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Humans aren’t rational. This is something that’s really hard for me to accept. I mean, I know it’s true. Is there anyone who doesn’t? But I don’t like it.

I mean, we’re not totally irrational. We can chivvy ourselves along towards more rationality too. But if I were wholly rational, I’d be doing a novel a week. I can write that fast, the problem is getting myself to sit down and persuading myself to produce instead of either going into brain lock or leaving in search of more interesting things to do or, if I prevent myself from leaving the office/desk, taking off mentally on chains of thought that have nothing to do with anything I’m doing, and emerging two hours later going “Uh, what? That much time?”

One of the most enlightening things was reading Pratchett’s book (I THINK “Once more with Ceiling.” in which he talked about his process, and finding out it wasn’t very different from mine. His writing process included what I call “Chasing myself around to make myself write.”  His, because that essay was written long ago, included “Clean typewriter keys.” Eventually at the end of the day there was “sit down and write” and then of course “Write till early morning.”

This made me feel much better, as I’d thought I was weird.

I also confess to laughing with sick delight (and recognition) at Peterson’s recommendation that if you’re bad at bribing yourself to produce (I AM) you’re a bad boss and a worse employee (to yourself) and should fire yourself and find someone else to be you.  There have been times I’ve started to write a want ad.

All this to say, humans in groups have this exacerbated.  No matter how much you try to be rational, you are still a social ape. And you will feel collective uncertainty and anxiety run through your surroundings, be they personal or professional, and you will respond.  Your response will often be what your colleagues and neighbors are doing. And you won’t pause to wonder if it’s productive, because, well, you know, there’s safety in numbers.  That is, if a lot of people are having the same response to a stress factor, you disappear in the crowd, and the crowd bolsters you.  All you need in times of stress is to be fighting your own band mates, right?  And they will fight you or shun you, unless you accommodate and fit in, because social apes.

On the other hand, if you exacerbate whatever the group has chosen to appease its stress with, you will probably end up being a leader, or at least looked at approvingly.

Which is how you get things like the massive and bizarre hairstyles of the nobility (and to be fair the rich bourgeois, but that’s because they aped the nobility) in France just before the French revolution.

As the industrial revolution and various other shifts (including truly disastrous harvests) robbed those whose income came from hereditary landholding of their ancient riches and prominence, even while the court demanded a complex set of “dancing attendance” for royal favor (A policy started and encouraged by Louis XIV in part to rob the nobility of wealth and prominence, not to mention keeping their minds off rebellion) the nobility felt insecure.  The fact that its ranks were being penetrated by people come from the bourgeoisie, who married their children or “simply” franked the nobility’s lavish lifestyles, made the nobles feel they were losing control. Even though rank remained a thing of birth, they were in fact, in the real world, losing rank.

The response were fashions so extravagant that they make us go “Wait, what?” and must have given people headaches.

You can see where wigs came from and were fashionable, in a society without running water and/or decent shampoos. It was easier to keep your hair ridiculously short and wear wigs, which is why they’ve been part of human fashion since ever.

But it took the French revolution to come up with wigs on armatures (or hair extensions, ditto) and hairstyles that incorporated ships and, at one point, bird cages with live, singing birds.

To look at drawings or read descriptions is to go “uh, what? who ever thought that was attractive?” and also “Boy their heads must have hurt.”

Yet the competition for the most elaborate and showy hairstyle, no matter how insane, did not stop until those heads fell to Madame Guillotine thereby stilling forever their status anxiety.

I was going to write this blog about something completely different, but I had to hit FB to message someone, and the posts…

It clicked with something.

See, noblemen in France (in the rest of Europe too, but France’s old kingdom was special for how wide the disparity was) were used to being by far the richest in their surroundings.  And they were used to the peasants being less than dirt under their feet. Or their chariot wheels.

And then that changed, in what, is a cultural eye-blink.  Forget the crazy slogan. Humans don’t like change. Particularly they hate change that challenges their status. Unable to actually increase their net worth (within the prescribed realms in which noblemen could do such) or stop spending, the nobility instead went for displays of wealth.  Big and extravagant ones.  And the wigs were of those and… quite, quite insane.

So what does that have to do with facebook?

For a few generations, since the left captured the academia, entertainment and the industrial-news complex, aka, the opinion makers, to be a leftist has been synonymous with being smart.

And being smart, since the renaissance, but definitely since the world wars has been the greatest social “good” there is.

No, I’m not saying the left was smart.  Increasingly, most of them weren’t, because as it became a matter of social display, the easily led started imitating it.

No, I’m saying that to parrot leftist ideas was to be considered smart. Partly because of the left’s conceit that Marxism was “scientific” there has always been, attached to the modern left the idea that to believe as they do is “rational” and “smart” and that their opponents are stupid.

Not only did they hold onto this while their ideas were proven wrong by reality over and over again, but having captured academia, they pushed leftist ideas as synonymous with being educated.  I mean, if you’d attended an elite school, you received these ideas, and the way to signal you’ve attended the school is to parrot it. Thus leftism became the old school tie (mostly around the neck of our economy, but never mind.)

While they had full control of the media, be it entertainment or informational, they could reinforce the message, as well as revile anyone who challenged them as stupid, wrong and illiterate, and GET AWAY WITH IT.

With intelligence being the highest status-good in our society, the left had secure status. Forever they thought.

The change has been very rapid. The fall of the USSR and talk radio were the beginning, and since the internet took off, they’ve been trying to hold on to the tail of the comet, as it streaks away from them.

I’ve said it before and I maintain it. If Mr. Obama had been president in a country where the information tech was the same as in the 30s, all his failures would have been hidden, and people would believe him a staggering genius, instead of the little man who wasn’t there. Because that’s how the industrial-media complex presented him.

And then… And then they went all in for Hillary! They were “With her” 300%.

Unbelievably, it didn’t work.

I think they’d suspected, before, that things had changed. But they could still tell themselves stories, dismiss the opposition, preen on having all the power.  And then… it failed.

Since then they’ve been running scared with social insecurity.  They display their “brilliance” for all the world, and it didn’t work? Oh. Must signal louder, larger, crazier.

All the “Wokeness” over everything possible (and mostly imaginary) in the last few years?  That’s social signaling by a social group losing power and trying to regain it.

The less it works, the more extravagant it will get.  I am in premonitory awe over what will happen should Trump beat the margin of fraud in 2020. You thought the Democratic Socialist meeting was funny? You ain’t seen nothing yet.  They won’t be able to open their mouths without announcing “point of personal privilege” and their pronouns, and interrupting each other with every finer intersectional victimhood.

If you think having a woman who won an SF award malign the person the award is named after with a bunch of ahistorical nonsense, and seeing the institution cave within days was peak wokeness, you’re deluding yourself.

Soon and very soon the “Wokeness”displays will be the equivalent of having live birds in your hair.

Because in their subconscious, if they just signal loud enough they’ll regain their status as “smart” and “educated.”

Meanwhile, we’ll be buying popcorn stocks and saying “Is that a ship on your head, or are you that insecure?”

 

A friend of mine, on facebook, was posting the vexed question of why communists think nazis are right wing, and therefore accuse anyone to the right of Lenin of being fascist.

The discussion — as far as I could see of it — went all over the map, as it always does, but the question should still be fascinating: both of these are totalitarian regimes, both claiming to be in the name of the people (one, people singular, the other “workers of the world”) and both really favoring the well connected and/or powerful of one form or another (but neither of them much favoring the aristocracy, if one is in place when the regime emerges.)

