I was going to write a post on the concept of “literary” and might do that tomorrow, but today is all taken up with family things.
On the unpacking progress we now have functioning bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Next up, my office and the laundry room, and then we can bring the cats home. (We’re putting the boxes in the laundry room.) I miss them.
Derp fish is most assuredly dying, but after looking closely I’m not sure if it’s a fungus or a tumor. Looks more like a tumor, which means I might as well stop torturing him with the medicine tank and put him in his comfy one with the heating element and filter and stuff.
Poor derpy. He used to be a very fun fish. Ah well. Whatever it is near his eye it’s making him swim on his side. If there were fishy surgeons I’m sure he could be taken care of, but there aren’t. So all I can do is make him comfortable until he goes.
And now, kids and friends await me, so have a good day. I’ll be back tomorrow.
So, I didn’t mean to leave this without a post but this morning we left before I could come up with something to write.
I’m trying very hard to be good to myself, but I keep running out of spoons. I don’t think I’m still sick, though extensive surgery and a year of moving and rebuilding a Victorian probably didn’t help my overall condition. I think it’s more that I’m not twenty anymore, and when I was twenty I was pretty awesome, in the sense that I was the energizer bunny.
Our fourth move as a married couple, from Columbia SC to Colorado, we packed an entire 1800 sq foot, three bedroom household in three days without sleeping. Yeah, mistakes were made. For instance I somehow moved without my own, handmade maternity wardrobe (done on patterns from Dan’s grandmother, so it was all twenties look), we left a piece of the high chair and I almost threw away a $6k check, but by gum when the movers arrived the house was ready to load in the truck and — because it was my 30th birthday — we went out to dinner and were semi-coherent.
I don’t expect to be able to do that anymore, but when I start flagging after two hours, I get very upset with myself and with my stupid body.
So what do you do when you’ve got nothing: no strength, no drive, no ability to go on? You go on anyway. This is something my writing career has taught me. You take little breaks — I look at blog comments, or just sit down with my eyes closed for five minues, and then I go on. Because I have to. And an amazing amount gets accomplished.
We’ve spent the last three days mostly at the other house, collecting “stragglers” — i.e. the little things that weren’t boxed or were left behind, notwithstanding which I’ve completely unpacked our bedroom and bathroom, and done a million loads of laundry. I’m four boxes away from unpacking the kitchen which is good because eating out as a default is NOT for me.
My goal is to have everything essential (kitchen, office, bedroom) done by Monday so I can settle in and work. We’re not unpacking the non-essentials, like fancy dishes or such, as we’re very much hoping this is a 3 month only stay. We’re grateful for the house, but I’m dying to be in a permanent place and truly able to settle in.
I’ve already told Dan, though, that IF it all goes according to plan and we move in June, I am going to go to a hotel for the duration. (We have points, anyway.) The packers can come in and pack us and move us, and I’ll be there to direct unpacking at that end. This slow mo death march is not for me anymore, and I have books to write and publish.
All of which are very loud right now, of course.
In other news, I really think derpfish is dying :(. I’ve tried everything that worked before, but he’s just not springing back. Ah well. I neglected him too much, but when you’re moving and trying to write… I’ll stick to cats from now on. They tell me when I’m neglecting them. (On one notable occasion by peeing on my lap.)
And relating to the whole war on competence theme, the house we’re renting was builg in the fifties, and it is far smaller than where we were living, but infinitely better designed with so many conveniences and little tricks to make life easier that it makes me a little angry. Why angry? We’ve been seeing all these brand spanking new houses, and none of them is nearly as convenient, neat or well designed. (If it weren’t in the Springs, I might really be tempted to buy.)
It’s like the knowledge of the ancients. Once upon a time we believed in designing our houses to make things easy and convenient. Once upon a time we believed in improving things both great and small. We were going to the future, and it was going to be great.
Now these things are like knowledge of the ancients, that we must bring back. “Humanity is not doomed” “You don’t need to punish yourself” “the future is better than the past.”
Hark, I’ve unearthed the knowledge of a lost civilization: our own. And I will share it with a grey-goo present, even when I have nothing to pull from and I’ve run all out of spoons.
It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you keep going long after you want to give up.
So, in these days of moving, and dragging and pulling and kicking boxes, all the while worrying about derpfish (he’s still alive, but I can’t tell if he’s getting better or worse. If he goes, I’m not getting another fish again. I like pets I can sort of guess at and who live longer than 2 years) I’ve been thinking about the Hugo mess. And I realized it’s part of a bigger mess.
And the problem isn’t Larry or anyone defying the Hugo cabal. That would have come sooner or later. And the masterminds of the opposition aren’t fighting for the shiny plastic rocket, they’re fighting for their livelihood. And the writers caught in the middle are divided between those who have woken up and those who have. And I could have been on either side, but for a fortuitous circumstance.
Bear with me ladies and gentlemen, as I take you back to a distant time and place.
When I tried to break into writing, I bought all the propaganda. Who didn’t? As lovers of books, it is easy to convince ourselves that all the good stuff is getting published, and that by and large, the best stuff is getting recognized. Oh, sure the taste in what gets published is not often mine. (I enjoy very few non-Baen bestsellers and NO mainstream “literary” ones, all of which seem to be despicable people doing despicable things described in beautiful language. Though some of them are just hopeless people doing hopeless things described in beautiful language.)
However my degree is literature and languages (we can’t uncouple them in Portugal) and so I really some people appreciate that sort of book and a high culture that, by and large, has given up on life and civilization considers these books true to life and therefore good. Fine. I could live with that. After all the book machine still produced a ton of stuff I wanted to read. By and large more than I could afford. (Remember, this was 1985, I’d just come to the states and I had decades worth of books to catch onto.)
The first twinge of doubt came when I bought science fiction magazines to read, to scope out why I was getting so many rejections, (i.e. to see if I was even aiming in the right direction) and found myself flabbergasted. Of the majors, Analog was the one I could at least read every story (though some of them were mind bogglingly insane. What was with the re-built princess Diana as space ambassador again? WTF?)
Asimov’s (I got a subscription to the two majors) ranged from unreadable grey goo to one of two truly amazing stories a year or so.
The rest? I’ll just say one of those magazines is on my list to never even open again unless I’m completely and thoroughly SLOSHED.
It wasn’t that those stories, even the ones in Asimov’s were bad, precisely. It was that they weren’t stories that… that met my internal feeling of what stories were. (And keep in mind I studied the literature of seven countries.)
I shoved the doubts away by telling myself this was how little I knew of stories. I needed to read more of these and figure out the internal logic. Eventually I did, btw, but I never liked them.
The second doubt came around 94? (I don’t remember date exactly. Might have been 96. Kept it till almost 2000) when I had a subscription to the sf book club and got the main selection or the alternate, for the same purposes of studying the market. Unlike with short stories, I couldn’t convince myself it was just my sideways perspective. I discovered one good book out of this (I was already reading some of their selections and those I don’t remember. But without them I’d never have read Diamond Age.) But 90% of the stuff they sent me was … not even bad, just “What”” Or perhaps “did I get a subscription to the literary book club, by accident?”
This sent me on a quest to investigate how publishing worked. You see, I’d assumed it was lots of little publishing houses, each cranking out what made the owners/publishers happy and competing for the market. But not, apparently, since the mergers of the 80s.
I discovered it was in fact an oligopsony. There were only five (now four) big publishers. They all had offices in the same space, they all hired the same (mostly ivy league) college graduates, and there were no taste surveys, nothing. The only people they were publishing for, in other words, were themselves. And their opinion of each other was far more important than anyone else’s opinions or for that matter sales numbers.
