As much time as I spent immersed in other worlds as a teen, I can’t say I was ever into flying cars. Yes, I had posters of Mars and of Shuttle Mission patches on my walls when other girls had music and movie stars. And I had actual stars, and nebulae . . .
Flying cars just weren’t the thing that caught my attention in all the novels I read.
I still think the new Tesla Roadster is cool, and Nathan Brindle (have you read his novels? You should!) mentioned the suction stuff is very useful for low grav vehicles, so . . . check out the Moonmobile! (I call the Cybertrucks MarsCars, because they look like they’re meant to shed the Mars dust to me . . .)
Also, for added coolness, Elon Musk reposted our very own M.C.A. Hogarth’s comment on the test, which you may read here: https://x.com/mcahogarth/status/2110918617294360600 (Also you should read her novels, if you haven’t. Why haven’t you?)
What aspects of the new model look most interesting or otherworldly to you? Would you want one? I could fly over that guy going the wrong way on the one way street . . .
Yesterday, I linked one of Sargent Mom’s posts at Chicago Boyz (I still find it funny that my friend who is neither a boy nor from Chicago posts there) and on my reading it, and the comments before linking, I found that the very first comment was tediously familiar.
Note I’m not saying the commenter if a troll or ill intentioned. I’ve known him “from the blogs” for long before I started using my own name, and/or came out politically. I just think he’s not thinking things through. As aren’t all the people who make that same comment.
They are also hopelessly provincial, historically blinkered or, yes, both. It pains me to say so, but I can’t for the life of me figure out how people convince themselves of this nonsense otherwise. Though I will admit there might be a strong contention of “kids these days” and “get off my lawn” in there. In which case — at sixty — I’d like to point out that getting old is no reason to convince yourself of a bunch of nonsense. There’s much you can shake your fist at the younger generations for without swallowing old Soviet propaganda (spit it out. It’s been up Stanlin’s dead ass) or spreading pernicious lies that blackpill or worse the rest of the people still fighting.
The comment goes like this in its most commonly found form “The Republic is gone. Within its earstwhile boundaries, there are just a bunch of disparate people, who have nothing in common. It’s time to break it all apart and go our separate ways.”
My normal response to that would be “Poppycock on stilts” and throwing the nearest dictionary in the general direction of your head.
But because it keeps surfacing, it is obvious most people have swallowed this nonsense without having any clue where it came from, how it contradicts history or how utterly stupid it is. So I’ll unpack.
First, its origins: Perhaps it is unfair to call it Soviet Propaganda. I suspect it is, because of how deeply laid-in it is with a certain generation, but I know for a fact it started being widely circulated in the mid nineties, when the Soviet Union had fallen apart. Though it was mostly spread by old Soviets indulging revenge-fantasies, and by their friendly useful idiots in the US singing along with their old mentors.
All of a sudden, when my kids were little, the idea was everywhere, served up by every single leftist “The US will now fall apart like the Soviet Union fell apart. The only thing that held each together was the need to fight the other.”
It persisted till the mid two thousands, everywhere. I even remember a giggle-worthy pseudo-scholarly paper by some Russian about how the US would fall apart and in what lines, which made it blindly clear the poor dear only knew the US from Hollywood movies.
Do I need to unpack why it is utterly insane?
Yes. The Soviet Empire was mostly held together by the cold war. Let’s put it more bluntly: by the US helping them maintain it locked tight, because due to the cold war and Soviet propaganda, we were terrified Russia might get mad and bomb us all with its superior (largely imaginary) weapons.
(And Russia finally had a beginning on the empire of their dreams, which ideally for them would compass the entire Earth. Paranoiacs are like that.)
However Russia, with its very old culture, its crazy new Communist cult, and its even older tendency to want to invade and subdue everyone else so they don’t attack her is not the US, and never was. Because the Soviet Union fell apart, it didn’t nor does it follow that the Us should also. This is sort of like saying “Because you can beat egg whites into a firm froth, you should also be able to beat egg yolks into a firm froth.” Er…. what?
Neither of these things is like the other, and because the Soviets resented losing their empire and wanted the US to fall apart, it doesn’t oblige us to do so to make them happy in their revenge fantasies, okay.
Alright, Sarah, you’ll say, but just because the USSR’s bitter remnants believed it, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Do you see all our divisions and all our blah blah blah?
Yeah I see them. I also — as an outsider who became an insider — am here to tell you that all of those, save the divisions between Americans and those new imports brought over the border these last few years or those imports who are consciously staying foreign, are very small.
No, seriously.
Look: I’ve lived all over this great land. Even during my 30 years in Colorado, we made extensive trips elsewhere to visit and because we have friends/colleagues everywhere. This not counting the fact both our boys dated girls from all over. (Odds, you know?)
There are differences. Sometimes deep differences, in how you interact, where you shop, how you shop, and such. However, if you dropped me blindfolded into various cities in succession, I’d be able to tell you which ones were in America from the way we …. move, the way we look, and the way we hold ourselves.
I’ll never forget when, ten years after moving here, I visited Portugal and my mom had a melt down because having passed me on the street, she didn’t recognize me, just thought I was “some tourist.” This was capped by “You have become American.” (I’m not older son. I didn’t rub it in and say “Why, thank you, ma’am.” BUT I thought it.)
Go to the area where most of your local recent arriveds are and look at them. You’ll see the difference without much effort. I can’t fully explain it, but to me the rest of the world holds itself like a dog expecting the foot to come out and kick them at any minute. We don’t. In fact, that look in an American is a sign of profound trauma.
More importantly, when we had to suddenly function for a month in another state without help, while the national brands and chains helped, mostly we’d have found our way easily enough, just because it’s America. There are commonalities.
Having real-estate shopped across states just recently, you can suss out a neighborhood, evaluate your neighbors, and choose an area which you might or might not love, but you can live in easily enough in a week or so.
What I’m trying to say is despite all the regional differences, there is an overculture which is “American” and one that makes it easier for an American to fit in another area of America. Now, part of that overculture is of course believing them guys ain’t like us y’all. But that’s something completely different.
The only places with truly different and often hostile cultures are fractured, purposely held apart places, including ghettos/inner cities and college campuses.
Which brings us to the whole “We just found out there are enemies in our midst!’ Did you? Really? JUST found out? Well, you must have been covering your ears and shutting your eyes pretty tight.
Colleges have been embeds of anti-Americanism since I’ve come here. The joke about the student who comes home and lectures the parents on not celebrating thanksgiving has been a joke forever. (And not funny, because true.) The other innovations? One day in 2000 I was working in my yard and by a trick of acoustics heard my neighbor across the street discuss his son, who had brought a boy as his SO to Thanksgiving last year, and this year was bringing a girl, and they didn’t even care what the girl was, wasn’t it great? The vice-versa is not that rare, either. Any direction. Now of course, it would be his son thinks he’s a girl.