So why call one “right wing” and one “left wing?”  Both are for central control.  Yeah, sure, communism theoretically expropriates the factories and gives “ownership” to the people, while fascism allows the owners to keep the property (or gives the factories to the well connected in their party.)  But we all know — we know. There’s almost 100 years of practice to look on — in reality communism too “gives’ the factories, or the profit of them to a handful of well connected.  The workers might theoretically own all of the factory, but they certainly aren’t taking weekends on their Dacha in the volga river, or shopping in the capitalist capitals of the world. No, those are for a few of the apparatchiks who are supposedly working tirelessly for the people, day and night.

They are two regimes more alike than not. And when you say that, people say “politics is a mobius strip. The opposites touch.”

Yeah, no. That is one of those things that was all over Europe in the seventies, pushing people towards the “sensible” mixed economy, which btw means private business retains theoretical ownership but is either commanded or hemmed in by the government. Aka socialism, various forms of crony capitalism, or even soft fascism.

So, why the left/right dichotomy?

My normal answer is that people who say fascism is right are relying on the European spectrum.  You see, in Europe the right is nationalist and blood and soil.  They can be (and at least in Portugal’s case, and probably in France’s ARE) as socialist as the left. But by gum, they make sure the fruits of the redistribution are given to people of the right genetic heritage, or at least people who can fake it. They are also likely to extol the homeland, and intend to defend it.

The left, OTOH is internationalist.  It turns out in its final phase this devolves to suicide through open borders and a pathological hatred of your own country (because that’s the only way to get people to agree to commit suicide.) but Marx, the father of most (even he couldn’t manage all) bad ideas thought workers of different lands had more in common with each other than with the “capitalists” of their own land, and therefore would unite across all borders and study war no more.

And if you believe any of that crap, I have a dacha on the Volga, free of ice two months a year, and you can have it for only a million dollars plus slave labor.

His successors, who figured out the workers weren’t going to revolt, at least not spontaneously, overlaid a patch of “ethnic justice” under which anyone from a shithole country is automatically exploited, and the revolution will come from them.  (It’s Magic Tan Human. Just add bigotry.)

In one respect, this theory fails. See, the right in Europe is blood, soil and G-d.  And the G-d in question is the G-d of the country.  Okay, yeah, they’re Christian, but still, the right wing in say Germany should be Lutheran.  In Southern Europe they should be Catholic. Etc.  Does this hold for fascists?  Oh, hell no.  Hitler invented a whole new paganism.  Mussolini was pretty hard on priests, (at least those who wanted to follow their religion), etc. Not very different than your average commie, in fact.

So, again, what is with the certainty they are so different?

To understand that, you need to go back to the beginning and how each theory sold itself.

You see: Marx thought he was creating a theory of scientific governance. The fact he couldn’t understand science if it bit him in the fleshy part of the butt is beside the point. THAT’s what he thought he was doing.

His system has all sorts of just-so stories — a friend told me Victorians liked making up these stories about everything, which is correct, but Marx still takes the cake — which sound logical and all encompassing… if you don’t pay attention to the fact that they don’t touch reality, ignore human behavior, and kick history around like an empty can.

But he thought he had science, and that scientifically we would end up in an earthly paradise brought about by the withering of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And that’s how it was sold. It’s early adherents and the “culture” of the belief was that they were all scientific and full of reason; that communism was the outgrowth of the enlightenment.  I believe this is part of the reason, still, that leftists consider themselves “smart” and that they say things like “We believe in science” (while in point of fact treating scientific hypothesis or theories as revealed religion, but never mind.)

It’s because their system was supposed to take them to “reason.”

This is also part of the motive for a system that can’t survive without continuous war, both to subdue internal issues and to pillage and rob what they can’t produce thinks of itself as “peaceful” and as having war forced on them by those dastardly capitalists.

It’s certainly why our left feels a continuous need to denigrate the military and claim that war is “right wing.” (I honestly don’t think that our left knows the reason for this. They’re just acting on passed-down culture and indulging their parrot instincts. And the idea they should attribute everything good to their side and everything bad to the right.)

The fascists and Nazis, on the other hand, sold themselves not as scientific, but as a rebellion against all that.  Not as the heirs of the enlightenment but the heirs of the romantic movement. They were going back to das Volk and the Volk traditions. Their very unreason made them pure. They would each become the noble savage, and live according to the dictates of that noble savage, each man in nature.

So, you see, the left thinks that this means the fascists are right wing. They’re not scientific and they don’t use reason.  So they can’t be on the left which is all about reason.

Except of course, the left isn’t all about reason. There’s nothing sane or scientific about the hells communism creates on the Earth.  It’s just as animalistic and base as fascism. It relies on malice and hatred and will to power just as much. It’s just that the communist sanctifies envy, and the fascist sanctifies pride.

They’re still both totalitarian and they are still both horrors. A hammer and sickle should be no more acceptable than a swastika.

And that’s without considering the evolution of the communists (We’d consider the evolution of the fascists, but thank heavens, as a system they died seventy plus years ago.) since the fascists stopped being a competing system.  Since then the left has brought in:

Ethnic pride.

A belief that culture is innate.

An encouragement to give in to your feelings over your thoughts.

Ridiculous, touchy-feely stuff like veganism and other fads that fly in the face of scientific fact.

In other words, since fascists vanished, the left has slowly converged with them in theory as well as in practice.  I mean, if you think the crony capitalism of China isn’t, in everything but name, the most successful fascist regime on Earth (And it’s not that successful. As Dave Freer told me more than a decade ago, it’s a beautiful lacquered vase. The lacquer hides the cracks.)

Why would this happen?

Well, because the campaign used to sell each regime was never the truth.  The truth is that they’re both reactions of shocked cultures to the dual stress of a generational war and rapid change in means of production/ways of life.

They’re the result of the hysterical reaction of normal people to look for the man on the white horse, and of the powerful or power hungry to gather more power.

There is no functional difference between them. Neither was ever “Scientific”.  They are and always were screams of panic of entire cultures, and lashing out of those who felt helpless in the maw of history.

As such they each aggregate the various appendages of unreason, including bits of folk religion, which is why a vegan who uses crystals to decide the color of socks to wear is likely to think him or herself “communist.”

Heinlein called them “Red or black fascism.”  You can also call them “Red or black totalitarianism.”

I’m not that enamored of color.  And the red turns black as the blood dries.

If we must use “left and right” and we’re stuck with it, since the left is so gosh darn proud of calling itself left, which it equates to everything good, let’s use it in the American sense.  Left is collectivist. Right is individualist.

In which case, the fascists are, logically, all theirs (and they’re welcome to their kissing cousins. Maybe they’ll both lose.) while you and me and ours have a future to build.

Let’s leave behind the blood soaked insanity of the 20th century.  It has filled enough graves.

Make the 21st the century of liberty. May it become our ruling principle.

Because it is the only antidote to totalitarianism. And it works.

I’ve tried to do this, I’ve paid the price. But it IS powerful. I’ve seen ideas make it from here, half formed, and out into the world. It is worth it.
I’ve found largely what he says here is true.
Consider it.

*Turns out my dereliction of duty yesterday matched your dereliction of publishing. So, no promo post this week. And I’m alive. The cats are still sulking, except Havey who thinks we MUST be mad at him, so he keeps coming over and snuggling-SAH*

Every time we say something scathing about the boomers, RES gets justifiably upset and protests.

JUSTIFIABLY but not necessarily accurately, mind you.

