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One of the strange things about the left, born of their ideological overlay on the world, is that they are so often right in all the wrong ways.

Take diversity, for instance.  (I’m not using it.)

They are forever complaining about the lack of diversity here or there or that other place, as well as trying to advance diversity by law, by dictating the “correct” proportions of people in any position or organization.

For instance I understand that new directives insist on a certain number of women on the director’s board of any corporation.  We’ll revisit this.

As someone from Yale (rebellion, in the belly of the beast. I’m sorry I couldn’t find the link just now) the “diversity” the left likes to emphasize is a diversity of skin colors. To be fair to the left, though, he did them an injustice: any external characteristic will do.  Look at any show they get a free hand to cast — even historicals where it makes absolutely no sense, but never mind — and you’ll find people of all skin colors, all sexual orientations, all sexual organs, (Well, I don’t know. It’s not like I ask strangers to drop trou. I presume that they haven’t yet demanded to examine sexual organs for deformations or warts as a means of making sure they have all of those, too, but I could be wrong) and if they can get them, with handicaps proportional to their existence in the population.

What they can’t seem to get is the actually important (to improved functioning of an enterprise)  “diversity of thought and life experience.”

Are those really that important?  Yes, within reason, and as applying to the enterprise at hand, which the left’s autistic concentration on diversity of groups only, and their belief that individuals in those groups are interchangeable widgets fails to grasp. Though perhaps it is also because real diversity that applies to the enterprise at hand is almost impossible to head-count and enforce, which means it is not amenable to their favorite top down solutions. It is more, honestly, the sort of thing you write “company management” books about, and perhaps tests to identify people who come up with different and creative solutions.

To make this a little more concrete, before I dip into the enterprise/industry I know best, and where diversity is perhaps the least well understood:

Both my grandfathers were carpenters: one of them a cabinet maker, the other a specialized carpenter who had made a study of woodwork throughout the centuries, and how to restore it. Both were very good at their jobs, and remunerated accordingly.

The first, my dad’s dad, was the one around whose workshop I grew up.  He was retired –no, really, seriously — which means he only worked about normal hours (until his lungs became too bad to work at all) and usually only for people he liked.  From hanging out with him, I retained a love of really good wood which served me well in buying incredibly cheap but good furniture at garage sales in the Carolinas in the late eighties.  And though I never learned — the things we later recriminate ourselves for — his formulas for varnish and wood filler, which he mixed himself, or even how to use all the hand tools he owned (someday I’d like to learn, but time is growing short, now) I did know enough to refinish things so you never knew how cheap I was or that, for instance, the little colonial-village cherry desk that now holds my publishing computer (as far as I can tell built and carved in Pennsylvania sometime in the late eighteenth century) cost me $5 (And was covered in fifteen layers of paint, including the inevitable 2 metallic layers.)

I never saw my other grandfather at work — though he had a workshop, by the time I remember it, he mostly used it to hide in and read when the family was over and he didn’t want company. I did work with him on setting out my parents new vegetable garden and flower garden, after we moved, and he taught me math, and spent a lot of time telling me stories of his misspent youth — but I have visited castles, palaces and churches where he restored dry-rotted and/or broken woodwork.  As you can imagine there was a lot of work of that sort in Portugal, where there’s a castle or palace every ten miles, and it was difficult, intricate and well paid. (Though he spent most of that on loose women and crazy writers. We all have our vices.)

Anyway, my paternal grandfather was a one-man enterprise at least in retirement, but I’m given to understand maternal grandfather at one time had a couple of dozen workers in his “company” (it wasn’t that, but it’s hard to explain.)

I have no clue how he arranged it, except to know being smart and a perfectionist, he probably had a diversity of specialists: People who could remove the affected portions, people who would do the rough-in, and detail carvers and guilders. For various reasons, I know he was capable of doing them all, but I’ve seen the scope of some of his jobs. One palace would have taken him most of his work life. And few people were as …. universally curious as he was about the various facets of the work.

Now, the reason I’m sure there was a diversity of specialties is because I’ve done that sort of work (where it’s too massive for one person, so each is responsible for a portion) and outside of the very roughest sort (and sometimes even then) you specialize.  If you are, say, cooking 500 rissoles for a party, you have someone make the dough, pass it along to the woman who rolls it out, pass it along to the woman who puts the filling in, pass it to the woman who cuts them out, then to the woman who rolls them in egg, then to the one who rolls them in bred crumbs, and finally to one or two frying-specialists.  You do not give the most clumsy and slapdash woman in the group the job of rolling out the dough, because it would be all uneven and some would burst. The same for the cutting. So you put her on the fryer and pray.  (I have a long scar up my arm for failing to control the temperature properly and getting an explosion of oil up my arm, but the rissoles turned out all right and in time, so no big.)

So, grandad had specialists in various things, we can assume.  But let’s say for the sake of diversity of knowledge and experience, that he considered hiring someone completely different.  Say, for instance, a lawyer, or perhaps a professor of classics (which grandad who had taught himself Greek and Latin would have loved, actually, for the conversation) would that have added to their efficiency and their output?

Well…. uh…. no, because in those terms those people were basically untrained apprentices, no matter how smart or how great their knowledge. It would be like putting me in charge of rolling out the dough.

In that sense “diversity” is as absolute bollocks as the “diversity” the left preens on.  Sure, it’s diverse, but it has nothing to do with the diversity needed for the actual work.

Now, if grandad had found say an archeologist or chemist who had either unearthed a workshop from the 14th century and made a study of tools and paints, or investigated bits of woodwork for “what they actually used” and been able to afford to hire him, I expect that “diversity” would have been welcomed and probably improve both their techniques and their proficiency.

From which I turn to the industry I know best.

The left is correct that diversity is preferable to a mono-culture where you have people of the same background who have all been taught the same.

And I’m absolutely sure this would be best demonstrated with some branch of science (though there the challenge usually comes from foreigners or those differently trained and on the fringes) but I know nothing about this, so we’ll go with the arts and literature.

The arts first, because where I was writing this, it occurred to me part of the issue the left has is SEEING past their training in a certain model.

At one time we lived in Colorado Springs within (if I didn’t have the car for some reason, as back then my eyes weren’t changing so fast as to make it near impossible for me to drive) walking distance of Bemis school of art.  We were also doing well enough, relatively, for me to splurge on a couple of art classes a semester.  Which meant sometimes there were no art classes center with my interests, or that didn’t require expensive material fees. Which means that I took everything from “how to draw naturally” to “Drawing from sculpture models.”

That later is the method taught in The French Academic period.  For me, it was just, really, a way to get some practice. But at one time this was the passport to proper art.  You drew classical sculptures, chosen for the proper proportions, so you learned TO SEE things that way. Which meant that if you got in someone whose features were less than perfect, your eye and hand would automatically correct.

This was of course great except for the fact that after a while the result of that school all looked the same.  Van Gogh was one of people who went against that rigid frame of “seeing” (After trying to conform. Apparently he got the worst possible views of the statues, because the teachers didn’t think much of his effort) and I think we’ll all agree that we’re better for his efforts. (Well, I’ve learned to love his work because one of my sons is a rabid fan. And it has enriched family outings and discussions.)

So diversity was absolutely needed (otherwise I expect the art would have got more and more repetitive and irrelevant [though one is tempted to wonder how much more irrelevant it would get that what happened to art in the post-modern world, but that’s something else again.]) but the establishment protected itself against it.

Which is one of those unfortunate characteristics of the human ape. We’re tribal. We tend to tribe up.  And tribing up is almost always a function of  how alike we are.

The funny thing is for any intellectual enterprise we identify as tribe more those who think exactly like us than those who look exactly like us.

So, take traditional publishing — please, I’m not using it — which is staffed almost exclusively and increasingly by females who have all gone through the best schools, be they ivies or ivy-adjacent.

There is a trained perspective that comes with this, a way of looking at the world, a way of interpreting what you see. The fact that this is mostly the Marxist model merely reflects the academic fashion of our times.  (The Marxist model enthralls universities because it’s a just-so tale that sounds profound and can be used to discover ever finer nuances in the society, which only the academic can correct (or even see) and which therefore confer a great sense of unearned superiority.)

The more this tribe controls/ed the decision makers on what gets published, be it as analysis or entertainment, the more the writers who are allowed past the gate/given large advances and vast rewards, are those who echo the characteristics and training of the ones doing the gatekeeping.

This would be fine and dandy, if — in fact– the vast majority of the American book-buying public were the same. If we’d all gone through the same ivy league schools AND BEEN CONVINCED of the same model (instead of doing barely enough pretending to “pass” while internally making rude faces and flinging bits of chewed paper at the lecturers. Not that anyone here — coff — would do that.)