In fact, the only thing that has happened since I have been here is that the anti-Americanism has moved explicitly down to Kindergarten and up. (Implicitly it was already in my 12th grade history book in 1981 when I was an exchange student. It already was clear enough to make me fume.) It has done so because they are “educated” and think everyone MUST agree with them. But in doing so, it has become visible for everyone, and the counter-attack is everywhere and truly ferocious, because people might tolerate their young adult children becoming idiots, but you don’t mess with their babies.
On that, btw, note that my generation already was heavily indoctrinated anti-American. I remember that none of my classmates would admit to America’s good qualities. It was so…. gauche. And yet, unless I mistake it, my generation formed the core of the Tea Parties. And we’re still here. Because those of us — even those of us with graduate degrees. Even those of us with graduate degrees from Europe! — who grew up, married and have kids know what reality is. Those with experience abroad, know how rare it is what we have here. And we want to keep it.
One additional point, here: the culture used to be WAY more diverse. WAY more. Pre-expressways and TV, them guys over there not only talked funny, but they had other strange habits. I know because I met with remnants of that in my inlaws’ generation. (In fact, I loved my FIL’s Connecticut accent (I’m an accent-loving person, except for my own) and was shocked and startled to hear it come out of my husband’s mouth when awakened in the middle of the night by a would-be-intruder this summer. Suddenly my relatively accentless husband was gone, and a Connecticut patrician was there. And he wasn’t amused.)
In fact, it might have been impossible for a continent-sized nation to have a common culture and way of being in the world absent fast-travel and fast means of communication. And it might be impossible for us not to with that.
Going further back in history, and when the fe(de)ral government was a less powerful polity and states could get their freak on with nobody bothering them, I remember reading a biography of someone shortly after the revolution (Well, you see, there’s this mystery series with a ghost that I want to write. Might involve going to Connecticut for a six month stay, heaven help me. We’ll see if the story shuts up) where this person was in Maryland, escaping the crazy puritans of New England, and then had to get away from there, because Maryland was full of crazy Catholic laws, etc.
We were more desunited in the past. In culture. And it was by region. We were still the United States, where it counted.
“But Sarah, it’s all gone. It’s all vanished. We’re not respecting the laws of the Republic, or the Constitution!”
Ah yup. And I’d agree with you there. However, just because we’re behaving very badly it doesn’t mean the laws are gone. Just that we’re ignoring them. And you know, to an extent we’ve been violating the Constitution, more or less, since we adopted it. Like our flag, it is still there. And we often come back to it. Sideways. Upside down. Kicking and screaming, but we do.
Look, there were worse — far — violations under Woodrow Wilson, FDR and frankly a lot of others in the 20th century. It’s just you didn’t hear about them, because the press didn’t tell you. So you had this idea that everything was hunky dory.
Part of the impression that everything is falling apart and the center cannot hold is that Mass Media can no longer hold the uber-narrative, and those of us who see cracks in it and would rather believe our lying eyes can find each other and create our own spaces. That doesn’t mean things on the ground are worse. Only that it looks that way, because you hear more voices, not one over-arching, all-singing-together-narrative.
Now, are there many among us who are frankly repulsive in their disdain for the land and the law that gave them everything? A-yup. And the pro-Hamas demonstrations are only a small show of that.
But here’s the thing, there always were. And if you say that it’s particularly bad now, I’m going to laugh in “I remember the seventies.”
And if you are going to scream in unassimilated immigrants, I’m going to say “Drives me bonkers too, and I think we need closed borders and a decade or so of mass deportations and of very limited legal immigration while we sort ourselves out.” And? Every period of mass migration did this. Mass migrations are a very bad thing. Combined with a welfare state and a victimhood ethos, they’re horrendous.
Doesn’t mean they’re lethal. Though remedy best come fast-ish within the next decade. As frankly, I suspect it will.
But you have to remember that’s not “Americans.” Americans are those who were born and raised here, or those who bothered to do the work to be more American than not. Those who haven’t are “people living here.” Not “Americans.”
And btw, my kids had a lot of friends who had one foreign-born parent. The kids were Americans. Often annoyingly so. (Note one foreign parent, not both, and none of them lived in an embedded foreign enclave.) In fact, those with one-foreign-born parent were more likely to believe in America as a credal nation.
Speaking of: America is a credal nation. Yes, it’s a land mass (and no, we’re not giving an inch of it to the idiot commies. For one, it would be like what Israel did when it pulled out of Gaza. We don’t need an enemy that close) and yes, it’s an history, a culture, and a way of living. Also a certain genetic heritage, and trust me, it’s still present in America. My kids might be second generation Americans (first born) on my side, but on the other side they’ve been here since before America was independent (and ancestors fought in the revolutionary side), are related to several presidents, and have a considerable contingent that greeted the pilgrims from the shore, okay? My ah…. new and impure blood (snort giggle. I’m just a mutt, y’all) didn’t erase that history. And both of my boys are very proud of it. It’s just good every once in a while to import a bit of DNA, less everyone have twenty toes and play banjo really well.
BUT those saying The Republic is Dead are mostly referring to it in the credal sense.
Nations don’t die because they go through a period of lawlessness. Almost every older (almost all of them) nation has gone through this. They go through periods of lawlessness, or even being outright occupied, and then come back.
But for a credal nation held together by “this we hold to be true” it can feel like it’s all gone.
Go read your Bible, kindly. No, I mean it, even if you are not a believer. Find an old testament. Steal it from a hotel room, if you must, and read the story of Israel.
Credal nations don’t go away. They just don’t. Look at all the foes of the Israelites. The Persian empire is gone, whatever the Iranians think. So are the others, including the mighty Romans. That little credal nation of Israel, though? Well, it went a long time without land, but it is still a people and a creed. And it will be.
I suspect should we be so unfortunate as to lose our land and our common links to each other, and our living together, Americans will yet persist. We might become even more genetically dilute (for us it will take effort) but 100 yeas from now or 500 there will be people claiming to be Americans (Or as some very strange sf writer made it, turning an insult on the boards into a point of pride, as we do, Usaians) even if they really can’t prove an ancestor ever set foot on the continent. And even if some of them are blue skinned and have tentacles.
And as long as the creed is there, we will come back, as an idea at some point.
Not that our falling apart is anywhere near. No, stop that. We are not Rome. The idea that we were is another Soviet idiocy. We used some of the forms, but dear Lord, not the …. history, the feel, the genetics. And if we were, that horrible Rome of the decadence continued for a thousand years or so.
If I had to guess we probably have that long. Maybe more.
Oh, granted, we’ll go through periods much, much worse than this. And periods much better. Nations are things of humans, and that means they’re not…. pure ideas, that live in the purity of being themselves. Every nation goes through very bad times. And comes back. Often seeming decadence, or occupation, or attack, teaches the nation what it SHOULD be.
This doesn’t excuse you from fighting for America to be what it should be.
“But Sarah, wouldn’t it be better to divide?”
HOW? Do you see any “cut on the dotted line” lines on the map? Because I don’t.
And the American feeling and beliefs aren’t quietly divided into states or even regions. The first civil war happened the way it did because the South had common economic and cultural interests the North was unwilling to tolerate. (I’m not going to dip my toe anymore into that. And remember, it’s a forbidden topic for good and sufficient reason. BUT:) There was a clear geographic demarcation, even if the borders were fuzzy.
