Yesterday, in the time between ALMOST finishing unpacking the kitchen (there’s a box to go.  It’s cleaners) and scrubbing the floor, I got involved in a sort of argument on facebook.

It wasn’t exactly an argument, because the person who was lecturing me and an Indian gentleman wasn’t arguing.  She was lecturing.  She was absolutely sure of her ground, and she was in her role of lady bountiful enlightening the benighted.  If you picture her with a long suffering expression, arms half-open and light issuing from her hands, you have the right mental pictures.

The other benighted and I weren’t having any, and we were becoming increasingly more upset, but I doubt she saw it.  If she saw anything, she saw us being very rude indeed to our betters.

It started with Dave Freer’s sharing of his brave post, in which he admitted that we as Sad Puppy supporters are responsible for everything bad in history.  Since we have a time travel machine, we’re responsible for everything from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the eventual heat death of the universe.  The heartbreak of psiorasis, leaf mold, and that embarrassing little problem one of you gentlemen suffered last night are our fault, and I’m glad Dave admitted it, since he is far more eloquent and gifted with language than I am.

However this shocked one of his facebook friends, who I am to understand is also one of our colleagues, though I’ve never heard of her.  (There’s dozens of successful practitioners of science fiction I’ve never heard of, because there’s branches of sf/f that only marginally interest me.  My reading is selective in urban fantasy, non-existent in paranormal romance, post apocalyptic is not a good idea for a chronic depressive (unless it’s done by Ringo who does post-apocalyptic like a shout of rage in the face of darkness), and 99.9% of “literary” science fiction could double for a soporific.)

She knew, you see, that Dave writes women and people of color (ever so much less racist than “colored people”.  Don’t ask me how.  It’s a sort of magic) and therefore she couldn’t possibly see him supporting Sad Puppies.

At which point I entered the fray with flame thrower blazing.  And she fell back on “both sides are wrong” (though to give her credit, she also admitted she didn’t know the difference between Rabid and Sad.  Have I mentioned Grandma used to say there are none so blind as those who won’t see?)

This was fine, or rather she was boring me, so my ADHD had pointed out that I REALLY should unpack the kitchen machines, until an Indian gentleman joined (I think what discomposed her was that he called her ma’am) and pointed out he really doesn’t want world changing or anything from sf/f.  He just wants a fun adventure and somewhere he can escape to from the difficulties of life.

This is when we were told that SF/F has to a) be representative.  You have to have however many minorities have been head-counted into being statistically relevant or whatever, because only by writing minorities will minorities want to read sf/f.  b) Write about oppression and discrimination to change the world.  c) have “diversity” in our stories, because “diversity” enriches and blah blah blah.

Forgive me, I come from a small Latin village where, when things got on our nerves, we (women) put our hands on our hips and spoke without delicacy.

(Sarah turns the picture of Heinlein to the wall to spare his sensibilities.)

Let’s start with C, shall we.  Why?  Why is diversity enriching?  What the hell is actually meant by enriching?  And what the hell, for that matter, is meant by “diversity”.
We can establish it’s not diversity of thought or diversity of artistic vision, considering how the advocates of this “diversity” react to actual different opinions or ideas.  I think it involves trembling lips and extended pointing fingers and “not one of us.”  It even extends to calling near-anarchist libertarians like me “nazis”, because as we all know nothing says national socialism and death camps as “that government is best which governs the least.”
Is any work actually enriched by describing a character as being this color, another as another color, and have their oppression follow the hierarchy of their color?  Is any work actually “enriched” by being filled with little stereotypes designed to be oppressed by other stereotypes.
Who knows?  Perhaps they are in the sense that Literature Professors understand them better, and find a lot more in them to bore classes with.
Pfui.  And also meh.

Let’s move on to B.  Change the world with your writing?  Sure.  Of course.  Heinlein arguably is responsible for us still having a space program.  Almost all of us space-struck nuts grew up reading Heinlein and almost all of us think only sissies and bores don’t want to space.
If you don’t think that’s changing the world, you are entirely clueless.
BUT what changed the world, what made us move in directions we would otherwise not have taken, was not his preaching at us that we must go to space.  He did that too, in several essay which even he admitted were largely failture.
No, it was his creation of a compelling place to dream upon.
You want to change the world?  Great.  Though first, perhaps you should pay attention to what you want to change it FOR.  After all some of Heinlein’s early advocacy for things like an international governing body were misguided at best, as he himself admitted later.  And we won’t go into other things writers of his time advocated.  Unilateral nuclear disarmament aka the plan to surrender to the USSR was so stupid even the left no longer thinks it’s a good idea.  (All except our current president.  Never mind.  Fourth generation red diaper babies must be granted special dispensation.)  But once you’ve decided what you want the world to be, write it.  Write it in a compelling enough manner that people want to go/live there.  DO NOT just preach and “show oppression.”  Most people who want sermons go to church.
It is perhaps no coincidence that most people mad about this plan of berate-to-change-the-world are from puritan ancestry.  What’s bred in the bone will out in the flesh and familial cultures take very long to change.  I invite them to consider their preachy ancestors didn’t make much headway or much change in the world.

And now A.  Ah. A.

(Sarah makes sure that Heinlein’s picture is still turned to the wall, then puts her hands on her hips and realizes there will be no subtlety here.)

If any of you think that you “need to show minorities” or need to have some head count of a particular skin shade in your book, you are not only unredeemed racist, you are also culturally imperialistic and so blinkered idiotic you shouldn’t be allowed to cross the street without adult supervision.  And by adult in this case I mean any five year old who hasn’t spent a lot of money to be indoctrinated into stupidity, as you clearly have.

What do you mean racist?  You want to include all these minorities.  You want them to see themselves represented in science fiction.  You are lady (or lord, but, pardon me, most males like this are ladies too) bountiful enlightening the world.

Get off the pedestal, milady, and look the f*ck around.  We people who tan, in varying shades of tan, are not only capable of agency and thought.  We are also capable of common humanity with you people of pallor.

WE CAN SEE OURSELVES IN CHARACTERS OF ANY COLOR.  In fact, most of us who read genre literature (literary is different, being read mostly by college professors) couldn’t give a good goddamn about the skin color of a character.  For one, the character description tends to be brief, and then we can reset our brain to be more like the way we want him.  It’s not a movie.  And even if it were a movie, we could still enjoy a character who doesn’t look “ethnic.”

Do you know why?

Because — hold on.  Sit down.  Have a cup of tea, because this is going to be a shock — we are not toddlers or mentally disabled.  We don’t need to “see ourselves” in a book to want to read it.  We need the BOOK ITSELF to be interesting or gripping, or stimulating.

IN FACT a great part of the attraction of good fiction is that you can be someone else, for a while, there in the space behind the eyes that is normally the loneliest place in the world.  You don’t have to be whatever color you were born, or whatever gender, or whatever orientation.  You’re set free to dream.

I’ve BEEN characters of many colors and many orientations and many genders.  THAT is why I read.  To experience being someone else.  To just watch a story, I see movies.  It’s not the same thing. (And arguably this is why I prefer to read and write first person.)

I know this goes against all your training, but people of different colors or genders or orientations than the mean, DON’T need your help or your white-knighting.  We can fight our battles ourselves, and judging from the world, most of what oppresses us are NOT (I know, shock) white people, but broken, dysfunctional cultures, some of them hinging on very old errors, and some on very new Marxism.

Your racism is so deep, so profound, that you would make people of various shades of tan into PETS for you to caress and comfort, and feed.

Sorry, milady, we’d rather be human.

And before you say that people like me only want to read about white people, doing white things, or whatever.  Please see above.  I don’t care what the color or gender or orientation of a character is, provided he’s alive and interesting.  Or she. Or it. Or multiple gender martian.

What I DO care about is alive and interesting.  The character has to hold my interest.

And now we come to “But won’t diverse settings/backgrounds/people” make it more interesting.

Well, hell, yes.  I loved Barry Hughart’s tales of a China that never was.  I have actively sough out science fiction, mystery and fantasy set in other places and other times.  Most often these are a disappointment, as they are the US “elite” version of these places and times.  The oppressed are being properly oppressed, and there’s much blinkered preaching.  But sometimes there are gems.  There was a very good Margaret Ball novel set during the Crimean war.  (And eventually I’ll remember the title, but not enough coffee yet.) I love Stephen Saylor’s Roma Subrosa mysteries and Lynda Robinson Egyptian mysteries.  I love P. F. Chisholm’s Elizabethan mysteries, even if I disagree with her interpretation of some historical personalities.  I LOVE BEING SOMEONE ELSE for a little while.
This is arguably why I loved Agatha Christie and Enid Blyton, both exotic foreign writers to me and both setting their work in a land so strange it might as well be SF/F. Ditto for a lot of early American SF/F.

Because, you see, from the other side, white people and anglo-saxon civilization are exotic and exciting.  It’s all on account of us being REAL PEOPLE and not Marxist constructions.

I know.  Unbelievable, right?  You know who doesn’t believe that people darker than him/herself or of different genders and orientations aren’t fully human and capable of enjoying things without “similar” people in it?  Bigots.  Racists.

Also, innocents abroad.

The truth is that these people have never met any of the oppressed face to face.  Not to live among.  If they did interact with those less fortunate than themselves, it was as part of some international charity, there to dispense a bounty.  (And if you think people present themselves frankly to such charities, you ARE an innocent.)  Else, they talk to people at their own level of comfort and wealth in other countries, and don’t even realize these people were indoctrinated with the same Marxist cant, or else are catering to the gringo’s obsessions, and laughing behind their hand.  It was obvious from another part of the conversation that this person had no idea how UNFREE other countries are nor that people who can create art in Iran, or even in Europe, are doing so, largely with government financing and approval, and so what they’re creating is really propaganda.

And here we hit on what I have against these people writing “by the shade” and “exotic oppression” books.  I am against their writing those books, because they can’t SEE the real “exotic” or “other” or “different.”

All they actually see is what their sociology professor taught them to see.  Vast shambling groups of “by the numbers oppressed” people. They don’t see these people as people with agency at all.  They’re just targets for the white knighting of the “enlightened” writer.

