Category: Uncategorized

Or worse, in this case, they get actions.

Look, guys, this is not new, and it wouldn’t surprise many people in the past.  It’s more that what we’re engaged in is a very weird revolutionary activity.

It is a revolutionary activity, don’t make a mistake on that, just because I haven’t bared my boobs like the chick above, and I’m not charging forth with standard.

Think back, those of you who are my age or close to it, to all the times when you were — seemingly — the only one who saw that “what everybody knew” was wrong, all the times when if you had said what you believed people wouldn’t necessarily oppose you: they’d just think you were crazy.  It’s not that you didn’t think them: of course you thought them.  And in the company of very trusted friends or family, you might even say something, but you had no way of reaching the public.

Having blogs, commenting on blogs, working on internet diffusion of ideas that are contrary to the establishment — and the establishment is wholly liberal now — is a revolutionary activity.

The founding fathers and their precursors did in fact engage in much the same activity, given their technology: handbills, political discussions, all of them were part of the revolution, or perhaps the ramping up to it.

Thing is, the founding fathers, (and the few saneish French revolutionaries) EXPECTED the other side to have a say.  Hanging was not off the table for all the revolutionaries.  When they pledged their life, their liberty, their sacred honor, they expected to lose all three.  The chances of success were infinitesimal.

So, why are we shocked by the people who think we need to be put down and controlled?  Why are we shocked by attacks on the amendments the founding fathers gave us?

The other side gets a say.

Look, for almost a hundred years now they’ve been at least as privileged as the French aristocracy.  There are tangible benefits to lefty privilege.  Why do you think people virtue-signal?  Because virtue signaling translates into jobs, book deals, media appearances and applause.

They had it all.  Make the right noises, support the right causes, and you’ll be on top.

Thing is most people aren’t even political.  They are clever apes who identify what is best in their tribe and what will bring them rewards.  We’re the weird ones.  And the rewards have been on the left for almost a century.

Yes, they managed the neat trick of pretending to be revolutionaries even as they controlled all of the establishment.  The extent to which they controlled it is becoming very apparent in the civil war going on in our institutions.

But they are still the establishment.  Third generation now.  And it has its privileges.  No one on the right with Obama’s type of mind and experience could make it to president.  (And no, Trump isn’t the same.  He’s run businesses.  Obama couldn’t run a lemonade stand.  And oh, yeah, for the lurkers, this is not racial, it’s political.  Red diaper kids rarely manage to comprehend economics.  Their religion makes them believe a set of precepts that is at odds with the world.)  No one on the right who was no smarter than most main stream pundits would have got anywhere.

We’ve had to be faster, stronger, and insanely hard working to be heard, and evne then we were torpedoed at every turn.

Then there was the net.  And computers.  And ways to communicate.

You have to understand how deep 2016 cut.  They spent all their money, they pushed all their celebrities, they controlled all the press.  Everything said they were going to win.  And then they lost.

Is it any wonder they’ve gone nuts?  This is like Marie Antoinette finding her palace full of not-at-all-respectful peasant women, demanding bread.  (True.)  And the guards being unable to clear them away.  (Also true.)

So yeah, unsavory rats like Zuckerberg are going to try to preemptively ban our opinions.  Banks are going to try to refuse money to companies who make guns.  Idiots like the Twitter Twit are going to call for us to be crushed.

Did you expect to have a revolution, and the establishment didn’t fight back?

I’m seeing despondency and preemptively throwing in the towel.  I even understand it, kind of.  We seemed to be growing.  There seemed to be no limits.  And now there are action to limit us to, to stop us.

So what do we do?

We do the same we’ve always done.  We’re faster, smarter, more capable.  We need to stay one step ahead.  We need to ensure the establishment fears us, at least as much if not more than they fear the left.  Sure, we’re the nice people who don’t boycott, who don’t make a political line in our consumption…

Guys… we might have to.  And we might have to get more vocal.  We have to make them fear as they’ve made us fear.  We have to fight back as hard as we can in this arena of words.

Because, guys, this is a civil cold war.  And we want it to stay cold.  If it goes hot, then the OUTSIDE COUNTRIES get a say, and America as such will be a notional memory.

There is one thing we remember from the cold war: Mutual Assured Destruction works.

It’s hard, because we’re starting from behind.  But we need to make them understand if they can ban us, we can ban them.  If they can punish our opinions, we can punish theirs.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.  Because that prevents us having to take the whole head.

Sure.  If the war turns hot, we’ll probably “win.”  But what we’ll lose in resources, in time, in people, and possibly in sovereignty will be incalculable.

So, let’s fight the cold war so we don’t have to fight the hot.

This is no time to get wobbly.  Even if we win it is no time to get wobbly.  The French revolution was, arguably, lost after being won, because they let the nutters and the nihilists control it.

Yeah, things suck right now and the waters are about to get choppier.  Did I promise you a rose garden?  I must have been talking about thorns.

Giving up absolves you from having to fight.  It also allows the left to turn the US into another Venezuela.

Liberty is always a generation away from extinction.   Pull your pants up, take a deep breath.

We’re revolutionaries, with all the danger that entails.  No one said it would be easy.

Keep going.  In the end we win, they lose, but only if we fight.

 

 

A Beginner’s Guide to Creative Commons licenses – D. Jason Fleming

I’ve been listening to Creative Commons-licensed music for over a decade at this point, and everything I write goes out under a CC license. In addition, my social media bios describe me as a Creative Commons advocate.

So, while I am in no way associated with the Creative Commons nonprofit organization in San Francisco, I do know a thing or two about how the licenses work, and I sometimes get a bit distressed at how less experienced people misunderstand CC licenses and what they mean.

The two biggest misunderstandings I see usually go hand in hand: that there is one single Creative Commons license, and that it means you can do whatever you feel like doing with the licensed content. The usual tell is a phrase along the lines of “used under the Creative Commons license”. Since there is actually a set of CC licenses, the definite article is a giveaway that somebody is either ignorant, or being deceptive. (Usually the former.)

There are, in fact, seven CC licenses; and only three of them are “Free Culture” — that is, you can do what you want with the licensed work, with no restriction, provided you follow the terms of the license. (Technically, one of those three gives you permission to do whatever, without following any terms, but we’ll get to that.)

The shorthand for Creative Commons licenses is simple: CC followed by one, two, or three two-letter abbreviations and the license version number. The CC stands for Creative Commons, naturally, and the other abbreviations tell you which terms apply. There are four, one of which is present in all licenses. (Again, there is one exception, which will be the last one explained.)

Let’s start with the most restrictive license:

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0. This is sometimes referred to as the “listen and share” license. This gives you the right to acquire the work for free, make copies, and give those copies to anyone. However, the license must remain intact, you cannot use it to make money or aid you in making money, and you cannot change the work in any way.