While it is entirely justifiable at being tied in to idiots you have nothing to do with but the age, [I was born the year after Obama, and I resist any intimation that everyone born in the early 60s is like the little train that couldn’t but bragged really loud.] there are more factors that go into “Why I’m not a boomer and will beat anyone who says I am to death, with a wet sock.”  And I’m not the only one who feels that way. And there are reasons for that too.

Look, RES is correct that boomers as we see them are largely creations of the media. They invented this “baby boom” generation who was somehow, automagically, going to make the evil nastiness of WWII (and WWI before that) go away.

In a way, what the opinion makers and narrative creators were doing was the equivalent of a young woman who gets pregnant out of wedlock, and freights the resulting infant with all possible good qualities and a grand, predestined fate.  I’ve seen this more times than I can count, to the point I started calling it “the fated infant syndrome.”

They were doing this civilization wide, and trying to will a “fated generation” into being.

It worked about as well generationaly as it it does individually. The fated kid normally beats all odds to fail at whatever he was “fated” to do.

And here is where we get to “not accurately.”  (Not that I’m tying RES to the dunderheads of his generation. Look, frankly we Odds aren’t typical anything.  But we still follow trends — all my sins remembered — and respond to peer pressure, which explains where my “generation” comes in and also the fate of the echo-boom (poor things) which ended the year older son was born.

Before we begin this, remember that generations are not as they appear on TV. Not only the dates of starting and ending, because it can be WAY more flexible than that, but that individuals are individuals. RES is right in that. And most individuals are not media creations, even if they are influenced by them. Also that none of us can do anything about the currents of history we’re caught in, and which are sometimes very odd.

And about generations not being the way they’re portrayed, note older son was born the last year of the echo boom. The designation echo-boomer seems to have gone the way of the dodo, but if they still used it, would older son fit in?  Well… no, because his parents weren’t boomers, and by the time he was born were, in fact, divesting themselves of vestiges of boomerhood (as described on TV, she says before RES throws something heavy at her head). So his most influential cultural unit had nothing to do with the entire idea of boomers.

Dan is an echo boomer, since his mother was born just after WWII.  In that he is like Obama (a year older than us) whose mother was also a boomer.  The resemblance stops there, as Obama’s mother, perhaps more than usual seemed to have lived the tv-boomer lifestyle and Obama chose to embrace it, while Dan was the child of an intact family unit, and even though coming to adulthood with a bunch of second-hand-tv-boomer attitudes, chose to reject them.

But I’m very much the child of children born during WWII and by the time I was 22 was shedding the boomer attitudes I’d acquired from my brother who is almost ten years older and completely embraced boomer stuff.

Confused? don’t be.

Numbering generations by the years of birth is a creation of the mass media, and therefore stupid.  Most “mass” things are stupid.  The idea of “normal” sizes for instance, and that “normal” cuts should fit everyone is loony if you look at the variety of human bodies. But mass production has had people starve, cut and rearrange themselves with compression to fit what the machines could produce in batch lots.

This created other mental artifacts, because if people all should fit one thing, by gum, there should be a recommended diet.

The one thing we’re finding out — though Dave Freer tells me biologists who specialize in other species have always known this, but it couldn’t be SAID about humans. Was Verboten — is that “ideal diet” is almost individual. For instance, if I eat lunch, I’ll gain weight, almost regardless of anything else. Imagine how much joy I get whenever health professionals or well meaning people enjoin me to “make a good lunch.”

In the same way I suspect how each person is influenced by the “image” of their generation, and which image they choose to embrace and how is unique.

However, the TV boomer thing had an effect.  And it wasn’t the fault of the boomers.  Not really.  Just like the child born out of wedlock, they were propagandized from birth. And there was no way ANYONE could have fulfilled everything expected of them: they were supposed to study war no more, and yet they were supposed to achieve everything, including the stars. They were supposed to break all rules, and yet harmony should rule. They were supposed to have free love and it would work automagically. They were supposed to learn painlessly and joyously, and yet they would be SO SMART and educated.

Then there was the cold war, and other stuff. Read the beginning of Glory Road. He said it better.

Here’s the thing, though. coming in ten years after, I saw the trend in the generation in my brother’s children books that I inherited.  From comics to the advertisements in magazines it was all “your generations is going to break all the rules and fix everything going all the way back to a sort of prehistory, but one where we’re all noble savages.”

It had an effect. Impossible for it not to. Picture how much that kind of propaganda has to penetrate that in a little village of a country that was neutral in WWII (mostly through being bankrupt) the baby boom sounded loud and clear.

Look, I’ve also read books written by the boomers’ parents.  There was a lot there that was “we can beat Hitler, we can do anything by the same methods.”  The fifties weren’t the fifties the TV has dreamed, either, but they were more regimented and “collective” than we’d stand for.  And these people, kind of in rebellion, dreamed up their children as noble savages.

The long hair, discarding of suits? The silly attempts at “free love?”

The world had seen them and been dealing with them for a long long time. Every so often…

The problem is this stuff all hit at the same time that the USSR was winding up its propaganda arm and the kids were perfect targets, and many people in the narrative-building arms of the society from education to journalism were being paid in Russian coin.

So Marx wound his sinuous and scaly body around a dream of Rousseau and went traipsing through the west.

Free love became rejection of the idea of matrimony, became “marriage is slavery for women.” The idea of free and idealistic poverty became “all capitalism is evil.” Etc etc ad definitely nauseum.

And unfortunately humans are social animals. Enough signals were taken in to ruin a whole lot of people.  Probably not the MAJORITY of boomers, who were by and large normal, functional human beings, but a good number of them.

More than that, it was enough to plant this idea of “revolution” as an expectation in the mind of a generation. And to make people disdain the past, because they’d been propagandized that it was all bad. They weren’t going to study war no more. Or as it turned out, Latin, Greek or history.

So even the decent boomers carried that idea forward into their kids.  They’d been convinced the IDEAL was this tv-boomer creation.  And by gum, their kids were going to be those all wise peace makers.

Did I mention that Obama, born a year before me, was the perfect embodiment of what my son’s classmates were trying to be?

And this brings us to a problem: generations aren’t simple. Just because you were born a certain year you’re not a boomer, or a millenial, or whatever. Those are media-creations.  Which I remind myself of when my kids act like typical millenials.

But they’re not. They just have… bits of it.  In their case, mostly, little ones, like older son can’t spell things most of the time, without looking them up, because NO ONE EVER TAUGHT HIM TO SPELL.  I tried, I swear, but the school would tell him it was okay “so long as we understand it.”  (Which is why younger son did copies of texts till his eyes bled, and spells much better.)  And they’re starting on adulthood kind of late, because, Obama’s economy, etc.

In the same way most boomers aren’t typical. But they do have the hangover of being raised as the generation that was going to make everything right. Which no generation can, nor should be expected to.

And we, who came after?  Look, we’re just trying to rebuild.

Which brings me to the fact that no matter when we were born, all or us, in this blog, are of the same generation: Generation rebuild.

Or generation pooper scooper, if you prefer.

The disassembling of Western civilization wasn’t the work of a generation.  If you want to be candid, it goes back to the French revolution.  Oh, not for toppling the king. No. For the demand of equal results, which is a virus that destroys civilization.

The only reason we haven’t collapsed is that there are builders, among the wreckers.

We’re all the same generation.  We build.

Sure, thanks to the media propaganda, and the idea that generations were uniform, a lot of the TV boomer bs has done a lot of bad stuff to our society. Worldwide, really.

Fine. They didn’t choose when they were born, and we didn’t either.  And thank heavens, thanks to new tech, the idea of generations designated by mass media will soon be a thing of the past.

