Category: Uncategorized

So, between the book banners and those who would fire people for sourced documents stating what any neuro-scientist will tell you over breakfast, the left has been on a tear and is going insane.

It is not, as some of my very young friends think, that the left has more dominance or is going more bully-like than ever.

No, this is the mark of a cultural revolution, where the dominant faction is losing its grip.  You see, they controlled the entire culture for decades and anyone who talked back was “crazy” and anyone they declared evil or stupid was evil or stupid.

If you lived through the eighties, you remember all the jokes about Ronald Reagan being both evil and stupid, both on network TV and in casual, non political gatherings.  The media reporting made it seem so, so everyone KNEW so.

Yeah, sure there were those of us who resented this, but we said nothing, because ‘everyone knew” we were wrong and the left was right.  Places like Readers Digest which were supposed to be middle of the road published crazy stuff like that the president of Mozambique was only a nurse’s aid because under the Portuguese no black person was allowed to be a doctor.  Reading this, I threw the magazine against the wall, because my SIL’s best friend, whom she helped escape from Mozambique (because the revolutionaries idea was to send all the black women to cut down jungle for agricultural space in the country’s deranged version of the cultural revolution) was black and a medical student.  But for millions of middle Americans that lie became the truth, and the revolutionaries, an armed puppet-branch of the soviets, became “liberators” of “black people”. ..  who would allow them to be doctors.  (Sort of.  If they survived assignments cutting down jungle or acting as comfort women to the Cuban mercenaries sent over to help with the revolution.)

The narrative was so uniformly shaped, so pervasively pushed that not only wasn’t it possible to question it without sounding crazy, but the inherent contradictions of the left couldn’t be pointed out.

Now, the good little boys and girls, who have done their best to virtue signal, play by the rules, and always say what “everyone knew” are getting talk back.  Worse, some of these people, like Damore, have science on their side.  which initiates meltdown, defensiveness and what appears from our point of view like roid rage.

Asking simple questions like “If men and women are exactly alike, what does a company gain from increasing diversity?” pokes a huge hole in political correctness, and makes it impossible for them to hold these contradictory ideas in their heads in peace.  If they tell you it’s because little Suzie who wants to be a programmer is being discriminated against, ask why we should instead discriminate against little Bobby, who wants to be a programmer, if they’re both exactly alike in any thing but sexual organs.  We’re not hiring them have sex, are we?  If we must have affirmative action, wouldn’t it be better to pick those people who grew up in poor conditions or something, and ignore other characteristics?

Be polite, be firm.  Ask questions.  When they tell you that you’re a Nazi or literally Hitler, tell them you’re not, but you’ve been called worse.  Then go back to questioning.

Question them everywhere you can, on every front you can without endangering either your job, your life or your family.  Question, question, question.  Their philosophy is full of contradictions and they can only hold onto it by pretending they’re not there.  Don’t let them.

The crazier you make them, the more they flail about, the more the unengaged spectators see that they’re in fact crazy.  And the more we win.

It’s time to throw this bastard child of soviet agit prop int he ash heap of history.  Go out there and poke.  If you see something, say something.  Do not let them think they can go unquestioned.

The end result of their efforts is always a soulless, murderous society.

Use your snark for good, and your logic for fun.

Go.

I am almost fifty five years old.  In my entire life, in two countries, I’ve never come across a book so dangerous it couldn’t be read.  I’ve never come across an idea so dangerous it couldn’t be debated.  And I’ve never come across a book that while being read went out and hurt other people.

In fact the only books I ever heard say one shouldn’t read or it would hurt people if one read it, it was because some group, often some government thought that the ideas in those books could hurt them.

Most such books were very silly.  I’ve read the communist manifesto.  No sane human being who has read in the world of humans and understands other humans can read that utter piece of delusion without laughing out loud.  Unless that human being knows the graves that piece of nonsense has filled.  But the people who fall for its honeyed nonsense are not rational people.  They’re people broken in the same way its author was broken: little people hungry for power and sure everyone else had what was due to them.  It wasn’t reading the words that broke them.  They would have broken anyway.

I’ve never read Mein Kampf.  No one I knew growing up owned a copy.  People I trust tell me it’s remarkably silly and also hard to read, unless the translator does a fantastic job.  At some point or other I might skim it.  Not that I think it will convinced me, but because I think one should have an idea what’s in it.  In fact, I’m fairly sure it won’t convince me.  People did not fall in behind Hitler because of the words in that book, but because of the Brown shirts, the show of strength, the fear their country and their people weren’t central to the world as they always thought they were.  (And since I’ve been reading about the genesis of the German people, I have a little more insight on how badly that would rub Germans wrong.)

I read Friedrich Nietzsche which in a recent mystery show I watched was portrayed as the gateway to becoming a serial killer.  I was actually 12 when I read him, and he struck me as very silly.  I read Camus at about the same time.  I read Ayn Rand. Only Jean Paul Sartre put me off his reading.  Something about his writing and his way of expressing things and seeing humanity was like being submerged in toxic sludge.  But I wouldn’t say other people SHOULDN’T read him.  On the contrary.  I think he’s given a great deal of power and credit he doesn’t deserve.

I can’t say any one book changed my mind or made me a better or worse person.

Heinlein did change me, but it was subtle and overtime, and mostly he changed me less by telling me what to think than my asking questions that simply weren’t asked in the society I was born and raised in “to whom does tax money actually belong?” and “why should the common person not have the right to defend himself, when criminals don’t care if guns are illegal, because they are — duh — criminals?”

Those questions over time changed me into who I am, but you know, I was not and I’m not sure that what I believe would even have Heinlein’s approval, much less his endorsement.  And as much as I admire him, I have problems with several of his ideas like the fact he views humans as a net drain on the Earth and believed Malthus’s old lies. (Though it was mixed, of course.  All real humans are. His characters were very life affirming.)  And I don’t believe his marriage arrangements would work for a majority or even a significant minority of the population.  Oh, I’m not against them, understand.  If you’re one of the few for whom it does work, be my guest.  There is too little happiness in this world to be restricting the ways in which people find it.  I just don’t think, humans not being bonobos, it’s the natural, untutored way of mankind, where we’d all go except for preachers and repressive societies.  But he was a man of his time and upbringing, as we all are.  Which means some of the things he believed he was rational on, were actually the blinders of his time and situation.  To his credit he knew it, and he advocated reading widely, both fiction and non-fiction, and experiencing others thoughts as much as possible to knock out the blind spots in yours.