As such these books are incredibly boring for anyone who went to college… anywhere.   There is nothing new there, no life.  We might actually find it interesting and exotic to read about tight-*ssed white people in an affluent environment where the voicing of the wrong opinion can get you ostracized.  You see, it’s different from where we live.

But reading about stereotypes clad in various skins?  — yawn — give me a break.

Open your eyes.  Then open your eyes again.  Learn to see real people around you, and write that.  And be damned what color they are.  People obsessed with color are called racists.  If you have different cultures, great.

But the important thing is that the book be fun.

Wanna change the world?  First your book has to be interesting and successful.

Wanna be read by people around the world? First your book has to be interesting and successful.

Wanna make it clear that people are people regardless of skin color?  Write people as people, and whatever skin color they need to be.

JUST dream and write, and let the paper pushers and button counters worry about details no reader is interested in.

Dream. Write. To the devil with what your professors taught you to fear or love.

DARE to be human.

 

 

 

 

This has been a week of profound annoyance.

Mostly not for me, though.  Some for me, sure, as younger son’s apartment search didn’t fare well (well, he SHOULD — knock on head — be employed in a couple of months, shortly after we come back from Portugal, so we said we’d pay a couple of months in an apartment, so he could only move once, and be near both work and college.) He didn’t find anything, in time, which is forcing us to move him to a storage unit/our spare room, adding to the confusion in this house (you REALLY don’t want to know.  Boxes, boxes everywhere.)  Also, because he’s new to moving (except for the last two years) we had to do some of his packing, because he always thinks it will take “five minutes.”

And meanwhile, the world has gone insane.

In the wake of the Brexit vote, I’ve been jaw-droppingly aware of people losing their sh*t over the fact the British don’t want to say in the EU.

For some Brits I even understand that.  Some families tend after all to bureaucratic work and the sort of administrative post that will be, if not eliminated, markedly affected by the transition back.  And I must remember that for a lot of the British screaming about this, the EU is ALL they’ve known, or at least all they remember knowing.  And that it was sold in all the school classes, all the universities “studies” courses.

Yeah, the same people who misread the problem with WWII to be all about nationalism and not about socialism, whether the national or the international kind, would extol the EU, convinced if they just prevented men from loving the land they were born and raised in, we’d study war no more.

This tragic misunderstanding has given us not only generations not ready to fight to defend their loved ones from the desolation of war, but also convinced that their place, among all in the world, is uniquely bad.  In other words, it has created a generation ready to capitulate to an invading horde of the worst element of humanity with neither self-awareness nor even a grain of mercy.

People capable of this, have probably embraced the EU’s inconveniences, petty maladjustment and bureaucratic red tape like the flagellant embraces his whip.

None of which invalidates the fear of the children (some of whom are nearing thirty) whom they educated to believe the EU was the thing that would save them all, sort of an earthly paradise descended upon the lands of the west.

What is less pleasant and understandable is the whining, screaming and pettish tantrums of the left on this side of the Atlantic, who are only affected by this ruling to the extent they might need to present their passport when their luxury tour takes them from one country in Europe to the next.

In fact, believe it or not, I’ve seen aristos both here and abroad complaining of how INCONVENIENT these borders will be.  Why, they’ll have to stand in line!

None of this makes much sense, unless you realize that the Brexit was a huge kick center-mass on the vision of the annoying.  (Yes, I know that Doctor Sowell called it the vision of the anointed.  One can only assume that such an exquisitely polite man couldn’t bring himself to give the word without wrapping it in clean linen.)

To be fair, all humans have a vision of where they are, and where they’re going, which includes a vision of where the rest of the world around them is going to.  And because most people don’t want to — nor should be required to — take the trouble to study enough sociology and economics to have a vision of their own, they download their vision complete from what they see on TV, what they read, or what Mike down at the garage told them.

Mike might be safe.  After all, a lot of us have a feeling “Winter is coming” dependent on nothing more than the sort of feelers on the ground, like people telling us that their business is down, or the number of friends we’ve seen be unemployed for years or go under economically.

The TV and entertainment in general, though, have long ago fallen victim to the Vision of the Annoying.

The Vision of the Annoying wasn’t complete bushwa, once upon a time.  Or rather, it was but it was the sort of bushwa that takes experience of more than one country, experience of more than one occupation, and a lot of study of history to detect and which is particularly gratifying to the sort of mind that spends its life in a college campus.  It was gratifying because it was all based on “central planning” which made things “efficient” and therefore it appealed to people headed for work in the bureaucracy, and made them feel all special.  (Which is where Doctor Sowell got “Anointed” (self.))

The misunderstanding about patriotism/nationalism being the equivalent of jingoism and the SINGLE cause of WWI and WWII, led to a sort of idea that the whole world would unite under a single government, which would bring about not only peace, but also end the inequalities among the nations of the world.

Sighs.  Looks skyward.

It is now very difficult to believe that adults, and what’s more intelligent adults — read some golden age SF — believed in this.  If you’ve been awake (unfortunately most people weren’t) throughout the 20th century and if you know some history you know the only thing multi-ethnic/national societies with no reason to be together except their “elites” say so produce is misery and strife.  You also know that civil war is the worst war of all, and that’s what a world-government would generate.  More importantly, if you have traveled at all, you know cultures aren’t nearly as plastic as our Annoying believe.

A culture is — to put it bluntly — a stew of the lullabies you heard as children, the stories you listened to/watched when you were too young to think about them, your mom’s face when you did something she disapproved of, your religious instruction, the religious instruction of your neighbors, the festivals observed and the meaning attributed to them, the food you ate.  A culture is EVERYTHING besides the genes that went into making you what you are.  Heck, what we’re learning is that cultural factors, such as diet, can turn genes on and off AFTER you’re born, let alone while you’re in the womb.

All of which brings us to changing the culture.  It’s really hard to do from top-down fiat.  It’s POSSIBLE to kill a culture.  The Chinese came close to doing it several times, to their own culture, with multiple book burnings, and executions of story telling grandmothers.

This was done to great effect by invaders throughout history where the children of the conquered tribe are taken away and educated by the invader.

This is the sort of thing happening in the EU where festivals and various traditional ideas are banned on the pretext of being unsanitary or -ist and the children, raised in the temples to the state that public schools are, know nothing substantive about their OWN culture.

But what results is not a new culture.  It’s a sort of sad remnant of acculturated to NOTHING people.  It often results in profound depression and an abyssal decline in population.  The remnants know something is missing, but not what, and are too psychologically wounded to reproduce.

Even then the old culture doesn’t die completely, of course, and weird tidbits remain in the way things are done.

So the idea of integrating the whole world, with thousands of cultures and changing each culture enough that these people could function under a world government is something that would only occur to those who think the differences between TX and NYC constitute cultural extremes.

(Note that even Heinlein stopped peddling the one-world government after his one world tour. Of course, others took world tours without changing their minds, because to quote my grandma, there’s none so blind as him who refuses to see.)

But that was the idea.  The world was supposed to go towards a single government.  Nationality was a thing of the past.  One world government and redistribution would solve all of the world’s ills.  (It has always amused me that the dystopic SF written when Reagan was president, partly to show we were headed to hell according to the Annoying, then stuck around as a sort of promised land for the self proclaimed elites.  The second tierr of the Annoying, fed a bill of goods by the top tier actually feel uilty about their Western abundance and lifestyle, and keep trying to “live with less” and “be poorer” as though this automagically made someone in the third world richer [the truth is rather the opposite.]  Our current president, not a great thinker, is one of these second tier bunnies, which is why he thinks that at some point you’ve made enough money and also that if he makes America poorer, the rest of the world will benefit.  Their good intentions are matched only by their ignorance of international finance and their devotion to Marxian just-so stories.)

This is not ALL of the vision of the Annoying.  There’s a lot more including total flying mouse excreta such as the belief all individuals are evil and every governmental or non-profit organization pure and fine and noble.

Sigh.

And then reality keeps breaking their little — quite literally — red wagon.  Here, they’d barely recovered from the fall of the wall, and decided that the problem was how brutal the Russians were, and here they were uniting their little world with their good intentions and soft little heads, bless their little hearts, handing it all to nice bureaucrats to dictate how cultures would unify from above, and the British had to go and want to go back to their old nationalist ways.

Haven’t they heard — how could they avoid it? — the Annoying tell them that nationalism only leads to war? Wouldn’t they rather have a cozy multinational entity where clueless bureaucrats regulate the curvature of bananas and pasteurize public festivals?   Do they want war?

Perhaps they had food with too much salt.  Perhaps they consume too much sugar.  Perhaps their health care needs to kill older people earlier.

On and on the Annoying persist in, well, trying to annoy us all into falling in line with their vision, not realizing that it’s impossible to pound a square peg into a round hole.

The best thing is to smile beatifically, say “bless their hearts” and set about building visions that can happen, and futures that our children and grandchildren can dream of.

So take an ibuprofen and set to it.

Their vision is, ultimately, a passing annoyance.

 

 

*First, before the post, I must tell you that I’m in this bundle.  This means if you’ve been meaning to read Darkship Thieves, but were afraid it stank on ice, this is your chance to get it (Prometheus Award Winner, 2011) and a bunch of other books by better known writers.  You can’t beat the price. https://storybundle.com/scifi.  So, buy, pass to your friends, whatever.*

There have been several times in my life (so far) when I was watching news coverage and someone said “the world will never be the same.” The first time was when I was eight, listening to coverage of Black September.  The last time was… this week over Brexit. In between lie Brexit, and a dozen other “shocks to the system.”

Every time this, for me, had the “taste” of hyperbole, in varying degrees.  I felt like “Oh, please, the sun will still come up tomorrow, parents will still love their children.”

The one I was most doubtful about was 9/11.  Never mind that I was in shock and in horror, and I thought “Surely they’re joking.  Terrorists have hit massive countries before without their collapsing.”  I confess, fifteen years later, I was wrong and they were right, but not the way they meant.  It wasn’t the hit that weakened us, and which makes that wound in NYC still fester.  It was our fifth column, unable to process or integrate that “littles brown peoplez” are fully conscious and self-agented and that they chose to attack us, and that we must PERFORCE defend and survive.  Instead, the left (mostly the left, we have some cartoon critters on the right — for the American definition of right — too.) has chosen to view 9/11 as “all our fault” and a vindication of their hatred for America and their reflexive oikophobia.  THAT is still tearing us apart, has resulted in a disastrous president whose greatest qualification was his cool ethnic name, and results in the two bellends at present standing a good chance at the presidency.

