Category: Uncategorized

Sorry I didn’t post yesterday.  I was finishing up the rock moving and yard reshaping phase of this year’s great gardening project. (Which, other than carrying a few buckets of pebbles to a better location will hold until next March or whenever snow stops blowing.)

As usual, when I’m doing these things, I have time to think.  What I thought about specifically was this article I’ve linked at instapundit, and which I can’t find right now, which was on dishwashers.

I don’t know how many of you have realized how ridiculous dishwashers have gotten.  I mean, I have realized how ridiculous washers have gotten.

For years we got expensive front loaders, and yet our clothes kept smelling, there were stains that would not come out, and these things seemed to last only 5 years, on the outside.  And I knew it wasn’t our problem, as such, because at the same time we started noticing we couldn’t get our clothes clean, the detergent isle of the supermarket sprouted an entire section of odor removing things, febreeze got added to detergents, and, in general, people smelled odd…

Then the washer broke while we were also very, very broke (we were paying mortgage and rent in the run up to buying this.  I saw an ad for, I THINK a $300 washer, and we went to look.  What we found, instead, was a $200, not advertised washer.  As we’re looking at it the saleswoman hurries over and tells us we don’t want it. This washer, she says, uses lots of water.  For those who don’t know I suffer from an unusual form of eczema. While it’s triggered mostly by stress with a side of carbs, it can also, out of the blue, take offense at a slight trace of detergent left on the clothes. I’ve found that the eczema got markedly worse the less water the washer used.  And it required me to run the washer three times, once with soap and two without to avoid major outbreaks.  The idea of using lots and lots of water was great, so I was all excited.  Which shocked the poor saleswoman halfway to death.  I will point out, though, though that this washer washes well enough I can get away with only one extra rinse cycle and if I forget it it’s usually survivable. Also, our clothes don’t smell. Unfortunately, we’ve not found that time of washer any of the times we’ve walked through the appliance isle, so I think that choice has been eliminated.

Certainly the choice of dishwashers that use “lots” (i.e. what they used 20 years ago) of water and electricity was never offered to us.  And since we seemed to have really lousy luck with dishwasher, I found every time we replaced one over the last 20 years, they had less space for dishes (more insulation, to allow for less electricity) to the point that I needed to do 3 or even 4 loads for a family of four. I mean, I cook from scratch, but I really don’t use that much stuff.  And it ran slower than before.  Right now our dishwasher actually washes (a bonus) but it takes four hours to run a cycle.  I rarely do more than one wash a day, though, because it’s just Dan and I, and we … well… the kids used a lot more glasses and little plates, and frankly meals get more complicated for four people.

All the same, there was a time there, for like 10 years, where we were running all this “green” approved stuff, and not only was I running the washer and drier more or less continuously, but to make things more “interesting” I was using MORE water and electricity, in the sense that I was running the appliances a ton more.

This of course is what I also found with the “low flush” toilets.  We had them in our previous house, and we found that we spent an inordinate amount of time flushing the toilet.  Also, since it took four or five flushes to do the job or one, the fact we were actually only using half the water per flush didn’t save any water. We spent instead twice to three times the amount of water the “high flush” toilets had spent.

All this, btw, to appease Paul Ehrlich — the prophet of wrong. As in, if he foresees something it will be wrong — and his ridiculous idea we’d run out of potable water in 1978.  Apparently none of these people have noticed that 1978 has come and gone with no problems.  And as for electricity, if they stop their idiocy about nuclear, it’s not even a consideration. (And no, Chernobyl isn’t a caution about nuclear energy. It’s a caution about stupid communist regimes. They can’t run anything — not even a nuclear plant — without destroying it.)

Anyway, having thought of all these unintended consequences, I had two thoughts. (Hey, sometimes I have more than one.  It’s rare, I grant you.)

The first was, isn’t it weird that all these regulations always trend towards making humans smelly, improperly washed, infective?

Sure perhaps it’s just a side effect.  Or perhaps the political side that hates humans — really, really, really hates humans — just wants to torture us while virtue signaling.

Maybe I am paranoid. But it seems like a great part of their regulations and plans, including the Green Nude Heel are designed above all to “make the peasants suffer.”  I mean, it’s not like any of these people ever actually hold themselves subject to the regulations they create for others. After all, rules are for the little people, right? Which means they want to be the only ones who live in relatively pleasant ways while forcing the “peasants” to live in muck.

Again, maybe I’m paranoid, but you know, humans do like these distinctions. And non-introspective, authoritarian personalities will give rein to their basest instincts.

The second thing I thought is that it’s astonishing that for all their virtue signaling, not a single one of their rules and regulations designed supposedly to save the environment have the desired effect.  More, it’s astonishing that all of their virtue signaling has the opposite effect of what they claim to wish.

Low flush toilets use more water. Slow, inefficient dishwashers force more loads, and therefore use both more water and more electricity.  Low water dishwashers don’t wash really well and therefore have to be run over and over again, using more water and electricity.

But wait, there’s more.  Their wind energy generating big gigantic fans are exterminating birds and bringing some species to the brink of extinction. AND it gives, of course, unpredictable energy, though not as unpredictable as solar, which has throughs leading to brown-outs, and to make things shinier, fries wildlife and destroys the ecology in acres and acres of land.

And then there’s all the other stuff: the recycling of paper that’s worse for the environment than just harvesting fast-growing trees grown for the purpose of making paper.  The alcohol in gasoline that both makes food more expensive and destroys engines, which will need to be replaced at a greater cost in ecological damage.

How is it possible? You’d think that at least once, by accident, they’d get regulations right, right?  You’d think at least once, by accident, even if they made our lives more unpleasant, they’d achieve what they claim to want, right?

So why haven’t they?

I don’t know. I can’t explain it other than “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times it’s enemy action.”

Which means–

Which means if the Green Nude Heels is ever implemented, not only will we all be ruined and dying in the millions, but it will ALSO somehow screw up the Earth and the environment, possibly fatally.

Environmental alarmism and statism? Not even once.

Those who beat their chests and claim to want to save the Earth hate humanity. And aren’t too fond of the rest of the Earth too.

It’s time we tell them “Oh, you want to limit the damage humans do?  You first, buddy.  You first.”

It Was a Bright Cold Day in April, and the Clocks Were Striking Patriarchy – a blast from the past from April 2016

 

‘As you lie there,’ said O’Brien, ‘you have often wondered you have even asked me — why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, “I understand how: I do not understand why“? It was when you thought about “why” that you doubted your own sanity. You have read the book, Hayek’s book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?’

‘You have read it?’ said Winston.

‘I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.’

‘Is it true, what it says?’ Something about the idea that O’Brien had written it did not ring true, but Winston had no proof it had existed before the Utopia.

‘It was thought to be true once, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The individual by himself, no compensation to historically oppressed groups, no debasing of privilege.  Everyone knows the only way to run a society is to keep the forces of oppression and compensation in balance, to right historical wrongs.  The way to sanity is to always be aware of your evil thoughts, your tendency to abuse your privilege.  And everyone has privilege, except the priests of balancing, the enlightened, those who know how to keep society running.