I took him at his word.  For fun I’ve read fiction by everyone from deep racists (and no one does racism as well as the elites of the nineteenth century.  Not all, of course, but the baseline for “not racist” was in a place we’d now consider racist) to modern science fiction feminists.

I will not read a book that won’t hold my attention but other than that, I will read writers of any political stripe.  I even like some authors whose basic outlook on life makes me want to pound my head on a wall until it breaks.  I rather enjoyed the Left Hand Of Darkness.  I read it three times.  Once for the book, once for magnificent character development (I’ve been trying to pull that trick of making the reader hate the character, then prove the reader wrong and break his heart for a long time.  It’s a hard one) and once to yell at the book “Biology doesn’t work like that.” and “that’s not how an hermaphrodite human race would work.”  and “you’ve been blinded by stupid feminism.”

(It’s the book that started me writing a — duh — world with a bio-engineered hermaphrodite race.  (Bio engineered for equality and peace.  It …. doesn’t work that way.)  I wrote eight very bad books in that world.  Hey, I started at 14.  Reading them wouldn’t hurt you, except in the sense I didn’t know my craft.  Yes, that world will be revisited… maybe next year, if I can stop being interrupted by health crisis and actually write.  Probably indie because my goal is not actually to drive my publisher insane. I swear.)

I’m often offended by lying history, which is why I stopped reading Anne Rice at Queen of the Damned.  Oh, it’s lying biology too, but I could give her that, its being fantasy.  I’m not going to tell you not to read it, though.  As long as you realize she was pulling history from ass, it’s not a bad set of books.  Yeah, even if you prefer to set vampires on fire.  She does setting really well.  Makes it a character.  Good idea to read it.

The point is, that books I deeply disagree with, but which are still interesting, I read.  Most of the time the worst they do is make me roll my eyes and go “yeah, that is the problem” when the author intrudes upon the action to explain how everything would be solved by a sufficient application of Marx.  At best, sometimes, they make me see that they might kind of, sort of, have a point.  Or at least, as with Heinlein’s ideas on marriage, reading him makes me go “Uh, yeah, I understand how with his history and living when he did–”  And that is good.

Look, unless you believe — as mom would put it — that you are pregnant with truth, and know all the ultimate dos and don’ts of mankind, so that you’ll be forever vindicated, yay and verily, world without end, even if you’re fairly sure that your set of beliefs is the “closest to right humans can get” you know that people believed differently in the past and likely (if you’re not an idiot and understand humans and history) will believe differently in the future.  Reading different opinions allows you to see how other people can believe what they do.  (Even if sometimes it just causes you to say “against stupidity the gods themselves strive in vain.”)  This not only allows you to test your own beliefs against the flint of other minds, it allows you to turn your insight into them into introspection and say “maybe this thing I believe is not so much right, but simply what I believe due to this blindspot.”  (It is entirely possible I find the idea of group marriage weird because I’m a deep introvert, who for a long time thought she couldn’t even do a conventional marriage, because I need so much “getting away and being by myself” time.  Turns out marrying another introvert works.  Also, with time you get okay with having him in your space all the time.  You can sit there and read next to him and recharge as well — better — than when alone.  Am I sure this is my blind spot?  No.  I think the whole idea of group marriage is psychologically too taxing.  But I’ll admit that it’s entirely possible it’s JUST my view.  Hence, ladies and gentlemen, why I say you should be free to try it.  I just don’t think it will ever be a thing of the majority.)

And I’ll be honest, absent magic, I can’t understand how someone reading a book, or even making a book a bestseller — EVEN IF THE BOOK IS BIGOTED AGAINST A GROUP OF PEOPLE — hurts anyone.  Dan Brown didn’t cause the Catholic Church to collapse in a heap.  Oh, sure, it lent some fire to pre-existing hatred of the Catholic Church among Protestant denominations.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion haven’t caused Judaism to go extinct.  Sure, they lent ammo to some very idiotic people who ALREADY wanted to believe the worst of Jews.  Both bits of hatred pre-existed the books.  Reading them or making them bestsellers didn’t physically run out and kill people or even cause people to say mean things.

This is why this entire dumpster fire annoys me. It annoys me all the more because you know and I know that it happens all the time.  I’ve been subjected to this insanity as have my books.

To put it succinctly for those — you lucky few — not following at home: YA author wrote a book in which the character gradually overcomes racism.  It honestly seems to all intents and purposes a Politically Correct, innocuous book, which was getting the push such books get UNTIL someone decided that portraying a character who started out prejudiced WAS prejudiced, and that the book was therefore the worst thing ever, and the author was racist, and no one should read it because they’d become tainted.

And then there’s this crap — this crap right here:

Author Tristina Wright was one of several who condemned would-be readers of called-out books, while young readers followed suit.
“Imagine being so privileged you care about your own entertainment more than the hurt of marginalized people,” one tweeted, while another declared, “Reading a book specifically because it’s been called out for racism doesn’t make you a champion of independent thought. It makes you racist.”

Say it with me, ladies and gentlemen: no book ever on being read reached out and PHYSICALLY hurt any marginalized (or none marginalized.  Or purple with stripes and three heads) people.  Reading a book can cause you to agree with it, disagree with it, change your mind or become entrenched in your own prejudices, but it DOES NOT HURT ANYONE.  The Necronomicon is fictional, okay?  Reading a book does not open a pathway to the nether realms.

It can’t even be that Ms. Wright thinks reading the book will make people “racist” since the character sees her errors as the book progresses.  So why is she doing this?  I tell you why.  This totalitarian wanna be enjoys the power she has to destroy the career of, honestly, probably a fellow traveler, and to keep emotional bubble children like this one from reading whatever she decides is double plus ungood this week:

Mimi, the teen blogger who had once been so excited about The Black Witch, was among those who urged others to avoid the book, writing on her website and Twitter about the emotional pain it had caused her. She still hasn’t read it, and doesn’t plan to; she feels that Sinyard’s review tells her all she needs to know. “I trusted her take on it. She showed pictures from the book, and certain passages in the book, so it’s not like she was making it up,” Mimi says. And in the wake of the book’s release on May 2, Mimi is upset by the lack of response from Harlequin and galled by descriptions of the novel as pro-diversity and anti-prejudice. “I wanted the author and publisher to understand that there were people who were hurt by this,” she says. “But [Forest] says her book is for diversity, anti-homophobia, anti-racism, and it’s poking fun at all of us, like we did this all for nothing.”

