Category: Uncategorized

This is not a post devoted to examining whether a revolution is a good idea, or even if it is a better idea than not having one (which it sometimes is, even when it’s not a good idea.)

Instead it is devoted to examining the illusions about revolution that reign in our society in large part because the Marxists believe them.  And part of the reason they believe them is that it is part of their ur-myth, the idea that at the end of history you find communism, kind of like at the end of the rainbow you find a pot of gold, or more like at the end of times you find the worldwide caliphate.

Anyone doubting that Marxism is a religion need only take a close look at its myths about history and its eschatology.  I grant you some of these are extra-Marx and grown by some of the stranger branches of Marxism (Feminism As She Is Practiced, for instance) but they still tend to feed back and influence the whole.  Part of this, of course, is due to the fact that Marxism in its stranger branches dominates entertainment and that stories you read/watch as fiction if even mildly convincing ones over time get lodged in a place of your brain that says “I lived through this, so it has to be true.)  The other part is that Marxism as practiced in this 21^st century of our Lord is a “No Crazy Shall Go Unheard” (as long as they are against Western Civilization) type of ideology. And the reason for that is to be found in their myths.

This mythology pervades everything, and many people who think they’re staunch anti-communists have swallowed all or parts of it, hook, line, sinker and sometimes line and rod too.  (Look at the precious poppet who came over to quote Marxists at us, while under the impression he was anti-Soviet.  If he ever grows a brain, that will be one he’ll look back at ruefully.)

It is very important for us to realize where the myth comes in, what it is, and where it’s influencing our own thought, so that we can fix it.  Or more likely, the way things are going, so we don’t make stupid assumptions about the crash and know what to do when it comes.

Right now the myths of Marxism/Feminism/Anti-Capitalism, most of them unexamined and not explicitly believed in the awake mind, except in college students/professors, go something like this:

In the beginning there was communism.  Society was without form or shape (unless you believe it was a matriarchy, which worshipped the great goddess) except that everyone was equal (which clearly is a violation of all we know in nature and about our closest cousins.  Which is why this is religion) and there was no king, no nobleman, no hierarchy.

What property there was got shared by all alike, so everyone got what they needed.  There was no famine and no need.  (This also does violate everything we know from pre-historic burials.  Again, what is your point?  It’s religion.)

This dovetails very well with the expectations in our mind, because it’s an echo of the Garden of Eden which, in some form, has been a myth in most religions and most civilizations.  Perhaps the need to believe in this “we were once perfect then fell” is inherent in the construction of the human brain.

Perhaps it is a racial memory of acquiring sentience with all its complications or perhaps, more simply, it is “logical” because it reproduces our personal experience.  We were once infants, who got our needs met without work or strife, and then life got complex.

For whatever reason this is one of those myths which while – at least in the Marxist version – patently false, yet occupies a niche called “sounds reasonable” in our brain.

So, in the beginning there was the perfect state, but some people weren’t happy with paradise.  Now, Marxism differs from other religions in that it changes the time when the fall took place from as far back as pre-history to as recently as the Industrial Revolution.  (This amuses me greatly since in any Marxist society, it’s the past that keeps changing.  That was, btw, how I got my first doubts about Marxism – no, I wasn’t born knowing – by realizing that even in the same book, their views of events kept changing.)

The feminists have perhaps the most coherent description of the fall – poisonous, in that it makes them hate half the human race – but coherent.  Men weren’t happy with paradise – their fable goes – because they weren’t on top.  So they displaced the paradise women had wrought with their highly hierarchical and violent society, and that’s why there won’t be paradise again till we can have a world that’s all women.  (In the back of my mind, I always see the women who feel a need to believe this as the very well dressed, shrinking violets of my elementary school years, who shrank in a corner, looking in horror at the little boys chasing each other and fighting.  They never grew up, not fully, and men are violent and mean and have COOOTIES.  – My reaction to the boys’ violent games usually meant I came home with torn dresses and my hair in a mess and mom had a hissy fit, until she gave up and started cutting down my brother’s clothes for me, including the leather knee and elbow patches.)

Then comes the description of the fall that goes that before settling and agriculture we were all healthy wealthy and wise – pardon me, I mean, of course we were all happy communitarians – but then we became sedentary and—

Do I need to tell you it’s poppycock?  I probably do, since right now even serious anthropological journals buy into this.  However, for the record, if that’s true it’s the first time a model that made humans more unhealthy and short lived supplanted a better model.  It is, that is, highly unlikely.  And besides, I’m sort of used to this myth because it’s a projection backwards of the Marxist’s favorite poppycock.

This is where in the middle ages, in an agriculture society, in the communitarian VILLAGE – this is believed by EVERYONE who hasn’t lived in a village – everyone was happy and shared and stuff.  Then came the …. Cue scary music – machines and capitalism, and the disposed farmers (who, in EVERY COUNTRY, not just England, where this did happen to an extent – but only an extent.  I wonder if unbiased research would see this as a reaction to flight to the city, rather than the cause of it – were dispossessed by their evil landlords ENCLOSING the common) who had to go to the city and work in inhumane conditions, upteen hours a day, till they all died, which is why the industrial revolution spread across the world, and…

I got nothing.  I particularly got nothing because for the love of babies, the industrial revolution is still spreading.  I saw part of it in my own childhood, and let me tell you, the only people who think life in the villages was better than in the cities, and that peasants were happier working the fields are people who have never done any agricultural work or lived in a traditional village.

Yes, the conditions in the early factories were horrible.  They were just good enough – and the pay was just good enough – to attract peasants from the fields.  And that’s where it is – they offered what they needed to, to be better than an existence as a peasant – and yes, peasant children worked too, sometimes from toddlerhood.

The reason Marxism embedded this idea of the industrial revolution as being forced on an otherwise ideal system is that he was an ideological descendant of the romantics, that sickly eighteenth century poetic/artistic sect who believed that the past was always better than the future.  You know, they liked tombs and ancient graveyards, adored cottages, and had a highly poetic idea of the Middle Ages.  The best thing they did was collect folk tales.  The worst was, like most intellectuals, drinking their own ink.

Anyway, we can’t even blame him too much, unlike his followers he hadn’t seen the same industrial revolution sweep other countries like India and China.

So… That is the general myth of Marxism’s paradise and fall.  Their myth of redemption centers on the concept of revolution, as crucial to them as the Flight From Egypt is to Judaism, or the Resurrection to Christianity.

The redemption myth of communism goes something like this: one day the oppressed peasants are oppressed beyond endurance, and they rise, and kill all their masters, and then – then, you get back the paradise before the (depending on the branch of the church) men took over/greedy agriculturalists settled/evil capitalists forced workers to move to the city en mass and work in their revolting machines.

Come the revolution – and make no mistake, even in Portugal, when Marxists said “Come the Revolution” they weren’t talking about that thing that happened once a month, but this Ur-revolution that brought back paradise – we shall all share and share alike, and the girls will sing songs as they weave wreaths for mayday… or something.

(It’s hard to evade the suspicions that at the back of all this were Odds gone seriously wrong and dreaming a society where they would be, if not on top, at least accepted.  Since most of us have absolutely no taste for business [some of us had to learn] or unremitting labor, this sort of “like the lilly of the valley” existence sounds appealing.  Few realize it’s also impossible and if it were – Thank G-d I grew up in a village and KNOW – it would be a dreadful existence.)

Because of this, in movie and novel and even in supposedly serious historical work, Marxist myths about revolutions have permeated society and made us believe a bunch of things that just ain’t so.

1-      When society collapses, revolution happens and communism results.  This has never happened.  Not once.  Even in Russia, what happened was the take over of power by people who had placed themselves to take it.  Russia was in chaos and had a weak leader (which I think is what gave them this bright idea) but the takeover happened because the communists were placed to take it.  They were in no way the peasants or the wretched of the Earth, but educated men with the backing of foreign powers.

2-      Revolution happens when conditions become unbearable.  (Or as someone said in comments, when people miss three meals in a row.)  Poppycock.  If this were true, North Korea would have revolted long ago, Zimbabwe would have been up in arms, and …  It’s not true.  As far as we can tell, revolution happens when the middle class gets tired.  Which means there must be a middle class of course.  In France, in England (several times) in the US, in…  Every time someone rises it’s the middle class, who are missing no meals, but who are seeing their lifestyle slip and their kids’ futures diminished.  You do get something – sometimes – when the main populace has missed one meal or so every other day, but what you get is the sporadic, leaderless spasms of Greece right now.

3-       When revolution happens communism results.  This is also not true in almost any case – not even Russia, since the “no true Scotsman” fallacy informs us that wasn’t real communism.  What tends to result is strong man “he rode in on a white horse” government.  In an instance – here (and perhaps in the revolt of the Barons against John Lackland, but I don’t know enough of that time) – it results in a relatively more representative system that sort of works (this excludes France which while relatively – I think – better than the Ancien Regime, has never QUITE worked.)  (Yeah, I know, it’s an awful way to bet.)  What NEVER happens is a return to the communitarian paradise they were sure was once there.  (Probably because as Phil Dick said of sanity [paraphrasing, since I remember only the Portuguese] “It is thinner than the edge on a knife, sharper than a guard dog’s tooth, more elusive than a ghost.  Perhaps it doesn’t exist.  Perhaps it is a ghost.”  In this case, for sure it is a ghost, a mirage, something that only devout people could believe, in defiance of all evidence.)

It’s important to know that these myths about revolutions are wrong, because right now the Marxists are trying to collapse worldwide society in the firm belief that revolution will happen and their paradise will result.

And the rest of us need to stay awake and aware, so we can counter what inevitably results from collapse.

We might not be able to stop the collapse.  It might (MIGHT) even be in our best interests to speed it up.  BUT we must stand ready to take the reigns when it all crashes, and we MUST not let them pick the man 0n the white horse, and shove his “enlightened” rule down our throats.  You know what always results from it (Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao) and we can’t allow it to happen.

Liberty to the extent it has existed (rarely) in history has always rested on the shoulders of a very slim minority.  We’re not any worse placed than our ancestors.  And we must at least try to avert the tide of death and poverty heading for us.

Do it for the children.

UPDATE: I have blogged Human Wave over at Mad Genius Club.

Ladies and gentlemen

We still hear that at big soirees at the beginning of shows, and when people wearing very good clothes gather to give each other awards.  In some circumstances, you have to say it ironically – say any gathering of science fiction and fantasy people, unless you do something like reverse the genders (and people are sitting in a way you can make that clear) you’re going to get in trouble, because people will take offense at being called that.  (In science fiction and fantasy we’re Odds who are also used to being looked down on by our peers.  We can take offense at pretty much anything.)

I’ll probably get called a gender traitor (again) because of this post.