The peons can’t be trusted with such delicate balancing of forces.  Left to themselves,s the lumpen proletariat will embrace greed and money making and the society created will be unequal, and wrong, and chaotic.  Like Somalia.”

“What’s Somalia?” Winston asked.  And for a moment he saw a shadow of confusion cross O’Brien’s eyes.  “It’s not important.  That’s how to answer the idea of individual freedom.  It’s like Somalia.  And Somalia is not Utopia. Utopia is perfect and it’s forever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.’

The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into O’Brien’s face. He knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the enlightened ones did not seek power for their own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the enlightened ones was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it.

You could see it in his face. O’Brien knew everything. A thousand times better than Winston he knew what the world was really like, in what degradation the mass of human beings lived and by what lies and barbarities the enlightened ones kept them there. He had understood it all, weighed it all, and it made no difference: all was justified by the ultimate purpose. What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

‘You are ruling over us for our own good,’ he said feebly. ‘You believe that human beings are not fit to govern themselves, and therefore –‘

He started and almost cried out. A pang of pain had shot through his body. O’Brien had pushed the lever of the dial up to thirty-five.

‘That was stupid, Winston, stupid!’ he said. ‘You should know better than to say a thing like that.’

He pulled the lever back and continued:

‘Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. Only the enlightened ones can punish humanity as it deserves to be punished.  Humanity is a cancer upon the Earth, the only species capable of rendering others extinct, the only species that will destroy the planet left to its own devices.

But killing everyone would be wrong, because then someone might get the idea they could kill us and we don’t want to die.  And the instinct to reproduce is so strong, that merely outlawing reproduction wouldn’t work.

Setting a barrier between men and women? Convincing women men are the oppressors?  Convincing women that they are simultaneously fragile and powerful, till they’re crazy?  That works.  Convincing people heterosexuality is somehow abnormal, and sex is just for play, and then ultimately that all sex everywhere is about power and wrong?  That works.  The birthrate is falling, Winston, and soon we will have w orld without people.”  Winston stopped, a mad gleam in his eyes.  “A world without people.”

For a moment Winston ignored the dial. He made a violent effort to raise himself into a sitting position, and merely succeeded in wrenching his body painfully.

‘But how can you control all humans?’ he burst out. ‘Don’t you think here and there, a new colony will start and the species will grow anew.”

O’Brien silenced him by a movement of his hand. ‘Oh, yes,” he said.  “Humans are like cockroaches.  But if we get in their minds and make them believe us, then we have them. You can make them believe anything. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not make you believe. Invisibility, levitation — anything. That despite biological, obvious differences, and other differences in musculature, in brain formation, despite hormones and how they shape everything about a human before he’s even born, we can make humans believe there are no differences between the sexes.  And alternately we can make them believe all males are natural oppressors and must be punished simply for existing, and all women, no matter how powerful or rich are natural victims and must be appeased.  We can make them believe there are no differences, and at the same time that there are six genders, or ten, or twelve, or a hundred, all of them natural from birth.’

“But that’s mad,” Winston shouted.  “Utterly mad.  You can’t make anyone deny the truth of their own eyes, forever.”

He knew the lever would be pulled.

****

“How many genders does humanity have, Winston?”

“Two!”

The lever was pulled.

“How many?”

“Four.”

The lever was pulled.

“How many?”

“A hundred”

The lever was pulled.

“How many?”

“As many as the enlightened say.”

“That is right, Winston, you are almost well.  And what is PIV.”
“Violation.  Always violation.”

“Can’t a woman consent to sex with a man?”

“There is no true consent, since even in Utopia cis het males are programmed to institute patriarchy.  You must always be vigilant against your own thoughts and your own unconscious privilege, even if you can’t be fully aware of it.  All penetration is violation.  A baby is an invader in a woman’s body.  Utopia is forever and only the enlightened can tell us when we’re wrong. Because the individual is not able to balance the forces of retribution and oppression and greed by himself, or not even within himself. Society is always imbalanced, and there will be oppression till all of humanity is gone, so the enlightened ones must teach us and correct us until that time.”

*********

Winston gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken zeem to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the androgynous, unreadable face. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of zees nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Zee had won the victory over Zeeself. Zee loved Big Gender Indeterminate Sibling.

Yes, I know, you guys are wondering why I’m writing about culture, when it’s obvious I ain’t got no culture.

Well, actually–

Look, I like museums, and historical lectures (if I can find them with minimal or separatable (totally a word) politics, and if we ever get the money we’ll get season tickets to one of the music thingies (look, not enough caffeine, and all I can think of is the Colorado Springs Symphony.)

I’m just fond of that stuff enough to make normal human beings uncomfortable around me (coupled with the fact most TV series bore me to death) while refusing to be high culture, because high culture these days is defined by “does it support the revolution.” Even our d*mn art museum is all about exhibits that high light the plight of illegal immigrants, or whatever. And I dislike those not even because I disagree with them.

I mean,I do. I mean, that plight is easily solvable by not breaking into my d*mn country.  Don’t like your country? Change it. We — quite literally can’t take everyone from a dysfuntional country. There isn’t enough room, but worse, you’ll change us by coming here. You’re already changing us by coming here. And I don’t like it.  Hold on to this thought, it will be coming back around, okay?

For now, I’ll say what pisses me off about “high culture” is that it’s boring. It’s mind-bogglingly, bizarrely boring.  Particularly since it seems to be coordinated from some central location (might be. Might not be. It might just be highly mimetic people who want to be loved all jumping on the band wagon. It’s probably a combination of the two.)  Once you see the bursts of their causes hit the media/art/entertainment/news industrial complex all at once, you can’t stop seeing it. And if the topic is either crazy cakes or just stupid — like the plight of poor law breakers coming into the country to stress all our social welfare services, because they don’t get them in their land — from the beginning, I might find the first one amusing, but by the third, I’m going “Oh, that sh*t again.”

BTW they always did this to an extent. If you go back, you’ll see themes propagate through media/news/art every few years.  It’s just the current ones, in the year three of the Great Unmasking, are generally speaking even more eye-roll worthy and insane than the 80s push to “Make single motherhood respectable and worthy of sainthood.”

But at any rate, that’s NOT the type of culture I’m talking about.

I’m talking about national culture.

One of the comments caught in my spam filter, which I decided not to let through though you guys would have found it AMAZING is the one about how the future belongs to a white culture, with women being subjugated and subjected to the power of men. Or something.

Yes, I know that is a dream on a certain side of the internet (not sure they even register in the political map, but they’re really loud online.) It’s also one of the craziest things I’ve ever heard.  It’s the “left turned on its head” attempt to be “right”.  Except it’s not. It’s also stupid, a-historical and like most things that come from the left, right side up or wrong side up, it doesn’t work with real human beings.

Because, you know, culture isn’t race. It just isn’t. We can get confused by this because certain, broad racial groups got integrated into a global marketplace/visibility while at certain points of social development.  So, most of Africa is tribal and has the issues of tribal culture. Africa is also, largely, one race as seen from other continents (not as seen from inside Africa, because, see tribal.)

