Category: Uncategorized

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.

As is said in the comments, in this Mad Genius post by Dave Freer, the revolutionaries are always surprised when the tumbril stops at their door.

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.

Forever.

 

I spent my first year of marriage terrified.  (Sees readers look at title and glares.  Nothing off color you ‘orrible people.  Have a carp.) You see, I’d moved away from all family support structure to a country where — still to this day — things work so differently I have trouble explaining them to my parents.

We were living on very little and to make things more interesting, were making up for the dating we hadn’t done prior to marriage, so there were movies and dinners out.  For various reasons Dan also could count on no help from his family, most of it being that he was an adult and determined to make his own way.

So here we were, two 22 year old kids, who often got to the end of the month with $6 in the bank, and no safety net whatsoever.

The culture I came from was centered around a big tribe, and of course you could fail, but your family was there to cushion the fall.  When I didn’t have a tutoring job in college (some semesters I didn’t find any students) I had to save a bit on luxuries, but I wasn’t going to go without a roof over my head or food.

The realization that there was nothing between us and utter destitution but Dan’s job (and later my jobs, sometimes, but I never made much) made me very scared.  Particularly because this was the mid-eighties, time of sudden layoffs.

Where I came from the government was there to provide health care and education and in extreme cases if you managed to piss off your entire tribe, money for food. This is something that didn’t change through the revolution and shocks in the 70s — since the 40s or so, the government was a big old safety net.  National or international, socialists are socialists.

I thought the US was very hard, very cold, and there was no one to help should we fail.

I don’t remember when I stopped thinking that.  We hit rock bottom on money a few times, one of them while paying for the complete cluster… er… mess that was my older son’s delivery while both of us were unemployed. That was the time we actually considered going to a soup kitchen.  CONSIDERED, mind, but we never could get ourselves to go in.  Yeah, we were hungry and broke, but it seemed like that was something reserved for other people, people in REAL trouble.  We went to bed hungry that night, and the next day something happened and we got a small payment and got rice and frozen veggies which lasted us a week, and then Dan found a job…

And we were okay if very tight for a few years, and then he got a raise.  And until he was unemployed years later, we were okay provided we were frugal.

The last two rock-bottoms we hit were both while paying double mortgage or mortgage and rent while selling houses.  Our “Rock bottom” seems to be getting shallower.  We were very tight last year because rent and mortgage, and the house took forever to get ready to sell (it actually sold very quickly) but the “tight” was a matter of foregoing all luxuries and some necessities like car repairs, not of foregoing meals.  (Though of picking cheaper meals, yes.)

But even in those rock bottom times, I wasn’t as scared as that first year.  The feeling no one was there to look after me if I did something stupid was terrifying.

I don’t remember when I stopped being scared, or when I traded it for “we can handle it.” Yes, a lot of it was getting a bit of a cushion in the bank, but even when that is gone, like last year, I wasn’t as terrified as that year.

I think the greater part of it was having friends who are like family, and knowing that if worst came to worst, I could show up at Amanda’s or Kate’s or half a dozen other people, hungry and with only the clothes on my body and they wouldn’t even ask a question, just tell me to come in and make up a bed.

Look, we’re humans.  We’re built on a great ape frame.  All of us want the tribe to be there, to care for us.  We might never need it, but we want to know someone gives a damn if a lion leaps out of a bush and mauls us, metaphorically speaking.  And a nuclear family is not big enough to give that sense of protection.

Yet our economics, and in the US our demographics, conspire to make the nuclear family about the biggest unit most of us can count on, and a lot of people not even that.

Is it any wonder that the left (and those on the right who turn their hopeful eyes to Trump) want the government to be a daddy who steps in and saves them if things get too scary?

Both views of government are valid, in a way.  The “let us alone and let us do” and the “look after me.”  And both have trade offs.

I wasn’t wrong in being scared.  The situation we placed ourselves in when we moved away from kith and kin and faced the world without a safety net but each other was terrifying.  We scraped by okay, but we might not have.  If one or the other of us had got seriously ill, we had no one to turn to but charity, which we were both too proud to take.

If we’d decided when we got married to move to Portugal instead, we’d never have faced that.  Because in layoffs, or even while selling a house, we could have punted back to living with my family for a few months (or years.  Or forever.  No one bats an eye at that there, and several households hold more than one family.) And we wouldn’t have worried about how to pay for the boys’ schooling, or surgery when I needed it.

Without those dips, we’d have been able to take nice vacations and do a lot of other things we’ve never done. (Look guys, our idea of a vacation is a long weekend at Embassy Suites in Denver.  One time we were able to afford five days in a row.  We still talk about this as the most fun, EVER.)

So, am I sorry we didn’t do that?  Not only no, but h*ll no.  Why not?

Because being looked after has a price, whether it is by your family or the government.  Oh, my parents would have looked after us, and counted it as nothing, but the return is to do what they deem fit.  I.e. Mom has this thing about my wearing jeans.  If I were in her house, under her roof, it would be skirt suits all the way.  And then there’s this writing thing.  While dad would secretly approve of it, both of them would have told me to stick with teaching (which I would have done had I stayed there) because it’s steady income.  And if I were dependent on them when my income failed, I couldn’t say no.  I mean, how could I take risks with other people’s money.

So, you say, what about the government safety net?  They can’t tell you how to dress or what to do.

Sure.  Well, they can, but it hasn’t got to that point (yet.)

I don’t know what the safety net is there now — I haven’t been back for more than a couple of weeks at a time for 30 years — but let’s suppose they have — not unusual in the EU — unlimited and generous unemployment benefits.

Let’s suppose I’d started out teaching school and was so bad at it I got laid off.  (Bad? No. Mouthy?  Yes.  Comes to the same in the end.)

Let’s suppose they had those unlimited unemployment benefits.  If I were living in a place where family contributed, it might be enough I had no reason to find another job.  So, instead, I’d decide to write.

Here’s the thing: there would be no reason to try to finish something or even to start something “saleable”.  I could be an artist working for immortal glory.

Which is to say, there would never have been a need to grow up and live in the real world.

In the same way there would never have been a need to depend on friends, which means there would never have been a need to be dependable friends, when we’re needed.

And in the end the “hard” countries that don’t smooth out that curve for you seem to result in more freedom and prosperity and greater innovation.

Is it the result of less regulations?  Who knows?  Perhaps it’s the result of something in the brain that only wakes up when under stress.

Or perhaps it’s the fact they’re more in tune with the gods of the copybook headings:  “If you don’t work, you die.”

Even in a, at worst, medium soft country like the US, there is an incentive to get out there and work.  And half of success is showing up and rolling up your sleeves.  So by definition there will more successful people than in a soft-soft country where you have no incentive to get up and do something.

The truth is as much as we want others to take care of us, humans are not designed to live soft.  We thrive on adversity.  We adapt to the strangest circumstances.  Only infants and children get taken care of unconditionally.  And it’s fine for them.  It’s fine for the elderly too.  They’ve made their contribution and now can’t, it’s up to family/friends/us to look after them.

BUT the price of being taken care of all your life is being a child all your life.  No one who hasn’t faced that abyss without a net and made the changes needed to survive knows what being grown up means.

It’s hard growing up in a soft world, because you have to kick your own behind into it, and most of us aren’t good at that.

So in the end, the soft countries even with all the nets end up with a worse standard of life and probably a lower standard of happiness too.  (If your struggles don’t matter, nothing matters.)

If you have a choice, choose the hard path. You grow the calluses to deal with it. And in the end, you and your surroundings will be better for it.

