It’s snowing and I’m lazy.  I want to work on Darkship Revenge.  I might do a short story for you guys later, but I’m not promising that it will be done by any particular time.

I dreamed of Grant, which means I need to work on that again soon.

But today is a wonderful time to write, and I just want to work.

We were taught in school, and in fact it is something you learn very easily if you read literature starting from say the chansons de geste, is that each generation views the world according to a pattern, and that pattern is often their “scientific” (one should rather say macro, since science has very little to do with it, even after the emergence of a science that could be called that) view of the world.

I.e. if you view the world in terms of the procession of the heavens influencing things on Earth, your work is going to show this, not just as allegories but, say, as and alignment of planets causing Earthquakes and Earthquakes literally causing the Black Death.  If you’re an Elizabethan too, and have access to some simple gear models of machines, you’ll see the entire world as a machine of some sort.  “The machinery of the heavens.”

The models linger long after the theories are disproved and supplanted.  I once had a knock down drag down argument with a family member over whether things cooled faster in the fridge.  She contended they did not, because the heat would hide in the center of the pudding to escape the cold.  She could not have named Aristotle or his theories of animistic physics, but by heaven, it had been taught to her that way, and she was sure it was true.

In the same way, many writers (particularly in mystery) seem to use the words sanguine and bilious without the slightest idea (unless they are of course historical writers) that it connects back to the theory of humors of the human body that led, often, to bleeding critically ill patients.

This is not a failing.  This is called “being human.”  Humanity is large and varied (keep that in mind) and many people would rather believe what they’re told than their lying eyes.  There is a comfort in tradition.

More importantly, these views of the world get into the nook and crannies of your mind, and you pass them on without realizing you’re passing them on.

This is because, of course, it is hardest to apply this to our own age.  It is a matter of the fish being submerged in water.

Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)

The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.

It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”

You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.

This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale.  I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal.  A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people.  Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that.  There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare.  But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable.  If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls (one of my playmates would fight me for the right to be “the mother” when we played houses.  He turned out very hetero.  In fact possibly too much so) a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.

In fact, none of us are standard issue.  The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd.In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics,  I not only was pulled away from groups of boy I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling.  I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell.  This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine.  In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.  My ear for music was not bad before the pneumonia that took my mid-range hearing at 14, but I’m asthmatic, which means my breath control purely sucks.)

Humans are humans.  Individual humans will like all sorts of things, and barring things that require a certain type of physical structure, say siring a child or giving birth, humans manage to cross all sorts of barriers.  Sure, the fastest woman in the world is only as fast as your average male highschool track champion in the US, but how many men are track champions.  Statistically men are taller, stronger and faster than women, but when I was young and in better shape, I could very easily beat the heck out of a man my size or a little larger.  (Okay, part of this is that I didn’t play fair, but I was also somewhat stronger than the average female, and stronger than men who didn’t work out.  This is not a brag.  I’m neither now.  It’s just a commentary on statistics aren’t individuals.)

Because I grew up in a village, where clothes were mostly still made by hand to the measurements of the person who wore them, I can tell you that the very idea of “standard sizes” is bonkers.  There is no such thing.  Yes, it is an easy way to make garments that fit everyone in a rough size, but “fit” would make any village seamstress cry.  In fact my mother had the habit of buying me clothes, then bringing them home, taking them apart and adapting them to my actual shape.  And this was when I was young and skinny, i.e. the body form most designers thinks all of us should have.  (They scale up the size of garments, but don’t change the contours, which means if you’re a 16 or above, you look like you’re wearing a sack. Which in turn, I’m sure, fuels both our horror of fat, and our poor self image when we start putting on pounds, which in turn makes us slouch, which…)

I tend not to think in sizes as in “I’m size x.”  (After what hypothyroidism has done to my body, mostly I think in “yuck” but that’s something else.)

However the problem is that we’ve transplanted that sort of thinking of “one size will fit everyone in this range” to how people think.  This slots very well with a sort of dimestore Marxism and discount counter behaviorism which at this point is the reason for living of the left.

Behaviorism first — as believed and imbued by people, translated to history books, etc, the theory of stimulus-response became one of “Everyone in that situation would do this.”  Which is why we ended up with history books in which we do not study great figures or men who stood out, except to know they exist, but instead study “great movements of population.”  As though the blinkered crowd moved history.

Sure, some things predispose crowds to some reactions.  I’m fairly sure Napoleon wouldn’t have existed without the terror, because people wanted order and wanted it to JUST STOP ALREADY.  Also France was broke after the revolutionary follies, and broke countries often invade other countries.  But without the larger than life personality of Napoleon, the Empire might not have formed.  There would have been SOMETHING in reaction, but not necessarilly what there was.  And do note, that the war didn’t stop until Napoleon was rather finally put away.

So the answer to history is “yeah, the crowd will be looking for this or that, but you need someone who picks up an idea, gives it form and runs with this.”

This was completely absent in my schooling.  It was all by-the-numbers mass stimulus/reaction.

And sure there are behavioral explanations to why each individual will act somewhat and some very differently, but when you get done with all the convoluted explanations, occam’s razor is blunt and you remember Heinlein saying that every time a dog drools a Pavlovian has to ring a bell.

Unfortunately the idea of standard models and humans as vast classes of interchangeable widgets is so ingrained in society that no matter how much we put it down, it keeps coming back again like a jack in the box.

Yeah, sure, if you’re dealing with a woman rather than a man, it’s more likely she’ll have an interest in, or have death with child rearing.  But these, again, are broad categories, anchored in physical differences.  In the same way “Stereotypes exist because they’re often true” sort of works.  If talking to me, because I’m from Portugal you can sort of assume I will understand Spanish (if spoken very slowly or written, this is true) and because I have a degree in literature, you can assume I like to read.  Because my degree is also in languages you can assume I speak at least a couple other than English and Portuguese.  You can assume that because I’m a writer, I like words and am generally at least semi-competent with them.  And because I’m a woman of a certain age, you can assume my body is starting to try to take me out at unexpected times.  (Seriously, if it kills me, I’m taking it down with me.)

What you can’t assume, though, is that you know my food preferences (would you believe I hate hot food?) my political views, or even my favorite books or my preference in periods/places of history to study.

But Marxist theory presumes to believe they know all of those (no, not real Marxist theory, but Marxism as she is taught in our schools, by inference and implication) so I often give people near-heart-attacks when I tell them things that such as that I came here so a village wouldn’t raise my children.  Or that I believe in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for individual humans.  Or….

In fact where Marxism which divided people in nothing but broad economic classes (even if he presumed to know a lot of things about the motives of those classes) met the idea of industrial standardization which had seeped into people’s minds for over 100 years, we got this bizarre idea that people are exactly like other people with the same broad characteristics, and therefore must fight for “common interests.”

This is where we got the rather bizarre idea that people like me are gender traitors, as though every woman in the world had common interests and common experiences, other than say, giving birth or menstruating, and as if we couldn’t find more in common with many men (like those engaged in the same profession.  I mean, feminism is the strange idea that I’ll find more to talk to about with my next door neighbor, who is a nurse and a very nice woman but not at all interested in the same things I care about, than with Dave Freer, who read the same books I did growing up, has the same rather bizarre sense of humor and has for decades been in the same business I work in.  IOW Feminism as she’s practiced is delusional.)

Now in political and social terms, the theory is often hilariously wrong, and we can point and make duck noises, and we’re starting to make people see what arrant nonsense it is, at the margins at least.

But the problem is in other, side-cranies of the world-image inside our heads.

There is in our age a tendency to want to standardize EVERYTHING, including human experience, reaction and behavior that CAN’T be standardized.  (See previous comment about half the kids thinking they’re transgender.)