And we builders will find ourselves and each other, in spaces like this.

Which is why I tell you to build.  Build under, build over, build around.

The structure is weaker than it seems, and someone has to hold it up when it blows.

Be generation Atlas.

And this time, don’t shrug. Your shoulders won’t be holding up socialism, but a construction of our own devising, one that will give us a more viable future.

Not perfect, no. We’re not perfect, and our world won’t be.  And our kids and grandkids will have to continue building.  But a world that takes from the past, the future, and affirms the importance of humanity and the individual.

Square your shoulders, now.  One, two, three, get ready to lift.

Sorry. Left the house so early that I didn’t actually feed the cats, which is terrible behavior for me (Ask the cats.)  I’m just now back, and don’t want to do promo post this late.  Will do promo and vignette tomorrow.

In haste:
Dumas said that you shouldn’t rape history unless you intend to conceive a bastard.  The left has taken this to heart and is trying to create a bastard that will rule us with a rod of iron.

It won’t take.  Just like the leftist/Marxist illusion is a child of the mass production era, that era is passing and ushering in more customized times, more individual times.

This is good, because honestly the era of mass production and mass behavior encouraged us to see humans as widgets. Humans are not widgets, and we haven’t done well under this regime.

The Twentieth Century was worse than the fourteenth for soaking the Earth with blood.

The left will have trouble putting their boot on our necks again, now we’ve tasted freedom.  They’re trying, but it’s the spasms of a dying beast and a dying way of life.

I’m not saying they won’t win temporary battles, but every win will only lead to greater defeats. That’s the way of changing times.

Be not afraid and neither be you nostalgic.  Instead, turn your minds to ways to hasten the change over to a more humane and individual-oriented age. There is work to be done.  The faster and easier the transition, the less likely we’ll have to wade through rivers of blood.

Let’s work each in our own way, even if it’s just helping the young — snatching brands from the fire — or writing, or whatever we can do.  Even cleaning the house (my work today, since it’s gotten insane) helps, because it creates a calmer environment for you and others.

And no matter how small the effort, remember it ripples.

Now go work. Be not afraid. They won’t snatch history. That’s an act of desperation.  And they won’t snatch the future away, either. That remains to be built, and frankly they suck at building.

In the end we win they lose.  Go.

Okay, I confess this is a phoned in post, mostly in the hopes of amusing you.  I’m not ragging on indie (scarily some of these weren’t even indie) or even on “writers who don’t do research.”  It’s more that in countries with universal public education, books available everywhere and more than a few historical movies (which are crap on the details, but not THAT bad in general) it’s amazing how little people understand of the way people lived just, say 100 years ago. Or 200. Which is not that far. Look, my grandmother remembered stories from her grandmother, and right there we’re at about 150 years. Granted these stories became complete hodge podges in my head, and I suspect grandma’s.  I think the Napoleonic wars were mixed up with the civil war, which in turn was mixed up with the deposition of the king.  But still. Enough came through I knew people lived very differently. Even if as a kid I had real trouble picturing doing dishes without detergent. And btw, having a regency maid washing dishes with detergent would be a MINOR violation for the stuff I keep running across.

Now, you’ll say, why does that matter?  Well, because without an understanding, at least on general lines, of history, people will believe crazy things, like roads are the result of socialism. Or your only alternative to communism is absolute monarchy. Or it’s the increasing erosion of individual rights that brings about technology. Or China is a successful state and people live well there. Or that our times are the most difficult and fraught ever.

That’s the real side of this post and “OMG, how idiotic has our teaching got?” and a wake up call for parents to try to give their kids a sense of what came before.

Now for the funny side.

When I first started making covers and my tools were limited, I subscribed to two or three stock photo sites, and mostly used the thing as was (you can still see it in the covers of Ill Met by Moonlight, etc.)

One thing I figured out very quickly: most of the people posting on these sites — who granted aren’t Americans. Most of them seem to be some variety of Eastern European — have no idea of history.  There is present day and then there is “middle ages.”

The middle ages searches will kick up dragons, witches, sorcerers and elves.  The illustration above came from a pixabay search for Middle ages.

Worse, the Middle Ages search will kick up everything THROUGH THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

Now maybe that’s just me who stares at these things in open-mouthed wonder, but what the heck.

As some of you know I’ve spent the last month or so, since things were busy and often weird, without the spoons to give reading “seriously.” For a great part of it I read mostly Jane Austen fanfic, but then eased into other historical mysteries and such.

As part of this let me give some errors in no particular order:

• No matter how much your teachers told us that “peasants” were mistreated by “noblemen: there is no way that at any time since at least the high middle ages, in England, a nobleman could kill a peasant for no reason in full view of other people and suffer nothing. Even in times of high lawlessness, at the very least he’d lose reputation.  More likely, he’d come under the purview of the law.
  In other times and places this might be honored more in the breach, and even in England people might not necessarily pay for the crime. There have always been corrupt lawmen and ways of evading the law if you’re rich and powerful enough (which is the whole point of noir mysteries) but it wouldn’t be “no one cares”.  Not in any Christian country, unless in the middle of a civil war or similar.
  Making this the centerpiece of your (trad pub, incidentally) mystery makes me want to scream. Or laugh. Or both.
  Peasants are not serfs, are not slaves. If you don’t learn the difference, you should stick to present day.
• Duchesses didn’t do their own shopping. No, seriously, repeat after me. Duchesses didn’t do their own shopping.  Not for groceries. And if for some reason (the rest of the house plague stricken?) they decided to go to the farmer’s market (!!!!) they wouldn’t drive themselves in the family carriage.
  And if they did this, they wouldn’t be called “a proper Duchess.”
• No one in the regency wrote letters on parchment. Unless, of course, they were very wealthy and eccentric (if they were poor, they’d just be crazy. Also, not able to afford parchment.)  At any rate, in the west, before paper became common, people were more likely to use velum than parchment.
  However since Shakespeare’s day (and that was roughly as far from the regency, backwards as we are forwards) paper was common, and there were PRINTED copies of books.  To have a young woman write a note saying she’s eloping on parchment is idiotic. I’d have thrown the book against the wall, except I was reading on my kindle.
• Horses are not cars. You’re unlikely to go from one end of England to the other riding one horse without stopping. For an education on this, read Dumas whose characters kill horses with fatigue with wild abandon.
  Seriously. You. Can’t. Do. That.  You also don’t park your horse and go gallivanting around. They’re animals. They need care.
• If you fought a duel in the regency and killed your man, you don’t just walk away. Killing people was illegal. You’d at the very least have to run off out of the country.  It’s not a “It’s okay, everyone does it.” Most duels were fought to wound, not kill, because of this.
• If you’re a regency miss, you don’t go around, half cocked with no chaperone. And if compromised you don’t just say it’s stupid, and carry on with your life. Society exacted a penalty.
• There was a war with France for most of the Regency. You don’t go over to France on vacation during the war. Not at the same time people are fighting Napoleon.
• A manor house (the P & P movie, which I ASSURE you doesn’t exist is confused about this too) is not really a farm and the daughter of the manor worth 2k pounds a year does NOT go around barefoot or help slop the pigs. (DO try reading Austen. Consider Mrs. Benet brags that her daughters have nothing to do in the kitchen, meaning they have help. She certainly wouldn’t tell the girls to slop the pigs.) The manor might include a “home farm” which would be tenanted by a farmer family and give the manor family some percentage of the produce, eggs, etc. Arrangements varied. But the manor house is NOT a farm.
• Peasants in the Middle Ages were no more likely to know how to read than they were to meet a dragon face to face (and let us be clear, there were no dragons. Ever, really.) There would be exceptions. Nota Bene Peasant is not the same as “not titled” and even in the middle ages there was a “middle class” for lack of a better term, which might well be educated and work as lawyers or accountants.
• In Shakespeare’s time lower middle class might read quite well. The number of people who could read for fun was calculated at about the same as the number of people who are comfortable reading for fun now.
• Cooking a meal involved a lot more than cooking a meal today. 1) They did not have refrigeration. So, no, they won’t have fresh meat in the house, just “put by”. The shopping has to be done every day. They might have preserved or salted meat, fish or vegetables, depending. You can at least extrapolate it.  2) I don’t have any proof of this, and I might be dead in the water here, but I don’t THINK that making bread was the duty of the least experience scullery maid.  Can’t prove it or anything. I just doubt it because it’s not that easy without mixers or packaged yeast, and it takes some finesse. I wonder why everyone thinks it is. 3) in the regency in a well to do family pastries would generally be purchased, certainly for a party. 4)In the regency courses don’t mean what you think they mean. What we call courses they called “removes.”
• Going to the bathroom was more complicated. If you must go there, remember there were no bathrooms IN THE HOUSE for most of the time until oh, the 18th century (very, very rare, and only for what we’d call cutting edge geeks, who were laughed at by normal human beings) and really until the 19th century going to the bathroom in the night involved chamber pots. In the day, and if it was safe (it might be shared by several households) there would be an outhouse.  During balls in the regency, (and particularly before, when women wore these unwieldy gowns, including padded hips and who knew what else) the way women relieved themselves during a ball was to go to a room set aside for the purpose and use these vessels that to modern eyes look like gravy boats (you can tell they aren’t because they don’t have a pouring lip and are more “rounded” there) which they stuck under their skirts, to pee standing up.  No, seriously. And you think your costume for dragoncon/comicon was a pain!
• Underwear is complicated, because it was all homemade, and might vary village to village or even household to household.  As might the wearing of it.  Some people say authoritatively that women in Shakespeare’s time wore no underwear, but when you deep dive into it…  well, it wasn’t always so. And as Foxfier pointed out there were things found that looked remarkably like bras from the 14th century. (And from drawings, there are suspicions of them among the Egyptians.)  So, yeah, you can get away with almost anything, provided you say it was this cunning design her grandmother had perfected/the local seamstress made/etc/etc.
  What you can’t do is have a man unzip himself.  Please. I mean, I don’t see a point in it, but even if I did, no. Just no.  In the regency it’s called a “fall” and it’s a panel in the front of the pants, which can be untied. Depending on time and fashion, it can be a narrow fall or a wide fall.  Going back further than that, you’re going to step into codpiece territory, and unless you really want to research that, just have the guy untie his breeches/underwear/whatever. Remember buttons, while older than zippers are relatively recent. You look at them and you go “it’s logical” right? Sure. But no. The Elizabethans had buttons but the concept of a button hole hadn’t occurred to them. So buttons were decorative, but everything was tied. [A friend who is a professional costumer informs me this is wrong. See, this is what comes of believing MY college professors. There was a course on garment construction and they assured us everything was tied on.  The inimitable Jonna Hayden tells me this is wrong, and I’ll assume she’s right. She said it’s “teaching from Victorian sources.  This makes perfect sense as vast portions of the college were still stuck in the Victorian era. The other half were hard core Marxists. Sometimes it overlapped.]
• And speaking of clothes: in a time and place where laundry was a production, beds were aired.  Were the sheets washed between guests?  Uh… I’d say it varied, and you know what, just don’t go there.  Just say the bed was aired.
  Also, because washing was difficult, clothes were constructed of portions that could be changed more often and portions that were worn over and over.  And a minor spill/stain might doom an expensive garment.
• Not everyone owned a carriage. Not even among the relatively wealthy in the regency. If you have carriages, research the various types.  I very much doubt you could pack a family in a high-perch phaeton or a curricule.  Not that this is my era. But anyway, don’t mess it up too badly.
• Remember that books like “A writer’s guide to x” is the beginning.  The internet is yours.  If it’s important to your book, RESEARCH IT.  If it’s not and you can’t find exact information? Soft pedal it.
• But above all, if writing about the Middle Ages? Lose the dragon and the elves.

Yesterday, at coffee with friends, the following words were said “the Democratic party became communists so quickly everyone noticed.”

I’m not sure this is exactly true. Millennials by and large neither know what communism is, nor what the inevitable consequences are, and are all for the democrats because — I swear I heard this as a reason for voting for Colorado’s disastrous governor “they elect gays and people of color [ever so much better than the bigoted “colored people”] and women.”

And the fault is ours, and if we spend the decade in sackcloth and ashes, begging pardon on our knees, or if in the coming unpleasantness we get a bullet to the back of the head, we brought it on ourselves.  Because younger son was right. We didn’t start it, but Lord knows we didn’t end it, or tamp it down, or even object to it much. We let them bring, for instance “political correctness” that corruption of language that has seen both genders of stage puppets referred to as “actor” (when the physical act of acting is quite different for male and female) and we’ve let ourselves be maumaued into not calling things by their proper name, or using an expression instead of another, just because we were being polite. Well, that and because the rabbid weasels of the left would already, even in the 80s have destroyed our livelihood and our way of life, if we so much as spoke up. The land of the free was already in the grip of something that would make Mao, who invented the term political correctness blush. At least the Chinese had to be forced to say what Mao wanted to hear at the point of a gun. But we did it to ourselves. For politeness, and because “aunt Maggy is really nice. She’s just a little silly.”  And then it came to the point where there’s real pressure to use sewist instead of seamstress. Even though there’s a perfectly good word for men who sew and that’s tailor.

And you’ll say “what does that matter? Why would you take issue with such a silly thing?”

Because this battle was composed of a million silly things, and we let it slid, because they were little.  Except the left was pushing — like all crazy messianic cults — towards an end state that was so insane we weren’t even aware of it.

Like the idea there is no difference between men and women, when often men and women need interpreters to even know what the other one is actually saying.  No, seriously, being a woman and raised by males (well, females, too, but my brother and father were living gods, as far as I was concerned as a little kid) I often get thrust out into situations where I have to explain to some guy that no, the fact that some girl said the most heinous things about him doesn’t mean she really believes them, doesn’t mean she is a conspiracy theorist, and doesn’t mean she is irrational. It just means she’s really really angry and wants him to shut up.  Debating the accusations is useless, but if he explains what he actually meant/where the misunderstanding (if there is one) is, she won’t remember saying any of those things, and he shouldn’t.

Because you see, being weaker than males, and (statistically) smaller, women fight with words.  And when you fight with words, you give the beat down up front, so the other doesn’t have the social standing to come back at you.  But people who don’t understand evolutionary mechanics don’t get that.  And because they see fewer girls punch each other out (this is changing with grrrl power, btw, and I wonder how much of it is because the perception of having won a confrontation increases your testosterone. We do know that younger women have way more testosterone than our generation. Anyway, in younger son’s highly competitive high school the most common injury was from fights between girls. Interestingly and gratifyingly for students of history, this was of course mostly knife violence. In the school halls) they think women are more peaceful than men, which is where we get pages and pages of stories about peaceful matriarchies. In fact, trust someone who attended all-girls high school, an all-woman planet would be hell, but with more snide remarks and mocking (However if the story of a Chinese Empress (Look up “Human pig” and China, but only if you have a very strong stomach) and of a lot of queens and concubines who inherited from their husbands are to be trusted, then Hieronymus Bosch’s heartening vision of a demon sticking a pineapple up someone’s rear end is not out of the running.) Because men and women are different. Often very different, though neither sex are saints.  And some of us can interpret across the isle, which doesn’t mean we are free from the defects of our sex. (And some of the other. If you see me in Sarah-smash mode you’d never think I was peaceful. I do, after all, berserk, and that affliction comes from mom’s side.)