Just as if all consumers of art had been trained in the Academie’s way of seeing, the art would have been right on target. But, alas, people hadn’t.

And most people who consume most reading, particularly genre books in the US (as I’ve described many times, and am not revisiting) found themselves increasingly allienated by what was being marketed to them as science fiction or fantasy or mystery.  Not even, to be honest, because of the political interspersion, (for those too young to remember, even those of us who knew the game was rigged rolled our eyes at those, and took them as the price to read anything at all) but because those works often had nothing to do with what attracted us to the genre to begin with.  As I’ve said before, I might love reading planet colonization stories, but they shouldn’t be a long, long, description of growing tomatoes in another planet, with very little else holding it together.  And I might love fantasy, but there’s only so much I can take of magical battered wife or daughter, or whatever before I grow bored.  As for mystery, is it too much to ask not to be able to guess from page one that the guilty person is the one who is rich or has conservative views? Because that’s not what mysteries are supposed to be.

And so, the vast majority of readers slow or fast wandered off.

At which point the tribe holding the offices of gatekeepers tribed up MORE and held it firmly that the only reason to reject their product (Other than low-brow preference for movies or video games, or whatever) was the LACK OF EDUCATION of all those people out there.  And the next phase was to imagine themselves as martyrs for the “faith” of Marxism, seeking to “educate” the public.  Like so many — far less interesting — Joan of Arcs, they clutched their hammer and sickle to their inconsequential breasts and stepped into the flames of not selling at all, FOR A GOOD CAUSE.  The cause, of course being virtue signaling for their fellows from exactly the same background (no matter how diverse the external characteristics.)

And this is why indie publishing/Amazon/etc is making such a huge dent in the industry.  Why? Because the industry lacked all diversity where it mattered: diversity of thought.

Had they got in a crass and brash businessman/woman (though more likely a man, since women have a different style) who would want to make money at any cost, the establishment would have resisted this very real diversity of thought, and done all they could to sabotage him into giving up, rather than changing and preserving their jobs and their industry.

So…. yep, human enterprises need diversity.  Diversity of skin color? Who really cares? Unless you think with your skin, in which case you are a curious species of alien, no one really SHOULD care.  Unless, of course, the job is having various sunblock systems tested on you.  Or serving as models to advertise something.

BUT barring that, what you need is diversity of thought. All human enterprises, arts, schools, government…. everything periodically needs fresh blood, and a new perspective.
And because of the human ape’s tribal inclinations, all will resist it.

Which means…

Nothing. It certainly doesn’t mean that the problem can be solved from top down regulation and supervision, and certainly not governmental prescription.

Why not? Well, because it would take an intimate knowledge of how EVERY field operates, which ways it’s going wrong, and what it needs. And let’s face it, the people who know the field are part of the tribe and blind to its blindspots.  And the ones who don’t are likely as not to dictate that a publishing house should hire a classical violinist to oversee its Science Fiction line, or a carpentry outfit must hire a French chef.

So…. the left has a point that diversity is needed and valuable, in practically every human endeavor.  What they’re wrong about is what diversity is, what type of diversity actually helps and how to fix it.

Other than that? Yeah, completely right.

What do we do about it? Nothing.  See, the thing is that the narrow minded tribalism of places completely “eaten” by the Marxist left brings on their own demise.

It doesn’t matter how hard you wear the skin of the freshly-killed enterprise/area of endeavor, and demand respect; if you are unable to make it function, it will disappear and something else will arise to fulfill that function.

Which — in our day and age — given how widespread the rot is, means we have to get ready to take the impact when things start failing.

Build under, build over, build around.

Because what can’t go on won’t. But civilization must go on. Those who can must do. No matter what the establishment thinks of us.

 

Give Me My Smelling Salts, Ho! A Blast From The Past From April 2015

[And stop calling me Ho – SAH 2020]

I don’t make much secret of the fact that I grew up in an actual honest to goodness sexist society. And by sexist I mean one that believed that women were sort of second best when it came to human beings.

No, this wasn’t micro-aggression, but the actual, stated opinion of most people in the society, including women. Teachers thought nothing of saying in front of a class “this might be a little more difficult for you ladies, since it requires logical reasoning.” They expected, in a co-ed class, that men would be better than the women at just about anything involving academics. In craft class, women were shunted to sewing and such, and I was told that no, I couldn’t do carpentry because that was weird and unnatural.

I don’t think it’s the same now. EEC, and a determined campaign to make women “equal” – which is probably… Never mind. We’ll get to that.

Fortunately or unfortunately I have a really hard time staying told. What I mean is, the more they told me I was inferior and had to defer to the better male brains, the more I set out to prove to the guys that I could run circles around them, mentally speaking.

It always gave me great pleasure when, by the end of the year, the teachers looked to me, and not to whichever boy they’d decided was the prodigy when they asked a difficult question.

This wasn’t always easy, particularly since by culture I was expected to take a great deal of the housekeeping off mom’s hands, while most boys went home and had no other duties than to study. But I studied harder; I read more; and by gum I worked to be better.

So – is this an extended whine about discrimination?

Shrug. No. I don’t know if I would be me – pig headed and stubborn as some species of weed – if it weren’t for those “handicaps” thrown in my way. I don’t know if I’d ever have learned to work hard, either. You see, if I had been handed things on a plate, I don’t know if I’d ever have made an effort. I’m very lazy, after all.

And if I hadn’t fought to be admitted to the confraternity of “the best” in each class, I’d never have understood the strange comradery that can flourish between men and women, when the men know a woman has bested them at their game and earned her position among them, they – at least the decent ones – tend to treat her as an equal.

Now, there are downsides to this, and we’ll talk about it in a moment.

I imagine, though I have absolutely no backing for this, that I resemble, in spirit and experiences the feminists of the 40s and 50s, when the point was to prove you could be as good as a man, and when the sort of work required and (perhaps in the fifties) effective contraception made it possible for women to have equivalent professional lives.

At least what I’ve read from those time periods, women’s attitude seemed to be “We can do it. We can be better than men, work harder than men, take knocks like men. And we ain’t no wall flowers.”

There was the inherent belief that, yes, the world was biased, but it was up to us to prove we could make it despite the bias. This was my belief when I lived in Portugal too.

I realized things were different in the US – very different – when my American literature teacher, fresh off the plane, used “he” to refer to indeterminate gender in a class full of females, in my third year in college and then started apologizing and ritually abasing himself for his “sexism.” The class of 20 some budding linguists blinked at him and said “but that is the default pronoun for indeterminate gender in English!”

I’ve never seen a man so astonished. Which prepared me for what I call “the feminist war on language” through the late eighties and nineties in this country.

Though I might say nothing prepared me for the piece of strangeness that was “Herstory.” Seriously, women, learn philology and stop embarrassing people with vaginas. It was as stupid as when preachers use English to decide that there is some arcane meaning in the Bible. It’s as though they don’t realize languages evolve. Which begs the question of whether they understand societies change, or whether they live in an eternal now, but that’s a question for another time.

And then things got ever weirder. One started getting dinged for not using his/her in any correspondence of non-fiction.

It made me a little …. Uncomfortable. Both as a linguist and as a human being. Look, language is language. Language isn’t sexist because language isn’t anything. Yes, there are fossilized meanings and fossilized attitudes in language, but they don’t “intend” or “mean” anything beyond well, the explicit meaning.

This is hard to explain, but suffice it to say half of my teaching career (teaching ESL mostly, but also French and briefly German) was spent saying “there is no why in language.” I.e. don’t ask me why “bread” is “bread” in English but “pao” in Portuguese. I don’t mean there is no explanation of how those words came to be used. Of course there is. Different invading people, different pervading cultures, etc. That’s what philology does and it’s fun for a winter’s night. (Okay, so I have a weird idea of fun.) BUT it’s not a LOGICAL reason. A lot of my students would say stuff like “but bread makes no sense. It doesn’t sound like the thing.”

I think the war on “he” as the default for indeterminate is the same kind of thought. “But it could be a he or a she. So we should mention both. Even if it just makes sentences really awkward.”

That was only part of what made me uncomfortable, though. What really bothered me was this sense that the woman (and it was always women) enforcing the he/she had this need to be noticed, even in a sentence that didn’t refer to them. It was as though they were saying “AND a WOMAN too.” (There are any number of oral story telling techniques that do just this, so you’ll say something like “Five hundred men, three elephants, and the flea in the captain’s beard.” That was sort of the feeling I got.)

Still, you know, language evolves with culture, and I figure this was part of it and just wished they’d settled for something other than he/she or a “they” that broke the number concordance. (Yes, I know Shakespeare did it. He did all manner of foolish things, as well as brilliant ones.) I thought even “it” would be better.