Years ago, when Robert was a toddler and I was thinking of homeschooling him, I read a lot of books on how to teach, what worked, etc.  (I ended up not homeschooling him, partly because I had a near-fatal pneumonia that almost killed me, and when I fully recovered, three years later, he was in school.  Eh.)

One of the books I read was by Maria Montessori, because of course, she is known for “helping kids learn” rather than teaching.

And then the book went against the wall.  This champion of individual learning actually proclaimed that if you hadn’t learned a language by age 3 you’d never be able to use it creatively.  If she’d said that unless you had learned it — seems to by 18 actually, from people I know — and spoken it every day with natives by x age, you’d never get rid of the accent, I’d have shrugged and groaned. The meat suit, particularly its auditory and vocal functions are trained early.  BUT she said you’d never think in the language like a native or be able to use it creatively and artistically unless you learned it by 3 — or was it six? — in any case, this writer who learned English by fourteen and who was, by then, winning contexts against native-borns, and starting to sell some short stories, laughed until she cried.

But there is this temptation and tendency to put people in groups, and shove them there, broad categories of “how you behave.”  And once you put people in groups, the next step is to say “you can’t do this, because your group can’t.”

It’s very human and it’s worsened by “standardized production” thinking and Marxism. It’s also very wrong.

One of the commenters yesterday said something about people being more interested in history where their ancestors were involved. This person is a nice commenter generally and if I hadn’t been very out of temper due to doctor appointments yesterday I would not have snapped the commenter’s head off.  I’m also sure that person was also taught this in school.  It is also not true.  It’s part of that “widgets will have these characteristics” bit.

In the village school where many of us were distant cousins, I found that kids were interested in history that was interesting.  (Something our teacher sucked at, honestly, so I who by then read history by preference, would tell these exciting tales to the other kids at recess.  Village girls (and some boys who crossed over from the boys’ school) were very interested in the battles in South Africa between Boer and Zulu, fascinated by the French revolution, and very interested in the 100 year war.  You don’t need to match the widget to the history.  You need to teach it passionately and in terms of common humanity. The proof is that half of this blog is interested in history that has bloody nothing to do with their ancestors.

In the same way one of the commenters made fun of my supposed Russian accent.  The problem is that what he made fun of  is not something I do.  I do not say “Show me the way to the nuclear wessels”  V and u are distinct in my accent, as are v and f, unless I’m trying to imitate another accent (at which I’m piss poor.)  The similarities between Portuguese and Russian accents are in a certain flattening of intonation, not in consonant transposition.  (I actually make the vowel mistakes of hispanics, not the consonant mistakes of Russians.  Ie. I say leeve instead of leave, and don’t really HEAR the difference between live and leave.)  The problem is if something sounds “like Russian” people HEAR the other mistakes, even if they aren’t there.  In the same way that once, a gentleman became convinced that I had Ricky Ricardo’s accent (trust me, if you hear me, there is no resemblance, because Portuguese is so different from Spanish in pronunciation.) He’d heard I was Portuguese, and since this meant South American to him, and all of South America spoke Spanish (!) he heard me with a Spanish accent which was actually physically impossible.  And he was willing to swear this is what he heard.

In the same way a lot of people who catch oddities in my expression will think it traces back to Portuguese.  Ninety percent of the time (unless I’m very ill and have been reading in Portuguese for a week or so, which does sometimes happen) what they’re identifying as “Portuguese” is actually some archaic or regional form of English, born from the fact that I fall in love with dialects or historical expressions.  Or just the fact that at the moment I wrote I was ill and under-caffeinated.  (For instance hypothyroidism made me think in spirals.  I had to approach meaning from the outside in, in a circuitous manner, as though I were ambushing the words.)

This last part is important.  People who are used to thinking in categories, think they see characteristics of those categories which aren’t actually there.

Why this is important: right no most of our politics and policy is oriented to that idea of groups, and people keep seeing confirmation to their often completely crazy cakes beliefs in the behavior of groups, because they approach expecting, say, all women to be the same, all people who tan to be the same, all immigrants to be the same.

The funny thing is that we’re on the verge of  a breakthrough (well, the breakthrough has happened but not percolated down the societal layers, that changes mass manufacturing into individual manufacturing at all levels, from books (already here) to clothes.)  But our mind is still stuck in broad groups and categories of models that must all be the same.

Hence, you know, our visitor yesterday maintained that all immigrants take three generations to acculturate.  This is probably true, nowadays, when acculturation is a bad word and when we’re receiving large batches of immigrants from one particular culture.  But while it is broadly true, if applied to people who came here for economic reasons and have no interest in being Americans, it is not true for those of us who came here to be Americans, and who worked like hell at every aspect of it, from the politico-social, to watching old sitcoms and becoming familiar with popular culture and references.  (This is another of those things: I often run into people who make a cultural reference like “Pow, right to the moon” and then apologize because obviously I haven’t heard of it.  Actually I have, as the sitcom played in Portugal when I was a little girl, but even without that, how is it possible to live thirty years in a culture and not assimilate stuff like that by osmosis?  Unless you are actively fighting it.)

But he wants an inflexible rule for “all immigrants.”  And feminists want an inflexible rule for “All men” even though the percentage of men who rape women has always, historically, been vanishingly small (unless you count starting at women as rape, of course.)

The thing is, we don’t come out of assembly lines.  We’re not made to specification.  The freaky studies where identical twins lead similar lives are news because they’re freaky.  Probably every one of us knows at least one pair of identical twins, raised by the same mother and the same father who were opposites or at least very very different.

The variety of influences, both genetic and epigenetic, both environmental and physical that go into making an individual who he is, means none of us are standard sizes or standard shape, or standard thinking or standard issue.

To think otherwise is a relic of the mass-industrial age which is now passing.

We are entering a new age of the individual.  Stop thinking in standard models.  The result of thinking in mass-manufacturing terms is the filling of mass-graves.

And the twentieth century was more than enough for that.

 

 

*Sorry this is so late.  I had some potentially worrying news yesterday and dealt with it the way I deal with things: by doing stupid cr*p, which meant I spent the morning finishing outdoor holiday decorations.  I hope Drak forgives me posting this so late.
Also, will 60 guilders, and whoever else sent me blog posts that haven’t run re-send with “blog post” in the title?  Thunderbird is a pain to search, and right now all I can find is William Lehman’s and Foxfier’s. – SAH*

The American Race – Drak Bibliophile

No, not the Indianapolis 500 or other auto races.

Awhile back some idiot over on AccordingToHoyt said that Sarah Hoyt isn’t a real American because she wasn’t born in America.  At the same time, this idiot appears to be saying that American Indians aren’t real Americans because they aren’t part of the American Race.

So what is the American Race if there is “such an animal”?

First we have to consider “what is the English Race” as the Founders generally considered themselves English and their major gripe with England was that Americans were not treated as Englishmen should be treated.

Well, the English can be considered to be the descendants of the Angles, Saxons and Jute tribes that conquered the area now considered England.  Yet, we can’t forget the Celts that lived in that region.  John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, points out that spoken English has major differences from any other Germanic languages.  These differences can’t be traced to other languages known to have been an influence on English, such as French or Latin.  Mr. McWhorter points out that spoken English shows influence from Celtic languages so it is very likely that the Angles-Saxons-Jutes must have ruled over a good sized population of Celtic speakers which influenced the development of spoken English.

So the English race is a combination of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Celtics.  However, we can’t forget the Danes who made successful invasions of England.  While the Anglo-Saxon Kings managed to conquer the invaders, the English language of those areas shows marked differences from the language elsewhere in England.  Therefore, we have to add the Danes to the mixture that is the English race.

Then we come to the last successful invasion of England by the “Frenchified Vikings” known as the Normans with their Flemish men-of-arms. Not only did they “add” to the English language, they added their genes to the English race.  Then we have those Scotsmen and Welsh who didn’t stay in their “proper places” and added their genes to the English race.