But to believe that representative government works all the same for the “white” race requires you to think that the only white people are English. No, seriously.  And even the English not so much, depending on the time at which you study them, because they’ve gone through some amazingly wobbly periods, at different times in their history (like the current. And yes, it has to do with immigrants, kind of, but not really. It has more to do with Soviet infiltration.)  But the French? The Scandinavians? The GERMANS? none of those act like a race that will be great with representative government.  And btw, NONE of them have a tradition of making women chattel, even after women have caused wars or worse. THAT tradition is from a completely different culture, which while also white (guys, the Mediterranean subrace that most Arabs belong to is a subrace of caucasians, okay?)

Explaining things like why the Portuguese used to dominate the world and are now at best a 2 1/2 world country for governance leads to some amazingly bizarre assumptions about the “race” of Portuguese changing between say the 16th and 17th centuries, which is sort of the equivalent of “the parties switched sides.”  Almost wet myself when seeing a “racial supremacy” site support the “race change” of the Portuguese on the basis of… the portraits of kings.  No, seriously.  This requires ignoring that the kings of Europe were mostly related to other kings of Europe, and in Portugal in the 19th century they were all related to Queen Victoria. Etc.

Look, to an extent, I understand the left’s confusion of race and culture. Particularly because of US subcultures that have been propagandized for generations into behaving a certain way and that has penetrated all of education, often in an upside-down attempt at propagandizing (let’s say considering yourself historically wronged does not promote good behavior.)

Also, culture is largely invisible. Particularly when you’re inside it. But you do see it in other groups, and if it coincides with skin color/body characteristics, it’s easy to attribute the behavior to that.  Humans have been doing it since their tribal phase.

But here’s the thing, for all it’s invisible: culture exists. It makes a difference. And it definitely affects how humans govern themselves (and everything they do together.) Culture, not some mythical race change is responsible for both the Portuguese empire and the fact it couldn’t hold.

Culture is not individual. By this I mean, as an individual you have no specific to YOU culture.  Sure, you will have individual ways of acting. But what you have is part of a culture IN YOU. Some of it you absorbed before you could even talk.  And it affects how you act.

It CAN be changed, but it requires several things, including isolation, introspection and will power.  Acculturation hurts and is difficult as hell.

All of this is very important, and all of this is getting f*cked up right now by the view of the culture as indistinguishable from race.  It is this view that causes the left to scream we’re “racist” for not wanting to invite the destitute of the world on over an open border, or for wanting to do rudimentary screening and keeping undesirables out.  Because the left is racist they see only race. And they view doing that as the same thing as keeping people out/down because inferior races. (Thing is, if you talk to a leftist you also find they do believe people who tan are in some measure inferior. They just should be helped and accommodated, and must never ever be made to acculturate or come up to scratch. Because that is somehow “racist.” Never mind.)

It is this view that causes the upside-down left to scream only whites can govern themselves.

And it is all so f*cked up it makes one want to giggle through the tears.

Look–  I have a 23 and me test in hand. What is more, so does my husband. So do a lot of friends.

If race and culture were equivalent, then I’d have come back with 100% Portuguese ancestry. There would be Spanish ancestry. German ancestry.  These different cultures would have isolated, radically different DNA. Okay, I do have a couple of friends who are MOSTLY German. But even that is ignoring all the Romans who left their genes all over the place way further back than we can even test for, and who are now part of “German Ancestry.”  Or how little you actually get from anyone past your great grands (in genetic terms.) Look, as I stand here, I’m apparently descended, in a direct line of mothers, from a woman in 10th century Norway.  My Scandinavian DNA, while more than Fauxahontas Amerindian DNA is something like 2%.  (And yet the facial structure and pale eyes and hair surface again and again on mom’s side.)

Instead Europe is mostly made of Europe. It would be easier for Americans to visualize this, if they see 18th century US stretching into the future a thousand years, then people being tested. (18th century because travel was more limited. NOTE not nonexistent.)  Some people in those conditions, 1k years from now, might have “pure Ohio DNA” or “Pure Colorado DNA” but they would be rare. And in the port cities, with lots of commerce? Or the seaboard states? Katie bar the door. People would be mutts, sons of mutts.

Which is what Europe is, by and large.  Racially, Europe is “potato.” And yes, that goes double for the vaunted Anglo-Saxons.  For one, there was more trade — of everything including genes — between the peninsula and the British isles than you can shake a big stick at (and judging by DNA reports, several very big sticks were shaken… metaphorically speaking.)

However it is true that different parts of Europe behave radically differently in relation to representative government, hiring for jobs, how companies are run, etc.

For instance, all countries that come from Rome are governed by a combination of oligarchy and nepotism (and yes, do business that way too.)  In the Roman Empire this was open, now it’s swept under a prettyfying pretense of “representative government.” But it is no more that than it is pure market capitalism. Or socialism, for that matter. All those are modules plugged in mostly for appearances sake.

And btw, again, not race, but culture. Rome wasn’t race. And the original Roman stock was replaced by adoption/invasion/etc.  What they were really good at though was transmitting “the way things are done” which is CULTURE.

So while I’m willing to entertain the idea that some aspects of culture might be genetic, it still makes no sense when you consider the persistence through near-complete genetic replacement.

Culture is a bizarre, stubborn beast. I bet if you dig really far back, you’ll find that each part of the Roman empire has slight twists on how business is done based on the culture of the tribes that were there and the culture of where legions were recruited when Rome invaded, and the unique cross section of that.

I know there are differences in things like public presentation between the North and the South of Portugal that are cultural and very very old. (People still intermarried.  I mean, 23 and me assures me I have ancestors from — the horror — Lisbon. The cultures remained different.)

And despite the native cultures, you can still see the imprint of the Roman Empire in most South American countries.

Honestly, because most cultural assumptions are invisible to those who make them, they’re almost impossible to shake.

I was talking to friends from Africa and the idea of any government being representative in Africa is laughable. The idea of representative government (outside of a few “good” families) in Latin countries is similarly laughable. Even France has a part of this if you dig (I recommend using gloves.) And this regardless of the level of tan people have achieved.  It has nothing to do with race. Culture is more persistent than race.

Part of the blithering idiocy that was the 20th century was thinking humans could be “remade” into new things.  We’ll forget the biological part (it can’t be done) even at the cultural level, this is impossible. No, trust me, China has tried it several times along its history.  Culture remains, now with an added layer of trauma from people trying to re-make it.  Wrong lessons are learned and applied, and the culture is the same, but now even more irrational.

Even Heinlein thought Americans could make over other cultures in the image of theirs. It was a widespread madness.

And this madness will kill us if we persist.

Look, guys…

It is possible for America to take untold numbers of immigrants and remain the same. Of course it is. No, seriously, it is. We have.

But it needs to be done in a way that allows for acculturation. That means not only that integration and assimilation is REQUIRED but that we can’t import vast masses of people all at once, all from the same culture. We did this before with Italians, sure, but we were getting other people too.  And particularly not from LATIN cultures, because what remains of Roman culture is like some sort of mind-virus and will take over given half a chance. It might be breakable, but I don’t know how for groups. I know how for individuals. Short version, again “hurts like hell, and you have to really want it.”