Down With Godwin -Kate Paulk

If I could eliminate one thing about the Internet, it would be Godwin’s law. Why? It’s made it next to impossible to make actual comparisons about what is probably the best documented instance of the rise of a populist dictator. The instant the magic words come out, any semblance of rational discussion gets defenestrated and the next thing you know people are shouting past each other and the whole thing dies.

Consider: a nation whose people were known for hard work, for pride in their achievements, who – not without justification – saw themselves as having been betrayed by wealthy elites. Their savings were wiped out by what appeared to them to be a combination of malice on the part of the same wealthy elites who claimed they were shameful warmongers and financial mismanagement. Despite what they were being told, they could see themselves losing ground and becoming less well-off than their parents and grandparents had been.

Simply put, these people were immensely vulnerable to a charismatic populist willing to tell them that they had every right to feel betrayed; that they had been betrayed; and that he was going to change all this and make them a great people and a great nation again.

Sound familiar? It should: there are two populist demagogues spinning their separate flavors of this particular scenario through the USA right now. One of them has deployed rioters against the other, although it’s not impossible that the whole thing was staged the way the early NSDAP supporters would pretend to be opponents of the party to set off violence that made the NSDAP look like the victim. It made for good copy, and gave their leader some really good material for those crowd-pleasing speeches he became famous for… before he became a synonym for evil.

It’s worth remembering the man was an idealist. He had a vision of a once-great nation becoming great again, and he wanted – at least as far as all the documents available suggest – to bring that dream to life. He was also more than a little narcissistic and barking mad as well, something that leads to nightmarish alt-history scenarios in which he’s not so utterly insane the British don’t stop trying to kill him because his grandiose plans do more damage to his side of the war than theirs.

None of this means that any of the current crop of wannabe US Presidents are going to be like that. It’s a warning sign. Middle and working class Americans do feel betrayed by both national leaders and the big multinational corporations (particularly the ones outsourcing their jobs despite this actually being more costly in the long run because said outsourcing causes a drop in quality which in turn drives customers away; customers who are unable to make their opinions known because the customer service has also been outsourced and just try to get through those phone menus and speak to someone who understands what you’re saying and whom you can understand – of course by then the decision-makers have claimed their golden parachute and are long gone).

They know they’re being lied to. They know the only place the economy is ‘booming’ is the artificial hothouses where the government of the day is directing funds to its favored supporters. They know their life is worse than their parents in many ways. They know their kids have it harder, despite the plethora of gadgets (bread and circuses?) to distract them. They’re sick of being told they’re the source of all evil in the world, even places where they’ve never been and evils that existed long before they were born.

Is it any wonder they’re angry? Is it any wonder they’re rushing to support someone who’s telling them they’ve been lied to and cheated? Is it any wonder they’re not seeing past this to where the vision they’re being sold could take them?

If I were fifteen or so years younger and less cynical, I probably wouldn’t see it either. But now…

The angry dragon awakens. The populist demagogue who betrays it will pay dearly – and he will betray it because he (both options) are making promises which are impossible to fulfill.

 

My role in all this is to do my best to keep the ideals of the Constitution going through the mess so that what emerges on the other side is a freer, more just USA. I believe it will: I can’t define why, but since the financial crash of 2008 I’ve had an unshakeable sense that we will win, that the USA – and perhaps more importantly, the principles endorsed by its founders – will prevail no matter how dark the future appears. I don’t understand it, and if I try to examine it, it slips from my grasp and my mind turns away. But it’s there. It’s solid. There are times when it’s the only light I can see.

 

But in the end, we win. The darkness is dispelled. We do not fall to dictatorship or the bleak emptiness of Communism. That is enough.

Years ago, when I joined my first writers group, I met a woman — probably younger than I’m now — who was writing HER book.  (Warning, almost all new writers have a book.  It is only when that one is finished and published that we feel we might have more. Of course, some don’t.  I’ve always been of the opinion that lady was one, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Being older than my at the time 30 years, and having more money — not exactly difficult, you know, since at the time we were living on rice and huge economy bags of frozen veggies and if we bought a paperback book we had to eat pancakes for a week — she had gone to Brazil to research her book.

And yet, there in the middle of the first chapter, she had someone call out “Mio Dios.”  I pointed out to her that was Spanish (and I think the order inverted to look like Portuguese.)  the Portuguese is eu instead of i in the words.  I grant you the pronunciation is similar.  eu would seem to be pronounced ew like io, but it’s not, it’s more like eh ooo. I could understand her saying that she heard it that way — which she did.  Your ear hears familiar sounds, when faced with unfamiliar ones — but she then went on to dispute with me that the words should NOT be written Meu Deus, because she had been in Brazil, and she’d HEARD it, and had I ever been in Brazil?

Think on this for a moment.  She was disputing with me the spelling — and ultimately the existence, since she really seemed to think it was a dialect of Spanish — of my native language, a language I had used both written and spoken for the first 22 years of my life. (And before anyone says anything stupid, yeah, I read books printed in Brazil, had an uncle and cousins there, and knew for a fact they didn’t spell it the Spanish way.)
But this writer had learned Spanish in school, it sounded like Spanish to her and THEREFORE it must be true and I must be wrong.

After all she’d spent a lot of money to go and research her book in its native land.

I was reminded of this recently while reading one of my favorite writers.  I’ve run out of his series I really like and the offshoot of that series too, and being slightly depressed (look, bub, if your plans for housing and what is going to happen in the next six months were changing as fast as mine, while packing keeps you from writing books that are not only overdue, but which WANT to be written, you’d be slightly depressed, too) I’m attracted to his work like moth to flame.  So I bought the first of his first series.

His character has been working in Portugal for years, in a small village in the south.  And the fisherman he works for is … Sanchez.

Later in the chapter he tells us the locals don’t accept strangers, but he must be wrong, since this person in their midst is obviously a Spaniard.

Or to put it another way, if I didn’t already love this writer’s works, the book would have been walled with force (walled in this case meaning to throw against the wall) and I’d never, ever, ever have read him again.  Because Sanchez is a name that doesn’t exist in Portuguese.

For various reasons I suspect he either visited Portugal or was in touch with a Portuguese colony in the US.  If the later, I suppose one of the people might have had a Spanish father.  Or they might have learned to write and spell their name the Spanish way, because it is what the locals EXPECT.

On the other hand if he went to Portugal and heard the nearest equivalent Sanches (pronounced Sanshesh), a relatively rare name, he would have to believe he was hearing Sanchez.  And after my first experience with an American writer hearing Portuguese, I’m willing to believe.

There are other, weirder misapprehensions of the culture. Later in a different writers’ group I ran into a woman who had also set her book in Brazil (maybe this was a trend) and in her book she killed all the men (with an engineered virus) to free all the women, because it was the only way to fix the culture and blah blah blah (rolls eyes.)

However the fascinating thing was a detail in her setup.  She was absolutely convinced that the women in Brazil only went to church because the men made them (being naturally pagan — giggle) and the idea was given her by her father who had lived in Brazil for some time.  I couldn’t convince her otherwise.  Men made the women go to church.  Without men the women were natural pagans.

While I will confess that at least the part of the for lack of a better word “woman culture” in Brazil that comes from Portugal (as opposed to from Africa, where I’m not on firm ground or from Italy which might or might not be like Portugal in this) would give a nervous breakdown any person not familiar with how schizophrenic traditional cultures can be, what the man thought he was seeing makes no sense whatsoever.

Yes, women in Brazil as in Portugal are the keepers of certain traditional knowledge which to the uninitiated might appearl “pagan” in the American sense.  It ranges from healing, which can run to brief incantations using fire or a knife (only for cold sores, I swear.  Well, at least it’s the only one I know) to various rituals to appease wild spirits (putting Maias — a wild yellow flower — on all of your house openings the first of May, say) or performing the proper rites for the dead, before or after the church gets involved.  However this is not viewed as a religion or even a separate tradition.  It is treated as “practical knowledge you don’t need to bother learned people with.”  It comes from the same school of thought which until recently put spiderwebs on wounds to staunch bleeding, a practice it turns out works.