So even before the English pushed their way into North America, they could be considered mutts.

Even before America became a nation, plenty of other groups found their way into the developing American Race.  There were the Dutch already in America who got conquered by the English.  The so-called Pennsylvania Dutch (actually Germans) who found their way to America followed by other German groups.  French Protestants found their way to America.  Paul Revere’s family was originally from France.  Even before the Revolution, we got plenty of Scotsmen who didn’t like living directly under the English Crown. [Note from Sarah: there were a lot of Portuguese, also in the New England Region, apparently escaping the Napoleonic invasion.  But also a lot of British immigrants imported Portuguese servants (this was a thing in England, too, as early as the 1500s.) Curiously one of the heroes of the American revolution was Portuguese.  I don’t remember his name, but since his claim to fame was being able to single-handedly carry a cannon, and since he came from Azores, I figure he’s one of Larry’s relations – SAH]

Of course, let’s not forget the American Indians.  While Americans weren’t too nice to them, plenty of them married into American families or otherwise became part of the developing American society.

So even before we kicked the English Crown out of America, the American Race was a race of mutts.

Afterwards, Americans welcomed into the US plenty of people from Europe.  More Germans, Italians, Irish, French and others.  While there were some rough spots, in general Americans welcomed these people and allowed them to be part of the American Race.

Still Sarah and others are correct, these people were allowed to be part of the American Race because they accepted the American Ideals.  As long as they accept the Ideals, Americans as a group didn’t care if their ancestors were Polish, etc.

Our problems today appear to be that some “born-Americans” don’t accept the Ideals and those “born-Americans” don’t see the need for Immigrants, legal or illegal, to accept the Ideals that make us Americans.

IMO those people who see a difference between themselves and people like Sarah who while born elsewhere accepts the American Ideals, show themselves to be Not-Americans even if their ancestors have been here since 1776.

Note, comments and corrections are welcome.

 

 

Back many years ago, when number 1 son was born (on COBRA) we were left with something like eighteen thousand dollars to pay off, and no job.  Worse, not only didn’t Dan have a job (okay, he did, but his job didn’t pay him.  Yes, we should have sued, but we were young and stupid.) but I also had been sidelined by pre-eclampsia for almost a year and therefore had lost all my free lance translation clients.  (Also I wasn’t in my right mind.  I don’t know if it was pre-eclampsia after effects or post partum depression, which I also did have, but I had real trouble figuring out tough problems like “the clasp on this little baby garment came off, how do I get it back on?”  I’ll note I packed that garment without a clasp and three years later when I unpacked it the only thing I couldn’t figure out is why that had been such a tough problem.  So I probably wouldn’t have been all that good at translation.)

During this time we went to Portugal.  My parents paid, they wanted to meet the baby.

While there, when I tried to explain the bind we were in (as in, why we’d probably have to move, and why we might lose our house, and why–) I always got the same thing “If you were here the birth would have been free, and employers can not just pay you because they don’t feel like it.  Are you sure you don’t want to stay?”

I couldn’t explain it, and I couldn’t put it into words.  This was before my own personal political awakening, and the afternoon when things suddenly made sense and linked to each other, and I had a reason for my feelings.  What they said made sense.  If we’d lived there life would be a lot safer and a lot softer.  We’d not have debts except perhaps a house (which is what we strive for.  And that I intend to pay off as we conquer the health cr*p and I can fully write.  Also, when we are not paying for the boys any longer.  So, two years.) What’s more, beyond the government programs, we’d have the support of an extended “tribe” of family who would take a lot of the sting off being young and poor.  When we were buying sofas at thrift stores, my brother was just getting my mom’s old ones for free, when she changed furniture.

But even though we considered working there for a while, until we were back on our feet, I didn’t want my son to grow up there.  And I couldn’t explain why.

Relatives and friends told me that the US system was unjust.  I mean, when you’re unemployed it’s the last possible time you can afford the exorbitant premiums of cobra (From Dan’s last job.  The one he was in not only didn’t pay, it also didn’t pay insurance) for practically no coverage.  Wasn’t it much better that the state picked up everything, and you had no worries.

It was only years later, when the crunch passed, that I started glimpsing why it wasn’t a better thing to live in the soft state of being taken care of.

We paid off that debt in two years, you see, even though it was half of Dan’s annual income.  We just lived really cheaply, mostly off rice and vegetables with a little bit of meat to flavor it.  (And that went to Robert after he started eating.)  And then in another year we saved enough for a down payment. And Dan got another job, and I started trying to get published.  By the time #2 son came along, we weren’t rich, but we were rich enough to splurge on things like flavored coffee once in a while. Yeah, I still bought 3 turkeys on the sales after thanksgiving, when they were $10 and dismembered them and we ate them for months disguised as various things (I have it on good authority most of the veal scalopini served in restaurants is actually turkey breast) but we weren’t starving.

Now we’re a little crazy in how tough we are on ourselves to get debts paid.  And I’m not holding us up as some sort of an example, because it’s rather obvious when it comes to money we’re not all there (for instance, we have no consumer credit.  None.  Which means there is no piece of furniture in this house that was bought new, and there very rarely are any clothes we buy new, too.)

But the thing is, after that point, is when I stopped being afraid.  I’m still not absolutely sure we’re adults as adults are supposed to be, mind, but I’m fairly sure we can survive financially, even if we can’t help the boys as much as we’d like to (but that might be good too, as it prevents them getting sidelined by degrees in line fishing and underwater basket weaving.)

These days I don’t discuss our system with my relatives very much.  There is very little point, because they’ll never see the advantage of a “Hard” system versus a “Soft” system.  You see, they never went through the tight point and emerged into daylight on the other side.

The point is not just that if you pay for your own health care, yeah, it can suck hairy goat, but you at least get to choose what you want, and how far you’re willing to go into debt.  Other than the fact that it was probably doctor’s error in giving me too much pitosin to stimulate labor (an error that could happen there too) it’s quite possible that Robert or I or both wouldn’t have lived through that.  Sure, the original doctor was terrible and gave me too much pitosin, then refused to believe the contractions had stopped.  But given that error, the monitoring of the baby and the emergency caesarean were very, very good.  Though even they weren’t sure they could save us both, they did.

Our medical preparation is double the time and far more rigorous than in most countries with socialized medicine.  But also, the doctor is ultimately a professional who can be ruined and sidelined by a law suit.  Government employees in socialized systems are immune from that.  The system is soft for them too.  Which means it might not be worth the hassle of fighting to save both mother and baby, when the overwhelming chance is one of them will die.

But that’s not all.  It’s that going through those periods of extreme need and extreme struggle molds you, and gives you strength to go through other things, and even to seek trouble, in order to reach a worthwhile goal.  I don’t know if without those three years of extreme privation, I’d have stuck with it through the series of kicks in the teeth that were my early attempts at getting published (and that my career often turns into.)  But the habit of clenching my teeth and facing the storm was there, and I could fall into it again.

The problem with soft systems is that they’re against everything man was molded to be by evolution.  We’re built on a scavenging ape.  That means we thrive on strife.  If a scavenging species has too much to eat, it stops “working.”  This is because as pre-human and early human, if you went out hunting while you had a half mammoth rotting in the cave, you’d have no advantage, and you’d only deplete game and make it impossible to live in that area in the future.

Knowing that you’re not going through a tight time (we never came close to starving, though we once found ourselves outside a soup kitchen, considering going in.  But the people going in were so obviously worse off than us, that we went to bed hungry and then the next morning figured out some way to buy food [no, I no longer remember what] or, that is a 50 lb bag of rice and bulk frozen veggies.) ties right into that ancient brain glitch that says “plenty of mammoth, rest now.”