Which explains what I went through later on, after the failure of my first — Magical Shakespeare — series which was literary fantasy. Every agent I talked to after dropping my agent told me in the same breath that a) Literary Fantasy didn’t sell and b) that this is what I should write, since I “could.” This baffled me, but it should have clued me in that prestige, for authors and agents is the coin you trade to get money — nothing so crude as sales to the public. And that the field was rotten from top to bottom.
It took a while for this to sink in. You see, I was arguing with the eight year old who was going to grow up and be a writer. She was still somewhere inside me, and as hard to talk to logically as any eight year old.
And besides I can write anything, though writing the Magical British Empire convinced me that there are things that aren’t advisable for me to write. It is also literary fantasy, of a sort, and I almost killed myself through sheer depression while forcing myself to write it. (In a writers’ edition, i.e. cleaned up, it will see light of day again soon.)
Then I ran away with the Baen circus, and I don’t actually have any objections to writing shifters and space operas, and besides baby needed new shoes (school books, actually) so I worked my tail off on Musketeer’s mysteries. Writing six books a year while homeschooling a middle schooler leaves you curiously uninterested in the state of the publishing industry.
What I have assembled a posteriori is not absolutely certain, so you guys can protest if I’m wrong.
You see, the oligopsony worked fine as long as there was another control mechanism, which we’ll call distribution and sales. The sales were mostly tiny stores, run by people who loved books. This meant that as rotten as the NY publishing establishment was, if it threw out (almost by accident) something worthy, the distributors ran with it and the retailers handsold it, and you had a surprise bestseller.
This didn’t please the establishment who decided they needed full control. Enter mega chains of bookstores that put small stores out of business; enter distributors who didn’t read the books; enter retail clerks who also didn’t read and pushed only what they were told to push.
Sometime by the late nineties, the publishing business had a perfect lock on distribution, the famous push model. I.e. “You’ll sell what we tell you to and LIKE it.”
Enter Amazon. Their hatred for it goes that far back. Suddenly people were finding and buying books not scheduled for bestsellerdom. And liking them. And buying more.
I think the push model started falling apart then. I remember seeing a few books that got all the push and disappeared without a sound.
But there was worse to come: indie.
All of a sudden the lie that whatever got published was the best became apparent.
It was around this time that a well-established traditional author told friends of mine “if this indie thing works I’m going to be very rude to many people.”
And that’s what the Hugos fight is all about.
I woke up to Indie, in my personal timeline, because I had a weird coup-de-writing.
While in the middle of an extremely tight schedule, I took art classes to avoid thinking in words for a little bit. And coming out of an art class an August five (?) years ago, I got an entire trilogy downloaded into my brain. A musketeer trilogy, in a parallel world where vampires are winning. I came home and typed in a jumble of scenes, mostly at Kate who said what I felt “this is good. This is gold.”
Now, I know good doesn’t mean anything in publishing. Agent, push, getting it in front of the right eyes at the right time have more to do with it.
But I thought…
Well, my agent shopped it around or at least told me so. I only realized recently that unlike her other submittals, she never sent me rejections. It’s alright. Maybe it was done all in electronic, but still…
She finally sold it to this tiny house, for 3k a book. And then I got the copyedit on that manuscript, and all hell broke lose. For one the next book stopped cold. This is the copyedit where the copyeditor spent a lot of time doing stuff like correcting the names of the musketeers (unnamed in the Dumas books or correcting my sentences in even more bizarre ways. I looked at those comments recently and while it’s not the worst edit I’ve ever got, brother it’s a doozy.)
Even though we were broke at the time, I tried to buy the rights back. And then I considered giving up writing. If my agent could only sell what was to me at the time my best work (Yeah, A Few Good Men is better, but it was not yet even a glimmer) then I gave up.
In the middle of this I contacted Kris Rusch who told me to come out to an “how to go indie” workshop.
Everything else, including letting my agent go came from there, and if my indie career isn’t more advanced that comes down to a health collapse.
But it also freed me to come out of the political closet.
And you have to understand the closet is deep because livelihoods ride on it.
I don’t know why anyone would bother claiming publishing doesn’t trend left. Of course it does. It’s run by NYC people, with NYC opinions. As NYC votes, so is it run. They don’t THINK they’re left, because in their world it’s just what everyone thinks. But thought NYC is a city-world, they’re missing the majority of people out here.
The result though was that in the old oligopsonic days, you had to play along and pretend, or be labeled far right wing (it should give anyone a clue that now they label me far right wing. Me. Oh, sure, not Marxist, but close enough to anarchy — true anarchy, not the leftist weirdness — to touch it, and they shove me into the neo-nazi spectrum, because, you know, those of us who want as little government as possible SURELY want to have goosestepping troops. WHAT?) and never work in that town again.
I’ve said before that years ago, being mentioned at Instapundit would have meant the end of my career.
It wasn’t a stupid fear. It was real. Even though writers can’t control who reads them and likes them, if you’re liked by the “far right” you must be using “dog whistles” — and thus the blacklisting starts.
So those people asking to be removed from the Hugo recommendations which were made by fan vote? Perfectly logical. Getting tainted by association is a thing in their circles.
The people proclaiming that we: Larry, Brad, myself, John C. Wright, I don’t know if they were stupid enough to include Kevin J. Anderson and Butcher in that, but definitely everyone else in the list, had “ruined their careers” are right. For their world and their definition of career. None of the big four will ever publish us again, except Baen.
They are stuck in the old push-model days in their head. They think that everyone down the chain will now boycott us. And they want to make d*mn sure it doesn’t splash on them.
Meanwhile we’re living in a different world. We’ve tried indie, and it worked. (Even though in my case it was just toe dipping. More to come once internet is fixed and bedrooms, kitchen and office unpacked. (It’s all we’re unpacking in this house.)
We’re living in a world where we can be rude to whomever we please, love our fans whoever they are, and have our own opinions. Because NYC publishing is NOT the boss of us.
And though I’ll write for Baen as long as they’ll have me, I’ve done enough to know that indie will pay more. (Never mind, Baen is family. You do what you do for family. And it’s worth it.)
Which means we live in a land without fear. And it’s hard to remember that the reactions to being put on a list BY THE WRONG PEOPLE is perfectly logical.
And it’s hard to remember that the publishers too are afraid, and that holding onto the Hugos is all they can think of to keep prestige which they can then use to dangle in front of new writers to attract them, since they can’t have money. (First book advances are now 3k.)
To them it’s a deadly serious game, which is why they can’t understand we’re doing this half in jest (the Sad Puppies name should have been a clue.) They can’t understand that to us it is “we can do it” and not “life or death.”
And this is why the two sides talk past each other. And why it’s perfectly logical for each side, but the logic of one doesn’t apply to the other, because we’re living in completely different worlds.
(Hopefully internet works long enough to post this. Pardon typos and weird constructions. Typing in more haste than usual. Now must open boxes to find essentail supplies to run the house.)
*So, I just want to know which shrine I desecrated. On Tuesday, with fifteen minutes to go on the clock and an owner argued down to the price we wanted, someone came in and made a full price offer, snatching a pretty much perfect house from under our nose. (We could go full price, we could, but I refuse to get in a bidding war.) Yesterday the movers arrived at the same exact time as the biggest snowstorm SINCE the one raging when we came into town 23 years ago.
Meanwhile poor derpfish appears to be dying. While I was busy packing, I didn’t notice the fungus had come back. I’ve put him in the hospital tank, but I think he’s too far gone. We’ll see.
It’s sunny today for the second day of moving, and I hope the streak stops, before I have to wake every morning with “What fresh hell is this?”
Keep the place clean and black hat free while I move and unpack. we’re unpacking the essentials only because, being deluded, we still hope to find something permanent soon.*
I was talking to Charlie yesterday about the problem of “social justice writing.” By which we mean writing that is more concerned with conveying the “right message” delivered by the “approved group” writer than with telling an entertaining/uplifting or otherwise interesting story-that-earns-its-own-keep.
