote) I had to fill more paperwork than to open a bank account.

I’ll note in the US elections are on Tuesday to allow (back then) people to travel by horse and buggy to the poling place.  If they could do it…

I think there’s only one way to secure our polls.  ID cards, yes, of course, but also voting in person.  Early voting allowed only by reason of absence and/or job won’t let you out.  And that allowed only on specific days (Say the Sunday before) and no votes touched/counted till then.  And no results even spoken of till three days after the voting, to make sure everything is counted.

But in this our corrupt time, I sat and voted at my kitchen table yesterday — a serious violation of the secrecy of the ballot.  Oh, not for us.  We’re a decent family.  We each sat and voted and though husband and I traded jokes about some of the initiatives like the we really want to keep the money we overcharged you on yet another excuse this year Storm Water initiative, I didn’t even glance at his ballot, much less the boys’ ballots.  But I imagine situations of abuse or even just well intentioned interference.  Secrecy, what secrecy? And that without counting rampant intent to commit fraud — and filled out my vote.

It might count for nothing, mind.  I know.  I’m not an idiot.  The elections have been corrupted since Motor Voter, when you didn’t have to show proof of citizenship to get a voter’s registration.  Now, it’s just silly how easy it is to commit fraud.

But for the good of everyone, including those who think it’s their right to commit fraud in order to hold onto power over those “less capable” people, nota bene — I experienced almost cathartic relief in voting against you.

What does that mean?  Well, like my little protest vote in Portugal, there is relief and empowerment in being able to say “This is my middle finger.  You can’t have my vote.”

In Portugal, at least, I knew my vote was counted.  Useless, but counted.

That relief I experienced yesterday?  If my candidate loses (and there’s a good chance, because see rampant fraud) and you manage to reinstate One Idea Mark Uterus  then it will become obvious I might as well have written my choices in a paper and thrown it away.  And then next time the election will bring no cathartic relief.  For me or anyone else.

And that’s the road to revolution.

When you rule over the people against their will, it’s not going to end well.  You might think you have the tech and the ability to keep power and convince people it’s for the best.  I shall remind you that the soviet union called itself “scientific” too, and that you fourth generation authoritarians aren’t even that capable.

Can you hold onto power?  Sure, for a little while.  But these regimes always end in tears for everyone.  And the more ground you take, the worse it will get.

The certainty that your vote counted; the legitimacy of elections is the only way we have to keep peace over a large populace.

I don’t care if Marx told you you’d inherit the Earth.  I don’t care if you’ve been telling yourselves for generations that people really want your rule, they just don’t know it.

I counsel for your sake, as well as ours, that you step back before you step out into the abyss.

Whether the abyss is Irish democracy or armed revolt, you won’t like us when we’re angry.

That’s An Awfully Nice Civitas You’ve Got There . . . – David Pascoe

We are mere hours away from finding out the results of the latest batch of experimentselections (so what if it’s more than twenty-four; if you can’t count higher than that, you’re insufficiently ambitious). There’s been speculation for months on whether the Republicans will once more snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. More recently – and more widespread than ever – there’s been speculation that voting practices enacted by largely Democratic legislatures will provide sufficient screening action to allow for the necessary fraud to secure power for All Timeanother couple of years. Regardless, the results of these elections are fiercely anticipated on all sides.

Well, except for that silent mass who don’t know, and don’t care. They just want today to be more or less like yesterday, and for tomorrow to be more or less like today. Which is why Daddy Gov’t appeals so strongly. Someone else to take responsibility for making things work? How great is that? And when the Sun God, er, der Fuhrer, um, Uncle Joe, uhhhh, the Dear Leader promises you’ll get, not just what you need, but enough to provide all those big screens, enormous SUVs, and all the iDevices you could want? And at the expense of meanie rich people and their eeeeeevil corporations? What’s not to love? Especially since they hate us anyway, because accidents of birth, or skin color, or some such.

And, at one level, that’s what it’s all about. And what we writing Human Wave keep working to change. Humans being tribal, we’re wired to gather some “in,” and box everyone else “out.” And we do. Even we, the Huns, do it. Those who show up spouting foolishness about collectivism, and how the good of the many necessitate sometimes, unfortunately, require the trampling on of the rights of the individual get quickly shown the door, so we can go back to picking on each other like a good family.