But the disturbing trend continued to grow. Bookstores started labeling history sections “herstory” with no irony whatsoever. College educated women honest to goodness thought there had been as many female medieval fighters as male and there was a vast conspiracy to hide this. (Where women were supposed to come up with the upper body strength for those weapons I don’t know. Yeah, some managed it. Maybe one in a thousand.) A vast conspiracy involving millions of people through the ages. A conspiracy of which we had no record. A conspiracy that never once broke ranks.

Then there was the sisterhood thing. You know, where every and any woman is supposed to understand me better than a man. That was jaw-dropping. I mean, I’m supposed to have more in common with Mary who does tatting for a living in some little village in England than with, oh, Larry, say, who writes for the same house I do in America.

And there was the “men are afraid of you” thing that was brought up as to why I didn’t get along with my boss when I was a lecturer in college. (It probably had more to do with the fact I didn’t intend to make a career of it, and wasn’t going to jump through his hoops. Oh, also, I was a smart-mouthed kid with no social sense.) This is used to explain any man not liking any woman nowadays and particularly any man criticizing a woman’s performance of her job.

But when I first realized things had gone off the rails was when a professor, in a well reported snit, ran out of a lecture hall, crying and threatening to throw up because a college president mentioned statistics and the relative, statistical position of women in intellectual fields and said it was the same as the relative IQ curve. That is, that women mostly occupy the middle ranks, while men claim more geniuses and more morons. This is a statistical fact. It doesn’t mean any woman is or isn’t a genius or a moron (you have to test the woman for that) but as a statistical fact it explains some of the distribution of women we see in intellectual and STEM work. (It also tends to mean those women at the top are good, as they fought all sorts of assumptions to get there.)

THIS – this statistical fact – caused an educated woman to feel personally insulted.

I thought this was insane, and perhaps she was off her meds. But the incidents just kept coming; too many for me to remember much less mention.

The ones that come to mind, though, are the dongle thing and the shirtstorm.

The dongle thing is where a woman heard two geeks talk about dongles and assumed a sexual meaning. Now, the descriptions of the actual event are so muddled, I don’t know which was true. It is entirely possible that the guys were just talking about dongles, and she read a dirty meaning into their words. Or it’s possible that they were making veiled dirty jokes.

Here is the thing: neither of them was about her. What I mean is, men have a different sense of humor than women. Any woman who’s fought her way to the top of a male dominated field, who finds herself considered one of the guys learns this very quickly. And the wise woman – you know, one of those that JUST wants to prove she’s good enough? – turns a deaf ear to it. (Or joins in, depending on personality. But if you want to continue pretending to yourself and others that you’re a lady, you just don’t hear those things. You learn to filter them out.) Guys do the same in a female intensive grouping. Trust me, the things we think are funny and joke about are just as shockingly bizarre and offensive to normal males. Both my gay and straight male friends have on occasion, hearing me talk to a female friend, said the equivalent of “stop. You’re tearing my illusions apart.”

However, the woman who overheard the talk knew it was all about her. (Even though I haven’t found anything saying that it was directed at or even referring to her.) She overheard this talk, and it was bad talk, and it made her feel uncomfortable. And so she set out to destroy the men’s careers. Because every place should be made safe for a gentlewoman of delicate sensibilities to wander through with impunity and without some word – even one she misunderstood – sullying her virgin-like ears.

Shirtstorm was more of the same. Rose Eveleth, Vagina Vigilante, might not know much about probes or comets, or have much interest in them. One gets a feeling in her mind aerospace is that icky thing that sweaty, nerdy boys do. So, forced to cover it (or snatching it up as a prize assignment) for her paper, she paid attention to the one important thing in the world: herself. And since she’s female, she projected her prejudices onto all other females, and decided women everywhere would be put off science by a man’s shirt decorated with “space pinups.” A shirt made by a woman. A shirt worn amid a team whose leader was a woman who saw nothing wrong with it. But Vagina Vigilante was on the job! One gets the feeling she didn’t do very well at science, and now she had a REASON. It was the sexism of the field, manifest in a shirt.

Which totally justified making a rocket scientist cry on the day of his greatest triumph. After all, people like him had ruined her life, right?

But it gets worse than that – there was an entire campus filled with supposedly educated (ah!) women terrorized by the statue of a sleep walking man.

And then there’s the ever-elastic definition of “sexual assault” which – I’m not making this up – can now be ratcheted down to “Looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable” or, for that matter “failed to sexually assault me.” Oh, sorry, that last was the definition of racism. Some Palestinian woman looked at rape statistics and found that Israeli women are raped by Palestinian men in much higher numbers than Palestinian women are raped by Israeli men, and immediately concluded this is because Israelis are racist. It beggars the mind.

Another thing that beggars the mind is the progressive image of women as great warriors. You know, in all the movies and half the books (often without supernatural explanation) a 90 lb chick can beat 300 lb men. And women were always great fighters throughout the ages. And, and, and…

And yet, women are peaceful – peaceful, d*mn it. This is why “peaceful planet of women” is a trope on tv tropes. Not just a trope, but a dead horse one.

Attempts to square that circle have included the explanation that women are only violent because patriarchy. There needs be nothing else said because in this context, and with apologies to the ponies, Patriarchy Is Magic. Honorable mention on trying to square the circle must go to Law and Order’s attempted episode on Gamer Gate where the game the woman designer had written was about Peaceful Amazon Warriors.

An episode in which my younger son accidentally touched a girl on the behind – in 3^rd grade, when Mr. Hormone hadn’t visited yet and he had no clue behinds had anything to do with sex or being sexy – and the school tried to charge him with sexual harassment (Which stopped cold when I threatened to write about it for various mags and make them a laughing stock) gave me some insight into why women are reacting this way.

It’s not all their fault, no.

That little girl had it far worse than my son. Because you see, for having been touched by a rather innocent little boy, who was reaching into a group and trying to get her attention (to play “the space game” which was sort of a LARP in which they were in a spaceship in an alien planet. Hey, he’s mine.) this girl was put in COUNSELING sessions and was told that her life would never be the same, because she’d been – gasp – sexually assaulted.

I lost touch with the kids from that class, and don’t know if she still thinks she was victimized, but let’s say she was a little strange for months after the incident.

Of course, she was actually bureaucratically assaulted.

You see, the directive to make the sexes equal is being applied top down by a thousand little bureaucracies, none of them very sure how to accomplish this. They’re also in general trying to force the sexes to be equal, which is impossible, instead of equal before the law, which is desirable. This further muddles their attempts, particularly when you throw in the lovely academic theory most of them imbibe that “gender is a construct.” And gender might be, but whether your genes are xx or xy still affects your upper body strength (men have more), your endurance of pain (women have more) and several other things you can’t make equal by declaring it so.

The problem is bureaucracies are stupid. They can’t see finer shades such as “allow exceptional individuals to be wherever they belong” or “just let people be people.” No, they hear “make women and men equal and by gum, they’re going to do it if it requires being at war with reality. It’s kind of like performing brain surgery on your sofa, using a rusty saw and a soup spoon. Even with the best of intentions, you’re going to do more harm than good.

Now, do I think it was okay for the culture to be as it was in Portugal, where I was assumed to be an idiot because I lacked 250grams between my legs? Oh, heck no. But I also don’t want a culture where little girls are mollycoddled and little boys berated both in compensation/punishment for things that happened before their grandparents were born.

For one, it makes girls into sissies. For another it makes a lot of men give up on society.

And the girls into sissies thing is dangerous. Women who’ve been mollycoddled all their lives will think that anything is an attack or an aggression. Like, you know, being called Ladies. Or pinup shirts.

This means, more and more, as the younger generations come in, professional and academic environments with women become mine fields for men and histrionic opportunities for women.

And sooner or later, looking at our throwing up, swooning, crying, trigger-warned, peaceful amazon warriors, someone is going to say “you know, women are too fragile for the workaday world. Let’s put them in burkas and lock them up in purdah.” And then it will all be needed to do over again, the fight to let those women who can and will compete do so.

On behalf of my future great great great granddaughter whom I don’t want to have to endure that kind of things, stop this feminist charging forward to the fainting couch and the smelling salts, like some Victorian maiden that never actually existed.

Stop trusting what the bureaucracy tells you. Men are not the enemy. Most men welcome women who can work with them as equals. Yeah, they’ll still try to protect you and avenge you, because they, the same as you, have instincts. An unfortunate side effect of having physical bodies.

Accept them as they are so they can accept you as you are. Demand their best behavior, but don’t demand they stop being men. And don’t make them walk on eggshells around you. The power might feel good but in the end it betrays you, because it means you’ll never belong as a co-worker.

Oh, and fight the war for equality on the cultural level.