It’s about doing this “for something” and the something is the power of the Puppet Masters.

Mimi is a teen and so we must excuse her twerpitude.  You have to go through miles and miles of twerpitude before you finally, perhaps, arrive at being a worthwhile human being at some point.

But unfortunately she’s joined by many so called adults.  I’ve heard my own books referred to as “racist, sexist, homophobic” (always in that order, yes) and this given as reason not to read them, because you know, quotes pulled out of context totally tell you what a book is about.  Take the sainted Handmaid’s tale, which like most Margaret Atwood I’ve never managed to read, because you know, the world building suspends my disbelief till the neck breaks.  Also she has literary pretensions.  I’m sure her book contains not a single anti-woman quote if taken out of context, right?  That mystery I read last week certainly had a straw man walking around all over saying how women were inferior.  And it was CLEARLY meant to make us think the opposite.

If you’re so emotionally fragile that a sentence that goes against your beliefs will forever destroy your psyche; if you’re such a primitive that you think the magical process of reading a book hurts someone; or if you’re a born slave, who thinks other people should control what you read and think and know, then you’re probably marching on the side of people who want the past bricked up and taken down, and put behind walls, so as to give unthinking children like our Mimi above the impression that what they think and what they know (pitiful little as it is) is the only right thought and was always, forever, in the eternal now.

On the other hand, if you’re a free man or woman, or aspire to be, read whatever you want.  Do not let the howls of outrage from petty totalitarians and their unthinking thralls lead you to either read or not read something.  READ WHATEVER YOU WANT.  THINK WHATEVER YOU WANT ABOUT IT. WRITE WHATEVER YOU WANT.

I’m free to declare your thoughts repugnant and you a wanna-be Puppet Master who wishes control human minds (which I also consider repugnant.  In fact, vomit inducing) BUT I will not declare that you should not read whatever you want to, or write whatever you want to, and that whoever who wants to read you and finds you amusing should read you, whether or not they agree with you.

Most “scary books” turn out to be either boring or laughable.  Some are mildly amusing.

Only people without the ability to think or discern reality think reading something is scary or mind-altering.

Humans grow by testing their thought against other humans.  Prevent them from doing this  and they remain eternal infants.

“For the first time in my life, I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet’s censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy…censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to it’s subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked, contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein.

Be free.

The Myth of the Peaceful Woman by outofthedarkness

There’s a persistent trope in science fiction and fantasy about a society consisting solely of women. It’s a peaceful and prosperous society, free from all violence. There may be some female warriors, who are somehow better than all male warriors everywhere despite having no real pressure or battles to harden themselves on. As a female reader with a strong taste for rational thinking, I am begging authors to stop doing this. Every female over the age of seven knows that a planet full of only women would not be peaceful. Every female Odd will picture this situation as The Special Hell. Allow me to explain the matter for anyone confused as to what this situation would actually look like.

Female social structure is completely different from male social structure. Men tend to organize in a hierarchy of sorts. There’s one guy at the top, a few guys he trusts underneath him, etc. downward until you reach the guys that are on the bottom of the pile. The structure makes sense. It’s efficient, everyone knows who’s in charge, and it’s largely based around the individual. Someone can rise or fall in this hierarchy based on any number of things, but their position is usually pretty clear from the outside looking in.

Female social structure is more fluid. It’s based more on group identity than on individual characteristics. You tend to have one woman who is kind of in charge, your queen bee as it were. Those in her favor circle around her, and the circles continue outward until you have the women who are not part of the group. They aren’t at the bottom of the pile, they pretty much don’t exist. At least, if they’re lucky they don’t. One’s position in the social hierarchy can change at any time, to include who the queen bee is. Remember the scene in Mean Girls where Regina tries to sit at the lunch table with the other plastics but isn’t wearing the right color clothes? She was just knocked out of her position in the social hierarchy.

In a social structure like this, there’s no room for difference of opinion or people who stand out too much. If an individual, even by noncompliance, threatens the group identity; she will gain the ire of the entire group. They will hunt her without mercy until she complies with the demands of the group, is removed from their reach by either death or physical distance (which is getting much harder with the internet), or manages to win enough females to her side to either form a new group around her or replace the existing leader. The last option allows her to push her standard on the group as a whole. There is no option to live and let live. In other words, female social structure is closer to the Borg than the complex world we currently enjoy.

I can already hear the cries of, “But women aren’t violent!” If you’re talking about direct violence, you’re mostly right. Women are not men, and we don’t hunt in the way that men do. Our weapons are usually words and emotions, not direct violence. Instead of a brawl in which two people fight it out and determine which is the strongest, you’re looking at extreme emotional abuse for anyone who is outside the group and unlucky enough to have their attention. Emotional abuse attacks a person in the most deeply personal of ways, and the scars it creates are more damaging than the physical scars of a beating. We wonder why girls who stand out grow so bitter, but if you’re a little too pretty or a little too different, other girls swarm on you and rip you apart with constant emotional abuse. They attack who you are at the base of your being, your very self-perception. This is why you see truly beautiful women who struggle to see their worth. Other girls have been ripping into them since the nursery, and it only gets worse as they get older. Boys court you and try in their awkward boyish way to get your attention, but you’re mostly convinced that it’s a cruel joke they’re playing on you, because of course you aren’t pretty or smart or special. The scars run deep and never fully heal.

However, physical violence is not out of the question either. Female genital mutilation is a very physical violence that is inflicted on women, mostly by other women. It is not unique to or even required by Islam, the religion we think of most on this issue. It’s tradition, and women will inflict this on their daughters and granddaughters quietly in dirty back rooms with rusty and unsterilized razor blades if the society they live in declare it to be illegal. If enough women decide to mob on some unfortunate outside their group, they may well turn physically violent and the beating will not stop once the point is made. It will stop when the target of their wrath is dead or nearly dead. Women don’t really have much of an “off switch” when we move into physical violence out of anger.