First of all, of course, there is the fact that a story that relies on “right think” to justify its right to exist might not bother with less glamorous bits of craft such as making sure your reasoning makes sense throughout, or that you have established the character’s traits to evoke an emotional response from the reader and catharsis at the end of the story.
In fact, in this “writing to effect social change” shares the exact same drawbacks as writing fan fiction. As a former fan fiction writer (Jane Austen fanfic. Yeah, I know. Exciting. Shud up.) I’m just glad I was a professional before I started playing in fanfic. It is all too easy to acquire bad habits from writing fanfic. For instance, if you’re writing Pride and Prejudice fanfic, all you have to do is name the character Lizzie, even if you set it in modern day, and the reader immediately imbues it with every characteristic of the Jane Austen character, without your having to do any heavy lifting. In the same way if you name a character Whickam, everyone knows he’s a cad or worse and never mind making his faults believable or foreshadowing them.
Writing the politically correct story is much the same thing: introduce a minority character, be it racial, sexual or religious, in one of the approved “categories” and the readership, which are “fans” of social justice will immediately imbue that “victim character” with all the characteristics of noble victims ever penned since Jean Jacques Rosseau rode the noble savage into the sunset.
Because of that, “message writing” will always be inferior to “entertainment writing” when viewed in the dispassionate cold light of day.
Change how fashionable the message is (and frankly the left seems to do that every few years, as a matter of course) and today’s “masterpiece” becomes a story only of interest to historians of passe modes of thinking, if not an outright heresy to the people trying to pretend that we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
But there is more moral peril to “message writing” because of the very mode of thought it encourages amid its practitioners; a mode of thought best described as “seeing oppressors under every bed.”
I’ll illustrate by admitting that when I first came to the US, within the first three years, I fell in with a group of people who were generally minorities (racial, sexual, cultural.) Nothing strange about this. A lot of my friends (perhaps a majority) still fall in those categories. However, my group these days is mostly conservative or libertarian or yes, which makes them a completely different type of creature.
You see, the first few friends I made were people who obsessed over what today would be called “micro-aggressions.” Oh, macro too. And there was some reason behind their paranoia (and mine, at the time.) Where I was at the time, and the faux-pas I committed as I tried to adapt to living in the US did cause a lot of very strange reactions, and some of them outright hostile. Some of my friends at the time had similar causes of complaint.
I mean, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
For instance in my first (retail) job every guy (including the ex con) and every “white” (mostly blond) woman was taught how to open the safe and trusted with it, but myself and the black woman (who had an MBA and was only working retail due to a recent divorce, while looking for another job) were not. However, when money went missing, we were the only two people questioned. (Turned out the ex-con was taking money out of the safe whenever he felt like going out to dinner. I know you’re shocked.) This was definitely outrageous, but instead of taking from it that one should strive not to work for *ssholes, we took from it that everyone was bigoted against poor little us.
Anyway, at some point, it hit me that we were getting together to share grievances, and that most of our conversation, not to say most of our thoughts revolved around injustices done to us and how unfair the world was.
And then it occurred to me that more than a few of my friends, and to an extent I, myself, were using these ‘injustices’ inherent in the system (so to put it) to justify not doing anything, not trying anything and not making any efforts to improve our (relatively invidious position.)
Now, I want you to know that yes, there were injustices against us. It wasn’t all in our head. And yes, we were in a relatively difficult position.
But that wasn’t the point. Having realized the effect it was having on me; realizing that my resentment and my feeling of being victimized were holding me captive, I decided to set myself free.
I broke up with my comfortable/encouraging/justifying crowd overnight, and resolved that while I might be discriminated against, I didn’t have to let it define me. That is, while people might think I was less capable, I wouldn’t allow them to make me less capable.
For my own sake, not theirs, I would from then on ignore any discrimination against me (save for occasionally finding it very funny, like when the school was persuaded my younger son had a speech impediment because my husband and I spoke Russian at home. [Why Russian? And why poor Dan who was born and raised in New England and Ohio?]) and proceed to take no excuses for underperforming.
I might or might not be able to prove discrimination against me. I might or might not be in fact discriminated against in some particular. But the fact remained that I couldn’t control those who might or might not discriminate against me. I couldn’t even predict it, or the reason why.
Discrimination is not, as the left seems to believe, a rare thing or confined to minorities. Yes, I know, part of the reason they go crazy about white male “privilege” is that they assume there’s a hierarchy and that white males are the least discriminated against.
I suppose that is true if the white male is you know, one of the Norse gods with inherent superior looks and abilities. But even white males are never exactly what it says on the package. Any white male of less than say five feet six is going to be discriminated against. So is any over 300 lbs. So is any who is just Odd enough to have to back-engineer other people’s reactions to figure out how to react himself. So is any who is too smart or stupid for his own good.
In fact, once you figure out the various kinds of white male, there is no privilege left. And the same for every other “category” of human.
So, most of the time, the obvious form of discrimination against me comes in reaction to my accent. And it’s not even exactly unjustified. I find myself worrying, too, when talking to someone with an obvious accent. You’re not sure they can understand you, and you automatically dumb-down the talk.
But I’ve also been discriminated against because of culture. And I don’t mean Latin (though the boss in that first retail store being a dumb *ss did think I was Mexican. He also thought my name was Feliz (as in Feliz Navidad) – loooong story.) Many people (my inlaws included) just don’t “get” science fiction and fantasy. My mother in law thought and might still think that I invented “grown up stories with elves” and at one time told me I should write for children because ‘they’re the only ones with a mind as open as yours.’ She’s not alone, though most people in that position wouldn’t dare voice it to my face, so I don’t know most of them.
I was even discriminated against when I was young and slim and pretty for being young and slim and pretty and fairly well dressed. For instance, at a gathering of an unnamed high IQ society I was repeatedly asked whose date I was.
The truth is that people make judgments based not on social justice but on past experiences/what they’ve read and watched/the bottomless depths of their own weirdness. The good people revise them later, but almost every one of us has been discriminated against for something or other. And sometimes for nothing at all, but the idea in someone’s head when they first saw us.
Having realized this, I figured that if I became hung up in every time that someone didn’t treat me fairly I’d be paralyzed.
And so, in my head, I’ve decided I’ll ignore those who discriminate against me. (Save for occasionally pointing and making duck noises, because that’s only fair.)
If I let their oppression define me, I’ll be a captive of the impotence that their oppression engenders.
If I ignore it, pretend I’m the mistress of my own fate, and continue pushing to get better and to do what I want to do, then no one can stop me. Because it’s all dependent on me and how hard I’m willing to work.
And that is how I have avoided the moral hazard of victimhood. And why I feel sorry for all the writers entrapped into writing “socially relevant” fiction that enshrines and deifies victimhood.
The chains of defining yourself as a victim are a tourniquet wrapped around the soul.
The only way to stop it is to declare yourself free and ignore those you think are trying to limit you. The only way to break the chains is to believe you alone are responsible for your state of happiness and prosperity or lack thereof. Yes, other factors (including the animosity of strangers) might influence that state, but if you are willing to work hard enough you can overcome additional factors. And if you aren’t willing to work hard enough nothing, not even the most favorable of circumstances, can make you successful.
The chains of victimhood are insidious and will destroy your soul as well as your writing.
Fortunately the key to freedom is in your own hands.
I have been sitting here, staring at the computer screen, trying to find the words for my feelings in the aftermath of what happened in Brussels. Oh, the immediate reaction is easy. Disbelief followed by anger mixed with a large dose of concern and sympathy for those impacted by what happened. Then, as the stories continued to roll in, other emotions came. With it all comes the understanding that the time has finally come for us to realize that we can’t continue to play by the rules of civilized warfare because the enemy is using our own ethics, for lack of a better word, against us.