That we live in an age where you get called a “gender traitor” is in itself a sign that we have entered Heinlein’s crazy years.  No, think about it.  You can be a traitor to a cause, but the fact that I was born with a vagina is not a cause.  It is merely a biological fact, like the fact that I have olive skin, tan rather easily, that my hair went white when I was 28, or that I have a high likelihood – given genetics – of eventually going either via cancer or a heart attack.

Would you call me a traitor of people who grayed early, because I dye my hair?  Would you call me a traitor of people who have heart attacks because I have low blood pressure?  Of course, you might call me a race traitor because I like redheaded men (no, my husband is not, but love transcends mere physical attraction.)  That would be stupid too because olive skin is not a race, but rather a characteristic of the Mediterranean sub-race of Caucasians, broadly identified (but not covalent) with cultures that speak either Portuguese or Spanish.  However stupid is the mark of the day, and our polity seems to have gone insanely howling into the night.

Once upon a time – metaphorically speaking, in a garden far far away – there were men and there were women.  Actually it probably started before that, before our fall into sentience, before our ascent into reason, before we tried to be “like onto gods, knowing good from evil.”  At some point back there – well at all points back there starting with the point at which life on Earth invented genders as a good mechanism of genetic recombination – there were males and females.  There is a fascinating book on sex by Doctor Tatiana something or other.  No, not that type of book on sex.  This is about how males and females of any – and all species – compete with each other to gain the advantage of the other in the reproductive stakes.  The goal is always to pass on your genes with minimal effort and as broadly as possible.

For instance, the male praying mantis is sort of losing at that game, since in most cases (not all females actually do this) he gets eaten while he’s copulating.  (His hind quarters just keep going even as his head is bitten off.)   So he won’t be passing his genes on with any other female.  On the other hand, little appreciated is the fact that he also leaves part of himself in there, preventing the female from copulating with any other males.  He also, incidentally, gives her a nutritious snack, which increases the chances of his offspring being strong.

Humans are not just animals.  In some frameworks, you could consider us animals who have gone thoroughly insane and started defeating instinct with… other things.  On the other hand, since I doubt very much that cars, or even carriages or even the domestication of horses, much less steam and electricity are instinctive (though it could be debated.  No?  Show your work.  There are quite complex instinctive behaviors in other animals. Incidentally, older son and I need to remember not to have these debates in front of normal people, btw.  It tends to make them try to run into the night.  Which is difficult when you’re in a doctor’s waiting room) we’ve done pretty well out of going collectively mad, in that for a tropical animal, we now cover most of the land masses in the world, one way or another.

However we are built on the framework of the animals, back there, through which we emerged.  It’s like when I write a novel, and then rewrite it completely – traces remain of the original framework if only because it’s very hard to re-think everything from first principles.  So, while someone approaching the novel for the first time might not see it, the traces are there, at worst in a scene that doesn’t quite mesh, at best in a line of dialogue that seems oddly out of place, here and there.  Or imagine that you took apart a sweater to make another (in the village of my childhood this was NORMAL.  When a sweater started to go, you unraveled it – sometimes you dyed the thread in between – and then you made it again.  Yes, we do – even I – forget how wealthy we are now, and how people not so long ago had to make and scrape.  And even they were incredibly wealthy compared to most humans throughout history.) By the fourth or fifth time, sweaters acquired this … lumpy and patchy appearance, because the thread had worn unevenly.  It was a new sweater, but you saw traces of the sweaters that it had been.

So, humans, like animals, have evolved strategies requiring the genders to compete, at the same time they cooperate in the passing on genetic characteristics.  The ultimate goal, of course, is to pass on as much of our genes as possible, while the species goes on.

Starting with the pre-humans, if what we see from the great apes translates (it might or might not.  There are… differences)  this meant that our ancestors lived in bands, and within those bands divisions of labor developed, according to the strengths of each gender.

See, the insanity of the sixties (and seventies) was this odd idea that despite all the external differences, despite all the different hormonal brews that course through our veins, gender was a societal construct and that without it men and women would be exactly alike and express in exactly the same way.

There has been a lot of mumbo jumbo developed in favor of this idea and I think in some kindergartens in Sweden children are now officially “it.” Which is … insane.  Because even before puberty, the stuff coursing in a little boy’s veins is quite different from the stuff coursing in a little girl’s and TRUST me, it matters.  More importantly, little boys and little girls are the result of different evolutionary pressures, of different selection processes.

We’ve talked about, before, how women tend to work towards cohesion.  It’s an instinctive thing.  Put most women in a group and they try to maneuver to be just like most other women.

I can only imagine – and it’s hard to, without descending to the level of a just-so story – that throughout most of our pre-civilized stages, women or pre-human females – being weaker and considered somewhat of a “commodity” were often kidnapped by different bands, and that the ones that survived were the ones who were best at adapting – at mimicking the behavior of the new band.

There are other explanations, too.  In a hunter, gatherer culture women tended to gather in bands, and both collect whatever comestibles and watch toddlers.  If you’re “in” with your group your toddlers are more likely to be watched carefully by other females than if you are an iconoclast who just had a big argument with more than half the women and called them all poopy heads.

(So, Sarah, how come we got you?  Recessives, children, recessives.  Same reason two brown eyed parents can, and sometimes do, throw a blue eyed child.  It’s amazing how long the things can stay buried, and how much counterproductive ones – like my temperament – manage to survive.  This is a germane point.  Whenever I talk of males and females and the processes that shaped them and what resulted, I’m talking of “on average.”  There are always weirdos and sports, like myself.  And some women are hairier and stronger than most men [I’ve threatened a male friend with finding him one of these.]  However, to quote Heinlein, “that’s not the way to bet.”)

Anyway, we’re not just animals.  So you take that brew, and you translate it to a highly sophisticated culture – say the early twentieth century – and you get ladies and gentlemen, with the virtues of each clearly defined.

Gentlemen were – for various reasons, among others because women’s lives were often cut short by pregnancy or at least severely handicapped – the motor of civilization.  You can have women’s history day as much as you want to, but almost all the big, public work of civilization and technology, of construction and invention was done by men.  The way people grub in the dirt for things that women – outliers – have done in the public arena, bringing out stuff like Ada Lovelace’s mathematical work and blowing it all out of proportion — is humiliating.  It is also stupid.

Women were as much instrumental in building civilization as men – of course – but their work was of a different kind.  “The hand that rocks the cradle” is a line that people love to mock, but that doesn’t take its power away.  Women formed the very young mind (whether the woman was the mother or a paid servant is a discussion for another day) and instilled both the behaviors and the gender norms into children.  Without them, the gentlemanly virtues wouldn’t exist.

By and large, the roles of each gender in civilized society were the refinement of those things that made men reproduce (and raise offspring) better in pre-historic times: they were strong, determined, innovative and – this is very important – protective.

Women on the other hand were consensus builders, networkers, keepers of knowledge and records, teachers and  diplomats (with the attendant dose of backstabbing.)    For a woman to be a “lady” implied a refinement of the APPEARANCES necessary to evoke gentlemanly behavior in public.  A lady was therefore refined, acted as was viewed as a pattern of perfection by men – that is, demure, quiet, innocent and always “well mannered” (that is fitting within the group.)

To some extent all men aspired to be gentlemen and all women aspired to be ladies.  It was the way to climb socially and therefore get better treatment for your kids.

Yeah, women like me probably couldn’t hack it – though I understand great grandma whom I’m said to resemble both in appearance and mind, managed to walk the line and APPEAR the grand-dame in public.  (The fact that she was also a holy terror who kept her many sons and PARTICULARLY her daughters in law in abject terror, and the fact she ran the family business were backroom things, not to be talked about.)

Yes, the gender order was oppressive.  Yes, people like me and many of you, and a multitude of people who fall on the far ends of the spectrum either way would be out of place (I’m sorry to tell you guys this, but most of us would be out of place anywhere.  I know.  It’s sad) and yeah, I’m glad it broke to an extent.  In a technological age, there is no reason for women not to do public work, the same as most men.  It’s not like we’re required to hold a pig under each arm while leading the horse, something for which men have a physical advantage.

But though I’m glad that women can enter the labor force and that women with excellent minds can use them for other than infant games (though please DO let’s talk about creating in intelligent women the idea that it’s noble and right to raise your own kids.  The fact we’re outsourcing this to – largely, though not always – infantile brains will break the back of our society.) However – did it have to come about in the sixties and seventies?  Did it have to come about when people were so eager to deny biological differences and to reject everything western, instead of analyzing what worked where and why?

Because western civilization was built on a division of labor – because the initial division of labor was simply male-female – because the public virtues were always “manly” and the private ones “womanly” when women first washed onto the public sphere they decided they needed to be more like men.  So far so good.  (I’m talking here of the VERY EARLY women’s work pioneers.) Because most of these women were ladies, they tried to be gentlemen.

This works well, because gentlemanly virtues is what Western Civlization in its public sphere is based on: fair work for fair pay; honoring your commitments; remembering those who helped you on the way up (which my dad taught me as “There are debts that aren’t monetary and that can NEVER be repaid.  There are people who, when they call favors, you do the favors, and you don’t question it.”); and most of all fighting fair.

The problem is that the sixties and seventies while talking (flapping lips) endlessly about social construction forgot the basis on which the social constructions are built.

Women are not men.  Some of us are – or try to be – gentlemen, but it’s a fine line, even for an outlier like me.  Women were chosen by an entirely different process.

Most of the lady-like virtues were DESIGNED to be appearance-only.  Women are VERY good at giving an appearance of respecting all the male virtues (when they understand them.  These days they’re more likely to imitate the male vices.)  In fact, they’re often better than men.  The rub is that they’re not good at HAVING them – not without a conscious effort, and not without the virtues being held up to them as something to be/do.

Do I mean every woman is a sneaky back stabber?  Oh.  My.  No.  Of course not.  But I mean that in a pinch our lines on that are more blurry than man’s.  Consensus must be built, and we must look out for our offspring.

Women IOW don’t fight fair.  We’re not meant to.  Women who fought fair – being smaller and weaker than men – left no descendants.

All that is fine and dandy while you’re using it in the private sphere and keeping the men in the family in protective mode, even while you cajole, manipulate and generally run the place with an iron hand.

In business and in politics on the other hand… it sucks.  It means that we slowly but surely push marriage laws so that they’re a trap for the man and a consequence free experiment for women.  It means we make use of affirmative action even when there is no logical reason to.  It means that we – even in fields like university attendance and novel writing – become the majority while steadily screaming that we’re being discriminated against.

It means we dismantle those very same western modes of behavior that made our civilization.

It also means that the gloves come off.  The war of the genders becomes overt.  Worse, instead of leading to more offspring, it leads to no offspring at all, as each is taught to hate and/or despise the other.

Do I want women to go back to the home and the kitchen?  Well, if they want to.  I think each individual should do what suits him, regardless of gender. Individuals aren’t statistics.