Does this mean everything has changed?  Well, yes and no.  QUITE beyond our chattering elites, America is still America.  The thing is the idiot reactions, the opposition to any form of self defense (even dogs have a right to self defense.  If a dog bites a human after near-death provocation few jurisdictions will put it to death) and their inchoate need to prove how smart they are by hating their homeland is bringing about an equal and equally reflexive reaction.  I think in the end America will still be America, but the backlash against the misguided visions of the progs won’t be any fun in the meanwhile.  And by not being any fun I mean, we’ll lose lives.  Perhaps some of people here.  Perhaps mine.  And in the end an America will survive that will be different from the vision of the annoying (intentional) which has been pushed on us through the unified mass media complex for well nigh 100 years.  Whether it will still be the land of the free and the home of the brave… that’s up to you and me, and our children and grandchildren.  The train is  not stopped, but it’s markedly slowed down, the track about to be torn up.  Our choice what to do next.

Which brings us to Brexit.  Francis Turner wrote an excellent and well reasoned post here Brexit: How, Why and What Next? – Francis Turner.  I’m not Francis, and I don’t have six hours to analyse all the implications of the Brexit nor the knowledge of Britain that comes with growing up there, as he has.

What I do have is this sort of weird sense of “what things mean in world context” and unfortunately I tend to be right.  I predicted before the d*mn primary started that what we were looking at is Trump vs. Bernie.  If I was wrong on the last, it wasn’t me.  It was the Democrat undemocratic system.  Otherwise, yep, our election cycle would be fractionally more insane.  (Though picking a felon — Hillary — only not indicted because not one of the little people over a guy who spent his honeymoon in the USSR might not be counted as an improvement.  Who knows?)

So I’ve been hearing a lot of bull excreta about Brexit, and first let me tell you what it’s not/doesn’t mean.

1- It doesn’t mean that US states will now start to separate.  (Sigh.)  This should be obvious to anyone, but apparently it isn’t.  The left has had a rock hard boner for the US falling apart into several states at least since this happened to the USSR.  And now and then, and always, it makes me want to hit my head against a wall, hard enough to make the wall fall down.

You see, one of these things is not like the other.  You’re not comparing apples to oranges, you’re comparing apples to peacocks.

Yeah, sure, our federal government as an intrusive entity is of relative recent coinage.  (RELATIVELY.  It started biting off more than it could chew about 100 years ago) it overlays a land that has been used to thinking of itself as the same country for about 300 years, give or take, depending on different states.  The people who moved to the new Western states were at least partially from the old states.  The culture is different between the states (something that no one who hasn’t lived here and MOVED between states can fully understand.  I felt ALMOST as lost during our visit to Ohio was during our visits to my parents.  Almost.  There are still certain underlying assumptions.)  And yet, there are assumptions, attitudes, and a general way of being in the world under it all, throughout the land.

Look, it’s not that a Texan and a New Yorker have that much in common besides (sort of) language.  It’s that they have more in common with which other than with anyone else in the world.  So we are a nation for the reason nations exist: we are the same over-arching culture, and as much as we want to pop our sibling states one, at times (I have news for idiots: the same tensions exist even in postage-stamp size countries like Portugal whose culture is more uniform but not UNIFORM.  Because uniform doesn’t happen in human populations except under pretty brutal totalitarian regimes.  (And soemtimes not then.))

Now, the USSR: an unsteady alliance between ethnicities and countries historically independent, and often hating each other, forged by elites after WWII mostly to protect THEIR interests.

The EU… see above, except not after WWII.  A mistake of those colossal proportions might have been conceived of after WWI, but it took them over 50 years to bring it about.  You can bend reality to the illusions of the elites, but not easily or readily and it takes a LONG time.

2- Britain has turned its back on free trade.

This is where my eyes roll back in my head so far I can examine my own brain.  ONLY idiots or exquisitely educated leftists (it takes a lot of education to believe that much stupid) can believe that Free trade equals Huge and overarching government with a myriad rules and regulations into things like the curvature of bananas.

The rest of us have news for you: Yes, I KNOW that your professors told you that free trade was a very dangerous thing that could only exist with regulations for EVERYTHING and thus you needed “an ever closer union” not to mention regulations on what type of clay ware was acceptable, and what wasn’t.  I knew you guys were learning exactly the wrong thing about free trade and prosperity when the newly elected leftists in CO not only set about regulating POTENTIAL space travel till it squealed, but then boasted that CO would have the first spaceport “Because we already have the most regulations in place for it.”  Yeah.  I’m sure Texas appreciates your efforts, guys.

Free trade is free trade: the right of contract, the right of buying and selling, the right of association WITH WHOMEVER YOU WANT TO.  Neither for nations nor for individuals does it require manacles on the hands that trade back and forth.  In fact, those AREN’T free trade at all.  They’re regulated trade.  Which is sort of an opposite, here, where the rest of us DON’T live in opposite land.

Britain has reclaimed its right to make its own treaties, alliances and trades, like real countries have done throughout history.  Oh, sure, I agree with Mackey that the EU are going to be vindictive little bitches and try to hurt Britain, but given the hold on reality of Brussels bureaucrats, they might actually achieve the opposite.  “Ah, we’ll totally de-regulate our trades with Britain.  We’ll see where that gets them.”  Yeah.

3- This means that Donald Trump will win.

Okay, my eyes are somewhere under my desk.  I really should keep them on a chain.

Yes, Trump’s plurality win in mostly the OPEN primaries (meaning the dems could vote for the Republican nominee they’d rather face — what idiot thought this up? –) did mean a great deal of nativist sentiment, and of working-class support, just like Brexit is said to have the same.  (Said to?  Well, don’t forget who is doing the support.)

However, like a paid off boxer, Trump seems to be doing his best to kiss the canvas already.  (Check the May report.  And no, all his “free press” doesn’t offset the lack of local GOTV organizations, which he started shutting down when he secured the nomination. TRUST me.  I’ve worked GOTV for years in various elections.  Many people have opinions, but without prodding just stay home.  And this year, when most of us say “there isn’t a difference, more so.) And there are… other things.  In the end, Trump is the elites and on their side.  If you look at his debts (he won’t release his financial reports for a reason, but there’s a lot you can find online) he’s a wholly financed subsidiary of international banks. Just like Hillary, though granted with less “selling our secrets to the Russians” at least that we know of.  (We used to hang traitors, before we decided to use the cruel and unusual punishment of stuffing them in mao-suits and parading them around the country.)

In fact I suspect the Trump candidacy time line went like this:

1-Hillary’s biggest contributor decided to run in the Republican party and at least make the potential nominee bleed, so Hillary would face a softened field.  His vicious attacks (some of them loony tunes.  See Gabriel Cruz and Kennedy) on his opponents were meant to give Hillary something to pick at in the main.

2- He found himself winning a plurality and thought he just might take it.

3- He realized that Brexit and … other things were in the works.  (More on that in a minute.) Being brighter than what passes for a brain in Hillary right now (she was never that smart, even in her prime.  Ambitious, scheming and ruthless, sure.  BUT not that smart.  Unlike Billy Jeff, she actually believed in international socialism, which takes a certain degree of moronic faith) he decided he didn’t want to be caught in the middle of that, or of the backlash when he won and governed, as he couldn’t help to govern, like the elites (given the banks who have loaned him more than he’s worth, and the contacts he has which are all left-international-socialist.)  Maybe he decided he REALLY is allergic to rope and lampposts.  Who knows?

4- Initiated Operation Kiss the Canvas, to cause even the limp spines of the GOP to replace him in the convention.

I’m going to add the gratuitous prediction this won’t succeed, and that he’ll be the main GOP nominee, and that he’ll be more mad at that than his never-failing supporters would be if he WERE replaced.  I’m also going to predict it’s up in the air whether he’ll win or not.  He would win with even minimal campaigning, but I’m not sure he’ll do it.  And if he wins, we’re in for crazy of epic proportions.

Because…

What Brexit means is the first LARGE SCALE breach in the wall that the (largely national socialist) elites have erected with mass media/mass entertainment/mass art over the last century or so.

What the inimitable Sabrina Chase calls “the media-entertainment industrial complex” worked very hard, mostly by commanding the heights of power and making everyone an outsider labeled “crazy” or “fascist” or worse, if they disagreed from the consensus being built.

This was not a conspiracy precisely.  It was making international socialism with all its empty promises and all its false glamour a positional good in education/arts/the media.  Once they had enough deans/editors/gallery owners/government curators in their pocket (this is btw standard operation when the USSR was softening you for take over.  Just FYI) they could sneer down anyone who disagreed with them, label them no-talents and bar them from publication/public notice.  All they had to do was make it impossible to succeed in many professions (the latest one they conquered was tech companies, mostly through HR) without spouting their doctrine.

This is an old tactic that has been used for centuries, including in Europe in the Middle ages.  No matter how many doubts you had of religion, you still had to express yourself in the language of the church if you wanted to succeed and have patronage.

It’s not conspiracy, except for a very small number, early on, and even that is not conspiracy, just absolute belief in the same (in international socialist case rather absurd) principles, steering you in the direction of keep anyone but your fellow travelers out.

This worked PARTICULARLY well through the 20th century because the communication medium of the times were uniquely centralized.  To put out news even at the local level, required a considerable investment.  To put out a book, ditto, and the distribution was a right bugger, as many self-published authors left with thousands of books in the garage, found out to their own chagrin.

So your chances were kiss the effigy of Marx, or be silenced.

That this has changed and continues to change I don’t need to explain.  Sure, the mass media still holds a large portion of the LIVs, but… but it’s not the same.  They could never run the campaign that demonized militias under Clinton now.  It took them longer to demonize the tea parties, and the job was always patchy.  The Tea Party suffered more from what it WAS — a leaderless organization.  Yes, that was also its strength — than from anything else.  Their news/books/art/narratives reach increasingly fewer people.

Which not only allows things like Brexit to happen (and I’d like to remind you that Europe is well behind us) but makes a lot more of them inevitable.