So, if it’s a work of music, you can listen to it, and share it, and that’s it. If it’s a book or a story, you can read it and share it, but that’s all.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike License 4.0. This is much more free, in that you are permitted to use the artwork in your own work. The terms of the license do limit you, of course. You have to give the original artist credit, at a minimum naming and linking to their site. You can’t make money off of your derivative work or your copy of the original work. And any derivatives you make must be shared under this same license.

This brings us to the question: What is a derivative work? Basically, it’s anything that is transformative to the original work. If you burn a CD with music on it, but don’t change the music, that’s not derivative. If you put some music into a video, that is transformative, and therefore derivative.

CC BY-ND 4.0

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License 4.0. Here we get toward freedom in one way, but not others. You can copy, share, and sell the licensed work, provided you give attribution and do not alter the work or create works that derive from it.

CC BY-NC 4.0

Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial License 4.0. And freedom in other ways comes in here, but not fully. With this license, you can make any changes or derivatives you want, but you must give attribution to the original creator, and you can’t profit from your derivative works.

With those out of the way, we now enter into the realm of Free Culture. There is an official definition of what makes a work free culture, but what it amounts to is that the conditions of the license do not limit your ability to alter or build upon the work, nor do they prevent you from profiting from your own derivative of that work. There are, however, still conditions that you must follow.

CC BY-SA 4.0

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License 4.0. This license lets you do what you want, to any extent that you want, but you must give attribution to the original creator, and you must share the resulting work under this same license. I think of this license as the sweet spot, because using it is guaranteed to grow the pool of Free Culture works in the world.

CC BY 4.0

Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0. Do what you want, to any extent that you want, but you must give attribution to the original creator. There is one musician who has been releasing his work exclusively under this license for about a decade, and if you watch Youtube at all, you have heard his work. Kevin MacLeod has thousands of credits on the IMDb and even got his music in a Martin Scorsese movie.

And finally, we have the real outlier, the CC Zero License, which is a dedication of the licensed work to the public domain.

CC0 1.0

Creative Commons Zero License 1.0. If something is released under this license, do what you want, no restrictions, no attribution necessary. However, I personally hold that it’s simply good form to give attribution if there is a means to do so.

So, now you have a better idea of the range of freedoms and restrictions that the Creative Commons gives you. I focused on how you would look at them as an end user, but I think you can see, at least implicitly, how using them can benefit you as a creator as well.

I was thinking the other day, apropos nothing much (you know that kind of thought you have when lying in bed between waking and sleep) and realized how strange our sleep arrangements were when I was little.

You see, my parents believe mortgages happen to other people.  So when they got married, my grandparents converted what used to be the “storage” portion of their house into a shotgun apartment which my parents rented until I was seven and they’d built their house, into which we moved at that time.

This is why when I was little I thought windows were “posh.”  We didn’t have any.  The height of my ambition was a veranda.  (Having now rebuilt two upper-floor porches from scratch, I’m okay, really.)

The floor plant of the house was as follows: Living room/mom’s “office” for meeting with clients, into which daylight came from two glass panels on the front door.

Mom and dad’s room (3/4 of that width, with a window cut up top to get a little light from the living room.  (Not super effective.)  And a hallway, large enough for a row of chairs and enough space for an adult to walk past.

Past mom and dad’s room, the space widened again, and there was a single bed for my brother and a very large bin-cabinet for mom’s work supplies.  After that there was a kitchen the width of the apartment and about twice as long as the living room (I’d say about 14 ft? but I’m remembering with a child’s eyes.)

We pretty much lived in the kitchen.  Mom worked at the kitchen table most of the time, and cleared it only for meals.  The radio was in the kitchen and was the main form of entertainment in the house.  Dad brought his typewriter from work, and worked at the kitchen table.  I learned to type (and write) at that kitchen table.  Mom’s knitting machine (a way to supplement money between big jobs.  Even local farmers payed to have a sweater knit a winter, even if sometimes you had to undo the previous sweater (developing holes) and redye the wool.) was against the wall across from the sink and stove.  My earliest memories of reading were of scrunching on the floor next to the knitting machine and just going away in my mind.  Oh, the kitchen door had glass in it too, but this being a Mediterranean climate, in all but the coldest days, the door would be open for more light.

You will notice there was no bathroom.  That’s because the bathroom was outside grandma’s kitchen door.  And it wasn’t an outhouse, but a full bathroom, with sink and shower.  It just was outside.  I don’t know how much of this was because the walls were thick stone and almost impossible to pierce/plumb, or how much because great grandma thought bathrooms were dirty and should be out of doors.

Anyway, what I realized is that I had (at least) three sets of memories: one of my brother sleeping in the 125 grams (1/2 of a quarter kilo.  The word for quarter and room is the same in Portuguese.  Yes, my family is like that.)  Of me sleeping in the 125grams (particularly when I started school, about a year before we moved out.) and of me sleeping either in my parents’ room with mom, or upstairs with my cousin Natalia.

So I lay there and put them in order.  The apartment was adequate, though not wonderful when my parents had only my brother (about nine plus years before I was born.)  There was a curtain to give him some privacy, and he had a little “not quite bedroom.”

Then I was born.  Fortunately when I was born, my dad worked outside town, so I simply slept with mom, except on weekends, when I was turfed out to my grandparents’ and slept with my cousin Natalia (14 years my senior.)

Dad came back home when I was about 5.  At that time my grandparents had partitioned off a bedroom off their large, second floor family room, for a visiting relative.  My brother was sent up to sleep in that room, and I inherited the 125 grams (at any rate he was six one at that time, and the little childhood bed, even with all the additional patches at the bottom that grandad had made over time, was not particularly safe for him.)  So when I started school I had my own “room” of sorts.

Note I had to reason this out and pay attention to things like my brother’s surgery at sixteen, when he was laid up in grandma’s spare room.

All of which is not to tell you how terrible my childhood was.  It wasn’t.  Heck, grandma’s backyard was a kingdom and I ruled it as queen.  Also, I wasn’t aware of being poor (we weren’t for the area.  The neighbors sharing a wall with my parents’ apartment were raising six children in the same space arranged similarly, cut out of the house of the farmers’ next door. Mom was raised in a smaller space with four siblings.)  Our diet could be eccentric, mostly because mom lived in search of the cheapest meal, so they could save more money for the house, but when I went into school I was one of better fed kids there. I’d have been one of the healthiest too, except for my screwed up auto-immune.  We had plenty of books, even if sometimes I had to go dig in the storage buildings for them.  Sometimes my paper was rationed because I used a sh*tton of it writing and drawing, but then dad’s godfather who owned the general store across the street found in his attic a pallet of composition books that had been there probably 50 years.  They’d long since been written off, so instead of selling them, he gave us the lot.  Those books, with yellowed pages and gengivitis-pink covers lasted me for my purposes till highschool.  I wrote my first “novels” in them.  And I had toys aplenty.  In fact the only lack of my childhood was people to play with, since I was by far the youngest in the family and my brother, the next youngest, had modeled his amusements on our older cousins.  This is probably why I make up stories (it was so lonely.  It started with imaginary friends) and why I started to read very early and read a lot.  It’s a weird upbringing for a kid, but not bad.