Now? Oh, for the love of Bob. Yes, there are baked in blue states. But if you think they’re that way because it’s what the population wants, let’s talk. I saw my state flipped from under me by massive fraud securing a tiny margin then going vote-by-mail.
Almost every state that’s baked in blue has some procedural trick (CA) or vote-by-mail holding it that way. What is the will of the people? What do the people believe? I don’t know. And neither do you. If you’re trusting the press, you need help of the mental kind.
I have had three very different people, in/from very different circles tell me they think NYC went Trump in 2020 and that’s why the occupiers are determined to destroy and punish it. Is it true? I don’t know. I found their reasons compelling. So. Why are all big cities hard left? Well, darlings, because vote fraud is hellofeasy in a big city. All you need is well organized vote fraud groups that control the polls. And one side that refuses to fight it. (Trust me. 2012 drove me nuts. And Colorado Springs was not that large.)
Now there is another thing, which is that in the big cities a lot of people work for colleges and big corporations. Judging by the number of you flying under false names and telling me for the love of heaven not to out you, there is a substantial legion that confesses progressivism from the lips out, while hating it in their breast. And the more they’re forced to confess it the more they hate it. But they can speak progressivism very very well (I’ve seen some of you under your real names, yes) and pass. The problem being that in those areas people overestimate the number of the true lefty believers and anti-Americans around them, because they are not allowed to tell the truth or appear as they are in public. It’s poison.
I have a strong feeling I can’t substantiate but is based on the amount of fraud needed and obvious even in supposed bastions of the left, that this is not a 50/50 country. It is at the very worst a 75/25 country, with the 25 being the “progressives.” But even then, I expect about half of that are true believers, and the rest are sleep walkers, who are convinced of the media narrative and that they have to vote for the left because the right are “racissss sexisss homophobes, and WORSE uneducated hicks.”
A lot of that narrative broke badly with the events in Israel and the displays in this country. I’ve been more sleep walkers awake than at any time since 9/11.
And the rest of the left are either very young and indoctrinated, or well…. the same old Soviet-lovers who never woke up and never will. But by themselves they’re not a reason to break up this great country.
Even if we could break up. Even if there were clear regions, instead of each of us knowing friends or relatives who are enmeshed in the left’s narrative, and who live next door, it would be inadvisable. The left can’t build. Only envy. And that means if we separate, we will prosper and they will hate us.
I refer you to October 7 in Israel as what would happen with neighbors whose whole purpose is hating us and taking us down.
So let’s eschew and bury that foolishness once and for all. This is our land. The Republic isn’t dead or close to it, though it’s occupied by an implacable enemy. Which we should each fight, overtly and covertly in every inventive and relentless way possible.
Because after this, comes a revival. They can’t win. And in many ways we already have. But because the defeat took a hundred years, the revival will be slow.
I might not see it, but others will. (Yeah, probably not others of my blood. And? They will be Americans. Even if they’re polka dotted with tentacles.)
It seems very peculiar to me, at less than a month before the election, that one of the candidates for the thirty-three regular senate elections has apparently vanished. Gone. Silent. In this day of all-online-all-the-time!
Officially Mr. Talarico has the flu. Odd that he’s not livestreaming something from his bed, don’t you think?
Speculation of course is rampant, ranging from hospitalized to . . . pretty much anything you can imagine. https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2108553958696399249 is a place you can start at, but PJMedia and NotTheBee are covering it if you like them. Probably our Texas Hun Contingent has more local input on the matter as well.
Given the last couple days of posts here (less last night’s chapters), though, I think we might as well speculate wildly.
Was the poor Senate candidate hauled off by aliens to install a new and improved Puppet Master? Or to have one safely removed? He’s from a very weird splinter sect off of Christianity, so weird I hesitate to call it Christian at all, but perhaps he got raptured? (IDK if they even believe in rapture.) Kidnapped by time travelers? If so, because he himself was a time traveler trying to mess up the timeline, or was he native to our time and they’re trying to prevent what he would have done? Bricked up in a cellar he was tricked into by asking him to get the Amontillado? Can we get Miss Drew or the Hardy Brothers on the case to solve this?
In any case, may God have mercy on him, whatever is wrong with him.
I don’t believe in aliens but I profoundly dislike Woo Woo. And Aliens at least aren’t woo woo. Or they weren’t. It could be argued that when everyone on the left started running around talking about UFOs being some kind of psychic phenomenon, (circa early seventies) it was a sign of true cultural rot or perhaps a sign that my (tongue in cheek, I think. I THINK) theory below is true, of course.
I don’t know how many of you remember this, but UFOs and aliens didn’t use to be in the same category of belief as elves, fairies, ghosts, weird spirit messages and the thing called “Earth changes” that has sneaked back in under the scientifist guise of “Global Warming” on the left.
UFOs were a sign of something physical out there. Of possibly more scientifically advanced but not supernatural aliens. Maybe very bad aliens. (Looks at Puppet Masters.)
And then it changed and became part of the new age circus. Which is when I gave up on it, though I always had trouble believing in aliens, which is why they don’t exist in my fiction, even when they seem to. (More on that later.)
Yesterday in a group, a friend said what is obvious about the left is that they seriously oppose human reproduction and longevity. Ultimately human life, I guess.
Here’s the list as to why:
NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:
1) Pushing to maximize abortion
2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality
3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting” b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies– allowing limitation of IVF, and also e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)
4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de-facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink
5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY
6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids
7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider
8)Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID
9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)
And then this:
Whether they intend this to be a coordinated effort or passively want us gone, at some point you realize
The Democratic party? They’re the aliens in Independence Day.
Because I don’t like Woo Woo, I jumped off from this to aliens:
If the hypothesis that appeared in a lot of pulp age SF that humans were “the old ones” of the Galaxy (or the universe) who lost a war, and whose remnants were sent to Earth in exile, and whose “leaders” are being manipulated by “aliens” to keep them from achieving high tech, specifically space travel again, what would be different?
Space travel?
Well….
1- Shortly after the moon landing, there was a concerted effort by the left to confuse, thwart and obfuscate all attempts at space travel.
2- the talk of UFOs and possible space travel was corrupted by an entire slew of “sightings” and ideas that made UFOs and aliens into a supernatural, woo woo phenomenology fit only for New Age circles.
3- NASA might have gone the way of all government agencies, so natural, but–
4- Every democrat president is intent on crippling our ability to travel in space further, and discredit the very idea we SHOULD aim for it or attempt it.
5- Even space opera with or without minimally believable science, which — if nothing else — kept the idea we can eventually travel to and colonize the stars was shut down hard, in favor of fantasy and HARD science fiction. (I have nothing, absolutely nothing about hard science fiction, but with very few exceptions, it is only exciting to people who know enough science to understand what’s being done. It’s not how you popularize the idea of space colonization.) And the old masters who were pro-space were discredited and attacked. Even Baen who kept space travel fic alive, kind of, ended up in the narrow mil-sf sub-field most of the time. The rest became one of those self-fulfilling prophecies of trad pub: Space opera doesn’t sell, so we won’t publish any, and what we publish we won’t promote, so it doesn’t sell, so space opera doesn’t sell, so we– last verse, same as the first. Note trad pub did this even though space opera movies continued to do exceedingly well, even arrantly stupid ones.