Our so-called leadership keeps working to do exactly that: fracture American society along lines that make us easier to control. Watch the vileprogs at work: those white people (forming a majority of American citizens) hate black, brown, yellow, orange, chartreuse and mauve people, and want to keep them as chattel. Look at that group of brown(ish) people: they’re really more like white people (as evidenced by things like test scores and college attendance rates), so they hate these other brownish people (who are generally newer to the scene, and so haven’t had quite as long to develop roots in communities and build on their ancestors’ wise decisions). And of course, all those people with more stars on their bellies hate all the people with no stars on their bellies, so you should Always Vote Democrat (early and often, now facilitated by all-mail ballots, though fought tenaciously (those enemies of history, them (AhhH! Nested parentheses!!) by such horrific things as voter ID laws, like they have in Mexico) because we’re ever so much cooler than those old fogies who believe in personal responsibility and duty and similar regressive concepts.

(This is the part where Dave gets to the mother-loving point.)

With all this fracturing, aided an abetted by technological upheaval, we’re losing the older senses of community. The neighborhood, where people sit on the stoop of an afternoon, waving to those out perambulating (another thing which happens rather infrequently) and enjoying the fresh bugs and the delightfully muggy air. The parades and gatherings to celebrate the togetherness that happens in a group of people who live in the same area and have had to help each other to survive droughts, winters, floods and Those Jerks From Over the Hill.

We’re losing (lost?) that sense of togetherness for those whom near we live. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, just that it is, and the more able we are to fool ourselves about long-term survival by looking at short-term trends (what? No, we’re fine: the grocery store is FULL of food. And TP), enabled by technological miracles, the deeper that disconnect will grow. We’re seeing it replaced by more far-flung communities, often of a virtual type. We are an instance of this. Many conventions do the same thing. Fandoms of all kinds are notorious for bringing together misfits from all points of the globe. It’s practically what they’re all about.

I was going to pitch the notion that we’d do well to resurrect some of that small-town, Music Man kind of local patriotism – and I think we would, though this isn’t the way to make that argument – as a means of revivifying the social glue that may or may not have ever actually existed, but that doesn’t seem to be where my fingers have lead us, this morning. It may well be that the old civitas, the sense of citizens bound together by law, with rights and privileges pertaining thereto, is dying. We’re seeing evidence of this as our betters treat us peasants commoners with infuriating disdain. As they gather to protect their own, instead of those to whom their duty is sworn. I mean, really, what are you going to believe, our credentialed experts, or your own lying eyes?

Can we salvage our society from the encroaching hordes of barbarism? I don’t know. Can we do it by writing decent stories, by telling those stories to each other to bolster flagging courage? Again, I don’t know. But I do know that’s the only thing that can, and that’s how big things always start.

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

When I was six, I found out that my parents could yell, they could threaten, but they couldn’t actually, physically, get in my brain and make my body do things.  This must have led to a fun and exciting time for my parents, in finishing raising me.

However, to this day, I remember that.  In the ultimate analysis I am free.  People can kill me, but they can’t MAKE me do stuff.  (absent neural programming, which Speaker assures me we don’t have yet.)

In the same way, in the course of almost as many years as Shakespeare’s total life, I’ve found Heinlein was right.

I don’t care how noble a side sounds, how profoundly urgent its benevolent message, if they say “this you cannot think.  This you cannot read.  This you cannot even consider” they are a tyranny in the making. If they get power over you and yours soon you’ll find that it’s “This air you cannot breathe.”

They are also unsure of their logical appeal and their ability to withstand the market place of ideas.  Otherwise, why ban certain thoughts and ideas and points of view?

This is why “political correctness” is a bad thing, because it takes away your tools to think of things properly.  If you can’t even express that men and women might be different, you surely can’t think about it.

It is also why progressivism with its ever growing list of “forbidden terms and words” because of racist sexist and imperialist bad thought (brown bag, really?) is a tyranny in the making.

I read an article this week, from Popehat about gamergate. I would like to say he made some good points, but he didn’t. Impossible to make good points when you mis-define the sides in the Gamergate and (by extension) the SFWA dispute and everywhere your favorite Social (in)Justice Whiners attack.  He seems to have bought into the definition of the sides brought by the SJWs and so views them as mostly urban, educated, often in tech professions, etc.  I.e. “Smart and cutting edge.”  He also seems to think they’re in search of true social justice.  (Le sigh.)  He says he is neither on “team blue” or “team red” (his terms) because while he’s fiscally conservative he’s for gay marriage and he prefers urban environments.  And he defines the opponents to SJWs as homophobes.  (I wonder if he defines them as racist and sexist too?  Including the women and the many gamergaters of interesting racial origin?)