But I don’t think that women – or men – are tabula rasa.

If we’re to save what remains of our culture, we MUST establish modes of behavior.  If you don’t want to be sexist, call them public and private.

In private anyone should feel free to act like a lady – we could use a bit more of not airing private laundry in public, and that’s a very lady like virtue.  But in the public sphere, where we transact politics and business and the public decisions, everyone should be a gentleman.  Contracts should be honored; each should take responsibility for himself; backstabbing, betrayal and unfair advantage should justly be reviled, no matter who does it.

Ladies – I know this will cut out much of your advantage, but – you must learn to be gentlemen in public.  To be ladies, manipulative, deceptive and contriving, does give you an individual advantage, but it is destroying our culture.

And if it destroys our culture, the one that WILL replace it IS one in which women will be held in subjection.  I don’t want that for any female descendants I might have.  I don’t want it for anyone’s female descendants.

Ladies, be gentlemen.  Play fair.  Gentlemen, relearn the gentlemanly virtues.

In the home be what you very well want,  but in public, dry your tears and stop your flashing of leg.  In public life, we must all be gentlemen. Gentlemen play fair.

UPDATE: And today I’m Guest Blogging at Anthony Pacheco’s another member of the great Portuguese conspiracy in SF/F

It is something everyone knows that anyone who wants to shrink government is aiming to push grandmas off cliffs and let the poor starve in the dark.

Just because “everybody knows it” doesn’t mean it’s so.  Some time ago – oh, seventy years or so – international communism made it a goal to capture all the gatekeeper positions for mass media and entertainment.  (No, I’m not saying everyone in that position is a communist.  Most of them aren’t even conscious fellow-travelers.  They’ve just bought the “every good/smart/well educated person thinks this, and they’d rather die than think.)

That’s actually what makes it worse.  If these people had been conscious communists, they would have had to re-examine their beliefs when the horror-show that the Soviet Union had hidden came out when it collapsed.  But because they’re simply going on “what the good people believe” without examining it or figuring out where it leads, they have continued, pretty much on course, repeating the lies that were once in service of a now defunct evil empire.  It’s a zombie thing.

So the “big lies” that get repeated over and over by the media, until everyone knows them often are gross distortions of reality.  More often, they have absolutely nothing to do with reality and are made with reference only to the Marxian theory of the world.  (Sort of like the maps medieval cartographers made with reference only to other, previous maps – often someone’s guess at reality – had absolutely nothing to do with where land masses were or even what the shape of the Earth was.)

It is much easier to assume that anyone going against those in power (yes, dears, those who want to GROW government are in power: in government, in the economy, in industry and in media.  No, that doesn’t mean they’re right.  At one point everyone in power thought it was right to get rid of “inferior” races) is wrong and to think up evil motives for them then to examine the moral foundations of unbridled government and to wonder who really wants to throw grandma off the cliff (and grind your childrens’ bones to make their soup.)  Because once you start examining things, you might find yourself on the side where the “good” people aren’t.

First let’s establish what taxes are: taxes are a way to collect money by force – if you don’t pay you go to jail – for purposes so important that they justify the theft.

Theft?  Well, taking money from people by force is theft.  If it’s immoral for the local tough to do it on the street corner, what makes it moral for the government to do it?  Because a lot of people say it’s moral?  Please…

But I can see a position in which it is right for someone to relieve you of your belongings at gun point.  Say, you’re carrying a vial full of a new virus you intend to release in a NY restaurant and which will kill millions of people.  It’s still theft, mind – but it is a justified (sort of) theft.

And here we come to where taxes are justified – in my opinion (no one died and made me G-d, this is JUST my opinion.) – taxes are justified when the goal to be obtained is so clearly and obviously not just good but necessary that it justifies shaking down a grandma for the dividends on her investments.  As a further test, it is justified when even just one person not contributing can markedly affect your chances of obtaining your goal.

Say your neighborhood – in some Mad Max post apocalyptic future – is under attack by a gang of Reavers, and you need to buy barbed wire (or cement) to enclose it.  If grandma next door refusing to give up 25% of what she owns is going to mean none of you can protect yourselves, then it is moral and just to force grandma to contribute, because if she doesn’t, not only you but she ALSO will die.

Now for those of our visitors outside the United States, let me explain that there are three (used to be) largely independent levels of government in the United States: Federal, State and Local.  What might be appropriate and just at a community level is NOT appropriate and just for a government that lays down the law to 350 million people give or take a few dozen.  Why?  Because you lose granularity.  Also, because – trust me, you don’t know that you are ignorant fo this, but you are – we are an incredibly regionally diverse country at a level that no foreigner who hasn’t lived here can begin to GUESS.  H*ll, many Americans who haven’t travelled outside their region or haven’t LIVED outside their region have no clue.  When I moved from the North to the South and then the East to the West I found greater differences than I’ve found between countries in Europe.

So, let’s talk first of the Federal Government: what is it right and just for a government covering 350 million people in widely varying circumstances to take money at gunpoint to cover?  Common defense is the only one I find particularly convincing.  Why?  Because it’s d*mn hard to setup a subscription system to buy a nuclear bomber – though we might come to have to try that.

To cover the expenses and salaries of those negotiating on our behalf with foreign potentates, simply because it would be really expensive and counterproductive to have Texas, Maryland and Rhode Island appoint ambassadors who might disagree with each other.

I’m willing to concede that whether the Federal Government should have some say over highways that cross more than one state, and whether the Federal Government should concern itself with food safety when it crosses state laws can be debated, though I’m not sure either of those rises to the level of “let’s take money from grandma to pay for this.”

If you go to the state level, I’m willing to concede that the government has the right to take money from individuals at gun point to pay for other things.  For instance guaranteeing a minimum income, if the citizens of that state think it is a just and worthy goal.

(I don’t, particularly.  Why should you take money from grandma at gun point to make sure that grandson who is working by day as a barista and playing in a band that makes no money in the evening gets 10k more money he didn’t earn?  Tell me why this is morally justified.  Show your work.)  I think this is an iniquitous practice, but if most citizens in a state think this is morally justified, it’s their state and none of my business.  And if grandma isn’t so confused, fluffy and dumb that she gets lost in her own underwear (Pants-Bunny) she’ll move out of that larcenous state.

Then there is the city level, and at city level, everyone should be able to do whatever they very well please, provided that the citizens of that city agree with it, and provided, of course, they’re not depriving anyone of life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness.  (And here we’re talking real rights, not penumbras.  If a city decides to kill every busker who comes in, it’s violating the constitution.  If a city decides that buskers aren’t allowed to perform on their streets, and fines them and drives them to the edge of town, that’s within their rights, and it’s within their rights to tax citizens to pay for this de-busking program.  The busker can’t really claim that he/she can’t pursue his/her own happiness elsewhere.  Not credibly.  Again, if grandma thinks raiding her savings to get rid of buskers is not a moral imperative, she’ll move elsewhere.)

And right now the kung-fu straw fighters are getting ready to say “you do want the poor to starve in the dark” and “if grandma is poor you want to throw her off a cliff.”

The kung-fu straw fighters are really good at fighting strawmen.

Every human society since – from what we can deduce from their skeletons – before we were fully human has looked after its sick, its ailing and its truly helpless.  This is not something that’s about to change.

Yes, most of the time that was left to private charity – though not always and though sometimes private charity was funneled through the state.

Being me, and being a student of history I think it’s less dangerous to leave the care of those truly indigent to private charity.  The reason I think this is that private charity can’t put to death those who have become too burdensome: a national government can.  (For examples of national governments that have done that, look to Nazi Germany, look up China’s “dying rooms” [if you have a strong stomach.  I looked once almost a year ago, and I’m still having nightmares,] and look at “non voluntary euthanasia” in Europe or what happens to babies who are going to cost a lot of money to keep alive to adulthood.)

However, I’m willing to concede two things:

First, contracts must be honored.  Those people who had money deducted from their paycheck their entire working life on the promise that their retirement would be secure and who are now past or very near retirement age, should be given at least enough to survive comfortably on.

Second, we live in an age when religious moral imperatives have been (deliberately?) chipped at for almost a century.  This means some people (most of whom think the State should do it for them) are not at all inclined to give even one cent to provide for an indigent neighbor no matter how deserving – not out of their own pocket.  Because of that, at state and city level, some arrangements might be needed to provide for those who can’t provide for themselves.  For the record, the Federal arrangements are so inefficient, so poorly targeted (they often require you to own nothing in order to give help – even though your entire worth might be tied up in a house you cannot sell, no matter how much it is nominally worth), that local and private charities have to step in to keep people from real trouble – and often fail.  (For instance, our kids do not qualify for subsidized education loans because a) I’m a contractor and get paid irregularly, so we have “savings” in the bank.  b) The government assumes that all the savings in the bank should be used to pay for the kids’ education first – even if that means we can’t meet next month’s mortgage, or the month’s after.  c) the government assumes I’m going to use that money for EACH of the kids which requires us to have either the ability to use the same money twice, or to (of course) pick the kid we’re going to help through college and let the other one go hang.  No, I am not complaining about this.  I don’t think grandma should be robbed so my kids can go to school—we can contrive and if we don’t, there’s always an appliance box under a bridge.  I’m simply showing it’s impossible for a government covering 350 million people to account for every individual circumstance in a just and fair manner.)  The bigger the government and the more intrusive its aims, NO MATTER HOW NOMINALLY GOOD, the more misery and injustice it will spread.

This does not mean we don’t think the things that the government taxes us to do are bad.  A commenter yesterday brought up a “road safety program.”  That is a nice goal.  By all means, tell people not to text and drive, not to drink and drive, and to keep a car length between themselves and the car ahead of them – I’m sure these are things we can all get behind.  Or at least things we don’t think are INHERENTLY evil.

However, now visualize someone holding grandma at gunpoint to get money for this road safety program.  Is it worth it?  Why?  Show your work?  Haven’t people heard this message before from other outlets?  Why do you think they’ll pay attention when it’s done by the government if they haven’t before?  If they don’t stop under the threat of fine, why will a series of billboards, program spots, or even a policeman stationed here and there along the road make a difference?

Now imagine that the money you’re taking from grandma is the difference between her living independently and not.  (No?  Right now my household spends more on taxes than it spends on food or mortgage and some years it’s food and mortgage combined.  And most of those are Federal taxes.)

Road safety is a nice goal, but is it worth it?  Is it worth taking all the savings grandma has worked for all her life and throwing her to the mercy of public charity?  Is it moral and just?  Show your work.

And then there’s the fact that a bureaucracy has a tendency to become the creature of long-established functionaries and the slave of idiotic law makers.  (And we won’t even go into the fact that our presidents can now legislate with their signature, via executive orders.  I’m sure I don’t know why we can’t power most of the country from the energy generated by the Founders spinning in their graves.)

