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.
Yes, we realize getting moderated is a pain. Yes, it is automagic thanks to WordPress. Yes, we can blacklist certain words, IP addresses, etc (you might recollect we had to block a whole chunk of a certain foreign country some years back?). NO, we canNOT whitelist you. Not by IP, not by handle. It is NOT a feature WordPress offers. Believe you me, if we could, we would, because for whatever reason there are half a dozen known regulars who get spam trapped regularly. Compared to the actual thousands of spammers and trolls that WordPress traps each day, it’s not bad.
Neither of us, as much as we love you, can spend all day at the computer letting comments through. We try to make sure one of us checks at least twice a day to let your brilliance through. And you really don’t want Sarah sitting here all day, because then you don’t get stories. Me, you don’t pay enough for that job: I’m one of those multiple-small-business-women, and you’d need to replace the rest of my income. But you can submit bids, if you really want to.
(You may have noticed that Sarah and I swapped last Friday for this Tuesday. This was intentional, be not alarmed.)
The nature of being a musician is that I know a lot of teachers. My students play in school groups, my performing peers are often school teachers, their friends are teachers . . . a good amount of my local social circle is spread from Kindergarten teacher to tenured professor. And my parents were professors, so the overall multi-generational social circle . . . anyway, teachers everywhere.
And the thing is, they all mean well. They have good intentions. They want what’s best for their students. (I know there are ill-intentioned teachers, because humans, but I don’t know them personally. Well, except for two who . . . but that’s a different story for another time, and I’m absolutely sure those predators thought they were in the right all the way to prison.)
Which is the problem. Wanting what is best and actually knowing what is best are two very different things, and having the right to decide for another person is an entirely separate matter altogether.
Our educational system, by its nature, is central planning oriented. One teacher plans the classes for her many students, one principal plans the policy for her teachers, one dean directs her college. So conformity is a valued trait, by the nature of the system. To get employed and stay employed the teachers jump through hoops. (And tenured professors more than others, because PhDs are a dime a dozen and if you don’t conform you don’t get tenure, and you probably won’t land another position, at least not easily. It quickly becomes habitual, and habits stick.) If the person at the top of the hierarchy has decided that recess is good, teachers conform to that. If she’s decided that peanut butter is bad, teachers conform to that.
People who mean well who are selected for conformity. (And of course have a preference for students who match their own characteristics, and encourage students’ characters in that direction.)
That’s the educational establishment in this country.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: if the thing being conformed to is good, then it’s a very good thing indeed. But if the thing being conformed to is bad, then it quickly becomes very bad. Take Zero Tolerance, for an example. Zero Tolerance of bullying is a very good idea on the surface. No one wants bullies tolerated. They should be disciplined until they reform. In practice, though, it’s the victims who get disciplined when they finally retaliate. Why? The simplest explanation is that no one actually notices until the victim reacts. Often, though, there’s good evidence that the teachers did know, and ignored the bullying because the bully was of a group deemed to need extra help and support. Giving extra help and support to kids who need it is itself a good thing. Tolerating bad behavior because the kids need extra help and support is the opposite of good, but if we allow the common prior that people behave badly because of bad circumstances, it follows that the kids will just be good if helped and supported enough, so the victim who retaliates is actually the bad kid because he is in good circumstances and yet acted badly in retaliation. (Rationalizing FTW? Humans.)
And there we see the slow application of pavement of good intentions leading right to hell.
There’s yet another case of a teacher secretly transitioning a kid in the news. I guarantee you that teacher believes that she is doing this thing in the kid’s best interest. The state agrees. The parents don’t. It’s before a judge.
How do we decide what is best? When do we have the right to decide what is best for someone else?
The traditional answer goes something along the lines of conforming to the general society in ways that lead to successful survival is what is best, and that the head of the family/tribe/clan has the right to decide for the people within the group.
The religious answer is something like obey God, even if it leads to failure of personal survival, is what is best, and the head of the family/tribe/clan decides for the group, but the individual within the group is right to rebel if the order is against God’s law.
The modern American answer is actually pretty unclear about what is best, but pretty solid on as you choose for yourself, provided you are in fact an adult.