6- our capacity to generate enough energy to allow for even thinking of space travel is under systematic attack, which
a) feeds into depopulation, or will this winter, but also
b) inexplicably nuclear is included in this and attacked twice as hard, which of course is at war with us going to space, interstellar travel and eventually FTL (yes, it’s “impossible.” Our species has an history of doing the impossible on the regular. It’s just incremental steps, which are being thwarted by cutting us off at the ankles.)
That second list is also not exhaustive and I’m sure other people can contribute more instances of “this just doesn’t make sense, unless….”
Now I said I don’t believe in aliens and I don’t. I mean, base level fundamental, either aliens are utterly incomprehensible to us, or we wouldn’t realize they’re sentient. I THINK. But at the same time, if our species is much, much older, the aliens could be us.
Maybe there’s a universe of space commies, and we’re the space Americans who’ve lost the battle but not the (final war.)
Look, no, I don’t believe in any of this. This is the process I go through to create universes. I go through the evidence, see if it’s coherent, etc.
But if this were true what would be different?
And mostly I say “aliens” because I don’t like woo woo.
On the other hand, if it’s aliens I can’t do anything about it. If however it’s activity by a well-dressed gentleman of wealth and taste whose expensive perfume can never fully disguise an underlying whiff of brimstone.
…. Well, I can pray.
Even if it’s the equivalent of looking for the car keys under the street light and doesn’t make much sense.
Anyway — I don’t believe in any of this. I think. But it was worth laying out to think on.
And of course the realization that the fine arts programs by and large do not graduate into paying fields hit the internet like a freight train.
First of all, we’ve got to exclude the B.Ed. degrees in the arts. Lots of arts majors are smart enough and capable of putting up with public schools enough to get the B.Ed. Those programs will be unaffected: they make as much as any other ed degree holder. The jobs are scrambly and often require midday commutes from one school to the next to the next, but they are education jobs. They pay well, like every other public education job, with good benefits.
No, the degrees affected will be the degrees like mine, a Bachelor of Arts in Music. This degree qualifies me to do exactly one thing, which is, go apply for a Master of Arts program. Had I done so, that would have qualified me to apply for a Doctoral program, the graduates of which are then eligible to compete for the very few professor of music jobs.
As it happens, I have a now-local friend who is, oh, about four or five years older than me, who did exactly that. She has a pile of student loans, and is paying them back on a professor salary, which is not nearly as well compensated as it used to be. Still not bad, but not what we’d call high paying.
I do not and am not. I was an academic full ride student, and could study anything I wanted as long as I kept my grades up. And I have spent the last decades working as a freelance musician, a little of this, a little of that, some weddings, some funerals, lots of teaching, some decidedly non-music-related gigs (points at Sarah), and that is very typical of my classmates, including those who did go on to get more degrees, including those who borrowed money. Dr. Professor Friend is, in fact, up for tenure this year, which is to say, she has just barely been a professor long enough to be eligible to apply. She will probably have her student loans paid off before she retires: she’s very frugal. Her first decade or so out of school she took whatever part time gigs she could get. It is a bad field to go into.
These degrees are demanded by the institutions for a look-in at the professor jobs, and there are more of us who would like to work professionally in the field than there are jobs available. Many more.
The Arts, with this rule, will become the property of rich kids and full ride scholarship kids, and the closure or reduction of most college arts programs, which means there will be no choir or theater for students in other majors to participate in. I do not like this. I think it will be bad for Art, and make the fields even more self-referential and nonsense-prone. I think the entire point of college was to expose students to a broad variety of information, and closing the arts departments will remove a large amount of human endeavor from the curriculum. (Especially since it looks like History is also in the same position of non-paying degrees.)
But I very much more dislike seeing my friends, my colleagues, kept in poverty, scrambling to pick up odd gigs, trying to make ends meet, when they would have done better to not have that mountain of debt, and would still be working at the coffee shop, the hardware store, the grocery, and performing and teaching on the side.
I think we have need of a great deal more educational reform, and that probably eliminating all federally backed student loans would be a good start, but as a prologue, this will do. It will slow the bleeding. It will help stop the old lie that if you study what you love the money will follow. Maybe it will help us get some reform into the high schools. That’s probably too much to hope for, for something that will affect only four or five percent of college students, but it might start the process.
Take what you will from this, and use it for your arguments with well-intentioned and naive folks, who haven’t and don’t work in the Arts, or who worked in the Arts two generations ago when it was a different career. Please.
As some of you know I watch very little TV. Even very little SF TV. I’ve assumed for QUITE a while this means I’m extensively broken and not normal. I mean my father used to tell people I didn’t watch TV in the same tone that you warn someone your kid has a handicap. It’s not exactly wrong. I work around it just like I work around the driving phobia.
Mostly, if a series makes enough impact, you guys will eventually tell me all the highlights and important points with references over time. But also eventually Dan will be in a hard project — coff, the last five years — which doesn’t leave him mind space to do anything after work, but sit vegetating in front of the TV. These days, with streaming available, he usually catches up on old tv series. All of them. At once. And I sit in the next chair, usually doing blog posts or reading. So, I kind of get a bit of it and some visuals. Sometimes I get enough for the politics to p*ss me off. Other times, as with Star Gate, I get a general impression of it, but would be hard pressed to name a character, much less an episode.
Anyway, for a while there, I’ve heard a quote going around. “The avalanche has already started. It is too late for the pebbles to vote.” – Ambassador Kosh (Vorlon on Babylon 5)” Straczynski J. Michael.
Note, I only figured out it was Babylon 5 when I looked to attribute. I thought it was some commie. (Looks at Hollywood politics, snaps mouth shut.)
You see, there are two versions of history and how it happens. There is the “great man” version of history. And then there is the “popular movement” version of history. I was taught both, because the culture in Portugal is “Great Man” or if you prefer “People are born special and fated to lead and they change history.” And I was raised in the sixties and seventies, and after the revolution it was all Marx all the way down, so I was taught a lot of “The inevitable forces of history, blah.”
Of the two, I’d say the first is more correct. The second is typical Marxist autism, trying to reduce humans to widgets and history to economic pressures. Something like “Given 26 inHg of economic pressure per capita, the people all together, at once, rise and blah blah blah.”
Some of it takes in account things like propaganda which then puts the cart before the horse and assumes Nationalism and Militarism caused WWI, instead of WWI required a ramp up of nationalistic and militarist propaganda. Particular kudos to the idiots who convinced us that fashions that imitated military uniforms led to WWI. Instead of their being inspired from the Napoleonic wars and– (BTW WWI was the LEAST stylish of ALL wars. So no.)
Note I said the first is more correct, not that the first is correct. There needs to be what I’d call the “one guy who had about enough” version of history.