For years, decades even, many in our country and in our government have operated under the belief that war is something that can be waged by following the rules. They want it to be clean, with no collateral damage. That is a grand idea and one I could get behind – if the other side agreed. Unfortunately, as we have seen time and time again, that isn’t the case. We try to use surgical strikes to avoid destroying non-military facilities and avoid civilian casualties. The enemy, knowing this, hides in mosques and churches, homes and schools. They use civilians as their shields, knowing our citizens won’t put up with “unnecessary” civilian deaths.
We have watched as our citizens have been targeted overseas. We have seen in living color the attacks on Paris and now Brussels. How many other attacks have there been? I don’t know. Our media doesn’t report it all. It doesn’t fit the narrative, especially not during an election year. Most especially not when our President is making his so-called historic visit to Cuba.
I cringed when, as news was still coming in on the bombings in Brussels, the media talked about how President Obama was not going to cut his visit to Cuba short. In fact, at that time, he was still scheduled to watch a baseball game between a Cuban team and an American one. I’ll even admit to not knowing if he kept to that schedule. Why? Because the thought of him sitting there watching a baseball game when our allies were under what could only be called attack made me sick to my stomach.
How long are we going to sit back and watch, telling ourselves that the battle isn’t going to come to us? How long will we continue to delude ourselves by saying that all we need to do is listen to why ISIS hates us so much? After all, to hear some of our fellow countrymen talk, the real responsibility for all this ill will falls directly at our own feet. Funny how there are always those singing that song until the shit hits the fan right outside their door. Then they are crying for the rest of us to step up and protect them. That is exactly what will happen here if we don’t find a way to end the war before it gets any worse.
One of the comments I heard in response to the attack came from Donald Trump. Now, as those of you who have read my previous posts here know, I’m not a big Trump fan. Hearing his response to the attack on Brussels had me, initially at least, cringing and telling myself that his comments were exactly why I don’t want him to be president.
“You know, we work within laws. They don’t work within laws — they have no laws. We work within laws. The waterboarding would be fine, and if they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding,” he said.
My first reaction was probably similar to what many of you had to that comment. I cringed and said to myself that we couldn’t allow ourselves to become like the enemy. We are better than them. Just as our Constitution has provisions against cruel and unusual punishment for criminals, those same protections should apply to those who are enemies of our country.
Right?
The good part of me says “right”. But the other part, the part that watches the enemy attack civilian targets without compunction, the part that knows my son and so many other mother’s sons and daughters are in harm’s way because of ISIS and their allies, says maybe not. Maybe that old adage “All’s fair in love and war” is right.
Still, I am conflicted. My brain tells me that is what the enemy is wants. It wants us doubting our approach to them. It wants us second guessing what our government and our military does – or might do. In short, it wants our doubts to hamstring any quick and decisive response we might have to them.
Hell, it is something they have successfully done for years. We did not finish the job with Operation Enduring Freedom. We didn’t finish the job with Operation Desert Storm. We sure as hell aren’t finishing the job now.
Let’s be honest. We haven’t “finished the job” since World War II. I can understand Korea. Our country was exhausted, our resources stretched then by World War II and just a few years after we found ourselves in Korea. Vietnam? I’m not sure we ever had a battle plan for success there. Add in the fact the media was sending daily updates that we could watch at our dinner tables, as well as there had been little down time from Korea and, well, we had a recipe for anything but winning.
Now we are fighting an enemy that won’t be satisfied until we are dead. Not just our leaders. Not just our military. All of us. How long is it going to take us to wrap our heads around the fact there is no negotiation with a zealot? There is fight back, fight hard and fight to win.
But that doesn’t mean I believe we need to round up every person who has come here from a predominantly Islamic country. Nor does it mean we round up every follower of the Islamic faith. That would be just as wrong as it was when, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, our government rounded up the Japanese-Americans and put them in camps.
It does mean, however, tightening our borders – all our borders. It means reviewing our immigration rules and doing a better job at vetting everyone coming in. It means increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and giving them the authority to actually stop and arrest anyone they find coming over illegally.
It also means remembering who our allies are. Kissing up to certain leaders in the Middle East and Africa has done nothing that I can see to help keep our country and its citizens safe. In fact, it has done just the opposite. The enemy has seen our president bowing to those who hate us. They have seen our government turn its back on allies like Israel because a potential ally – pardon me while I laugh hysterically – might be insulted by our continued association with Israel. We have walked the path the enemy has set for us, never really striking back and never finishing what we start.
At least that is how it seems from the outside looking in.
Now I find myself remembering the 1980 presidential election. I had no love lost for President Carter. I’d watched, along with so many others, as he sat on his hands while our people, and our allies, were held hostage by Iran. Oh, I know negotiations were going on behind the scenes but what sort of lesson did that teach the Iranians? The answer is simple – we would rather try to talk our way out of a bad situation even if doing so makes the situation worse in the long run.
Not that I had much more confidence in what Ronald Reagan could do. I’ll admit, I didn’t know much about the former actor turned politician. I knew he had been governor of California. I’ll even admit, I wasn’t that impressed. I’m a Texas girl after all and I knew even then that California was much more liberal than my beloved home state. So could Reagan, even though he was a Republican, be the conservative – or, even better, libertarian – that we needed?
What quickly became apparent was that our allies liked his plain speaking and our enemy quickly came to realize that he meant what he said. We may never know all the discussion that went behind Iranian doors before they decided to release the hostages before Reagan could take action. My gut tells me that they were scared to death about what the Cowboy President might do.
Which brings me to Trump. I’m still not a fan. Far from it. But I have to wonder if he would put the fear of God into the hearts of our enemy. He certainly scares some of our allies – which is not a good thing.
There’s a song by Bonnie Tyler called “I Need a Hero”. Right now, I’m asking myself the same questions she asks in the song but about our national leaders. I know where the real heroes are. They are in our military and serving in other positions that help keep our country safe. Unfortunately, their hands are tied all too often by the “civilized war” requirements the pols and the vocal minority place upon them.
It is time for each of us to wake up and, whether we like it or not, admit that the war has come. It might not be taking place each day on our shores but we are no longer an isolated nation. Technology and advances in transportation have seen to that. What happens in Europe impacts what happens here and vice versa. We can no longer afford to sit back and shake our heads in sorrow as our European allies are attacked. We can no longer extend an olive branch and watch it be batted away, telling ourselves that if we try again maybe, just maybe it will be accepted next time.
As I sit here looking at the framed memorial document hanging on my den wall that recounts my Great-great grandfather’s Civil War battle history, I have to admit that we are at war once again. Our government might not want to admit it. Our President might prefer making his “historical” trek to Cuba rather than deal with the realities of what is happening around us. But the truth is there and it is time we all recognized it.
The question we have to ask ourselves is how we are going to respond. Are we going to sit back and wait until the battle lines are in our own backyards or are we going to demand our government finally stand up and once again prove the United States deserves to be called the Leader of the Free World? I don’t know about you but I’m hoping for the latter. That means making sure we have men and women on Capital Hill after the election who will stand up to whoever our new president is and demand the country no longer sit back, waiting like the lamb to the slaughter.
I confess when listening to Leonard Cohen’s “The Traitor” I love the lines “The dreamers ride against the men of action; oh, watch the men of action falling back.”
I also will confess that I identify with “the dreamers” in those lines, though I’m not sure that’s true anymore. But as a teen I was very much a dreamer, with my head in books or in the clouds. Many of the things I dreamed were air-fantasies and impossible and I didn’t even know it. Many others would be tragedies, not the utopia I imagined.