They think they learned to ride the tiger, with the masterfully orchestrated foisting of Trump as a revolt vote (yeah, yeah, they attacked him.  With things calculated to strengthen his position as the protest vote’s candidate.  Note that very few of his supporters ever heard that Vichy Mitchy bragged of being Trump’s golf and text partner.  AND virtually none have heard of his boasts re: universal health care.  Or his walking back the wall, and Arab immigration promises, or… Because THAT would actually have hurt his position as protest candidate.)  They haven’t learned to ride the tiger.  Trump has seen through it, hence his attempts at taking a dive (and dividing the party.)

You see, the tiger is getting stronger every day.  The main mass media has less power every day.

And because the vision of the elites doesn’t work, and could only be sold while they controlled EVERY means of communication, and — what’s more — both socialism and internationalism are opening more and more cracks as the same thing that allows us mass communication also makes international actually FREE trade between individuals inevitable, the revolt will only gain force.

It will be stupid in many ways, because masses are stupid.  But because the tech of the age isn’t “mass” but individual and one on one and because people in general as individuals don’t cut off their nose to spite their faces, it will settle out.

Oh, the time is past for mass immigration, that last gasp of internationalist nonsense.  And for “free trade” in which most favored third world nations get all the advantages.  And for “communications” in which they get to tell everyone to think like them, and punish those who dissent.

But we’re about to get real free trade and real communication, one on one, between individuals of differing nations.

This neither requires the erasure of national cultures and national identities, nor is that desirable.  Given actual free trade, the most functional cultures and identities will attract the best individuals from everywhere.

NONE OF THIS requires a one-world-state (which was always the dumbest idea imaginable) nor the intervention of the elites.  It is the last that is driving them crazy right now.

Because they’re NOT the elites.  They’re a portion of the population indoctrinated in a doctrine that has been superseded by technological advance.  Like the nobility of old, some of them will hold on, as relics, but their time of leading the world has passed.

This is not right nor left.  It is the people against a few (relatively.  In historical sense) individuals who think they are supposed to lead us to a “bright new future” no one but them wants.  It is a case of people who drink their own ink not seeing reality.

This too shall pass, and yes, the world that emerges will be very different from where we are.  How different and how free is up to us to ensure.

Go work.

 

 

 

 

 

Sorry — I am swamped trying to unpack and catch up on work-work before trip to Liberty con/Portugal and my post on “the crazy stuff being said about the Brexit” and “the crazy stuff that might actually result from it” will have to wait.

Meantime read Francis Turner’s excellent post

Brexit: How, Why and What Next? – Francis Turner

*I was going to do my own post NOT PRECISELY on Brexit, but life overtook me.  At any rate I want to give Francis’ as much exposure as possible.  He’s below, if you haven’t read it, and it’s the best post you will READ on Brexit.
Meanwhile, my husband having pointed out that the reason my auto-immune is worse could be either age or (and he cleared his throat) stress, I’m going to take some hours off.*

Your long wait is over at last; the Promo Post has returned! After a lengthy drought (and a couple communication snafus), I bring you a trove of entertainment. A quick reminder: inclusion in the promo post does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement by Our Beloved Hostess or myself. That said, a great many of the authors listed here are regulars in the comment section, so the odds are good and the goods are odd. Remember, if you like a book, please be sure to leave a positive review; if you don’t, make sure to provide the writer with constructive criticism. As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Lapsed editor, attrocious correspondent, wary admirer of the starveling cat

Alma Boykin

Shadows and Anguish

A Cat Among Dragons Book 8

Out of the embers wakes a fire. Out of the shadows comes an avenger.

After near death at the hands of her father’s enemies, Rada Ni Drako returns to her duties, her body healing and mind intact. Or is it? The new commanding officer of the 58th Regiment of Foot does not trust her and guards his own secrets. Her strongest allies now serve elsewhere. And new dangers threaten all that the Cat Among Dragons holds dear. From the coasts of Britain to the forests of Drakon IV and the depths of the Harz Mountains, Rada Ni Drako fights her shadows.

Everyone has a breaking point. Rada is about to discover hers.

Peter Grant

Brings the Lightning

The Ames Archives Book 1

When the Civil War ends, where can a former Confederate soldier go to escape the long memories of neighbors who supported the winning side? Where can Johnny Reb go when he can’t go home?

Walt Ames, a former cavalryman with the First Virginia, is headed West with little more than a rifle, a revolver, and a pocket full of looted Yankee gold. But in his way stand bushwhackers, bluecoats, con men, and the ever-restless Indians. And perhaps most dangerous of all, even more dangerous than the cruel and unforgiving land, is the temptation of the woman whose face he can’t forget.

Anthology

Interspecies

The Inlari Sagas Volume 1

Fifty years after first contact with the inlari, war ravaged the Earth, leaving New Zealand and Australia the victors and survivors, but at a devastating cost. As human and inlari factions compete against each other in the struggle for power and resources, some seek zealotry and dominance. Others strive for peace and unity—and with them, hope still lives.

Interspecies is a shared-universe anthology containing four stories of transformation, survival, and the eternal search for meaning and purpose in a turbulent world. Can inlari and humans alike bridge the gap created by their prejudices? Or will one species forever rule the other?

Enigma Front

A wave of possibilities rolls across the land and nothing remains the same IN ITS WAKE … Dinosaurs. Dragons. Clowns. From nineteenth-century China to the moons of Saturn, from the Renaissance to the aftermath of apocalypse, these eighteen stories share one theme–change, like you’ve never seen it before. NOW, EVERYTHING CHANGES! Read stories penned by Aurora, Hugo, and Nebula Award winners, as well as up-and-coming authors, in a single volume.

Includes the short story “Grasshoppers” by Christopher M. Chupik

JL Curtis

Rimworld: Stranded

A military Sci-Fi short story.

Senior Sergeant McDougal wasn’t a combat troop, he was a maintainer. He was good at it, proud of his status, and on his first planetary detachment as the lead maintenance troop for an outpost.

But, when he got stranded on Regulus Four, a Rimworld and one of the clusters that formed the DMZ between the Patrol and the Dragoons, his status didn’t mean a thing…

Improvising, adapting, and trying like hell not to panic, he did his best to fulfill the Patrol’s prime directive to destroy the portable stargate, and still get himself off the planet in one piece before the Dragoons got to him.

C.J. Carella

Decisively Engaged

Warp Marine Corps Book 1

(WARNING: Contains violence, strong language and adult content)

They picked a fight with the wrong species.

A NATION AT WAR: The United Stars of America. Born in the conflagration of unprovoked alien attack, the newest entrant to galactic politics took the few crumbs of hypertech gifted to it and ran with them, soon expanding over dozens of star systems and establishing a wide trade network, protected by its powerful Navy and the dreaded Warp Marines.

A FIGHT TO THE DEATH: A single Marine platoon, tasked with protecting an embassy on a hostile alien planet. An embassy – and the human enclave around it – that soon finds itself surrounded by armed mobs. Can the Marines and a ragtag band of civilian and Navy personnel survive long enough to be rescued?

SPECIAL INDEPENDENCE DAY SALE! To celebrate the launch of the second book of the Warp Marine Corps series, No Price to High, as well as Independence Day, Decisively Engaged will be for sale at $0.99 until July 4th.

No Price Too High

Warp Marine Corps Book 2

(Warning: Contains violence, strong language and adult content)

The battle for humanity’s survival continues.

Peter Fromm: After barely surviving the Battle of Kirosha, Captain Fromm and the rest of the 101st Marine Expeditionary Unit are sent forth to defend a vital star system. While the US Navy battles a vast alien armada in the skies above Parthenon, the Devil Dogs must fight a formidable, well-equipped army on the ground. Retreat is not an option.

Lisbeth Zhang: The former naval officer, once a rising star, faces the end of her career. She reluctantly accepts a new, secret posting, one that will turn her into an experimental subject in a covert weapons project that may save humanity – or spell its doom.

Heather McClintock: Being a CIA operative in a hostile galaxy is never easy. Out in the cold, with no support but her wits and skills, can she make a difference in the battles to come or just become another casualty?

Independence Day Sale! No Price Too High will debut at a promotional price of $0.99 until July 5th, when its regular price of $3.99 will go into effect.

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Rainbow’s Lodestone

Lodestone Tales Book 3

On a whim, the rainbow’s child falls to earth, where a cruel adversary takes advantage of her innocence. Bereft of her thunder-swept heavens, she dwindles. The sky calls to her, but she cannot answer. This transcendent short story of J.M. Ney-Grimm’s troll-ridden North-lands explores how inner freedom creates outer opportunities.

Earth trumps heaven until ancient music plays.

This edition of Rainbow’s Lodestone includes its sequel story Star-drake.

Karen Myers

Mistress of Animals

The Chained Adept Book 2

AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.

Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.

This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.

The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.

C Chancy

Count Taka and the Vampire Brides

Welcome, traveler, to wild Tramontana!

Here you will find snowclad mountains, roaring rivers, vast caves perhaps never seen before by mortal man! Here the strong Horses of Night roam the mountainsides – perhaps you can tame one to ride with your charms. Here the shepherds call to the long-fleeced sheep, the sheep to their sweet lambs – and you can find true telemea, the softest and freshest of cheese, in the gift shop, herb-flavored, a dozen special varieties-

Eh? You’re not here for the gift shop?

Ah, the cameras, of course! Forgive me, most of the photographers we see head straight for the ski lifts. Or the whitewater. Yet there’s so much more to Tramontana! The healthy farmers bringing in the hay, the soaring churches, the wild gypsy dancers – you must dance with the gypsies – and Raven Castle! Oh, there’s a place of history… and mystery.

It held the line against the Turks, they say, and the ancient lords rooted out all manner of uncanny beings… or bargained with them. Have you heard the rumors? That Count Herodes has ruled from that castle for over a hundred years? True, I tell you, all true!

&jellip;Monsters don’t exist, eh? Well, well, take your photographs, and we’ll see!

But you must visit the castle. The Blood Moon is coming, yes, and they say that’s when vampire lords can take a Bride! Other years have come and gone with no new lady in the castle, but this year… oh, you should hear Mistral sing the omens! A lass with your modesty and charms-

What’s that? Ah, temper, temper; location shots, yes, I see. Which way to the castle… there are maps in the gift shop, and tour schedules – but we can do better than that! Why, we’ll escort you there ourselves, no trouble at all, I insist–

Ooof. That’s a feisty one! Well, she’s packed off now. The other Brides should have some interesting weeks… Mihail? What do you mean, Kae’s not a girl’s name?