So what would a world made up totally of women really be like? It would be tyrannical beyond belief. No one would be willing to speak against the accepted narrative unless they were willing to be unpersoned or killed. Think of a mix between 1984, the very worst social aspects of socialist regimes, and the Borg. There would be constant pushing for position, usually by starting whisper campaigns or setting someone above oneself up to be badly embarrassed. Look at the SJWs of today’s world and see how they operate. That’s what it would look like, writ large across the entire planet. They attack anyone outside the group who doesn’t comply with their demands, and if someone inside the group says a single word out of line according to the ever-shifting standards the entire group turns on them without mercy. The only way to get back in their good graces is to loudly proclaim your “sin” and accept their abuse until they get bored of you. Even afterward, you’ll forever be “tainted” with the sin of noncompliance.

When you write your books and send them out into the world, please stop writing women as soft, cuddly pacifists. We aren’t. Kipling was completely right about the female of the species being the more dangerous sex. He was also right about the price of letting women control society. If any thinking individualist finds themselves in a society run by women, may God have mercy on their souls because those women will have none at all.

 

Don’t Be A Victim! A Blast From The Past from June 4, 2014

This is a post about victimhood: admiring, sanctifying, exploiting, parading and – strangest of all – stealing victimhood.

Guys, seriously, if aliens dropped in from alpha centauri tomorrow they would think we are very odd creatures. What is it with the big fights over who the biggest victim is, shaming and trying to make people feel guilty because they aren’t victims, claiming victimhood on behalf of anyone else and, most important of all, endowing oneself with someone else’s victimhood by white-knighting for them?

To define things: a victim is someone to whom, through no fault of his or her own, unpleasant things happen. Worse, in today’s lexicon, to cultivate the victimhood, a victim must remain a victim and allow bad things to continue happening to him/her. The minute he stops being a victim he loses all victimhood points.

So… who would WANT to be a victim. Beats me. I’ve been one at times, through no fault of my own, and it was pretty unpleasant.

Part of this, I think, is a perversion of the desire to help others. For instance, in books, it is easiest to gain sympathy with a character if pretty unpleasant things have happened/continue to happen to them. Anyone who has read my books knows I’m not above using those.

Here’s the thing, though, in a book worth reading, the character doesn’t come in whining and sobbing, doesn’t drape himself all over you claiming victimhood and REMAIN A VICTIM for the rest of the story. Instead, the character shoulders his or her limitations, grows and becomes admirable not by feeling sorry for him/herself, but by doing something worthwhile. If he or she does remain a passive victim, for this reader at least, the book takes flying lessons.

Mind you, if your ambition is to be assigned to a school’s reading schedule, then that’s exactly what the book should be. I don’t know how many of the kids’ assigned books could be described as “Downtrodden minority has a shower of sh*t rained on his/her head every page of the book, till the end when he/she dies a horrible death or achieves revenge in some stupid way.” It’s the plot of all of them I skimmed.

Add to that the strange concoction of sixties/seventies ideas that no one is ever guilty of anything and that even the most heinous criminal was driven to it by society, and we have… a fine mess, where being a victim gives you license to do whatever you want, and be as nasty as you want to perceived “evildoers” while remaining “saintly” because you are a victim.

As a confession, when I was in 9^th grade, during the final exams (the ultimate accountability exam. It having come to someone’s attention that through the previous three years, the first years of the revolution, teaching had been spotty; days had been spent painting murals and having our “consciousness” raised and that some schools were never in fact assigned teachers, in 9^th grade they made us take a nationally scored exam – ours was the first and weirdest year, since we weren’t prepared for it, but since then it’s become a national thing. You had to pass the exam to continue or, in fact, to have any chance at college.) which were stressful-crazy, since most of the stuff on them we’d never been taught, and “I haven’t been taught this” was no reason for the question not to count, one of the boys in the all-boy school across from mine committed suicide.

In retrospect, he must have been mentally ill. What he left behind was the usual “manifesto” bumble broth of complaints about how we were treating the environment and men’s inhumanity to men.

His letter made the rounds of both schools and more than one of us posted it in some public space, because of course, he was a “victim of society” and we identified with him.

This was foolishness. First, I’m fairly sure he was mentally ill (though it might not have been permanent had he survived. In the boiling broth leading up to those exams, all of us could be fairly overheated) and second, it was his decision to kill himself, not anyone in society.

But as adolescents we were primed to view “he was driven to it” as a reason enough and to lionize him. It was the spirit of the times. Nothing better than being the ultimate victim: a dead one.

It wasn’t always this way. One of my favorite books is A Little Princess, which is admittedly my most girlish taste in reading. I read it round about twelve, and granted, the girl is a victim. But the thing is, she doesn’t stay a victim. Through imagination and compassion, she builds a universe for herself that can’t be destroyed, and is ultimately rewarded. (BTW the movie is not like the book, and the book is better.)

And there were times, further back, when being poor or a “victim” in any way was proof that you were somehow evil. A bit of this mentality is preserved in Islam’s belief that Christ could not have been crucified, because that would be proof he wasn’t a prophet.

Yes, if you look further back, there are some hints of this in the Judeo Christian tradition. All the prophets of Israel seemed to be cast out and wander the wilderness doing the Biblical equivalent of eating out of trashcans, which was a necessary passage to their destiny, and of course Christian martyrs went singing psalms to the lions’ bellies. (Believe it or not, they did. It was a great factor in early conversions. Though I suspect now and then, one of them, faith or not, indulged in a good cry or scream. Who knows?)

What one is apt to forget in our secular days is the difference between dying in the FIRM belief in a reward on the other side, or suffering ill on Earth in the certainty that Himself will life one up after. The amount of certainty in the afterlife even among people in my village dwarfed my most faith-filled moments. They spoke of it incidentally and casually, as one plans a holiday or a trip abroad. I think that most of those days from which the stories of true martyrs come to us were more like that, and in face of the great reward promised, a passage through brief victimhood was acceptable.

It was perhaps predictable the tradition would get perverted by the romantics.