But the thing is man doesn’t live by food alone.  There is pride and sense of purpose in a job or even an occupation like ours.  Sure, life with someone else (or someone else’s taxes) looking after you is softer, and easier.  But in the end, you never reach for what could be.  You’re not even aware it’s possible.

I completely understand how not just our welfare but our subsidized class can resent those better off than they are.  To them it is a sort of sorcery.  A lot of them assume it is either because you were born better off, or because you know some secret they don’t know.  Half the nonsense of micro-aggressions and institutional discrimination comes from this sense that there’s something they don’t QUITE grasp, that they can’t quite figure out; some secret to success that’s being kept away from them.  And if you multiply that by millions, you understand why so many countries envy and resent and hate the US.  It’s because despite our “Hard” system which is SELF-EVIDENTLY worse for people, we produce more, we invent more, we innovate more.  And they can’t figure out why, so it must be some horrible trick/hegemony/colonialism/whatever the Marxists are yapping about nowadays.

Only it isn’t.  It’s just relatively (compared to the rest of the world) free individuals, striving to do the best they can in any way they can, because very few of us have anything to catch us if we fall.  That’s it.  That’s the whole of the secret and the magic trick.

Heinlein said you shouldn’t ruin your children by making their lives too easy.  The same goes double and writ large for your citizens.

Sure, we’re human, and out of charity, we will help those who have fallen and can’t get up.  But that should be a temporary thing, until they find their feet again.

Too much hardness can kill, and no one is suggesting throwing widows and orphans out into a snow storm.  But too much softness can smother, and keep you in a life of dependency and depression that is, in many ways, worse than death.

 

 

 

 

Rainbows and unicorn farts – by William Lehman

I get the free download of the New York Times. Why? Well, because I am not about to give those idiots any of my money, but it is worthwhile to keep up on what my political opponents say/believe.  Every once in a while it leaves me with dents in my walls, and corresponding bumps in my head, because face palms just aren’t enough for the stupid. One catastrophically stupid article I expect, (and am almost never disappointed) but two or more, well…  Today was one of those days.

Let’s start with an article on Graduation rates being up, but the product being unsatisfactory… http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/us/as-graduation-rates-rise-experts-fear-standards-have-fallen.html?emc=edit_th_20151227&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=28200476  Look these folks obviously thought Garrison Keiller’s radio program was a f*cking documentary. You remember Lake Wobegone, “where all of the children are above average?”  We have been pushing for a one hundred percent graduation rate for over two decades.  We’ve got it up to 85% or so, and guess what?  Surprise surprise! The quality of the education went down! WOW.

People haven’t changed, we’re not suddenly producing wunder kindin from the Third Reich. The level of intelligence on average is probably unchangeable. Now that completely ruins the narrative that the left shills, but it’s sadly so. The article would lead you to believe that “we don’t understand why the quality has gone down, it’s complex, and there’s a lot of variables”. Hell, anyone with a basic understanding of economics and statistics understands why the damn quality has gone down! (yes, I realize that leaves out most of the left) The only way to make more of the kids graduate is to lower the standards or raise the average IQ, and we covered that second option already. Eventually buried way deep in the article they do admit that the requirements to graduate have been lowered, and the quality of work required has dropped. Well, this is bad enough as it is, but now that they have spent the last two or three decades (and in fairness it’s been going on for more like five) trying to give everyone a high school education, the stupid bastards want to give everyone a college education.  Guess what Bozo? (yeah I’m looking at you Bernie) if everyone has a Bachelors’, they’re going to be worth exactly what a High School Diploma is worth now!  (IE you practically have to have one just to be employable at the minimum wage level) and for good reason.

This isn’t a eugenics thing; brilliant minds have come out of families in the ghettos, from parents who are frankly below the average line.  This isn’t even a suggestion that we go the route of Europe (oh yes, that wonderful place we keep getting told about by the left? That place that gets held up every time a debate is brought up on taxes, or socialism, or guns, or… Yeah that place, where in third or fourth grade you’re given a test that will determine if you are allowed to become educated, or if you’re destined for a factory job somewhere. [Sarah’s note- while I went through this system, fourth grade to determine if you go on, then 9^th to determine if you get to go on and attempt to enter college or will just be taught a skilled trade, I don’t think this is true in at least half of Europe now.  MIGHT still go on in easier form in Germany and England – the 9^th, not the 4^th grade cut off – but Europe has caught the everyone has to finish high school, too.  Partly because people no longer leave 4^th grade literate and numerate])  There have been late bloomers, there have been kids that just didn’t get it, until suddenly in fifth, or seventh, or… the light bulb comes on.  Those kids get failed by the European system, and that is a problem.  This is merely an observation that 1) if you give everyone something, it means nothing, 2) if you never expect someone to grow up, you’ll probably get your wish (if everyone is required or expected to go to college, you just extended adolescence for another four years) 3) maybe, just maybe, even a high school diploma may be too high an expectation for the entire population.  Hell, in the years prior to and post Second world war, a sixth grade education was very employable.  Of course a sixth grade education in 1945 was probably the equivalent of a ATA today.

Now, on to the second stupid: They tell us “a Fearful Congress Sits Out the War Against ISIS”   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/opinion/sunday/a-fearful-congress-sits-out-the-war-against-isis.html?emc=edit_th_20151227&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=28200476 This is an oped piece by the editorial board of the NYT, that basically says “it’s congresses fault that the President is overstepping his bounds, and assuming powers in excess of what is permitted by the constitution.  If they would just do what he wants, he wouldn’t be tempted to do it without permission.”

EXCUSE ME? Now I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the sort of mind that can wrap their heads around the first issue I brought up, can come to this conclusion, but still… The very concept that the overreach by the President is caused by congress not acting to give him the resolution he wants, is a microcosm of what ails the political left.  It’s never the fault of the person who did something wrong, because actions and responsibility are completely divorced.

Here’s a thought NYT, how about you make the case for war (you’ve done it before Gods know, cough Spanish American War, Cough) and make the case for congress approving an actual declaration of war!  Not yet another ‘use of force authorization’ with no defined goals, no exit plan, and by exit plan, I mean we have to either plan on a war and occupation for as long as it’s determined to be needed… Like oh say Germany and Japan where we still have troops, or a “punitive expedition” like Teddy R was such a fan of, were we go in, kill everyone that is causing trouble, or looks like they are thinking of causing trouble, then leave with a “if you start causing me trouble again, I’ll be back to kill a lot more of you”.  And separately, you hold the asshole in office responsible for acting without congressional authorization in violation of the constitution, like you have many other presidents over the years. Oh wait, I forgot, you have a different standard for politicians on the left, than you do for politicians on the right.  So shit that caused you apoplexy when Ronald Reagan did it, is congresses fault today…

The thing that really depresses me on this, when I think about it and look at it, is this sort of thinking seems to be in the majority today, even on the right.  Folks, get your heads out of your fourth point of contact. If it’s wrong when your opponent does it, it’s wrong when your friend does it.  If it seems to violate basic math, it probably does, and unless you are working in the sort of field where discovery of loopholes in the math and physics (cold fusion?) are at least possible, you should figure that the Gods of the copy book headings are going to get pissed and seek revenge if you ignore them.

Yesterday on one of the Facebook groups I attend, I came across a post by one of the Puppy Kickers, (echoed by someone in the group in exasperation) which went something like “Neo nazis want books that are less about conscious feminism and diversity.  So did the Sad Puppies.  Are the Sad Puppies ashamed of themselves now?”

I don’t need to spend much time on the argument itself, and frankly, the person who made it is not a stupid man, and he should be ashamed of making such a stupid comparison.  This argumentum ad similar tastes is ridiculous.  Say, didn’t Hitler love dogs?  And wasn’t he a conscious vegetarian?  So, are dog lovers and vegetarians ashamed, yet? Mao (probably) loved Chinese food.  Are all Chinese food lovers ashamed? Che Guevara, one of history’s most disgusting mass murderers (in that he preferred to club children and puppies to death himself) wore a beard.  Are all beard wearers ashamed now?