The whole debate right now is focused on who decides for non-adults, and exactly what is a non-adult. Is a sixteen year old a non-adult unless she wants an abortion? Is a twenty-five year old a non-adult if he’s on his parents’ health insurance? What constitutes mistreatment of a non-adult that terminates parental authority over the non-adult and moves her under government guardianship? Is the government automatically guardian over all non-adults within it’s jurisdiction? Do the parents have to pay if they have no authority over the non-adult? Is everyone actually under government guardianship and has freedom to act only with governmental permission?
This is on the ballot in a number of states this November, in various forms. When you read the propositions-and look up and read the actual text, not just the ballot summary, don’t just think about that particular issue, think about the broader principals of who decides what is best for another person and in what situations.
Among my personal friends are a family with a child with a rare genetic mutation incompatible with life, long-term. They are part of a foundation of families supporting the researchers working towards cures for this class of mutations. Which is to say, one-off genetic engineering on a living person, which cannot be tested for safety with double blind studies . . . who decides on taking the risk of trying the genetic engineering on the child, if the researchers get to the point they think they may succeed?
And then for adults, we’ve recently seen a couple whistle blowers over organ donations intended to be taken from living, responsive, adult humans, who would have been killed by the donation. Who decides what is best?
When your relative is too old to decide for himself anymore, who decides for him? Who decides he is too old? What’s in his best interests?
The perfect person who perfectly knows what is best for everyone else doesn’t exist, and would be overwhelmed with sorting out the entire world population if she did, anyway. Given that, letting the individual figure out what he thinks is best for himself, and letting the closest kin of those who cannot decide for themselves, however we decide who cannot decide for themselves, determine what is best for them, is the route to the best results for the majority, even though there will always be those individuals who make bad choices for themselves and for those they have control over among us.
Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness, as someone much wiser than I once put it.
I’ve been reading about Jack the Ripper again. Yes, there was a reason for it, at least at the beginning, until I realized my research was a bit stupid, and what I knew was already enough, unless I can find an interesting way to incorporate all the theories into the story, and that’s unlikely. (Rhodes to Hell. Which will get written one of these weekends.)
Anyway, the current book had an interesting theory I’d not seen before, so I started reading it, because given how our secret services and how corrupt they are I could well believe the British secret service might well have been behind the Whitechapel murders.
Except… two thirds in, before he gets to why the secret service would even do this, he gives us a panorama of the world at the time, relying exclusively on socialist sources.
Look, I’m not going to say there weren’t terrible things happening in Victorian England. For one, yes, they were much poorer than us, which means their poor were far poorer than anyone today. But most of them were recognized as terrible and dealt with by non socialists. And the socialist press was usually at good twenty years behind. Amid the terrible things adduced to the “capitalism” of Great Britain was the story of a single mother abusing her little boy. The only way this makes sense as being the fault of the system is if one swallows the Marxist bullshit that capitalism is the cause of insanity, and that only socialism can bring about its banishment. Which is, of course, poppycock. Also the reason the Soviet Union treated opponents as being mentally ill.
I’ll grant you that the British empire was not merciful. Though I’ll note it left places in much better shape than the soviet empire did. I’ll also mention that colonialism is just what we call “Mankind’s drive to survive” often expressed at the tribal level. And that you can’t have one without the other, as we’re learning daily.
Anyway, this made me think of how socialism was brought in int he name of “compassion.” In the same way our socialists talk of the difference between rich and poor as calling for some kind of redistribution and vengeance, the author of this book practically foams at the mouth that there were rich people, while the inhabitants of the East End were so poor. And then foams at the mouth some more at the idea that the poverty of the East End was largely self inflicted.
And yet– And yet, even though I note he white washed the biographies of the murdered women a lot, even he records the fact that they were all — everyone of them — addicted to the bottle, and often also to sex with strangers (not just for money.) He foams at the mouth about their not having “the price of a bed” but in at least two cases records that they had it and drank it before night time. In fact, one of them is dying of alcoholism as she’s killed.
All of this is, somehow, the fault of the rich of people, as though — somehow — they were responsible for making sure their brothers and sisters didn’t drink. Or perhaps, had life so good and perfect they had no wish to drink.