Letting people just walk in, who aren’t self-aware enough to know there are even other ways to think or act? bad, bad idea.

The other part of this? We need to teach our kids American culture. They too are immigrants, in a way. And they won’t be like you, just because they were born from you.  NONE OF THIS IS GENETIC.

Kids need to be taught about America and our system of government and not “America bad.”  America isn’t. Or to put it another way “Compared to what?”

Selling them “America bad”requires teaching them ONLY lies about the rest of the world, too. And it prepares them very badly for what promises to be a very difficult century.

So, build the culture to support our culture.  And stop importing people from other cultures, who don’t even know they have a culture in ways that allow them to hold onto their culture and change our mass culture to be closer to theirs.

Because representative government and free trade and meritocracy?  None of that is plug and play, and doesn’t work with every culture.  And with all its flaws, it’s the best way of living we’ve found.

Sure took me a long time to say just that.  And yet, it is true.

 

 

 

 

Lighting A Candle on the Road to Damascus a Blast From The Past from July 2017

Science fiction and fantasy icon Ursula K Le Guin  has a rather tiresome essay saying that she was once “a man.”  Because, she says, once upon a time the only role models available for women were male, and therefore she viewed herself as a man.  Yes, I’m rolling eyes as I type this, just as I rolled them while reading the nonsense the first time.

I’ve often expounded my theory that people who need someone who is exactly like them in external characteristics to enjoy a book or a movie, have never left the early toddler stage, where having your name in a book really helps you enjoy it.

I never had that problem, and reading stories with men or boys never made me less of a woman.  Perhaps, of course, because I knew a lot of women in normal, every day life.

Books about humans interest me more than books about aliens, now, but books about aliens are usually so badly written and I keep visualizing humans in rubber suits.

Of course, perhaps I’m doing  Le Guin a disservice.  Perhaps, she, rationally wrote the article for mercenary reasons knowing that the way to advance and be considered an icon in the field is to be as leftist as possible.  Or even more.  And that the most prized form of leftism is “feminism” as we wind our way to a full misandrist society.

(It is not wrong nor bad to seek one’s own advancement.  In fact that I can’t do it and still look at myself in the mirror in the morning vexes me greatly.  I blame dad and his notions of honor.  They have crippled him all his life, so of course he shared them with me.  Honorable as an idealized Roman patrician, proud as the devil himself, and yep, inevitably, poor as church mouse.  Okay, he managed to defeat the last due to sheer insane work and self-denial, but it’s not a patch on the life he could have had. What does it say about me that I’m proud of him for it?)

Which brings us to the topic of this post.

By Ursula Le Guin’s definition, before 1992 I was a leftist, in the sense that there were no role models in movies, books, even news or my personal circles, that had non-leftist people who loved liberty.

I was never leftist in the sense that the most leftist people would consider me such.  I was always more or less a reflexive anti-communist, which exempts me from being considered in the same category as, say, Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton. It also shields me from ever being considered “cool” by most editors in my field, who, by the time I broke in, had convinced themselves that communism was where it was at, and that belief in that scourge of human life demonstrated their massive intellect.

However, if you’ve graduated from a Western university in the last forty years, you can say that you were once a leftist.  And that goes double if you graduated from a university in Europe.

Unless you went in fortified and determined to resist brain-washing, (and I was in Europe, where the options, from the US pov are international socialism or national socialism.  there no non-left option) they got under your skin in one way or another.

One way they got under my skin was via my hobby of reading science fiction and fantasy, most of whose practitioners were, at the very least, soft left and many of whom were communist or very very socialist, back when I was young.

Oh, sure, I could resist the outright communists and groan at things like saying capitalism had died because it wasn’t viable, in their so-much-better communist future.  Look, I read Heinlein too.

I even fell for “feminism” (remember I grew up in a Latin country) until I came to the US where the first thing to make me give them the hairy eyeball (besides the fact that honestly, to an outsider the US read as a matriarchy) was their tendency for raping the language (Herstory, pfui. Every time I saw that written anywhere, I knew the leading lights of the movement were exquisitely indoctrinated morons.)  No sane movement does that, inventing meanings for words that the words never had, just so they can change language.  I’m a linguist.  A decent respect for language and etymology is needed for me to consider you a sane intellectual option.

But where they got under my skin were the things that even Heinlein bought into: ecological destruction that needed government intervention, the sense that we were living in the last viable generation on Earth, the idea of massive, destructive population explosion, the idea there simply weren’t enough resources to go around and some extensive  form of government control of private life was inevitable.

Mind you, I still wanted children (I’d also read The Marching Morons) but apparently there was gloom in my heart for what the future held for my descendants.

I worried about crazy things that the left pushed in the news.  The industrialization of China, and its relative opening up to the free market meant more pollution.  The US’s rejection of mass transportation meant – doom and gloom – we’d all run out of oil and have to bicycle everywhere in the not so distant future. Computers were destroying person-to-person communication. Increased pollution was giving us all cancer.  Everything that made human life more comfortable had to be curtailed, removed, destroyed so we could scratch a living from the surface of the Earth a couple more generations.  And then if no miracle occurred, we’d die or return the the stone age. All the good life was gone, and only the husks remained to my generation and succeeding ones.

Looking at that list, it’s no surprise that science fiction publishing and reading retreated howling to fantasy.  After all, what future was there to look forward to?  By the nineties most science fiction was just scolding humans for their sins. (Okay not all, and later I found out my reading habits followed Jim Baen around.  As he moved houses, so did my buying even though at the time I had no idea who he was, and never looked at the editorial house name.)

I was 29 and my son was 1 when I got a gift magazine subscription from an anonymous donor.

The magazine was Reason – then under the redoubtable Virginia Postrel – and I still have no clue who sent it to me.  If you ask me, EVERYONE I knew at the time in the US was at least soft left and some of my friends were considerably hard left.

But someone did send me the magazine.  I don’t remember what the issue was, precisely, but I remember it took on a series of ecological issues, and it had a lot of facts about why these weren’t precisely so.  For the first time in my life people were telling me the future was NOT all doom and gloom.  There was hope for life, liberty and yes, even the pursuit of happiness.

I have stopped subscribing to Reason – sometime after 2001, when liberaltarian became a thing – but I can’t describe the effect those first few issues had on me.

It was like opening a window in a dark, moldy room, and letting the sunshine in when I didn’t know sunshine EXISTED.

All of a sudden, I could integrate what I’d seen with my lying eyes – that people were generally living better, that the world as a whole was safer and cleaner – with facts and theories.  I could understand and integrate the fact that poverty was always greater under socialism and less under a free market, and consider that maybe we were not running out of resources, we were being stamped out of our liberty, and oppression took all our wealth.

I stopped fearing runaway global warming – and how I managed to do that, frankly, when I still remembered the global cooling panic is a testimony to the power of biased media – and world war three, and running out of gasoline, and nuclear energy, and wearing non-organic-material clothing, and pollutants in my beauty products, and guns in the hand of the common folk, and—

I don’t mean that the magazine converted me overnight.  It didn’t. It took at least five years and a lot of thinking for me to become anti-statist and to fully digest the enormity of the lies I’d been told by people in positions of trust.