What I was thinking about, lying in bed, though, was that these days if one of my kids tried to get married and rely on that type of arrangements for living, I’d hit the roof.  “Wait, you don’t even have a bathroom?  You’re going to share the single bathroom with a family of three?  And it’s OUTSIDE?”

Unthinkable, right?  As is “Tell me again how this apartment doesn’t have running water, and first task in the morning is to bring in a bunch of it in gallon jugs!  Is this even up to code?”  And “Wait, you wife is going to run her small business out of the kitchen, meet clients in the tiny living room, and store her stuff throughout the house, including kids rooms?”  You know what the verdict would be: “You guys can’t do that, that’s slum conditions.  CPS will be down on you like a ton of bricks.”

And yet, when and where I lived, it was solidly middle class.  A little below my parents’ means, since they were saving to buy a house outright, but not, you know…. alarmingly low.  If anyone had reported us to the equivalent of CPS, the social worker would have laughed herself into stitches.  There were people living much worse.  We had cement floors in the kitchen (not beaten Earth) and electrical light throughout.  And I pulled through my constant illnesses, was doing well in school, and my brother made it to college (even in my time that was rare for village kids.)  It would be viewed, now, as someone complaining of living in a small but adequate home.

And that’s what this is all about.  I’m sick and tired of the whining about “inequality” as though that means anything.  It’s a sanctifying of envy, is all it is.  As it is, my family was pretty wealthy compared to our neighbors, partly because my mom squeezed every penny till it screamed, and kept the house sparklingly clean.  So we lived like people richer than us, while a lot of the local craftsmen who made a ton more lived in filth and misery, with six or seven kids crammed in the same space we had.  They got a ton more meals out, pastries on the weekend and “bought wine” (as opposed to the one you grow yourself) though.

Sure, right now there are people so wealthy I still can’t imagine their circumstances (let alone my little self who dreamed of windows imagining their circumstances.)  But I fail to see how their being unimaginably wealthy hurts me.  We have a bathroom per person, right now, and a powder room to spare and I have room for my hobbies that mom could only dream about for her job.  And we’re not exactly wealthy.  (We’re not poor either.  Though we might be if the kids don’t graduate and support themselves soon.)

But thing is, I’m not taking money from anyone living in conditions similar to what my parents lived when I was born. (No one lives in the same conditions.  Not if CPS catches them.)  I make my own money.  I don’t take it from the poor.  And the people above me, save for those that ally with government to get the tax money, aren’t making money off me.  They’re just making money.

I think the left has a fundamentally broken understanding of economics.  They believe in a fixed pie, in which the only way to get rich is to steal from others.  In that kind of system inequality is a problem, because the people at the top are rich at the expense of people at the bottom.  But that’s not what we live in.

The only system in which their fantasies are true is the one that suggest to “cure” our inequality:A top down, controlled economy, with bureaucrats in charge.

Thing is, my friend Nicki grew up in the Soviet Union, under one of those systems designed to stop inequality.  Not only were the common people unimaginably poor (the village would seem like a bit of paradise to them, what with one family per house, and each family growing most of their own food in the backyard) but the party members lived almost like our current one percent, and yep, on the backs of the poor.

In communism and socialism, the only way to live well is to exploit others.  And boy, do they ever.  Some of the world’s wealthiest people are children of “great leaders”.

And in OUR country there is enough interference, mind you.  See where I said above that my parents would have been denounced to CPS if they tried to do what they did then, now and in the US (or even in Europe.)  And yet, fifteen years of sacrifice allowed them to build a house beyond the dreams of their parents’ (particularly mom’s parents) and to send two kids to college.  And then to have my brother build a house beyond THEIR dreams.  If the government had forced them to move out of that little (and relatively cheap) apartment and rent a real one, in one of the highrises then coming into the village, they’d probably never have been able to move out.

Rage, if you must, at bureaucrats who make your property not your own, and force people to live in ways that much wealthier middle-class people think acceptable.  That does, probably, rob wealth from the poor, in the long run.

But stop worrying about inequality. What does it matter to you what your neighbor has?  In college, (or even I, at professional meetings) my kids found out we were Job-poor.  We’re not of course.  But I’m a writer, which means work/payment is irregular and can’t be counted on. Also, though we have a mortgage, we partake my parents’ madness in the at consumer credit is something that happens to other people.  (We should take out a small loan and do some work in the house — we bought it short sale and it needs stuff done — and then pay it off, instead of saving for the work.  But my dad’s last words to me, as I got on the plane to the US after my wedding, were “don’t run up debts.”) So our kids were raised buying clothes at thrift stores, and without a single European vacation.  OTOH they each had their own computer from age 3, and we did buy them materials/books for whatever interested them at the time.  So, in a way we were richer than their rich friends.

And note, at no time did our way of living have anything to do with how billionaires live.  Who cares how billionaires live?  How does their being very well off affect you?  Do the people who are much worse off than you get a vote in how you live?

And what precisely would it do to take people’s money away and give to those below them in conditions?  Remember where I said the people in the village who made more money than my parents lived far worse, because they never saved for better housing (or kept the one they had clean?)

Make the most of what you have, and stop hankering over the unimaginable riches of the super-rich.

The poor we shall always have with us, but the poor in America live better than my parents did, middle class and working as hard as they could, long ago and far away, and we live better than my parents ever did.

The rich we shall always have with us, even the super-rich.  In the middle ages, inequality was if anything greater, as the poor lived close to animals.  But their kings — except for ceremonial and power — lived worse than our wretched poor.  And going back further, Solomon in all his glory couldn’t get piped in hot water, or food warmed instantly in a microwave, or aspirin to manage the headaches he acquired from his multitudinous harem.

You can’t eliminate the super rich.  Even vast revolutions don’t manage that.  They just replace them and the source of their wealth.  You can’t eliminate the poor.  As Venezuela is proving yet again, the best you can do is make everyone poor.

Let everyone do what they want to and can do with their own.  And keep your mind off other people’s business.

If you must have fantasies of being super-rich, have those.  But don’t bother thinking that you’re not that because others are.

Envy is poison that corrodes the soul.  Work for what you want.  No one has ever stolen your success.  Only you can blight your own life.

If you don’t think about it, the problem of inequality goes away.  That means it’s not a problem.

Go tend your garden.

 

 

 

*Sorry this is so late.  I have all symptoms of a sudden cold, but I think it might be allergies.  At any rate, I just feel I’d like to sleep a lot and took time getting organized enough to do this.

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.  One book per author per week. Amazon links only.-SAH*

GRAY RINEHEART: Walking on the Sea of Clouds

Before permanent lunar encampments such as Clarke’s Clavius Base (in 2001: A Space Odyssey) or Heinlein’s Luna City (in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress) could be built, there would have to be the first settlers–the first people to set up shop and try to eke out an existence on the Moon. Walking On the Sea of Clouds is the story of such lunar pioneers: two couples, Stormie and Frank Pastorelli and Van and Barbara Richards, determined to survive and succeed in this near-future technological drama about the risks people will take, the emergencies they’ll face, and the sacrifices they’ll make as members of the first commercial lunar colony. In the end, one will decide to leave, one will decide to stay, one will put off deciding … and one will decide to die so another can live.