Yeah, by that measurement, and actually including the “well educated” and “citizen of the world” measurements, I’d be in between too.

I’m not in between.  I’m staunchly in opposition to the SJWs.  Why?  Because the sides aren’t as pictured.

Are there some homophobes on the side of Gamergate?  I doubt it, particularly in the States.  Look, most of these people are younger than I, and gay relationships are just a thing that at worst we don’t care about one way or another.  Are there some homophobes on the right side of politics? Undoubtedly.  Probably not as many as there are on the left, though.  (No? Look to their favorite slurs and accusations to people they hate.)  More organized, maybe, though disapproval of homosexuality for religious reasons is not necessarily (or often) homophobia.  (Can be, but I’ve met very few.)

As for educated… pfui.  It’s possible that on the SJW side there are more graduates of “good universities” with impeccable credentials, but listen to them for ten minutes and you realize these credentials were acquired by regurgitating the indoctrination poured down their throats by their patchouli-infused professors.  In fact, if you try to discuss anything real with them, from the history of Western culture, to the real issues of some non-western civilizations, they gape at you like guppies in search of a crumb.  You’re talking of things they were told don’t exist and they can’t think about them, because thinking about them would make them automatically bad people.

So if your head hurts and you’re confused, this is because Popehat mis-defined the sides involved in this dispute.

The SJWs aren’t for equality or inclusion or any of that grand stuff.  They’re not even for upending the “scales of privilege” which at any rate haven’t been as described for at least fifty years.

They are for one thing only “Do as we say, and enshrine us as arbiters of all that’s right and just.”

Because their “system” of competing victimhoods is so confusing and irrational, they need someone to tell you when and how to discriminate, and whether a black handicapped straight woman has precedence over a Muslim, communist, gay guy.  These hierarchies change, too, depending on whim and whatever comes from the top.

So you need to constantly pay attention to the “voices from above” to know what to think and believe.  And even the wrong word you didn’t know was wrong — “lady” — can get you attacked by people who are keeping up with the SJW diktats.

Which means there must be SJWs in charge, and they must be listened to constantly.  IOW they get power to tell you what to do, what to think, what to read and what to believe.  Read or believe the wrong thing, and the pack descends on you like the red brigades on a deviationist.

In fact the whole thing smells of the power struggles in the Soviet Union.

This is not coincidental.

Both systems are tyrannical and aim at controlling your thought.

This you must not read, this you must not think, this you must not see even if it happens before your very eyes.

To be an SJW you must believe that, the long history of life on Earth notwithstanding, the attraction between male and female is arbitrary and part of “conditioning.”  That men and women are both exactly alike save for sex organs, and completely different in that women as historical victims have all the virtues of humanity, including compassion, peacefulness, healing, etc.  That if only we weren’t “oppressed” by a capitalist system, everyone would have enough of what they need/want and there would be no war or strife.  That saying that a 200lb man can carry a 90lb woman under one arm and laugh at her struggles is sexist.  That saying cultures are differently functional is somehow racist (even when the cultures belong to the exact same race, like say, Morocco and Italy.)

In other words, you have to be willing to believe things that just ain’t so and that simply won’t work in the real world.

In the article, Popehat makes reference to how they’re trying to get into gaming because it’s one of the sectors of the economy still doing well.  All the places that the SJWs have colonized before: books, news, industry, corporations are floundering.

It never occurs to him there is a cause and effect here.  As John C. Wright points out, everything they touch they destroy. EVERYTHING.  That is because what they want is power over the human mind, and because their set of beliefs is completely out of touch with reality.

You can’t, for instance, run a corporation as though men and women were exactly the same from the neck up.  As though they were both capable of leadership sure.  Identical, though?  Never.  Women have a completely different style in social relations.  To deny that is the true sexism.

The difference between the two sides is not red and blue, a scheme that changed in my lifetime anyway (Really, since when isn’t red communist?  Were they afraid of the linkage?)

The difference is between the bound and the free, the mentally enslaved and those who can read and think anything.