In the discussion someone said “But most people prefer non-preachy fiction, so why would the fact even neo-nazis prefer it something against SP?”  And someone else mentioned that people like the poster who made that argument above (I’m not naming him, because at times he has flashes of sanity and I’m hoping he realizes his argument is insane.) might not consider anything that ISN’T consciously feminist/diversity preaching GOOD.

This argument interests me far more, because it gets to the roots of what we consider “Good” which I think is what is at the basis of the split in science fiction.  Their position is not without … defense.  In fact it is the traditionalist position in literature. And our position is a bit of a rebellion, a very much “Aristo, aristo a la lanterne” position, a populist and revolutionary stance, if you prefer.

We’ll dispose before we go on of the fact that yes, the neo-nazis probably oppose feminism and diversity in science fiction because they oppose it EVERYWHERE.  My position (I can’t speak for all of Sad Puppies, since we’re a lose and non dogmatic (ah ah) movement, and what we agree on is that literature should be a ludic endeavor (more on that later) is that I agree with the “motte” part of the feminist argument which is that women should have the same opportunities at pursuit of happiness as men, and not with their bailey argument, in which they find sexism under every rock and are, in the end, in revolt against being a woman. Nature is neither equal nor egalitarian and attempts to make it so have filled countless graves. Women are not statistical incidences nor somehow flawed males.  Every woman is an individual.  I believe in equality before the law for female and male individuals, and after that each of us must make his/her own way through life and find out what we’re good at and what we love doing.  I owe no loyalty to anyone just because she too has a vagina, and no one is my natural enemy because he has a penis.  Insofar as the self-conscious feminism in books is of the “woe to me for I have a vagina and I’m oppressed” variety, the book dents the wall.  But I have never had a problem with strong female characters, particularly those that ring true.  And I know what strong women are like, since most of the female ancestresses I was privileged to meet were of the “I am not oppressed; the bastard hasn’t been born who could oppress me” variety, and that in a genuinely sexist society.

As for diversity — meh — diversity of what?  I have no issues with characters of various hues, though I often forget to mention what color my characters are because it fails to interest me to any marked degree.  I like characters from different backgrounds and with different modes of thought, because that’s just good writing and interesting fiction.  Like most science fiction and fantasy (and even mystery) readers I’m drawn to different settings and different cultures, because again that’s just interesting.

I am not interested in arguments about how all these cultures have been victimized by the west.  (Oh, sure, to an extent it is true.  Africa wouldn’t be the mess it is, if our “intellectuals” had exported socialism and fixed pie economics.  But it would probably still be a mess, due to the evil of tribalism.  And that is not something we exported but arguably something our ancestors escaped if the out-of-Africa hypothesis is true.)  I am not interested in economic arguments where you somehow injure a place by buying its products, because that’s fixed pie, Marxist and (but I repeat myself) stupid.  And I’m not interested in stories about how the poor victim gets up, is victimized and goes to bed being a victim.  (This was 90% of the books my kids were assigned in school.)  You don’t need to raise our awareness that victims exist.  Anyone who has survived middle school knows that.  And we’re all of us victimized enough that we’re far more interested in the story (often a fantasy, but still heartwarming) of the victim overcoming oppression. That is more likely to give us strength to go on another day.

And this gets us back to what “good books” are.

Once upon a time, in the beginning of the present literary culture, what was considered “good literature” was that which bore the signs that its author had an excellent classical education.

Part of the reason this was important is that books were expensive, and while — because we’re human — a lot of them would have a ludic undertone, such as the stories of Arthur, they were also supposed to serve a greater purpose, so you could justify buying the d*mn book.  Even onto Shakespeare’s time there was supposed to be an educational purpose, yeah, even to the plays that made the groundlings throw their greasy caps in the air in joy.  So things were advertised as “the most piteous and instructive tragedy” etc.  For enlightenment see the end of Romeo and Juliet.

Now both the legends of Arthur and Shakespeare were not “high literature” (no really) and therefore wouldn’t have references to classical antiquity.  Marlowe, otoh, who was far better educated than Shakespeare couldn’t help himself and not only wove classical references (and took the themes of his plays from classical stories) but also is said to have written stage instructions in Latin (which the actors crossed out and wrote above, at least according to one of the biographies I read.)

You can find marks of this “I had a good classical education” in the classical references that hit you out of nowhere in nineteenth and even early twentieth century books.

There was a (justifiable) rebellion against this in the early twentieth century.  Probably as a result of World War One, which was viewed as a madness of the elites, people sought “authentic” experiences to write about, and for a little while, because let’s face it, they were rebelling against a literature that never existed, where everything was noble and good (no, not even Victorian literature was like that.  That’s why novels were considered bad influences) this devolved to, as Agatha Christie speaking through her Miss Marple characterized it  unpleasant people doing unpleasant things in the most unbelievable of ways.

But nature abhors a vacuum, and so does intellectual snobbery. Partly because these novels weren’t any fun and people didn’t want to read them, they needed the shelter or academia to “empower” the authors and tell them they were ever so much better than their stuffy predecessors.

And the Academia, by the middle twentieth century was thoroughly infested with Marxist thought (though often not called by that name.)  There was a time there, between the end of World War One and the end of World War Two where the new hotness to show how educated you were was pseudo-Freudianism.  And even if Freud hadn’t by now been thoroughly discredited, what these people thought of as psychological was something even Freud wouldn’t recognize.  If you come across one of these, you’ll be caught up between a desire to throw the book against the nearest wall and laughing to hard to do it.

But for the last sixty or seventy years, the way to signal your “hotness” sorry, your “good literary credentials” was to preach Marxism, in whatever incarnation it took at the time.  A lot of it started with the oppressed proletarian, and now it’s devolved to the rather bastardized version of Marxism taught in our best colleges (which like the Freudianism mentioned above, would give Marx himself kitten fits.)  The proletariat having proved less than amenable to revolution, the true revolutionary force is sought in far distant places, in people oppressed by colonialism, and in that most rare and obscure of creatures, the oppressed woman.  (There are oppressed women aplenty, just as there are oppressed men aplenty.  And some women might be hated because they are women. Most of those are abroad, though, and our feminists can neither mention them nor help them, as that would be “colonialism” and also little brownz peoplez are always right and their culture is precious.  There are some women in our midst who are oppressed theoretically for being women.  What they’re really oppressed for is being themselves and the sort of people who allow it, since the law is on their side in escaping oppression, and there are plenty of groups to help them.  But never mind.)

Because Marxism like the puritans (with whom it shares a number o characteristics and in fact it’s not amazing the same families who were once puritans now fall into Marxism) believed that humans should be USEFUL, rather than simply being — and trust me, I was raised this way and one of the motos inscribed in one of my notebooks for high school was “The important thing is not to be happy but to be useful” — even though books are cheap enough to justify spending money on them simply to “enjoy”, people feel guilty about simply “enjoying” a story.  So a book must be “good for something” and advance the causes that are pushed in the best educational establishments: Equality (of results), Diversity (of skin color) and Feminism (of the all men oppress women by existing, because penis, variety.)

Which means to excellently educated people, including those who don’t consciously buy into the Marxist vision, finding these “markers” in a book makes the book “good.”  The most piteous tragedy of the oppressed woman is instructional and therefore can be enjoyed, and in fact MUST be enjoyed, even if you doze multiple times in the course of reading it, and end up downing three pots of coffee just to finish the novel… and even if you sometimes don’t finish the novel.  You know these are novels your literature professors would approve of, and therefore are sure it is a “good” book.