It’s very easy to convince these “elected representatives” some of whom are dumber than my cat (look up “Guam tipping over.”) that say the lightbulbs we’ve been using for years are baaaaad and we should ban them.  It is particularly easy when lobbyists – GE – get involved.  And if it turns out afterwards that the “ecologically safe” lightbulbs they want you to use emit mercury and can cause brain cancer… well, it’s all to the good, right?  The fewer humans the better for Mother Gaia.  No?  You don’t think that’s worth it stealing grandma’s savings to give more power to these creatures who go to Washington and become self-enriching machines and creating regulations that actually make things worse?  You don’t want to give them power of life and death over yourself and yours?

Then perhaps you should stop doing it.  Perhaps you should keep each level of the government to its essential functions, with a little more leeway at the local level, where, you know, if they want to forbid Big Gulps and their idiot constituents let them, it’s their stupid business and not yours.

It’s very easy to say “I want to make sure no cat is homeless” but when it comes to creating Federal homes for homeless cats – is it worth it robbing grandma to do it?

Look, it is a fact – known through history and enshrined in human nature – that humans tend to do that which they perceive as a greater good for the individual self.  This doesn’t make humans evil.  Most humans are fairly decent people – if flawed – and none of us wants to watch our neighbor die on the street.  The fact we’re social animals means we care for the “group” as well as for ourselves.

Assume we haven’t changed radically in the last two hundred years – we haven’t, at least that we can tell – what is the good of putting all-too-fallible humans in positions where the best for them (more power, more security, more public acclaim) comes from robbing their neighbors to pursue increasingly more quixotic goals?  Why would you assume they wouldn’t go from essential goals to goals they think would be cool to have?  Particularly since this ensures they keep their jobs?

Government is a necessary evil unless and until it is possible to network to such an extent that a group of citizens can buy a stealth bomber.  But let’s keep it small, to carefully enumerated powers and DISTRIBUTED.  You can keep an eye on your local b*stards, but how many of us can go to DC and tell our representatives (or our all too imperial President) that they’re out of their rocking minds and that we don’t want grandma’s money taken at gun point in order to take over GM? (And steal grandma’s shares in it, too.)

I don’t want to throw grandma over the cliff.  I don’t want the poor to starve in the dark.  But if we give the power to make those decisions to a distant and impersonal entity, that entity will INVARIABLY – even with the best intentions in the world – through omission and commission do exactly that to some grandmas and some poor.  And right now we’re headed to a world where we write off the money we send to Washington and are lucky if it isn’t used AGAINST us – while all the real needs have to be taken care of at other levels.

We’ve tried massive governments that supposedly took care of everyone.  The Fascists and Communists were humans like us, made of the same genetic material.  They weren’t monsters.  They had a strong, centralized government and — by their lights — the best intentions in the world.  Both claimed to be “scientific.”  The results were appalling levels of death and misery.  There are no angels you can port in wield that much power with no consequence.  Sooner or later those in charge lose track of the boundary between essential and “would be nice.”  There is no right way to do this.  It’s a bad idea to turn humans into numbers on a bureaucrat’s slate.  And it is evil to expose mere humans to the temptation of playing G-d and (thinking they can) forming the ideal world.

Let’s give the other option a try.  Small Government: Too Small to Throw Grandma off The Cliff or to Make Us All Poor.

Who knows?  It’s such a crazy idea, it just might work.

Yesterday we were driving back from Denver – molestation of dinos happened, (aka I got to look and dinosaur bones and let my inner kid out to oooh and ahhhh) and looking for a radio station to listen to.  We don’t actually listen to much Country – not a hatred of the genre, but we grew up at a time when Rock and Roll was cooler, and it formed our tastes.  That said, we like some Country – but as we hit that station, my husband said “you realize they think this is what we listen to all the time.”

I must have looked blank, because he said “You know, we’re the unenlightened.  There are only two types of people who disagree with them on how the world should be run: i.e. with the idea that you can merge all nations together and stop war; with the idea that if America just becomes poor other countries will become rich; and most of all with the idea that people could or should be guided in everything by their “betters.”

The only two people they think disagree with them, are the evil rich, who don’t want to share out their ill-gotten loot (and all wealth is loot to them, since like Marx they don’t realize wealth can be created) and the unenlightened.  I said “the unenlightened.”  And he said “Oh, yes, they live in trailer parks, listen to right wing talk shows, own several guns and might or might not sleep with their relatives, depending on who you talk to.  But they are all white and all male, this is very important, because otherwise instead of unenlightened they would be a downtrodden minority and their opinions would have immediate moral authority.  As is, it’s a wonder they reproduce.””

This made me burst out laughing, but of course, the problem is that in internet forums (particularly when not under my name, but often then too) I get accused of being one or the other of those and often, for a truly contradictory stew, both of them together (evil rich, who live in trailer parks, and….)

The truth is that the Aristo class are a little fuzzy and contradictory on the unenlightened, because, of course, they like to think they are for the “downtrodden” which means they actually can’t look down on the poor.

But the truth of the matter is they don’t (by and large.  I’m sure there are exceptions) know any poor.  Their ideas of the poor come from ill-digested eighteenth century (truly, not debased) liberal ideas combined with what they see about other classes/races/professions on tv shows and movies.  Which are… bad.

Look, stereotypes are a tool of my trade.  You have to round out your world with stereotypes or EVERY pulp SF would be the size of War and Peace and about as interesting.

If I have to bring in an eight year old for one scene, she’s going to fall into one of two stereotypes: either she’s going to be all in pink, like dolls and plastic horses with multicolored tails, or she’s going to be in jeans and a torn t-shirt and carry a football under her arm.

No real little girls falls into one of these stereotypes, no matter how close they come.  I was closer to the second, but I loved my dolls, spent a great portion of my time playing house (I must admit too I was very unenlightened in those days.  I beat up the neighbor boy because he wanted to be the mommy, which I found just “dumb”.  For the record, he didn’t grow up to be gay, (that was the OTHER neighbor boy who never – at least while playing with me – wanted to be the mommy.  Mostly he wanted to build go-carts, so we might never have played house) he grew up to be a wife-abuser.  I probably shouldn’t have pounded him ;) )

However, if the kid is only there for a scene, and maybe featuring as a dead body later, you don’t have time to explain that yeah, she likes to play games with the boys, and play with trains and cars, but she also likes to play at being the mommy.

So, we use stereotypes, of course.  And to an extent they reinforce the stereotypes other people have written.

However, good writers, or writers who try to be good try not to use stereotypes for the IMPORTANT things.  And certainly we try not to stereotype entire economic/professional classes.

In fact, I stopped reading a particular mystery series, because the murderer was ALWAYS the entrepreneur.  And more and more I can’t watch TV – sitcoms and dramas – because all the characters, good and bad are stereotypes.

It wasn’t always this way.  Yesterday we were watching the first episode of Columbo, and what got me was how well drawn the characters were.  The bimbo actress has unexpected depths, the murdered wife is NOT a victim of male oppression, but a woman embittered by life in a marriage gone sour (and probably entered into for the wrong reasons on both sides.)  The husband too, yes, is a murderer, but you can sort of see what he saw and how he got there.

I challenge you to find me a mystery episode like that today.  It always ends up defaulting to the stereotypes of “abusing” husband and “helpless” (or saintly) wife, the “right wing” intolerant man, the open minded intellectual, the rebellious (and ultimately right) teen and on and on and on.

That’s not art.  That’s speak-and-spell.

And the problem has its roots in the eighteenth century, when liberalism deserved that name.  In the eighteenth century, to believe that everyone had the right to equal treatment before the law was as heretical as most of the things you guys and I say here today.

But anyone who believes that, (and I do) inevitably comes across the fact that all men are created equal but (who was it who said it?) “differ greatly in the sequel.”  And most people immediately try to justify this by going on about how all men could be equal if just: they had proper nutrition, they had proper education, they had–  whatever.  (What got us in the housing crisis was the idea that all men would be equal if they just lived in the “right” neighborhood.)

The most popular belief in the eighteenth century was that all men would be “enlightened” if they just had enough of the right kind of education.

It’s a naïve belief, and one that continued through to the idea that if you just indoctrinate the kids in communism, you’ll do away with greed and private property.

It doesn’t – to put it bluntly – work.  In many cases it backfired spectacularly.  There is no reason that knowing a lot makes you good.  (My favorite con-seen t-shirt is “Knowledge is power; power corrupts; study hard, be evil.”)  Education helped the underclasses, of course.  In fact it often helped them overtake the upper classes, which led to little unpleasantnesses like the French Revolution.

What it didn’t do was make everyone angels, which is something that SOMEHOW keeps managing to surprise humans.  (That we can’t be made over into angels.)

Our Aristos are descended from the eighteenth century liberals (sorry but they are.)   We are too.  We are the liberals who decided you had to endure some human imperfections, while trying to be as good as possible, and trying to give others the same opportunity.  (I think the founding fathers were our kind of liberals.  You give the opportunity, but you can’t enforce the results.)

The “liberals” of today are descended via the wrong side of the blanket, bastard sons (and daughters) of communism, by way of the French revolution.  They think this time men can be made perfect, if JUST—

One of the justs remains “they’re educated right.”  Only because real education results in a varying array of opinions, with sub-opinions differing greatly within the opinions (just the words abortion and “gay marriage” suffice for me to pick a fight with most of you, and not in the way you’d expect either.  And then within each of the sub-opinions on that, if I give vent to my full beliefs, I can get both sides to hate me too.  Not to say I can’t do business with most of you.  Of course I can.  If you believe in a small government that stays out of most people’s private life, and if you believe in local control over federal control, you’re a brother or sister of mine, and we’re going the same way.)  When you think, and when you analyze history, your opinions will vary.  You won’t be “enlightened in the right way.”

So… Because our Aristos REALLY want the masses to be enlightened, because this will lead to of course universal peace, brotherhood and rainbow-farting unicorns, they have given up on real education in favor of indoctrination and teaching the “right” conclusions.

On top of that, because pesky humans still insist on coming up with different ideas, once out of the control of the school, (or learn to double think, which I did, early) they reinforce this through entertainment.  Which means the only movies/series/books the gatekeepers will bless are those that enforce the stereotypes they want.

Which is why these days, if you watch practically anything, anyone who disagrees with the Aristos is either evil, rich and greedy (weirdly greed for power never makes their lexicon of sins.  At least not greed for political power.  It’s always greed for money – rolls eyes) or an ignorant gun totting redneck living in a mobile home and talking only in Bible phrases.  (Or, as someone said “clinging to their guns and religion.”)

