Category: Uncategorized

Women’s Work  by Alma Boykin

So, Sarah’s recent posts about feminism, plus some reading I’ve been doing for an upcoming book, got me thinking. What is women’s work? How did it affect women’s place in society? Here are some very, very general thoughts and observations, with a few books for more reading if you are interested.

The idea that women do certain tasks and men do others, and rarely the twain shall meet, goes back a very long way and has a great deal of truth to it. It has nothing to do with “patriarchal oppression” and everything to do with biology. Despite claims in the media within the last few months, human males (the individuals with an X and Y chromosome) do not give birth. They do not lactate. Bearing children and rearing them was the original women’s work, the main focus and goal of women’s lives for much of human existence. There were a lot of other things as well, but anyone who wants to complain because “B culture oppressed women” has to look at women’s and men’s physiology and what it took to survive for most of history. You cannot fight off marauders while chivvying two small children and carrying a third.

Once we get past “having little humans,” the next tasks for women were gathering, a little hunting and fishing, and doing things with hides, furs, and fibers. These were all jobs that could be done with children in tow, or while children napped, and that contributed to survival. You can watch children and spin wool or other long fibers into yarn and thread. You can dig tubers or gather clams and keep one eye on a child. Tubers don’t run, and they don’t fight back. And gathering had a better chance of providing calories than did hunting. Granted, when hunters are successful they brought in a lot more nutrition per pound than did gatherers, and the two together were the best strategy for group long-term survival. But if the aurochsen got away, there were still tubers and fruit and nuts and maybe a snared rabbit or netted fish.

With the so-called Neolithic Revolution[s], and the rise of agriculture, things shifted a little. When you have draft animals and heavy farming, men will have to do more of the work, and their contribution to survival becomes greater. Women were still very, very important, because children, and pottery, and textiles, and some gathering, and processing food so it could be stored, but women’s work became less visible and less obviously critical to survival. And women with small children, or very pregnant, still couldn’t fight well. As long as upper-body strength is critical, guys have an advantage in aggregate. (See Adriana Meyer’s Amazons about the steppe nomads and classical Greeks for an example of where technology made women warriors far more important than was normal among settled peoples.) This change was not because of the evils of the patriarchy, or because a sedentary, matrilineal and matrilocal and matriarchal egalitarian society was cruelly overrun by he-man woman-hating horse-riding Indo-Europeans. Actually, the cultures of Old Europe had some problems with climate change and water-logging of soils to contend with even before the Indo-Europeans showed up. But that’s not Grrrrrrl Power! It’s called Life.

The change seems to have come about because of physical strength, and children. As long as physical strength and pure muscle power was vital for survival, guys were more important in the eyes of the law. Warriors fought, warriors moved around, and warriors could raid and bring in more goods for prestige and better survival. Guys could handle the large livestock more easily than women, especially nursing women, or women trying to wrangle small children. The thought of trying to break a horse to harness with a toddler wandering around scares me spitless. Little kids are fearless. Fearless plus large animals is a very bad thing. And since men seemed more important for survival, and were more visible, they gained more rights because they could carry out the duty of defense. Roman law sealed it, at least in southern and western Europe. Germanic-influenced law was . . . different. And economic realities were different again.

Weaving and making clothes became women’s work, at least in northern Europe. And in places where enslaved women and other crafts workers could be forced to do it. There’s some evidence that the introduction of large frame looms shifted the weaving and making of high-end luxury fabrics to men, much as tailors and professional weavers tended to be men. Once there was cash involved, the fancy stuff moved out of the women’s quarters, sometimes. Women’s work was still important for survival. No kids = no humans. No preserved food, no warm clothes, no safely prepared food, no medicinal herbs, no hens or other small livestock meant very hungry people. Women’s work was always important, but not visible in the sense that it appears in archival records. Archaeological records, yes. Other non-traditional sources, like business accounts, and letters, and law-suits, and other things, oh yes, you’ll find women.

Even in China, which has not been exactly a feminist paradise, women had a lot of rights up until the Mongol conquest and the subsequent Ming Dynasty. Although the neo-Confucian writers of the late Tang and Song Dynasties (roughly AD 700-1250 CE) insisted that women should stay in their proper inner sphere and only concern themselves with matters of the Inner Courtyard, they had few difficulties with women managing the household budget, overseeing household management, buying and selling property for the good of the family, inspecting properties to make sure the tenants were taking care of things, and other “matters of the household.” And filial piety meant that even the Neo-Confucian who disapproved of his mother’s Buddhist practices kept his mouth shut and let her do her thing, because respect for his mother and domestic harmony was far more important than obliterating Buddhist superstition, at least until the 1250s.

When we look at medieval and early modern Europe, we see women working. They did not have the same legal rights as men, or so it seems in many cases, but a little more digging reveals cases like that in Lübeck, the imperial free city on the Baltic, where widowed women who managed property for minor heirs or for absent merchant husbands had the same rights and duties as their male counterparts. They had to help defend the city, they participated in religious and social events, and did business in the name of the family. Nuremberg looks like a patrician patriarchy, and it was, but again, women had to know how to help keep the books and manage the household, which might have ten or twenty members. A good wife, competent in household management, was crucial for the family’s success, and the patrician’s letters and bequests show this. There are numerous accounts of noble women acting as advisors to their husbands and sons, or preparing castles for defense, or defending against sieges. Women had fewer legal rights on paper, but by tradition and necessity they had a lot of clout. They always have.

The New England colonies had the legal tradition of “deputy husbands,” where women were authorized under law to do everything necessary for the family and family-business while their husbands were away. They had to.