To compare us to the “party of the past” and the “party of the future” and to ascribe to the SJWs the future is to forget that America is not Europe.  Our past is not the staid past of aristocrats and serfs.  It is the past of revolution and freedom.  And none of us is advocating stasis.

We know technology changes, and its changes affect society.  It is the SJWs, the party of the past of Marx and Lenin and Stalin and Mao and other blood stained, dead, and for the most part white males, who are afraid of the change. They own the imagined future of the past and they can’t face the real future with interpersonal communications they don’t control, news they don’t control, entertainment they don’t control.

It is they who want to shut down internet discourse, or at least control it.  It is they who hate the free and chaotic environment online.

It is they who run around telling everyone “this you must not do” and “this you must not think” and “this person you must not associate with” on pain of being ‘worse than Hitler’.

We?

Heck, I gave my sons The Communist Manifesto when they were 12.  I figured it was better they taste the poison from the source, and not from the various repackagers who made it more palatable.  Looked at, in its naked horror, the ideology can’t fail to repel.

I also let them read their fill of various of the diluted sources afterwards, because if you’re armed with logic, the dankiest corners of the SJW universe hold no terrors.  Mostly, they hold boredom, because without the ability to be challenged there can be no independent, individual or new thought.

The two sides are as follows:

They’re the would be slave masters; we’re the free men, holding two middle fingers aloft in their faces.

Yours is the choice.

Greetings, O people my people. Now that All Saints Day has passed, the deluge of Christmas kitsch can now descend. To drown out the pop stars murdering White Christmas, I offer you some interesting books to peruse this week. So go, buy stories, leave reviews, and for those of you doing NaNoWriMo, good luck and make sure you send me your finished work! Heck, you could submit it for the promo post too. :D As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

World-Renowned Word-polisher, Shameless Self-Promoter, and Slave to the Groove

JL Curtis

The Grey Man: Payback

Deputy Sheriff John Cronin and his granddaughter, Jesse, are preparing for Jesse’s upcoming wedding to her Marine when the Cartel decides to murder some South Texas cops as a payback for arresting their drug smugglers. They send a hit squad to kill Cronin, Jesse, and everyone close to the family. The only problem?

They missed the old man.

Leaving his badge behind, John Cronin, Francisco and a few others head south to teach them a lesson about what old school western justice really means.

John Van Stry

Of Temples and Trials

Portals of Infinity: Book Three

With the first of what he suspects will be many favors completed, William finds himself busy with important tasks back at his home on Saladin. Queen Rachel has several jobs she needs him to do, and Feliogustus has similar tasks in mind for him as well. All in all, it seems easy enough to Will, it’s not like he’ll be fighting in any wars, or traveling across the infinite on a strange quest after all.

But things aren’t always as easy as they might seem, and both politics, as well as the other gods, aren’t going to ignore Will, or the tasks he’s been set to complete. And is if dealing with that isn’t problem enough, when the time comes to do some serious diplomacy between Hiland and a neighboring Kingdom, a deadly problem comes from a most unexpected quarter, forcing Will to take immediate action to payback both his, and his God’s foes.

Jenna Vincent

A Deed With No Name

A Rae Vigil 911 Story

Rae Vigil stumbles into an ugly case of domestic violence with a young child caught in the middle. The parents are very powerful and the police are powerless. Torn between saving the child and professional confidentiality, every instinct tells her not to get involved, but sometimes instincts are wrong.

Impossible Odds

Impossible Odds contains a pair of stories involving everyday people, making difficult choices in uncertain times and coming out ahead, despite the odds.

Available for free from Smashwords with the code RZ84D until Christmas Day.

Ben Zwycky

Nobility Among Us

“Still, this process does not sit well with me. Letting the people think they are in control of these proceedings, having them vote for their chosen candidate as if they will change the way things are done, these are dangerous ideas. Furthermore, these are actual lowborns we are admitting to our ranks. What if something slips through the filtering process, what then? I have this nagging feeling that this whole enterprise will come back to haunt us one day.”

Brought together by a reality show designed to pacify the people of Gandria, Viscount Marcus Draishire and his low-born wife are secret devotees of the forbidden book. This could get both of them imprisoned or worse. Marcus hears a case of a cattle farmer suing his baron for unfair taxation. Should he follow the king’s decree, that all nobles are immune from criticism, or judge the case on its merits? Marcus chooses the latter and gets himself some unwanted attention. He now has to balance acting in the best interests of his subjects against antagonising his superiors, who tend to express their displeasure with a bomb, bullet or knife.