FRANCES DECHANTAL:  Marguerite: A Novel with a Little Murder

What should a loving relative do to help her family? Can Marguerite Wilmington protect her cancer-stricken nephew from a killer at large in the hospital? Can she help her widowed sister and not lose herself in the process? Can she finance her own next cup of coffee?

Marguerite is a journey through a child’s cancer treatment with added stress from a mysterious extra threat to the child’s life.

L.A. MAY:  Niko and the Shades

Monsters lurk in the streets of Aldemyr …

Fifteen-year-old Niko secretly longs for magic spells, crystal balls, maybe even a hero’s sword. Instead, he can see the scarpies, sinister little shadow creatures who live in darkness and feed on black magic. Most people can see one or two, here or there, but Niko sees them everywhere, scuttling along the streets, hiding in shadows.

No one takes the scarpies seriously. Niko’s cousin calls them spectral rats. But when a powerful figure at the royal court is murdered by black sorcery, Niko begins to think the scarpies are involved. While court factions scheme for power, Niko may be the only one who can stop a magical assassin before someone else is murdered, and a killer takes control of the kingdom.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

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

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

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: follow

Okay, I forgot to post till now, mostly because I was doing art, I’m sorry.  Husband woke up and I remembered “oh, shoot, blog.”

But yesterday’s discussion on “why should we believe the UN on population when we don’t believe them on anything else?” made me think we have a pool of people with diverse backgrounds and knowledge…

WHAT things are generally accepted as “the truth” that are doubtful or outright wrong in your experience?  Particularly things that, like “the population is exploding, zomg,” trend to support higher government control?

I mean, not “people think the best gun is blah blah, but it’s actually blah blah, because that falls under holy wars” but other stuff, like population that you either know or have a strong reason to suspect ain’t as painted?

 

Yesterday we had friends over, and for reasons unknown to anyone but the psychiatrists we don’t have, we ended up sharing “favorite youtube crazy people” from Ants Canada (run by a Philippine from the Philippines) to Collin Furze, to someone a friend shared and whose name I don’t remember (really bad night.  Asthma) but who seems to be an African living in Belgium and commenting on… lifestyle videos on the internet with a surprisingly common sense perspective (in English, of course.)

For whatever reason the first of his videos that came up was of his fisking someone’s review of “eating ass.”  (Most aren’t that salacious.  He fisks vegan videos and such.)

First, the guy was absolutely right in fisking that video and in what he says a) why do you review something like that?  Are you selling it on ebay?  b) you can’t convince us it’s all that and a cup of coffee.  You’re lying (It was curious, watching the woman — kid really — doing the video.  Given the subject, and how much she tried to tell us not to knock it till we tried it, she looked bored and joyless, and like she was performing some sort of duty.  It made me think of the far left talking about the revolutionary nature of sex or whatever.  They honestly make sex boring, something no one else has managed, ever) c) You need help of the mental kind.

BUT what struck me was her clinching “argument” at the end of the video which was that if you were against eating ass, you should just be killed.  It went like this “The Earth is overpopulated, and if you’re not even going to try this you’re weak, and we should get rid of the weak first.”

There are rings of madness around that central, insane point of her argument, but let’s for a moment go with “The Earth is overpopulated” which the left seems to default to in their arguments on why, oh… we should support wholesale abortion for nay reason; it’s a good thing that people don’t get married; non reproductive sex is superior; we should have low-tech and the resulting deaths are a good thing; we should encourage assisted suicide; we shouldn’t spend money keeping old people alive… etc…

Yes, I know that the center of this is that they hate people, and in a more wide circle, they hate all of life.  They’re hierarchy of hates goes: oikophobia, hate of humanity, and ultimately hate of all life.  The core of their being is self-hatred which they project outward, until their ideal is a rocky planet scoured of all living things.  Only then would they be happy.

The inevitable massacres of Marxism, and the population decline and death of socialist (even soft socialist) countries comes from that place.  It’s not so much an unintended consequence as the wish they don’t even admit to.  It’s return of the repressed written in graves and rotting corpses and lost opportunities.

I know that, but they don’t.  It’s very important for them to view themselves as good people, hence the “this time utopia!”

However, they use overpopulation as an excuse.

As you guys know, I think overpopulation, ie. the numbers the UN quotes are bullshit slathered in bullcrap.  The giveaway is not only that the countries still reporting massive growth are those that are net receivers of international aid per-capita, but that they’re not countries who could count their own government functionaries and get the same count within a thousand two times in ten.

But let’s leave that aside, and pretend that the UN, in this as in nothing else ever, is absolutely right and has an accurate count of the Earth’s population on the way to 9 billion or whatever the heck their crazy estimate is.  Let’s say it’s that.

By what principle are we even remotely overpopulated?

1- Overpopulation is when an organism runs out of room.  I’m looking out my office window on 300 acres of natural preserve.  If the Earth were truly overpopulated, we would be trying to take over every last little bit of land.  Oh, and also, I’m not in a mega high rise, to take advantage of the high-priced acreage.  (I am on a third floor, but it’s MY house.)
Look, the free market and prices are the best way we’ve come up with to measure abundance and scarcity.  Abundant resources are cheap.  Scarce resources are expensive.  At least barring the government interfering.
The reason we know we’re not overpopulated is that, except by some urban areas (and that’s not overpopulation, that’s people wanting to live there for other reasons, like job market) land is NOT at a premium.
Honestly, I think Europeans buy this because they never drive to the almost-abandoned rural areas of their countries; because they imagine that America is as populated as their own countries (honestly we aren’t.  We have miles and miles of miles and miles.  They don’t.  Older countries, etc.), and that most Americans who push this line live in dense urban environments.
Out here, particularly in the west, but hell, I’ve driven rural Pennsylvania, land is not at a particular premium.  Certainly not the kind of premium if we were overpopulated.

2- Food would be scarce if we were straining the capacity of the Earth.Food is not scarce.  Even in the worst spots in the world, famines aren’t as bad as they were, and famines are mostly caused by kleptocracy and bad governance, not by a lack of arable land, a lack of food, or anything like that.  In this year of our Lord most people’s food problem is being fat, not being famished.  And not even just in developed countries.
In socialist countries, yeah, it’s bad, same as it’s ever been, because they whack the free market, i.e. the only engine for knowing what is abundant and what is scarce and when to make more of anything.  Pray for Venezuela.

3- There would be mass immigration from starving countries.  That’s not the mass immigration we have.
Immigration is not a sign the places the people are coming from are overpopulated or that the numbers they report to the UN are true, btw.
Immigration is sign that some regimes, some cultures are so dysfunctional they have nothing to offer their people; and that western regimes are so soft headed as to give everything to newly-arrived parasites.
That “caravan” from the Honduras that was coming to the US?  Yeah, I saw the pictures.  No one there was eating the bare minimum of calories, okay.  This is not a symptom of overpopulation.  It’s a symptom of crazy.