And no farm could possibly succeed without a good farm-wife, the bachelor farmers of Scandinavia being exceptions and rather late in history. Women cared for the family, ensured that food was prepared and preserved, raised kitchen crops, cared for livestock, kept the house in good repair, doctored the sick (two footed or four), taught the children, sold extra produce on the market, tended dairies and processed dairy products for home use and sale, made and repaired clothing, and other things as needed. Are you tired yet?

What do all these things have in common? They are sedentary. They can be done with children in arm, or on the floor, or in the house. And they are not outdoors where people can see them. Women were defensive fighters, physically and morally. When Black Jack Ketchum and his gang tried to rob the Gallegos house and estate store at Gallegos, NM, the matriarch got the kids and other women into shelter, then sniped with a rifle from upper floor windows, shot a few of the bandits, and drove them off. The men finished the job.

To read more: Elizabeth W. Berber. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. Great when she sticks with textiles, not so great when she wanders into other areas.

Man Xu. Crossing the Gate: Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian. A little heavy on gender-history theory, but otherwise excellent.

Steven Ozment. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. About Nuremberg. The family that lost 9 children before one lived to his first birthday is heartbreaking, but not unusual.

Damnatio Memoriae by Nitay Arbel

The slippery slopes of “damnation of memory”

[See also this earlier PJMedia article by the blogmistress, https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/08/20/remembering-the-past/ ]

Ancient Rome had a practice called “damnatio memoriae”  in which emperors or public figures that had fallen into disgrace were literally erased from view: not only were any monuments to them torn down, but their name was erased from things they had built.

In the wake of the recent push to demolish statues to military leaders from 150 years ago — respected on both sides of the war they fought in — the POTUS facetiously asked whether the Founding Fathers would be next. [Sure enough, some regressive leftist soon answered, “hold my beer!”.]

But seriously: as long as we’re engaging in “damnatio memoriae” by tearing down statues of historical figures who owned slaves etc. — why stop there? Let’s have a look at the sciences.

Karl Pearson held views on eugenics, race, etc. that can only be characterized as vile. He is also one of the founding fathers of statistics, and indeed coined such concepts as the correlation coefficient, standard deviation, and regression coefficients. Are we going to discard these statistical concepts as tainted by Pearson’s odious views? Or are we going to excise just him in favor of Ronald Fisher, who invented or popularized (Student’s t-distribution, ANOVA,…) several more statistical concepts? Oops, Fisher too was big on eugenics and racial stuff.  And if you start digging into Charles Spearman: with all his work on intelligence testing, “if you’re looking to beat a dog, a stick is easily found” (Dutch idiom). So are we, in the name of political correctness, going to have to ascribe the fundamentals of statistics to “an unknown author”? At the risk of Godwinizing, the way Heinrich Heine’s song “Lorelei” and several popular compositions by Mendelssohn were credited “to an unknown author/composer” during the Third Reich because of their creators’ Jewish origins?

Let’s go from statistics to physics. Johannes Stark was awarded the 1919 Nobel Prize in Physics for experimental spectroscopic work that in part inspired the development of quantum mechanics. The splitting up of atomic and molecular spectra in an electric field is known to this day as the Stark Effect.

Yet Stark was also a stark (ahem) raving antisemite, and this wasn’t just a privately held prejudice. During the Third Reich was actively involved in purging Jewish scientists from German academia and attempting to establish an “Aryan physics” purged of such subversive “Jewish” notions as Einstein’s theory of relativity. He was helped in these endeavors by another Nobel laureate, Philipp Lenard, already in his dotage.

So are atomic and molecular spectral lines now no longer allowed to split up in an electric field? Or do we need to rename the Stark effect after some mythical philosopher-peasant of [insert favored minority du jour], the way this happened in the former Soviet Bloc?

William Shockley led the research group at Bell Labs where the transistor was discovered: he shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with his subordinates John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. He was later said to “have put the silicon in Silicon Valley”. The always eccentric Shockley became an  outspoken racialist in his later years. Does that mean he is no longer the co-inventor of the transistor? Or, worse, are transistors and the microchips based on them now racist? Does that mean that SJWs now only get to use computers based on vacuum tubes or relays? Or do we simply edit Shockley out and ascribe the transistor entirely to his co-inventors?

And since so many readers here are space and sci-fi enthusiasts, I probably won’t need to rehash the story of Werner von Braun and his involvement with the V1 and V2 missiles — suffice to say that he must have been aware of the inhumane conditions prevailing at the Dora-Mittelbau underground factory (a satellite camp of Buchenwald) where the missiles were mass-produced.

In chemistry, I will just cite Fritz Haber as an example. Haber, with chemical engineer Carl Bosch, developed the Bosch-Haber process  for the fixation of aerial nitrogen, which freed agriculture and chemical industry from dependence on guano deposits as sources of ammonia and nitrates. It is hard to imagine how today’s world population could ever be fed without a sustainable source of artificial fertilizer. (Among other honors, this work earned Haber the 1918 Nobel Prize.)

Yet on the other side of the ledger, Haber was instrumental in introducing poison gas on the battlefield. WW I would probably have ended two years earlier (probably with Germany starved into surrender) without Haber.

Does this mean we no longer can use the Bosch-Haber Process, speak of the Born-Haber cycle, … Or that the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin needs to change its name?

I can go on like this for quite a while longer. Academics are probably second only to artists and politicians in their propensity for virtue signaling and moral preening. Yet in these matters, they let common sense prevail.  A person can be a genius in one area of human endeavor, and at the same time an imbecile or a scoundrel in another. One can acknowledge the latter without gainsaying the former.