…Oops.

(Vampire with annoying relatives meets photographer with terrifying relatives. Hilarity Ensues.)

A Net of Dawn and Bones

Oyster Note: I’m including the author’s note rather than the blurb because I thought you lot would appreciate it. Click through the link for the blurb.

This book was written because I couldn’t find anything like it on the shelves.

…No, seriously. After the umpteenth time picking up yet another urban fantasy that looked promising but on closer skimming had the Designated Protagonist choosing the Sexier Evil, I kind of snapped.

Part of the fun of any story is putting yourself in the character’s shoes. But these shoes I not only didn’t want to slip into, I wanted to set them on fire. Where were the good guys? The honest cops? The ordinary people choosing to do the Right Thing, no matter how hard it was? Where was the belief that there is a Right Thing; that there is Good, and Evil, and you pick the side you’re going to fight for, even if the heavens fall?
In short – where were the heroes?

I assure you, if I were in on ground zero of a vampire versus werewolf blood war, my thoughts would not be centered on, omigod the two main supernatural guys are so darkly yummy in their hellspawn black leather. They would be, stake, silver – where are they and how fast can I reload?

So here they are: an honest cop, a half-demon, and an ancient heretic who just might be a saint. Out to kick butt, save lives, and hopefully save souls.

Welcome to Intrepid, North Carolina.

I’m hoping to stay awhile.

Brexit: How, Why and What Next? – Francis Turner

As the media all over the world is telling us, the UK voted fairly convincingly to leave the EU. With a turnout of 72% (higher than recent general elections) the final result was 51.9% leave and 48.1% remain. Most of the media and pretty much all politician everywhere, not to mention endless commenters on social media are saying something along the lines of “How could you do this to us?” and that is generally followed up by a sneer or two – it was the fault of old people, the working class, the stupid low information voters etc. Not to mention suggestions and claims that the Leave people were driven by racism.

Many of these people appear to be imitating the communist party leadership in the German Democratic Republic that Bertold Brecht mocked in his poem Die Lösung (The Solution). In fact you can easily update that poem to today by changing just a few words:

Nach dem Referendum des 23. Juni Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands In der Downingstraße Flugblätter verteilen Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung Löste das Volk auf und Wählte ein anderes?

After the referendum of the 23rd of June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed in Downing Street Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

That attitude and the disconnect that it illustrates is probably why the cognoscenti are so shocked. I was back in the UK at the start of June and from what I saw then I changed my mind and went from hoping (without much faith) that Leave would win to expecting that it would – or that if it didn’t the margin to remain would be razor thin. In either case nothing like what conventional wisdom was predicting. It wasn’t that hard to figure out either, all you had to do was talk to people who didn’t live in London and didn’t read the Grauniad. They were heavily in the leave camp. From shop assistants and porters to academics in hard sciences the muttering was clear: the EU has been a disaster and all the claims that we can reform it have failed. Hence, at some point, you just have to quit.

A tale of two cultures

The UK has developed in very different ways to continental Europe, and within the UK the traditional attitudes to many many things are totally different to those across the English Channel. The usual point made is about the UK having common law whereas continental Europe being used to the Napoleaonic Code, but this is far from the only difference.

The UK and its former colonies (including 13 revolting former colonies :) ) are amongst the most generous when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering. The UK’s Charities Aid Foundation has created a “World Giving Index” for the last 6 years and the UK sits there at around #6 or so with the majority of the countries above it being former colonies. With the exception of the Dutch (who, curiously, also want a referendum about remaining in the EU) the rest of Europe is a long way down the list. In monetary terms some 75% of the UK population gives to charity every year whereas, again with the exception of the Dutch, everyone else is under 60% (and most are under 50%). Continental Europe on the other hand believes that the state should provide. The things that are not state funded in the UK include the coastal lifeboats (mostly provided by the RNLI) and light houses (Trinity House). For a nation which depends on maritime commerce to survive this might seem surprising but these are far from the only such things. Historically the UK was a leader in Friendly Societies, Cooperatives, Mutual Insurance and so on and in general the state’s aid (or possibly interference) in matters has been limited. Indeed until the proportion of government spending as part of GDP in the UK is generally lower than most EU nations, despite the fact that the UK has the (roughly) joint largest military and an almost fully nationalized and tax funded health service.

The point is that the traditional UK attitude was for self-organization to fix problems and not to expect the government to do it or organize it. To some extent this has been eroded as the state has muscled in, but particularly in the countryside, the traditions still hold. Moreover there is a very strong case to be made the this tradition of lighter government involvement, particularly since the 1980s privatizations under Mrs Thatcher, has helped the UK grow in ways that the rest of Western Europe hasn’t. This economic health mean that the UK has become a place other people want to live in.

Immigration

One of the major arguments of the campaign was about immigration. For the most part the Remain side were quite happy with the levels of immigration while the Leave side thought it was far too high. This does not mean, in any way, that the Leave side wanted to kick out all the (recent) immigrants. There are, perhaps, a few who feel that way but I suspect they are in no greater in number than the number of people who think the UK should simply have completely open borders and let anyone in that wants to come.

The UK is a small country. It has roughly same population as France compressed into a third the space and a significant proportion of the space is Northern Scotland which is very sparsely populated. Not only that but the UK has far lower unemployment rates (and higher labour participation rates) than most (all?) of Europe as well as a fairly generous welfare state. The result is that lots and lots of people want to live and work in the UK. This has been true for a while – the number of French citizens in London make it (IIRC) the 5th largest French city by population of French citizens, somewhere about the size of Nice – but the extension eastwards of the EU to Romania and Bulgaria, as well as the general influx of non European migrants into the EU, has lead to a large increase in recent immigrants. It is worth noting that non EU migrants seem to like the UK to such an extent that there is a large camp of them in Northern France who could go to any other part of the mainland of Europe but want to come to the UK instead. Why might that be?

Most people in the UK are fine with migrants up to a point and, while there have been issues with certain communities (Rochdale, Bradford…), people take pride in the developments of their immigrants such as the fact that Chicken Tikka Masala was invented in Birmingham. Going to a kebab shop or a curryhouse after a night out drinking is part of life in Britain. British people have had Indians, West Indians, Africans and so on as neighbours for decades. They’ve had Polish builders, Hungarian plumbers and Czech nannies for a good decade as well as numerous Italian and French (and Indian and Chinese) restaurants and so on for longer. And, in general, they are fine with continued immigration. What they want, however, is immigration at a rate of a few tens of thousands a year whereas what the last few years have shown is that immigration rates are ten times that (anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 depending on statistics).

Immigration at a rate of 0.5% to 1% of the existing population (a population which is having babies and growing anyway) puts a huge strain on jobs, housing as well as health and education services. It isn’t particularly racist to wonder why one’s own children or friends/relatives are unable to find affordable housing when the population is growing faster than the housing stock, neither is it racist to wonder why doctor’s appointments and school places (in schools that are actual permanent buildings) are hard to come by.

In fact I would say that the sneering dismissal that came when people dared to mention those sorts of very practical issues was a major incentive for people to vote leave. When that is combined with the prospect of visa free travel for Turkey and the way that the government came over all shifty when it came to actual immigrant numbers it is hardly a surprise that people didn’t vote for a position that had no prospect of slowing the flow.

Project Fear vs Project Hope

The remain campaign, when they weren’t sneering, were doing their best to scare voters. It seemed every other day some group or other predicted doom and destruction if the UK voted leave. In many cases the gloom was so overwrought that it was a joke. The list of prognostications and prognosticators was endless and many were silly. Why would a hit show like Game of Thrones no longer be filmed in the UK if certain EU film subsidies and tax breaks were not offered? And if that were the case who, beyond a few fragile thespians, would actually care? Why (and indeed how) would the EU immediately block all trade to the UK? Why would British scientists no longer have any research funding? Why would it be impossible to collaborate with European companies and universities? And so on. Moreover why would the average voter believe these people when they were the same ones who came up with almost the same arguments to try and get the UK to join the Euro? The remain campaign offered no positive reason to stay in the EU, just one dire threat after another about the dangers of leaving. Oddly they seemed surprised at the enthusiasm gap that opened up in opinion polls that showed that voters for the Leave side were massively more enthusiastic than those on the remain side.

By contrast, however, the Leave campaign were optimistic and, critically I think, funny. The Leave campaign leaders, particularly Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, were generally witty and all of them managed to think fast enough on their feet to outwit their hostile interviewers (and yes, almost 100% of the interviews were hostile). After a while the fact that Vote Leave’s claims figures were also a bit iffy didn’t matter, everyone with a brain could see that the Remain figures were extracted from various bovine anal orifices, so the fact that Leave played slightly loose with the truth was ignored.

American readers may think this bears a resemblance to the Trump campaign and I suspect that this is no accident. The people running Vote Leave are not idiots and they are quite capable at looking at what works in other countries and replicating it. Just as Trump talks about making America great again, so too the Leave speakers were talking about the vibrant historical past of the UK and its rosy future when not under the boot of the EU. They were vague – they had to be, in part because they don’t agree on the post Brexit future – but they were all optimistic.

In the end it was a choice between a side that failed to acknowledge any problems with the way things are today and threatened the apocalypse if things went wrong and a side that said that “yes things aren’t so great now but we can fix them if we’re free to do our own thing”. On the whole message about freedom to choose won.

What next?

In the short term panic. Some of that panic may be justified for the people panicking. The EU bureaucracy as a whole can quite justifiably be in a huge funk because their jobs, their gravy train and their golden retirements are all on the line. In most cases however the panic is not at all justified. The UK will not abruptly leave the EU tomorrow. Even if the UK were to make an official leave request under article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon there are two years before an actual exit must occur. Until the UK actually leaves it will still be paying Brussels large sums of money and getting some of that back in various subsidies and grants. Likewise no one will be forced to move – neither expat Brits abroad nor EU citizens in the UK. I anticipate that things will settle down in a few days as the majority of the world decides that this is not in fact the end of times and then things will be very very similar to the way they were last month.