If we took over a Middle Eastern country tomorrow we could (and should) fix the laws, so women are the same as men before the law. But we couldn’t fix the culture the same way. If we made laws giving women job preferences, or telling men what they could or couldn’t do around women, what we’d do in the end is what’s happening here: women who are used to being protected/infantilized/subjugated by men transfer that relationship of power by putting all their trust to government.

And since government is force, it’s more abusive than any husband. And the end result will be subjugation.

Fight the culture war now. So your descendants don’t have to fight worse ones. Humans are not widgets and bureaucracy is stupid.

Make your own judgements, and tell bureaucrats and their fainting maidens coterie to go smell some salts.

 

 

I mentioned D’Haut en Bas as a political strategy here sometime ago, and caused considerable confusion. So I promised to revisit it.

Of course the confusion was probably greater amid those readers who are fluent in French, who were going “what the heck does Sarah mean? Condescension is not a form of government, though I dare say our self proclaimed elites wish it were.”

Right. Look, I haven’t done any serious study of French in… 34, going on 35 years, so I can’t swear this is a fact, but I suspect “condescension” in French as in English only came to have a bad denotation in the last century or so, and before that you would praise someone’s “great condescension” as a positive quality, in that they consented to interact with their social inferiors.

What I do know for a fact is that when I was doing a deep dive into the French revolution (bad idea. It’s depressing. Also, you’ll never get the bloodstains out of your mind) I heard the king’s strategy described as D’Haut en Bas.

And it clicked with what I knew of Louis the XIV who arguably set the patterns of the ancien regime, which still subsisted at the time of the revolution.

You see, in the days of Louis XIV he had problems with the great noblemen.  This wasn’t unusual for France which for vast portions of its history was a set of borders in search of a country. At various times several portions of France showed themselves ungovernable, usually because under the control of a nobleman who saw no reason to obey the nominal king.

But Louis the XIV settled their hash. He constructed his court in such a way and build and arranged things in such a way that most noblemen couldn’t afford not to dance attendance on him, and yet dancing attendance on him was financially ruinous, which meant they need to dance attendance on him more than ever. (In case you wonder where the “they’ll turn us all into beggars, because beggars are easy to please” strategy of the left came from.

At the same time the king advanced (at least some, until, of course they got to big) members of the new French middle class, and raised them up in importance, creating a pincer movement on the big noblemen.

Louis XVI, who was nowhere near as adept, at least for a time trusted the same maneuver would work for him against the nascent and increasingly more rebellious middle class.  He tried to make himself into the protector of the dispossessed, the little people in order to crush the middle class between the royalty and the masses.

It didn’t work. I did say he wasn’t nearly as adept, right. In fact, in many ways Obama reminded me of him.  And in the end, he lost his head.

Of course, Obama’s issue was … slightly different.  We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let me point out that d’haut en bas as a pincer movement has worked in practically every communist country.  It worked, for that matter, for the middle class during the French revolution. Yes, the middle class used it against the rest of the middle class (and small nobility) by convincing the poor and dispossessed that they were being taken care of by whatever portion of the middle class was in power at the moment.  (Yes, the French revolution will give you a headache, which still beats … well, not precisely living through it.)

But take Venezuela for instance (going, going, gone.) The commies got in power by convincing the very poor that the commies would take care of them.  And kept this going for a long long time.  They might still be doing it for all I know. No matter how bad things are, they can always tell the poor that the commies are doing what they can to improve their lives.

But you see, Obama tried the strategy. And I think he still doesn’t understand why it failed.  I know the left alternates between not knowing why the strategy doesn’t work, and desperately trying to create a new underclass so maybe with them it will work.

Part of the reason the strategy didn’t work for Obama is that he is in fact pretty terrible at reading the country. This is because like all Marxists he only admits of reality in order to segment it into proper Marxist constructs.  And if something he sees doesn’t fit into Marxism, he by gum will make it fit, somehow.

So — I swear to you, having met and studied and worked with his kind I’d put my hands in the fire this is true — when he aided abetted (if not suggested that someone start it) and cheered on the Occupy Wall Street movement (the embodiment of his threat to have the mob come for the bankers, after all) he expected that the “underclass” would immediately rise up and cover his astroturf in a verdant coat of grassroots.

I suspect he’s still puzzled it didn’t work and that instead the Tea Party rose up to tell him they were taxed enough already.  You must excuse him, the man has no clue what America is like. Regardless of where he was born, he didn’t grow up here, but worse, he’s never made any effort to be of us.  He probably (like Hillary and her supporters) is probably still spinning over why precisely the people went for the man who promised to bring jobs back over the woman who promised to give them all better and larger welfare.

In nine countries out of ten, the promise of money for nothing (with or without their chicks for free) would have beat the offer of remunerated work.

So, am I saying d’haut en bas can’t work in America?

Well, it doesn’t work as well as it does in the rest of the world. And honestly, thankfully, it works less than it did in the seventies.

BUT, and this is an important but, it sort of works on a very regional basis.  There is a reason that democratic controlled cities — as I was reminded of when visiting Pete’s the other day, as the “homeless” problem has started spreading from downtown — are indulging the “homeless” with all sorts of rules and suspension of laws supposed to accommodate them.

The city government counts on people not realizing that in fact the homeless are not the dispossessed needing more money and city services, but drug addicted, mentally ill, often dangerous individuals in need of far more than money or city services. They also count on people — finding themselves accosted on the streets and sometimes even assaulted by people who aren’t even responding to reality (the homeless in this case, not Marxists. Making Marxists homeless is a laudable goal, though) — demanding that something be done, which allows the city to do more things that bring in more homeless.  And then raising the taxes, to do more things…

The end state of this is Detroit, I think. Or another of the American cities destroyed by socialists. And meanwhile, at the top, the leftists responsible for the debacle, get themselves a permanent position and become royalty.

Thing is, I think the mood is changing.  Only six months ago, I swear every cozy mystery released genuflected towards the homeless, who were always laid off computer programmers, or something.  Now… not so much.  I’ve yet to see a new one where the homeless provide the villain, but… I sense it’s not very far off.

Because here’s the thing with the strategy of d’haut en bas: unless played by a master, sooner or later the bas realize they’re being kept down on purpose to provide shock troops to en haut.  And then there’s hell to pay.

And most of our left aren’t masters. Most of them (partly, granted through an excellent education that tainted their world view with a dirty patina of Marx) aren’t competent to find their own *sses with two hands, a seeing eye dog and the latest model GPS.

And their idea of “the people” is — to put it mildly — deluded.

In these conditions, and with the media no longer serving as a shield, fooling some of us some of the time is a stretch goal. Mostly they hope to convince us to stay quiet and play along. Which is why the latest incarnation of d’haut en bas is a reach for the eternally unemployable malcontents cosplaying at “heroes” and heroines of social justice.

That is working as bizarrely as you’d expect, because of course these poeple have to step ever more to the left and demand ever more radical solutions.  You see, they aren’t poor, and they want to feel important and radical. Hence, their leader, Occasional Cortex.

Don’t let the chorus of ignoramuses silence you. Our would be rulers think they’re playing three-d chess, but in reality, they’re just a pigeon, sh*tting all over the board and declaring victory.

In the end we win, they lose. Because we wouldn’t know bas even if we were it, and as for haut, the bastage ain’t been born whom we’d consider above us.  And they don’t know what to do with that.

But we do.

 

 

I think it was fifteen years ago now that Classical Values coined the term “Cold Civil war.”

At the time I read it, it immediately clicked in my brain as “oh. Precisely. This is what it is.”

I could see immediately the same patterns as we saw it in Europe in the seventies and eighties, as the Soviets — through puppets — had taken over the schools, publishing, and all instruments of culture, and all those of us who opposed communism had as options was keeping our heads down, shutting up, and seething internally.  Oh, there was also and increasingly the option of malicious compliance.  Which we engaged in with much vigor and enthusiasm.

The victories of the Soviet Union were everywhere.  Partly because everything that happened was treated as a victory.  And the bad things that the Soviets did were never reported in the press.  You might know the Soviets — via their Cuban mercenaries — were beating Africa like a rented mule, raping it like the wife of the defeated and despoiling it like a jewelry store in a riot zone, but you couldn’t say it in public. For one it would be as uncouth as farting in church. For another, because farting in church would probably be forgiven, but telling the truth about the Soviets in social, professional or academic circles, would never ever ever be forgiven. And anyone who heard you mention the unmentionable would do their best to destroy you. Because the alternate option would be for THEM to step away from the herd and become a target.

In addition, the Soviet Union used violence unapologetically, and quickly, which the US, on whom we must pin our hopes for freedom, apologized and begged forgiveness for any even half-hearted attempt to oppose Soviet aggression. Even under Reagan — who at least tried to make public stands and not apologize — the US was never the bold strider that the Soviet Union was.  From the perspective of the nations in Europe, the Soviets were the strong horse. They were the way to bet. All the news of the world that we got to read said the result was foreordained.