I’m not going to say that alcoholism and drug addiction isn’t a disease. I suspect it is a form of mental illness, as are a lot of other things we do to our own detriment. Mental illness, to be fair, is very poorly understood. And I suspect a lot of what we call mental illness are simply impulses that helped our ancestors survive, but which are now out of favor.
Whichever way it is, I have sympathy with those addicted to substances, or for that matter to behaviors. I have a ridiculously addictive personality — I once got addicted to fanfiction to the point of barely functioning — and just about all I can do is avoid things I could be addicted to (there’s a reason my husband won’t let me have mahjong on any computer) and channel it to productive addictions (You could say this blog.) In fact, those who know I’ve barely been on facebook or other social media, know it’s a matter of avoiding addiction.
So, of course, I have sympathy. But sympathy is not the same as wanting to somehow banish the effects of addiction and self-destruction. On the contrary, when you enable addiction and self destruction, what you get is more addiction and self-destruction.
It’s now been a hundred years, more or less, since the socialists got their way, to some extent, in every country of the world.
A social net, administered by the government, and not at the mercy of random charities, and also not requiring any change of behavior from those it “helps” was build under most Western societies, where the free market is more and more restricted every passing year.
And yet, in the year of our Lord 2022, we have “homeless” lying in their own feces in the biggest and brightest cities in the western hemisphere.
They are the same type of people who ended up in the East End. (Not all. There were married East Enders on the way up, like most of the Jewish immigrants from Russia, malgre the socialist illusions of a lot of them.) Addicted, mentally ill, dangerous to themselves and others, and prey to every vice known to men.
As the lives of the prostitutes who were killed by Jack the Ripper exemplify, even then they were not starving. And a lot of them received charity from various sources, including those who got them jobs for a while. It’s just that any additional money went to drink as it now goes to meth or pot or other drugs.
And the more money they are given the more money goes to this, in the end creating a spiraling cycle of self-destruction.
We’ve tried it. We’ve tried taking from the rich to give to the poor, deserving and undeserving alike. We’ve tried propping up the self-esteem of poor strayed lambs so that they don’t feel the need for drink or drugs.
Except that it doesn’t work that way. None of it works that way.
Under the best possible circumstances, human life is tragic. Things happen to every one of us that tear the heart out of us, and the the will to live. Those are of different magnitudes, and the less suffering one has experienced the more one feels the slightest blow. Until one gets to “micro aggressions.” Note this is not a wish for more suffering, merely an acknowledgement that reducing suffering doesn’t mean less addiction or neurotic anguish.
Escaping emotional pain is very human. Some personalities are more susceptible to it than others, but all humans try to escape pain. Which leads us to addiction and alcoholism.
And then there is the fact that normal, not-broken humans aren’t diligent and persevering. Look in the stone age, if you killed more mammoths after you had more than enough to eat, you didn’t end up better off. You just destroyed the eco system in your area.
There is in normal human beings the tendency to do enough to be “comfortable” and not one gesture more. We who work, and like working, and like saving and differing pleasure are honestly more than a bit wrong in the head. It’s just that our brokenness fits with technology and has allowed us to give the world prosperity unknown.
Which doesn’t banish poverty, because most humans are not broken in that way. They will do enough to survive, and not a bit more.
In many ways, except for dying alcoholism and similar diseases, the East End poor were very sane. They were doing the minimal required to survive, even back then. And they did largely survive.
And our homeless (trust me, I used to hear them talk when I walked in downtown Colorado Springs) consider themselves the smart ones. No saying they aren’t either. They don’t do a lick of work, and live lives that would be considered lavish anywhere in the past. And by the way, also lavish in the Socialist Republic of the USSR. The rumored ad that said “Will trade state apartment in Moscow for sleeping bag in the streets of Los Angeles” is only a joke if you look at it another way. Look at it another way, and it makes perfect sense.
Socialists use compassion to get hold of all the levers of the economy. I’m not even going to say some of them aren’t really compassionate, though that becomes hard to believe the more each “experiment” in socialism produces nothing but suffering. However, the only way to avoid people killing themselves on the streets, in their own excrement, is to have a totalitarian state in which everyone is controlled and given so much they can do and earn.