This is because the only reason these poor children raised with stereotypes can imagine for anyone not to agree with “but teacher says!” is that you are either personally invested in saying the “wrong” things because you get paid for it (let me say right now that I’m FURIOUS I’m not getting checks from Haliburton, the Zionist conspiracy, the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, the Koch brothers and all these other people who are supposed to be paying us [I’m particularly mad at the Kochs since they’re libertarians who support the arts, because well, this art could use some support, guys.]  I guess they can’t get my address?) or because you aren’t “enlightened” – hence, poor, living in a mobile home (I have no clue what they have against mobile homes, except as a mark of poverty) and indoctrinated into the religion they disapprove of.  (Note these people must be white and male, and non-muslim, because otherwise you tread on the toes of protected minorities.)  And in the case of those poor and unenlightened, they think the only reason is that you have been traumatized, you lost your job, you don’t get enough from welfare and therefore you “cling to hatred of those who aren’t like you.”

Because apparently the idea that societies organized on redistributionist lines have not only never worked but resulted in misery and death, and the fact that every time the Aristos take over fully misery and death is exponentially increased HAS NEVER OCCURRED TO THESE PEOPLE.  Because after all “teacher says” these ideas are right, therefore they MUST be.

The truth is that, for the whole time I’ve lived in this country, the best way to climb the ladder of wealth is to be “liberal”.  This is because by the eighties the liberals were already in control of not just entertainment but the boards of most corporations.  Even entrepreneurs who make it, immediately acquire a veneer of lefty opinions (often ill digested) in order to fit in at the country club and network and get ahead.  (No?  Bill Gates.  Steve Jobs.  Major Republicans, right?  Pfui.)

As for the trailer park?  Well, I have nothing against trailer parks or people who live in them – I want to make that clear.  The way life goes, up and down, I might well eventually find myself in one (if I’m lucky.  There’s always the appliance box under the bridge!) – but it is usually a “lower income” neighborhood.  And like most lower income neighborhoods, while it might have some socially conservative people with morally inflexible judgements, these days mostly what it has are people who ran aground while imitating the (no need for marriage, do sleep around with everyone, no need for a job either – the state will provide) “morals” and definitely the manners of the Aristos.

Study after study has proven that if you have the bourgeois virtues: you marry early and stay married, you work as much as you can, you save and defer gratification, you’ll still do pretty well – for a definition of pretty well, in relation to current economy and to where you started.

So while you might live in a small house, you’re unlikely to live to in the kind of trailer park that the “liberals” have resort to for their stereotypes.  In that kind of trailer park most people will in fact vote for the Aristo agenda, under the impression that garantees mo’ government cheese.

Indie, both in writing (and in film – which scares them even more, and which is coming down the pike at torpedo speed, mark my words) scares these people spitless, because it will cease to reinforce the stereotypes.

The bursting of the education bubble (lower and higher) scares them even more because people will get “the wrong” kind of education.

The desperate power grab we’re seeing from the Aristos is complicated by their fear of this, which they can sense only dimly.  Because they think in stereotypes, they really think all homeschooled kids learn ONLY the Bible.  Because they think only in stereotypes they really think that books that don’t obey their blueprint are bad.

And I think, because they think only in stereotypes, they will ultimate be blindsided and left behind by the future.

Aristocracies that grow too divorced from reality ultimately can’t survive.  At best people learn to work around them and they lose all power.  At worst… there comes the guillotine.

I’d prefer the first to the last, but if we don’t manage the first, the last will surely come.

Sometimes it’s hard — and thankless — work saving the clueless from the consequences of their lack of clue.  (And I still don’t get any checks.)

Yesterday I had a very curious experience.  The gentleman who came here to brag of being an NPR listener (Okay, I know that’s not all he came to do.  He also came to exhibit his caring.  But I repeat myself and I’ll explain how those are the same later) sent me a dollar and a diatribe about how we’d taught him he was an idiotic, bigoted NPR listener or words to that effect.  I only read the first line, and refunded his dollar with a note that I was also now teaching him he was childish because that’s a trick only an infant would play.  (And stupid, thinking I’d feel obliged to read his pettish rant for a dollar.)

I’m sure somewhere in there he said he’d been a fan and now would never again read my books – because, they all do.  Let me tell you, children, if I’d lost as many readers as the ones who tell me they’ll never read me again, I’d need to have been a mega bestseller before.

I found this rather bizarre, since the NPR quip was thrown out at random, and wasn’t even particularly offensive.  Also, as was shown immediately after, a lot of us listen to or used to listen to (mostly used to listen to) NPR.  Heck, I even used to have PBS on all day (that or the Disney Channel when we had cable.) which led my in laws to think I was infantile.  (I came from a large extended family that was in and out of the house all the time, and yelling/talking/shouting at each other all day.  The silence in the house when we had no kids and Dan went to work gave me the creeps.  So I turned the TV on in the Living room, medium-low while I did stuff over the house or worked in the office upstairs.  Those two channels were the only ones where I wouldn’t suddenly get growling or shooting [or not often] that startled me out of my skin.  Of course, my inlaws came over, saw Disney and ignored my explanations that I wasn’t even in the room.  You should see the gifts they got me.  And also it took me forever to convince them that I did NOT in fact, want to or have the slightest inclination to write children’s books.)

Philosophically I disapprove of the idea that the state needs to – or should – underwrite a radio station and a tv station.  Philosophically I TRULY disapprove of the idea that there is an “approved” culture that should be shoved down the throats of the hoy ploy.

But frankly other than being dry as dust and twice as uppity, NPR and PBS are no worse than most of the mainstream media.  The opinions ventilated are exactly the same, only now with a veneer of intellectual justification that always fails to go into debate or into the law of unintended consequences, or…

And that was where the commenter was odd.  He came in, hanging his hat on that previous comment about being an NPR listener, and proclaiming it, as a way – I think – to put the rest of us in our place.  See, I PRESUME he thought that the comment was a stray one, and that the rest of us would skitter away from it.  This not only assumes people on this blog intimidate easy, it also assumes that anything on this blog is simple or easy.  To be blunt if one of us, who is a regular, proclaimed that anyone who thinks the sky is blue is dumb, and someone came in spouting obviously stupid (other) opinions and said “and I think the sky is blue” we’d be FAR more likely to close ranks about the one of ours who had gone one step too crazy than to back up.  The most he’d be likely to get was “Well, some people who think the sky is blue are only crazy.”  And then two of you would get into a to-the-death dispute over the meaning of “blue.”

So he’d either not read our comment section at all, or he was laboring under some misapprehension that prevented him from seeing where that would lead.  Frankly, I was very proud of ourselves, for sticking to mostly the economic argument with only a few sideswipes at NPR – except for the side track about several different NPR stations and their slants.  Normally, I’d have expected puns about NPR or worse.

Since he was an authorized commenter, and since I know he’s been by (and only marginally offensive at worst, since he never got banned) before, I have to assume he’d waded through our comments in the past.

So…

So I have to assume he thought the NPR listener thing was a shield of invincibility. See, there are these stereotypes in our culture, and he was wrapping himself in two of them.  Saying he was an NPR listener would prove he was a serious and intellectual, and saying he wanted the minimum wage to prevent Burger King from paying $3 an hour showed that he cared for the downtrodden and was therefore a good person.  How could you attack that?

The problem is that he was out of the place where such stereotypes are accepted.  First, we’re in ATH where we’re all Odd and stereotypes, like cows, are to be tipped.  Second, most of us are really into – really into – economics and numbers, and most of you guys make me look ill-read when it comes to history (I’ve bought more books from your casual mentions than I could afford to.) And third… those stereotypes no longer hold with at least half (perhaps more, depending on how bad the fraud was) of the population.

The political sides of the argument in this country have fractured deeply over the last twelve years.  Before that, those of us of an intellectual bend were as likely as not to listen to NPR or to listen/watch what in the UK (and Portugal) used to be called “Second program.”  You know, lectures, discussions of historical events, arguments on the meaning of the word “blue”.

The other side… were they really less offensive?  I honestly don’t know and can’t tell you, because see, the boundaries of the game were different.  As I’ve said before NPR is not much more loonie left than the mainstream media, and might be less.  I’ll confess that I haven’t listened in a long time, but I doubt they’d say fire doesn’t melt steel, and I’m almost absolutely sure they wouldn’t say global warming causes meteorite strikes.  This, by itself, makes them considerably less insane-left than what passes for talk and news in other stations.  And that’s without going into the biases built into sitcoms and dramas.

But I think they’ve got more explicit in their politics.  All of this is a market-driven change, and it shouldn’t surprise those of us who like economics.

Look, before 9-11, most of us were still getting our news from standard channels.  I think I started reading news on the net about two years later, when the hand-wringing of “what have we done to the oppressed brown people to make them murder us” put me in a permanent state of nausea.  Judging from the size of sites when I started reading them and how big they got since, I’d say I’m not alone.  Those of us of an independent er… path-finding nature took to finding channels that didn’t make us want to murder bunnies just to relieve our spleen.

Those of us who tried to hold on longer, because we liked classical music or whatever, became a tiny minority of the listeners of NPR – or watchers of CNN, which I also was back then.  In response, the stations felt free to radicalize further to the left, thereby sending the rest of us running from the audience, with our hands over our mouths.

This, in turn, left them free to radicalize further.

The readers/listeners/viewers who remained were of two kinds – the kind that thought that Stalin “had the right idea” and who think NPR is too right wing and reasonable by half, but will put up with it till the Let’s Kill All the Kulaks station comes on line – and people who are, I think, like my commenter.

Most people regardless of IQ want two things: to think as little as possible (a masochistic penchant for the activity is what makes the rest of us Odds) and to be thought as intelligent as possible.

So there is a vast majority of normal or above average people who flock to programs (and books.  The success in marketing grey goo comes from convincing people smart people read this) that they think make other people think they’re brilliant do so for that reason alone, and avoid thinking as much as possible.  They don’t even notice when the programs, while sounding learned and profound, in fact, refuse to discuss anything.

For an example of actual discussion on the minimum wage, look at Dave Freer’s comments.  He is somewhat handicapped, because I KNOW how the US is reported abroad and also because, frankly, we are a confusing mess when it comes to welfare (and everything else administrative.)  The flaw (small) in his argument is that he doesn’t realize that while our minimum wage is around seven dollars and change, people making that already qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (we qualified for this once, and got 10k in addition to however much we’d made, which was I THINK around 30k) and also for a slew of programs including free school lunch, etc.  In fact, I THINK the “support money” you get on welfare is probably fairly equivalent to Australia’s $17 dollars and hour minimum wage, and the support you get if you ARE making minimum wage is probably higher, particularly if you throw in city subsidies for power purchases, etc.  (It leaves behind people who have no clue how to navigate the system, but they’re almost always left behind anyway.)