This meant that a lot more of the cognoscenti, the people in the “best” classes and the “best” jobs claimed to be communist (or socialist) than the ones actually naturally attracted to this poisonous philosophy.  You see, it gave you a patina of virtue, made you unfirable, and at the very least made you cool.

And yet, through all this grinding misery, the sense kept leaking — and people said I was crazy there too. And yes, sometimes I doubted myself, too — that all was not good, all was not sound on the Soviet side.  The sense kept leaking in through that maybe, just maybe, there was no way for the US to lose. There was no way for freedom to lose.

Even I didn’t expect how fast, how peacefully the Soviet Union came apart. It came apart because it never worked, and it could only keep going by this massive pretense, this Potemkin appearance of power and prosperity. Because they needed to keep conquering and despoiling new lands to be able to keep going.

Once it became obvious that they would need to pay a price, they came apart.

Remember we did not have the internet.  Remember also the dismount on the cold war was, to put it mildly, NOT well handled. And part of the reason it wasn’t well handled was the problem we’re now dealing with: the left had also penetrated the, for lack of a better term, culture-manufacturing sectors of America.  So, the true bizarre horror that was the Soviet union was never heard of here. Oh, we heard bits and pieces. Most of the books about it STILL are either too dry or grim for me to read. And I’m an interested party.

And so, by fifteen years ago, I felt much like I was living in Europe in the seventies.  Which is why the term fit.

Since then … since then things have gone more so, but at the same something happened that didn’t happen in the international cold war: They lost control of the information stream.

The USSR never lost control of that, arguably even as it collapsed internally and officially stopped existing.  Or as we say around here, the snake is dead but the tail twitches.

But the tail has lot access to the levers of power, to overstretch the metaphor. It’s twitching madly trying to regain them, but they can’t.

Thing is though that one of the things they thoroughly infested is our democracy, from our bureaucracy to our voting mechanisms, to the point that they have power over us.

And they’re terrified. They’re so terrified that I’m wondering how deep the sewer is, and how dirty everyone involved in this is. I know in a couple of places they can’t reform. They’ll die first, because the alternative is they’re dead anyway, or worse, they have to part with everything they’ve been and everything they believe.

Which means they’re trying to regain control by all means possible and being increasingly aggressive and stupid about their aggression.  Which, in retrospect, is another parallel with the USSR before the fall.

As a parenthetical comment, the reason they’re collapsing is partly the reason the USSR collapsed. Turns out when what you’re choosing for is compliance and ideological conformity, you don’t choose people who can keep the lights on in civilization.  When you value fake science that confirms your prejudices over real science, you end up not being able to run a technological civilization.

But it is the snake flopping around and looking for levers and trying for a desperate win after it’s defanged….

There are several reasons I wish actual violence would wait until we had time to do more work on the “back panel” of the culture.  We have — despite everything — been turning the culture around. Which is part of the reason they are desperate.

The problem is that with the disarray in the culture, a lot of the people just have the gut feeling (and experience) that everything the left pushes is wrong. But they have nothing to replace it with, and therefore just turn whatever the left says on its head and says the opposite is true.

This is just as effective a method to destroy civilization, or at least a civilization of free individuals. The left is a tumor on western civilization, but it is of our DNA. If you reject our DNA, we merely die (instead of the chemotherapy approach of merely going through very bad times by rejecting the tumor and isolating it, but living in the end.)

I’ve prayed this moment not come for at least another four years (our rebuilding of the culture is much faster than it looks, honest. Partly because it’s been 20 years in the making.)

Maybe we’ll get lucky. It looked impossible the cold war would end without major blood, particularly as the USSR lost the plot and flailed around.

But I would lie if I said I’m not nervous about Virginia.  Tap dancing on a powder barrel is dangerous, particularly when the powder barrel has connections all over the world — everyone, everywhere is fed up with the left. If the signal goes up, I’m afraid it all blows at once — and when the people who might replace it don’t even understand the values of Western civilization.  Or at least no more than the left does.  (Not their fault. They got no real education, but still…)

What I’m hoping against hope is that the anti-left side doesn’t fire the first shot. (If they do, it’s entirely possible the left can put them down in public opinion and destroy all opposition, in which case say hello to president Bernie.)

Which means I’m hoping that the people there are alert to infiltrators and agents provocateurs.  I’m going to say right now that if a pregnant woman gets shot, it will be infiltrator/communist action. (It became almost a joke in Europe in the seventies. If someone opposed leftists with violence, a pregnant woman was ALWAYS shot, and then waved like a bloody shirt.  It is one of the reasons I’m 90% sure that Kent State was an action by communist agent provocateurs.)

Perhaps this too shall pass. And we’ll get a few years to turn the culture around. Because this can’t continue, and the left can’t retain a state of hysteria that long.

Also because I think if Trump gets a second term, the stuff that comes out will discredit the left forever.  Honestly — for those of you who are going to bay at me that we need to shoot NOW — before we start the music, we should consider how HARD the left has been trying to stampede us into initiating violence. I think they might — correctly — believe that’s their last hope.

It is always a bad idea to do what the enemy is trying to — openly — get you to do.

Because if the left gets us to start this, they will almost certainly will. We’ll have played into their hands with “unhinged right wingers.” To the extent they still have any power it is the emotive power of the news/entertainment complex and the people who believe in it.

And what comes next will turns us inside out, to non-functional and irrecoverable.

So, keep cool, keep thinking. Sure, self defense is a thing. And if it comes to that, well, it comes to that.

But keep your booger hook off the bangstick until and unless they start it.

Because–

They’re not engaging in provocations because they’re winning. They’re not screaming and trying to cancel you because they’re strong. They’re not letting the masks drop because they’re confident of victory.

If we can keep going through the squalls the left creates, we will win, they lose.

But I never promised you a rose garden, or that there would be no flare ups.

Heck, the international cold war was full of them.

I’m writing this on the night of the 19th. And I’ll be praying for Virginia, and praying that however it turns out, the cause of liberty comes through.

And it’s all I can do right now.

 

 

*Sorry to be so late. Yes, I actually slept last night. OTOH this morning I had a bunch of errands to do which I’ve been putting off because going to the grocery store (say) while sleepy enough to walk into walls is a bad thing.
Fortunately I don’t have to feel terrible about not promoting people on time, since I have no books to promote today.  I guess like me everyone was overcome by the forces of evil in the new year.
Okay, now I go finish short stories. – SAH*

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: Whispering.

 

When last we saw our heroine, in her battle against the forces of evil, understood as “things that prevent her from writing fiction”, she had made the valiant resolution of writing a lot.

To such purpose she’d enlisted The Mathematician (A figure of mythical dread — also hotness (it might be inferred she plied him with her wiles!))

— whose principal power is super-human abilities of scheduling and organization) and he’d deployed the near-mythical (in our heroine’s world at least) …. spreadsheet.

 

The very name causes our heroine to shudder, since the idea of caging THE Writing is almost sacrilegious. Also, it doesn’t work very well.

However, given the fifty some novels in her head and if she doesn’t get them out, she’s probably going to forget which of the voices behind her eyes is her actual own voice. Which would be a bad thing. A very bad thing.

So after The Mathematiciann deployed some wiles on HER, the writer agreed that she could do this. She could defeat the forces of evil in 2020. She would even use the dread (shudder) spreadsheet and keep to a calendar and everything.

But haha, the force of evil never sleep (in which they have some resemblance to our heroine these days. More anon.)

No more had our heroine got in two good days of work, or so, than the forces of evil deployed:

Euclid cat, whose life story could be written as “Euclid Cat, Enter The Derp.”  Or since he’s 21, “Euclid Cat, the Path of the Geezer.”

In this case right after new years he fell of a cliff health-wise. Since our heroine is an idiot who doesn’t like putting down cats who can still walk into the doctor’s office under their own power, and also since when she took him to the doctor Euclid was charming, sociable and cosplayed at being at least 10 years younger, our heroine has spent a bunch of money she doesn’t have, and time she has even less of stabilizing the cat (the model for Peesgrass in the Dyce books) who is now eating, and more alert than he was and has stopped screaming in the middle of the night.

So, that crisis averted, our heroine was ready to resume her course and deploy the spreadsheet:

But the forces of evil never sleep….

And being awake made them really really upset, so… they deployed:

Stomach flu….

Which ate about a week and a bit, until our heroine started getting better and thought: Spreadsheet!