And in a way I was a “woman of action” in the sense that I walked everywhere in all weathers and I’ve always had a constitutional (not that constitution) tendency to roll up my sleeves and DO when doing is needed. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t see myself as a “dreamer” of “impossible dreams.”
Part of this was my identifying most with dad, who is actually a man of action, but who is also a reader and someone with his head in the clouds half the time.
But–
But even though I identify(ed) with the dreamers, I loved books with hyper-competent heroes. (Yes, including female ones. The opening of Friday is riveting because someone is following her and she doesn’t drop and cry for help, but takes care of it. Efficiently.)
I loved authors who could do what I knew d*mn well I couldn’t: get dropped head first into a situation and control it and come out on top. Some of my favorites, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, Robin Hood, and of course The World of Tiers and Operation Chaos, Puppet Masters and The Door Into Summer hing exactly on that hyper competent hero doing what he must do.
I love these not because I am like them, but because I’m not. Because it’s fascinating to watch someone with everything under control. And it helps me, too, not panic when the excrement hits the rotating object (so many times this year) to think “Okay, there’s another way to handle this, now.)
I’m not saying I don’t love hopelessly neurotic characters as well, though the only one I can think of, early morning and sans caffeine is the main character of Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, (she has reasons to be neurotic) or for a more “dreamer” the main character of Way Station by Simak. (My husband wouldn’t allow me to name a son Enoch.)
But yesterday as I was falling asleep, I realized why the science fiction establishment keeps saying we only want big bad male action heroes. You see, they’re hopelessly in love with characters who when the going gets tough curl into the fetal position and scream for mommy. They think this makes the characters sensitive or special. They think in fact that dysfunction and the inability to work in the world as it is is a mark of specialness, from intelligence to insight.
I think this is because most people who are attracted to science fiction are “odd” — we stick out. We tend to think non-standard thoughts. We work at odd angles. That’s fine, every primate population has its “goats”, it’s “outliers.” It’s how social species work.
Many if not most of us were bullied or mistreated by our peers as kids. Most of us, when interacting outside the community, still get the “you’re weird” look.
Some of us — I’d guess about half — figure out that’s the way we are, that’s the way life is going to be, and we derive strength from it and learn to work in this strange world of ours. (I swear half the reason that book sold was the title.) Others … curl up and cry and demand accommodations, and say the world should accommodate them. It’s all so unfair.
Most of the establishment right now is the half that want accommodations, for themselves or others they imagine weak and in need. I think most of this comes from a decent pity and concern for your fellow humans, and from wanting to help them. Unfortunately it’s also misguided, as they tend to identify the people needing help by Marxist class and race markers, which actually have bloody nothing to do with who can cope and who can’t. In fact, the ones less likely to cope are the ones raised in too-easy circumstances, regardless of their skin color or wealth. Because humans are a scavenging animal, reverses and challenges harden and improve the individual. (Of course, it is also possible to have too many of these and break.)
The thing is and what makes no sense is that even those of us who write men (and women) of action don’t write what the other side accuses us of writing: privileged, flawless creatures who stride on the scene and set everything right.
Were there some books like that? Sure, to an extent. A lot of World War II wrote World War II veterans. I was reminded of this when reading The Book Of Ptath recently. I hadn’t read it in decades, and when I read it I remember the type was familiar, (though I couldn’t tell you the other similar heroes I read.) I don’t know if Van Vogt was a veteran, and, right now, am too lazy to look up his bio. But his character has an overlay of a personality that fought in WWII and which has a “can do” attitude towards the world in general.
I vaguely remember reading a lot of those, and they are yep white males (mostly white. I have a vague idea not all) who had won a difficult war and were men of action not daunted by anything.
My guess is most of those books were written in the 40s and 50s, but even then they weren’t universal. Theodore Sturgeon tended to write more nuanced, thoughtful characters, as did Heinlein (yes, I know, but they haven’t read the books, have they?) and so did a lot of others.
I, myself, and h*ll very much Larry Correia, not to mention John Ringo and others write people who act out of a deeper trauma. Yes, they’re men (and women) of action in the sense they try to fix what’s broken in the world and try to take care of themselves and those they feel responsible for. BUT often the reason they feel responsible and what makes them rise above average is a deep trauma, a deep flaw or some crack within themselves from which flows both insecurity and the ability to get things done. (I think these characters are far more authentic, anyway.)
So why do these books offend the mavens of the establishment so much?
Having dipped into their offerings, my guess would be because they think the only AUTHENTIC response to being broken is to curl up and stay broken.
Now that is the only valid response to being broken beyond all boundaries, but people like that, though they exist, of course, and excite our compassion, of course, don’t make very good characters.
“And then they were all killed by a flaming meteor” is a lousy ending but it’s vastly preferable to a series of books about people dithering and hesitating and suffering reverses and humiliations from which they can’t escape.
And yet, people read them. I mean, there is no doubt of that. I don’t know how big an audience this has, and I don’t know how many of them are influenced by the “great literature” shill, but some amount of people do read it.
It wasn’t until yesterday when one of the commenters insisted if books didn’t show people like you you felt “erased” that I realized what might be the driver there.
Some people ONLY want to read about people like them. I don’t understand the attraction, but then I am someone who crossed the ocean to live in another culture, so I’m attracted to knew experiences and different situations and tend to assume most SF/F readers are. But perhaps some just want the validation of knowing no one, not even characters, can hack the world, and therefore the only reasonable thing to do is to be neurotic and ineffective. I don’t know. Even when I feel neurotic and ineffective, I don’t want to remain so (like now) and I certainly don’t want o live in other people’s heads when they’re being neurotic and ineffectual.
But maybe it is the attraction of the similar and the “I’m not guilty of doing nothing.” Perhaps. In which case there are a lot of broken people out there, and it’s a little scary, because most of them are white, upper-middle-class and have no reason to be that broken.
Anyway, so when they’re complaining about us wanting “White men doing manly things” when our characters are either not white or not men (or various variations of white men, definitely not straight or non-handicapped, for instance) what they’re doing is reflecting inherent racism in their world view. Because what they actually mean is “Your characters are too competent.” And in their heads, that means white and male. Which is the ONLY thing that explains why they call competent female characters “men with boobs.”
Anyway, that was my sudden flash of understanding. And while I don’t care if they want to read about neurotic people being neurotic, and I don’t care if those books are on offer (not my circus, not my monkeys), I neither consider them the highest form of literary expression, nor want them to be the ONLY books on offer. I don’t think they fit with the tastes of the vast majority of the human race, nor that — frankly — they’re a healthy attitude.
Let them have their books, of course, if they enjoy them, but don’t let them dictate that these are the only “good” books. And don’t let them close the market to others.
“The dreamers ride against the men of action; oh, watch the men of action falling back” is a great thing for a teen. Teens don’t have the experience to solve things and identify with similarly paralyzed characters.
But if I wrote the scene now, the dreamers would have enough resources within themselves to REALLY make the men of action fall back and, thereby, become men of action themselves. (And women, duh. It goes without saying, but I know some people need it said. In this the human experience is not that bifurcated.)
Because that is the path to maturity and more importantly that is the path to a functioning society. Neurotics are interesting, but they have to learn to act in the world before their stories are interesting. Otherwise they’re just neurotic and rather pitiful.
And now I’m going to go pack boxes. Because– Because when this is done I get to write.
The State of the writer — I thought you needed an update, so you don’t get alarmed at late posts the next week — is frazzled, her nerves shot, and her time totally fried.
Sorry, I’m trying to finish a book and do final edits on another 2, while moving in what promises to be the first of two moves in three months.
Lest I sound insane(r), here how we got to this point in the plot.