But it in itself, it wouldn’t matter much, hadn’t Marx got his foot in the intellectual door of the West. (Like a bad salesman. A little bearded ink blot, selling hatred and divisiveness.)
It was Marx who allotted victimhood out by classes and classes in a later evolution of his theory came to be apportioned by such weird characteristics as sex, race or sexual attraction.

According to the neo-Marxists what you are determines your victimhood. You can neither escape nor change it.

Take me, for instance, as a Latina (and fairly dark if I spent any time in the sun, which I don’t), an immigrant, a woman, I am by definition downtrodden and a victim. My days are filled with endless struggle and humiliation. There is no way to change that… unless of course, I declare non-Marxist opinions when the other side will immediately define me as white and call me names. They have to define me as white before they call me names, otherwise they just would add to my victimhood points. (No, I don’t know what you get if you win. Perhaps a set of matched shot glasses.)

But don’t despair, if you’re born lilly white, and even – gasp – male, you can be a victim by proxy so long as your opinions are red. You become a champion of the downtrodden and from then on you can attribute everything that goes wrong in your life to political discrimination.

 

Sorry, I rolled my eyes so hard I dropped them. Will someone please retrieve them for me and dust off the cat hair. Right.

Do I need to tell you this is nonsense?

Yes, of course, some people are victims. In fact, I will pretty confidently state we’re all victims sometime. Sometimes it’s when we’re too young to know better. And sometimes it is because we love someone and allow him or her to take advantage of us. And sometimes it’s even because of our sex, color, or sexual orientation.

Most of the time, though we’re only victims for some time.

Even the people I know who grew up in the hardest circumstances imaginable, usually turned their lives around when they became adults/moved away.

In fact to remain a victim seems to take either mental illness or extraordinary effort not to improve one’s circumstances.

And no, of course, victimhood doesn’t always follow the lines that people tell you should be victims. Say you grew up in a middle class community as a black person, in America. You might think you’re a victim – only because the SJW’s tell you that night and day – but the truth is that you’re nowhere near victimhood. The poor black baby born to a crack addicted mother in Detroit is. As is a white baby in similar circumstances. Notwithstanding which, they might both turn out all right and have a good life.

Because here’s the thing: this is America. We don’t have a caste system. As study after study shows, people move all over the map, not just physically but economically.

America is a country where you can reinvent yourself. Unless, of course, you’re wedded to your victimhood and think it confers something special upon you.

I’m here to tell you it doesn’t. If you’re a victim, it doesn’t make you special, or good or full of human kindness. It is in fact likely to make you the opposite – human nature being what it is. But mostly, you’ll be the same human you were before you were victimized. And being victimized doesn’t excuse your acting horribly. Self-defense is not the same as hurting those who never did any harm to you.

Your “class of victimhood” doesn’t count in anyone’s mind but Marxists, and come on, those people are crazy cultists. It doesn’t make you better or worse than anyone else.

And if you experienced a little pang at reading that, it’s time you came out of the dank darkness of Marxism and into the light.

You see, while being a certain color or orientation or sex might cause crazy people who follow a long-dead white-man (failed) prophet of doom to fawn upon you, refusing to be a victim, taking your lumps and learning from your experiences and battling on, makes you human, and an individual human at that.

And if you are an individual human, not trying to follow any script, the possibilities are limitless, and you decide where you go and – depending on how much effort you’re willing to put in – how far you go.

And that – that – is far more fun and more interesting than being a perpetual victim.

Stand tall. You’re a free man/woman. Despite what the Social Justice Warriors Whiners would have you believe, your future is not dictated by your skin color, sex, orientation, or even (within limits) your handicap.

Your future is yours, and only you can script it.

 

UPDATE: Today being Wednesday, I have a post up at Mad Genius Club.

 

Over at Mad Genius Club my friend (is that what he is?  It would seem our relationship would be much closer, we’d been sitting with the murky water of publishing side by side in the same trench for 15 years now.  We’ve seen each other’s kids grow up from a distance, we’ve shared the victories (few) and the kicks in the teeth (many) and talked each other out of the extreme dismals so many times.  You’d think he’d be more a brother-at-arms, a co-combatant, something closer than the much-abused word “friend.”) talks about realistic fiction and how to create the illusion of reality in fiction.

[One of my favorite such moments, in a biography of Christopher Marlowe came when he was arrested — probably while working a sting for the crown — for “uttering” false coin.  The author dropped the “this or that might have been going on, or this or the other thing might be true” and said “so there he was late at night, probably in wholly inappropriate clothing, likely dying for a smoke, and repeating that he must talk to Walsingham, but he also let slip, recorded as part of arrest that he didn’t see why the Queen had the right to coin, and he shouldn’t, since he was as good as her.”  It gave me suddenly the human side, and how young the man was and what I would call “reckless Libertarian” in an age that had no word for it.  Suddenly it made the creature of shadows and spying, double and probably triple agent for merciless powers real, and flawed and damnably young.]

See, even “realistic” non-fiction is still fiction, because reality is boring, incoherent, often intrusive at the worst possible moments, and full of coincidences, and just plain not very good storytelling.

The funny thing is that even non-fiction falls under that “realistic fiction” thing.  You can’t actually read the life of Julius Caesar or Catherine Howard, or Joan of Arc.  You read a narrative of it, which, in the hands of a skilled writer, can give you an impression of who that person really was, like… like when you meet a friend and catch up on what has happened the last ten years.

What you get in that case is a highly edited biography.  There will be some pivotal moments the friend won’t even tell you, himself.  You know, he’ll say, “And I decided I really was not suited to the insurance business.”  He won’t say, “It was that morning, I had a headache and was prone to my cyclical depression, and then I had to deny three claims, and I said bugger it all.”  Or he might, but it’s not guaranteed.  He might no longer remember exactly what made the luster go from the job, forever.

In the same way, your own image of your own life is sort of that edited biography.  I get a lot of “uh, what was I thinking?” when I open long-packed boxes, particularly if they belong to the “apnea years” when dan had apnea so bad neither of us was sleeping.  Or perhaps to the years when the kids were tiny, and we were either low on sleep or ill because we lived low on sleep.