What I mean by Dave got to the actual discussion is that ultimately it ALWAYS comes to the same question: do we lower the wage, (or eliminate it) level the playing field and allow for a greater wealth of opportunity for all; or do we intervene, set a really high minimum wage and live with the fact unemployment will always be high, leaving employers with the ability to pay as little as they legally can and treat employees like dirt, thereby forcing the state to intervene more?

Depending on culture, size of country and homogeneity of the population – and the ability to live out of the grid, which is massive in places like Australia – the answer can VALIDLY be completely different.  (The size and homogeneity come in because in a large heterogeneous country studies have proven fraud is proportionally much higher, which means the US risks a lot more money PROPORTIONALLY going up the spout – and, given the mess the regulations are, we also risk NOT helping many of the people we’re supposed to be helping.  Heck, even something “simple” like minimum wage pushes minimum skills workers into competition with illegals (who are entitled to welfare, but whose employers don’t have to make all the legal deductions and paperwork, so they get the best of both worlds) and/or into a grey market where they have no legal recourse.)

From there we can get to a discussion of the unique US conditions that make the president’s suggestion of raising the minimum wage not only stupid, but rock-bottom-dumb.  For instance, the fraud in our system is massive and we have one of the least efficient bureaucracies in the world (and that’s saying a lot) with no supervision at all and no penalty for wrong moves.  Or the fact that the US has been, for the last just about 100 years, the main CONSUMER in the world, which means the engine that keeps the world economies chugging, and which allows smaller countries that pick security over prosperity to keep enough prosperity to keep giving security… So while the US driving itself to a crash will make everyone else not only poorer but markedly poorer and force other choices on other countries.  (This is expressed abroad as “when the US sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia.)  Or we can discuss the open borders that make an open welfare system and a generous (by comparison to south of the border) welfare system the equivalent of an unguarded pool in the neighborhood in a summer day, the kind that when the children drown in it, gets called “an attractive nuisance.”  Because if you can come North, live off welfare and send home the $9 (they’re not paying benefits in addition, so it’s a bargain) you make which make your family the wealthiest in the village – WHY WOULDN’T YOU?  Particularly if you’re starving?

I come from a country that flood Europe with illegal immigrants in the aftermath of WWII.  I know the other side of this.  People don’t think of legality when their kids need shoes and an education.

The difference, of course, was that the recipients of the Portuguese wave, like France, forced people to acculturate.  Kids HAD to attend all French school from kindergarten on, for instance.  Given something like that, and a demand that you speak the local tongue, this “invasion” though it strains our welfare systems (talk to Basset sometime about the reduction of services to his handicapped daughter because of the strain caused by illegal immigrants) and leaves the untrained in our population out to dry would not be all detrimental.  More citizens are usually good.  But if you add to those drawbacks the “unassimilated and taught to consider itself aggrieved” minority, then it becomes a disaster.

Then there is the fact that almost all regulations, including increasing the minimum wage (which also increases deductions) gives big companies with lawyers to negotiate exceptions and favored status the leg up over the start ups who might challenge them, but who never GET started up.  (And given our current system of crony capitalism, that’s probably a feature, not a bug for the Aristos.)

All of these are valid discussions.  Coming in and saying that OF COURSE unless a benevolent government forces the minimum wage up to a “decent” level people will pay $3 an hour isn’t.  First because yeah, right now – RIGHT NOW – very young kids might be desperate enough to take that (must be very young kids, because even college students can get more benefits than that, with food stamps which most of them receive.)  Which wouldn’t be all bad, since it would allow those kids to get work experience, and get better jobs, which, yes, are still available, but not to those with no experience. Second because if the regulations that prevent kids from being hired were loosened, it would open the door to more legal employment and squeeze out more illegal employment (kind of like lawful use of a park drives out drug dealing.)  NO ONE wants to have employees who have no concept of time, or who don’t get the culture.  They only hire them because they can’t afford to hire legal workers.  Lift the restrictions that make this prohibitive, and the economy will take off.  And then we can afford both to have more mobility of workers and more targeted help to those who REALLY need it.

But NPR-listeners who are still listening to the opinion pieces don’t KNOW that.  They are listening to commentary that ASSUMES that all private employers are larcenous b*stards, and all government officials not only like onto angels but smart and infallible.

Because it’s in NPR they also assume it’s “smart” – if they really wanted to think, they wouldn’t be looking for markers of IQ, they’d be reading and informing themselves.

And that’s why my commenter had such a weird reaction – because suddenly he found himself in the position of those people they call “Faux News Viewers” – which I very much doubt anyone here watches, or at least with any regularity – when they comment on left-leaning blogs.

See, NPR to them still has pre-9-11 status.  That it’s “smart” is not supposed to be in dispute.  So to hear it treated as just another peddler of bad fish left him completely confused and feeling as though we’d attacked him personally – hence the childish lashing out.  Because it hit him below his adult, formed and thinking mind, with the force of a kick in the gut.

We weren’t just, you see – as we thought – discussing opinions, with the occasional snark —

NO, we were attacking him personally by going after his idea of himself.

And both sides are NOT alike in dignity.  Because the left (what I call the fluffy left, which has slid considerably further left without noticing in the last twelve years) had long since captured all the channels of communication and most of the door-keeping functions of entertainment, people who wanted to think themselves smart had “fluffy left” as a default setting. (The fact this is also the side proclaimed ex-cathedra in colleges only helped it think of itself as “smart.”)

The few of those like me who escaped the reservation and looked for other forms of information had the option of “lower brow” radio shows or TV programs, OR of reading primary sources, which required a lot of work.  And even we admitted – back then – that a lot of the radio shows that weren’t hard left were “lower brow” even when we enjoyed them.

The left fails to realize that there are more channels now – because they consume news and entertainment mostly as status markers, so they would NOT go to places no one knows – and therefore sneers at anyone who disagrees with them as “Faux News Viewers” which makes most of us furrow our brows and shrug.  It doesn’t hurt because … because it would be like me calling you “Beaver cap wearers.”  Some of you might wear one, now and then, but I bet most have not ever except as a costume of some kind.  So even if you know the other side assumes “Beaver Cap Wearers” are all stupid, it doesn’t apply to you.

However, when you call someone a “NPR listener” as though it were a bad thing, you’re pulling the rug from under the feet of people who PRESUMED that by listening to NPR they were PROVING they were smart, with no more effort required.

Of course, part of me thinks that it should be done more.  That if they’re not willing to concede any dignity to – even – well reasoned opposition, no dignity should be afforded them.

The other side of this, though, is that most people – MOST PEOPLE ON ANY SIDE – would rather die than think.  Which means a lot of this would cause a hardening of the sides into unbreakable fortresses of thought.

On the other hand, it’s already happening, and they’re capturing a lot of people who fall into the “increasingly less fluffy” left simply because it’s the “smart” side, and unless and until we shake that assumption they’ll continue to do so.

So – with apologies to those who’ll fall on their asses and get bruised – let’s pull the rug.  One, two–

 

One of the things that has always puzzled me when our current mavens (Aristos is such a difficult word to type) go on is their obsession with skin color or gender or whom you are attracted to.

When the chips are done, none of that matters.  When the chips are down, humans go tribal, and when humans go tribal they couldn’t care less about that kind of thing.   When the chips are down, nobody cares if cousin Henry’s mother came from a line that was hereditarilly likely to hold a tan.  He’s still cousin Henry.  When the chips are down our women are our women and d*mn it, our women stay with us.  They might still care if cousin Henry is what Southerners used to call “A little funny” – but only because in our culture that has an implication of un-manliness, and in a threatening situation you wouldn’t want them there to think we’re a soft mark.  Only, let cousin Henry be bigger and brawnier, and pound his chest harder than the other warriors, and they’ll go “He’s a little funny, but he beat someone’s head in last week, so shut up.  He’s cousin Henry.”

It is only if the stress goes on very long, and if you have no hope of getting out of it, that you start purging your own numbers, but at first shock, you close ranks not by race, not by age, not by gender and not by orientation: you close ranks by culture.

How do I know this?

Well, I was an exchange student from July of the year I turned eighteen (so when I was still seventeen) and up through May of the year I turned nineteen.

Don’t pfui me.  There is stress in that situation.  There is also a great mingling of nationalities, races and cultures, and a great opportunity to sit and observe.  (Yes, you could say I had the first sight and the second thoughts.  I was a baby writer.  Who do you think Pratchett is really describing when he goes on about witches?  At least on the perception part.)

You take a bunch of sixteen to nineteen year olds, at the age of greatest social insecurity, you uproot them completely and you throw them into a vast group (there were 2000 of us from all over the world for the two or three weeks of orientation in NYC) and you make them comingle.  Whether you mean to or not, you traumatize them and you pull the rug out from under their feet.  (I remember one of my colleagues being asked by some minor reporter what she thought of American boys, and trying to answer “Well, really, to know what they’re like you have to know how well they talk, and I don’t talk well enough myself to judge.”  By which she meant the … markers of Portuguese courting which involve status markers through language weren’t there, and she didn’t know which markers to use.  That’s a minor example.  All the Portuguese were in distress, too, being used to six meals a day and getting only three.)

The first thing I noticed was how little mingling there was outside nationalities, PARTICULARLY with Americans.  Keep in mind we were chosen because we wanted to spend a year in the US, away from our families, learning about US culture.  We were, in fact, all of us, chosen for xenophilia.

And yet, when you got us in a group that contained some of our “people” we clung to them.  More, when there was socializing outside the group it was with similar cultures.  First, came the colonies of that nation, no matter how long ago they separated and NO MATTER WHAT THE SKIN COLOR of the people was.

People from Senegal gravitated towards people from France and vice versa.  Portuguese hung out with Brazilians (this was before the cold war ended, so we had no students from Mozambique or Angola.  I’m sure we do now, and that they gravitate towards Portuguese students.)  You’re going to say “well, that’s a linguistic thing” – yes, of course, to an extent, and I do think the reason that the Latin contingent in general was more likely to cling together is that English is taught late and often VERY badly.  (I lucked out, and it was pure luck, and had THREE excellent teachers, or I would not be where I am now.)

But it’s not all linguistic.  As I noted before, Spanish speakers can’t understand Portuguese at all – and no, I’m not buying the phonemes thing.  Sorry. They also refuse to understand WRITTEN Portuguese, while any Portuguese can figure out written Spanish.  Besides, continental Portuguese (unlike Brazilian) is a “flat” language.  It sounds like a language spoken by deaf people.  So it’s not the tones – BUT after the colonies and the same-language countries, group clung to “culturally similar.”

Let me explain – after that big group, they broke us up into groups going to our region, then more again, into groups going into a small area (my area included about ten small cities around Akron OH.  Cleveland was another area.)  Then periodically – Christmas break, Spring Break – we were shipped elsewhere and got together with other areas, so I got to watch several reshufflings.  If the Portuguese-speaking group (or the Spanish speaking group) was too small, they aggregated.