This vision collides at a fundamental level with that most of the Sad Puppies supporters have.  THAT vision is that reading is a ludic endeavor.  It exists to be enjoyed.  We are not interested in whether it advances the cause of social progress, the cause of social retrogress or no cause at all.  We don’t believe that the purpose of literature is to be useful, but to be enjoyed.

We think “good” in a novel or story depends on how deeply it moves us, how much it stays with us, what impact it has on us and our life.

We don’t count heads, or try to figure out if every woman, including the walk in in the third chapter is a “well rounded” character.  We couldn’t care less.  We just care that characters speak to us, and the plot makes us experience something that moves us, and stays with us.

Btw, unlike the other side (and possibly because the other side needs SOMETHING to make their academic-status-pushing books bearable) we don’t even care if the characters look (or think) like us.

I’ve been doing a tour of early science fiction, and yes, most of the characters are men, and many of them are in the hard sciences.  And yet, I fell in love with these books as a young girl in Portugal.  The characters didn’t look like me, and their culture was not like the culture I lived in — and why should this matter in science fiction, a literature of the strange? — but they were identifiably human, and like me they longed for adventure, interesting scientific developments, and human expansion.

A lot of these books are even confidently socialist or communist, having been written by communist or socialist authors.

But the books take very few pauses to preach.  The writers’ beliefs are just baked into the world building and how people react.  THAT doesn’t disturb me.

I’ve also recently come across some books (mostly indie) who do the “preaching and useful” thing, but do it from the right.  I’ve found my distaste of Piers Plowman type stories is not confined to those that push feminism and diversity. Those that mock people who push feminism and diversity with just as heavy a hand as those people use, also meet the wall with force.

This is because my main purpose in reading is ludic.  My interest in story is that it allows me to experience something out of the scope of my days.  My interest in reading over movies or games, is that it allows me to be INSIDE someone else’s head for a while.  It allows me to escape the space behind the eyes.  Now I have nothing against the space behind my eyes, but I think it’s interesting to “be” someone else now and then.  I also think it makes me a more rounded and better person in the long run, but that’s not why I read books that allow me to “escape.”  I do it, because the books are enjoyable and I enjoy them.  It is the reason I started reading for pleasure.

I knew the other side had issues with this, when the feminists started complaining about “escapism” in both books and games, and insisting that we should do these things for some reason that had nothing to do with entertainment, but more with “raising consciousness” which is modern for “being morally educated.”

They assume that because we don’t want to be preached at we must oppose the aims of the preaching, instead of our viewing books as completely different objects than they do.

We won’t change them, of course.

However, with Marx now entering his final phase of discomfirmation as a prophet, and with our universities teethering on the verge of irrelevancy, certainly for all non-stem disciplines, we will need a new theory of literary criticism.

Yes, I know it couldn’t matter less to the rest of us, but to the extent literature is an academic subject and that it is even important to study, insofar as it’s part of the history of western thought, there needs to be a theory by which academics can identify what is “good” and those interested in academic acclaim might put such markers in their stories.

I propose we go back to the Greeks.  A good literary work makes you experience Catharsis.  I’d add a good literary work speaks to people across the generations and sometimes across difficulty of changed language.

If you combine those two, you get a work that can be enjoyed at a pure ludic level too.  What this means is basically that good works can be enjoyed.

And while I’m sure that even mass murderers and thieves can enjoy literature at this level, I’m not ashamed to enjoy it, nor do I think it associates me with them, except to the extent I’m human.

Liking good stories is a human thing, that has been going on since we’ve been human (and maybe before according to some stuff I’ve read.)

I’m not now, nor have I ever been ashamed of being human.

There will be regular as sane as they get around here, posts next week, and a couple of guest posts, but this weekend I’m drowning.  I was already running way behind on both work and house stuff, and then I lost a week to stupid doctor’s tricks.

I can’t write posts when my head is full of to-do lists.

There are stories I want to write for you guys, and will.  But not today.

And all through this, I keep thinking of the way adults managed things when I was little and thinking “I expected to be more grown up by now.”

From what I have managed to ascertain all of us freeze, internally, at some age between 8 and twelve. I don’t mean we stop growing, but in our hearts that’s the age we still think we are.

And when I think of that, the world is much better than we have any right to expect, when it’s run by a bunch of kids pretending to be adults.

And now I go pretend to be adult some more, because I have promises to keep.  And miles to go before I sleep.

Some months ago, I posted my art here and one or more of you expressed interest in prints of this:

In the Mad Unpacking I recently came across a roll of prints, which I know has that. It might also have this one:And I’m fairly sure it has this one:

I’m also almost sure I can find the prints fairly easily (as in, I think they’re in the closet in my craft room, which I need to finish unpacking today.) If you’re interested in prints of those, email me at my first two initials last name at the mail of heat. I am assembling stuff to send to fans next week, and will be happy to send you those, no charge, under “Sarah is so happy to be out of the hospital.”

And because I’m too lazy to write a post today (okay, it’s not laziness, so much as it’s complicated. I spent the week running down to the Springs to various doctors appointments. The house is a howling mess, my book is late, and I’m feeling pressured and cranky. Oh, yeah, and we’re the only house on the street not decorated. I don’t intend to make a production but we should light SOMETHING to who willing. Also, it would be good to get decorations up before Christmas eve this year.)

Now I have my art computer set up, and I have a tablet to draw on, (I happen to know I’m getting a bunch of drawing stuff for Christmas.) I haven’t scanned in the things I’ve done with pencils (which are also unpacked) mostly because, actually like those above, they’re fairly raw. I’ve regressed in three years without access to art stuff.

The electronic stuff is fairly raw also, but this is the latest, done in the evenings, when my mind is too fried to think in words:

It’s called “Conqueror” and yes, I need to futz with stuff, mostly her boots/feet… unless of course futzing makes it worse, which it has so far.

If you’re wondering it’s not my story.  It’s apparently Amanda Green’s.  I was just drawing a scene in my head.  This was done with Corel Painter, virtual pastels.

Okay, now I go clean, zoom, like lightening, so I can write.

I guess I should start this with a health and doings report, like that Elizabethan woman’s diary.  I bought it (It’s something something, the diary of an Elizabethan gentlewoman) because I was working the Shakespeare times, and I wanted a sense for how people lived day to day.  In a less individualistic time there are very few autobiographies and those might not be representative.  So I bought this book.  And then I read half of it in disbelief and skimmed the rest.

I can’t remember who the woman was. (I have different “tapes” for the different time periods and universes I work in.  (DVDs I should say and even that outdated, but I think of them as tapes, which shows my age.)  When I’m not working in them, I remember nothing, except fuzzy details.  Before I dive back in, I do a skim and reacquaint myself, and then I have names, dates, details at my fingertips.  Part of what disturbed me, back when the thyroid was very bad is that the skim wouldn’t stick.  Never mind, that’s getting better, though not back to normal.) Anyway, whoever the woman is, she lost something like two husbands and three sons to treason, was in danger herself, but most of her diary is the same entry “Prayed, wrought.”

Most of my life is about the same, except I’m not so good about praying.

Anyway, the health — after that extended preamble — and this itself is a preamble to my real point, but since this is a blog and not an editorial, I sort of assume you mugs want to know.  Because you’re family.

I said when I fell it was just my body being my body and I was vaguely annoyed at being dragged to emergency.  I was right.  Yes, there were several anomalies caught in the hours right after the sincope, (sp?) but it didn’t last.  Everything smoothed out, and when I went to my pcp on Wednesday for a follow up and to book the MRI everything was text book.  I now have an appointment with the cardiologist for the week before Christmas, which rather baffles me, since the conclusion of every exam done is that my heart is perhaps too normal.