The people under him have their own struggles and the nobility itself is walking something of a tightrope, the need to crush dissent weighing against that of projecting a benevolent public image; no-one wants another uprising.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Feed A Read
• Nobility Among Us
• Alibris
• For our international branches of the Hunnish Horde, this book is listed on various Amazon sites too numerous to list here.

Some of you — cough Eamon J. Cole cough — asked about this novel To The Dragons that I’ll hopefully be writing in the later half of NanoWrimo.  It’s actually a trilogy To The Dragons, With The Dragons, For the Dragons.  I am not proposing to write those three in two weeks, but maybe I can finish it over the holidays?

Anyway, for the subscribers, yes, I’ll be posting more on it, as I finish it, you get first peek.  But so everyone else doesn’t think I’m even crazier than usual (or perhaps has his/her suspicions confirmed, who knows?) here’s the first chapter:

To The Dragons

Sarah A. Hoyt

I always get scared before a flight.

Up in the saddle, with my pulse racing, I check the extra magazines for the Lewis, in the saddle bag, and hope that I’ll have time to reload. Then I check the bombs in their container and hope we won’t have the rare kind of defective that will blow us both out of the air before we even come near objective.

My dragon’s wings spread, and I feel the shifting of his muscles, and that’s when I start shaking, in a mix of nervousness and memory. It is never sure, when we take off like this that we’ll come back alive. In fact, the odds are greatly against it.

Suddenly my uniform is too tight, the wool prickly against my skin at wrist and collar. I count the bombs on the saddle bag, afraid of one of them will be a dud, afraid we’ll miss the one chance at fulfilling our mission.

He stretches his wings and I feel, even beneath the saddle, the movement, as the great muscles of his thighs coil, then push, lifting us into the sky, his wings flapping madly, biting into the air for purchase, until he can find the thermals and coast.

The sound of the giant wings against the sky reminds me of the first time I ever heard them consciously, flapping above my childhood home.

For just a moment, I’m a three year old standing before the ruins of her home, thrown out of a window by the initial explosion, the only survivor of her entire family. A war orphan.

The trembling gets worse, and then I hear the dragon’s voice in my mind: “You’re all right.”

It’s not a question, but an affirmation. I’m all right, and he’s there with me, there in all my memories, there as we head for what might be a no return flight. There.

It makes a difference. I am in peril. But not alone.

From the age of three to twenty two I was alone, another orphan in the war with the dragons, a young waif evacuated in one of the last convoys from Great Britain to make it safely to the United States, raised in an orphanage in Chicago, trained to be an elementary school teacher to the other legions of orphans this war had made.

And then at my first job I was faced with the talent tracker.

It was a box, square, pale. Looked like it was made of painted metal, nothing much special about it.

I’d balked at it, but I’d been told everyone had to go through it when they got their first job. It was the needed thing to do, the important thing to do. Only one person in a thousand could bond with a dragon, and even then half of those who could didn’t, for some reason. Everyone must be tested. The Katharos dragons had numbers we couldn’t match, and we must use all our dragons. All of them. Humanity had no hope of winning a battle against the Katharos, unless we could field all of those dragons who stood with us.

I’d balked at it because I did not want to bond with a dragon, not even with a dragon on our side. We heard things, after all. How much on our side were the dragons? How much did they identify with the Katharos, the pure, the dragons who wanted to purge humanity from the world? Dragons had killed my family.

But it was the law and at least if rumor was true to have the type of mind that could bond with a dragon’s, you needed to have dragon blood yourself.

Dragon riders were needed because transformed dragons couldn’t drop bombs and fly or keep their minds and sight clear enough to battle in midair, so even the Katharos had one dragon in human form riding the other, in dragon form. And the dragon and rider had to communicate telepathically, which might be easier for dragons, but for humans it meant you had to be bonded to a specific dragon.

And we certainly didn’t have enough dragons in our midst to be able to afford dragon flying teams.

I knew all this. I still didn’t wish to be tested for it.

On the other hand, they said you needed to have dragon blood to be able to bond with one of them. And I very much doubted I had any, unless my ancestors were far more interesting than I’d been led to believe. Less than one person in a thousand had the ability.

Which is why I’d stood in that small office, transfixed, staring at the small white box as it hissed.