The same happened to other cultural and culturally “similar” groups/ex colonies/etc.  Germans and Swedes tended to gravitate together, for instance.

I’m weird here.  I tended to gravitate mostly to Americans and then to … whoever was nice.  My best friends that year were a British girl and a Japanese girl.  But perhaps I’m not so weird – more on that later.

However, during my year in Ohio I loved visiting my family’s best friends, who were Cuban.  I loved it because they did things (stupid things, like wash dishes) in the way my family did, which was comforting, in the middle of strangeness.

And sometimes the “feels familiar” goes back very far.  Gallicians from Spain hung out with the Portuguese by preference.  Yep.  All one province under Rome… how long ago?  But they’d rather cling to Portuguese – under stress – than to Spaniards.  There was something to the gestures and the body language, and the food preferences that brought you together.

Later on, while in Portugal, I found that American expatriates and I clung together despite political, social and other differences, because we were under stress (shuddup) and therefore the other felt comforting.  Heck, I liked the way the consul’s home SMELLED because they used American products to clean.  And one of my professors and I formed a friendship based entirely on watching the A team, something I’m sure we’d never have watched that religiously, otherwise.  But it reminded us of home.  (Yes, I’m a messed up chick.  Take a number.)

Also after I returned to Portugal I got to watch groups of foreign students coming through, and observe the same stuff.  They didn’t really want to hang with Portuguese. They clung to “sibling” culture groups.

Except… Americans.  Americans would interact with Portuguese with a will (and sometimes with both feet.  That poor American boy whom we made repeat the sentence “I need some batteries” over and over again…  And he had no clue why.  [For those who don’t speak Portuguese, batteries are pilhas, the lh pronounced palatal and not like the dental l.  Most Americans can’t make that sound and therefore mangle words like Silhouette.  Well, the poor guy couldn’t.  So he kept telling us he needed pilas – think on it, it will come to you.  Think slang and some legionaires’ dirty joke] – which when you’re still in your teens is irresistibly funny.)

Anyway, Americans were these gonzo people, trying to interact with everyone.  If you assume that Heinlein had turned my upbringing American enough that I was sort of Proto-American, my wanting to mingle as a kid in America was perfectly normal.

The exception to the Americans who went outward, to everyone, was the exquisitely (in retrospect) Patrician chick from California, who looked down her nose at Portuguese, demanded all vegetarian food, and once ate the roses off some poor lady’s garden (for shock value, I imagine, though she might have been that weird.)

Are Americans still like that?  I don’t know.  It’s been thirty years since I was involved with exchange students.  I think they might be more like the crazy chick from CA.

BUT – very important but – I think this is why our mavens are so against assimilation and tend to decide that culture is race and wanting you to change your culture and become American is racist…

You see, the last thing they want is We The People united against them.  And since they intend to inflict stress and pain on us, on the way to their Earthly Paradise (where 90% of us will be dead) this is a grave risk.  So they intend to keep us in insular little groups according to the countries we or our ancestors came from.  They can they play us against each other, and pretend to save us from each other.

Don’t let them.

I’ve never introduced myself as Portuguese-American.  I renounced previous allegiances when I naturalized.  Yes, of course, my origins are Portuguese, and it shaped a lot of my thought.  So it’s not like I hide that I grew up in Portugal.

But when the chips are down, I know who my tribe is.

My name is Sarah A. Hoyt, and I’m an American.

It occurred to me that not only did my health crash — and it has its up and downs.  The reason this is so late today is that I’m actually fighting SOMETHING that kept me in bed till eight thirty — make it very difficult for me to do promo guest blogs, but that I’ve been very bad at promoing here.  And since I have a book recently published, another book coming out in a couple of weeks, and another in July, I thought I’d go ahead and tell you about them.

The book that came out in December is Darkship Renegades, the second book of the Darkship Series — when Kit and Thena get to Eden they find all is not sound.  Or at least Kit gets arrested, and, after they spring him, he gets shot in the head.  To save him, they have to return to Earth and figure out things they’d rather not know about Jarl and the rest.  (click on the picture for the Amazon link.)  In this book we find out how truly interesting it would be to have angels govern us.  Or, as close to it as we can get.

This book is the sequel to the Prometheus Award Winning Darkship Thieves

In which a shy young lady…  Oh, stew it, in which a hellion of what Jerry Pournelle called (in his very nice review) “a princess of Earth” meets a rogue from a largely libertarian world and fights her way into a new home.  Cruel and unusual violence, explosions and torn nightgowns.

Coming out in March is A Few Good Men, the first book of the Earth revolution that starts immediately after the end of Darkship Thieves.  In both Darkship Thieves and Darkship Renegades you read about that weird sect, part religion part political movement, the Usaians.  Well, when Lucius Dante Maximillian Keeva, who’s been in solitary for 15 years and only didn’t go nuts because of being given access to literature and history “gems” (what they use instead of disks, deal) from the past breaks out of Never Never, he finds that there is an armed branch of the Usaians, the Sons Of Liberty, who appear to have murdered his younger brother, Max.  Imagine how thrilled he is, when he finds out his only hope of surviving is to ask the Sons of Liberty for help…  The tag line for this book (in the bookmarks) is “Your live, your fortune, your sacred honor, did you think those were just words?  Did you think this was just a game?”

Completely unrelated, but coming out in July — and I understand that the previous are schedule for re-release soon — is Noah’s Boy, the third book of the shifters series (the first two are Draw One In The Dark and Gentleman Takes A Chance.  The fourth will be Bowl of Red, and I’ll try to get to it this year.)  I don’t have a picture here, though I understand it’s in the Simon and Schuster Catalogue, and if someone links in the comments, I’ll swipe it.  It’ s a very pretty cover.

Noah’s Boy

Diners, dragons, panthers, were lab-rats, tuckerized flies, unnatural cavalcades of shifters and lion-policemen, oh, my.  I suspect the d*mn series is actually SF masquerading as fantasy and this book is a huge step in that direction.

Also upcoming soon enough but not from Baen, a YA called Shadow Gods, in which high school students save the world from an invasion of the Titans, which in this version are eldergoddish, with the help of some of the Olympians.

And of course Witchfinder.

D*mn sequel btw, wants to be called Rogue’s Progress, which gives no hint at all that it’s fantasy.  I SHOULD know that Jonathan Blythe would be trouble.

And this afternoon I’m going to try to get to the long-delayed (LONG delayed guest blogging, supposing I don’t crash, burn and end up sleeping.  I really don’t feel well.)

Anyway, spreading this self-serving, self-promoting page would greatly help the author continue writing and providing free ice-cream doing these free blog posts, as well as the free novel Fridays.  If any of you are willing to take bookmarks to cons, let me know, and I shall send you little bundles of them.  Books are also available, if you’re willing to do a review.  There are also (very few) t-shirts for Darkship Renegades and a few more t-shirts for A Few Good Men, which I’ll be happy to give away in contests.

Sometime ago I started talking about the problem with the publishers being that they were drinking their own ink.  I.e. they make up stuff, put it on paper, and then piously believe it, as though it were a fact.

They tell themselves the bestsellers – you know, the ones they actually give publicity and support to and to whom they pay high advances – support their houses, and next thing you know, they’re believing it, and getting rid of midlisters left and right and becoming puzzled when the bottom line doesn’t improve.  That’s because – duh – what they’re doing is roughly the equivalent of a steak restaurant deciding they make most of their money on the desserts and the appetizers, which are, of course, the highest priced in relation to cost on the menu.  Therefore, they’re now going to serve only appetizers and desserts…

The problem goes way deeper than publishers, though – we have a whole slew of people drinking their own ink, starting with our own government.  (Possibly because our government, our churches, our arts, our media, all draw for leadership from a pool of people who know each other, run in the same circles and were taught the same “truths” by the same mentors.)

Take that amazing froth of wishful thinking called the State of the Union address – did any thought go into what the speech writers wrote?  No?  I think not.

There is for instance the wonderful idea that we can’t get out of this hole by cutting expenditures.  REALLY?  REALLY?  So, let me see, if my family is spending 2000 a month, while making 1500, cutting expenditures is not the way to go.  We shouldn’t examine our food budget, cut back on entertainment or perhaps move to a smaller place.  No way no how, because cutting is not how you get out of a financial hole.  No, golly-me.  We’re supposed to get a student loan and take a course in something the government assures us will pay off.  AND we’re supposed to go out to eat more.  And move to a bigger place.  And buy a newer car.  And then we’ll be…

What?  I don’t know.  And neither do these people, because they’ve never balanced a checkbook.

The Aristos don’t have to balance anything.  There’s always someone willing to finance them while using them as stalking horses.  After all they talk so purty, and they say all the right things – the things that will allow those using them to get a greater grasp on power over the lives of everyone else.

Or take the minimum wage nonsense.  What kind of insane idiot, with the crisis of unemployment we have would want to RAISE minimum wage?  I mean, both the man reading these words off the teleprompter and the idiots who wrote them for him to read have presumably enough intelligence to stand upright and speak at the same time.  So it shouldn’t be possible for them to NOT understand that a wage is something paid in exchange for a service.  It is therefore tied to the value of that service.  The idea of legislating it at ALL is insane, and leads to people who can’t afford to pay it hiring illegals or simply not growing their business past the one man stage – because, children, economics is a science.  You can’t simply legislate wages, any more than you can legislate rain.  BUT on top of that the idea of in a recession wanting to tie the minimum wage to the cost of living is so astonishingly stupid that–  That I run out of words.

But the Aristos don’t know that.  The Aristos never had a minimum wage job, and they never had to climb out of it by acquiring skills that made them worth more.  The ARISTOS were born with the right connections, and mouthed the right platitudes, and lo and behold, the money tree was shaken into their lap.  This means they have clue zero where money comes from, and they think that the only reason everyone DOESN’T make a bazillion dollars an hour is that private employers are greedy and need the government to beat them into generosity.

What that kind of inanity – there is a reason wage and price controls only bring poverty and collapse everywhere they’re tried – will do to the economy is anybody’s guess, but I can tell you what it will do to my kids’ generation: it will eat their future.

I was talking to my son the other day and he said “Everyone in my generation has flat given up.  The height of our ambition is to someday have a job that actually allows us to live independently.  There’s no grand dreams for us.”  It was the saddest thing I’d ever heard, and even this modest ambition was just made more difficult.

But the Aristos don’t know that.  Their own children’s nests are feathered with the spoils of their parents’ career.  They have no idea what they’re doing to normal people out there.

And the Aristos are different.  They drink their own ink in a different way. They think that we are heading into a future without jobs because our automation and tech is getting that cool.

Of course, those of you who like me were semi conscious (teens) during the Carter years remember the exact same thing from then.  It was all “We can’t solve unemployment, because we’re that much more efficient that in the future there are no jobs.”  Then came Reagan.