Then again, this is not my first rodeo.  When I said “this is just my body, being my body” I as talking from a deep experience of something weird happening and then going to doctors’ offices to be told “you’ll never die from this.”  All sorts of specialists, from heart to blood have told me “Well, we don’t know what happened, but your xyz is so normal/on the good end of the curve, you’ll never die from this.”  Let’s call them appointments to confirm my immortality.  I’ll never die from any of these things.

And yet my body throws weird wobblies, before it rights itself.  The thing is it rights itself.  You have to understand, through my childhood, being born too premature and then catching everything, and with the auto-immune ever present (I mentioned to my husband that I wonder if I would be the same person if my eczema throughout all of my childhood didn’t present on the face (eyelids, and around the mouth.  Also my neck.)  I was a not-ugly child and I naturally like people, but having them recoil from you as if you were a horror-show freak (which is what I looked like) pushed me to both introversion and suspicion of others) anyway — no one could have predicted I would live.  And no one fully understands how.  So “It’s just my body being my body” will have to cover a lot of this.

I’m now waiting on results from the MRI.  The good news is I have a brain, which you guys will laugh at, but the thing is, given the early birth, several episodes of low blood ox because asthma and other stuff, and at least to major concussions mean I thought my brain as a shriveled little thing the size of a walnut.  BUT we have to wait to know more.  Of course I hope the delay means it’s nothing much, but that didn’t apply to the growth in my uterus, the biopsy also done around this time.  It’s just Christmas being Christmas and people being on vacation.  So.  We wait. But we really don’t expect anything earth-shattering.  This is just one of those things.  Partly they feel given the horror that is my auto-immune (Though between the thyroid and the prednisone — which damn it  made me gain weight I can’t afford to gain — This is the first time my arms are sore-free in… 15 years?) they want to check for stuff like MS, which I have no symptoms of.

Meanwhile I have new glasses and this was the first time, and I mean FIRST including the first pair of glasses I had, that I put them on and went “Oh,” in sheer relief.  That double vision up and down which I was not conscious of, until the exams forced me to notice it, must really have been wearing.  I felt like my eye muscles unclenched for the first time in probably a year.  The upshot is I can see the screen, which had become a matter of guesswork, and I don’t feel exhausted after writing for an hour.  So that’s the good news.

After this extended prologue, let’s get into “emergent.”

This morning I was thinking how, except for minor details, my brother and I divided our genetic inheritance according to the two families we “come from.”  Alvarim takes after mom’s family and has heart trouble hyper tension and the other physical issues of the family, including early baldness.  Mom’s family has other stuff like paranoia and epilepsy, and bi-polar.  (He might or might not have the last — treated — as mom does.  We don’t delve deeply on that stuff on the phone.)  And I take after dad’s side.  I’m darker too, as they are, (following the idea that Marques comes from a word meaning Moor, though I doubt they actually were.  The genealogical poking I’ve done points at Sephardic Jews.  Of course, the appearance is much the same.) And I have low blood pressure, low heart rate, a tendency to hypotension, and stomach trouble, and the endemic depression of that family line.

The exception seems to be the way our minds work.  My brother is smarter than I, and certainly conventionally smarter than I.  He had an eidetic memory once, when mine was only ever “near eidetic” and he could muster an understanding of fields I couldn’t attempt.  OTOH my brain moves by “erratic brilliance” like mom’s side.  He’s way smarter than I, but he’s predictable.  I’m not.  I will be dumb as rocks until suddenly a blinding insight hits, and then I will outpace experts in some field I’ve just been poking at.

It’s not quantifiable or predictable, which makes it difficult for employers.  It is however okay for someone who works for herself in a pseudo-artistic field.  And sometimes it serves me very well by wielding up something a regular brain could not have come up with in years of patient and sane plodding.

I was thinking of this this morning, and from my erratic mind I jumped to the culture and what is happening in the world.

I follow Richard Fernandez on facebook.  If I never did anything else on facebook, that would be worth it.  He is not just an enormously smart man, but one whose head makes sense to me.  There are people I can tell are very smart, and even right, but my mind can’t bend the way theirs does, and I have to get to the same place by different routes.  He’s not one of those.  He will think of things I never thought of, and then I read it and go “Oh, I should have seen.”

Lately he’s been on a …. not a tear, a mental pathway about black swans and the meaning of what is going on in the world right now, and whether it means a rejection of the progressive project.

I think it does, though not consciously.  People haven’t thought things through yet.  They just know what they know, and what their gut tells them is that all this stuff that’s been pushed on us from above is wrong.  Just wrong.  IOW the pendulum swings and having swung…

It remains to be seen whether they throw the baby out with the bathwater, or if they take bathwater and baby and make something so new, so different that none of us thought about it before.  I’m starting to get a feeling that’s it.

Part of what Richard has been saying is that you can’t predict “emergent.”  The black swan will fly suddenly, when you least expect it.

You can predict emergent even less if you’ve blinded yourself by taking over news and replacing real reporting with “narrative.”  You’re not getting what you need to to predict what is happening.

Thing is, none of us are, because you need to read the western press by ignoring the type and reading the lacunae between the lines to get even a sense of what is really there.  In a way the reporters, taught in schools pushing Marxist theory, aren’t even SEEING what’s really there.  They never remove the narrative glasses to see the world or attempt to see the world at it is.

And yet, Marx is dead.  Marx was always a cult, and cults only withstand so many rounds of disconfirmation before they fall apart (read When Prophecy Fails.)  Though on the way there, the proselytizing fervor becomes greater, as we saw after the fall of the USSR.

And yet, Marx is still dead.  And we as a culture (which means much longer than individuals) will deal with it over the next few decades maybe even to the end of this century and past the end of my life (immortal or not, I’m fairly sure I don’t last anohter 80 years.)

What emerges next we don’t know, and our information organs having been corrupted by Marxism, can’t help.  All we can do is work towards a better future.

Which brings me to a comment on one of Richard’s FB posts in which a man, I presume well intentioned, wailed that we need to figure out what we’re going to do when automation replaces 90% of the jobs.

I gave a snippy reply, because I’m still me, and you guys know my opinion (if not look back through posts.  Yes, I probably should label them, but if you use the search string “With folded hands” you’ll get hits.) I don’t think automation can or will replace 90% of the jobs AS WE KNOW THEM NOW.  Sorry, left, you can’t blame the unemployment on automation.  It didn’t advance that much in 8 years.

But beyond that, automation can’t replace 90% — or really much — of the jobs as we will know them, as they EMERGE in the new world.

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me about the left is what I’d call “Sh*t sentimentality” and a crazy desire for the past.  Growing up, they made me read jobs about how bad some jobs were: cleaning lady, assembly line, miner, server.  BUT now they’re wailing that those jobs will vanish.

There are two keys to this: first, they are truly contemptuous of their fellow men.  The modern leftist is not a worker, nor a man of the people, he is an intellectual, someone who did very well in the indoctrination factories we call schools.  This encourages him to think anyone who doesn’t think like him is stupid, but more importantly, it encourages him to think anyone who doesn’t do well and mind-and-pen tasks is stupid.  I know.  I would have succumbed to that temptation if I hadn’t grown up in a village, where there weren’t enough people to insulate me from contact with people in manual professions who, sure, thought I was nuts reading as much as I did, but who could think faster and better than I in non-intellectual/abstract subjects.

And the second is that the left, thinking they’re smarter, think they have an obligation to “look after” the less intellectually fortunate.  Which is why they are all bent out of shape about these sh*t jobs disappearing.  I mean, yeah, they suck, but how can the left/bureaucrats come up with new jobs to replace the lost ones?  How will they look after the unemployed?  And how can we not care that technology is killing jobs????  How can we not want to beef up the welfare state to look after these poor people too stupid to do anything else?  We’re monsters, I tell you, monsters.

Their anguish is real, even if truly bizarre.  It is a result of their personality type and their education, and it would be unkind to laugh.  You also have to have a heart of stone not to laugh like an hyena.