Note even we fall into the Great Man version when talking of the founding fathers. And indeed, they were cultured, and relatively smart and– But the thing is, for their time and place they were only slightly above average. People just thought and studied a lot more, partly because they didn’t have as many distractions, to be fair but also because life was harder, and you needed to be better to survive it.
But to an extent the American revolution happened when a few guys (and gals) had had about enough. It was never the Marxist “if only everyone.” And it was never just great man leading. Apparently 3% engaged in fighting, and they were probably supported by 15%, opposed by double that, and the rest of the people were trying to survive in the maelstrom.
Not that I’m saying we’ll get a second American revolution. That is not where likelihood lies if people don Hawaiian shirts and organize a big luau. Most revolutions consume themselves and end badly.
But there is something building, all over the world. And the quote above keeps coming through my mind.
A friend this week told me that something seems to have changed in Israel — which weirdly has more bleeding hearts than even we do, despite the proximity to danger — with 10/7 and the response to it. Something material. In the past, they would have stopped in response to the usual ginned up “international outrage” about nine months ago. But they’re not.
I told him I think it’s because 10/7 rubbed their noses in the fact that it’s fight or die. And it might be both, but at least you have a chance.
Mind you, for all that, they’re still being civilized people, who aren’t killing indiscriminately and take care not to destroy more than they must. In fact, almost unearthly careful in waging their war. (And brilliant. The page thing. Chef’s kiss.) It makes me think of the motto of the kosher hotdog brand (National Hebrew? I think?) “We answer to a higher authority.” (I prefer them, because I like hotdogs, but most give me heartburn.)
ANYWAY…. The rest of the world doesn’t answer to a higher authority. America sort of does, to the extent we’ve internalized our founding documents. I don’t know how many of us have.
But… bear with me. This is the feeling I get. You can hit me with cudgels later.
For a hundred years, and a little more, the “elites” and “the educated” have been trying to shape a future that made sense with the story in their heads. You know that future as well as I do, because it was the thing of all the early SF: centrally controlled everything by enlightened rulers, with people who are “educated” en mass to all behave like polite automatons. A world government. Humans being almost superfluous while machines do everything for them.
Yes, 1984 and Brave New World were the dark side of this, but most of the books sold it as the desirable thing, or if not desirable inevitable.
Communism — mostly the USSR — piled on top of that, because the ethos suited their politics to the ground.
But the problem is, like communism, none of it works like those fantasies. The “international elites” are not actually educated. They go to important schools that accept them because daddy has money. In fact, most of our “big schools” internationally were taken over by communists very early (There is a reason for this. Psychologically communism appeals to slightly autistic idea people.) They teach, but other than practical things, most of the teaching is not for this particular time line. Or reality. It’s stuff you learn by rote, which lets you signal you were very well educated.
The “International elites” are ultimately rich and connected elites who do not understand even slightly where food comes from, or how a huge, chaotic world keeps functioning. They think they can direct what you eat — eat the bugs! — what you drive — bicycles — and what you own — nothing — without realizing if they inflicted that on the masses their own world would break.
…. And they’ve been running with their program for about 100 years. Listening to the “experts”, reading approved books, and running in possession of bright ideas. (Which are much more dangerous than scissors, if left unchecked.)
Which means right now the world is on fire. If you think we have it bad here, you haven’t looked at the rest of the world beyond the headlines.
I fully expect our government junta to hold on by fraud, because people like them, the delusional elite, have been doing that everywhere in the world. Fraud or force, from Brazil to France to Venezuela.
The problem is that they can hold on, but they can’t do anything functional. At this point, I don’t think they’re even trying to. They know their ideas don’t work, and are breaking everything (“We can’t afford four more years of this- Tim Walz”) but they are trying to stay in power to avoid the reckoning AND to avoid being PROVEN WRONG. Because that means their entire life was in vain. People will do anything to avoid admitting that.
The other problem is that the longer they stay in power, the worse things get, and the more a lot of common guys get close to saying “Screw THAT.”
I think most of the world is really close to a final snap, like what happened in Israel. I think the US is more so, due to our scheduled supposed to be peaceful revolution this November.
The problem with being in this state is that it can last forever or seem to. Look at the last forty years and Israel. But eventually there is something that just snaps it. There always is.
Here, the way I see it, and trust me, I hope I’m wrong — not hoping for any of this — there are two potential breaks and then we tip in the pot.
One, they fraud themselves in, then feel super-confident and do what Brazil or Venezuela have been doing: start randomly rounding up people in batch lots. People who talk against them. People related to people who talk against them. Random people they don’t like, like say Jews (particularly observant Jews) or Catholics, or PTA moms, or homeschoolers, or well, yes, bloggers. But in the end, when you get to the “batch lot” stage these things are always more or less random. (Even in Nazi Germany they swept up non Jews as Jews, and some Jews managed to avoid attention, the same way that they also rounded up random Catholics, gypsies, Poles, etc. etc. etc.) And yes, I’m aware there are people under unjust arrest right now, and that they’ve been arresting pro-life people almost at random. Just not batch lot stuff yet.
It’s just I predict they’ll be even more jumpy if they fraud themselves in this time, partly because they’ll know the REAL numbers. And that’s a heck of a lot of jumpy, considering last time they had barbed wire and National Guard units. So I predict batch lot rounding up AND weaponizing the people they brought in to “demonstrate” and commit violence. Sort of a combination antifa and illegals. Because that scares them, so it will scare us.
If they do that, it will tip in the pot. Not right away, I think. It will take six months for the outrage to penetrate and pile up. And then it tips in the pot.
Or they don’t fraud themselves in, and Trump wins. And they activate their antifa brown shirts and incentivize illegals to cause mayhem. That tips in the pot overnight, because I think the result will be so much like 10/7 in a significant number of town — and I don’t mean just sanctuary cities like NYC or Denver or Seattle or …. — I mean I’m not sure MY town will be safe, because there’s been an increase in obvious third worlders homeless, hanging around.
Keep in mind this doesn’t work as they expect. The third worlders aren’t an army. They’re not even a rabble in arms. They’re a bunch of mutually warring groups. It will be rape and pillage.
And that happens almost immediately if Trump wins.
I suspect the response will be a lot of average guys just losing it, utterly, with the whole “elite” project.
After that…. After that I don’t know.
I suspect that if the US goes up like a Roman candle in that sort of thing, it will carry the world with us. Look at it this way, Israel already changed a lot of us. 10/7 marks a worldwide inflection point. The US will be more so.
If we’re lucky we’ll break the same way Israel did: remaining essentially ourselves, but relentlessly getting rid of the stupidity and evil we’ve tolerated for far too long.
Will we be that lucky? I don’t know. Hence why I don’t wish for any of it. Also, I know, even if we’re lucky, those of us who survive will be different. Call it hardened. Call it bitter. Call it broken. An entire generation will bear scars, and the marks won’t pass away for at least a hundred years.
But–
What I know is that while the quote about pebbles voting is essentially right, it’s also fundamentally wrong.