In the medium term it will all depend on the treaty. We have almost no idea what a real treaty will look like because almost everyone who would be required to negotiate that treaty has been telling the UK that the world will end. However when they stop having a tantrum and start getting serious the likelihood is that there will be some sort of free trade agreement and a more restrictive set of rules for residency. We may see more British retirees staying in the UK instead of retiring in the sun, we will probably see rather fewer Eastern Europeans living in the UK. There may be inflation in the UK as prices of imports rise and quite possibly there will be a related export boom as prices of UK products become more attractive to the rest of the world. Likewise the UK may see a tourism boom. Beyond that probably not too much. Trade will continue and the UK will – after some adjustments – almost certainly continue to grow faster than the EU. The one thing I am pretty damn certain of is that the City of London will remain the primary market for European timezones. Some trading will undoubtedly move to Dublin and Frankfurt but I doubt it will be as much as the naysayers of Vote Remain predicted. Just as New York remains a major market in the US, despite tax laws that seem designed to induce businesses to flee and just as Silicon Valley remains the hub of VC funded IT despite all sorts of issues from tax to drought the infrastructure is so embedded in the UK that it can’t move. Indeed if the UK government is smart it will end up attracting more business by providing reductions in effective corporation tax and the like.

In the longer term it’s all going to depend on the stability of the EU and the policies of the UK government. All of which are the result of the bahaviour and actions of politicians, irrational beings at the best of times.

Larger Political Implications

The big question that everyone is asking is about the future of the EU. As someone who has wanted to the see the EU collapse for at least a decade I’m on the side of hoping that it does collapse, but I suspect that EU politics are such that it won’t die as soon as I hope. More likely we will see votes to leave by, at least, the more economically vibrant non Euro members (Denmark and Sweden) and some rather extreme politicians becoming more mainstream all across the continent. Eventually the EU will die because there is no desire amongst the populace at large for “ever closer union” and the Euro is a currency that will be studied by future economists as an example of what not to do. However its death throes are likely to be both protracted and messy.

Assuming the UK negotiates a reasonable free trade agreement and the UK government continues to be run by politicians with clue (yes those are fairly major assumptions) then the UK could well end up being the anchor to a revitalized EFTA that consists of itself plus most of the Nordic nations, plus Switzerland and acts as a default exit for those Eastern European nations that bought into the EU mostly to protect themselves from a resurgent Russia. Again assuming smart UK politicians, this new EFTA could well end up including other unaffiliated developed economies such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand as well as, say, India, Singapore and Malaysia. Played properly it will form the basis of a global FTA as it will end up merging with NAFTA and nurturing an African FTA. Some of this is certainly optimistic, but, although the economies of most African nations are tiny, they are growing faster than any other part of the world and a smart optimistic politician would seek to tie the UK to such a region. (Sarc) Who knows we might call the thing a Commonwealth (/Sarc)

On the negative side, it is quite possible that Scotland will decide to separate from the UK and rush to join the EU. There is a significant fraction of the English population that sees Scotland as a bunch of freeloaders who inflicted the “New Labour” government of Blair and Brown on the rest of the UK so that divorce may be quicker and nastier than Scots expect. I have no doubt that EU politicians will welcome them and that Scotland will end up regretting its choice. Depending on who is in power in London at the time, it is quite likely that Scotland will not be bailed out again (the union of 1707 was essentially because Scotland was utterly bankrupt) because of the aforementioned perceived grudge aganst the ungrateful freeloaders. If so the only way it will survive is to embrace all sorts of policies (fracking, free markets) that the SNP hates. Probably this will be a good thing since it might help Scotland regain the mindset that led it to provide so many influential writers and politicians to Great Britain (and thence the world) in the 18th and 19th centuries, but I imagine it will be painful.

Another big question is Ireland. The English oppressed Ireland mightily for some 900 years so it is understandable that the Irish Republic was keen to join the EEC/EU since it wasn’t dominated by England. Similarly the creation of Northern Ireland is something that any dispassionate external observer has to consider a mistake – indeed there’s probably a lot of lternate history where Ireland is grated home rule in the 1890s as an entire island. Hence given that Northern Ireland also voted to remain (though not as strongly as Scotland and with significant areas voting to leave) it is not impossible that another result of the referendum is Irish reunification as a part of the EU.

However despite their love of the EU because it isn’t England I’m not so sure the Irish really have much in common with continental Europe. If the UK and the Nordic countries were to form some kind of EFTA and the Euro collapses again it is quite possible Ireland would seek to join that.

All of this future depends heavily on voters electing moderately sane politicians and, sadly, although the UK will almost certainly avoid insane politicians because of the referendum, there is a strong possibility that the establishment in other countries will fail to learn the lessons and end up ceding their power to something nastier.

Political Extremism

The great and the good of the UK – that is the BBC, most elected politicians and journalists as well as the “intelligentsia” – did their best to paint the Leave campaign as a bunch of xenophobic “little Englanders”. They failed in large part because a large chunk of the ruling Conservative party MPs as well as some significant Labour party MPs were clearly not extremists. Had few or no mainstream politicians gone for Leave things would have been far worse as it would have been much simpler to paint the UK Independence Party (UKIP) as said xenophobes, even though a deeper inspection would probably have show that UKIP itself is a coalition and much of the coalition are not xenophobic. The result of this referendum is sure to cause some political earthquakes in the UK. I would not be surprised to see Labour become a party of just the Right on SJW forces combined with some nasty Islamic radicals, while UKIP hoovers up their former white working class base in England and Wales (the SNP already got their Scottish working class votes). However although the dynamics will change I don’t expect the UK to elect a truly extremist party to govern anything other than a local council and probably not even that.

It is my belief that the UK dodged a bullet here. In almost every other country in the EU, the anti-EU forces are fascist, nationalist or socialist (and some combine elements of all). Perhaps worse these parties have been successfully labeled as such, whether or not they actually are, and as a result they are attracting the would-be jackbooted thugs even if they didn’t want them. This will not end well. In Europe immigration and unemployment/economic growth are huge causes of discontent. The elites have done their best to label anyone who complains about either as an extremist and this is going to come back and bite them hard. Unless they actually address the issues, we will either see elections where the “extremist” parties win (see Germany/Italy in the 1930s) or we will see revolution and civil war (Spain in the 1930s) and by the time the extremists take to power the economies will be so screwed up that idiotic measures like protectionism will seem to make sense. Some European politicians made noises today about the need to listen to the people and some “extremist” parties aren’t yet so demonized that the extremists are in control, but there’s not much time before disaster is set in motion. In some countries it may be too late.

Thanks to President “l’escroc” Chirac and his successor Sarkozy failing to kill the unions and liberalize the labour laws I think France is hosed. While the current leader of the Front National (Marine Le Pen) is slightly less xenophobic than her predecessor (and father) her proposed economic policies, should she manage a Frexit, make Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both seem sane and moderate. Should be become elected France will do its best to imitate those powerhouses of 1970s economic growth: Brazil and Argentina. On the other hand as the current president is discovering without a way to control the unions, labour reform of any sort is impossible, and without that France is stuck in a world of high unemployment.

The good news is that if the UK thrives in a post Brexit world, the chances are higher that most of Europe will figure out the problem and adjust themselves instead of insisting that the UK shoot itself in the foot too to make everything equal.

From someone I was a fan of, long before this blog started or I came out of the political closet.  He’s more qualified than I to comment on Brexit. And today there must be comment on Brexit.

Tomorrow I might extrapolate from this to the spirit of the times, the world turned upside down (or right side up, depends on your perspective) and perhaps an explanation on why Donald won’t run after he secured the nom.  He’s arguably more intelligent than Hillary (not hard, even before alcohol ate her brain) and he’s perhaps not a fan of defenestration as it applies to him.  It’s possible.  (Do the man a favor and put in someone who will run already.)

Anyway, I’ve already said enough that I’m going to have SO MANY political arguments during my visit to Portugal it’s not even funny.

So, I’m going to compound the trouble I’m in with this, stolen from the book of faces:

And now I’m going to write because this evening I MIGHT have to make scones.

 

Again this is late, and I’m sorry.  Yesterday Older Son came over and powered through moving boxes that were in the wrong place, while I powered through unpacking the ones that very quickly overwhelmed my bedroom.  By the time I did the instapundit night dj job, I was almost sleep posting.  Hopefully there weren’t any blunders too big.

So I slept a little late and haven’t had nearly enough coffee.

I was thinking as I woke up, that we’ve been eating out way too much.  After unpacking/moving all day, I’ll be so tired the thought of CHEWING makes me want to cry, much less the thought of cooking.  (Actually I still manage to chew, but there was a time I was so tired I had to have milk, because eating was too much work.)

When I get in that state, particularly if I also forgot to eat all day, I can be a pain and a half.  Add to that the tiredness of going out to eat every night — secret is I prefer my own cooking — and you get this:

“Where do you want to eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, we’ll go to Mexican Place.”

“NOT that.”

“Right then where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Chinese Place?”

“That would be fine.”

“But do you want to go there?”

“I don’t care.”

Repeat with anything you can think of.

I’ve heard exchanges of this type related as to why “people don’t really want freedom.  They want someone to choose for them.”

Right. Sometimes we do.  On things that don’t really matter.  Anyone who knows me well knows that “Sarah wants someone to choose for her” is the answer to “what is the sign that the apocalypse has come?”

BUT in certain things, at certain times, like when picking a restaurant while I’m dead tired, I want someone to say “We’re going to Pete’s, and that’s final.”  However, because I’ve trained my guys to leave me my decision space, we end up in an argument when I refuse to choose.  Same with every member of the family, btw, so it gets funny.

The truth is freedom — any type, even “just” where you want to eat tonight — is work.  Granted, the choice of a restaurant is less work than most, but you must still have some idea of menus, prices, and relative location of the place, which means really work at informing yourself.  And then you need to figure out what you’re in the mood for.

Does the fact that sometimes, on minor things, I don’t want to do the work mean I really prefer tyranny?

Oh, hell no.  I’ll be frank, I never want to do the work.  I’m very lazy except for writing.  BUT I also am aware that no one else choosing for me will choose “right.”