Only the forces of evil weren’t done!  These last three days they have deployed:

Sleeplessness.  No, our heroine has no idea whatsoever why. Okay, it might have to do with the fact she’s pretty much forgotten to take her ADD meds every afternoon, and for some reason not taking the meds means she not only doesn’t sleep at night, but she doesn’t get much done. (Though she’s rendered some pretty images she will eventually use in her (now being revamped) author website. Which will have a non political probably three times a week blog.

Images like this, which will ge used for a click to go through to a page talking about our heroine’s space opera:

It might also end up being the cover for a novel. Maybe.)

It’s also a vicious cycle, because the more tired she is, the less effect the meds have on ADD, causing her to behave like a very strange squirrel:

And then she gets stressed because she hasn’t been writing and is now late on two novels and two short stories, and then…. everything gets worse, including the lack of sleep.

And then… Well, these last two weeks the forces of evil have scored a major win.

Needless to say this can’t go on.  The Mathematician is looking at our heroine like this:

(Only hotter.)  And after all, our heroine is armed with the mighty spreadsheet!

(Even if she’s managed to screw up one of its functions — it’s like a superpower. not a good one –)

Now, there are hints that other distractions might loom, including perhaps at least a part time job in non-fiction again.

Which is good and bad, because while non-fiction isn’t fiction, it does help pay the bills, and has some not-irrelevant effect on publicity.  (And they’re not paying the heroine in Euros, because, just no. Stupid image.)

However, the heroine thinks she can keep the non fic under control, so it doesn’t eat all her time.

If that confinement is effective, then she will do it. If not…. well, she’s all grown up, even if she’s forgotten how to sleep. (I’ve slept successfully in the past, I swear.)

So The Writer (our heroine) and The Mathematician (very hot. Also good with numbers and organization) have vowed to join forces

And this time truly defeat the forces of evil so our heroine can finish two short stories and at least one of the novels (Other Rhodes) this week.

Tune in next week for another episode of The Writer Against the Forces of Evil!

Will our heroine figure out how to sleep again?

Will Derpish cats figure out a new trick to thwart her?

Will non fiction prove too much for her?

Will Greebo-cat, freelance editor stop glowering at her for being so late?

(Okay, that last one is unlikely.)

All these answers and more wait next week!  Same place, same blog, same overcrowded writer’s mind.  Watch as our heroine does battle against the forces of evil!

 

 

The problem with power and wealth…. yes, yes, is that I don’t have any. Right. The jokes write themselves. Don’t forget to buy your waitress (she’s a robot) and tip the fish (he bets on the ponies and is always looking for a tip.)

Now being serious, for a moment, the problem with power and wealth is that they’re inseparable.  And no, not just as our Marxist brethren have been taught, in “a capitalist society.”  Actually if there’s any hope of separating them it’s a true free market society. Not that we have that.

Even under monarchies, those who financed the king usually got power in return (also placed themselves in danger. If my research is correct some ancestors were that bloody stupid. Ah, well.) And at any rate, people with money (or other exchange. After all money is a proxy for goods and services you can’t just carry around in your wallet, right?) can by definition buy the allegiance, obedience or labor of others. In any society. Which means if you have money, you’ll soon have power.

The thing our Marxist brethren (or mentally-impaired little cousins, whatever. Every family has one, right?) forget is that the equation works the other way too.

If you have power, money will follow. Because people want to appropriate some of that power to themselves, so they will buy you dinner, give you material goods, find jobs for your ne’er do well cocaine addicted Hunter Biden son, give you amazing book deals that any professional working writer knows will never earn out (even if you were as fascinating as your crazed followers, who think you’re sort of a god, believe), or other make believe Netflix advising jobs taking advantage of your non-existent talent and brilliance that people keep trying to wish into being. If nothing else, if you have power of the government kind, you can make money the old-fashioned way. By stealing it, or getting bribed to sell uranium to Russia sell/give away national assets.

Power might be an easier route to money than money is a route to power.

Not the least of it, because if you have made money through some other means we know that at least once in your life you had to regard other human beings as autonomous units with wants and needs.

Sure what you sold to get there might be vapor ware of some sort, including stories, but you still had to think of “What are other people likely to wish to buy” and “What’s in their head that I can slot into as a way of making money?”

Note as someone who is supposed to make her living selling brain gleanings to other human beings, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what un-examined things are in other people’s heads; what they like; what they assume; what I can sell them that will slot into those two.

And I, alas, am not nearly successful enough to make money (Working on it, okay, guys? Expect big changes this year. Again, year of go big or go home) that will allow me to buy any power at all.

The people who make it at that level, in a free market. Yeah. They spent some time thinking about what to sell, how to sell it, how to create it for maximum appeal, etc etc etc.  These things don’t happen by accident. They can happen by luck, sure, but most of the time “luck is that with which people explain the feats of genius” or something like that (I don’t remember Heinlein’s words exactly.)

They can, of course also happen by rigging, nepotism and other forms of interference.

Which brings us around to the other side: power.

The left has power — near dang absolute — over certain fields.  And their thirst for more and eternal power leads them to favor and push things that no free market, ever, would reward with money. For illustration, look at most TV programming and most movies. There is no rational explanation for those projects even getting made, much less funded.

And while a lot of individuals are making tidy fortunes by slotting into the system and working it from the lefty-power angle, i.e mouthing all the right (left) words, and claiming all the right (left) beliefs, the system itself starts losing money when the takeover is complete.

Because those “successes” and wealth come from the side of power becoming wealth, these people have never spent three seconds together thinking of what other people want or — possibly — of other people as humans. If they think of those who disagree with them at all, they see them as worthy of re-education camps. (BTW some of the Chinese work camps do have conjugal visits. No, that doesn’t make them better. I hate to say it, but hearing Bernie’s staffer I kept thinking the Democrat party is a con game created and designed for the purpose of getting their slaves back once more.)  Mostly, though, they think of us as stereotypes. “Those uneducated, stupid rednecks.”

They don’t bother knowing anything of the real world because, who cares? In fact, it could be dangerous. Their wealth comes from kow towing to those in power and believing the right (very left) things. If they start having ideas that challenge that, then they’ll lose both power and wealth. (In case you wonder why skinsuited institutions become more and more rigid echo chambers.)

Which means that, people who come in through power into wealth, tend to have bizarre ideas of what the rest of humanity is like and what they do. They are more likely to believe the stories that brought them power and wealth, because, well, they are what they were taught in college and have given them great advantage. Among other things, they will believe if only we were “more educated” we’d believe as they do, they believe humans are infinitely malleable, and they believe a lot of things that just ain’t so, including that their degree in whatever field or their superior intelligence (well they believe what all the “smart” people believe, right?) means they know everything and can improve manufacturing processes, make the economy more “just” and/or design cities and improve agriculture.

To be absolutely blunt this is how you end up with wheat planted in Siberia in Winter. It’s how you end up with famines. It’s how you end up with Venezuela, a land of untold natural riches where people are starving to death.

Which brings us to the other side of this: when your system grants power for things other than competence and (well, it’s impossible to keep that out) wealth, what you’re doing is privileging power games over getting the job done.

The people who prefer to acquire wealth through power; the people who want power over everything and anything else, tend to be the sort who’d rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.  And “serve” includes selling ANYTHING that those unwashed deplorables will want to buy.

You’ve met their kind, and so have I. They come into an otherwise perfectly functioning office or work environment and set about empire-building. Sometimes it’s not even political. Sometimes — though not always, and I hate to ascribe everything to childhood trauma — it’s some kind of flaw that makes them feel unsafe, and they “need” to acquire enough power to finally feel safe. Sometimes (perhaps often) it’s being conscious of not being particularly confident, and wanting to make their position so powerful that no one else can dislodge them no matter how much they f*ck up.

They will gossip, lie, slander, steal other people’s work, put on airs, and do whatever it takes to get ahead and get power over others.  Weirdly this rarely has anything to do with actually doing the job in front of them. You know, the one they were arguably hired to do.  In fact, even when they are otherwise competent, they’re so busy playing f*ck-f*ck games (I could tell you stories and how) that the job not only suffers, but becomes distorted by their game playing.

This is not always political, as I said. In fact, at a certain level it is by definition non-political.  However, the higher you go in a corrupt hierarchy of a field taken over by the left, the more likely these people are actual convinced Marxists.

But whatever they are, and whatever they believe, power-oriented people make horrible employees and worse bosses. Mostly because the job and the potential wealth it might or might not generate have absolutely nothing to do with their path to power. And their path to power is all important.

I’d guess, from my and friends’ experiences that at least 50% of what goes on in companies (and much more in some) is contrary to what is needed for that company to survive and make money.  It’s all in the service of someone’s games and power acquisition.