Take Covid. I drove myself nuts, because I kept trying to find a way to stop the insanity. I couldn’t, of course. Some events are too large for an individual to stop or change.
But I flatter myself I kept a significant number of you sane, and perhaps alive. Not that I was alone in this, and that’s important, too. There were a number of us doing that work. And overall, maybe society came apart less than it would have. It certainly came together again faster than the “elites” expected. And has resisted attempts at locking us down again, etc.
So, the pebbles do have some vote.
There is nothing you can do about the macro event. Oh, vote, for the love of heaven. Even though I think war will happen faster if they don’t fraud themselves in, there is a very narrow chance we’ll escape it. Can we overwhelm the fraud? Probably not. But it’s worth a try given the alternative.
But that probably won’t do enough. We’re caught in things larger than ourselves.
However, we’re not insignificant. Keep yourself sane as possible. Keep yourself healthy as possible. Prepare to look after yourself and those you can help in circumstances that you can barely imagine.
Try to make arrangements to keep in touch with those who matter to you who are further away. Have a place to run to and go to ground if your area is one that goes up in flames.
Most of all, study history. Become as informed as possible about how we got here.
And if needed, if that’s the only hope we have? Teach the children well.
For now, keep clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.
Be not afraid. These pebbles ain’t getting ground up.
A few days ago there was a kerfuffle, minor, with the general opinion among my friends being “HSLDA is going to eat them for lunch.”
Wait, let me back up a few decades.
You see, I was home schooled, back in the ages when it wasn’t legal almost everywhere, and was widely regarded as suspicious. Everyone had opinions on how uneducated home schoolers were, back then, and how stupid our parents were. (Mine had more and higher degrees than their critics.) There was a need, some attorneys who wanted to home school their own kids formed a legal defense group, and Home School Legal Defense Association was created. (https://hslda.org/) Where it was legal, no one knew what to do with us. I had two colleges I applied to send the wrong application information. (One of them got written out of my then symphony stand partner’s will over it. She’d really hoped I’d go there, and the college screwing that up? She was not happy. Lovely lady, she translated the Kol Nidrei’s words for me when I was playing that. The other college was one two of my cousins went to. They’d gone to high school at Interlochen, however, which was at least a standard option.)
By the time my kids came along, home schooling was legal everywhere, though still difficult to comply with in some places, (NY, PA, CA, looking at you particularly) and the complaint had switched from academics to socialization, usually after ten minutes of chatting with my articulate kids. We walked into driver’s licensing, said “Traditional home school” and were handed the proper forms. College admissions, “Traditional home school”, handed proper forms. There was no fuss, no drama.
By and large, it’s somewhere between a non-issue and “My grand-kids are home schooled” today. And a lot of that is due to HSLDA, a legion of motivated home schoolers and retired home schoolers who pick up the phones to talk to legislators’ offices at the first email notification (last time I called on a state bill I got a very weary staffer who said “For or against?”) and a LOT of court cases. For the low price of less than a tank of gas a year, we fund HSLDA, as a group effort. (OK, I have a 36 gallon tank, but still.) When I was a child, it was postal mail and a phone tree (talk about a coordination job!), now it’s an email list.
So we went from CPS taking kids from families to CPS rolling eyes when someone reports kids being home schooled, by concentrated effort over multiple decades. And now, when the headline says: Firefighter’s Home Schooled Diploma rejected (https://www.firehouse.com/careers-education/video/55406408/homeschooled-diploma-rejected-by-freemont-ne-fire-department) we confidently expect that should the young man desire, the Home School Legal Defense Association will sic an attorney or three on the city, and eat them for lunch. Because that’s what OUR attorneys do: they’re good at it, and honestly, they probably wrote Nebraska’s home school laws, or a good chunk of them anyway, and Nebraska home schoolers hassled and cajoled their legislature into passing those laws.
I understand from my firearms activist friends that they’ve done much the same thing, over many decades. I just appreciate living in a Constitutional Carry state, and knowing that whatever happens at minimum ten percent of the people around me are carrying at any given time.
How far we’ve come, from the days of not being sure if it was safe to play outside in my own yard for a break from school work, lest someone report us, to the days where we can confidently say “Oooh, they screwed up, they’ll be paying,” when someone discriminates against a home schooled person.
This is what winning looks like: a long, slow slog, dismantling legal restrictions put in place by our do-gooder ancestors, who were sure that if they just controlled things the right way they’d make all those shady newcomers from places like Italy and Finland behave like proper Americans. We know better now: we know we can’t let the institutions of government have that kind of power over We the People, because the people in charge use it to destroy individualism, which is the basis of America. It’s the work of lifetimes. The home school pioneers, those still alive, have spent their entire adult lives at it. Now we carry their torches forward.
I was born a poor black cat. Okay, stop laughing. It is actually true. I’m mostly black, except for spots of white, embarrassingly shaped like human body hair, which show when I lie on my back. And I was born in the crawl space of a rental house from a feral mother who was dumped as a kitten, and the neighborhood gentleman Mrs. Hoyt pleases to call The Resident Mad Feral Tom.
I wasn’t much more than ten weeks old when I had to defend mam.ma cat’s honor against a roving tom who took the opportunity of papa cat (who used to baby-sit us when mama went about her errands) being absent.
To be honest with you, I didn’t so much worry about my mother’s honor. It was that the tom made it very clear my brothers and sister and I should be done away with and possibly eaten, so mama could turn her attention to his offspring, the getting of.
Well, I was tiny, but I had needle sharp claws, so I jumped on his head and–
Mrs. Hoyt says that’s when she decided to call me Greebo. It didn’t hurt for the name that when the neighbor next door trapped me and my siblings (we could never resist tuna) she took me to be “fixed” (I wasn’t aware of being broken) to a feral-fixing service, which then cut half of one ear so people knew we were fixed. She did this despite Mrs. Hoyt offering to pay for the fixing, which to be fair, she was never forgiven for.
Another thing she was never forgiven for was locking us all in a six by nine powder room, and not letting us be adopted. To be fair, she let the Hoyts come and pet us and play with us, but she kept insisting we were feral and dangerous — she wasn’t a cat person, and to be fair, I didn’t like her — and not letting the Hoyts find us families. Then when we were a year old she turned us out just before winter. This is when Mrs. Hoyt took over looking after us, and trying to re-tame us, as we were rather traumatized at being dumped out into the freezing cold. She even bought us an insulated house to sleep in during winter, and had us chipped and vaccinated.
Despite this, my brothers chose to live with the neighbors. Okay, fine, I might have chased Maurice away. Mr. Underfoot genuinely preferred the neighbors, even though they called him Dumb and Maurice Dumber. Look, given how et up with cats the Hoyts are I judged my chances of being brought inside best if there was just one of us, okay? A cat’s got to do what a cat got to do.
At any rate, Maurice owed me, because that first winter out, a fox got him in an indelicate place — to put it bluntly, the fox took an off-center chunk off Maurice — and if I hadn’t descended upon the fox like the wrath of Greebo, Maurice would be dead.