And that, obviously, due to problems of information (and human motivation) always ends in “They pretend to pay, we pretend to work.”
Someone with a state apartment in the old USSR might be (marginally. Trust me, I’ve heard stories) more comfortable than the homeless in LA. But he was also completely unable to change his situation or do anything to improve it.
Someone on a sleeping bag in the LA streets, if not addicted to anything, and if capable of working, would be out of there relatively quickly, and in a trajectory that might have limits in wealth and satisfaction, but probably not relevant ones. And what’s more, their work would ultimately create wealth for everyone else.
It is rumored that Asian illegal immigrants, as well as a certain number of African and Hispanic ones don’t linger long in the homeless camps, even if they head there first. They come possessed of behaviors, and a brokenness that makes them work and try to improve themselves.
The later-day-Socialists we live with have recognized this. They now preach that “privilege” includes any type of education and a willingness to work or interest in creating anything at all.
Which means only that they are now trying to eliminate that, in pursuit of their world where the state controls us each and every one and where even the least susceptible of us feel a need to escape by drugs and self-destruction. Because they’ve become insane enough that to them this is “compassion.” Or at least no one can feel guilty for having more.
One would think at some point they would re-examine their premises and wonder if all accumulation of wealth is theft, and if in fact wealth can be created as well as destroyed.
Of course they don’t, because they aren’t aware of the philosophy behind their feelings. They simply feel that no one should be allowed to have more than anyone else.
Which is all very well, except that if they take down the US, they take down the source of wealth that has been keeping the more socialism-infected countries from starving. Already this winter, we’re going to see the fruits of socialism worldwide. And it will get harder for the next two or three years at least.
The funny part is that the socialists can’t understand why people are revolting against their “compassionate” rule. Which figures, because they also can’t understand why some homeless guy isn’t entitled to take, say, everything I own.
Well, I came to this country with a suitcase weighing 20kg (It was the maximum.) What I have I’ve made, saved and built (And I’m by no means a paragon. Yes, I could have a lot more.) And what is mine I keep, partly out of compassion, because giving money to the self-destructive only makes them destroy more. And entices a lot more people to the same vices.
The false compassion of the socialists is based on erroneous premises, and is about to bring down the very engine of prosperity that lifted humanity out of dire need.
What can’t go on won’t go on, and the burned hand teaches.
There are a lot of burned hands in the world right now. And they’ll bring down socialism worldwide, from the “compassionate” states of Europe, to the repressive ones of Cuba and China.
It is more than time. 100 years is a long time for humanity to spend destroying everything in the name of compassion.
It is apparently that sort of day. Sarah is well, the cats are well through no fault of their own, Dan is not allowed to lift that, my husband very kindly bought me a new smartphone which has occasioned significant maledictions at programmers and is now mostly beaten into shutting up, but at least the weather is fine.
So, for your entertainment, here are a few pictures of interest. If you should feel so inclined, drop a few words about what is happening, perhaps a flash fiction or a scene, in the comments.
Fairly late last night, Sarah dropped me a note asking if I could put something, anything, up today.
This is anything.
The various cat anecdotes include “You’re playing with knives.” addressed to Circe, Muse, and Indy. To which I pointed out that they come pre-equiped with knives, so this is hardly an unusual thing. These, however, were box cutters, and we prefer the cats to stick to smaller blades. (Like the ten on their front paws.)
Then The Wolf tried to steal peaches, and I told him he was taking after his big sister, and he was very affronted.
Between packing and cats, the House of Hoyt’s internal appearance is currently best described as “Possibly en route to Oz”, and between de-cluttering, cats, and dogs, the House of Assistant’s internal appearance is “Accompanying the Hoyts to Oz”, so I shall leave you with a photo of a fine fellow who fails to feline, and who has discovered that de-cluttering is not a cat friendly activity.
In the 2000 election my brother told me he didn’t understand why I was so worked up. Both the candidates were basically technocrats and their program was very similar.
As we’ve come to find out, he was right. Wrong also, of course, but ultimately right.