I mean there are things I know how to do: like, oh, make a bed, or cook.  And you can say “you can do it in your sleep” and you kind of can, except you don’t do it the same.  Sometimes I find notes for novels and go “what the actual heck, surely by 2007 I knew a long, sustained whine wasn’t a novel.”  But either I didn’t, or at the time I was depressed/under the gun/too tired to realize what I had weren’t note for a novel but various walls to drop on a character.

If I ever do anything to merit having my biography written, it amuses me that so much of the last 10 years will be subsumed in something like “And then Sarah started getting seriously hypo-thyroidal and it affected her functioning.”  Maybe people will mind marks of the illness in my books.  Heaven knows they are probably there, as more and more, with my memory/verbal ability failing, it felt like all my energy was going towards hiding how badly things were going.

OTOH maybe that part will be lost, and they’ll attribute the hypothyroidism issues to something else, growing pains or whatever.

Even I can no longer remember everything that was going on when.

Yesterday was a very good day in some ways, but completely lost to writing.  In any biography it would be completely passed over.

Those state of the writer updates I do now and then is just enough to catch you up on what’s been going on, but not in anyway detailed.

I was thinking of the excellent William Patterson biography of Heinlein, a man who changed markedly through his life, and he gives us the times the man changed, and how, and sort of marks the places, but the hundred different ways he changed, and how he grew to be who he was.

Right now my life is working something like this: work like mad, finish work, get very ill with auto-immune, come back to life and work like mad to finish work.

My son tells me it’s not that I’m doing something wrong, and no losing weight will probably not make me get fewer of these episodes (though I am still trying to lose weight, or at least not gain) and no, exercise won’t help that much, except maybe for reducing my stress levels.  He says auto-immune syndrome (which I passed on to both boys) naturally gets worse with age, and whatever I die of eventually it will probably be because I lost that particular fight.

But none of this matters, in the long run, in my bio, just like last night’s dinner with friends won’t matter.  In the end it’s “the work of our lives” that matters.

Sure in my case that’s writing, to an extent.  At leas that was the realization that hit me like something very sharp when I was in the hospital dying of what would later be diagnosed as intercellular  pneumonia, and I realized that despite everything I’d done so far, the one thing weighing on me was all the worlds that would die with me, in my mind.  And that I was supposed to write, which I did, from then on, in a serious way, though it took me four years to sell a novel.

So I know writing is part of what I’ll regret not doing when my personal Ragnarok draws near.

The other part I hope is raising the kids to where they can fly on their own, and making whatever genetic contribution matters in the long run (hopefully not the curse of auto-immune.)

But it is not for us to make the decision of what will matter.  I wonder if Shakespeare would be shocked to know what a contribution he made to Western civilization when I’m sure his goal was pushing his children another rung up the social ladder of his time.

We just do what we can with our limited vision at that moment, but in the end all the stories and summarizing of life makes no difference, and it’s what we accomplished that stands and falls on its own, long after us.

All we can do is do the best we can and hope that it’s all for the best.  Everyday.

Just the 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: confuse

Today is one of those days I woke up with absolutely nothing that deserves to be said in a blog.  It’s amazing how often the block hits only one part of the writing.  Today I don’t have blog-brain.

Of course, you’ll say, it was exactly for this purpose that I started doing a serial novel.  And you’re not wrong.  The problem is that I need to go over what I have of Rogue Magic, before I can finish it.  There are “wrong pointers” throughout it that need to be corrected before I go on with the thing.

Look, I’m printing it right now so I can go over it in my copious spare time, which usually amounts to in bed, before going to sleep.

I’ve started trying to take at least every other weekend off, but I’m not sure how that policy will hold up or work out.  We shall see.

Meanwhile, I’ve come to the conclusion what I was trying to do isn’t working: what I was trying to do is work on Guardian in the morning and for indie in the afternoon.  My brain won’t divide that way, and all I manage is stopping both.  I shall now attempt to finish Guardian in the next couple of weeks (enough to send on to the boss to do what he will, and then kick back, maybe) and then resume the indie, where, yes, I know, I’m late on a bunch of stuff, the second Vampire Musketeer and the fourth Dyce being the most pushy ones right now.  Then there’s the next musketeer mystery (probably) and then I need to work for Baen for a while.

Don’t worry, it will all get done, now I figured I need to concentrate on one thing at a time.

Of course it would help if I stopped having days where my body is awake but my brain is shambling around inside my head going “brainz” which it’s now sort of doing.

Ah, well, perhaps a better eating and exercise regimen and not being a derp about going to bed on time will help.  Now that the ankle is… not healed precisely, but not hurting like living fire, we should do okay.  And if you guys ever catch me going outside, over the ornamental stones, in my slippers, particularly on a wet day, you have my permission to hit me with the two by four with da nails init.

My for-fun reading right now is The Invasion of Europe by the Barbarians by J. B. Bury, which might seem odd — and is — but lately I’ve been reading a lot about ancient peoples movements, which I think relates to a project growing/festering at the back of my brain.  (Think of it as World of Tiers, crossed with Chronicles of Amber but… well, mine, which as you know is a terrible thing for anything to be.)  If all goes well and I do the mass of work (six more books) between now and the end of the year, I hope to start on this one in January, whether it goes for Baen or indie depending on a whole bunch of stuff, including how long the books turn out to be, which I won’t know till I’m further into it.

Anyway, this book is giving me a ton of insight into things I learned as a little kid, about the Germanic invasions of Portugal.  This one, weirdly, sort of anticipates the current theory that the Germanic tribes trickled into the Empire and changed it enough that by the time it fell it was a Germanic principality/institution falling to wild Germanic tribes, rather than Rome as we know it falling to the Germans.

Anticipates?  Well, this book is from 1928.  I know, because I went and checked the copyright page halfway through, because I knew/thought it was about 100 years old, and then in a passage about “refugees” who came into the Roman Empire turning out to be really enemies, intent on destroying it from within, it had the passage “Note the difficulties present day Europe is having with refugees.”

Turns out they were talking about Greeks fleeing Turks.  Which goes to show you that plus que ca change….

Anyway, that’s the state of the writer right now.  I’m going to write some Julie mayhem now.

 

A friend got caught in a discussion on Facebook where he was told that Lenin and Marx were center-right.