BUT that subscription to reason was the beginning.  It made me see the contradictions that had been bothering me, but which I thought must mean I was missing something, since everyone who was someone seemed to agree the world was a dark, evil place and becoming more so.

Of course, part of this was the result of the false “uniformity of opinion” created by the mass distribution and control of news, which is fast becoming a thing of the past, as the new media rises in power.  Back then, if your lying eyes showed you something the media — all of the media — said was false, you wondered about your sanity, and the tendency was to fall back in line with the central narrative, unless you really, really couldn’t justify it.

I still don’t know who sent me that subscription, much less why they thought there was hope for me, considering the things I believed and the way I talked at the time.

But without that person, there would have been no Darkship Thieves, no According to Hoyt blog, and none of the PJM  posts, either.  I’d remain anti-communist, but also convinced that the free market and liberty weren’t the answer, and I’d futilely seek a “third way.”  I’d believe socialism was close to the answer, if we could just hold in that state, without falling into full communism.

I hope whoever it was is happy with the results.  I am.  And in the spirit of paying it forward, I’ve sent many a person copies of P. J. O’Rourke’s Eat the Rich or All the Trouble in the World, both of which have the same message as those first Reasons I read. There are other books of course, but those are the ones I normally send.

I’ve also sought to break the chains of leftist-induced depression in blogs and posts, many, many times.  I’ve tried to open the windows for others, so they see there is hope – lots of it – if only they’re willing to work towards it.

The world isn’t coming to an end.  Only the statist world.  And that leaves the future wide open for humanity and liberty.

Be not afraid.  Light a candle and let the hope of a bright future into your life and maybe even into someone else’s.

 

Forget the NYT — pretty much always, really. They’ve become purveyors of bad, bad fiction — and their project to prove America is the most racist nation evah!

That kind of idiocy will only convince the feeble minded. (Of course none of us knows how many are feeble minded. After all the data is vitiated all the way down by people repeating nonsense to virtue-signal and vote fraud… never mind.)

Sure, there was slavery in America in the seventeenth century.  Bad news guys. There was slavery everywhere in the seventeenth century, pretty much.  And it is a failure of the American education system that most people assume that all slaves were black.  First of all, it depended where the slavery was.  Also, if you think slavery in the US was the worst thing ever, (which btw, is the new modified, limited hangout when you call them on their idiocy) you probably are ignorant of conditions in the rest of the world at that time, period.  Hell, it might have been better to be a slave in America at the time than to be a serf in France.  Alma mentions what we can infer about conditions for slaves in the rest of the world.

And no, guys, no. Slavery in Africa wasn’t kinder and gentler just because everyone was the same color. To begin with, the chances are really high that people didn’t consider themselves the same race, no matter what the similarities in coloring or even facial structure. In tribal societies, small differences become really exaggerated. But beyond that, if you study that time period in Africa well… The Dahomey liked sacrificing slaves over the tombs of their kinds. The ones they sold to the west were the lucky ones.

Which brings us, not only to “why the NYT are so stupid that they can only guess their own names two times out of three” but to how they consistently get things upside down.

As in, they get what makes the US different not just completely wrong, but inversely wrong.

It’s not that there was slavery in the US. There was slavery everywhere. It’s not that there was rampant racism in the US. There was rampant racism and tribalism everywhere.  And it certainly is not that there are some remains of racism in the US. The NYT writers, being provincial and stupid, might believe that there is more racism in the US than there is anywhere else in the world. That’s because the US tends to judge itself against the ideal, and our media and public life is a continuous critique of ourselves versus the ideal (which doesn’t exist) non-racist non-sexist etc society.  While Europe and the rest of the world use press and public voices to make themselves look good. And these people are so provincial they don’t observe daily life when they go abroad. No, they stay in top of the line hotels and believe what people tell them.

No. What makes the US special is the way in which it came to be.

The US was a new nation, conceived in liberty.  No, seriously.  Let aside the slavery thing, let pass the ridiculous idea that this is why the US was formed.

The US at the time represented almost unending land, room to spread out, room to try new things.  This combined with the philosophies of the enlightenment (heavily leaning on Greece and Rome) and with the traditions of English law to create…  Something different.

The idea that men should be free. The idea that they are entitled by G-d to their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  An idea so strange that no one had hit upon it. Not for the common man and woman on the streets.

That is the true revolution.  Sure. I know that there was slavery, still when the revolution happened. I know that the revolution wasn’t a “real revolution” but a war confirming an internal change in the way people lived. Etc. etc. etc.

But the real revolution is right there, at the core.  Right here:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

After tribal chiefs, after the divine right of kings, after centuries and millennia of might makes right and the governed belong to the rulers, here is the world turned upside down.

Within it, these words — these revolutionary, crazy words — contained the seeds of real justice, contained the fall of slavery, contained… we don’t know yet, but contained the possibility of a future we can build, a future that’s more equitable than all the past.

Not all the crazy mess of Marx can equal those words. Nothing the NYT has done or will do can equal those words.

The left wants to revile and destroy our founding fathers in order to make themselves appear revolutionary and new, and innovative.

Ain’t never gonna do it biatches. Real revolutionary concepts are never going to be completely ignored again. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.

Sure the founders were flawed and the result of a flawed system, the one before the revolution. That is no reason to erase them.

When you want to become sober, you have to fight from being drunk. When you want to fight depression you have to fight while depressed.

Yes, the founders were men who lived and died in a world full of slavery. But what they built had within it the end of slavery. All kinds of slavery.  It was a mental revolution. The kind that can’t be reset.

The revolution happened. And now in all the countries influenced by the US, slavery is abhorrent. The idea of representative government is at least waved at (though it’s often mostly the homage vice pays to virtue) and prejudice based on color or race or other irrelevant characteristics is considered bad.

Because of those ideas.  Those ideas codified up there.

It’s probably not true that they played The World Turned Upside down when the small, upstart colony defeated the greatest power in the world at the time. But they should have.

Because we were conceived in liberty and born in fire and blood.

And as long as anyone, anyone at all, believes in those revolutionary ideas, the world will never go back to one in which slavery is normal. Either the formalized slavery where a human belonged to another, or the slavery where it was assumed that of course people belonged to the state.

The world turned upside down.  We live in a highly abnormal state.  Where the left wants to take us is the “normal” world of the boot of the powerful on our necks. Only their powerful will talk about how they’re the powerless and speaking truth to power.

Only we won’t be fooled.

We remember.  Even if they succeed at erasing the idea this time, it will come back. Ideas are like that. They don’t die.  And this is a big, powerful idea.

The world turned upside down and we won’t let them turn it back.

Liberty and the Founders!

Ignore the disinformation. Carry the flag. As long as human life endures liberty will endure.

It is that powerful.

Be not afraid.

 

I’m not depressed right now. At least I don’t think I am.

I keep losing track of the time and what I’m doing, but I think it’s just the ADD running wild, as it does, you know? Yeah, I need to get help for that (got massively worse after menopause,) but I keep forgetting too.

The ADD is problem enough because I drop things on the floor and don’t even remember I started them till I stumble on them months later.