This is completely independent from religion.  Religion in almost any Latin country (I think.  Though it might be different in those converted by Spaniards in fire and blood) is the province of women.  Women tend to attend church life long, while the only men you tend to find in church are very young and very old.  A family who loses their mother often stops attending church.  Women tend to chase the men around and make them dress properly for church.

But from this, somehow, this American man intuited “women go to church because the men make them.”

If you look at the framework he brought to the situation, this makes perfect sense.  He knew — like any protestant in the twentieth century — that the Catholic church oppresses women, so therefore they must not like it.  And then he must have seen enough hints of practices that protestant ministers in northern European countries are rather more vigorous about stopping than the Catholic church, which tends to turn a blind eye (these days) if its nose is not rubbed in it.  Ergo, presto, the women were pagans, kept reluctant prisoners by the Catholic faith.  It fit his preconceptions, it made “sense” and therefore it was.  I’m going to guess he wasn’t close enough to any Brazilian family to watch mom chase the guys around and line them up for church every morning, or even herd them out the door like ducklings.

Btw, that sight would have gone a long way to disabuse his daughter of the idea that anything wrong with a Latin culture could be fixed by killing all the men.  Mostly what is wrong with Latin cultures is wrong with the POLITICAL culture, and I’m not sure how that would get fixed.  But as in any culture, mothers are the first exposure of the children to what you do and what you fail to do.  And when there is blatant sexism (eh.  In American terms all Latin cultures are sexist.  They still work fairly well, provided you don’t happen to be an outlier as a woman who really wants to compete with the men.  Yeah, these days women work (thanks to high taxation) but few really try to compete, even when they can) it is transmitted by the women first.  Even in the Arab world it has been said that to get rid of the idea women are somewhere between second class humans and objects, you need not get rid of the men, but of the mothers in law, aka the matriarchs who finally rule the household and who will both do anything and everything to keep their daughters in law in check and to dish out a measure of what THEY got from their mothers in law.

This is not the post for this — or perhaps it is – but having been deformed by generations of “feminist” culture, American women (and men!) tend to only see power in masculine terms.  I ran into this once at a con panel in which women were talking about “powerful women” of the past and everyone they brought up was a woman who had functioned as a man, be it Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great.  There were no mentions of people like Isabella of Castille who could lead armies, yes, but whose very real power was in the children she raised and seeded around Europe.  (Same for Victoria, of course.)  No, their idea of a powerful woman was someone who had more or less buried her feminine nature in order to function as a man manque, in a man’s world.  (While to me those women, even the ones I admire for what they accomplished, are always a little sad.)

However most college educated American women can’t even PERCEIVE female power, no matter how real.  And it is very real.  I don’t come from a household like that.  Dad never used (well, now he does, as in the last phone call, but that is because he wanted an excuse to call) “You’re worrying your mother.”  Much less did he ever use “You’re breaking your mother’s heart.”  Mom is an outlier too, and if you broke her heart you’d learn it from her first, as she broke your head with the nearest object.

BUT my grandmother was the matriarch of the family, and though I don’t remember anyone EVER saying “you’re going to break your grandmother’s heart” I really tried very hard not to.  (And did, inevitably, when I married and moved away.)

And I can’t think of any of my generation who wouldn’t rather saw off their own legs with a butter knife than DISAPPOINT grandma.  (A hard bar, as she was infinitely forgiving, but possible.)  The fear of disappointing us kept us, no matter how eccentric (raises hand) within the bounds of acceptable public behavior for the culture, and even managed to get me to learn at least some embroidery and crochet.

That is power.  And for a strong and determined woman, it can be immense power.  In almost every culture (even in the US where it works) it is women who hold the family together and who, for lack of a better word, set a “tone” for it.  And the tone can make all the difference in terms of success not only for the parents but for the children as well.

However this immense female power — the ability to be the glue that holds civilization — is quite lost on the eye trained on the ideas of STATE power and of societal forms.

Powerful women who are powerful AS WOMEN and not as men manque are invisible to feminists, just like that troublesome final s of Portuguese (almost always pronounced sh) is inaudible to ears trained in Spanish in the US.  And just like the real structure of a society is invisible to those trained to expect something.

When we get people here who describe the last eight years as an halcyon epoch of peace and prosperity, it is easy to roll our eyes. I mean, fast and furious, Benghazi, racial tensions, drones, our troops involved in more and more tenuously connected ventures.  And as for prosperity — yeah, most of us have not gone more than a few months without being worried sick about job/money/ability to make it in the last eight years.

But I’m going to guess these people are in protected areas of the economy, perhaps the only growth one — government — and read and believe mostly the mainstream press which, like Germany’s, has proven it is far more bound to the government (at least a leftist government) than we ever believed.

In other words, they had the framework set up to interpret what they saw as peace and prosperity, and so they do, by ignoring all disparate information.  (Easier if you live in a bubble.)

They can’t believe their lying eyes, because their eyes are literally lying: spectacled with expectations they formed before they ever looked.

This is extremely hard to keep out of science even with committed and impartial scientists, and without taking in account funding and what strange opinions would do to your grants.  And scientists TRY to stay objective.

How much harder is it for those of us who are not scientists and who are trying to understand the entire panoply of human endeavor, where results are often unclear?

The only guide I can give you is to note and pick at the inconsistencies.  And assume no source is above reproach or too vetted to fail.  I remember reading a book on the post war period in England and finding, in the same chapter, that they talked about how poor the working class was, how industrialization had made it poorer, and then lamented that the working class had now so much money they were building over old estates and buying household machinery like vacuums.

It is amazing the writers’ head didn’t explode, but then I expect she had been exceedingly well schooled in Marxism which has somehow always retained the idea that industrialization is bad for workers (an idea belied by the industrialization we see in developing countries, but they refuse to see that) and in romanticism, where rapid building and electrical stuff in the house is always a blight.  She was seeing the world through two contradictory frames and didn’t even notice it.

So, to see clearly, pick at inconsistencies, try to find primary sources and, most of all, never trust your mind.

Stay awake.

Oh, the Humanity!  A Blast From the Past Post-7-3-2007

I’ve been thinking a lot about humanity, recently. Partly, I think, due to an ongoing and profoundly disturbing thread in my conference in Baen’s Bar (Sarah’s Diner) where someone suggested “feeding” humans to unspecified dark shadows. The thread (which is a fantasy thread, in which regular posters imagine themselves as shape shifters or what-have you, in a reinventing of their lives in the e-space of the diner. Think second life, without the props) has progressed, with some people objecting, to now saying that these people being pedophiles, who therefore “deserve” to be fed to the shadows.

I will confess this still makes me uneasy — vaguely nauseous too — and it’s not due to compassion for pedophiles. It’s more the fact that I like humans in general and humans in particular. This is something I often discuss with Son #1 who is going through his “I hate people” phase. And the whole thing has just been fermenting (festering) in my mind, while I go about cleaning and cooking and finishing my much overdue novel for Bantam (I’m on it, Anne, I swear) all of which was delayed by illness (to be explained later, perhaps.) The illness also prevented my posting here. And it also, at some fundamental level, seems to have changed me. I’m doing a lot more thinking about principles I’ve accepted, unexamined. I suppose this is good for a writer. And I promise I won’t be larding my books with long philosophical passages. (I adhere to the Heinlein code of WHY to write and making people think is way down the list. Though for the record, it is there.)

So — to stop rambling — Humanity, my friends. Are you pro or con?