After he was done face palming, he asked what that even meant.  He was told that any military action or violence is right wing.

Now, we’ve long, here, and in many other places, said that left and right make no sense as universal designations, as they have have completely different meanings in say Europe and America.  Hell, they have different meanings in America from the seventies to now.

The old GOP operated on the idea that a planned economy was always better because this was scientifically proven (okay, mostly Russian propaganda made them think that) they were just trying to keep some liberties for individuals under it.  The other side, OTOH wanted “communism with a human face.”  (BTW it is that some GOP representatives remain from this time — hello Senator McCain– that makes the GOP appear schizophrenic.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and a glimpse at the sewer of corruption and lies under their official figures, and the sheer desperate poverty under that, the US shifted to the right being “less government always” and the left… well, they still want communism with a human face as their long term goal.  Because this time it will work.

And in Europe the right means, roughly, “Land, G-d and king” even when there is no king and they’re mostly post-Christian.  The left… Oh, yes, the buggers want communism and aren’t too picky on the human face, though they’ll say what they have to say to get the power.  They’re nothing if not consistent.

But at some point you have to go with what people call themselves.  (Curiously both SJWs and alt-right after calling themselves those names started whining they were unflattering because of the ideas that attached to them.  Gee. Sorry, we’ll still go with what you called yourselves.  Any new name you chose would quickly be as tainted.  We’re just saving you time.)

Communists, socialists and Jacobins and Sans Culottes called themselves left, and all of them throughout history have committed more violence than any other historical regimes combined.  In fact the violence committed by left wing regimes could bathe the whole world in blood twice over.

It is not a surprise when you consider what all those movements had in common was making the sin of envy into their cardinal virtue.  If you believe other people are keeping from you everything you could possibly want, you’ll do anything to get them out of your way.

But the new and improved definition of “left” and “right” didn’t surprise me either, mostly because I read my kids school books, in which hard core communist regimes like Russia and China are called “right wing” and in which any sympathy for the army makes you an evil despot in waiting, and on and on.

Part of this is the ethos of the education establishment.  Most teachers are incredibly maleducated and taught by hippy-left professors.  So instead of a clear view of history, they have this vague impression that anything resembling organizatioon, work, money or fighting is icky.  And being icky it must be right wing.

The other part of it is that for decades now (mostly due to Soviet propaganda and leftist dominance of the medica) the left has succeed  in making the right their sin eaters.  I.e. if communists are violent in Mexico and the government cracks down, it will be reported as innocent “liberals” being put down by the repressive right wing.  The same could be said of the Soviet Union rampaging through Africa.  Anyone who attempted to stop them were “evil right wing fascists.”

What it boils down to, has already been seen in this country.  Their violence is JUST free speech, and any attempt to stop them attacking us (physically) even to the point of telling them “No, stop.” is unbearable violence.

Well, they got away with that crap because they controlled everything.  Now their really fascist supposed antifa is exposed in the full light of day by blogs and citizens with cell phones.

The poor indoctrinated sheep to whom they taught all violence is right wing aren’t much help either.  what they internalized as “perfect left wing” is a sort of vegetarian pastoral society who fights off enemies by saying “we’re really peaceful.”  They’re best exemplified by the “anarchist” leader who had been bragging in advance of the DNC in Denver in 2008 on how they were going to roll over those hick cops (if you’re from the Denver Area you know our cops are often …. a little too enthusiastic.)  Surrounded by a circle of police on horseback, tightening the circle, this brave activist fell to the ground screaming he needed his inhaler.  …. yeah.

To the left: stop moving the semantic goal posts at relativistic speed.  We are not your goats.  We won’t be driven into the desert.  Your twisted envy-powered beliefs have been responsible for the needless death of millions.

Pointing at us, instead, won’t wash the blood off.  Nothing will.  It would turn the ocean incarnadine.

Own it.  No matter how much you call yourself “blue” we can still see the red all over you.  It’s a blood guilt you can’t pass off.  And a warning to anyone who thinks your crazy ideas might be worth another try.

 

For me, and for a whole bunch of people I love.

So, I just want to say no one asks you to be perfect, and no human beings are perfect, and some of the strongest and best people I know are those fighting the greatest handicaps.  And sometimes the handicap is just the way you are: in your mind and in your sense of honor, in what you can do, and the way the world is setup.

Sometimes it is when you fail and fall on your face that you find the path in which you’re meant to be.

And sometimes it is the fact you’ve fallen on your face that allows you to see things others don’t.

If my health had been perfect in childhood, I probably would be a housewife in a tiny village in Portugal.  I certainly wouldn’t be a writer, and not in English, of all things.

Or, to quote Leonard Cohen “There is a crack, a crack in everything.  It’s how the light comes in.”

Let the light shine.

UPDATE: This just posted at Pjmedia: Mr. Acosta Can You Hear Me Now?

So I’ve been reading this mystery.  Yes, yes, “It came from KULL” [kindle unlimited lending library] I know, but it’s actually decent.  I mean, it’s not exactly setting my world on fire, but it’s pleasant enough.  Until…

The book is set in the nineteenth century. One of the characters is reading her father’s diary, and her father was a scientist/explorer (who has disappeared.  This is sort of the background to the whole series, not the mystery) and she’s enthralled by his adventures, until…

Until his party is attacked by neighbors, and they fight back, killing a bunch of the natives.  The author then refers to this as a “massacre” and proceeds to act as though this tarnished the main character’s view of her father forever.

Then to make things clearer, this woman’s bone-headed brother in law comes in to say that the savages should be glad we bring them civilization even if we have to kill them.  And in case you know, the reader might be tempted to sympathize with this opinion, blusters about how men and women shouldn’t work together, because they might become — horror of horrors! — friends.  Then he huffs off, shedding straw as he goes.

[Sarah puts thumb and forefinger on either side of the bridge of her nose, closes her eyes and inclines her head.] Where to begin?

Let’s start with the fact that the attitude of the main character is seriously a-historical.  A woman of the time might be horrified by the “barbarous” doings, but would certainly not think it constituted a massacre.  To consider this a massacre takes knowing that in these clashes the white men would ALWAYS win and were disproportionately equipped to do so, and KNEW they’d survive and kill all the others.