Mrs. Hoyt is still confused at my bringing her half a fox’s tail, ripped vertically. I’d heard they were valued for stoles, but I think she threw it away, silly woman. What do you expect from writers.
I also once saved them from a fugitive. It happened like this, see, I wasn’t very fond of the outside house, so I convinced them to put a cat door on the little screen door to their mudroom.
The mudroom didn’t lock, because back then Colorado Springs’ Old North end was, in the main, very safe. Besides, all they kept there were these tall plastic shelves with gardening stuff and basketballs, and the kids scooters. That kind of thing. Oh, and two cat beds, one in the lowest shelf and one on the highest.
It so happened that every so often a fugitive escaped the maximum security facility somewhere South of the Springs, and then the police would hunt them down and have lights shining from helicopters to catch them. We all knew what those lights meant.
Of course, the problem with that mud room — the Hoyts called it an air-lock. Shakes head at the silliness of science fiction people — is that once you were in there, you had all the time in the world to break into the kitchen. I knew Mrs. Hoyt was there, cooking, because I’d greeted her at the kitchen window — purr, rub on glass, purr — before going to sleep in the top most shelf.
I don’t know why I know this man was a wrong one, except he smelled bad, of fear and bad intentions, and besides he wasn’t daddy, who was the only person who should be coming into the air lock at that time.
Well — flicks claw — I have my claws. And I remembered who I got rid of mama’s suitor. Yep, I dropped on his head.
He ran out of the airlock with me on his head, and I stayed on, yowling and scratching, and let me tell you it wasn’t easy to keep my balance, so I held on with my front claws and ripped with my back claws. When we found the police he was sobbing, asking for his mommy, and saying something about demons.
Mrs Hoyt was very proud of me and gave me tuna.
So, what does this have to do with writing tips?
Be still, there’s more to the story.
Imagine my surprise when the Hoyts moved away and left me behind. I thought it was understood I was THEIR kitten — albeit a near 20 lb muscular kitten — but apparently the strange pink monkeys thought I was the neighborhood cat.
So I sat my butt in front of the house and yowled ALL NIGHT. It worked. One of the neighbors called and told Mrs. Hoyt she had to come get me, because I wouldn’t let anyone sleep.
And that’s how I achieved my long term goal of being an indoor cat.
Now, because I know she has a lot of other cats (Yeah, not happy about that, but one is old enough he shouldn’t be with us long, the other one is really her son’s cat and just staying with us for a year, and the third is probably just an animated ball of cotton wool) she has to feed, and I don’t intend to go without my tuna, I also herd the silly woman to the chair to write at all times, so she has money to keep us. Because, and here’s the thing, found if you work at it, you will be successful.
So, my tips for writers are:
No matter who you were born, or to whom, or how unlikely your circumstances, you can do what you set out to do. It just takes effort and determination. Tell yourself right now you’re not going to give up and die when the big feral tom wants you out of the way. You’ll chase him off if needed, even if you’re much smaller. And you’ll do it WELL.
Develop your innate abilities. Mine is chasing off large wild life and terrorizing neighborhoods. This not only saved my brother Maurice and the other cats in the neighborhood, since the fox found another place to prowl, but it made me beloved by a lot of people who only heard about me.
It also made me capable of chasing off a real, dangerous fugitive and earn the gratitude of the Hoyts.
Also, as I keep telling the writer-woman, when you become what you always wanted to be, don’t slack off. Be vigilant and always on the job, and you know, sometimes you’ll even get tuna rewards.
It’s all in working hard and never giving up. Now go write, before I figure out a way to come to your houses and chase you to your keyboards.
No, really. In spite of all the crazy wildfires, I haven’t heard any news of riots. Not like 2020. Even the cities deliberately hit by arson attacks stayed calm.
Maybe the rioters couldn’t afford gas to get to the preferred rioting locations?
Maybe the rioters were working for pay in previous years, and the funding spigot dried up with the crackdown on government spending through NGOs? (Now there’s a misnomer: if your funding comes from government grants you are NOT a non-governmental organization.)
Certainly there were attempts with the anti-ICE activities to gin up a few riots, but those fizzled pretty early on. Turned out that there was no natural rioting support for illegals. I think some of the anti-Flock efforts are also aimed at gathering angry crowds together, from the social media posts, and that doesn’t seem to be gaining any traction, either. People don’t love surveillance cameras, but they do love criminals getting arrested, so it’s a mixed bag, and no one seems to be really interested in having themselves a riot over it.
The hysterias du jour seem to be getting shorter and shorter, and the people flipping out over renaming one of the great lakes seem to have gone on to other topics now.
There’s some interesting stuff over on the White House website about hunting and fishing, and I urge our sportsmen to go read those. I think it might get considerably easier to get access to federal lands for hunting. The fishing one is for saltwater fishing, and I’m a creek fisher by . . . sheer laziness I suppose, it’s my backyard, after all. Everyone in the Chesapeake Bay watershed should look over that EO and see if they need to beat on their local municipalities for charging no longer justifiable fees.
I haven’t heard anything in the media about the tit for tat with Canada over trade, particularly federal procurement. That’s very interesting, especially here in the run-up to Alberta’s secession vote. Has anyone seen that anywhere? How about those of you on the other side of the boarder, is that hitting your news at all?
Gas prices seem to be what’s left for midterm drama, unless they can get some excitement going for other stuff between now and then, and I don’t know about you all, but we haven’t-quite-reached Obama level highs here yet. It’s pretty hard to get a bunch of excitement up about that for anyone who was an adult back then. (That’s before inflation adjustment, by the way, in my mind, but after per the official records. I distinctly remember prices higher than what’s reported, but I didn’t take pictures of the pumps back then.)
I think I’m more concerned about bad candidates depressing the turnout than anything else other than fraud at this point. Some of us have some real stinkers on the ballot. However, a lot of us have rather nasty propositions on the ballot, so maybe that will help get people out. Do encourage your friends to exercise their franchise, as much as is reasonably in your power to do so.
(A Blast from the Past: https://accordingtohoyt.com/2016/09/26/a-vast-wasteland-of-prosperity/ Additional Note from Holly the Assistant: Sarah wants me to let you know that Monday afternoon Dan had a medical false alarm, with the result that their local hospital is going to make a good deal of money off their insurance, and Sarah and Dan are recovering from the effects of spending most of two days and a night in a hospital, a battery of tests, and him being discharged with “Everything looks great, we have no clue, follow up with your PCP,” which all of us who have done that routine knows means they’re dead tired because no one lets you sleep in a hospital.)
Yesterday my husband threatened to drown himself in the shower, if I didn’t stop ranting about the stupid things people believe about history. It’s not that he disagreed, mind you, but that he thought it was too much to endure a graduate-level lecture with side-excursions into various examples he’d never heard about before even getting his pants on in the morning.
I sympathize. It’s been a long time since I became aware that when that darn, mobile soap box finds me and gets under my feet, I get really really fast-talking and sometimes drop details.