Look, remember being a kid and having your parents choose for you?  If you had anywhere near a normal childhood, those two people are the closest you’ll come in all the world, to someone with your best interests at heart.  And yet, how many times as a kid did they pick things you didn’t want?  And I’m not talking of the “broccoli is better for you than chocolate” type of thing.  I’m talking when your choice would be just as valid, like in buying outfits, but they picked one you hated, because THEY liked it?

Now make the people in charge of your decisions strangers with their own interests.  Do you see?

So what do you do when decisions are a pain?

You retain your freedom for all the decisions you can, and then you delegate.  Or in the case of restaurants, you write all the names down, close your eyes, point at one.

Do that in the case of judges and other political appointees you don’t have the time to research too.  (In my case I vote AGAINST retaining all judges unless one has obtruded on my attention as particularly good.  Too much time in power is a problem we have with our “elites” right now.)

But as much as I disdain the work, it must be done.  Once you surrender your sovereignty to get some peace, you’ve surrendered it all.  Yes, they’ll pick what restaurant you are going to go to, but also what you can say, what you can’t and how.

A lot of minorities — gay people come to mind — think an all powerful state could give them everything they want.  (At least their public representatives do.  Many gay people I know and I’m friends with are holding up both middle fingers RIGHT NOW.)  And they’re right.  An all powerful government COULD.

It also COULD take away everything they have.  Weirdly — and it is weird — I can’t name a single totalitarian government that has been good for minorities.  Communists in particular almost always attain power by courting minorities of all kinds, and then repress them ruthlessly when they attain power.  The “exception” is Africa, and it’s not an exception.  Black skin (well, varying shades of brown) is a MAJORITY in Africa.  So there communists don’t hunt down people with black skin.  Any other color, though, you’re out of luck.

I don’t know why, except that groups tend to behave like a lot of individuals, not a collective mind, and since that doesn’t fit the theory, communists must repress it.  Maybe.  Or maybe the only way to run a totalitarian state is by uniformity.

So when they think instead of doing the work of fighting for what they want in the forum of public opinion, they can surrender that part to the government, and short cut the process, what they are actually doing is surrendering ALL their decisions and all their rights to the hands of a third party.

Do some people want that?

Maybe.  Some people are so damaged that “not thinking” is a great good.  They live where I am after 12 hours of unpacking boxes.

But the majority of people?  No.  They don’t want to make decisions on what doesn’t matter to them.  And being busy cooking, cleaning, unpacking boxes, going to work and raising fat babies, they think a lot of things don’t matter because they didn’t take trouble to inform themselves.

This results in the two horrible candidates standing for president, but it’s not all.  No. The worst part is “people don’t want freedom.  They want someone to choose for them.”

Oh, h*ll no.  Except for our delegated power in our chosen representatives, most of us want to decide on what actually matters to us.  It’s what matters that varies.

Tell the most apathetic voter that you’re going to touch his precious — whatever that is — and it’s a lot like threatening to take me to a Mexican restaurant.  (I actually like food from Yucatan.  I despise tex-mex.)

Listen to what people are saying and the inferences made from your refusals to choose.

Sweet liberty is in your hands.

Keep it there.

*I’m sorry this is so disgracefully late.  I was a bad, bad, bad writer yesterday and had dinner with one of the occasional readers of this blog who happened to be in town (and who is a friend.)  AND THEN this morning had to unload the SUV and then unpack enough boxes to make coffee.  So by the time I sat down to write it was 10 am, and I got sidetracked.  And now I’m going to unpack boxes as I’m temporarily in possession of an older son to help me move things up and down stairs.*

Lately there has been a lot of flap in the respectable literary circles to which none of us would belong, even if they sent us a gold plated invitation about how you must not just writing only what you know, but you should write only what you ARE.

I’ve been on record many, many times that you should write what you don’t know, in the sense that you should write what you haven’t lived.  (Not can.  SHOULD.  It stretches your craft and allows you to experience something else rather than the space behind your eyes.)

Writing what you know should mean something different.  Once you’ve studied a subject or a set of circumstances, you know it and can then write about it.  This is in no way restrictive, and in this sense I FULLY agree with “write what you know”.  I.e. for instance, the person who wrote a regency mystery in which — in ENGLAND! — a nobleman could safely shoot someone in a main street in London and there was no outcry, only “well, he was a peasant” didn’t write what she knew, and made absolutely no effort to check her facts.  More shockingly, Penguin Putnam published that piece of dreck, once more proving the necessity of layers and layers of fact checkers, and demonstrating of fact checkers.  An indie publisher could never have corrected– oh, wait, never mind.

We’ll return to this particular piece of dreck later, for other reasons.  (No, not giving the name, partly because I don’t want to start a fandom fight, and partly because, d*mn it, I can’t remember it.  I deleted it from my kindle with a loud PFUI and have since forgotten both author and title.  This is good.  If I ever meet the author I won’t say “OMG, it’s you! How could you be so stupid?”)

However, by the side I entered publishing, there was already a string of crazy-cakes elderly aunts (particularly the men) screaming that you should only write what you’d LIVED.  Which suddenly and with enlightening force has revealed to me why their novels could cure insomnia.

Look, I’ve lived a relatively more adventurous life than most, by the definition of adventure where it is bad things happening to someone else far away.  A great part of it was through no fault of my own.  I’m a fruit of a place and a time and that whole “peaceful revolution” thing was vastly exaggerated.  Oh, sure, it was not the French revolution, or even the Russian or the Chinese.  But to consider it peaceful you’d need to avert your eyes from several incidents.  Which most of the press did, because these happened to people of no consequence.  And at any rate, you can’t have a revolution without the public getting shirty about it, on either side or — like me — against both sides (though I wasn’t above assuming one side or the other to piss off the other side.  I was a teen.) So there were… incidents.  And those could be the fodder of stories, except for a) my wretched memory.  I can’t even remember WHEN certain things happened.  I retain a memory of escaping through a small window to an alleyway because police were asking for ID at the door (I THINK I was out after the curfew.  I THINK it was nothing exciting.  Just hanging out with friends.  Sweeps were rare, but…) but I can’t for the life of me remember if I escaped through a bathroom window or a warehouse window, if the tip to the guy who showed me that route was extortionate, OR if he did it out of the kindness of his heart.  And I can’t remember WHEN.  All of which would help write a story about it.

Then there’s the various times I disrupted demonstrations in the school: Which year?  What was the price paid?  Don’t know.

Worse, all of these memories have become tangled in things I’ve read, things I’ve studied, and other, later incidents.

And while these were exciting, I don’t feel any particular impulse to write them.  Also, my LIFE wasn’t exciting.  Most of it was boredom, studying, working, and a lot of weekends spent in my bedroom reading, because, you know, I WAS a geek girl.

Since then my life has been anything but adventurous, and certainly not particularly fun to write.  I mean, I could write about my early married years, but even if I set it on terraformed Mars, it would still be a “slice of life” novel.  Now, if I introduced alien invasion…

But of course alien invasion never happened and I can’t tell you for sure how it could go.  For all I know I’m othering the Martians and disrespecting their culture.  (Hangs head in sorrow.)  At any rate, there will be a lot of crazy Marxists, telling me that I only wrote Martians instead of gays, or women, or the poor, or some race or other.  Marxists can’t help it.  They’re rather like the crazy people who follow you screaming things in the downtown of any big city.  Take my son at 13, for instance.  There was a crazy homeless guy in downtown Colorado Springs, who would follow my son around screaming that my son had run over his daughter.  Choice phrases included “You think it’s fun to drive your car and run over people.”  What had Robert done to bring this about?  He existed.  He didn’t even look old enough to drive a car.  But something about his existence piqued this man into deciding Robert was the man who’d killed his daughter.  I can’t even say if he ever had a daughter.  I can just say that when Marxists or crazy street people shout this stuff at you, you should understand the problem is theirs, not yours, and just pretend you didn’t hear.  (Though when I was sixteen and the guy followed me around downtown Porto shouting “you left me for a woman, you whore” this was rather easier said than done.  Never mind.)

However, if I introduce Martians, something I blatantly don’t know in the sense of haven’t lived, into the equation, then I can construct a tale few people have lived (and which might include escapes out of warehouse windows) and therefore interesting to read.

Because the whole point of reading fiction is to LIVE through things you wouldn’t otherwise experience, not to read about other people’s just like yours, humdrum lives.

While I was writing the above about Marxists inevitably saying the villain in your novel must be a placeholder for another race/gender/orientation/nationality, whatever, it occurred to me WHY they are so invested on people writing only what they lived and what they are.

It is entirely possible that flights of imagination are unknown to them.

This is not as strange as it might sound to those of us who whiled away our school days imagining various adventures.  There seem to be in the world a vast number of people — possibly a majority — who can’t really imagine anything wholly new, no matter how hard they try.

It has nothing to do with intelligence.  Even in gifted classes, you see this effect.  The teacher asks the students to write a story and what she gets is a rewrite of the last story read in class. OR you get a mishmash of the last two stories.  OR you get a recounting of the last movie they saw, with names changed.

People who write fanfic (have been known to do that) are several steps above that.  And people who write completely different stuff from anything existing are… apparently baffling.  Which is why — besides assuming that we’re bad people, without any proof but that we disagree with them politically — then tend to pour over our stories in increasingly far-fetched search for allegories and symbolism that mean we’re really, really, evil.

Bah.

I read because I want to experience being in someone else’s head.  I don’t require that the character match the author, I DO require that the author convince me.

To return to the unnamed dreck, this woman was supposedly portraying a tall gentleman, but all of the characters reactions were so wrong, that I kept reverting to seeing him as a small woman.  I finally settled on “Extremely effeminate small gentleman” and so was quite shocked when a woman comes out of the shadows and ravishes him.  (Yes, you read that right, and THAT was wrong, too.  Not that I have anything against a woman ravishing a man, but that the mechanics were …. subtly wrong.  It was not a woman ravishing a man, but a man ravishing a woman.)

By which I mean, by all means, write what you aren’t and haven’t lived, but make sure you know it enough to inhabit that space behind the eyes and then sell it to the readers.

And now you’re wondering why there is a writing blog at according to Hoyt instead of at Mad Genius Club.

There is a blog about this here, because this goes beyond writing.