Of course there were differences between Bush and Gore, beyond the question of which noses would be on the through. The left in the US seem to be the only true believers in communism left in the world. Even those at the top seem vaguely shocked when they try to implement extreme left measures and not having the success they’ve been assured should come. One must blame the universities. The rest of the world, by and large, those on top are aware that communism doesn’t work, it’s just a racket to keep the masses down. The intellectuals still believe, but that’s because by and large they need something to put their faith on, and religious faith is considered uncool.
Anyway, for one, Gore was industrial strength stupid, and wholly sold on using the climate cult to stomp on us, completely unaware of repercussions.
But other than that, and as far as we can deduce, they believed largely the same things and were largely “technocrats.” I.e. they believed in rule by the “educated class” and the “experts” who could “solve all the big problems.” And they shared — as we can tell from Bush’s post-presidency friendship with Clinton, of all people — a certainty that the little people should be ruled and not listened to.
The problem of course is that Obama was brought in by the same people. Who are the faces behind the Junta now. As well as those controlling most of the world. Badly.
Part of the hatred for Trump — particularly among the University educated class — is a sort of back-of-the brain certainty that he’s ruining the program. It’s the only reason I can find for the frothing mouth and glazed eyes, the screaming of how terrible he is and how he’s going to burn down the world, when he’s been president once, and all he did was stop the waves of illegals, stop the wars, and make us energy independent. This is terrible?
Yeah. For the international would be technocrats it is. You see, they need to dislocate people, make them rootless and disconnected. They need to herd masses of people here and there like sheep — a technique for breaking up nationalities that has worked since the ancient world (except, by and large, on the Jewish people) — broken from traditions/beliefs/ customs and social bonds. Only then will the masses be utterly dependent on their wisdom and able to be indoctrinated in the new beliefs of the….
Well, they don’t call it that, but of Homus Sovieticus in a new suit and tie, with a bit of computer savvy.
It is essential to them to make as many people as possible dependent on pay offs that are wholly divorced from labor or production. They need you to have nothing to live for. To, as they put it, own nothing and (pretend to) be happy. Only then can they direct every minute instance of your daily life.
Why? Well, they’ll give you all sorts of reasons. By and large the same reasons as communists: it’s a more efficient way to allocate resources, so we don’t all starve when the (non existent) population bomb goes off. It’s best for us to be kept in hygienic surroundings. It’s best to not let us get racist/sexist/homophobic ideas. Etc. etc. etc.
In other words, you’re a sheep they want to feed what they want, shear when they want, and eat when they want.
A curious thing happened on the way to the technocracy, though.
Humans don’t herd well. You can break humans and give them Stockholm syndrome, but you have to be offering something pretty strong for them to attach onto. Which “own nothing and be happy” ain’t.
Humans are in fact refractory apes, and have been breaking out in rebellion all over.
And the technology never worked as the technocrats thought. You see, they’re not in themselves technical. They just thought they knew how to control humans through tech.
They’ve already failed. Oh, they’re fighting a rearguard action, composed of vote fraud, violence, lawfare, spying, etc. etc.
Their problem is that it’s already out in the open, because they are fairly desperate. And the more it’s out in the open, the more horrified people become at the smile on the face of the tiger.
In a way the covidiocy was their high water mark, the complete coup of the technocracy. It worked, but not uniformly, only briefly, and the actual compliance outside big cities was — as I found out — notional. Their attempt to roll it into a “climate emergency” lockdown was shrugged off. Their attempts to spook us into locking up again have been… laughable.
As almost always, but now faster, the humans failed to comply.
Plus they burned their “expert rule” by revealing most “experts” are no such thing.
The insurgence — the real one, not the one they tried to gin up as an excuse in 2020 — is alive and well, composed of set faces, clenched fists and feet planted in the ground, refusing to be moved.
I don’t know if they’ll manage to fraud themselves into power in November. They might. But it will do them a whole heap of no good, you know?
In China rulers lose the mandate of heaven. Throughout the west… you can piss off people enough that they don’t put up with your bullsh*t anymore. So it’s been throughout history.
The only remarkable thing about our would be expertocracy is how fast they burned a clout that took them a hundred years to create.
We are not sheep. We are not in the mood to be herded. We are not going into their profoundly stupid future.
We are chaos. We are liberty. We are — us here — Americans.