And yet, the left’s idiocies, including the “no borders” one are based on the idea we’re so overpopulated we should be killing all babies and letting people in to relatively unpopulated areas, because humanitarian or whatever.

But scientifically, by the numbers, we’re not overpopulated.  The carrying capacity of the Earth might well be double what we have (however much that is) given current technology, let alone future.

And don’t cry to me about the animals.  The whole “if we take over the Earth the animals become extinct” is another excuse to kill humans.  Animals have been going extinct since the Earth has HAD animals.

So when people tell you we need to start eliminating the weak because the Earth is overpopulated, call them on their bullshit.

The Earth is not overpopulated.  Some people just hate themselves, are too cowardly to suck-start a gun, and prefer to turn their hatred on everyone else.

The answer to their hate-spewing is and should always be “You first.”

 

Dear Madam President. . .Really? – by Amanda S. Green

I am taking a step away from Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals this week. Don’t worry. I’ll return to it next week. As I told Sarah a couple of days ago, this week has been tough, and I feel the need to snark. That’s not possible with Sowell. I started the snarkage Tuesday with a look at some of the excerpts from Sean Penn’s book. But that left me wondering what to snark at over here. I have a couple of books set aside for later commentaries. So I really didn’t want to do them. Then I remembered Dear Madam President, the newly released book by Hillary Clinton’s former communications director, Jennifer Palmieri.

Here’s the blurb for the book:

DEAR MADAM PRESIDENT is an empowering letter from former Hillary Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri to the first woman president, and by extension, to all women working to succeed in any field. By using lessons learned during her experiences with Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and Elizabeth Edwards–to name a few–Palmieri through each chapter creates a forward-thinking framework of inspirational and practical advice for all women everywhere–from boardrooms to living rooms–who are determined to seize control of their lives, their workplaces, and their country. DEAR MADAM PRESIDENT will turn the results of the 2016 election into something incredibly empowering for future female leaders and independent thinkers everywhere.  

As a country, we haven’t wrapped our heads around what it should look like for a woman to be in the job of President. Our only models are men. This of course was seen during the Hillary Clinton campaign, and no one knows this better than Jennifer Palmieri. While wildly disappointed by the outcome of the election, Palmieri optimistically argues in the book that the Clinton candidacy and all she experienced on the campaign trail–confusion, admiration, hate, love, acceptance, rejection–can now open the country up to reimagining women in leadership roles. And that is what Palmieri takes on in this book–redefining expectations for women looking to lead and creating a blueprint for women candidates and leaders to follow.

Wow, “empowering”. That means it has to be great, doesn’t it?

But wait, it is a letter to “all women working to succeed in any field” based on “lessons learned during her experiences with Hillary Clinton”, Obama and Elizabeth Edwards. Oops. What lessons could she have learned from Clinton? How not to take responsibility? How to continue to whine about the results of an election more than a year after the fact? How to condemn and undermine women who accused her husband of sexual harassment and worse and yet support all those who accused the current president and other men of the same thing? (Double-standards are loved by Shrillary, aren’t they?) And what about Obama? What lessons could she have learned there? I know! I know! Maybe she wants to teach these women reading her “letter” how to sell out their country and allies. But let’s not jump to too many conclusions. After all, this is only the blurb. Maybe the book actually has some substance to it.

“. . . creates a forward-thinking framework of inspirational and practical advice for all women everywhere–from boardrooms to living rooms–who are determined to seize control of their lives, their workplaces, and their country.” What? Wait! If a man wrote this about a woman’s book, you could just hear the howls of outrage. From the living room?!? How many leadership or how-to books aimed at helping men be better executives, etc., refer to how they should act in the “living room”? In fact, I don’t recall any of them talking about how a man should react or act anywhere but in a business setting. Or is the author talking about in a social setting. Even then, isn’t that sexualizing the woman or at least saying how she socializes needs to be considered in how well she can be empowered? And isn’t that something all the Feminists tell us we shouldn’t do? Or is this another example of that double-standard the Left is so good at applying?

“As a country, we haven’t wrapped our heads around what it should look like for a woman to be in the job of President. Our only models are men.” OMG. There are no words. The writer in me wants to reach through the computer to find the person responsible for writing those two sentences and shake them until their brains run out of their ears. The only problem is I’m not sure they have brains. I don’t know of many women – or men – who haven’t thought about a day when a woman sits in the Oval Office as President. Following the Feminist dogma, it shouldn’t “look” any different for a woman to sit there than a man. Then there is the “only models are men” bit. Sorry, but no. We have other models. They might not have actually made it to the Oval Office but they are models nonetheless. They might be models of what we want or what we don’t want, but they are models. Every woman who has run for office, be it for local dog catcher or President of the United States, is a model. Every man should be as well. Sorry, whoever wrote this blurb, but the sex of the candidate isn’t the main thing most of us look at when deciding who to vote for. I know that doesn’t fit your agenda or dry your tears for Shrillary, but it’s the truth.

So, what about the book?

I’ll admit I haven’t bought it. Nor am I going to buy it. This book is a perfect example of overpricing by traditional publishers. Coming in at approximately 190 pages, the price for the e-book is $12.99. Nope, not gonna buy it at that price. I wouldn’t buy it for half that price. I did, however, download the sample.

The book opens as advertised, as a letter to some unnamed future female president. “Dear Madam President” are the first words you read. Okay, other than arguing over punctuation, there’s not much to snark there. Not that I have far to go before finding something.

“I am not even sure who you are.”

That’s the next sentence. All I can say is I’m glad the author doesn’t know who “Madam President” is. If she did, it would mean she can see the future. Of course, it would also mean she should have been able to see that Shrillary wouldn’t have been elected. If so, she either enjoyed tormenting HRC by encouraging her to run – and lose – again or she thought she could alter the future. Neither is very encouraging, is it? (VBEG)

“I don’t know if you are a Democrat or Republican or something else, I just know that you are out there somewhere. And you need this book.”

Wow! She is certainly sure of herself and her so-called wisdom, isn’t she? She doesn’t know who this future president is or what her party might be but, by golly, she knows that this unnamed and unknown woman needs her book.

“I wasn’t sure how to address you in this letter. Doesn’t madam suggest you are married?”

So, she is a Washington insider and wasn’t sure how to address the “president”? She’s worried calling her “Madam President’ refers to her marital status. Hmmm, am I the only one who remembers Condi Rice? I do believe she, an unmarried woman, was addressed as “Madam Secretary” and no one thought it meant she was married. Oh, wait, I see now. This is all a set up for the author to get to what she really wants to say.

It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, so long as you can do the job.

Bullshit.

It matters.