Allow me to end on a personal note. Last year, during a side trip from a work assignment, we visited the city of Toledo (Spain, not OH). The famous “El Transito” medieval synagogue was actually on Mrs. Arbel’s bucket list to visit. As we walked toward it, we passed through the Calle de los Reyes Catolicos [“Street of the Catholic Kings”, idiomatically and in context: Ferdinand and Isabella Street]. It was only to be expected that streets would be named in honor of the dual monarchs who finally unified Spain (and who, by the way, also sponsored Columbus’s voyage). However, we could not help being reminded that these were also the very same monarchs who issued the infamous Expulsion Decree, which gave the Jews of Spain the choice between exile, conversion, or death.

But did the thought of being “offended” that the Spanish named the street after Ferdinand and Isabella (and probably another street in most major Spanish towns, plus umpteen monuments) even occur to us? The very concept would strike us —both proud and unapologetic Jews — as bizarre. Ferdinand and Isabella are inextricably part of the fabric of Spanish history — for good and bad.

 

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: Greedy

Multiculturalism IS Racism A Blast From The Past From April 2015

 

Good Saturday morning. I apologize for not writing this in cave symbols, since I know that language is inherited in the blood and therefore can’t be changed as can’t any other part of the culture. Because it’s all in our genes. And that’s why I’m squatting here in my cave, working at starting a fire while my husband and the boys sit in a corner chipping flint implements.

Oh, how I wish that human beings had been designed with the ability to grow and adapt, to learn new techniques, evolve new beliefs, adjust their behavior, create new words to fit new meanings, and thereby change their culture to fit new tech and new times.

Then I might be sitting in a shiny office, (more or less clean. Hey, I’ve been recovering from surgery) typing on a keyboard in a language full of meanings that our stone age ancestors couldn’t even imagine.

Oh, wait. Maybe we can learn and adapt. Or else, I’d be looking for berries while the guys tried to club something to death with their bare fists.

No, I’m not actually out of my ever-loving mind, but I think our culture, our “intellectuals” and our cognoscenti are. Not just out of their minds, but over the hills and far away, staking out a position that Hitler would be proud of.

What prompted this were clashes between two Australian groups, Reclaim Australia and No Room For Racism.

On the face of it it sounds like the nice narrative we are fed every time something like this happens. I haven’t been following the international scene, and frankly it wouldn’t even surprise me if Europe headed for nativism and blood-related nationality. It is what is at the basis of their nation states (even if it’s often a lie. For instance I’d hazard that a lot of people in Portugal – yes, d*mn it, I’ll do the DNA testing. Let the house sell and let me have some money first – are as mixed as Americans. My kids call Portugal the reservoir tip at the end of Europe, which is unkind but somewhat accurate since that portion of land was part of the Celtic commonwealth, before being invaded by Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Moors (though their contribution in the North is minimal as the North was usually administered by overseers with little or no actual colonization) French crusaders, Viking raiders. Then there were British and Irish merchants due to ties going back before the Carthaginians who would set up trading posts, send their younger sons over, sometimes engage in a bit of raiding, etc. There are unkind proverbs about blue eyed Portuguese, but there are also a lot of them. (Two of my grandparents. A third was green eyed.) And in the end sometimes I think all of us are the result of some girl who tripped (on purpose or not) while evading a foreigner. All this to say that when my dad talks of the “The Portuguese Race” (and boy, does he) he’s mostly talking of a mythical entity. But it’s one they all believe in as hard as they can.)

I’ll even accept that given that most of the programs of blood-nationality parties are to put it mildly socialism (but with the goodies going to a different group) it is accurate to call them fascists.

And my sons at least assure me that the Golden Dawn is honest to Bog fascism. I bow to their knowledge. They read a lot more international news than I do and by virtue of being millennials have friends all over the world. (Ah, the internet.)

However, Australia is not in Europe. And going on the self definition of the groups – and only that. (Note to the idiots who are going to dig out quotes by some figure in Reclaim Australia saying that if you have a tan you should be killed – I’m only going on the group’s self-definition as stated in the article I read.)

So, the protests by Reclaim Australia were according to the article I read for: Around the country Reclaim Australia protesters held rallies to oppose “sharia law, halal tax and Islamisation”, where they waved Australian flags and carried signs saying “Yes Australia. No Sharia”.

Now you can think whatever you want of those goals, but I look at them and think “They want to keep a more adaptable and successful (in raw terms of giving people a better life) culture from being replaced with a medieval nightmare that makes women into slaves, gay people into corpses and denies people the ability to practice other religions/cultures without paying dearly for it, either with money or blood.” (And please, don’t tell me burkas are freeing, and gay people REALLY want to be thrown from buildings, and that the tax to be a person of the book but non-Muslim is REALLY freedom of religion. And don’t try the nonsense that this only happens in rare and isolated places, either. It happens EVERY TIME that Islam gets the upper hand or the numbers.)

While I don’t care if people practice/believe in Islam or not, I think that freedom should be restricted to what we in the west would consider a purely religious arena. Or to put it another way, you have the right to wear the burka, you don’t have the right to make other people wear it; you have the right to tell your gay son he’s going to hell, or even kick him out of the house, you don’t have the right to throw him off a building; you have the right to divorce your wife because she insists on having a job, you can’t honor kill her. Or in other words, you have the right to follow the rules of your religion, but you WILL respect our civil laws. Or, again in other words “Very well, you build your pyre, we build our gallows. When you’re done burning your widow, we’ll hang the people who burned her.”