But we let them get away with all this, little by little, with language corruption. We let them get away with Herstory, a corruption that ANYONE who knows a word of Latin should wish punished with a pineapple. Same for Human.  And we didn’t tell them “This is crazy, you’re silly. Go home and try to put something in your head that’s not fertilizer.”

In effect we let a poisonous Christian heresy (no? Check your assumptions.  The paradise from which we fell by learning about private property? Check. The subjection of women by a conspiracy of males for six thousand years? Check. The final exegesis of the world when humans start being born as Homos Sovieticus, or whatever the crap they call them now — I suppose they don’t. Being immense racists, they just assume anyone who can tan is naturally this — the perfect collectivist, with not a shred of individual will or desire for property, check.) take over our body politic and indoctrinate our kids with vile Howard Zinn bullshit, that teaches them hatred towards the nation that has done more to eliminate barriers to equality before the law than any other in the world. We let our kids become convinced that we OWE the destitute of the world, because the way to become rich is not to have a less larcenous culture and government but to “steal.”  We let them be taught fake economics. And we stood by while they were told that if they are pale they are guilty of everything.  (Or even if they are merely tan like my boys.  I have to confess I tried and failed to have them form a band called “The Swarthy menace.”)

So, we’ll leave that aside, for now, but there’s worse. There’s much worse we did, though I want to tell you I fought it every step of the way, though not publicly, not where it counted, because baby needed shoes.

I knew when Clinton signed Motor Voter that it was the death knell for the republic. I really didn’t need to have it confirmed that they wouldn’t ask for proof of citizenship to vote. I knew they wouldn’t because “discrimination” and it might make someone with a tan feel bad. (As a person of moderate tan and who has an accent you can cut with knife, I’m upset that no one has asked me for proof of citizenship.) I didn’t need the stories like the Colorado Springs exchange-journalist who got registered to vote with a JAPANESE PASSPORT as ID, or my friend Francis Turner who practically had to commit violence to get them not to register him to vote with a British one.

And because civics are no longer taught, most Americans who haven’t gone through the process and don’t know anyone who has, think you become American when you cross the frontier. So even a lot of legal immigrants are innocently being told they have the right to vote.

Then there is vote-by-fraud -mail. I can’t even begin to imagine how something that not only violates the secrecy of the ballot, but is prone to forced votes by family members or roommates is constitutional. And yet it has spread everywhere.  Every time democrats gain even a little foothold, enough to do that, they go to all-vote-by-mail on the excuse that it’s cheaper (death is also considerably cheaper than life.) And people go along with it because it’s “convenient” as is the month of “early voting” before the elections that gives the left the number of ballots they need to “fake.”

And blatant, strutting fraud like the thing in Arizona last midterms? Is never challenged.

Which means we have no idea what support the left has.  I know it’s become fashionable to say we’re a 50-50 nation. But I don’t think that’s true. If it were, the left wouldn’t always be coming down, heavily on the side of facilitating fraud (and btw, they have perfect mental cover for that. They’re doing what’s good “for the people”and their work will eventually bring about paradise. Enough cover for all the useful idiot fluffy bunnies.)

The left has no idea what support it has either, but it felt secure enough in its mechanisms to secure election, that it thought it could unmask.  I want you to contemplate that.  The great unmasking started with Obama, and they’ve been sneering about putting us in camps ever since.

And they thought they could get away with it.  They might yet, in 2020. If we don’t start fighting back with everything we have.

Do you like a communist dictatorship? No? Sure, it will have a veneer of “they were elected” because those always do. Pretending to the will of the people is part of their cult.

Yes, their cult is receding. Even millenials will/are waking up and at any rate, a lot of them just keep quiet for the same reasons we did.  They’ve hit the high water mark. You can tell for all their mumbling about “populism” and their sheer rage and fury at 2016. You can tell by the clowns they field as candidates. Most of their nomenclature can’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel. Which is why all of their power structures are dying, and every field they’ve taken over is in trouble.

They might still secure an “electoral” victory. And then we’ll Venezuela until we get pissed, shoot our way out of it (why do you think they’re mad after gun control and red flag laws) and then the backlash will be unimaginable. Like, if you ever said something about a Dem not eating babies, they’ll shoot you or hang you from the lampposts.

I don’t want that. No, I don’t think there’s anything good about communism. But there are the maleducated, the well meaning, and the crazy. And going that way won’t be good for the republic.

Also, frankly, given my health issues, years of starvation and deprivation are bad, ‘mkay?

BUT–

That means we have to work now.  First, lie to the polls. Answer them and lie to them. Lie like a rug.  It’s important they don’t realize the number of votes they need to fake in advance. Remember how low DT’s numbers were?  Like that. (And don’t believe the polls after you lie to them, for St. Gell-Mann’s sake.  What are you? Dim?)

Second vote on the day and as late as you can on the day.

Third, destroy any ballot you don’t use. DO NOT THROW IT AWAY IN TRASH.  The dumpster-rats of democracy harvest those and use them.

Fourth, speak up.  You get there and someone has voted for you in advance? Speak up.  Make noise.  Make it clear that you will not sit still for this. Make it clear you’ve had enough.

They can throw their utopia all they want to, but they can’t force us into it.  We’re Americans. We’re proud. And we intend to continue being both.

 

 

Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again.

Today I was talking to Bill Reader, who is a little more discouraged than normal about the stifling climate of academia.  Mostly because, if what I hear of reports from the “inside” academia, like the arts, like writing, like news, like… well, the democrats, and all other places colonized by leftists, has gone farking insane. I mean, if you think that the NYU (?) study declaring that milking cows was sexual abuse is bad, you might not follow the giant pile of manure that is academia in our day and age.

Anyone rational would be fed up with it. And I’m sure a lot of people are.  I’m sure a lot of other mild-mannered lecturers in the liberal arts keep their mouth shut, and nod or pretend to nod, because (their) baby needs shoes, and they can’t afford to do a grand gesture of honor and leave their family starving.

And I pointed out something that came up in one of my private groups on facebook: the peak of leftist crazy has already passed. The wheel is already turning the other way.

You can tell this in several ways.  The first one was given to me by an older friend — who might now be gone, but we lost touch several list-groups ago — who told me in 2004 that the left was losing. They always get louder and crazier when they’re losing.

As a show of the fact they’re losing — not the election. They might pull that from the a…ir by virtue of extreme vote fraud. Which they work to facilitate ANYTIME they get any kind of power — I refer you to the fact that they’ve never been this completely insane.  But wait, there’s more.

The more is that they are pulling out the most bizarre and unlikely slurs. Look, the Russia thing didn’t have any legs. For one accusing the right of Russian collusion was the ultimate act of projection, after Obama’s “more flexible” comment. But beyond that: there.was.nothing.there.