So, despite years of being told it shouldn’t matter what a candidate’s sex is, it really does matter. I’m confused. Which is it? Oh, wait. I know. It matters if the candidate is Democrat. Then we should vote for her because of her sex. That’s what Shrillary’s been telling us this past year plus. She’s harped – and like a harpy—on the fact all the women who voted for Trump were weak and couldn’t vote in any manner except how their husbands told them. They were traitors to their sex. They were jealous of her, a successful woman.

Riiiight.

Obviously, the author of Dear Madam President agrees. Worse, she wants us to listen and follow her lessons.

Nope, not gonna happen.

You will bring an entirely new perspective to the office. You will expand our nation’s comprehension of what it means to be a leader. In its best moments, your presidency will give us a more fully realized sense of leadership—one that combines the best qualities of women and men.

OMG. Pardon me while I laugh hysterically. How many years of women’s rights is this gal going to push us back? An “entirely new perspective”? Why? Just because someone does or doesn’t have a penis? How in the hell is that going to expand the nation’s comprehension of what it means to be a leader? And what the fuck is “a more fully realized sense of leadership”? Is she really telling us a woman will be a better leader simply because she is a woman?

Given all the gains women have made in the last one hundred years, having a woman president may not seem like that big of a deal. It is. Step back and look at it from the arc of human history. It is still a revolutionary concept for a woman to be in charge. All of our models for a person in power, and certainly for the American president, are based on men.

I swear, I’m glad I didn’t buy this book. I’d have already launched it against the wall and we’re not more than four or so pages into it. The above quote has to be one of the most asinine I’ve read in a long time. “It is still a revolutionary concept for a woman to be in charge.” I guess she’s forgotten about Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, Angela Markel, Indira Ghandi, Golda Meir and Benazir Bhutto to name just a few. [And in the arc of human history everyone from Hatshepsut on down to Empress Matilda, Queen Elizabeth, Catherine de Medici on to those people you named.  These people believe the arc of history has an arrow because what they know about history is jack and sh*t.  – SAH] That doesn’t take into account female governors, members of Congress or other world parliamentary bodies.

I guess they don’t count because their very existence negates the basis for her book – that we have no such role models and need the author’s “insight” in order to become the best woman and leader we can be.

I could go on. I could talk about how the author claims they tried to remove Shrillary being female from the political equation during the election and how that removed, according to the author, half of Shrillary’s humanity. Yes, you read that right. According to the book, HRC was only half-human because they didn’t let her play up the fact she was female. Funny, I don’t remember her ignoring the fact she was female. Do you? In fact, I seem to recall how she pointed out how that made her better qualified. She never failed to overlook a chance to be seen as part of Bill-and-Hill or as mother or grandmother. If you’ve read her book, you’ll see how she made a conscious effort to connect to women because she was female. So either Palmieri was taking part in another Clinton’s candidacy or she is deluding herself – or trying to delude us.

And this is the book being touted as the one we, as women need, in order to be successful in a man’s world. This book that tells us we didn’t have any control over our lives and how we were perceived until Saint Hillary took to the national stage and ran for the presidency. What an insult, not only to each and every woman who has strived to be the best she can be for not just years but for centuries but to each and every woman who ran for political office before HRC. It is in insult to Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president. It insults Geraldine Ferrarro, the first woman to run for vice president on a major political party ticket. It insults Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug and all the others who ran for office before HRC ever thought about it. Not that they care, but it also insults Sarah Palin who first ran for and won the office of governor of Alaska and who later took to the national stage. Of course, if Palmieri were to discuss Palin, she’d have to discuss how her own hero, HRC, took to center stage to attack Palin. Where was her loyalty to her gender then?

So no, I’m not going to use this as a handbook to “empower” me as a woman. A handbook should be well researched and historically accurate. It shouldn’t have me wanting to throw it through the window – unless I am in the middle of the zombie apocalypse and the book might take out one of the walking dead and give me time to reload the real weapons. Since neither is the case, I will delete the sample and go find the brain bleach. The only thing I can say is that, one chapter in, it isn’t as bad as HRC’s book. But that just means I’m damning it with faint praise.

Until later. (I promise we’ll get back to Sowell next week.)

[OMG, the reading masochist is at it again.  If you want her to do more slice and dice snarkage, hit her pourboire jar. – SAH]

She was there, in my head, without warning.

“Do you remember Lost Legacy Elsewhen*?”she said, her voice not quite my thoughts.

“I’ve never had a legacy. Trust you me, I’d know if I did.”

“No, Heinlein’s story.  The first book you bought in the US.  Remember?  Professor Huxley the professor sent himself back in time into his own mind. And lived his life differently.”

“Okay, now I’m suspicious.  You’re not the first sudden voice in my head, you know?  I keep getting that all the time. A Few Good Men, for instance.  There I was sitting on the… sitting, anyway, and suddenly there’s a voice in my head, and it’s Luce, and I have to write him.  Characters aren’t real, and you sound like a character to me.”

“I am a character,” she said.  “Because you are one too.  Cartoon character.  If someone gets turpentine near you, you’re a gonner.”

“Insults will really convince me you’re me.”

“Why not?  You insult yourself all the time.”

“Point.  Okay, so you’re my future self.  Are you going to tell me you ended up in jail and meditated yourself back to this time to warn me?”

“No.  I’m going to tell you I ended up in nothing much.  Death bed has an awful way of concentrating the mind.  I’m going to tell you you frittered away your life in the moment, and never did much.  Some people will remember Darkship Thieves a few years.  But not long because Baen no longer prints it, and you haven’t got your rights back.  The rest?  Fritt and flutter.  You never wrote the things you had in you.  You never finished series.  There was always something.

“I see you don’t answer, because there is no answer.  Besides, it seemed like a good thing at the time.”

“I don’t answer because you’re imaginary.  I don’t actually have to talk to symptoms of a dissociative episode.”

“Ah, but is it that?  Or is it real?  What if I came back today, to tell you you know very well what you need to do.  You know those books you’ve meant for indie, and never published.  You have at least ten of them needing only two days of work each before editing.  And your kids… well…  Let’s say if you’d been more yourself, they wouldn’t have–”

“Wouldn’t have what?  What happened to the boys in the future?”

“You don’t need to know.  You’ll know soon enough.  Unless you change.  Unless you do what you have to do.”

“You’re not helping.”

“I don’t need to.  Pretend you just came back from the future, to avert a terrible fate.  You know exactly what you need to do and where you’re falling down, don’t you?  You can see as well as anyone else, where your bad current habits lead, can’t you?

“Does it matter if I’m real?  You know what to do and what to avert.”

And so do all of you.  Right now, right this minute.  They say that this is the first day of the rest of your life.  And it’s true and stupid like saying we’re all naked under our clothes.

But it’s also true.

Pretend your future self just came back into your head.  It can’t tell you what happened, or how bad it was.  And it can’t give you instructions.

But you know precisely what to do to save yourself, or to improve the outcome of your efforts.  You know.

And so do I.

*I should have checked on it.  I had the wrong story/wrong character.  To be fair, they were both in Assignment in Eternity and it was early morning.  But I should have checked.