I don’t know if that’s what Reclaim Australia wants, or if they’re the more extreme form of “no mosques in Australia.”

I don’t care.

I don’t care not because I don’t see a difference between those positions (I do. I’d oppose the latter on principle) but because the group opposing them is not the “pro-islamicization group” or even the “no discrimination against religions group.”

No, the group opposing them is No Room for Racism.

This means that the problem they have isn’t even the problem that’s actually being fought over.

In other words, this is like if you had a problem because your car blew a tire, and someone pulled over and started arguing what type of seats you should have.

It is also entirely predictable.

The left can’t argue the actual problems and their actual causes, so it defaults to insane accusations and running around screaming what are (at least to them, but also to a vast portion of mal-educated young) trigger words: racism! Sexism! White supremacism!

We’ve seen this in the fight for science fiction and the fight for gaming, in the discussions about immigration, and in fact in just about anything that is a point of contention in the present day. I could write the longest, most carefully reasoned essay on why our schools are failing to teach people to read, and someone will quote truncated phrases and call me racist or sexist or (and this is funny) white supremacist.

This is how they’ve convinced themselves the people who want the Hugos to be the award of the majority of fandom again are about pushing women out. (Funny way to do it when Brad’s slate contained about half women.) Sigh.

They should consider not only are those words losing their sting but they DO encourage the people they purport to oppose. TRUE white supremacists in the US and abroad have been considered beneath the touch of normal people. However, when you call everyone who disagrees with you “white supremacists” how are people to know who the real ones are? They will just assume you’re going nuts again. And from that to falling prey to true demagogues is a step.

Anyway, to return to the point of this post – yes, I have one – the problem is that a lot of people on the left have evolved this bizarre theory of race/culture.

I saw it in my kids homework, when they were requested to write about “your culture” but got the essay sent back when they wrote about SF/F geekdom because they wanted “your ancestral culture.”

In my kids particular case the situation quickly became tragic or funny depending on how you look at it, because I descended on them like the wrath of Sarah, demanding they explain themselves.

The explanation went something like this “Language and costumes are tied to your race. Trying to get an immigrant to learn a new language/integrate in the culture he immigrated to is aggression, since you’re supposed to keep your culture, because it’s part of your race. To want you to change is racist.”

(Note to those in SF/F this is much, much worse than the position staked out by VD, the banished one, which if I understand him correctly is that SOME characteristics are inherited and make you more/less competent for industrial civilization. Note also that I don’t even agree with his position, much less the more extreme one. Note also that for his position he is condemned as racist, but the other position makes you enlightened and possibly beautiful and full of the meanings.)

This is the point at which I broke out my broom and flew in circles around their office, pointing out their position was something Hitler would have been proud to embrace. What they are claiming in fact is that there is some ur-mythical-quality to races (and races in this case are defined in the European sense, like my dad blathering on about the “Portuguese race”) which imbues them with their own language and culture. If wanting to change that is racist, and if some of these “races” are better at life than others (understood in the whole system of Marxist reward and punishment) then what will prevent them from in the future deciding to eugenically improve the breed by eliminating the less competent? Or just, as they’re doing now, handicapping them by never teaching them the lingua franca of the age and the technological culture needed to survive?

I didn’t convince anyone, of course, because this is a “religious” belief. I.e. if they thought rationally about it, they’d know that culture isn’t race, because we don’t all speak/dress/eat as they did in Ur of the Chaldees or on that distant day when we lounged about on tree tops eating insects, rodents and berries. But they can’t think about it because in their own blinkered minds, that would make them “racist.”

That is, the admission that all groups of humans (as groups. Obviously every individual is different) can adopt whatever religion/culture they like and be as successful at it as any other group (if they try hard enough) would to them be racist.

While claiming that you’re stuck with whatever culture your ancestors had and that even if you immigrate you have to keep repeating the mistakes of your culture, which caused your country of origin to have problems that caused you to immigrate, THAT in these idiots (apologies to real idiots whom I’m maligning)’s “minds” is racism.

(In other news, Slavery is Freedom, Work is Leisure, and Big Brother loves you.)

And that is what caught me about the confrontations in Australia. Not that they’re clashing over muslims, no. That half of these people think race equals culture.

And that is the epistemological error that can put paid to Western Civilization unless it’s combated every time we meet it.

And we must combat it, or the end result of this will be sitting in a cave, chipping away at flint. And I for one suck at making fires without matches.

Fortunately I also suck at tolerating racism and genetic supremacists of every race. So I’ll continue fighting, long before it comes to that.

In the end, we win, they lose. At least if we don’t allow them to change the meaning of words.

 

 

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The REAL American Dream

by Alpheus Madsen
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Every so often I’ll hear a news report about a sports person, or a movie star, or an unusually lucky businessman, or a lottery winner, and the reporter will say “This person has achieved the American Dream!”. I always cringe when I hear that. The hidden implication behind such statements is that the American Dream is to get rich beyond your wildest dreams, and then spend your newfound riches seeking extreme pleasure until you are a mere shell of what you used to be. The problem with this, though, is that becoming rich has nothing to do with the American Dream.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that money isn’t important, by any means. Money is the means by which we can take care of our needs, research new ideas, and in general have fun — however, if we don’t have control of our money, it will destroy us. When I first heard of Robin William’s suicide, it broke my heart to hear that the debts of his houses, former marriage financial obligations, and difficulty obtaining new acting work likely contributed to his suicide. Someone who made millions over the years, however, shouldn’t have had these issues on his mind! He should have lived well within his means, and should have had his wealth secured in good investments, so that when these other trials came along, money shouldn’t have been on his mind.