But the Aristos don’t remember this, because part of the requirement of being a courtier is to convince themselves Carter was wonderful.  And that the current unemployment is due to our precipitous ascent to Earthly paradise.

This is why they’re not worried about debt.  See, any day now, the robots will learn to spin straw into gold…  Or so the Aristos believe.

And in this future where we all lie under the trees, they want to thin human population, so they’re not worried about people not reproducing.  And everyone who remains, will live off the benevolence of the state.

No, seriously – the latest place I read this was a centrist economist, who was repeating this utter nonsense without irony.  Yep, unemployment will be high forever because our machines are that efficient.

I bet you – gold, because money doesn’t count, one ounce – that if we pull out of this tail spin, in twenty years anyone reading this bullhockey will split his sides laughing “their technology was so advanced they thought, that they didn’t have enough jobs to go around, they thought.”

But the Aristos believe the ink they spill as though it were gospel.  Because it’s written, and it sounds good, and in their sheltered, soft lives, being able to speak well and write well is THE most prized ability.  It shapes reality.  Well, it shapes reality as far as they are concerned, because they say these things and money falls on their lap, and praise is heaped on their heads.

And worse, now, when the best jobs that can be got are on paper 29 hours, (because to be 40 would incur the massive expense of Obama care and take the employer under)  but in fact require you to work 60, with unpaid overtime because “well, you must finish the project” they’re going to look at the ink on paper and say “Wow, most people are working under thirty hours, but productivity is up.  It really is the end of jobs.”

Because the Aristos are like children, who believe their own fairytales and they, unlike the rest of us never held a job that was much shorter on paper than in reality.

In fact, we should pity the Aristos.  Like some Eastern royalty, they live isolated and never see outside their palaces.

This is fine, while the palace endures.  But their own actions are fast bringing the palaces down.  They don’t understand economics.  And the main thing they don’t understand is that other countries have been allowed to do very stupid things, because the US was there to rescue them.

We don’t have a US to rescue us.

What can’t go on won’t.  The Aristos are on a course to meet the mud at speed.

Holla, ye pamper’d jades of Asia! What, can ye draw but twenty miles a-day?

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers, and as always thank you Glenn for the link.  And if you’re new here, consider hitting the links on the books on the sidebar and/or pre-ordering A Few Good Men from Amazon.  (And yes, to those who invited me to guest blog — or who wish to — that WILL resume tomorrow.  The health thing is finally settling down.)

*The Mad Genius Club Post is up.*

I’ve recently been hearing people complain, at the same time, about  both the new media meaning that news come from so many angles that no one seems to know what to believe so people believe all these reporters without CREDENTIALS and about how people believe nothing and look for holes in everything that’s reported.

Since the people I’ve been hearing complain are fairly conventionally liberal (what I would call establishment “liberal” – they don’t think about it much, but they tend to buy the party line, because everyone who is anyone repeats it) this is of course one and the same complaint.  They want to quote Leonard Cohen their “mirrored night” back.

Because for them news are a matter of “being in the know like everyone else who is in the know” they want an easy source of information that all the right people believe, a guided conversation that is reflected in all the conversations at the water cooler.  They don’t want to know the truth, so much, as they want to know what to believe so they won’t be revealed as dumb at water cooler conversations.

One of the things they seem to focus on is the “Sandy Hook” conspiracy theories as being particularly nefarious because they “are people’s attempts to deflect from the conversation we must have about the causes of the massacre.” This reference to the Sandy Hook Conspiracy Theories baffled me a little – or would have, if I couldn’t decode it – because though there are some (when aren’t there about a nationally reported event?) even I have only managed to run into one.  And I frequent the “out there” libertarian blogs which are, by definition, conspiracy central.

But the reason to focus on THAT conspiracy – not, say, the nine eleven conspiracies that brainless stars believe – is that the theories are nefarious because they deflect from the administration’s attempts to shove gun control down our unwilling throats and to use a school shooting as a pretext.

Because only a fool or a sadist speaks the truth in social circumstances, I almost bit through my tongue not to answer “Okay, do let’s talk about the causes of the massacre: improper care for the mentally ill; or perhaps families that are not families because each parent is doing his thing and pursuing his bliss; no fault divorce?; families with no father?”

That of course, was not what they were talking about, but gun control, which has not ever in fact, stopped ANY massacres.

Are these people, then, total stooges of the administration?  Do they want government controlled news?

Of course not.  What you have to understand – particularly if you’re younger than I and grew up in the new information era – is that the news used to be something you perused to know what everyone knew.

It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, it matters that there is a consensus reality.  Most people out there only want that.  And their complaints about the new media is that they’ve been denied that.  They no longer know “what to believe” to be socially acceptable.

Having been accused by a friend of being “too cerebral” as a writer (guys, I like explosions and soppy love stories, sometimes in ONE book, so I don’t see what in hell he means) I’m probably making my case worse when I say that’s never what I wanted to know.

Maybe it was very early on reading the Times report on incidents in the Portuguese revolution, which were not only wrong to what I’d witnessed, but managed to be more wrong and narrative-y than the more or less state controlled Portuguese newspapers of the time.  (Who needs state control, when every journalist believes the communists are ALWAYS on the side of angels?)

Maybe it was the fact that at one time I wanted to be a journalist – a real one – maybe it’s the fact that fiction counts for nothing if you don’t try to reflect a deeper truth.

Whatever the cause, when I read the news – in any media – what I’m trying to look for is the truth.

So to me, the same thing counted for reading the “real” newspapers twenty years ago and reading the blogs now.  I used the same tests: what a commenter yesterday referred to as “reality testing” – does this accord with my experience of how things happen?  Okay, suppose it does, next, does this accord with stories about similar incidents I’ve heard from people I trust?  Okay, suppose it does.  Apply Occam’s Razor.  Is this the simplest explanation for observed facts?  If it involves a conspiracy, does it necessitate hundreds of peripheral people collaborating?

The nine-eleven conspiracy fails on that.  The people in those airliners undoubtedly existed, and I don’t see them being walked out of their lives forever, into some sort of witness protection program and NEVER FOUND AGAIN.  (Beyond its failing on “how things happen” because fire does indeed melt steel – rolls eyes.)

I will confess that the “too many people in the conspiracy” has now failed me twice: the jorno-list thing.  I simply wouldn’t have believed it wouldn’t have blown up earlier or again (since I’m fairly sure it exists again.) And the Hide the Decline ditto.

OTOH these are not random people.  Everyone in the conspiracy is a true believer, and each of their careers depend on it – so I should have paid more attention to “is this how things happen?”  because it invalidates the “too many people.”  After all, I’ve seen this in fiction, where we’ve managed to have the impression of lockstep simply due to the gatekeepers and those of us who disagreed being too afraid for our careers to say anything.

But the point is, I’ve always done that, my whole life, because I always wanted the truth.  The reason I wanted the truth is because if you don’t know the real causes of things and what is really going on, you can’t anticipate the effects.  What is really going on – as opposed to what you’ve been told – might necessitate a reaction to prevent the true effect of what is going on from killing you.  It’s not just “What you don’t know can kill you” it’s “what you think you know can kill you.”

What I heard reflects the normal person’s frustration with not knowing what to believe to “fit in.”  They view news not as information, but as a system of social cohesion.

They don’t seem to realize social cohesion is usually created – in the modern state – by rulers, with intent to lead the people for their purposes.  They’ve forgotten – or never heard about – the “news” apparatus of Hitler and Stalin.  And they clearly haven’t been paying attention to the successive “summers of recovery” even as we sink deeper into penury and morass.  Or if they have, they believe that if only we believed–  (Click your heels and say “there’s no place like mainstream news.”) — the economy WOULD have recovered (the average person on the street seems to have clue zero what makes the economy go, or downright wrong ideas “price measures labor” or “money is gold based.”  “If we believed in it, socialism would work” is about a same-order fallacy.)

I for one prefer a news system in which I can filter from many dissenting voices.  And I test EVERYTHING.

And part of this reflects the fact that the left has in fact managed to politicize EVERYTHING.  (They weren’t just whistling Dixie about “the personal is political”.)  I realized that at the con as an otherwise very nice young woman said that her panel on steampunk had been interrupted by a very rude bestselling author who called them polite fascists and went on about how they longed for a return to British Imperialism.  She was bewildered by this, since she likes the setting for the costumes and the gadgets.  And she said in a plaintive tone “I don’t know why he wanted to do that.  We’re not political.  I hate politics and I don’t think it belongs anywhere near your fiction.”

While she was right that the author was insufferably rude and that most people involved in steampunk are in it for the manners, the costumes and the sense that at that time civilization was going somewhere – she is wrong about the argument being about “politics.”

The argument is in fact about history.  (And had I been there, I’d have folded that author’s words all in corners and made him eat them – since he’d already broken decorum.)

In that case, because there was no point yelling at the very nice author, I had to bite my tongue again.  What she didn’t want near fiction was not “politics” it was HISTORY.  And when you refuse to refute the skewed view of history being forced on you, you are in fact accepting it as the consensus.

History is just slightly older news.  In history as in news, what you don’t know can kill you and what you think you know can kill you FASTER.

You might not be interested in what is really happening; what is really happening is interested in you.

Those who forget history and ignore current events aren’t destined to repeat them – the twentieth century has shown us, by and large they’re destined to die from it.

So, Witchfinder is done — well, it’s all over except for the (moan groan, sigh) editing — and Galaxy fest is done.

I want to put a question to the hive mind (Stop that, RES, you’re not allowed to answer with either buzzzz or honey): I want to do the goes to hell to figure out why hell is invading Earth thing but unless and until I figure out I don’t need someone with special forces training, there’s going to be a long (possibly six months or more) hiatus.

So, in the meantime (and it could be longer as, as you know, these things can take a time to gel, and also I’m now under contract for the next DS (still unnamed) and for Through Fire, the second book of the Earth revolution) do you guys want me to post Jonathan Blythe’s book?  (Tentatively entitled Magician Rogue?)  ’cause I can start that probably second week in March (I can’t let it interfere with Witchfinder.)

And meanwhile, to keep you all amused and sort of tying in with next post — if it were real, how would we KNOW?  http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/montana-emergency-alert-system-hacked-broadcasts-zombies-war

Okay, zombies are silly (probably.  I mean, the Bible does go on about the dead climbing out of their graves and walking among the living) but suppose it was something like UFOs.  How would you know it was true, or just the upteenth joke?  (And remember that Connecticut school that closed for however long because the students were convinced there were vampires among them?  Right.)  I was recently listening to the beginning of Puppet Masters — why wasn’t it contained?  Because no one believed in UFOs.

And…  Sign, portent or a remarkable coincidence?  http://www.weather.com/news/pope-resigns-20130211