When Robert was one and a half, we asked his pediatrician if his intelligence seemed normal.
Look, I know IQ is mostly inherited, but mom’s family has some startling up and downs (okay, given the times, that might be nutrition) but also everyone and their brothers had warned us that as severe as pre-eclampsia was during that pregnancy he’d probably be mentally retarded.  And Robert was, like every high IQ (and/or Odd) kid ever given to saltational development. What that means for those who haven’t heard it, is that he lags WAY behind in a skill, then acquires it seemingly overnight. Both parts of which scare the crap out of parents.  He wasn’t as weird as his brother (Marshall, his brother is a great title for a novel) who refused to crawl like a normal human being, for instance, and crawled around the house on knees and shoulders, looking like a lizard.  Then one day he stood up and realized he could reach the chocolate on the table.  Within the week he was running.

I don’t remember what, in particular, was worrying us about Robert, but I think we’d got it in our pointy heads (look, we were young) that his vocabulary was too small.  (Mostly due to our never having met any other kids his age, at that point.)  The pediatrician looked at us like we were crazy and said “Any kid raised in your house, even an adopted kid will have a great vocabulary, and a great knowledge of the roots of western civilization.”

I still don’t know how he intuited that from just seeing us in the office, but anyway, that was what he said, at the time.  I’m still not sure it would have been true without trying.  I remember years of slog, teaching the kids the RIGHT word for the right moment.  And I remember realizing they were getting basically jack about the common roots of Western civilization in school.

I mean, I know my generation was shorted.  i was the first in my family not to have to pass at least two years of Latin in middle school.  (Which is bad, because Latin is the root of Portuguese, but also because so much of medieval culture is written in Latin.  All the way through the renaissance.) I also remember all the times I expounded on something literary and classical and my brother and dad cracked up, because as all auto-didacts I had massive holes in my knowledge.  Still do.  That I HAD to be an auto-didact is an indication of the fact that school was no longer teaching much.

But by the kids’ time, school was teaching basically nothing, except for the occasional “commandment” like “Save water because Paul Ehrlich says we ran out 20 years ago” or “glass is a natural resource we’re using up” or “you should go up to people who are smoking and confront them and tell them they’re doing a bad thing.”

Of the traditional education we expect in schools there was very little.  part of this is that immersion method of teaching languages (stupid enough in languages, if you don’t first have a time period with the rudiments and if your learning is limited to classroom time at best an hour a day) had by then propagated to other disciplines.

I don’t know if it’s actually ever been proven that anyone not otherwise dying for the knowledge learned a single thing from just being in the presence of it.  I know that it works really badly for captive children in schools.  it is, however, way easier for teachers.  Just have the kid in the general vicinity of spelling, or math, and they’re supposed to pick it up automagically.  So you don’t have to make them do anything they consider boring, and you certainly don’t have to think on how to reach them.

It took me a while to figure out that was how they were teaching spelling to #1 son.  He was just supposed to “pick it up”, with the result that he’s a very educated and smart young man, who periodically commits boner spelling in the highest degree.  Say Conquor instead of Conquer.  I did however give him enough spelling lists and copying duties it’s only very occasional.  I’ve met people his generation who are articulate, smart, and you need an oracle to interpret what they write.

By the time he hit French, I knew I’d have to teach him or he’d never learn.

As for Western culture, the doctor might have been right.  We just tend to get in these conversations over dinner that assume a knowledge of Greece and Rome and the history of science, and of course explained the references to the kids when they asked.  Robert was mad in love with Rome from age 2 anyway, and Marshall studied ancient Greek on his own and developed a love for the ancient epics (and the mechanisms used in Greek theater, because yeah, embryonic engineer.)

But I know how they’d have been educated except for that, and I remember their classmates, so it doesn’t shock me that, as their generation moves into the work force we’re starting to see complete ignorance in places like NPR and the NYT.  (This partly because the people they choose to hire have impeccable lefty credentials, and the left not only despises and resents all of the civilization that spawned them (with some reason, I mean, have you looked at these people?) but also are the greatest believers in “Learning just comes without effort.”  But only partly.  That generation just wasn’t taught.)

So we get things like confusing the resurrection with the ascension and NO ONE not an editor notices. Or the NYT thinks that the Trojan Horse was built by the Trojans to confuse the Greeks, and then gets in an argument that it should be called The Greek Horse.

It’s not the kids’ fault.  They just weren’t TAUGHT.  Their generation was so busy reading the assigned (not even joking) book about a Latin Lesbian who is tormented by religious people, or stories about the Vietnam war by someone who admitted making it all up, or the vomitous communist sympathizer Gabriel Garcia Marques who has written only one bad thing: everything he wrote, that they never learned, read or are even aware of the works that formed civilization.

When younger kid, in a fit of “I have to take another humanities course” tried to find a classical history course, it didn’t exist.  There MIGHT have been Chinese history, but all the other history courses were part of the victimology studies: women’s history, queer history, African history.

I’m not saying those shouldn’t be studied, mind you.  Heck, as most people who know me know, I study and read EVERYTHING, including, yeah, ridiculously biased leftist things (okay, sometimes I skim them) because if you don’t, how do you know what they’re up to?

And some of those can be interesting.  I have on myself a history of prostitution, for instance.  Sometimes you just need additional color on a period of history, and that fills it in.  But the point is that those are fragments.  It really means nothing unless you know what else was going on a the time.  For instance, yeah, sure, Tudor England hanged gays (at least gays of not sufficient status to get a pass) but they also killed Catholics and everyone who diverged from what the regime was trying to create, as a cohesive society.  it wasn’t anti-gay discrimination, it was, for the time and as much as they could make it, a totalitarian regime with no freedom of belief or thought.  If you just study gay history you come away with the impression that they have been victimized/tortured through time, with some very rare exceptions.  If you study history as a whole, OTOH you realize everyone different was marginalized/ destroyed, and some of the persecuted groups are people you wouldn’t now guess, and worse, that this happens every time a government has too much power.  Every single time.  Which is a completely different thing from “the government must protect these victims.”  (Government doesn’t work like that.)

The problem is, worse than that, that these children (a stretching of the point, since some of them I suspect are early thirties) have some reason to THINK they’re educated.  I mean, they spent their time in school.  They reaped passing grades and praise.  They know things their parents don’t know, and if south American Victim literature is so unimportant, why did the teachers assign it?  No, it must be that it’s important and the parents are bigots.  Hence they not only don’t know much, but are unaware of the they don’t know   And also — self-esteem education — they know they’re the smartest generation ever.  So these things we tell them they don’t know must be unimportant.  They’re the walking definition of Dunning Kuger and sound like it too.

Here’s the thing: still not their fault.  Here’s the other thing: the self-esteem bullshit prevents them from educating themselves after they leave school, as I and a bunch of others my generation did.

A third thing: our civilization can’t survive this.  To explain things like “why the constitution is still important” they need to have some link to the past the founding fathers came from.  They need to know that every regime that kills you for what you think and believe is a horror and ends up killing pretty much everyone in random heaps.