Last January we rented this house and put our house in downtown colorado springs for sale. We don’t think houses sell very well while living in them, so we thought this was the best thing to do. In our naive estimation, we could have the house ready for sale by April/May, sell in June and be out of here by 7 or eight months of lease.
We packed the living space, unpacked about half the things, enough to allow me to work and settled in.
This is when the fates decided it was time to start the fun times. You see, my doctor had told me some tests were perfectly fine. Turns out that wasn’t… precisely the truth, which led to surgery and recovery, as the house was only half empty and nowhere near to go up for sale. By the time we finished emptying the house was June.
There wasn’t a lot of deferred maintenance, because the house was where our money went for 13 years, but there is always some in a Victorian. Mostly what we needed to do was paint, clean and refinish the floors (well, some of them. The living room was its own mess and we more or less left it like that.)
As soon as I could and earlier than I should, I enlisted the boys to help because at that point we had run out of reserves, from paying rent/mortgage the whole time. But Robert was working an almost full time job while waiting to hear from medschools and Marsh was taking summer classes so he can finish the degrees in another two years.
So, it was slow, and by the time the house went up was September. We did have an approved offer within a month, but we were already on the ragged edge of what we could afford. It closed just in time, in November.
The lease ran out in January, so we started exhaustive house search, but our needs are a little odd, what with two and maybe three offices, so we had no luck. We tried for a foreclosure but we underestimated what they’d take.
On new year’s day we put an offer on what was coincidentally a short sale. (Though not cheaper for that, which is stupid.) We went month by month on our lease and I settled in to finish books, as well as I could as my office is full of boxes and dismantled shelves, and I don’t work well in confusion.
In February our landlord decided he wants to sell the house we’re living in, and told us to be out by the end of March. Since at best the short sale would come through in May, and we have four cats which very few people allow in a rental, we were thrown into a panic.
But thank heavens we’ve found a place that fits us all and will take month by month. (Yes, it IS one of you. How did you know?)
So we’re right now in the middle of the first move. Due to shortness of time, we’re having professional packers, though I still need to do a lot of it. So for the last week I’ve worked in snatches of five to ten minutes, and usually answered comments here while in the car between the two houses.
Meanwhile short sale came back demanding more money, which the house won’t even appraise at. I’ve heard enough horror stories to be sure the bank is stringing us along and wants to foreclose.
So this last weekend we did a blitzkrieg house search. We found one we want and have put an offer on (fingers crossed, because we really loved it) and one we can live with, but would take a second look at before offering for, if the first one doesn’t work.
I still have my current work and my bedroom to pack.
This weekend was enlivened by Greebo who, freaked out with having strangers in the house (He was feral and still loves only me, and tolerates younger son) decided it was time to hide. We though he’d got out and spent three hideous hours searching for him. Then we realized we’d need to trap him, as movers are coming Wednesday.
We had now corralled him and put him in a carrier and are taking him and his companions to the vet to board.
We hope to be moved in and the essentials (like my office, the bedroom and the kitchen) unpacked enough by Friday. If the offers we have extant is accepted, we won’t even unpack anything else, as the move would be in May. And then I’ll hire someone to unpack us, because I MUST get settled and work.
On the work front Darkship Revenge WANTS to be finished, but I’m stuck because dragon isn’t trained enough for it. Also it freaks the packers out when I dictate about mass death. :D
I really need about three days on it, so G-d willing next week.
I’m entering copyedits into Through Fire (as in from Copy editor. I REALLY wish Baen would do these electronic. It’s much faster.)
I’m editing, in car while looking at houses, Sword and Blood which has reverted. (Historical, vampires, Musketeers.)
As soon as work for Baen is delivered, I’ll enter the changes and bring S & B out, same with the British Empire trilogy, one a month, more or less.
The next in the vampire musketeers, Royal Blood, is almost finished, and I hope to bring it out in June or July. the last one, Eternal Blood, is only plotted, so maybe August or September, depending on the move dates/visit to Portugal (which I must do. It’s been 5 years) etc.
So if I’m occasionally late, forgive me. As you can tell life is complete and utter chaos right now. Even for a chaos dancer, it’s hard to keep my footing.
I know I never sent out stuff I owe subscribers, and I have a surprise for some of the older/most faithful supporters of this blog (not just money, but comments and encouragement) and that too will have to wait. All I can say is I am so sorry. I haven’t been able to stop long enough between crisis to catch my breath. Keep fingers crossed this stops soon. (2016 is making me miss 2015, except not on MY health or money front.)
Be patient with me. We’ll get ‘er done. Maybe someone/something wants me so busy I don’t think about politics. (There’s a hope.)
An American college student on holiday in India, Rafael fell afoul of a Rakshasa, an old and very powerful tiger-demon. When he finally manages to escape from his captivity, he is left with two small problems; the first is that he is now a Rakshasa himself, the second is that India is deporting him.
So just where can a shape-shifting tiger-demon find acceptance in America?
Las Vegas of course. But before he can claim his territory, there are a few small problems he’ll have to clean up, like a fifty year old vampire infestation that the church and the government have been failing to control for years.
J.M. Ney-Grimm
Fate’s Door
Secrets, like troubles, come in threes. Nerine, a sea nymph of the ancient world, knows too much about both. Love and coming of age in a mythic Mediterranean where the gods and goddesses of old shape history.
Over the last few days, since Kate published the list of Sad Puppies recommends, we’ve been inundated both in email and in social media by people requesting, clamoring and whining to be removed from the list. The eructations from these special snow flakes vary in levels of self-delusion and insanity and at least one was very polite.
The prize MUST go to Damien Walter of Grauniad fame for tweeting that he hopes Kate Paulk has deep pockets, to withstand all the lawsuits resultant from putting people on the list without asking their permission.
I know that poor Damien probably was born with rocks for brain (I apologize to any rocks I might be maligning) before he filled it with Marxist excrement, but seriously, kid, DO pull your socks up and try to keep up with those of normal intelligence. What Kate did was collect recommendations for an AWARD — you know, something that publishers and writers in the past have shown they covet? — from fans of the writer and then use arithmetic — you know, that thing you slept through in first grade while collecting grievances and how people told you to pull your socks up? — to collate a list of recommended reading for those intending to nominate for the award.
If that’s actionable in your world, then your tweet is a walking libel case, and the things you grace the pages of Teh Grauniad with should see you flogged at Charing Cross — at least in more vigorous times.
And no, little Damien, this is not actionable either. This is merely a statement of your actions and an inference of your intellectual capacity.
When you tell people who have actually been slandered in mainstream media and called racists, sexists and homophobes not only with no evidence but with contrary evidence, that RECOMMENDING SOMEONE FOR AN AWARD without “asking their permission” is actionable, you are suffering levels of delusion that most people are medicated for. Either that or you lack the intellectual capacity G-d gave a goose.
Speaking of which, all of you, even the polite ones, who send me purple prose about how badly Brad Torgersen ran Sad Puppies IV and how he created an evil slate also make me doubt your mental capacity. Seriously, guys? A slate? If you’d bothered to look at the numbers and had a minimum of arithmetic ability (did you also sleep through it in first grade, while dreaming of little Damien’s slights and grievances? — Seriously, he really should pull his socks up) you’d have realized the only real slate was “no award.” Sad puppies nominations and votes were not only not lockstep but all over the place. Because, you know, they were reading what was suggested and making up their own minds, instead of — like the other side — taking marching orders from their betters who told them to not even read and just vote no-award.
Also, and btw, if you’d bothered to read the definition of slate, you’d stop thinking it was some uber evil thing:
Slate:
noun
1.
a fine-grained rock formed by the metamorphosis of clay, shale, etc., that tends to split along parallel cleavage planes, usually at an angle to the planes of stratification.
2.
a thin piece or plate of this rock or a similar material, used especially for roofing or as a writing surface.