It is, of course, possible that the people insisting the character MUST match the writer are in good faith, and that being devoid of that kind of imagination themselves they can’t imagine anyone else possessing it.  It is POSSIBLE, even if it is unlikely, since if you DO write what you are, then they accuse you of MarySuing, but that might just be the “crazy people compulsion to follow people on the road and scream at them” in another venue.

Assuming they are in good faith: WHY in h*ll are these people in the arts, much less are accorded any kind of respect and authority?  What has gone so badly broken in our society that their demands aren’t met with the guffaws they deserve?

Another point is: do they imagine everyone is locked in the categories they are born into, unable to understand or work with anyone else forever?  No wonder they so much desire for the government to arbitrate everyone’s life and tell everyone how to live in the most minute detail.

But then the important question is: WHO ARE these creatures that constitute the government?  Last I checked — the Lord be thanked — there were neither gods nor supermen living among us.  So ultimately the people governing us are just humans.  And even if they try — they do — to have humans of like hue and sexual preference and whatever represent each population, the more power they have the more they have to interact with people different from them.  If they are incapable of understanding everyone else, then injustice is inevitable, unless we confine government to very small units over very small groups.  Which might, of course, obviate any sort of common defense or other benefits of civilization.

OR they could tear down that wall in their minds and realize we are all humans and that the hue of our skins, the people we prefer to have sex with, or our socio-economic status are not even the most important things about each of us.

And that the only way to understand the space behind another’s eyes is to put yourself in their places, using sympathy, empathy and, yes, imagination.

 

Yesterday, late in the day (we had vent cleaners, a process that unexpectedly took something like 7 hours, and I was trying to prevent stupid cats from running out to tangle with coyotes and wild turkeys) I finally sat down to read my compadre’s Dave Freer’s blog post.

It was about many things — okay, it was mostly about manure, because you can take the monkey out of the jungle, but… — but in the middle of it he mentioned something about CNN’s CEO admitting they’re in trouble and saying they need to hire more center and center-right reporters.

I thought the Monkey was seeing things — you know, manure has dangerous fumes — so I checked it.  And son of a borg, he was right.

For a moment, for just a moment, I felt as though the ground shifted under my feet.  It wasn’t big or strong, mind, more like a couple of earthquakes I lived through that were so small they barely registered in the richter scale.

The thing is, as with a lot of those, there’s a good chance they’re foreshocks.

I should explain for those of you who arrived late — didn’t you read the schedule?  Is that popcorn?  Do you have enough for everyone? — why this is such a shocking event.

For as long as I’ve been alive — probably longer — the intellectual/publishing/arts/administrative/and lately most managerial establishments have been solidly left.  So solidly left that when a company was in trouble you could count on the roll left.  The process went something like this: get in serious trouble through alienating your audience, roll left, die.

The roll left didn’t save the institutions.  Maybe management was so stupid as to think it would save them.  But I doubt it.  If they got any statistics — it’s iffy.  Most fields that have fallen to the left treat statistics like magic incantations, and look at them as though they were thing that can augur success if treated right.  It’s a process akin to reading the future in the entrails of the sacred goose.  And in some of the fields in advanced stage of leftist necrosis like publishing, they prefer not to get them at all because they might show bad things — they knew they were competing with all the other media and all the other similar institutions for the eyeballs of 1/4 of the population.  (Particularly in the last fifteen years when the other eyeballs have got some place else to go.)

What the roll left did, though, was make sure all the managers and everyone with fiduciary capacity was on record as being “one of the good people” i.e. a member in good standing of the left wing.  Which meant that when their institutions died, they got other jobs.  I’ve followed a particularly lefty magazine editor through four magazines killed, and always falling upward into bigger jobs.

Because that’s how it worked.  For almost 100 years, the left has been safely in charge of the “heights of culture” and cultural institutions and safely indoctrinating anyone graduating from college in the soft sciences into believing that Marxism is as scientific as the poor deranged founder believed.  (Even though no one who has seen it in action up close and personal thinks it is more scientific than Elizabethan views of the cosmos.)

That meant the key to personal upward mobility in any of the soft fields, was to display your badge of leftism as loudly as possible and the more loudly you displayed it, the farther you got.  (Which by the way explains what has made most of our field unreadable.)

So imagine my shock when CNN can in public make noises about hiring center and right of center reporters.

We know they won’t be center and right of center.  I mean when you’re looking from the extreme left, the things that look like center are kind of funny.  (Remember when they thought that George W. Bush and Romney — ROMNEY — were far right?  Good times, good times.)  I mean, even Fox that imagined bastion of right wing isn’t right wing.  Well, right now, by backing Trump they’re kind of European right wing, but not American.  For that matter, by being American right-wing — ie “the government is not the boss of me.  I am the boss of me” — I am invisible to their radar and when they call me “right wing” they mean the European soil-and-blood right wing, which is almost hilarious.  In a bitter-laugh sort of way.

BUT the fact that they’d consider looking at any reporters to the right of Lenin — hey, Pat, have you applied? — and that they’d announce that in public is a seismic shift of global proportions.

So, what happened?

Part of it is time.  There seems to be a clock tolling the maximum time of socialist regimes upon this Earth.  If they go total balls to the wall communist that seems to be 70 years.  No one knows if the socialist insanity would have about the same maximum half life if it didn’t get help from the parts of the economy not yet taken over and from well meaning sympathizers (our government) in other countries.  However, throughout most of Europe the wheels are coming off the various degrees of socialist insanity.  (“No time to have another drink, the lights are going out.”)

Time is their enemy because of that leftist necrosis I mentioned, above.  Why?  Because leftism is a religious cult that often (though not always) runs counter to reality.

What do I mean by that?  Aren’t leftists — or to call them by their proper name, socialists of various stripes — as competent as other people?

Sure.  Sometimes more competent.  And in the beginning years of socialism, a lot of them were the brightest of their kind.  Which is why so many of those bright young things, in the turn of the twentieth century, got pushed up the ladder very quickly.

But those were the days when socialism was scientific.  Psychology, you see, would get quantified and become a hard science.  And then nothing would remain between government and the creation of a better race of men, one that would live in harmony with socialist principles in an Earth where we’d study war no more.

Mind you, the creation of that socialist race, that harmonic humanity that would live in joy in communal prosperity, would require killing vast numbers of people: as George Watson shows in The Lost Literature of Socialism, even such luminaries of both socialism and our field as H. G. Wells believed that attaining this socialist utopia required eugenic genocide and the destruction of everyone who didn’t fall in line with it.  (To give him credit, H. G. Wells didn’t want to do it along the lines of race. And speaking of it being better to read the artists without knowing the craziness they believed, H. G. Wells and Jack London were what I read when most people read picture books.  Ah, well.)

The problem is that psychology never became scientific, and meanwhile genetics did.  Sure, sure, we still have idiots who believe we can breed men like cattle, but they’re not anyone who has actually LOOKED at the genetics of humanity, which are far more complex than cattle genetics (possibly because it now seems possible, instead of homo sap overcoming the competing human species, it loved them to death.  I.e. it absorbed them genetically) and in which traits you’d never think of as linked ARE in fact linked.  And then there’s epigenetics.  Trust me.  I have friends who study this stuff, and I try to listen to them for as long as I can keep my head from hurting.  It’s not very long.

What this means in practical fact is that socialism hard or soft has broken over 100 million eggs and so far not an omelet in sight.

And so, as the “scientific” side of socialism started to visibly fail, it became important to hire not for competence or intelligence (as was done in the days when they were convinced that the future was inevitably theirs) but for one quality only: belief in the shibboleths of the left.  And the more those failed, the more the quality of people who believed in it changed.  Oh, they aren’t stupid.  Not exactly.  At least MOST OF THEM aren’t.  But they are those who are willing to believe or fake belief in a murderous/freedom depriving path to a supposed utopia that never comes.  Weirdly — coff — those attributes don’t relate well with functioning in a sane way in the real world.  (I know.  You could knock me down with a feather!)

Which means sooner or later socialist necrosis sets in.

But the problem with socialism is that it destroys the idea of freedom and personal responsibility, usually early, usually in the schools.  So in the absence of innovative technology and alternate channels, when socialism fails the society/field/profession just… dies.

Thank heavens for the sons of Martha, and their innovative technology and the internet and all that.

Which brings us to where we are.  This is not the beginning of the end — I think — of the left’s cultural dominance in Western society.  But it’s starting to look like hte end of the beginning.

Remember though there is a lot of money, a lot of power on their side now.  While portraying the right as on the side of the rich, they’ve been recruiting the rich and entrenching their privilege for almost 100 years.

It’s not going to be easy and simple.  But there are sudden cracks in the perfect lie presented by all the public outlets.  There are… dissonant notes in the music of the socialist pied piper who has been piping us to our death in soft, slow notes.

I don’t think those cracks will show to those not obsessed by politics for 20 years or so, but who knows?  I could be wrong. And sometimes, in a preference cascade, where falsification of preference has taken place (and at least in publishing the problem has been that you couldn’t tell them anything but what they wanted to hear and have a career.  So they were/still are completely unprepared for the indie revolution when it hit them), can be startlingly fast, a tsunami where things change in the blink of an eye.

It could happen here.  The thing to remember is that it’s unlikely to happen in favor of liberty.  Liberty is hard.  Self responsibility more so.  (Take guns.  Yesterday idiots accused me of being ammosexual.  To anyone who knows me, that’s insanity.  I hate shooting for the same reason I hate driving: because I’m not very coordinated and my eyes are funny and I’m afraid of flubbing.  But as with driving, if I want to live as a free human being, there is no alternative.  I must be responsible for my locomotion and my self-defense.  And that’s all.)

So in the confusion that follows a seismic movement, it’s easy for another form of socialism to sell itself.  Socialism, only now with more blood-and-soil!  The government is not your mommy.  It is now your daddy.  Surrender yourself to the government.

Arguably that form is even more short lived, though they DO tend to have snazzier uniforms.

It is important in the maelstrom building, to remember your principles, and to keep your head.  Schadenfreude will be rife (Really, did you bring enough popcorn for everyone?) but Schadenfreude is not a philosophical or political theory.

Remember the vision of the founders.  Hold on to that.  Statists of various stripes will come out of the woodwork to offer you the easy way out and the snake oil.

But in the end we win, they lose.  Things will just be really choppy on the way there.

Stay the course.