There is a movement afoot to make our kids content with less.  My sons, both of them, like their parents, unable to comprehend the fact that body and mind have limits, have always dreamed big.  Now mind you most of their dreams are not predicated on “I will own” but on “I will do.”  In that they also resemble us, aka “why we’re not rich”: because while we don’t want anyone to pay our way, our work has always been geared to what we want to do and what we feel must be accomplished than merely to “I must get rich.”

No, the two are not exclusive, and getting rich doing what you feel must be done is the ultimate objective, but my husband has the tendency to refuse advancement which means he can no longer do the work he loves and I… I refused to “sell out” in a way and it wasn’t all politics.  It was also that the books that make you a darling of the industry could put an insomniac to sleep and are, therefore, torture to write.  At least for me, your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, etc.  (And the laugh line in all this is that the books I’d consider selling out and the ones I consider following my drive are completely reversed for the people using those terms.)  As for the activities purely designed to make money, neither of us could ever stay with them for very long.

Which explains why we’re not rich, and why there is a very strong chance our children won’t be.  That is not what the school was preparing them from.  In “job day” after “job day,” my kids would listen then come home baffled with some variation of “My classmates want to be bureaucrats who make a median salary, marry a median woman, drive a median car and have one or two median children.  None of them wants to push, invent, take risks, or make any waves at all.  And I can feel the push to be the same.  It’s what they want for us.”

If this were planned, I’d say it was attempt to make us like Sweden where the world “enough” has double plus GOOD connotations.  I’d say that it was an attempt, in other words, to make the American people suitable to Euro Socialism.

I don’t believe it’s planned.  Not in most of the people pushing for that.  I think it’s part of fifty years of education that pushed “the world is overpopulated”, “humanity is a burden” and “diet for a small planet,” and other bits of insanity.  The teachers and others pushing this point of view honestly think humans are scary and dangerous and if they don’t outright go out and start mowing them down, they try to convince them to do the equivalent of curling up in the fetal position and pretending not to be there.  (And don’t get me started on the pledges not to reproduce pushed at 12 year olds.  Just don’t.  It won’t go well.)

This is not what I mean by going small.  I don’t mean destroying your hopes and burying your ambitions and “leaving light footprints” or any of that nonsense.  I believe humanity has as many rights as any other species to “Grow, multiply, and fill the face of the Earth.”  More, maybe, since we have the means to control our environment that other species lack.  More, because if Earth’s biome ever explands to the stars — its one chance at survival in the truly long scales — it will be because humans took it there.

IOW, growth is what life does and human life is not less than other life.

What I mean by going small is different.

I’ve confessed before that before 9/11 I was an INTERNATIONALIST Libertarian.  This tends to make people who know me look at me as though I’d grown a second, evil head, and I confess those ten years were a sort of holiday from reason and thought.  The fairytale was so pretty I wanted to to work.  Besides, I have friends in a lot of countries who could work in a “one world” sort of thing.

Oh, I knew better — duh and derp — of course I did.  I knew most countries in the world are kleptocracies and this is not just the result of bad politics, but of bad culture.  The culture infects the politics and makes them what they are.  The country I came from still gets its politics from Rome, aka “rule of law? what rule of law?” or “he who has no godfather dies in jail.”  And this is not overcome by selling them slogans.  Their form of government changed at least 3 times (in macro movements) in the twentieth century but “the way things are done” didn’t, as it hasn’t in at least 2000 years and probably more, because that’s culture and the only way cultures change that rapidly is through major trauma, like invasion or mass death and even then never that much (and also there’s a boomerang tendency to revert) as Portugal’s history is example.

But I wanted to believe.  Not in a whole world of brotherwood or a Coke commercial, but in a world of free humans working together.

I read Grumbles from the Grave and P.J. O’Rourke’s all the trouble in the World and Eat the Rich and foreign news and history, but you can picture me with hands over ears going “lalalalalalala.”

9/11 shattered that and at any rate I was always a bizarre sort of internationalist as I was an American patriot and for small governments and didn’t wish national identities to be abolished, only, somehow, for countries to work in harmony for free minds and free markets.  (And for my next trick, I shall make this elephant fly.  Fly, elephant, fly.)

9/11 shattered my “lalalalalala.” It shattered a lot of people’s more serious belief in “one world” government/polity/entity whatever you wish to call it.

This is a very old idea, a very old thought, that people came up with to “prevent war.”  i.e. “if we all were one nation, there would be no war.”  Which is stupid, given the number and nature of civil wars throughout human history, but never mind.

The generation that fought WWI embraced it with the fervor of desperate, shell-shocked children.  This is why so many of the early science fiction books assume it, and so many of the tv series use it not just as a background for humanity, but as part of what makes a world/breed/etc civilized.

This seems more plausible to America than anywhere else because, as noted here before, our states have a very different culture but the same, overlaying structures that ensure easy movement between states and communication between every citizen, as well as a sense of belonging.  It’s easy to think this means we could extend it to the world and make it the same.

It’s easy to think but impossible to implement.  I’ve heard that entire Italian villages moved en mass to NY in the early 20th century.  This might be true but I suspect it’s a bit of an exaggeration.  It’s more “everyone who was young and who had a mind to succeed moved.”  IOW those who came what was then (due to slowness of travel, and expense) an almost for sure one-way trip were of a different mind as those left behind.  They were also, consciously or not, willing to work to shed their centuries of culture and the things that made the land they came from what it was.

This is not the same now, because travel is a few hours and relatively cheap.  We see the problem of this in moves between states too.  Used to be you moved, you adapted to local ways of doing things.  Moves were always piece-meal anyway save for great migrations caused by massive disturbances.  And even then The Grapes of Wrath might have overstated the matter a bit. Now it’s easier to move between states for a job or an opportunity, and that means when states become inimical to job creation, they send vast hordes forth to get jobs elsewhere.  Hordes that bring with them their way of voting that made the initial state inimical to job creation.  Or as we call it around these parts, Californication.

Partly in reaction to that, and partly because it’s obvious attempting to get people to reject their country isn’t working, and partly because we have been pounded for a century, via all forms of media and education with the idea of “identities” hinging on totally insane things like skin color, food preferences and a myriad other incidental characteristics, there is a nativist/racial/statist movement afoot. Now that movement is more plausible than the one-worlders.  I never understood how, having determined that dividing people into economic classes and setting them against each other wouldn’t bring about paradise, the one-worlder Marxists convinced themselves setting people against each other by melanin content and what is between their legs and other more or less arbitrary characteristics would a) yield uniform classes and b) bring about utopia.  I think the underwear gnome was involved in their plans.  And it is also, invariably involved in the “national identititarians” plan.

There aren’t many of them, mind, but like the one worlders they are convinced the world is inevitably going to go their way and they’re the way of the future.  Look, guys, if you find an arrow in history tell me, okay?

And like the one-worlders, their conviction comes partly from the belief humans are widgets.  All they disagree on is what divides one set of widgets from the other.

Unfortunately for them and everyone else who has  sought to impose an arrow on history, humans aren’t widgets, and even if there is such things as an “average” woman or man, worker or intellectual, Masai cowherd or German goatheard, the “average” is a mathematical construction created by statistics and if you meet these people you find that each is highly individual.

And the tendency to view people as “average” and “median” and to divide them according to statistical characteristics is a twentieth century characteristic born of the typical industry of the twentieth century.  I.e. when the watchword of the century was the refinement of the previous century’s “mass manufacturing” and “mass production” one had to know what the average or median person wanted.

Because while people aren’t widgets, it is possible to produce something with the maximum appeal to most of them.  Surveys, statistics, etc, all reveal what’s the most acceptable to the majority of people.