3.
a dull, dark bluish gray.
4.
a list of candidates, officers, etc., to be considered for nomination, appointment, election, or the like.
A list of candidates TO BE CONSIDERED. I.e., in book terms, read them and vote for what you like.
In other words, what Locus publishes when it does its list of recommendation? Slate. What various names in SF publish every year? Slate. And by this I don’t mean a dull dark bluish gray, except in the case of the lists published by some writers, which do tend to the grey goo.
So, where is that evil evil “vote lockstep” meaning in it? Nowhere. Were you so sure your “thought leaders” (who apparently have your thoughts on a little chain) were correct you never bothered to check the dictionary.com definition? And you call yourself thinking adults?
Oh, well done.
A list, which Brad also compiled in public from recommendations suddenly became a magical and somehow evil “slate” that must be stopped at all costs, because some loudmouths with vested interests thought so.
And speaking of vested interests darling brainless ones: HOW CAN YOU BELIEVE YOU’RE SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER?
Over and over in the media — much of it the sort of mass media only a mainstream publisher can reach through their contacts — you talked about a cabal of powerful white, straight men trying to keep women and minorities from science fiction or at least from recognition in science fiction.
This took the sort of faith that used to lead people to convince themselves they’d seen street-corner sorcerers perform magic. Seriously.
First if you’d bother to look at that evil recommends list, you’d have seen plenty of women and some minorities. At least before you browbeat some of them into public denunciations of the list and self-deleting. Most of this in public, btw. Second, if you’d bothered thinking for two minutes, you’d have realized the Sad Puppies cohort consisted mainly of fairly new writers. Yes, one is a bestseller, but he’s fairly new. He also publishes only with Baen, the publisher none of you wants into.
I think I’m the longest published there, and I’m a midlister, which in this field means I have no power of any kind, save the power to scream when I’m cut from a publisher’s list. Also, last I checked I’m a woman and the federal government insists I’m Latina (at least some departments, but even for the census I fall in under Galician since Galicia extends to Portugal and the area my family comes from. And while that’s not a race group but a culture group let me assure you if I am out in the sun and mildly well as opposed to as ill as I’ve been the last few years, I can still spot melanin to your entire side while remaining darker than average.)
Two other women on our side are INDIE published only (except for short stories) even though one of them makes a living at it. Oh, and while I’ve never looked up close and personal (we’re not that kind of friends) I have it on fairly good authority that they’re both women. One of them gave birth to a kid, after all.
So tell me by what feat of insanity you think any of us — if we wanted to do that, which none of us do — could keep women or minorities out of the field?
I tell you who could: a major publisher, which can decide who gets published and not, and which can spend to buy memberships for its people so that they can vote lockstep for the awards. (They probably expense it. And they probably have some under-secretary deputized to make sure all the ballots are absolutely alike.)
You know, the same people who have been accusing us — people with no power in the field — of distorting and perverting the awards. Those people. The people with all the power.
But they told you that you were speaking truth to power and you believed them. Or perhaps worse, you know they were lying, but you are so desirous of the benefits that power can confer on you that you’ll slander, lie and attack on command, knowing its a lie and wishing only to receive the benefits of that lie commanded by evil and self-interested people.
I can’t tell which is which: whether you’re dumb or conniving. I’ll leave that for you to decide in front of your mirror every morning of the rest of your life.
I’ll only note you’re worse than the Soviets who condemned the Kulaks during holodomor, worse than the people on the street who mouthed the Nazi lies about Jews during WWII. Why worse? Because those people lived in fear of their lives. They had to say what they did because they feared being next on the kill list.
But you? You willingly go along with slanders and destroy reputations and attempt to destroy livelihoods for the sake of a plastic rocket. To coin a phrase: It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world … but for Wales, Richard?
One of you I knew to be insane since an unprovoked orchestrated attack years ago, but the rest of you (Damien excepted. Damien is just funny) I had some respect for, ranging from lots of it to residues. Now I don’t.
Depart from us in peace. Go lick your chains and cavort before your masters at their command. Relish the slavery you purchased so dearly.
As for us, we shall make some note you requested removal, in some way that YOU insult the fans who went through so much trouble to nominate you and who up-voted your work enough times to get it on our list. We won’t insult them for you.
Until Kate returns from Lunacon that’s the only answer I’m willing to give you. And it’s more than courtesy demands, since I know you’ll take no answer but what comes from those who hold your thoughts captive.
Someday maybe you’ll wake up and realize what you’ve done. On that day may you be able to forgive yourselves.
I was looking through the posts to find a blast from the past and came across the post I wrote shortly after TVIW in November 2014, called Table Settings At the Cannibal Feast.
Most of it, including the (joking?) accusation of my being the creature named Requires Hate and my semi-joking reply and explanation of the only reason they could think we were the same person.
All that is old stuff and I didn’t want to go into it again — though I understand the creature is now again publishing. Because even the crime of attacking your friends and gaslighting your communities is not enough to keep you out if you’re an interesting enouch color/orientation and have the right (left) beliefs — because it is not particularly topical now. But from halfway through, the post is topical.
It will always be topical, because it is the mechanics of revolutions that go bad; it is the mechanics of Animal Farm. It is the mechanics of the cannibal feast where the revolutionaries turn on one of their number over and over again till only the ones at the top are safe (and the rest are terrified peasants as in say Cuba or North Korea.)
The commenter Synova whom I quote below nailed the mechanics perfectly.
It starts with good impulses. We shouldn’t condemn all on the other side, because most of them are going along to get along and TRYING to be good people. Our schools, let alone our media and our entertainment in the last 100 years at least have glorified those who care for the poor and downtrodden.
If you’re going to say “That’s Christianity”… sort of — waggles hand — Christianity didn’t overcome normal judgement or common sense, and it didn’t require you to do “good” that actually caused harm. The Victorians had a very good handle on the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.”
But because they weren’t perfect and sometimes excluded true victims who could be helped, or whom the do gooders fancied could be helped, the people who wanted to be better than others, the arbiters of all true charity have been molding society to discard all common sense, until being proclaimed a victim — even on the flimsiest evidence — is power, and until no one can say there’s a difference between deserving and undeserving, and until it is all just “you’re good or bad if the arbiters of what is good or bad” — mostly the media and entertainment — “say you are.”
Humans can’t live like this. A society worth living in can’t be formed this way.
It is an endless debasement of all the best impulses and the best wishes of people, and turning them into weapons to destroy not just society but individuals themselves. All for the power of a chosen few who could never get power the healthy way: contributing or creating something that makes the community, the society or even all of humanity better.
Think about it, they can’t even engineer a better can opener or mouse trap, but they would rule us all.
And this is very relevant, given the times we’re living in.
(The rest is a quote from a post in November 2014.)
And of course their problem – as explained in this article – is not that she did all those things, but that she used the tactics against the “wrong people” i.e. fellow “social justice warriors”, people who want to eliminate patriarchy and who are sure white privilege is hiding under their bed, ready to pounce out as soon as they relax — People who think that everyone who doesn’t think like them commits thought crime and should be silenced.
That is, they are upset because tactics they sanction and use against people like us are being used against them.
It was that comment, and other comments in that post (which you absolutely should read) particularly the ones about how RH/Winterfox caused real suffering and about how some people are suffering from PTSD after being exposed to her tactics, and WHY her tactics worked with them, when they don’t work with us, that got me thinking about this post.
I quote Synova’s comment below on how pernicious accusations of thought-crime are, because she is absolutely right, and because it makes clear why communist societies (starting arguably with the French revolution as a pre-Marxist, but proto-communist attempt) eat themselves. It explains why the SJWs are inevitably headed for this same cannibal feast, why even if Marx’s cooky theories of economics worked – they don’t – the crazy attempt to build a “new man” free from the “capitalist taint” (they can’t – capitalism is inherent in being human. You can make it illegal and drive it underground, or you can allow it to lift all boats, but creating and trading, buying and selling is being human.) with its attendant tendency to criminalize thought crimes would still end in mass graves and mass misery.