Only the left doesn’t know how to back down anymore. Everything is a fight to the knife, and everything must be pushed to absurdity.  Take the nonsense around Kavanaugh.  They might have accused him of being skivvy around women and got along with it, but no. They had to go for rape, and the chick had to pretend to be so traumatized that she couldn’t fly (while having a vacation house in Hawaii) and then they had to accuse him of having a rape ring. And then…

In the same way they could get away with saying that Trump was crude in speech and manner towards women, and even emphasize the morals of work in the seventies were different from now, and leave him tarnished and walking wounded. But they had to go for the pee dossier and claim he really did grab them by the p*ssy and REEEEEE to 11.

Which pushes it past any pretense of being reasonable or believable.

#metoo could have flown if they’d made it a few, judicious cases, but their people have no discipline — and I’m not talking about the kids in schools and work. I’m talking about cases that get press — and when the press decides to run with George H. W. Bush molesting a nurse, in a description that anyone who has cared for an aged relative recognizes, empathizes with and realizes the man has no more control than does a toddler and only a fool considers that abuse, it’s insane and the movement is already burning itself.

This “and the kitchen sink” behavior is not the behavior of a movement that has any answers or any self confidence.

And as for the clown car of Democrat candidates… who the hell thinks it’s a good idea to pile on with “Health care for illegals, because health care is a human right and they’re huamns?”  So is the rest of the world, but we assuredly can’t pay for it.  They are laying bare the idea that proclaiming something a human right that requires the labor of others is insane and a form of reinventing slavery. (The Dems? Slavery? Who’d have thunk it!)

Other things they keep signaling are how much they hate America and all of us. “Vote for us, peasant. We hate you” could only be a platform that appeals to an aristocratic class that has climbed so far up its own behind it’s forgotten what history looks like.

What history looks like, once aristocrats, or self proclaimed aristocrats get so out of touch is “Aristo, aristo, a la lanterne” and ça ira.  I recommend to the usual leftists reading this blog for things to offend them that they study the French revolution and realize once and for all that they are not the revolutionaries. They are the stodgy, entrenched aristocrats who have all the power. They got there via selecting for the kind of cant that at this point no sane person can believe. And so they’ve achieved in 4 generations what would take a monarchy centuries of inbreeding to achieve: either total lack of ability to think, or total refusal to.

Which brings us to… they survive because they really like power, and because they are protected by being on top.

Look, the institutions they control at this point are the profoundly conservative ones: news (prestige news) reporting, academia (the older and more established, the more leftist) the good old families, the people with money and power.  In fact, now becoming “woke” is the equivalent of joining a country club for parvenus to fit in, which is why people like Bezos and Gates trip over themselves to pay homage.

But the thing is, in every time and in every place by the time an elite controls all of that, the revolution is under way. If not a physical revolution with head chopping, a tech revolution, a new way of doing things that dethrones them.

The left is blind to that because it’s part of their credo to believe themselves eternal underdogs and revolutionaries. Writing that into our entertainment and news ONLY requires them to pretend they’re living somewhere circa 1950.  And not even the 1950s that were, but something from their own heads.  Which means…

They’re out of touch. Even those of them who can reason and think can’t do it without realizing the foundational lie of their ideology: that they’re in power while pretending to fight power.

Now they’re desperately trying to redact history to make themselves eternal victims. That never works well.

And meanwhile the real functions they hold are moving on, however shambling and imperfect. They have to move on, because the corrupt institutions can no longer perform. And a lot of these functions are needed (arguably even storytelling.)

More and more, the left holds a shell of power, while the real power moves on.

That’s the good news. When they seem most entrenched, theyre already falling apart.

The bad news is that they won’t go without a fight. And the fight is going to get bad. Both in overreach, because they are doing that, and not just with accusations. Consider proposals to make KG or preschool mandatory. It’s crazy overreach, an attempt at indoctrinating the kids who are somehow still evading them after 12 years.  Or consider California’s bizarre plan to make race studies (their way) mandatory.  Or– It’s all around. It’s all insane. And yet, they will continue doing it.

And then there is the fact they have an iron grip on vote manufacture, which means disinfecting our government might take … well… a revolution.

They’ve already lost where it counts. They’ve already lost the real culture and the “way things will be done in the future.”

What they still have, though, is the ability to make the next fifteen to 20 years very unpleasant, and, possibly, to ensure that what comes next is much, much harsher and more punitive than it would otherwise be.

Keep your hearts on high.  And if you’re a praying sort, pray.  Because the waters are going to get very choppy.

But given half a chance, we’ll turn this yet, and come out on the other side as America. Home of the brave and the land of the free.

 

Out of Weakness – A Blast From the Past From October 2016

It never fails but if I’m talking to someone, particularly someone who is or thinks she is older than I (being mistaken is not rare) and the conversation turns to politics, they say something like “oh, you’re for small government and negative liberties because you’re strong.  You’ve never experienced weakness.”

The funny thing is that there is no point to my explaining, because they won’t believe me, but not only am I not strong, but I am unusually weak.

I was born severely premature — I fit in my dad’s size eleven shoe.  Yes, that is my family: faced with a severely premature child they didn’t expect to live out the night, they could think of nothing better to but see if I fit dad’s shoe.  The strange thing is that I’m one of two sf fans in the family — in an unheated stone house round about the Cuban missile crisis. Until I was 12, I spent more time bedridden than standing on my own two feet.  You name it, I caught it, and I probably caught things that no one has caught since the middle ages and which, as they swept the village, never got a name because they were just “one of those things.”) I probably had the scrubbies, the gnats and the gurgling peas.  (Part of this is that we lived in close intimacy with animals and with sewage both human and animal.  As most humans have, for most of history.)

Granted, after 12 or so I didn’t get sick more than normal human beings, but I still have some deficits.  Part of my fear of driving is that I know I have never been good at physical things.  I can in fact screw up something that requires coordination and agility and which I’ve executed perfectly a million times simply by THINKING about it.  And I think too much.  I swear whoever put me together left out the instinct module.  There are things everyone else seems to know that I have to reason through, painfully.  And sometimes I get it better than other people seem to, and sometimes I screw it incalculably worse, and I can never TELL which.

Besides, to compensate for no longer being sickly, I decided I needed other kinds of handicaps, and so I got married abroad.  Not only abroad, but in one of the few places in the world in which neither mom or dad can claim relatives.  Sure, we now have a network, of sorts, but we’ve gone through vast portions of our life where if we (or we and the kids, later) died in our house, no one would ever find out.  Dan’s employer might get upset, but I don’t know if they’d have looked.  And the same for the kids school.  Chances are that eventually the house would get foreclosed and the new owners would get a surprise.

That type of isolation has its own weaknesses built in.  When the kids were little, this was mostly that there was no one to lend a hand.  Not even just the big important things, but for the little “all the time things.”  No matter what else was going on, kids needed to be taken care of, house needed to be at least minimally sanitary, food had to be put on the table.  And I suspect this is what some of the people who have argued with me think is “strength” but it is not.  It’s the direst weakness.  I had no give, I had no margin, I had to keep going till I got sick, and then I had to keep going when I was sick, because people depended on me.  My kids and my husband depended on me (these were mostly the early days when Dan was working often 16 hour days) to keep the house running in such a way they had food and a place to sleep and weren’t unduly disturbed.  And my husband depended on me to write, because when we got married he gave up his music and took a job that would take a lot of his time, so I could write, because my money was our retirement.  The only retirement we could hope for.  (I’m hoping for it, still.  I have hopes, now there’s Indie.)  Because though both of us intend to die with our fingers on the keyboard, we know old age means more of what my childhood was like: there will be times we can’t earn our keep no matter how we try.