If there are two TV channels (what I grew up with) none of them is going to devote three days to an extended documentary on dinosaurs, because the majority of people would be bored stiff by that, have their eyes roll inward on their skull, and go to sleep.

But if there are 300 channels, one of them can be the “dedicated dinosaur channel” and it will find enough audience to survive.

The technology of the time didn’t allow 300 channels, or personal 3-D printing, or authors to put their own books up for sale, worldwide.

For the two centuries before us, the economies of scale and mass production have tended to try to make everyone as close to the same as possible, so the industry could provide them with the means for civilized living.

And that’s where the one worlders’ dreams came from.  “Make everyone the same and everyone will be happy.”  (Not quite that way, but you get a whiff of this in early Heinleins.  Never that stupid, because the man had a brain, and knew there would be malcontents anyway.

The nationalists’ dreams come from seeing the obvious flaws in that, the persistent nature of culture, the horrors of trying to make many nations one.  Because that never ends well.  And it is aided and abetted by “the future and its enemies.”  Ie. the bureaucrats and other classes that have grown fat on the nation-state and who therefore long to extend and expand their power.  Mind, it’s much easier to be a kleptocrat over a more or less small and homogeneous nation.

And they come too from the fact that nation-states have been sold for what? three centuries now, as a form of uber-identity that replaced religion as Europe became industrialized.

Only nation-states are children of mass production, took off at the same time as the industrial revolution, and are, in the end, wholly artificial creations in human history.

Sure, humans identify with/are designed to identify with a tribe.  And the tribe is, as far as studies can determine, suppose to be about 50.  A couple hundred people, at the most. IOW “Me and my cousins.”

That means when the nation state “stole” tribal affiliation and put it to work for the nation state it had to pervert it.  It had to devote its not inconsiderable mass-media and mass education to make people think of the nation as a tribe.  This was probably (mostly) not done on purpose, though heaven knows I’ve read my shre of books approved of and designed by central states selling the idea of “the Portuguese race” or “the British Race” or even “The German race.”

Even in countries as small as Great Britain or Portugal, the regional differences are vast, the tribal loyalties often vivid and vociferous and the cracks the nation-state papers over momentous.  For “countries” like Italy or Germany, children of the nation state movement, itself, it is about as accurate to speak of a national identity as it is to speak of a Kenyan or Rwandan national identity.  The borders were drawn by bureaucrats, planners (or conquerors) and have bloody nothing to do with the “tribes” underneath.

The only way to keep the nation state cohesive and to sell them on the idea they are a tribe (and thus harness the instinctual need for a tribe) is constant propaganda by mass-media means, and the harnessing of people’s longing for a great tribal leader which was probably evolutionarily sane when we lived in hominid bands (IOW yesterday in evolutionary terms.)

This is why nation states are always and forever looking for the man on the white horse, the father of the nation, etc.  IOW it’s why the twentieth century was the twentieth century.

But the thing to remember is that the nation state on a large scale, itself, was a creation of mass industrialization.  Even the empires of the past were different.  Even the Roman idea of making everyone a Roman citizen was a different thing, because they had no mass media and no way to sell “we are tribe.”  So the Roman citizen might adopt a lot of the identity but it was overlaid on his local identity of Celt or Greek, and the underlying identity was made to work with the overarching one, instead of being crushed by it.

In the same way, even old and on an European scale relatively large countries like France, took centuries to eliminate — by education and identification, and ultimately by force — other linguistic/cultural groups within themselves. Because they couldn’t put on TV programs every morning telling children they loved Big Brother.

What I mean is that the last two centuries of civilized life have been profoundly unnatural for humans.  Look, not complaining.  Natural is sleeping naked in the Savannah.

But the point is that the type of industry and communication that brought about these massive nation states (the bigger the better) with their massive bureaucracies is being replaced by “smaller, more personal, more agile.”

This doesn’t mean the future is ripe for one-world.  On the contrary.  And it doesn’t mean the world is ripe for nation-states.  On the contrary.

Go small, young people, go small.

I’ve been watching this work in my own industry, where the most agile people are the ones doing well, and to the extent that publishers will survive (let alone thrive) it will be the ones who are willing to keep as small a staff as possible, subcontract/pay bounties on individual jobs that need to be done for books, and generally be capable of shedding/adding functions as the market conditions evolve.  (I’m not saying that the big publishers won’t stay around.  It takes a long time to kill a behemoth.  Just that they in no way are suited to the conditions on the ground now.)

It’s sort of the same with nation-states.  Nation states serve some vital functions that smaller groupings (and certainly our individual, tribal groupings) aren’t very good at: mutual defense.  Construction of large scale things, some of which will still be needed, like, say highways, and ultimately the suppression of tribalism.

But Sarah, you just said tribalism was good!  No, I said tribalism is natural, and you have to accept it’s there, and by tribalism I mean the fighting of groups of about 100 people against groups of about 100 people, whether the fight is financial, of words or physical.  We identify with an “extended family” of blood or not, and will defend it against all comers.  It’s what makes humans so admirable — and so screwed up.

The bad side of that is that left on their own anything larger than a medium city would be a nightmare of internecine warfare, and why the one-worlders and “governments will just wither away” people are nuts.

So the overarching government of nation or state is needed to keep the tribal impulses at bay and to guide the entity to the common good.

But what the twentieth century has shown us is that decisions should be made on as local a level as possible, not only because people accept that better, but because people closer to the problem are less likely to think it’s a great idea to sow wheat in the snow or to teach all the kids that the sky is made of green cheese.  Not that as small as possible rule doesn’t also go wrong.  We all know tyrannical families and crazy-cakes small cities.But when polities that small are completely insane, at least the damage is contained, while when an entire country goes batexcrement insane you get WWII.

So it would seem the ideal political organization for what our industry is becoming and what our technology is enabling would be a “nation state” loosely connected and with a relatively powerless central government whose only function would be to prevent inner strife, defend the nation (both in the sense of war and guarding the borders) and oh, I don’t know, provide for the common good by arbitrating those projects that must be large enough to span all the myriad states that otherwise comprise the nation.

And each of such states and each of the entities under them should be as free to govern themselves as possible, each unite, down to the individual, retaining as much autonomy as physically and mentally possible.

Such state would be very agile and able to change itself in an era when technology and industry are changing at an incredibly fast rate.  It would be a chaos dancer, capable of being both very large and very small, and flowing into the future seamlessly.

Of course, such a country would not have survived very well in the nineteenth and twentieth century when the ideas of the mass-industrialized “tribe” nationalistic state were ascendant and what every right thinking person “knew.”  And it would have trouble, being relatively powerless at the central level, countering the naked aggression of those nation-states. So it would change to fit the times.

It is probably pure coincidence that the way it was founded is now more suited to the coming technology and industry.  Or possibly because the coming industry and techonology allow for the emergence of very old tendencies in humans, it was designed that way by people who thought deeply about the nature of humans.

I’m not a materialist determinist.  I don’t believe that the material conditions determine the mental and emotional state of men by themselves.  In many ways not only doesn’t man live by bread alone, but man lives by belief alone, in that he is able to hold on to beliefs contrary to reality even when it destroys everything around a culture/nation/etc.  Look at North Korea or Cuba.

But by and large, and always providing for stragglers, the way the cultures of humanity are expressed, the way people LIVE is determined by the technology/industry of the time.

Thus, mass industrialization birthed the nation state.  And as mass industrialization is tottering, the nation state as we know it (which is not the same as tribal identification/regional loyalty, etc, but is an overarching bureaucratic entity selling itself as a tribal entity) is tottering with it.

This is not to say the one-worlders are right — I can’t imagine a HUMAN world in which they would be right. You can’t just blend all human cultures and come up with anything usable.  The only possible one-world government would be in a world settled exclusively by one culture.  And even there, as the world population grows, it will fragment.