I can still remember it perfectly, the expression of the matron and the principal frozen in shock, and then the principal’s smile and “Well, well, that’s never happened before. That’s quite an honor, Miss Winter, that is. Now, if you would wait here, I shall go put a call through to the search headquarters. I’m sure they’ll send a car.”

He shook my hand, effusive and congratulatory, his hands dry and very warm, his face grinning. I wondered if there was a finder’s fee going to the school, then chided myself. After all, anyone who wanted for humans to survive would be glad to have found a potential dragon rider, right?

But I didn’t feel glad. I made a muffled excuse, something about using the ladies’.

I went out and kept walking, with only the money in my purse. I didn’t dare return to my lodgings.

In my mind, I had the vague idea that I could take a train across the country to California, that I could find some place to get lost there. We always heard that California, being subjected to attacks by the Katharos was far more chaotic and tests weren’t being properly made and all.

This was not so much a clear thought as a mindless drive to get out of Chicago, to escape, to escape the search office and their car, to escape the search itself and bonding with a dragon.

I couldn’t do it. I approved of it for others, mind, but I just couldn’t.

Twenty eight hours later, I got out of the train in Denver, to take another long-distance train to California.

And stopped as I saw a line forming, in between platforms. There was a desk and a search machine set up. There were military police all around. I could have run, I could. But if I had run, I’d have found myself caught very quickly. I could earn nothing by it but bruises.

And two hours later, I was winding my way along mountain roads, in the back seat of a car, with a military police next to me, telling me how glad they were to have found me, how difficult it was to find dragon riders, and particularly young women dragon riders.

Turned out the search wasn’t for me, but just a general search. Apparently people who were discovered weren’t always willing. Some had history like mine, but more were already married and set in their ways.

“I suppose you had no idea you were a dragon rider,” the young man said, as he dropped me at a base outside some caverns which I understood had once been used as a touristic attraction. “I mean, a potential one.”

The people who received me, men in uniform whose insignia I couldn’t understand, were all smiles. “There is a bonding going on right now, and there are far too few riders. Come on along. You’re just in time. No, I’m afraid there is no time to change.”

There was also no time to escape. As panicky as I felt, I could not run in the face of this. They weren’t doing anything to make me run. And besides, where I would I go.

They escorted me down what might once have been natural corridors, now provided with smooth floors and electric light.

The bonding cavern, as I’d learn it was called, was a huge room. You could have dropped three or four Cathedrals in there and not have noticed.

There were half a dozen people there who were not military personnel and who looked as out of place as I was. Or at least, they wore what looked like jumpsuits. I suspected it was the same uniform they’d have given me had I had the time. But I wore my grey skirt suit, and clutched onto my purse, as the uniformed men escorted me to join the group.

Past the group were… I smelled them, the slightly reptilian, dry smell. It smelled like… like hot leather. I didn’t have any associations with the smell. I’d never smelled those who’d destroyed my home.

There were at least a dozen dragons, in colors ranging from bright red to green to a strange silvery one with a shimmer to him that made him look like he was made of glass. I knew this type of dragon. At least I knew him from reading. They were called Pures by the Katharos and considered the most desirable of all types of dragons.

I found myself blinking at him, as he turned his triangular head to look me in the eye. He had dark grey eyes and somehow I got the impression he was there as reluctantly as I was. He looked away quickly.

“Ah, here, if you just put your hand on their muzzle. If you bond, you’ll hear the dragon in your mind.”

My hope was that I would be one of fifty percent potentials who wouldn’t bond. Bonding with a dragon is like a marriage. In fact, to preserve decency, the bonded pair is strongly encouraged to marry. The flip side is that you might have all the ability in the world, but if you didn’t find the right one, you might never bond.

With a military gentleman next to me, I patted desultorily at the nose of a brown dragon who leered at me, and a green one who rolled his eyes. There was nothing.

I took a deep breath of relief as the military gentleman took me to stand right in front of the silvery-glass one, and waited. I lifted my hand and set it on his muzzle. I knew he was male, though I hadn’t been sure about the other two. Don’t ask me how. Something to the structure of the face, or the expression.

I set my hand on his muzzle. Like the others, it was soft and warm, which surprised me, since I expected dragons to have cold skin.

Nothing.

And then something happened, like a tingle in my back brain. The dark grey eyes focused on me and widened and I heard an unmistakably masculine, faintly accented voice in my mind saying, “Damn.”