But it’s not depression.  Which frankly is new.

I don’t know how much of the depression was first hypothyroidism and then side effects of singulair.

But I remember depression. Vividly.  And I have friends who are fighting it.

Today has got away from me, mostly catching up on a 100 things at once (Ah, ADD!) but a friend just said he couldn’t do something or other due to crippling depression.

And I want to point out that’s one of the best ways to FIGHT depression.  Look, I know, I’ve been there.  The black dog wants you paralyzed, unmoving, the better to lie to you about being a worthless human being.

The black dog lies.

Do something today.  Do it even though you think you can, even though the dog snaps and snarls at you every time you try.

It might be small and stupid.  Can’t write a novel? Write a paragraph.  Can’t draw a comic? Draw a sphere.  Just a sphere.

And then when the black dog lies and says it’s nothing, realize it’s a lot.  You did that against those ice-cold teeth fastened on your heart, and that evil mocking voice in your ears.

Sure, if you were free, it would be nothing. But you’re not free.  None of us is. And some are more crippled than others.

Pat yourself on the back.  You did SOMETHING. Tomorrow you’ll do more.  For now, kick the black dog in the teeth.  You called him the liar he is.

Tomorrow you’ll continue doing things.  Soon you’ll be so busy you won’t have time to listen to that evil, mocking voice.  You’ll have run away.

But it takes time. And patience. And you’re wounded. And sometimes you’ll backslide. And that’s okay.

Just remember, the black dog can’t keep you prisoner without your cooperation.  Don’t give him that cooperation.

Rage against the dying of the light, sure. But light a lot of little pin point lights, too.

Enough of those and the black dog will vanish. Clear away.

Baby steps.  Start now. And be patient with yourself.

On the How & Why of Amazon Reviews – by RES

We’ve all read them and on occasion most of us have written some.  We each have our signals for which to ignore and which we attend to, and why.  As there is little that a reader can do which will so much help move an author’s books (that is, keep the moolah flowing to encourage an author to give us more) as writing a good review, it behooves us to give some practical consideration to the mechanics of reviews, in order that we might write more and more helpful ones in support of books we’ve enjoyed.

Some elements of reviews seem obvious.  We’ve all seen and shrugged off the reviews that condemn a writer for Bad Think™ and denounce the author as an apologist for oppression of [Womyn, Homosexuals, Minority Religions, non-Cis-Gendered Persons, People of Venusian Ancestry, Other] and proves the author is a racist/sexist/something-phobe hatey-hate Mchater.”  Just so, we have also read and discarded reviews from obvious drooling fangits who will buy and praise the author’s shopping list.  [I take offense at this. My fans would buy my shopping list, and they’re not fangits- SAH] But the question remains: what should we put in a review?

The first step seems to consider what our intended purpose is in writing/reading any review.  For such things as DVDs there is useful information to convey regarding such technical details as whether the video transfer is crisp or so muddy that the action is impossible to follow, and whether the audio is mixed so that when the sound is turned up enough to follow the dialogue the music and effects will damage your speakers, eardrums, and relations with the airport three miles away.  But these issues are not relevant to books, which is the primary concern for the moment.

Mostly we want our reviews to promote sales of books we enjoy and ward off unsuspecting readers of books we found tedious and/or offensive.  Thus a positive review should offer some sense of the elements of a story; we might note that characters are clearly drawn or that it becomes difficult to keep track of them.  We would properly describe the plotting, employing terms such as fast-paced or intricate – or as unduly complicated, bogged down for pages on end, confusing or downright not credible.  We might even describe characters as stereotyped, two-dimensional, or tepid versus vivid, credible, multi-dimensioned and “people with whom we’d like share a bottle of wine.”

It is best to eschew spoilers, although it can be fair game to give away minor plot elements, such as “The section of the novel depicting Thorby’s assimilation into the Free Traders was exciting and thought-provoking.”  Such a statement does not give away anything critical and alerts the reader that there will be such a section without giving away how Thorby gets there nor how he assimilates.  Saying “I cried for hours at Old Yeller’s death” probably crosses the line into TMI.

It is certainly appropriate to warn readers that an author’s head has found its way into tight malodorous places, warning of such egregious inaccuracies/improbablities as having Hopi Indians raiding White settlements along the Ohio in the 1640s, but what about lesser transgressions?  A mighty swordswoman (e.g., Belit or Red Sonja) could be tolerable (as long as she isn’t wielding a claymore) where an entire legion of gorgeous gladius-wielding warrior-women is likely too much to accept.  Certainly any prospective reader deserves to be warned if elements of the book are likely to result in damaged walls.

It is sadly true that realistic review ratings are not really possible.  Anything less than five stars is often interpreted as negative no matter how hard reviewers strive to reserve that status for the truly exceptional reads.  A four star review with a very positive title (subject line) might be a fair route to go, providing a very positive response while still recognizing that the real five star book is rare.  Perhaps some among us is sufficiently familiar with Amazon’s algorithms to enlighten us as to how the stars affect sales?

I find in my use of reviews that some of the best information is found in the one star reviews, knowing that what infuriates an SJW is likely to delight me or, at least, be something which will disturb me not in the least.  Just as I often find the effusive praise of some five star reviews is as clear a warning as a Hugo nomination.

What are elements you rely on in judging reviews as guides for your book purchases?  Do you find brief reviews more effective than several lengthy paragraphs?  Keep in mind that a well written review is one of the main ways you can help a favored author move enough books to write sequels – and that as the publishing world moves further toward Indy the review becomes an increasingly important way of promoting the sorts of reading you like.  We are all likely insufficiently diligent about providing reviews, and a part of that is probably a consequence of early school experiences writing book reports.  The Amazon review acts more as a blurb and ought be approached as such.  Leave us work on ways to help our favored writers make more money and sell more books.

[Thank you, oh Wallaby of Wisdom.  And you guys: listen to him!]

Book Promo

*Note these are books sent to us by readers/frequenters of this blog.  Our bringing them to your attention does not imply that we’ve read them and/or endorse them, unless we specifically say so.  As with all such purchases, we recommend you download a sample and make sure it’s to your taste.  If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months. One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

(Finally, you guys are writing again.  Yeah, me too. Now shut up.)

FROM PETER GRANT:  Gold on the Hoof (Ames Archives Book 3.

The Comanche and Kiowa are painting for war in the Texas Panhandle. The US Army is preparing to stop them – but it needs horses to do so. Lots of horses. Walt Ames knows where to find them, and breeding stock for his horse ranch, too. All he has to do is ride down to Mexico, buy them, and bring them back safely. That’s easier said than done.

He and his men will have to cover more than two thousand brutally hard miles, and deal with Indian raiders, Comanchero renegades, bandidos, and would-be horse thieves… not to mention a certain Irish-Mexican redheaded beauty who can make him forget everything else in the emerald glow of her eyes. Walt’s going to need every ounce of his grit and determination, plenty of firepower, and a lot of luck if he’s to convert the gold in his pockets to gold on the hoof.

FROM J. L. CURTIS: The Grey Man- Down South.