In fact, both nation-states and one-worlders are ideas of the past, brought about by mass-everything.

I expect the world of more individualized everything will bring about a lot of small units — down to the individual — that connect upwards in ever larger/less powerful entities, till at the top of a large enough territory is one that just provides for the common welfare (ie. too big to be done in small scale) and common defense.

Where I differ from other people who see that and see “one world” is that there are common cultures and common geographic areas that must be respected, and people are not widgets.  The importation of say masses of middle easterners into Germany is not possibly while watching out for the common defense and welfare of Germany.  Not that Germany is really an ethnic entity (it is composed of smaller tribes, and since WWII it has absorbed masses of immigrants) but because it is a geographical and cultural entity and you can’t simply move individuals in and out of those.

In other words, I think we need nations.  I just think in the coming era those that survive, thrive and make their citizens rich will be those that are as decentralized as possible at their center, while defending themselves and understanding the cultures that comprise them.

How we get there is something else.  It will happen, because humans always adapt to the changes in tech and industry.

But it’s not straight forward or rational.  Which is why at least half (and possibly more) of the right AND left feeling we’ve gone down a wrong path are reaching back for solutions, but not far enough back, which is why there seems to be a growing consensus for national socialism.

It won’t work.  It’s like the publishing houses trying to solve their problems by pricing e-books higher and giving myriad interviews about how ebooks are vanishing.

The denial of reality is strong in humans and can be imposed for a period of time, but not on the whole world and not without consequences.

The future is small, more fragmented and overall (not accounting for small pockets of tyranny) much freer.

IOW in the end we win, they lose.

Getting there, OTOH, as any great movement in “how we live” in the history of humanity is going to involve convulsions and conflicts and mass-scale dislocations that will at times feel the world is coming apart at the seams.

That’s because it is. But it doesn’t follow, no matter how painful the process, that what results from that is a bad thing.

The important thing is to neither prematurely try to make the world burn nor (prematurely also) reach for a solution of the recent past.  Both of them are normal human reactions, but both of them will do nothing but delay the solution and create devastation and suffering.

In the end, the future is small.  And if we can get there it would enable the biggest and most glorious form of human civilization yet:agile and capable of rapid change and keeping the bad side of the human nature to as small a group as possible, while maximizing human ability to create and prosper.

Go small, young people, go small. And dream big.

 

 

 

 

A Barrage of Books -Jason Dyck

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Sarvet’s Wanderyar

Running away leads right back home – or does it?

Sarvet walks with a grinding limp, and her mountain culture keeps girls close to home. Worse, her mother emphasizes all the things Sarvet can’t do. No matter how gutsy her spirit or bold her defiance, staying put means growing weaker. Yet only boys get wanderyars. Lacking their supplies and training, how can Sarvet escape?

Can dreams – even big dreams – and inner certainty transform impossible barricades into a way out?

Becky Lickiss

Miriam, the wife of Job

Think on this for a while, when was the last time you heard someone cry to God saying, “Why God, why have you given me a beautiful home, good food, and all the things I need? Why give me a husband who is kind, and gentle, and loves only me? What have I ever done to deserve children who respect their parents and follow the commandments?”

You’ve read the story of Job, now meet his wife Miriam. The woman who stood beside him through all his triumphs and trials, and who had tragedies and tribulations that were uniquely hers to overcome. What can an ordinary woman do when faced with devastating failure and unremitting loss? Sometimes surviving until tomorrow is the best anyone can hope.

Also available from Smashwords

Peter Grant

Take The Star Road

The Maxwell Saga Book 1

Nineteen-year-old Steve Maxwell just wants to get his feet on the star road to find a better homeworld. By facing down Lotus Tong thugs, he earns an opportunity to become a spacer apprentice on a merchant spaceship, leaving the corruption and crime of Earth behind. Sure, he needs to prove himself to an older, tight-knit crew, but how bad can it be if he keeps his head down and the decks clean?

He never counted on the interstellar trade routes having their own problems, from local wars to plagues of pirates – and the jade in his luggage is hotter than a neutron star. Steve’s left a world of troubles behind, only to find a galaxy of them ahead…

Mary Catelli

Curses And Wonders

A collection of tales of wonder and magic.
A prince sets out to win his way to the dragon’s lair.
A woman fights a curse on her lands.
A man returns to his castle, bringing a magical sword, and worse things.
And more tales.

Includes “Dragon Slayer”, “The Book of Bone”, “Mermaids’ Song”, “Witch-Prince Ways”, “Sword and Shadow”, “Eyes of the Sorceress”, “Fever and Snow” — and “The Emperor’s Clothes”, which is not sold separately.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

Enchantments And Dragons

A wizard must produce justice enough to satisfy a dragon.
A young man tries to rob a tiger’s lair.
An enchantress tries to keep a court safe while they ignore the perils of misusing her magic.
A lady finds that court intrigues can spread even to the countryside.
And more tales.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

Magic and Secrets

Tales of Wonder and Magic

A woman, sent to a far off duchy, finds a mysterious wolf haunting the forest, and learns there are secrets no one even suspects.

Playing with props for amateur theatricals has more consequences than any of those doing it dream… act with care.

A king’s tyranny sends a woman searching desperately for a legend of lions, there being no other hope.

Also available from these fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• iTunes
• Kobo
• Inktera
• Scribd

Jason Cordova & Christopher L. Smith

Kraken Mare

Sergeant John Manning was a simple Marine who liked spicy foods, big guns, and even bigger explosions- so long as those guns and explosions weren’t pointed in his direction.

When offered a well-paying job after being unceremoniously drummed out of his beloved Corps on a medical discharge, he jumped at the opportunity for good money and the prospects of a bright future. For the first time in recent memory, John had a chance at life.

Then his life turned into a horror movie.

The secret research station hidden on the moon of Titan was not just any government facility. It harbored dark secrets and frightening realities. The scientists here have not only studied more than just the local fauna, but have discovered something far more important. A discovery which would shock the very foundations of the universe. Something out of a nightmare.

The depths of Kraken Mare hid a horrifying truth, and the unwitting Marine stumbled right into it.

This year has been a long sustained series of shocks.  Nothing serious, meaning no one has died.  People — two of our parents — have been seriously ill, but the people hasn’t been me.  It’s mostly delays/countertemps, confusion, and now extreme uncertainty.

The latest one is that the house we’re trying to buy and have been trying to buy since Jan. 1, might not come through.  Considering how long it’s taken, we were more or less mentally moving into it and all our packing, all our what to sell and what to keep has been aimed at it.  Also it took us six months to find — six months in which “looking for house” consumed most of our time.  (No, we’re not THAT picky, but it’s the time of life we’re at.  We need some rather specific things, including offices and — d*mn it — a place for my art, that most houses aren’t built for.)  We were also looking for that undefinable “good writing place” which really is undefinable, and you have to see it to know.  I mean, even some of the hotel rooms, when we go away on a writing weekend, are far more conducive to productivity than others.  And we’re looking new-ish because of my health.

Unfortunately we’re set to move out of the house we’ve been renting at the end of March.  Not our decision, we were month by month and the landlord wishes to sell.

This leaves us homeless with four cats until we find a place we can buy/move into which, if this house doesn’t come through, means we have to find something in two weeks or less, since the bureaucrats have decided what was REALLY wrong with the real estate market was that loans could happen in a month.  (Rolls eyes.)  So banks are still being forced to take bad credit risks, but now they can take longer to do it.  Yeah. That will solve it.  It’s our government’s normal way of “fixing” situations, the equivalent of seeing a house on fire and promptly dousing it with gasoline.