But then, Robin Williams isn’t the best example: he was suffering from something called diffuse Lewy body dementia, which, as I understand it, is a horrible thing to suffer through. No matter what we can achieve financially, there will always be horrible things that can happen to us. Perhaps a better example can be illustrated by a mansion sitting on top of a mountain ridge in Moab. I still remember when we visited Moab as a family, and my Dad pointed to that mansion, saying “That was built by a person who made a fortune in uranium prospecting, and then lost it all.” That person is Charles Steen, who, with his wife, struggled in poverty leading up to that fortune, and then built that mansion, threw weekly parties for people in Moab, and flew with his wife to Salt Lake City for weekly Salsa lessons. Then, sometime in the 1950’s, the United States Government decided they had enough money for their needs, the price of uranium collapsed, and Charlie’s fortune pretty much collapsed with it. He managed to live until 2006, though, although he never had the wealth that he did in the 1950’s.

So the first lesson in this is that you must live within your means! Even if you have to go into debt, live within your means! Well, ok, it’s more difficult to live within your means when, like me, you’re not rich, but instead have mounds of student debt and getting blindsided somewhat regularly with medical issues. I cannot emphasize enough (backed by experience, to boot!) that if you have to go into gobs of debt to achieve your dreams, there’s probably something wrong with how you are trying to achieve your dreams. And I will not hesitate to say that the Federal Government’s encouraging of vulnerable students to go into mounds of debt pursuing those “passions” that simply don’t have any marketable value, in an attempt to get everyone into the middle class, is probably one of the most harmful things they could have dreamed up to harm the real American Dream, than anything else they could have devised.

It’s clear that money isn’t the core of the American Dream. If the American Dream isn’t getting rich, then, just what is it?

In one word, it’s Freedom. It’s the ability to decide we want to have a nice little cottage with a picket fence in the mountains, and/or a bungalow on the beach, and saving up until we can buy one or both. It’s the ability to decide what we can do and what we enjoy doing, and then use those to help other people with their problems. It’s the ability to save money for the future — both to own and do things that we think are fun, and to make investments that will ensure that we’ll be comfortable in our old age. It’s the ability to organize friends and strangers into small gatherings, clubs and even conventions, to discuss things that we enjoy discussing. It’s the ability to forgo that promotion, and its accompanying raise, because you’d rather live comfortably and see your family, than be rich and alienated from your children. It’s the ability to help people in need, because you have the time and resources to help those people. It’s the ability to do things completely irrelevant to our training and our profession, heck, to do things completely irrelevant to making money, just because we find them amusing. In short, it’s the ability to prosper, and to help others prosper too! And sometimes, when we are in the pursuit of all this, we do something so important, riches inevitably come in anyway.

Many people gain riches, but fail to do things that make them happy, and fail to organize their finances to secure themselves for the future. Such people fail to achieve the promise of the American Dream. In contrast, Brigham Young University ran a study to see how their business students were doing in the market place, and found that their alumnni would typically rise up to middle management and then get stuck there. Rather than cry “Discrimination!” (which, being Mormon, they can easily do) they ran another study to figure out just what was happening, and found that their alumni generally rose to a position with good responsibilities and pay, that didn’t require them to work long hours that would take them from their families — which is a very important family value. In other words, the alumni were finding work they enjoyed that was in line with their values. If we take for granted that upper management really needs to work those extra hours they do (a debatable claim, to be sure), then it’s clear that no amount of social engineering will put BYU Mormon alumni into upper management. They have their values, they know what rewards they want, and they get exactly what they want. This is what freedom looks like! And this applies to all minorities, even the smallest ones, which is why, beyond working to ensure that everybody is free to choose whatever career that might interest them, it’s a fool’s errand to try to fix perceived injustices in the marketplace.

The American Dream prospers in large part because we believe that we can do whatever we want to do, regardless of what others want us to do; thus, the greatest dangers to the American Dream are those imposed by government and, to a lesser extent, by society itself, via regulations and social pressures telling us what we can and cannot do, generally independent of what is truly harmful to others. So long as Americans have an attitude of ignoring the multitude of regulations and social pressures so complex that no one — not even bureaucrats, lawyers, judges and social justice warriors — can fully know, the American Dream should prosper, particularly if Americans grow to understand the regulatory thorns in our side, and find ways to root them out.

Now, I don’t wish to contradict our esteemed hostess’s reasons for participating in the lottery, but here is Bill Whittle’s video where he has an interesting take on why the lottery is evil. (Ah, who am I kidding? Sarah is an Evil Space Princess, so what would you expect? How can she not participate in something so evil as the lottery?) The point of providing this link isn’t to emphasize the evils of the lottery, so much as to provide yet another very optimistic take on just what the American Dream is — and what we should go and do about it!

Bill Whittle’s Afterburner — Winning the Lottery

So, what are you waiting for? Go, and live the American Dream! And do whatever you can to get rid of and/or neutralize those meddling bureaucrats!

A Precious Narrative

By Cedar Sanderson

 

Storytelling is woven into human DNA. Even the discovery of DNA’s shape is enrobed in a thrilling tale of deceit and betrayal – with a sexist twist, of course. We tell our stories every single day. Some of us are very clearly aware of the delineations between fact and fantasy, and make our living spinning narratives others enjoy reading for the fun of it. Other people lose the boundaries between fiction and their own desires, and that’s where it starts to get, for lack of a better word, problematic.