After too much action, too much peace gets on a man’s nerves. John Cronin’s back from Vietnam and bored, when Billy Moore suggests he check out the brand new Drug Enforcement Agency. He’d expected paperwork and meetings; he got on-the-job training in South America with stakeouts gone wrong and ambushes exploding into firefights.

This isn’t Cronin’s first rodeo, and now he’s taking the fight to the cartels, from the laboratories hidden deep in the highland jungles to the enforcers in the cities and secure compounds!

Novella 34,500 words.

WRITING CHALLENGE

Yes, Mary sent me “the word” but I forgot to do this before leaving home, and now I can’t access it.

So.

Here’s a picture. Write the opening of the story and explain the scene. (Yes, it’s mine. yes, I put it here before. Now have fun.)

 

 

*Two days ago I was talking to a friend about how we’re better off despite/because of horrible experiences, and remembered this post of Cedar’s from her blog.  She very kindly gave me permission to reproduce it here. – SAH*

Kintsukori – by Cedar Sanderson

I often touch on social issues, and occasionaly very personal ones, on this blog. Earlier today I did this, writing not only on behalf of my children, but of every child of a disrupted family that has ever overheard adults dismissing them as worthless and hopelessly damaged because of it.

My dears, it simply isn’t true. Disruptions can come in many forms, whether they be the death of a parent, the deployment or other long-term job assignment of a parent, and of course, divorce. But hear me, children. You are not broken beyond repair.

When a potter is creating a bowl, he may drop it and break it. If it is unfired, the clay is put in a vessel of water, mashed up, and remade. This can’t be a comfortable process, if you are the clay, but healing is possible.

There may be scars, and a case of utter abandonment by a parent is doubtless a pain that will never entirely vanish. However, there are also many families that are re-shaped larger, odder, and with perhaps three or four loving parents rather than just two.

However,the children need support, not snide sniping at those parents who are trying to make the best of the situation as it is. There are few ideal outcomes in this world. As someone said to me recently “I realized that twenty years of bad marriage was doing more harm than cutting loose.” Sometimes life takes a left turn, and a family has to talk, try to keep communications open, and they will heal.

There is no broken beyond repair. I know I am defying some accepted truths: that a person cannot change. I do believe it is possible. I think that trust can be re-formed, and extended perhaps into something that is even more beautiful than the orginal, as the Japanese art of kintsukuroi shows. When a broken pot, which would would ordinarily be discarded as hopeless, is healed with gold to create a work of art.

We are art forged in the fires of pain. It is our choice to take that pain and create something beautiful with it, or something ugly and vindictive that wants to create an unending cycle. Just because your background was unpleasant, is no need to apply that to everything you see around you.

Dream, my children, and fly on mended wings. You are kintusukuroi, and you are loved by many.

 

I was going to write something completely different — sorry Phantom, again — but last night just before I went to bed I saw the beginnings of another Amazon panic. Again.

Look, I understand this. We’re dependent on and at the mercy of Amazon, and the more money we make, the more we fear what they can do to stop it.  I GET it.

But this case is even flakier than former panics.  So, stand by.

There is a whole thing making the rounds of all my writers’ groups involving a writer who was banned from Amazon for life because “he had too many KU reads” an answer that supposedly took him months to get.

None of this makes any sense, and I don’t mean the reason given. Yes, that also doesn’t make any sense, but the “nonsensical” Amazon actions usually have a certain logic this lacks.

So let’s go into the story AS I HEARD IT — and keep in mind I haven’t watched any of the author’s videos. I SERIOUSLY dislike listening to and/or watching videos on the computer, so I don’t do it if I can help it. That’s my first caveat.  However note that I’ve heard this story now from like 10 people, and they agree, so…

My NEXT caveat is that this is going to be a very long post.

So, TL/DR: There are enough holes in the story that I can’t regard the supposedly wronged author as truthful. So, this obviously is a big problem.

His experience with Amazon is entirely contrary to mine, and I have reason to believe they banned him FOR OTHER REASONS than what he chose to divulge, though what he chose to divulge is probably partially true.

IOW be not afraid. Amazon might go insane, but I have reason to believe this is not it, or even the beginning or it.

I’m not looking for a fight. I’m about to go away on a writing-and-cuddling weekend for the first time in over two years (almost three years) and I don’t want that ruined by an online fight.  But I’m tired of watching people run around with the pants on their heads on fire.  So I’m delaying departure to say this. (And yes, my husband is THRILLED. Why do you ask?)

FIRST and because I know some of you have caught Amazon-derangement from the left (heaven knows why, since you don’t trust the left on anything else. And yes, the left hates Amazon and would love to see it crash. TRUST me, I still lurk, unnoticed in a lot of writers email groups where the average politics are “Stalin or Mao?”): I neither trust nor love Amazon.

I don’t trust Amazon because I have now 21 years experience  of traditional publishing, and my last illusions about trusting anyone associated with my books (other than me) were destroyed over the last year.

Trust might not be POSSIBLE for me under these circumstances. If tomorrow Robert, Dan and Marshall, formed a company and offered to make an animated movie of one of my books, I’d immediately start suspecting them of skullduggery.

As for loving Amazon, I love the CONVENIENCE, particularly of overnight delivery or sometimes same day delivery.

But to say I love Amazon itself would be like saying I have a mad pash for Walmart, which allows me to buy cheap bras and panties when I forget to pack them for a trip.

Both companies, btw, have boards/owners that are at least soft left and occasionally hard left. Both have arbitrarily banned merchandise because those idiots at SPLC say it’s evilbad.

Not in love with either of them. Amazon is more efficient than B & N and Walmart is cheaper and less crazy than Target, but that’s praising with faint damns.

I do HOWEVER have experience with Amazon both as publisher and as customer. As customer, they have the best customer service EVER.

As publisher, they occasionally throw bizarre, mind-boggling wobblers which take sometimes up to a week to resolve. Important note on this: Their wobblers are never unjustified, though sometimes it is “How programmers think publishers work.” (Like, not letting me publish my collection because it had “bits stolen from other books.” because they didn’t get that short stories revert to the author after a year, per industry standard. Or take the problem LitRPG people had last year, where Amazon was pulling their books because it was afraid that their games were violating game-makers copyright.  The authors were justly incensed “It was a made up game.” BUT they failed to see the other side. There was logic. The logic is that SOMEONE used a real game, the game maker bitched because it was violation of copyright and threatened to sue Amazon. Amazon pulled anything that sounded real, or to close to real games for comfort.  Yeah, a wobbler, but there is logic.  And as far as I know, most of them eventually got solved)

Their wobblers are always solvable, even if it sometimes requires more time than I can give it in a day (hence the week.) I can get this stuff resolved by going on the phone. ME, with my accent and the voluble Latin temper. I’ve never had any other company ignore those as Amazon does, and still solve the problem.

Now, to this author’s specific case as I’ve seen it laid it out:

1- The most successful indie author ever. This should ring SO MANY alarm bells in the back of your head. No, seriously.

Why? Because how would he tell that? It’s not a claim you can even make. There is no way to tell, unless he’s been the #1 author on Amazon since indie was allowed. And even then, we know things other than sales influence the ranking.