For the next two months — thank you to everyone who was going to offer, but we’re intensely private people, and wouldn’t be comfortable staying with strangers in close proximity.  You have to to understand, I AM actually an introvert, I’ve just learned to pretend I’m not, but that’s exhausting and I can’t live like that — we’re going to be staying at a friend’s place, kind of like you’d stay at a hotel.  Which means we’re putting everything into storage, and each of us is taking a large plastic bin of clothes and a large plastic bin of work stuff (in my case research books, notebooks and flash drives. Maybe a sketch book and charcoal, if I can find that, which I doubt, as I haven’t been able to in a year, so I might just buy a new pack.

But I don’t want to stay homeless a long time; I need — rather than just want — my office unpacked, not filled with boxes and collapsed shelves and in the dark basement, as it’s been for a year; and I don’t do well with insecurity.  We’d just go ahead and rent again, but we have four cats.  Finding someone who takes four cats takes A LONG time  (and a huge deposit.)  Also it’s about fifty percent again more than the mortgage on a similar house.

So.

So, I faced writing this post and realized I have nothing to give.  There are no emotions.  they have shut down.  (Which is an issue in finishing novel, too.)

And yes, I DO feel like a total wuss because no one died.  I’m just emotionally drained.

And then I realized that’s where we are as a country, and why this election is such a freak show.

No, we haven’t gone through a war on our territory, but we got hit on our territory, which had never really happened before.  The shock of our own vulnerabilty sent well over half of the polity insane, which accounts for the disaster that was 06 and 08.  The democrats didn’t put up credible candidates, but the incredible got elected anyway, because everyone wanted a change (this is the equivalent of buying the house you know sucks, just because it’s there and you can afford it.)  And then as the crisis deepened, each shock just sends more people into the side of “I just want it all to go away.”

And that’s where we are.  Yes a lot of the anger is justified.  Just like I’m angry at the crazy bank who seems to WANT a foreclosure instead of selling us the house a little cheaper.  BUT a lot of it is “things you’ve done to yourself” like handing the legislature over to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed because… I don’t know?  The entire country was on magic mushrooms, maybe?

But that’s the thing.  Polities (communities is too small for something the size of this country) get shocked the same as people.  When a number of its constituent parts get shocked and distressed enough, countries behave like scared children.  They just want what they want, and never mind it it makes no sense.

No, this doesn’t help.  Except for knowing both in my present circumstances and in the country’s, this too shall pass.

And hey, we survived sixteen years of FDR.  Yeah, yeah, the world is much more dangerous, or at least smaller, and the country itself is at greater physical danger.  But this too shall pass.  And we will survive it.

Be not afraid.  (As I tell myself.)  We will just have to get through the rough spot.  And the light at the end of the tunnel is not always an oncoming train.

Work, build, be constructive.  The rest will come.

 

 

A House Divided – Amanda S. Green

 

I grew up in a house divided. No, not one where my parents were divorced. Not even one where they stayed together “for the good of the kid” and hated one another. I was lucky there. My parents loved one another and fought to make their marriage work when things got tough. My dad was confident enough in himself that he didn’t feel less of a man when Mom started making more money than he did. Both had good jobs, especially considering they did not go to college.

Despite all that, it was still a house divided. Oh, things were fine except during election years. Presidential election years were the worst. You see, my parents could agree upon everything except – drum roll please – politics.

You wouldn’t know it, looking from the outside in. My parents were of the generation that believed there were two things you didn’t talk about at the dinner table: religion and politics. They were careful about what they said when it came to politics. Unless they knew you well, they pretty much kept their opinions middle-of-the-road. That sometimes meant excusing themselves so they could walk away from a conversation before they said something they shouldn’t.

But, in the privacy of home, we did talk politics. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, my mother and I talked politics and my father talked political party. You see, much as I loved my father and much as I wish he were still alive today, he had one glaring fault. He would vote for anyone who ran on the Democratic ticket.

It’s not his fault. Not really. I’ve mentioned before how Dad grew up in Oklahoma during the Depression. His family, while never destitute – my grandfather always found a way to have at least some food on the table – was never well-off. For much of my father’s youth, it wasn’t close to what we would call middle class. The family, for a while, was split simply because they couldn’t afford to have everyone together.

So they were helped by some of the programs put into place by FDR. That, as well as the constant comments by his family and friends that the country had been saved only thought the actions of Saint Franklin formed his political opinions. As a good Oklahoma Democrat of the time, once he was old enough to vote, he knew his duty. It really was simple. He was to go into the voting booth and vote straight ticket. After all, he had to do all he could to prevent the evil Republicans from taking office. The only time he had to worry about who to vote for was in the primary when there might have been more than one Democrat running.

Mom, on the other hand, had been raised to look at the issues as well as the candidate. What did the candidate place importance on? What was the candidate’s track record? What was his personality like and did she feel like she could trust him?

That approach was also the product of her upbringing. At a time when divorce wasn’t almost as common as marriage, her parents divorced. Her mother, one of the strongest women I’ve ever known, moved the two of them back to Tulsa from Chicago. Nothing surprising there. My grandmother had grown up in Kansas and moved to Oklahoma when she left home. However, my grandmother had grown up at a time when she saw women finally getting the right to vote. Her family, male and female alike, had been active in local and state politics in Kansas and later in Ponca City. Then there was the fact that my grandmother was one of those who never liked being told what to do or how she should think. She taught Mom to look at all the facts and promises – and broken promises – when it came to politics.

Growing up, we never had political signs in our yard or bumper stickers on our cars. There were some discussions when my folks would talk about whether they should vote or not because their votes would simply cancel one another out. In a weird way, I understood what they were saying but it still bothered me. How many people thought like they did? How many people could have been out there voting but not because they thought their spouse or best friend or whoever would simply cancel out their vote?

This was our house when it came to voting until the 1972 election. I was still too young to vote (I may be old but I’m not that old) but I remember that election season. The war in Viet Nam was still going on. Updates from the field were coming in on the nightly news. Protests at home were continuing to grow. But what was so bad – and so very sad – was how our vets were being treated when they returned home. Not that the country cared then.

That election cycle saw George McGovern running as the Democratic candidate for President. My father, who worshipped at the altar of FDR and who thought JFK walked on water and who mourned with the rest of the nation with Robert Kennedy was assassinated, looked at the news in horror. Mom and I knew that particular election cycle would be different for him and for us. Ted Kennedy had been tossed out of the running after Chappaquiddick. Even though Dad didn’t particularly like Teddy, he was still a Kennedy and Dad felt sure he would at least have good advisors. McGovern, for some reason, Dad hated with a passion.

It might have been because of McGovern’s opposition to the war. Dad had been unable to serve in the military but each of his brothers had, serving in World War II, Korea and even in Nam. It might have been because he didn’t trust McGovern to treat the vets as they deserved for serving our country. I’m really not sure. All I know for certain is, for the first time in my life, our household was united politically. My father did not vote straight party ticket. He looked at who was running and, gasp, voted for Richard Nixon for President.

And then spent the rest of his life reminding Mom and me that the only time he voted Republican, the man turned out to be a crook. It didn’t matter to him that Nixon probably was no more corrupt than many of the Democrats he had voted for. Nixon’s biggest problem was that he didn’t have a good team around him and they had hired folks inept enough to be caught and who were willing to talk. Nixon’s other problem was that he had what would never be called a warm personality.

Even so, even though Dad lived to regret his decision to vote for Nixon, I have to wonder how he would look at the race today. I have no doubt he would never agree to support Bernie. Dad might have been a dyed in the wool Democrat but he also believed that you needed to work for what you want. A handout might be needed on occasion but no one should expect the government to support them or give them an education or anything else. I have no doubt that he is spinning in his grave as his beloved Democratic Party moves ever more steadily toward socialist ideals.