So I know weakness.  And it is out of weakness that I believe government should be small, almost powerless, providing to individuals only that which needs coordination and cooperation of many: mutual defense, for instance.  I believe each of government’s actions should be overseen, watched for potential violations of liberty and cut back if there is a shadow of a doubt over its unintended consequences.

Usually in this part of the discussion, I get accused of wanting widows and orphans to starve in the dark.

Which is not just not the point, but is entirely beside the point.

Look, humans are tribal and therefore we identify with the weak and the needy in our group.  And our group can and sometimes does extend to all the world.

I think it’s no small part of the fact we are the dominant species in this world (after grass) and have conquered all types of habitats, that we DO look after the weak.  As far back as we go we find skeletons with the marks of injuries and illnesses they could not have survived without everyone rallying around.  Even some of our cousins, now extinct or absorbed, were like that.  This is probably because cousin Gugr, who broke his arm and can’t throw the spear, can sit around the cave long enough till he figures a way to make fire, or perhaps to make a new type of spear, or perhaps —  Human invention often comes out of enforced idleness, so such a scenario is at least plausible — basket weaving or pottery.

However, what we have to think about is two fold — charity is a wonderful thing.  Looking after the poor and the weak is a great thing but — Who should do it?  AND Should it be a right?

The who should do it is important.  The so called “positive liberties” which our current [at the time Obama] president is very fond of include some doozies.  I think — but someone can fill in here, since I only think so because I heard it from sympathizers — the Soviet Union guaranteed housing, food and a job.  At least that’s the sort of thing proponents of positive liberties here wish to grant everyone.  Oh, and health care, transportation and, for the more daring ones, the right to free entertainment.

We agree these are all lovely things.  Things we would all like to have.  H*ll if I didn’t spend half of my time worrying about money (I know, I know, but the boys will be out of college in two and a half years [both managed to have to add an year. ARGH] and off our payroll) imagine the art I could create.  (More on this later.)

But who should do that?  Who has the power to grant these “positive liberties?”  The only entity large enough is a powerful government.  In the US a federal government.

So a lot of people (including the current president [Mr. Obama]) think that it is the duty of the government to do this.  Because you’re not truly free if you don’t have a car to drive wherever you want, or a place to live, or–

But the key word here is not freedom.  It’s liberty.  And liberty for what?  Life and the pursuit of happiness.

Let me back track: as beautiful as those ideas sound and as much as, as an idealistic 14 year old I’d have told you yes, yes, we need positive liberties, any adult who keeps on thinking they’re a bright idea is either not really an adult in mind, or is so thoroughly indoctrinated he never thought through the consequences.

When you say someone should have “housing and food, a car, entertainment, health care” you’re not saying that angels will come down from heaven and grant this.  Or if you are, you really should tell us how to summon these angels.  What you’re saying is “we should violate someone’s most basic and fundamental liberties so that someone else can be the equivalent of a trustfund baby with never a worry in the world.”

Whose liberties?  Well, builders and farmers, entertainers and doctors.  And while you might think those people can “give” you’re not thinking of scale.  If “everyone” is entitled to this what you’re saying is that these people have to work so that other people can have everything for free even without doing anything.

And if you say this is just a safety net, for when people fall through all the rest, you’re still missing the point that somewhere along the line you’re taking people’s labor and people’s goods to give to others, and since no human institution was ever free of fraud, and since that type of giving creates INCENTIVES for fraud, what you’re doing is taking from those who work to give to those who choose not to.  At which point I must ask, who died and made you god, precisely, that you would take from others their G-d given liberties, those that exist if no one violates them?

And if you make these things a “right” people WILL stop working (enough experiments with guaranteed minimum income show just that.  People can live on very little indeed, provided they have to do nothing for it and there’s no stigma attached to living from it.  Oh, they’ll agitate for more, and therefore empower the government to give more and more “rights” on the back of fewer and fewer people working until–

We have readers here who grew up in the Soviet Union. They can tell you how the end state of this is people doing less and less while demanding more and more, till everyone is living in dire poverty and bitching about deserving the stars.

But let’s leave aside the fact it doesn’t work on the macro-level: does it work on the micro-level?

Humans are scavengers.  This means we are instinctually designed to bring down (or more likely initially find) mammoth and then sit around and eat till mammoth all gone or too rotten to eat.  We’re not instinctually designed to run around killing more mammoth while we still have mammoth because animals that act that way deplete the food supply and starve.

I too have illusions.  One of my favorite games when stressed over money, is to buy a lottery ticket and spend a few days fantasizing about what I would do with 100 million or whatever.  And the first thing that comes to mind is “I’d write a lot.”  I might even do it.  I’m broken on the instinct front. But most people wouldn’t.  It doesn’t matter whom we’re talking about, someone always says “Yeah, he wrote those novels when he was paying a mortgage/putting his kids through college/paying off his divorce”  This is always and inevitably the writer’s best work.

Sure there are others, people of means who spent years perfecting the single, beautiful work they’re known for.  But they’re not nearly as many.

In the end that’s the worst thing.  Grant everyone “positive liberties” and you turn the country into a huge project.  No, I mean Cabrini Green type project.

Humans who don’t have to strive, and who by virtue of the system, don’t have the hope of getting much better, turn to the old human pastimes: fornication, fighting and mind-altering substances.  (Yes, I DID try to come up with an f.  No caffeine yet.)

You see it in the very wealthy throughout history, that sort of enui and a kind of “active despair”, the feeling that life is meaningless, and the appearance in them of all the vices of mankind.

The end of it is the destruction of the human, himself.  Humans are made to strive.  Remove the strife and we become less than human.  Apes, with too much time on our hands, and nothing to strive for.  When cousin Gugr was lying about in the cave with a broken arm, if he invented a new spear or a better way to preserve mammoth meat, he did it because he was conscious that without him the tribe was vulnerable, and he must find a way to compensate.

If you have no one dependent on you, nothing that you absolutely need to do, no matter how you feel, at best you go through life doing nothing and being nothing.  At worst, you find ways to introduce strife to your life.

I won’t say that I think we should eliminate all social programs.  I don’t say it, because I don’t think it’s achievable. Though with winter coming and the mess in the world, who knows?

And no, I don’t mean I want widows and orphans to starve.  I wouldn’t let any starve that came within my purview (and before you say something about the circles I move in, let me say you know nothing of them.  We spend almost as much on charity as we do on taxes, and besides that we give and help with stuff that isn’t official charity.  We’ve bought more computers of writers — sometimes with the money coming out of our food money — than I can count.  Literally.  If I try to count them I always forget some.) because it’s my duty as an able bodied human to look after other humans.  Even when I’m weak there are those who are weaker than I and need me.  Which keeps me from being too weak and therefore keeps me moving.

But I have no interest or need in supporting also a tribe of bureaucrats who eat the substance of that which would go to the poor.  And I have no interest in making the poor and needy feel these are permanent conditions, that they’re entitled to all care, and that no one, ever, should have to strive.  Because that’s denying them their essential humanity and the right to stand on their own two feet and find strength in their weakness.

Because I’m weak and because some days I’ve sat and wondered where the next meal was going to come from, I understand them perhaps better than most of the children of fortune addicted to “positive liberties.”  Give a man everything he wants and needs, and you’ve just destroyed him.  It would destroy me.

So because I’m weak, because I still have no idea what we’ll do for food or housing when we can no longer work, I say: leave us alone.  Leave us our negative liberties, those we have without your interference.  Don’t kill us, don’t imprison us, don’t take our stuff, allow us to struggle for what we want and need.

Because only then can we find strength.