When you explain that Marxism is a Christian heresy, and why it doesn’t work, these children need a modicum understanding of religion (and don’t get me started on how religious education in the main churches is possibly even worse than secular education.  A diet of veggie tales and the giving tree does not spiritual guidance provide.)

Instead, they are ignorance covered over with overweening pride.  They glory in the false and superficial knowledge they’ve been given and use their present day mores and manners as a stick to beat the great people of the previous generations.  And they don’t know enough to realize some of the things they do might well be looked upon as as evil as slavery is now.  Because they don’t understand history and the “manners and mode of the time” and how they can blind even the best of us.

In other words, they’re savages, wearing the clothing of civilized people and convinced there is nothing civilization can teach them.  They are men come from the wilderness into civilization, who have no idea what created the riches of the civilization

What they lack is not technical knowledge. You can always study that as needed.  What they lack is the software in the head of a man who lives in a free society.  This is part of the reason they prefer absolute regimes, because that’s what savages do.  It’s also why they gleefully try to pull civilization apart: because they don’t know what it is or how it was built.  And why they believe cultures where women are stoned for being raped are better than their own: they know nothing of their own culture, except a few insults at the past their teachers taught them to recite “Racist, sexist, homophobic” and they certainly know nothing about other cultures, except that they can’t be as bad as ours, because they were taught ours was the worst.

Civilization might — MIGHT — be able to survive a generation like this, but it won’t survive many more.

Educate them where you meet them.  Puncture their overweening self-conceit, so they can at least try to learn.  And teach the younger ones.  If you must send them to school, make sure you know what they’re studying and supplement it at home.  You might have to learn some stuff yourself, to be able to teach it.  School has become part of the apparatus for destroying Western Civ.

As a species we cannot afford the long dark ages until civilization is reinvented (if ever.)
I’m sounding the tocsin.  There is a fire burning in the night, and it’s taking with it all that has raised MOST of humanity out of the ancient and intractable poverty of millennia.

Work now.  Make them learn.  Do not let civilization die in the dark.

 

 

 

 

Woke-ify Your Fiction

A good rule for writing science fiction and fantasy these days: If it’s not woke, it’s putting people to sleep. The key now is being socially conscious. Most people are regular conscious — reactive to basic stimuli like sight, sound, small rocks being thrown at them — but the more pertinent thing to be is socially conscious — reactive to microaggressions and the racism and bigotry that undercut all human activity. And if you want people to buy your fiction these days, it needs to reflect that social consciousness — as tedious as that all sounds.

I know some are resistant to this idea. You’ve probably heard this quote: “Why do I have to worry about all this political stuff? Can’t I just write fun stories everyone will enjoy?” You know who said that? That’s right: Adolf Hitler.

A lot of people don’t want to confront how closed and exclusive science fiction and fantasy have been throughout history. H.G. Wells spent a whole chapter of The Time Machine making explicit that in the future there would no longer be Irishmen. And when J. R. R. Tolkien ever had a woman do something useful in one of his stories, he always had to follow that with a note that this was a fantasy and would not happen in real life. And were later authors like Isaac Asimov or Arthur C. Clarke any better? I’m honestly asking; their books look very long, and I haven’t read them.

But you need to be better than that if you want to write today. You need to Woke-ify™ your fiction if you want to reach today’s readers. And I’m here to tell you how to do that.

Remove Anything That Could Trigger or Offend

In olden times, people would just plod away writing whatever they’d want without thinking about the damage they could be doing to the psychological well-being of their readers. They would probably plead ignorance of how their language could cause harm, but ignorance is no longer an acceptable defense — though, yes, most of us honestly have no clue what could set people off nowadays.

Well, my advice is that you consider your reader to be a fragile little mouse which any sudden movements or loud noises could frighten into running away. With each word, ask yourself: Could this scare someone? Could this offend someone? Could it be misconstrued as something offensive? Could this remind someone of some other word that could be offensive? If I were to look this up in the dictionary, would there be any offensive words on the same page?

You might think it’s a good idea to just stick to really simple language to avoid offense, but it’s not that easy. Think of one of the simplest books ever made: Fun with Dick and Jane. We’re not even past the title, and it’s already highly problematic.

Words are just a problem in general. I say don’t be afraid of leaving a few blank pages in your book. In the least, it will give your reader a nice respite before more of those troublesome words start bombarding him or her.

Be Inclusive

Now, I believe the usual habit these days is to think of every oppressed minority group you can think of, write them down, and then check them off as you include them in your story. And while that’s a great method, I think we can be even more inclusive. That’s why I say expand your horizons and try to come up with new groups that no one ever thought to include.

For instance, in my first novel, Superego, I was inclusive of psychopaths, a group still very much discriminated against. In my latest novel, Sidequest: In Realms Ungoogled (available now in paperback, ebook, and audiobook — just putting that out there), I’m inclusive of computer programmers. Computer programmers barely ever get to be the hero because they’re weird, awkward, and not very athletic. And frankly people don’t like them and say mean things to them, and it hurts my feelings.

So take a daring stand and be inclusive. It’s great, because it’s the type of daring stand where you can expect accolades for how daring you are — versus the other type of daring stand, which makes people angry at you. Avoid that.

Advocate Social Justice

To be good woke fiction, your story needs to be about social justice. But what is social justice? Well, regular justice likes to sit by itself. It’s just over there in the corner, at a table all by its lonesome, nursing a beer. Not even looking at anyone else. But social justice is friends with everyone. It’s chatting people up and laughing at their jokes and having a great time out with the gang.

Okay, I don’t actually know what social justice is. But judging from what I’ve seen described as social justice, just take whatever theme you have in your story and be real smug about it. Like let’s say your story is all about how teamwork is important. Then at the end have your character be all like, “We’ve blown your minds with our teamwork ideals, destroying your colonial ‘don’t help each other’ mindset. I bet your world has been turned upside down and you feel enlightened.” And maybe throw a hashtag in there. I think social justice requires hashtags.

Don’t Be a Straight White Male

This one is going to be harder for some than others. Sarah Hoyt has been pretty good about this, while I have always struggled. But if at all possible, when you sit down to write, don’t be a straight white male. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with being a straight white male — you were born that way, no fault of your own — it’s just that everyone hates you. So stop it.

Nix Fun

Some people are going to be resistant to this one. Isn’t fun fun? No. Fun is not fun. Fun is bad.

Think of it this way. Imagine someone smiling and laughing and having fun. Is that person thinking of all the oppressions going on in society and the racism that pervades all our interactions? No, if they’re smiling, they’re forgetting about all of that. Having fun is the opposite of being woke. Smiles are for fascists who don’t care about oppression. If you think any of your writing could make someone smile, you need a drastic rewrite so that your fiction constantly hits people in the face with all that’s wrong with society so they would never imagine smiling again.

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Well, those are all the tips I have to help you Woke-ify™ your fiction. So go write something enjoyable and socially conscious. Or at least socially conscious. Or don’t write anything at all; it’s kind of a minefield. Plus I don’t want the competition.