The thing is the government/bureaucrats/intellectuals have never created jobs.  Humans are clever apes, even those who aren’t into juggling abstract concepts (some are cleverer than those who do juggle abstract concepts.  You can get lost in the pretty pictures in your head.)  We’ve survived changing environments before, even environments WE changed.  We survived the discovery of fire, we’ve survived metal weapons (will no one think of the plight of the flint chippers?  They didn’t even have an all-wise government to tell them what to do next or give them mammoth-meat welfare.)  We’ve survived the industrial revolution and the replacement of jobs, wholesale.

My bet is on humans.  We’ll continue to survive.  We do not need wise bureaucrats to look after 90% of us or hold our hands in the transition.  We ask only one thing of those who think they need to invent the future: LET GO.  Remove your “caring hands” from the throat of the future.  You’re killing it.  Leave it alone and it will emerge, on its own.

And it might very well be better than anything you can imagine.  Sure, it can be worse too, though by and large, human civilization can be defined as “things get better for the common man” despite some truly horrible interludes.

Let go.  Things might come out better or worse.  The only thing I can promise you is that they’ll be weirder than you can imagine.  Which is the point.

No one made you the gods of humanity, and now I think about it our antropomorphic gods were continuously surprised by us, too.

Let go your fear, your anxiety, your sense of superiority over the common man.  Let people be and do in their own self-interest.

We’ll be all right.

                                    Flavors of History – Alma Boykin

 

In the beginning there was vanilla, and it was . . .

OK, correction. In the beginning there was olive oil on flat bread with goat cheese, better known as Herodotus. He really does deserve the title of the Father of History, in the sense that he did research, interviewed people who had traveled, and made clear what he knew to be fact, what he had been told was fact, and what he suspected was conjecture. As far as Western history goes, he is the first general historian, and we might say the first social historian, since he wrote about unusual people way over there and what they did. He could also count as an anthropologist, back before the two sides parted company. In China, I’d count Sima Chin as the first historian who was not simply compiling king lists or writing on oracle bones. He is a political historian and intellectual historian, writing about monarchs and the good and bad things they did and if they accorded with his preferred philosophy. No, he wasn’t “objective” but back then historians weren’t supposed to be.

The next major Western historian was Thucydides, a military and political historian. In fact, political and military history dominated the field for quite a while, if you focus outside the Christian Church. People who could write tended to be churchmen and/or affiliated with royal or princely courts. The most important things going on involved ruling, challenges to ruling, inheritance, and how good the patron was. As a result, we tend to find pious descriptions of saintly monarchs (Alfred the Great) interspersed with descriptions of battles and marriages and offspring, or accounts of how horrible the previous monarch was and how G-d, in His mercy and grace, allowed the current claimant to the throne to overcome the bad monarch and replace him. Buried within the accounts, we find nuggets of what moderns consider history.

During the early middle ages (say, 1100s – 1300s or so) we find a lot more national histories written. These are descriptions of the long history of the Bohemians, or Magyars, or Britons (although the English and Welsh started early with Gerald of Wales and the Venerable Bede tracing things back to the Trojan War). The goal was to show how long a nation had been in the land, and how noble and dignified their ancestry was, thus locking in their claims to territory and respect from other, less worthy peoples and rulers. This is when the Magyars staked their claim to Pannonia based on descent from wandering ancestors related to the Huns and farther back, to the sons of a princess and an eagle. The Bohemians didn’t go quite that far, settling on a princess in the 600s or so (pre-Magyar and German) and a plowman. The Kieven Primary Chronicle dates to this period, skipping the mythology for the most part.

Until the 19^th Century history focused on what we call today political and military history, with some diplomatic history wrapped in, and historical biography. When people grumble about “history is just dead kings and battles” they are thinking of this sort of writing. But the people writing histories were not interested in “objective” history. They were recording events in order to support a certain side, or to justify certain actions, or to explain why their side won (or lost). And the most important things to the literate people who were not businessmen and women, or clergy, were politics and wars. Politics and wars shaped everything in the world of the nobility and upper classes, international trade and diplomacy, and even some religious matters, so that’s what you wrote about. And that’s what interested the people who had enough extra money to hire scribes to write family histories and accounts of events. A few individuals wrote diaries and detailed accounts of events that they participated in, like Samuel Pepys (most famously), a latter-day version of the old monastic chronicles, but they were not writing history per se and did not claim to be.

Then along came the professional historians, first Gibbon, and then most importantly Leopold Von Ranke, who ordered his students to go into the archives and government documents and write down things as they really happened, no favoritism or glossing. And political history, diplomatic history, and nibbles of economic history appeared in the form of trade histories. The American diplomat George Perkins Marsh wrote the first environmental history in the 1890s, with the book Man and Nature where he compared the descriptions of the Classical world with what he observed as an ambassador, and described what he thought had happened and why. After WWI people began turning away from the older kinds of history, looking below the level of monarchs and ministries, to see what had been going on in departments, counties, parishes, and villages. The French in particular started combing through local records, digging up anything they could find and trying to make sense of it. Called the Annals’ School because of the title of the journal where the first of their work appeared, the French also began looking at the longue durre, the extended stretch of history of places and peoples.

After WWII, with the surge of new people coming into the universities and more access to archives and new tools to analyze things, history either exploded or shattered, depending on how you view things. Political and military history still led the field in terms of respect and number of practitioners, as the box on my office floor containing the full paperback set of Samuel Elliott Morrison’s history of the US Navy in WWII can attest. Governments still funded historical writing. But economic history emerged as an official specialty, and environmental history, women’s history, Marxist and labour history that looked back at the working classes, and peasants and slaves and serfs to tell their story (E. P. Thompson most famously), religious history that didn’t focus on the development of theology or advance a pro-denominational thesis, corporate history and industrial histories, much better histories of non-Western places with South Asia, China, Japan, and so on developing their own standards and patterns and conventions, geographically focused histories such as American West or Borderlands, and new takes on older writings. Medicine developed its own history that lapped into social and political history. Military history shifted from how battles were won and lost into the daily experiences of soldiers, and of civilians around the soldiers, to histories of logistics and supply, how warfare affected society and shaped culture (see Victor Davis Hanson’s early work), and war-on-the ground like John Keegan’s Face of Battle.

Historians also began nibbling, then gulping, the tools of other fields. We crunched numbers and developed Cliometrics, history based on statistical analysis that could be amazingly useful when it worked and miserable to read when it didn’t. We pestered the archaeologists and the Dark Ages turned into Late Antiquity as more and more continuity appeared in the historical and archaeological record, plagues, invasions, and the climatic downturn in the 500s-600s notwithstanding. We harassed geographers (OK, we’ve been doing that since Herodotus), plagued engineers, annoyed ecologists and foresters and naturalists, irked physicists and chemists, “borrowed” from archaeology and linguistics and hydrology and anyone else who forgot to lock up their journals and research notes, and came up with some wonderful results. And some not so wonderful results.

Today, late 2016, you can find a historian looking under pretty much any rock you mention. Music historians, art historians, historians of ideas, environmental historians, historians of sex (not as exciting as it sounds), historians who write about people and animals, historians of water, or fire (Stephen Pyne and yes, that is his real name. He was predestined to go into fire science and pyrohistory). Is this good or bad? It can lead to some pretty dead-end research, because the PhD requirement is to either find something new, or refute something old. Classics and political history especially have grown some pretty esoteric-to-questionable branches, in my opinion. But it also means that anything is fair game for anyone, and you can find works about all sorts of fascinating and odd and intriguing and “that is so cool!” things and peoples and places.

Of course, I’m the poster bad example for someone who could not focus in graduate school and who still refuses to specialize to the extent required by academic standards. So you might not want to follow my lead.