Synova:
Some of the comments by people who had been subject to the full treatment just made me want to cry. I didn’t think it was funny because the guilty parties and enablers aren’t the ones who are hurt. Yes, we can scoff at Scalzi when he makes a rational counter-argument and is made, ultimately, to retract and abase himself and agree in public and start proselytizing in public that no… you really can’t trust your own brain and if something seems wrong to you or you feel like defending yourself it is simply proof that you’re guilty.
But there were people who reported rather severe PTSD type reactions to even sitting down at a keyboard to write because they were so terrified of offending… again. Because *rationally* they’d done nothing wrong the first time, but they were forced to an irrational acceptance of their guilt. So now they’ve “accepted their privilege” and “checked it” and confessed and repented (they could come to the Dark Side and be welcomed, but they don’t know that, and have been taught that the Dark Side is evil, and that’s why shunning is so very evil within closed communities… being exiled is a horrific punishment) but since they had NO IDEA how they could have done something wrong in the first place, they also have no idea how to avoid it the next time.
Imagine doing this to a child.
The kid is walking through a room doing nothing much and suddenly POW… and then you tell the kid… well that was YOUR fault. You screwed up. You stepped on that spot on the floor.
So the kid looks at the spot and it looks like every other spot. But the kid is told that, no, the fact that she can’t even SEE the spot is what the problem is. You can’t SEE the spot… that’s why it is YOUR fault. Also, a good child will try to learn. You’re a good child, aren’t you?
So the kid says, yes… it was my fault. I could not SEE the spot. Not seeing the spot makes this my fault.
Afterward, it’s still impossible to see the spots, and walking across the room becomes fraught with danger. Sitting down at the keyboard gives this very “good” person the shakes and panic attacks… where are the spots? She still can’t see the spots but she MUST agree and believe that those spots exist.
I have a LOT of sympathy for those who were hurt, just like I have sympathy for any abused person.
For reasons and in circumstances I’m not going to get into here, I often found myself EXACTLY in the position of that child, growing up. It’s crazy making and it took me years (20 and a good marriage) to recover from it.
Which is why it’s a particularly evil thing to do to a single person.
But in a greater sense, it is literally what certain kinds of revolutionary doctrines, be they religious or political can do to a human being.
Note, these are usually doctrines (again, religious or political) that not only think they can remake humans, but think they can remake them into flawless creatures. I was going to say they can come from the right or the left, but only if you accept that all religious extremism is from the right, which I don’t think makes much sense.
There is a certain tendency in conservative/libertarian circles (if that’s what we’re calling “right” this week) to assume that humans come with some natural flaws, one of them being a thirst for power, another being a need for recognition. There is also an understanding that life isn’t fair.
It is only certain feverish religious states (well, the sects call themselves Christian, I have issues with them, and no, I’m not talking about any recognizable mainstream Christian sects, though there were certainly some interesting heresies in that direction in past centuries) that partake the illusions of the left (itself a fevered religion, albeit a godless one) that you can infinitely remake humans and use that change to create a paradise.
Here is the thing: every society has rules by which its members are judged. Some are sensible rules and we can applaud them. Some are batsh*t insane rules, and we’re jaw-dropped about them. And some are indecipherable to our current mentality.
Some of the things that bring condemnation on characters in Jane Austen’s novels, for instance, I only understand are “bad” because I studied the period. I’m sure blundering into it, I’d make a million gaffes. I find the morality police that whips the ankles of women who show them in Saudi-Arabia repulsive, but it is a rule and the women know about it. I understand rules about things like not eating from other people’s plates, not insulting strangers, etc.
BUT and this is very important, the point is not that those rules are fair. The point is that if you grow up in those societies, you have a reasonable expectation of knowing WHAT the rules are. I.e. if I’m strolling in a mini-skirt in a Saudi Arabian souk and get whipped, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. It can come as an outrage, but not a surprise.
Revolutions like the US, which changed governance but didn’t presume to change the way people worked, in their minds and hearts, don’t turn into cannibal feasts. OTOH revolutions like the French, where people descended/aspired to changing the names of the weekdays and the months, in order to construct a completely different humanity, inevitably end up in a pile of blood-soaked corpses.
So do revolutions like the Russian and the Chinese, and others.
The difference is this: these revolutions make functioning as a normal human a crime. This requires changing your very thoughts and the way you process reality. And they presume to divine from your smallest actions, your most casual lapses, that you have commited a thought-crime.
This, of course, requires special people who can look into the actions and every day assumptions of others and tell them where they went wrong.
The process is bad enough when done by a minister or another nominally trained person. (I am not talking here of ministers in normal denominations, who are usually trained and don’t want to remake humanity, just get it to behave a little better.) In extreme cases, it creates Jim Jones. It is nightmarish when done by the left, which means it is done by people given power and authority to do this by the grace of totally arbitrary characteristics: where they were born/when/what pigmentation their skin has/what happens to be between their legs/whom they like to sleep with. This is not an exhaustive list, but it should give you an idea that none of these attributes is magical, and none of them should confer the authority to discern and judge the secrets of other’s hearts.
But the SJWs believe it does. They believe someone who is born with more victim cards, even if the person was in fact born very wealthy and never experienced a day’s hardship, immediately can judge them and tell them when they’re exhibiting “privilege” which is a taint that attaches to other seemingly arbitrary characteristics, no matter how poor or downtrodden people born with them are.
This sets them up to be abused in exactly the way that Synova describes. Worse, it sets them up to join the mob and wail for the blood of innocent people in whom one of these “anointed ones” discerned guilt. Not to do so, might mean they were tainted with the guilt themselves, after all.
By this process, they saddle themselves with psychopaths as leaders (yeah, some of the anointed ones are merely true believers, but that kind of power inevitably attracts psychopaths and sadists) and make any organization, place, country or government they take over into hell on Earth, instead of the utopia they imagine.
The state of irrationality is demonstrated by the commenter who thought I was RH because of our “similar rhetoric.” There are in fact not even mild similarities between an extreme leftist and myself. BUT both of us made him feel pain. So, therefore we are similar and possibly the same.
That means the commenter had the ability to think/react/avoid pain of a nematode, if that high.
I would enjoin those people caught in the vortex of accusation/appeasement/abasement to take a good look at what they’re doing.
A society where the rules have to be divined by special individuals (no? Would any rational human being think of “lady” as an insult, till the SJWs declared it so?) is not conducive to liberty. It’s not conducive to kindness. It’s damaging to the ability to think.
In the end it makes you animals, joining a mob to avoid being killed.
I suggest if you are caught in it, or suspect you might be, that you re-read Animal Farm. And then evaluate the goals of your movement. You can demand that women be given opportunities in business and art. You can’t get into anyone’s heads and demand that they never have a bad thought or that all women have to have good results in business and art.
You can establish that pinching a woman’s butt against her will is bad. You can’t establish that men shouldn’t be allowed to look at naked women or wear art showing a naked woman. And you have to decide whether female nudity is empowering or demeaning, btw.
The rules need to be clear and well established. They can be changed, but if they are, they need to be proclaimed so everyone in the society/group/cult knows them.
And no one should be condemned by inference/whispers/accusation without a fair chance to defend him/her/dragon self and confront his/her/gerbil’s accusers.
That is how you stop cannibal feasts. You start by admitting humans aren’t infinitely perfectible, and that even the “anointed ones” can have flaws like a search for power.
The alternative is that you tuck your napkin under your chin and dig in.