I would argue that in order to exist in this world full of contradictions, some people must create an insulting narrative to keep them from confronting the harsh realities that surround them. Without that precious blanket (and you may also envision a thumb firmly inserted for sucking on) they might have to face truths they cannot accept. I’ve seen this time and time again. Heaven help you if you dent their story, because they will lash out in irrational anger. It really doesn’t matter if you can prove they are wrong and you’re in the right. That’s not what they feel is right.

Thus, the idea becomes that reality is an amorphous thing, moldable by the individual human as they drift through life, bumping into things and adding buffers at those sore spots. How did we get here, you might ask, and I’ll be asking it right along with you. Mark Gover of Michigan State University calls it an ‘intellectual cul-de-sac’ which seems very apt when we consider the dead-end results of basing ‘truth’ solely on one’s own desires. He states: “Similarly, the quest for an absolute ground of narrative, either as a structure embedded in the mind or as a stylized cultural tradition, is ultimately a crazy-making pursuit.”

We need, then, some kind of lodestone outside our selves to ground our reality. Observation, data, and analysis are crucial to keeping our unconscious daily narrative from becoming insanely out of touch with the world as-it-is, rather than the world as-we-desire-it-to-be. Even science is not immune to the creation of a narrative, when it ceases to question some particular that has become established as tradition. Aside from the current position that climate change is settled science, we can see the failings of science in the case of fat intake – demonized in the 1960s, through research that was funded by the sugar industry (JAMA, Nov. 2016) – and in shaky peer-reviewed papers that, well, sometimes are obviously not reviewed at all (there have been entire papers consisting of profanity, or thinly-veiled Star Wars references).

But still, science is the best solution we have to ensure that we are grounded and sane in the face of the narratives that come rushing at us daily with their contradictory claims. I know that I often say ‘data is not anecdote’ but it is difficult to deny the attraction of knowing that something works for/has happened to you, or even to someone you know well and trust. This is, after all, how word-of-mouth marketing works. The trust circle we surround ourselves with forms our narrative and reality, and if, say, your best friend posts on social media ‘I just read this great book!’ you are that much more likely to buy that book next time you are looking for something to read. It was good for your friend, and you know you like the same sort of books, so… and most of the time that works very well.

On the other hand, if your friend posts a meme from David Avocado Wolfe, and you just scan it and say ‘oh, RoundUp causes cancer? And I’ve seen ten other memes about that in the last week! It must be true.’ And I’m here to tell you that even Mother Jones has published an expose showing that the study published showing glyphosphate (active ingredient in RoundUp) was carcinogenic was based on flawed data, with proof that it was not cancer-causing being withheld by one of the main scientists.

Trust, but Verify. Relying on memes for solid data is a bad idea, but you wouldn’t know that from social media. Between confirmation bias making people click share before their brain has a chance to engage, and the phenomenon of ‘everybody knows’ the whole scandal over ‘fake news’ is simply human nature. Once that battle played out in yellow journalism, now it flashes across the face of the globe in an instant through the ‘intarwebs.’

Narrative is baked-in from birth. Family forms some, school takes over around the age of five (with preschool getting younger and younger these days, whether that’s good for children, or not doesn’t matter, it’s part of the social narrative that a child won’t succeed without pre-school). Increasingly, the narrative a child is told does not come from parents, but from teachers (or shall I say educators?), peers, the internet, and television. These have always been factors – or were, to some extent, but it is inescapable that in the Age of the Internet, just as in the Age of Steam before it, the revolution of technology has been overwhelmingly fast, and we are still processing the changes in our culture, and in our narratives.

Are the stories we tell true? How do we know? We must question, and listen critically to voices that are not telling us what we want to hear. When we take in the narrative of the media, we must ask ‘what is the bias?’ Above I mentioned the studies which led to low-fat diets, and possibly deleterious effects on the health of millions of Americans, were funded by the sugar industry. Who is paying for your news? What will they gain by telling this story? Dig down to see where the source of the story is. You’ll find, more often than not, a multitude of stories spring, like Zeus’ children, from the forehead of one journalist. Whether or not that original story was fact, or fiction. When a person wants something to be true hard enough, they unconsciously write that narrative, rather than the truth.

I keep hearing the cliche’d saying ‘there are three sides to every story. Yours, theirs, and the truth.’ Perhaps, but I find it annoying. Trained in investigation, I refuse to believe the implicit declaration in this: that the truth is unknowable. Instead, I think that with persistence, and evidence, truth can be known. If you are willing to accept that perhaps you are partly incorrect, and to admit that when you are, you can analyze the story and find the truth. If you are not willing to admit you may be wrong, then the truth is going to remain invisible to you.

There Are Four Lights
by Synova

There are a number of things that I’ve learned over the last few years.  Here is a partial list.  I’ve tried to be as fair as possible and include things that were explained to me and which I can specifically place, both where I heard them and who was speaking.

For example, just recently someone shared a post talking about a YA book that had been declared racist by a self-appointed judge who encouraged all of her significant number of followers to harass the author and make sure her book failed. (It didn’t.) But the person who originally sat in judgement of the book also made a curious statement, that no one should read for themselves to confirm if the book was bad or not.   I’m sure that many of you can think of specific cases where someone has insisted that people not listen to the other side, don’t read, don’t engage, don’t judge for yourself.

Some are paraphrases and contractions, such as “Their speech is violence and our violence is speech.”  That’s not often paired, because pairing it highlights the problem.  But “speech as violence” is something often said in complete seriousness by educated people who should know better.  I can picture two or more specific individuals who have made the argument in my hearing (or at least reading.)  And hearing violent marches, riots, or other performative sorts of things described as protected speech is also not at all uncommon.  After all, what is breaking that Starbucks window if it’s not political speech?