So, how does he know? It reminds me of another figure who kept saying that he was about to publish the three “Biggest writers in SF/F” and couldn’t figure out why I was backing away fast.

Look, when there is no way anyone can know this, that kind of brag smacks of hard sales, and — at the very least — a looseness with the truth that should set off alarm bells.

I also know how Amazon treats high-selling indies — and you don’t need to be as high as you think, for that — and I have friends who are that. Not only do you get vouchers for stuff for free, but you have access to the highest ranks of Amazon often in personal visit, paid for by Amazon itself. So–

Not conclusive, but this type of sales-talk makes me doubt anything else the author has to say. Also to level set, the top tier of indie authors is making … millions, multiple. Keep that in mind for what he’s claiming.

2- Also went over to BN and took a look at his books there. What struck me first was there is no preview, at least not on my Mac. The second was file size for some of the books. The first one I checked had a file size of 3 MB.

It took several tries to find one under 1 mb.

Which means he either includes a hell of a lot of images or he is padding the books somehow–and that is something Amazon will get you for. If he’s not padding, he’s a damn liar.

He can’t be doing four of those a month. Hell, he can’t be doing one of those a month, not without hiring out a lot of it.

Look, this is ME saying it. And yes, I know John Ringo. There is a limit to what you can do, even when you have graphomania, which arguably I do.

For those who don’t know what those sizes mean: Witchfinder which weighs in at 170k words, meaning about two “normal” novels is approximately the same number of pages as the book I looked at. The file size for witchfinder is 1126 KB. He doesn’t seem to have pictures except for top of chapters.

So… what is going on? I don’t know, but it’s weird. And weird will get attention from Amazon programmers, period. Also it makes me suspect some kind of code embedded in the book to make each page count as more (Look, I haven’t heard of this, but LitRPG and anything bordering on erotica — supposedly this author always does harem — are always the leads in this kind of “how to game the system” innovation.)

3- The reason he gives makes no sense. No, bear with me on this.

Dark Sarah writes in a field where I usually sell NOTHING but make all the money in KU reads. I haven’t been very active the last year, so my money is down to nothing.

But at one time I was making most of my money from those, and it was ALL KU reads. No one even cleared their throat in my direction.

In view of the above, I presume 3 books a month or more this guy puts out are “Harem Fantasy” — so the same kind of thing — while Amazon might have an algorithm for “alarm bells, look at it” I DOUBT they’d pull his books, much less remove them and ban him based on an algorithm.

At most they’d send him a note going “Uh? What is happening, call us/email us.”

Now there is the possibility of those emails going astray, yes, and that causing a mess, but I DOUBT it would be instant. And a first step, I think, would be kicking him out of KU. NOT out of Amazon. Also, as me, sometimes I don’t check my emails for months (until recently, it wasn’t even close to my main income) so it’s entirely possible to get in big trouble. BUT again, you call, and eventually it gets solved.

5- He’s had books on Apple since 2016.The books he had banned, he had on Amazon on KU. Are those the exact same books? Because it’s possible to go wide and be on KU, but it’s very difficult, and 20% of content needs to be different.  Is it, or did he do what many people do and just put on Omnibuses on other venues, and hope KU doesn’t notice?  Mind you, even then the most they do is bann you from KU, but it is a violation of TOS.

That’s if they are the same books. IF they’re not, it makes his output even more unbelievable.

It’s not impossible nor criminal to have a “writing factory” of colaborators, and putting your name on the edited material.

But not telling your readers that is at the very least a “certain looseness with the truth.”

6 – His actions make no sense.  No seriously.  Keep in mind, he’s been making a bazillion, if his claims are true. And suddenly it’s cut off.

I don’t know about you, but my main source of income goes away, I’m going to try to replace it.

Banned for life? Sure. But see YOU are not the same as an entity with another tax payer number.  And if the ban somehow mentions that? I’m sure he has a wife, a cousin or a close friend who could become his publisher.  He’d have to change names, and lose income momentarily, sure.

BUT if he can write as much as that, it’s no big, and anyway, it’s only while he resolves things.  Now he might have done this and not be divulging it, but it sure doesn’t SOUND like it.

Also, again, remember he has a ton of money.

You guys more or less continuously get confused over Amazon.  Let me make something clear: you can get banned from Twitter or FB with no recourse.  BUT AMAZON IS NOT SOCIAL MEDIA.

Amazon is BY DEFINITION a public market place.  There are laws against those banning people because “oh, well, we felt like it.”

It seems to me the kind of lawyer he could hire with the money he has made would be making a federal case out of it.

LITERALLY.  Probably headed to the supreme court.

And that kind of case would be in EVERY paper.  We’re talking someone blocked from making MILLIONS of dollars.

It wouldn’t be some guy screaming on you tube and running a fundraiser.

Something doesn’t add up. It just DOESN’T.  There is no way to make this stuff make sense, and I mean his side of it, not just Amazon.

7- What I suspect he ran into is “the many ways to violate KU” AKA “Stealing KU money from other writers” but the perpetrators never view it that way. Given that he has to be loose with the truth (see claim of bestselling indie ever, also see the diddoonuffin on how they gave him no warning, whatever, also see claims of how much he writes,) if not outright lying, I don’t feel too bad about suspecting this, but I still feel somewhat bad.  However Harem and LitRPG are infected with more fraud than any other field.

The non-charitable thought is that he hired “bots” to read his books. Yes, this can be done. Yes, this will get you banned, because Amazon deals with Russians and Chinese doing this ALL THE TIME.  The pattern is discernible by programing, and if serious enough it damn skippy will get you pulled without warning and banned-for-life.

The charitable view, and it has happened to people before, is that he got hit by accident with a “the bots also looked at my books to throw off where they were from and whom they were favoring.”

This happens every so often and there have been half a dozen cases, including a well-known Romance writer.

It takes a couple of months to solve, because Amazon has to be SURE you didn’t contract the bots.

I don’t even know how you DO that – my guess is programming forensics to figure out what the bots were doing and where they came from, etc – but there has to be a way to do it, because all the cases of this I heard of before have been solved.  Yes, the writers lost a couple of months of income, but the cases have been solved.

8- That’s it. I have one version of it I can’t get to make sense, and the beginnings of the usual “Amazon has gone insane” panic among the usual suspects.

I’ll point out if Amazon has gone insane, it’s still less crazy than trad pub.  And yeah, Amazon NEEDS competitors, and I understand your fears. I have them too.

OTOH this is one of the flimsiest causes for panic I’ve ever even IMAGINED.  So you will forthwith (all of you, not John particularly) calm your bujungies and untwist your variform underwear.

Add to my reasons of suspicion that this guy is trying to cause just such a panic and stamped public opinion, instead of getting on with making a living, while solving this on a personal and if needed legal level.

NONE of it makes sense.

Amazon can be weird, but there is usually a rationality in the weirdness.  This has none.

Take a deep breath and see what happens next.

And now I’m off. All my bags are packed, etc.  There will be guest posts tomorrow, Sunday and Monday, and my presence here will be, G-d willing spotty.

Amuse yourselves.  (This post is duplicated at Mad Genius Club, should you want to have fun there, too.)