So, what does all this mean?  One of the things it means is that government needs to be a lot less powerful. It is better to have businessmen by power than to have the powerful politicians be bribed with wealth.  Because at least the first have some idea of other people existing and wanting things, beyond what’s in the businessman’s head (because if the businessman is that clueless he’ll go bankrupt and stay bankrupt.) Right now our federal government attracts people who crave power like sh*t attracts flies.  Which means it is increasingly a corrupt money-sink that does nothing anyone wants of it.

Government being a necessary evil, let the overarching branch of it have the least power and let power devolve ever down, till the most power is with the individual human being himself. Yes, I know it will take a miracle. Miracles sometimes do happen.

Part of making this one happen is the culture.  Marxists have succeeded to a bizarre degree in making normal, every day businessmen, those who seek wealth and yep will acquire power, into the villains.

Now, businessmen aren’t saints.  No class or type of person is. Once they become big and powerful enough, the temptation is to use that power to knock out business rivals. That’s just humans being humans.  And yep, it will require vigilance, as well as a government where people actually believe in equality before the law and don’t try to use — say — tax law to favor their big donors and stomp down start up rivals.

However, businessmen in general are more likely to be rational and moral than any politician ever, and certainly than any powerful (but hidden) unelected bureaucrat in the machinery of government.

The fact that our books, movies, etc. sell it the other way around, representing apparatchiks as selfless paragons of virtue and every person who makes his wealth by selling or running a company that makes something as evil and crooked is one of the reasons we’re in this mess.

It’s time to turn it around. It’s time to blow that stereotype sky high.

Politics is downstream from culture. Stop pouring sludge into the stream, and start cleaning.

In the end we win, they lose, but let’s not make it harder than it has to be.  And let’s try not to make it the work of the next generation.  I have maybe 30 years left, if I’m lucky. I hope to see at least the first glimmers of the turn around.

Get it done.

 

 

*So I lied. I’m not going to write a new post today. The novel is late, and I need to finish that. OTOH I AM going to fiddle with the blog at lunchtime and possibly after work. So if you notice wildly appearing and disappearing features, headers and titles, pretend you can’t see it ;)  It will pass. – SAH*

Immovable A Blast From the Past From June 2013

Recently I posted about the fact that at least the gatekeepers in science fiction are solidly left – and by left I mean they’d shock many people in our college campuses – which leads to the selection of works that enforce (a rather colorless, drab, and frankly unreal) “political correctness.”

I thought there was no disputing this. Look, guys, as the country debated things like government take over of health care, 99% of my colleagues said a resounding “yeah.” Redistribution of wealth? A resounding yeah. Restrictions on doing business – yeah. The science fiction field is full of works with evil military, dastardly corporations and saintly public servants. Woman after woman in the field imagines herself downtrodden and preaches endlessly about evil males and thinks she’s fighting the patriarchy that in her mind existed circa 1950. (And in fact not since the thirties or, for some aspects, never outside Islamic countries.)

In fact, the only place you can find as far left as science fiction is the college campus.
Imagine my surprise when someone – a person I like actually, personally, and outside politics – informed me on my facebook page that I was mistaken and if I thought science fiction was hard left it was because I didn’t know where the center was.

Right…

He assured me that science fiction was libertarian. After all, Wikipedia says so. I have by the way had this quoted at me by foreign fans. Which at least makes some sense. They haven’t sat at panels in sf cons and heard writers and editors declare themselves socialists or say that their duty is to “unsettle the bourgeois.” (This due to the fact that these luminaries lack mirrors, I think.) And they might not know that the dreck that wins most of the peer-awards (really, guys, really? The Cultural revolution was nicer than the American suburbia? And you bought that because it was all wrapped in sentimentality or because you secretly agree? I’m not even sure I know which answer I’d prefer from you.) is not in fact the best that’s produced here. It’s like my poor mother not knowing anything about the IRS scandals because the press there won’t report them.

But that a local thought the field was “mostly libertarian” is jaw-droppingly strange.

And then I realized what the heck he was talking about. I’d “misestimated where the center is” because the center, like Pratchett’s turtle, moves. That is, he figures that libertarian is now anyone who isn’t openly a Stalinist and advocating the internment of everyone to right of Lenin.

At least that is the only interpretation that can be put to “don’t know where the center is.”

So… let me explain something – the definitions of left and right are at best flawed. But let’s go with the idea that the left advocates for maximum government control. Despite the flapping about keeping the government out of people’s bodies and private decisions, they do after all advocate for controlling what people can drink, eat, smoke, what kind of health care people can get, and what procedures are approved of (abortion) and which denied (life extending surgery [whether or not] of dubious value.) They in fact think that either the government or a group of enlightened people needs to keep the masses from making “the wrong decisions.”

I’m not saying anything controversial. Person after person at the Democrat convention in 12 said that everyone has to belong to something and we belong to the government.

That’s the left. And frankly, as someone who grew up learning Marxism (in every course in tenth and eleventh grade) and studying (and experiencing) both socialism and communism, those are the foundations of socialism and communism. “The individual counts for nothing, the collective is all. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.”

Let’s place that on the left pole, shall we?

By comparison to that, I AM the right. (I get called right but actually the current left/right continuum is on internationalist/nationalist lines, not on the lines of individual freedom — which means libertarians don’t fit anywhere. Since I get called “right” I’ll take that. I’m certainly opposite both communism and fascism, both red and black totalitarianism.) I stand on the opposite side, holding my broomstick like a samurai sword and saying “I don’t care what you need, you don’t have the right to take from anyone against their will.” That is me. Or at least that’s me as I would like things to be. Morally – mentally – I stand solidly anchoring the side of the individual against the state.

Now, I am not stupid, and while in an ideal world, a system of all being extreme individualists would work, in an ideal world so would communism work. (It’s just that in an ideal world for communism, humans would all be termites or carpenter ants or something.)

So while my heart is pure I’m willing to compromise. I’m willing to understand that governments are needed in order to secure the individual’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I’ve read the constitution and I’ve seen that it’s good. Common defense? Yeah, we need that. After all the foreign nations aren’t all – or any of them – angels. Not letting the states go to war with each other? I’m all for that. Having the president negotiate with foreign powers. Yay. Most of the other stuff left to the states? Okay. It could be inconvenient having to move between states, but after all people do that all the time. So let the states be laboratories of governance. I’ll buy that.

I’ll go that far, but no further. There are evils already inherent in that compromise, like the critters who believe that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness gives them the right to confiscate the results of other people’s labor or that “at some point you’ve made enough money” – because it arrogates to them to decide how much people should make. Like the people who think they should have the right to every email you send, to store somewhere and look over for signs of sedition. Like those who think that the people the country should be defended against are those who believe in the constitution.

But a government is needed. And if we can keep the intrusions to a minimum, we can take a little poison with our tea, like the nineteenth century people who took a little arsenic every day.

So, is my position center? Good heavens NO. There can be no center between the Stalinists who would enslave, silence and murder all who disagree with them and those who wish to keep a maximum of freedom, responsibility and power in the individual.

The center does not move just because one side gets more and more extreme. And the center holds no special virtue anyway.

Look, if half the people think that you should cut your head off, and half think the head should stay on, do you compromise by cutting off your ears?

Of course you don’t. Cutting your head of is wrong even if half the people believe you should do it. It is wrong even if all the people believe you should do it.

I don’t particularly care how many “experts” tell me a command economy is better – I grew up watching command economies up close and personal. I can also read seven languages and I KNOW the unholy mess Europe is in. I’ve also studied economics, which by the way is a science and not a sort conjuring wand that you can wave around to get the results you want. I know that you can raise the minimum wage till you’re blue in the face but it will not create prosperity. What it will create is the type of market distortion that makes illegal immigration unstoppable and makes the less-educated Americans already here unemployable (and dependent, and suffering from all sorts of pathologies.)

Because the people who believe in the magic wand of minimum wage are more than half the country, does that make the solution sensible? No. Not any more than creating and raising a minimum wage makes it “real”. It just creates distortions and evokes the law of unintended consequences. It’s sort of like making cancer illegal so no one will die of it. All you’re doing is making the MENTION of cancer illegal and ensuring MORE people die of it.

Every time an all-powerful state gets power over individuals, it ends in tears. Sometimes – most of the time – it’s the mass murders, from Hitler (yes, he was left bucko. Kissing cousins to Stalin. They merely disagreed on whether state power should be national or worldwide) Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot. Sometimes it’s the soft glove of lack of innovation and settling for less that has taken over most of Europe (and how many young people who couldn’t find jobs have died of drug abuse or despair? Can you count them? No? Why not? Because you’ve been told it’s unbridled markets that cause the trouble? We haven’t had unbridled markets anywhere for a century.)