As for Clinton? Not only no but hell no. He wouldn’t dismiss her as a candidate because she’s female. Not at all. Where he would look long and hard on her is her history. He hated politicians who went shopping for a district in order to be elected. He would see her move to New York after Bill left the White House as doing just that. But that’s not the only reason he would look long and hard at her.

He would look at the economic feasibility of her plans for the nation. Oh, wait, we haven’t gotten any solid platform from her yet. So he would go back to look at what she advocated while she was First Lady of Arkansas as well as the First Lady of the U. S. He would look at her record as a senator. He would frown and scratch his head and be disappointed by her stands on health care and the military and so much more.

Then there are the e-mails and her actions as Secretary of State. Let’s just say, my father would be irate about her actions, even before Benghazi. The fact she had classified emails on her personal server and cellphone would have sent him into a rage.

Most of all, he would have to wonder how much of an influence Bill would have on her should she be elected. That, as much as anything else, would have him doubting the wisdom of voting for her. He would have no, absolutely no, respect for Bill Clinton. He would have been one of those voices that had called for Clinton’s impeachment even though it would have hurt him to do so. Personal integrity meant everything to my father and he would not see it in either Clinton.

As for Mom, well, she is voicing the same concerns about the Republican candidates so many of the rest of us are. We see Trump running around like the school ground bully and cringe at the thought of how he would act in the Oval Office. The only track record we have to determine how he might act is his business record and, well, that’s sort of an apples and oranges deal. Mom has voiced more than once the concern that, if Congress didn’t work with President Trump, he would make use of executive orders in such a way that every president before him would look like an amateur.

Even though Cruz is our senator, Mom isn’t convinced he is who she should vote for. His record isn’t quite what she would like and, well, she thinks he looks and sounds like a used car salesman. We are both uncomfortable with how he brings religion into the mix – when it looks like it would help him. Still, he has served Texas well, relatively speaking. The downside to him is he isn’t particularly known for working well with others.

Then there’s Rubio. He’s the candidate Mom hasn’t figured out. We both agree that, if Dad were alive, he would probably vote for Rubio. Marco is more center of the road, by a little at least, than the other two, but that isn’t saying much. Then there’s the fact he has little chance of getting the nomination. Like Kasich, who is Mom’s preferred choice, a vote for Rubio is basically a vote against Trump.

And that, it seems, is what a lot of those voting in the Republican primaries who aren’t supporting Trump are doing. It isn’t that they really support the other candidates as much as they can’t vote for Trump. The Donald might claim that he is uniting the party and bringing in more voters but is he really? How long has it been since either party has been as divided as the Republicans are today? How many of these so-called new voters are actually Democratic cross-overs, voting for Trump because they think it will be easier to defeat him than anyone else (or who realize that, if he were to be elected, he is closer to their own ideology than Cruz or any of the others)?

And so, instead of my own personal house divided, we now have a larger house divided. How it will be resolved waits to be seen. Trump hasn’t yet wrapped up the nomination. Sanders continues to stun on occasion on the Democratic side of things. It isn’t going to be an easy ride or a fun one between now and November. All I can say for sure is that we had all better buckle up and hold on.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. To each of those who have said they will leave the country if so-and-so wins, well, I hope you do so. Anyone who has so little love for this country doesn’t deserve to live here. Go try out those countries you think are better than ours. For me, I love this country and it is worth fighting for.

And Then I Popped Him One – A Blast From The Past- 8/7/2013

I grew up reading Rex Stout books (And all sorts of mysteries, ranging from cozies to the hard stuff. Because my dad read them.)

It wasn’t till older kid started reading them recently (After he told me, “Society sure has changed!”) that I went and looked at them through … well… new eyes.

Yes, a lot of the changes were for the better. What he was talking to me about was how some things seemed so expensive/upscale in those books, but to us are the merest common place. (I don’t even remember what.) But then I went in with fresh eyes and noticed tons of things. Guys and girls would flirt in public and often on first meeting. Yes, yes, the SJW’s would tell us we’re all so much better now, but our interactions, I’d guess would seem rather bloodless to them.

But the thing I noticed the most was interpersonal violence between males. I’d noticed the same when reading For Us The Living.

Popping a guy one for saying something funny about your girl was perfectly normal. In fact, men could punch each other out and then arrive at an uneasy truce, and sometimes even progress to friends.

If those books are an accurate representation – and I have no reason to believe they aren’t – two guys engaging in fisticuffs was a perfectly normal scene.

Ah, but we’re so much better now, aren’t we? We’re so civilized. If some guy punched another guy for being rude to his girl, why, he could be taken in for assault. And if the girl is a ninny she’d leave the guy too, for icky, horrid violence, or something.

This is better, right?

You know – I’m not sure.

I mean generally the trend in society has been towards less interpersonal violence. If one is to believe memoirs and first hand accounts, getting in a duel in the middle of an Elizabethan street was not all that odd. And though other things went into it (like the fact that they could no longer do inter-domain war) duels were such a popular er… pastime that the king had to make edicts against them in the France of the Musketeers.

This might be a symptom of us taming ourselves, as time goes on. We pick for people more likely to do well in a tightly packed society, perhaps.

But at the same time, it seems very far to have come in less than 100 years, from fisticuffs in the street to people being unwilling to speak out against someone else who is doing something heinous.

And we know part of this is not natural. Part of this is the enforcement of the laws on assault, the tightening of the mesh of anti-male behavior, the de-legitimization of the code of chivalry that had obtained in Western Civilization since the troubadors.

Man is no longer allowed to fight for his honor or his maiden fair, even with words or fists. Instead…

Instead we have lawyers. And girls are insulted if someone defends them. And it all rests on the law and government, and little nuisances get magnified to major issues.

Note that this change has greatly taken power out of the lower classes – as in those who can’t afford lawyers – rendering them in effect powerless and emasculated by the “upper classes.”

I suspect, though I have no proof, it has also increased the level of thug behavior to shooting, because, well, just punching someone’s lights out isn’t acceptable.

This has rendered some movies and behaviors completely opaque to today’s teens.

And since the school is teaching them things like not fighting back because all violence is bad even (particularly?) self defense, and to run screaming to the principal instead… the feeling I have is that we’re creating a nation of snitches.

My parents had a simple rule. Yes, you were absolutely allowed to come and tell them if someone was doing something wrong. But then you were a snitch, and you got the same punishment the other kid got. So you’d better be very sure that you couldn’t deal with it yourself and that it was important enough to tell.

To this day I’m thoroughly unrepentant for giving the beating of her life to the girl who threatened to tell my friend’s parents that my friend had failed her dictation again. (My friend was severely dyslexic.) Because in my eyes there was nothing – nothing – more repugnant than the sticky-sweet girls who would simper to the adults that so and so was doing bad things, and could the adults stop it, now?

I can’t help but feel that’s what this change in the standards of interpersonal violence (particularly between males) has done. It took the power out of the individual hands (and fists) and put it in the hands of authorities, to whom you have to debase yourself by snitching. And then you have to wait till they make it all right.

It’s not, you know, that people are less prone to fighting and disagreement. It’s not that people hold fewer grudges. You see them on internet forums pouring out the crazed venom of people who tell themselves they’re too civilized to hit a fellow human.

It’s just that the power of solving disputes quickly (and often physically) has been taken out of the hands of individuals and delegated to the state and, for the very rich, to lawsuits for personal injury.

Reading Rex Stout reminded me how much simpler and more egalitarian it would often be to just pop someone one – right in the nose.

When the king of France forbid his noblemen from dueling it was to concentrate power in his hands. If they could not deal with their own problems, they’d have to come to him.

It seems we’re all French noblemen now.