Reality check, okay, even in this book that’s given the lie, since her father was almost certianly killed by natives.  But beyond that, the world is strewn with the corpses of scientists/explorers, even those way better armed than hostile natives, but at a disadvantage in the landscape.

Then there’s the brother in law’s opinion that colonialism is good for you.  You know… for most of human history it was.  Now, it wasn’t particularly good for INDIVIDUAL humans.  Being invaded and more often than not reduced to the position of serfs or slaves purely sucks. But when the colonialists bring with them a higher level of production/wealth creation/security… well…  I’d hate for it to happen to me or my kids, but in the long run future generations might be much better off.

Now this isn’t always true, of course.  Colonialism, like other Marxist buggaboos, has no existence in itself.  It is the abstract isolation of a phenomenon that can be good or bad or indifferent, depending on who is colonizing whom.  (It is also not, btw, a characteristic of white men.  All humans colonize. Which is why there are humans on every continent.)  Europe being invaded by the Moors might very well, on the whole, have redounded to the worse.  Some things were gained from the invasion, sure (almonds and the artesian well were among the ones we were forced to memorize in school) but had it not been thrown off, the level of individual happiness and wealth would probably have ended up lower (as it did in Africa) and it can be argued it left behind habits of mind that are at odds with modernity (which they didn’t know would come) as well as regressive treatment of women.  It’s far more complex than that, though, since each invading civilization brings both good and bad, and also changes while it’s occupying the land.

That change, btw, accounts for a lot of the disastrous effects of European colonialism in much of Africa: as Europeans embraced Marxist thought, the leading minds of Africa came to Europe to study it.  What communism, socialism, and its cousins have done to Africa doesn’t bear contemplating.

The author, btw, as though aware she’s being crazy and imposing her crazy on the story, goes on about how her father was “trespassing” and that’s why these young men attacked.

[Does sinal salute again.]  She never actually tells us what moral behavior in those circumstances would be.  Letting themselves be slaughtered when they were attacked, even though they aren’t doing anything wrong (objectively) but merely looking for specimens?

Look, I’ve described this type of encounter between western civ and tribal mind set before.  To an extent our current confrontation with Islam is that, writ large.  There is a tribal mind set that is very old, is probably built into our genes, because we were tribal long before we were anything else, and which goes something like this “strangers in our territory” (however defined, since most tribes lacked the concept of land ownership.)  “We’ll commit atrocities against them, so they leave us alone.  The greater the atrocities, the less trouble they’ll be.”

Unfortunately western civ interprets/ed atrocities as “these savages can’t be tamed/integrated.  Kill them all and let G-d sort them out.”

This is a problem, because in the language of violence (and violence, between human groups is a language, intended to convey a message) what is “said” and what is “understood” are completely different.  And it will escalate violence until the stronger civilization destroys the weaker one.

It’s a tragedy, but it’s unavoidable.  It’s been happening for centuries or millennia — alas, Cartago! — and absent the ability to telepathically communicate with a tribal civilization to make them back off, I do not know what the author thinks could be done to avoid the “massacre” of people who were trying to kill a scientific expedition.

But more importantly, speaking to the mindset behind this, the mindset that thinks colonialism is somehow evil, and can only exist from whites/Europe versus everyone else, and also that SOMEHOW Europeans are so powerful that when they kill EVEN PEOPLE ATTACKING THEM it’s always a massacre:

1- All humans are colonialists.  All humans are territorial.  Before we had anything as complicated as tribes, if our understanding of our nearer evolutionary relatives is right, we had family bands, who had territories.  Clashes occurred at the bands of these territories.  The band that was successful in taking over the territory and aggregating the other band, eventually became a tribe.  The tribe most successful in conquering others, eventually became a nation.  You can beat your chest and cry, but it doesn’t matter  We’re not angels.  We’re uppity apes and this is how we function.  All your scolding won’t change it.

2- Violence will always happen when two very disparate civilizations meet.  Why?  Because even when they talk, even when they learn each other’s language, the concepts will be different.  Take martyrdom.  In Christianity this means entering the Arena singing Hymns and acting happy, because overtime that will convert the spectators.  In Islam it means blowing yourself up killing the infidel.  You can talk martyrdom, but it doesn’t mean the same thing on either side.  Violence is also a language, and when even your violence is misinterpreted, it means you don’t have a language in common.  And violence WILL happen and someone will win.  If you feel that your civilization should never be the one to win, there might be something wrong with you.

3- Someone will win from this violence.  All the scientific/exploration parties that died and disappeared means that sometimes the tribal humans win over those who are contributing to the species knowledge of the world.  Those are sad occurrences, but they count for nothing, except that it encourages other tribal humans to fight and die trying to take down something they CAN’T take down.  It’s an escalation of tragedy, if you will.  In the end, killing the tribal band that first attacks you (instead of what?  Lying down and dying, to expiate ‘privilege’?  In a land where the privilege is obviously with the natives?) is the best thing you can do.  It sends the message “fighting is futile” and will encourage the local tribe to try to protect itself by other means, be they negotiation or trade.

4- In a clash between civilizations, if you decide that your morals require you not to fight/lie down and die, you’ll be the one colonized.

There is no option between human civilizations for ‘we’ll each go to our little territories and stay there’.  That’s not how humans work or ever have.  Population pressure; desire for goods; desire for a certain land; conviction of one’s superior civilization, will keep us fighting and trying to expand (and btw, that last applies to ALL human civilizations.  Yes, Islam believes they’re superior to and more powerful than the west.  They have Allah on their side, after all.)  Your choice is never “let’s all live in harmony.”  Your choice is colonize or be colonized.  Think carefully of where you’d rather live, and which mind sets and conditions you’re willing to encourage.

And stop mouthing pieties about “massacres” when someone fights in self defense.  Western Civilization is not always the winner, and will not always be the winner.

The fatal oikophobia you’ve been taught is the worm gnawing at the heart of the civilization that’s lifted most humans out of poverty.  Examine carefully how you’d like to live before your throw your weight behind the supposed victims.  They’re just another set of aggressors.  And if you wouldn’t like to live under their rules, that’s not the side you should be fighting on.

No humans are angels.  Some are just more accomplished warriors than others.  That doesn’t make them bad.  It all depends on what you’re fighting for.