I’ve skipped the sorts of things I learned that had very narrow political or social focus.  Lots of people are wrong about lots of things and it’s not useful to list the little stuff.  There are a few science fiction specific ones on the list that some of you will recognize, though.

Things I have learned:

• The only reason I can vote or have anything good in life is because someone in history was an asshole, therefore assholery toward random fellow citizens is proved to effect positive social change.
• Processing your Privilege in Public via confessions and discussion among other privileged white women helps. Like hashtags.
• Tolerance is about the moral necessity to be intolerant.
• Inclusion will be achieved when enough of the right people are excluded.
• Compassion is about figuring out who doesn’t deserve any, such as that fellow who got tortured to death by North Korea for stealing a propaganda poster. That guy didn’t deserve any.
• Free Speech only applies to things that have broad public approval.
• Their speech is violence and our violence is speech.
• Comparing identical behavior and motivations is a false equivalency if different people are involved.
• A conversation involves listening until you understand.
• There are no bad tactics, only bad targets.
• Bigotry based on race isn’t racism.
• Anyone is entitled to a little violent acting out when judged negatively due to their race, except for white men, who are better people.
• If someone has made it possible for people to lie about them, the liars are entitled to run with it.
• Authoritarian threats can be solved with more government.
• “Anarchists” want more government.
• Denying slander proves that it’s true.
• Making little old church ladies uncomfortable is funnier than hell, and probably means you’re a good person.
• Disproving an ideology through words and logic actually makes that ideology stronger.
• No one should read a book that’s been condemned nor listen to a speaker they expect to say bad things.
• Getting people fired is right and just and true, and you should be very proud of yourself.
• Shutting down speech, reporting thought crime, and destroying people’s lives doesn’t make you a fascist.
• Wearing the face of a man who was a murderer, racist, sexist, and homophobe on your shirt means you’re down with the struggle.
• Constitutional protections are subject to how strong your feelings are.
• Morality can and should be legislated, just not that old morality that you didn’t like.

 

What have you learned in the last few years?  Keep it clean and have fun.

How Political Ideology Trumps Family
By Rhiain

The title of this post was a compromise. There were plenty of other titles I could’ve settled for instead, given the subject matter: “How I Allowed My Victimhood Complex To Ruin My Relationship With My Mother,” “How Her White Privilege Ruined My Relationship With My Mother,” and “How I Virtue-Signaled Hard AF (common millennial slang) In ‘The Root’ Over My Trump-Voting Mother” were some of my discarded choices. No, “How Political Ideology Trumps Family” turns out to be a fitting alternative header for this post.

The author makes clear that he loves his parent, but clearly he has a problem with a)the social differences currently wrought from her skin color and his, b)her choice of presidential candidate, and c)his mother’s inability to understand “the black man’s struggle.”

My mother voted for Donald Trump. She’s also white. And she and her (white) husband are members of the National Rifle Association, own two small businesses—including a gun shop—and were actually screwed by Obamacare. In short, my mother is probably what a typical, white Midwesterner looks like on paper. Except, she’s not. She’s an immigrant. She moved to the United States from France in 1970 when she was (I believe) 13 years old.

This American-born homeboy apparently believes that because his mother wasn’t originally born on U.S. soil, she should’ve known better than to vote for that bigoted misogynist in the White House. Yes, really. Immigrants should be naturally inclined to better understand Teh Struggle of younger non-white or mixed-race American citizens.

Our homeboy describes his background growing up with a black father and white mother, and accepts that he’s a “light-skinned black dude.” It’s great that he never “struggled with [his] racial identity,” but astute readers who aren’t “woke” will note that it takes him awhile to admit that his complaints about America revolve around race – all the time. I don’t know about you, but people who obsess about the flaws of others who don’t share the same levels of melanin tend to be bitterly angry shrews. See K. Tempest Bradford’s posts if you want an example of such a person.

If I’m being honest, there has been a very slow erosion of the relationship over time because of what I view as her lack of perspective about the life of her children. Maybe our reality wasn’t hers on a daily basis, but denying our reality, even passively, was eventually going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Let’s get something straight: homeboy complains about racial injustices regularly around his non-black mother, but refuses to acknowledge that perhaps his mother’s views on the subject of race wasn’t influenced by politics or even skin color so much as it was by the common American sensibility to “live and let live.”

“Woke” people can’t seem to get this through their thick skulls in this day and age: many Americans, until now, have been more preoccupied with the daily tasks of life than they are with figuratively assaulting others with their politics. Nowadays conservatives and libertarians wax nostalgic about the times when they could have dinner with liberal friends and relatives; polarizing subjects could be glossed over in favor of good food and discussions that had nothing to do with politics. Believe me, this used to be possible. Given the modern liberal’s penchant for segregating their loved ones by political party, I’m convinced those days are over.

Something, somewhere changed. Shortly after the election, my sister and I had planned to head to Michigan for the Thanksgiving holiday. That visit went off the rails before it even started when my mother decided that we would be going to my stepfather’s family’s house for dinner, a family I knew voted for Trump.

Something did change, though it wasn’t on his mother’s part. Homeboy decides he doesn’t want to have Thanksgiving with a bunch of Trump voters, and last November he wasn’t the only one with such sentiments.

His mother and aunt visited last week, and things escalate quickly when his Trump-supporting parent buys MAGA gear and dons it on a tour of the U.S. capital:

But this is when our relationship hit the point from which I realized we’d never fully recover. When we were getting in the car to head to Rockville, Md., she asked why I found the T-shirt offensive. I told her that by her wearing that shirt, it showed that she didn’t care about my life or those of her grandchildren or daughter; after we argued, she refused to speak to me for hours, again.