Weirdly, this fit wasn’t prompted by the commenter who came back to an old post yesterday to lecture us about how stupid it is to expect dem poo’ peoplez to be able to retool and find new jobs, once technology dispossesses them of the old ones. Weirdly, it started because he was telling me about a TV show and something said in the TV show. (Beginning of digression. I watch second hand TV. Whenever you guys see a reference or a quote to popular culture, I acquired it by listening to Dan talk about it. At least most of the time. No, I don’t know why I don’t watch TV. What’s worse, I find most of the people who say “Oh, I don’t watch TV” are the sort of prigs who are bragging of their moral superiority. I’m not morally superior, and my inability to sit still in front of a television, unless I am ill or engaged in some complex project that involves most of my head and hands, is almost as my dad thought a “handicap”. It isolates me from the culture. But it is also true. I think it’s because I never “got used” to watching TV, like some people don’t get used to reading for pleasure. Most of the time I was growing up, Portugal had two channels, and one only operated on the weekends and evenings. End of digression.) Dan, as he puts it, watches TV so I don’t have to.
Anyway, he was telling me about how terrible conditions were after WWI, and I started pointing out they weren’t. Not really. Sure, some people (a lot of domestic servants) were displaced. Sure, immediately after, a lot of men came back and found their jobs were gone. Veterans went around the country side, selling booklets and stuff. You see this in Agatha Christie.
Unspoken is the fact that a lot of these Veterans were actually not quite right in the head, not that you can blame them after the trench war. BUT even in Britain, which did itself no favors by prolonging the same kind of rationing, etc, it had had during the war, the economy recovered.
Again, if you read Christie, who was unaware of writing history, since she wrote these books contemporary to the events, you see a lot of new houses being built, of factories being started. Sure, the old families and the old houses never quite recovered. But that wasn’t because of the economy. It was because of punitive taxation. If you had a death in the family, the estate would be lost.
“But Sarah,” you’ll say. “That’s why the economy recovered and they were able to live better.”
Really? You’re going to go with that?
I know that was the theory back then, and we really can’t hold it against them, I think, but no, the state doesn’t “invest” in the economy. Or “ease transition.”
Mostly what the state does is create more and more bureaucracy. Of course to the extent that that pays a salary to some people it does SOMETHING (I found out, and was shocked at the racism of it, that this is part of the reason democrats support the endless growth of the state. They think there are a number of people — specifically black people — who cannot adapt to new tech, and therefore must be employed by the state, ad infinitum, in a sort of work fare program.) I suspect though, having seen the make-work and endless nonsense of bureaucracy in three countries, what it does do is retard the growth of the economy by removing capital from useful purposes. Oh, and retarding the prosperity of the employees, not to mention their mental health, by keeping them chained to ultimately meaningless work they know it’s meaningless. A lot of those people are in the position of soviet citizens. They pretend to work and we pretend to pay them.
Without the galumphing bureaucracy, these people would have shifted and adapted.
How do I know that? Because they’re human and I’m human. Yeah, okay, there are differences in IQ range, but you know what they are not that pronounced amid the whole species. Oh, sure, our dumber friends annoy us, but they’re still smarter than any other thing this planet has ever seen.
And our species thrives on change and strife. Our species are cunning apes, who keep finding new ways of doing things. Which drive progress, which shatters the status quo, which in turn causes people who were forced to change to look for more cunning ways of doing things, which…
Yeah, I saw the arguments of our visiting Luddite. I have also read people who say we were much better before the invention of agriculture. But what I know is that before the invention of agriculture we lived as individuals maybe 30 years, and as a species occupied certain zones of the globe, and lived in family groups of maybe 15. There was a total number of us of maybe a million. Maybe. Now we cover the face of the earth and as individuals we’re healthier and more longer lived than we’ve ever been.
And while I sympathize with my fellow libertarians who think agriculture brought in a tiered society, I’d like to say poppycock. With raspberries on top. It’s not that you don’t get history (archeology is uncertain, and confused at that level. Agriculture brought greater prosperity, and that made some tombs much less equal than others. Also, the tombs we tend to find form the nomadic period are all chieftains or their equivalent) what you don’t get is human nature. You’re engaging in the same form of fallacy the leftists engage in “Humans were perfect, and then an event–” Bullshit. I’m human, they were human. I know exactly their degree of perfection. And as for thinking some kind of egalitarianism prevailed pre agriculture, those of you who think family-bands are egalitarian have never lived in a family with a tyrannical matriarch (or patriarch.) It can be (not my family, we were never that organized) like a miniature totalitarian regime but even closer and more in your face.
Yeah, yeah, paleolithic diet and people were so much healthier and stuffs. (Rolls eyes.) While some of our metabolisms don’t seem to have caught up with agriculture (almost everyone I know who has issues with carbs has a relatively near ancestor from a nomad/hunting culture. Say no more than six generations off.) and while I myself eat very low carb for health reasons, the whole idea that people became LESS healthy with agriculture is a little mad.
Sure, and if you looked at graves from the village, from the time mom was a kid and my time, you’d find modern medicine, vaccinations and antibiotics had wreaked devastation on a healthy population. This is because people died younger/less battered in her time. Also infants tend to sort of vanish into the soil, so you wouldn’t get the great culling that happened before 3 years of age. Only the strong survived. In my generation, OTOH almost everyone survived, including the halting, the lame and those with chronic conditions.
Yeah, okay, so no progress comes without a cost. Sure, some things will get worse, if only for a little while. Yes, I read Christie (as I said. One of the amazing things about mysteries, because grounded in the quotidian, is that they are a good record of how life really was, not how historians interpret it) and I read a lot about “pre war” (first) quality. And it’s true there was a quality never again encountered except now, at high end craftsman created threads and clothes and furniture.
But the industry of the time would never have supplied the masses of humanity that progress allowed to live and thrive.
So, technological progress causes some losses, sometimes for a while.
What it causes, mostly, is disruption. And the older you get the more you feel all disruption is for the worst, and the world is coming apart. And if the progress happens too fast (say the first 50 years) people have trouble adjusting their MENTAL PICTURE of the world and some depart reality altogether and when this happens, (the last time I can think of is the industrial revolution, which more or less opened with the blood of the French revolution and closed with WWI. If it has closed) it ends in blood.
Yeah, it’s scary out there, and things are shaking loose. But a lot of the things that are shaking loose are undoing the mass-industrial-entertainment-news complex, and the idea that one size fits all. Some of what is shaking lose is the inability for any of us to reach a mass audience without intermediary “gate keepers” who have long been taken over by the long march of Marxists (speaking of people who have left reality far behind.)
Technological progress — or even change — hurts. But so does iodine. It still allows us to live better and longer than our ancestors.
And the one thing you can count on is that we, cunning apes that we are, will continue engaging in it, and adapting to it, and fighting over it.
Those people who are all concerned about you losing your way in this heartless society? Those who try to cushion you and put you in a safe space?
They’re not your friends. They’re afraid of what you do if you and your creativity were fully unleashed. They have achieved a certain domination over their society but are afraid if anything more happens they’ll lose it.
It’s not you, but them, they seek to help.
Ignore them and build. Build under, build over, build around. Anticipate technology. Build technology. And ignore them. It’s the only way to deal with them.