And sometimes, when it ALMOST works, when the country is more a tribe than a country, as in most of Scandinavia, it just leaves you open for plundering by foreigners who come in and are unassimilated and unassimilable and hate you because you pay and pay and pay but you can’t MAKE them like you.
Every time the individual is left at least a bit of freedom (we are at best social democrats) unparalleled prosperity and innovation – UNEXPECTEDLY – flows out onto the world. Must be luck!

Is there a center between these two points? A place where only some people are killed? A place where only half of your earnings are plundered? (About where we are, at least if you’re self-employed.) Is that just? Is that fair?

If three wolves and sheep vote on what’s for dinner, is it the center to make the sheep only half-dead?

And if all of science fiction writes about the glorious future when the wolves eat the capitalist sheep does that make the wolves right? Does that mean that’s the center now?

Let’s not kid ourselves – the fans who remain hardcore fans and still attend cons are those who believe the center moves. They have gone along with the stories of all men as villains, humanity as a plague upon the earth, redistribution and glorious statism forever. There are exceptions: some cons in the South East. But by and large the field tilts further left every year.

Is this where the center is? No.

Is this where the rest of the country is?

Snort. If it were the print runs wouldn’t fall every year.

Yes, I know. It’s because those… those… those… rednecks refuse to be enlightened. (Weirdly, Baen doesn’t have that issue. Baen continues to sell. Yeah I know “they sell to those rednecks” because they publish “right wing tripe.” Actually Baen publishes all political opinions and finds readers of every political color. Maybe the other houses should try it? Maybe they should look at how sf from different perspective sells indie to people who in fact haven’t gone along with the ride to the far left? Maybe they should consider that in fact people who disagree with them are not some sort of evil fanatics but simply people who believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)

People who, in fact, know the more you feed the beast the more it will – eventually – eat you. Turns out unbridled unaccountable power is not held by altruistic scientists somewhere, always looking to serve others but by self serving bureaucrats who will torture those who oppose their power – for now psychologically. And that’s wrong. It’s always wrong.

Because the consensus might move and the center mean nothing, but: A government that allows for individual freedom and human dignity?  THAT is the ideal and it doesn’t move.

Go on – tell me that because I don’t believe in controlling others, nor do I grant you the right to take from me my freedom, my labor, or my property without my consent, I am a “fascist” and “extreme right.”
I’m only extreme right when opposed to the fanatical devotion to faceless bureaucratic government the left now seems to believe in. And if that’s the left, I’m so far right that by definition everything else is to the left. (Fascist? Good Lord! You mean Hitler didn’t believe in power to the government? Who would have thunk it.)

I am what I’ve always been: a believer not in the masses but in the individual.

The RIGHTS of the individual outweigh the WISHES of the many.

Eppur NO si muove

 

It didn’t extend the text very much. It doesn’t let me move that column. Ah well.
For now I just want to point out that contrary to rumors, neither Greebo nor I are cyborgs.
And I don’t have a throne in my volcano lair.
Okay, so I MIGHT be slap happy.
I’ll post something real tomorrow.

So, what was the last writer of color you read?

Hint, the answer is “whatever writer you read last, since I’ve still to find a single transparent writer.” Which is good, since it would be disturbing. And I hope one of the last you read is this chick Sarah A. Hoyt and her novel Deep Pink(which is profoundly weird, yes, but come on you guys, if you didn’t like weird, you wouldn’t hang out around here, would you?)

Anyvay….. I swear there are people who never read a book trying to dictate not just what the rest of us MUST write, but also what the rest of us must read.

I thought the “challenge to read writers of color” was stupid enough when I first heard of it 10 years ago, but it’s only gotten stupider. Now entire writers’ organizations (puts hat to chest and holds a minute of silence for RWA. I’d do it for SFWA but RWA was once far more useful including teaching and mentoring stuff SFWA never had. Besides SFWA is long dead and rotting, so I’m going to edge away from the coffin.) are falling into this insanity.  We’re hearing that BLIND-JUDGED-CONTESTS, where you can’t even guess at the name of the writer (and these days, honestly, it won’t help. I swear my kids, now mid to late twenties are the last properly spelled names in their generation.) are “racist.”

And we’re hearing that your novels must be “inclusive” and at the same time you can’t write anyone who isn’t exactly like you.

Seriously, how many cat-addicted Portuguese-born women can I write?  (The person who just muttered he or she is waiting for me to write ONE can go to the corner without dinner AND without a book to read. I’m not saying I’ll never write someone with my background, but she won’t be ME. Mary Sues fail to interest me.)

They also think writers read only about characters just like them. And that if you aren’t actively seeking out writers “of color” (Well, you must tell me, chilluns, where you find transparent readers. Because I’m curious.)  or giving awards to them, then you’re evil and racist.

This bullshit has gotten so bad that Stephen King himself has gotten out of his left-leaning tower that what matters, really, is the novel. Or the work of art. The actual writer is irrelevant.

He’s right you know? To this day it can’t be proven who Shakespeare was.  Me, who studied the era, think that the Oxford theory is a bunch of elitist codswallop and that the Anne Hathaway/Queen Elizabeth theory is a bunch of feminist nonsense, for the Marlowe theory to work the man would have needed massive doses of thorazine which they didn’t have, and…  But the truth is we don’t know. Was he actually gay and just married for show? We don’t know. Bisexual? Likely, but we don’t know. Did he identify as a winged dragon and an ornate building? We don’t know. Did he dress like a woman and hang out in bars? We don’t KNOW.

What we do know is that the characters and plots he created still speak to us across time and space and often in translation.  The art lives, as the artist lies moldering in his grave. Or rather (as someone who as a kid played in some ancient stone mausoleums (what? you know you only didn’t do it because you didn’t have them. Amazing places for hide and seek with a side of making your cousin pee himself when you jump out.) probably mostly some musty-smelling dust.)

This is how people read. We don’t care what the writer looks like. Actors are a little different and we DO care because we have to look at their mugs. (And no, I’m not watching any historical dramas set in Europe with prominent people played by black actors. No, it’s not racist. It’s the fact I know history. You want an historical drama with black people? Set it in Africa. There weren’t many white people around.) But writers? People could be purple with pokadots. I don’t CARE.

Sure, if you’re writing about a village populated by Zulus, I care that you know what you’re talking about. That has zero to do with your skin color, and everything to do with research and sometimes (but not always) life experience.

I know I could have got a lot more publicity and push in my trad career if I’d written about Portugal. Double if I could write about victimhood.

The problem is writing about the REAL Portugal doesn’t translate well. When you think you’re being pretty sympathetic but realistic, people tell you that you’re a narrow minded pain in the ass (a rejection I once got for a story set in Portugal. And Larry and I still get bitching about the Portuguese scenes. Some of it from Portuguese. Don’t ask.) Because you don’t fit the American head-picture of Portugal.

I actually had to learn to write Americans, because of that. Okay, my contemporary Americans are odd, as in, see Dyce Dare, but then all my characters are odd.

Anyway, the point is the many people who read Dyce Dare, not a single one — not even on finding out who I really am — has given a good g*ddamn that I didn’t grow up in Colorado, with crazy parents who own a bookstore. (One out of three isn’t bad.)

People read novels for novels. If you read people’s skin, you …. are in a completely different sort of hobby.

I won’t claim that I write what sells. Me and salesmanship are rarely in the same zipcode at the same time. heck, my garage sales usually give stuff away because I don’t know how to sell.

Mostly I write because a character shows up in my head and says “Hey toots,” (My characters are very rude. Also the last one to say so was a cat. Yeah, yeah. Look for The Protectors Series later this year.) “write my story.”  That’s it. And because I’m assured that if I let the books build up forever, they will drive me insane(r).

I write because I like telling stories. Which means… I don’t know. That I’m a traitor to my gender and skin color, not to mention genetic origin? Bah. I can’t betray things I have no allegiance for. Sure, all of them influenced who I am, and I’m assured my voice is unique (most used word in my reviews. It’s probably not a good thing.)

BUT most of all? I write because I must, and I hope people enjoy it.

I’m very proud of my award wins, mostly because neither award gives a flying flick about people’s skin color and orientation, age and nationality, or any of that.

For all of those clamoring that we must give awards “properly” by skin color and other characteristics that have bloody nothing to do with writing: I’m a first generation immigrant, a woman of (tan. The paintchip says spun gold) color, writing in my third language and from my own “unique” perspective.

What do I hear when people tell me one must read writers by color and other such characteristics, including but not limited to whom they sleep with?  What do I hear when I’m told we must give awards to more people like that? Even though NO ONE can tell the color of a writer unless they employ extraordinary effort and search engines?

I hear “You poor little thing. We know you’re not as capable as male, white people, and those who speak English natively.  And we want to give you an A for effort.”

My answer to such racist, sexist, demeaning bullsh*t is and will remain “Gaze upon my middle fingers. Behold! I have a matched set.”