“Make America Great Again” quickly became as tiresome a political slogan as “Hope and Change” did in the aftermath of last year’s election, but homeboy doesn’t elaborate on how it makes his mother a callous woman. Nor does he explain why his mother’s political worldview endangers his life. He seems to assume that his readers understand that Donald J. Trump’s presidency is enough of a gamechanger in his familial relationships to not bother with an explanation.

‘Scuse me, homeboy, but homegirl here is confused. Or bemused. Or something.

I can’t sit and actively engage with a person—even if it is my mother, whose blood is running through my body—if she doesn’t care about me, my story or what I live through. If she can’t see past her own appreciation for a bigoted, dangerous man, who, because of the position people like her have placed him in, has the ability to do significant damage to my civil liberties, then I don’t know what place she can have, reasonably, in my life.

His public decision to cut off his mother due to a difference in political views is a common occurrence these days. It started on the evening of November 8, 2016 and seems to have snowballed since. Friends are cutting off longtime friends based on how they voted last year. Same thing is happening with families.

Blood is not thicker than freedom and it’s not thicker than safety. Sometimes blood is just that, blood. I know my mother loves me; I’m her son. But, honestly, I don’t think my mother cares about what that really means.

I agree with everything in this graph except for the last sentence. Homeboy, some words of advice:

It ain’t all about you.

You filled a post with an innocent-sounding string of anecdotes about the dissolution of your relationship with your mother. You were wronged by her vote for a man that you consider dangerous and bigoted, yet you blame that man for the damage done instead of engaging in a little introspection.

You view life and especially its flaws through the lenses of race and social justice, which doesn’t make you sound like a fun person to be around on a regular basis. Donald J. Trump wouldn’t know you from Jamal, yet somehow he jeopardizes your life and safety by his office and very existence. Folks from both sides of the aisle are guilty of fearmongering when someone from the opposite political party is in power, but good gods above, man, act like a man, not a wussified homeboy afraid of his own shadow.

If you want to challenge the president on his stances and Tweets, there’s a line as long as the country is wide. First, however, grow some balls and stop blaming him for your own selfishness where your mother’s concerned. Recognize there’s no harm in your political views diverging from hers, which is so common that I can’t believe I have to remind you of this. Yes, members of white, non-white and mixed-race American families all vote differently, if they vote. Shocker, I know! Once you acknowledge this, try to consider that differing political views from one’s parent doesn’t automatically make her the enemy. That’s the important thing; people these days are too quick to label even family as “the enemy.” Before it was “The Other,” but liberals seem to have escalated that.

I mean, after the events of last weekend in Charlottesville, I’m almost tempted to grab a tiki torch for giggles and march through the streets myself, white hood and all, even though I’m not white and certainly not a Nazi. But if doing so forces you to start thinking about the futility of drawing a bloody line over the pettiest of sociopolitical issues, I will have accomplished something.

No, seriously, I’m feeling very odd, and not even sure what is going on.  I woke up feeling either very tired, terminally relaxed or depressed, and I can’t tell which.  I know this is bizarre, and it’s possible what it actually is is “coming down with a cold” or something like that.  I just know nothing matters very much and I want to sleep a lot.  I hope it’s not a cold, as it would be very hard in terms of traveling on Wednesday.

The other side of this is that I’ve been doing some work with professional guidance.  No, not exactly seeing a psychiatrist, but a friend is a psychiatrist and we’ve been talking.  Believe it or not, I’m writing a novel to work through my problems.  This is the same world I hid in when I was very unhappy growing up.  So, the terminally relaxed makes some sense.  But it’s weird.  If I shed my neurosis, what have I got?

Anyway, I have no intention of just sleeping, because I want to leave the house some semblance of clean, or at least not the mess it is right now, and I also have some clothes to take in/let out before we go.

I realized yesterday that I forgot to give you the program for oh, from tomorrow through the 10th of September.

I am running a lot of guest posts/blasts from the past.  I might write a post if something of note happens and if we have connectivity (we will, at least at times) I’ll drop into the comments and hang out as usual, but pardon me for doing this, okay?  I need some time off.  Not a lot, and not off-off.  I’ll be working on Guardian for one (was just telling the boss when to expect manuscript) and other stuff, if I finish earlier than expected, but…

Every morning I wake up with the consciousness I owe a blog.  I’d like two weeks without it.  After that, I’m going to try to do more of a write all posts one day and then schedule them too, because just the anxiety of figuring what to write for you every morning often stops me writing fiction and that’s not good.

BUT the blog will go on, and I arranged some great guest posts for you, from the polemic to the informative (Stephanie will have a series on the New Madrid fault.)  I hope you’ll enjoy it and only miss me a little.  (You have to miss me a little, otherwise what’s the point of coming back.)

Once school is in full swing, and we know his schedule, I’ll try to rope younger spawn in to a post a week, and maybe I can get Dan to do something once a week too.  Perhaps “adventures in tech” since I SWEAR he’s always figuring out something new to do with his computers.

Meanwhile, please keep this country in one piece and the ports open so I can come back.  I don’t want to have to devise a way to walk back from Europe.  I’d be very pissed by the time I get back.  You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Oh, yeah, as to the eclipse, a few things:

In the Dark of the Sun

Officials In South Carolina Are Warning Citizens Of Possible Lizard Man Sightings During The Eclipse

AND

Eclipse tips: Prepare for werewolves and the Moon Serpent