Okay guys, just checking, but I think this is a case of “We are not the same.” And I think most of y’all will be with me.
If you were adventuring throughout the galaxy and you landed on a planet where people told you “oh, we no longer have wars or violence. We evolved past that.”
Would you
a) assume they’re superior beings?
b) get the hell out of dodge as far as your spaceship can carry you, before whoever has farmed these sheep comes to collect?
Because my answer is B with an extra “make sure I can’t be traced from here.”
As you probably can deduce, reading of this week’s “legacy sf” book is not going well. My kindle estimated 2 1/2 hours to read it, and it’s probably been that, in five minute increments, because it’s that long between “pshaw!”s. Yes, there will be a post about it, but for now this is just about one thing I stumbled on this morning.
That was … well, the setup is ancient aliens guiding humans. More on that later. But anyway, as the ancient aliens turned their back, the humans created atomic bombs. And used them for peaceful (?????) stuff like leveling mountains for engineering purposes (just keep on going.) But then a scientist created a super-bomb and was made minister of war and decided to attack the neighbors with it… Which meant humans weren’t evolved enough to blah blah blah….
Wait, let me give you the quote because it exemplifies the thought pattern so well:
“A generation passed during which time this dangerous invention was used only as a controlled explosive for building dams, destroying mountains, to divert the flow of rivers, etc. But one day a scientist drunk on power built A-bombs with the agreement of his government, which appointed him War Minister, he started a dreadful conflict. The conquered under the supervision of the conquerors pursued their own research no less secretly. We do not know exactly how it happened, but the fact is that 20 years later a new atomic war broke out. This time the two antagonists each had their A bombs and even hydrogen bombs. It was a cataclysm of unheard of violence.”
Jimmy Guieu, The Time Spiral
That sound you heard across the miles between us was me hitting my head on my desk repeatedly.
Look, this book is full of many, many bad ideas of the Alien Civilizers suborder. And again, we’ll go into why those rankle later. Much later.
That paragraph above though really got under my skin because unlike, say, the idea that evolution leads to more perfect and moral forms which is also in the book, it is very much still an European attitude.
Some of you are in various off-blog groups with me and have been unlucky enough in recent weeks to trigger rants about Europe, specifically about what my European relatives think is happening here and their refusal to believe my lying eyes might be better than their “best source” news in Europe. (Which, let me tell you, having heard the news on CNN international while I was there, it makes our plain, old Communist News Network seem right wing.)
I keep getting this sense that this is what families spread across Germany and the US must have felt like in the 30s, but I also realize that’s bs. That was more or less a narrative imposed during the war. Actually given our own shitheads (I’m looking at Woodrow Wilson, FDR etc.) our beliefs about good governance and how to organize a country — at least as propagated from the top. I’m sure American citizens were always different to an extent — weren’t that different. The big difference was Germany going on an invading rampage and also their bizarrely massive extermination program and its ethnic/religious overtones. (Look, we also sterilized and euthanized people. Leftists always do.) And for various reasons most people didn’t believe that was actually going on in Germany, so it wasn’t a point of contention for families across the Atlantic.
But now, the international leftist media complex has the bit between its teeth. In a bid to save its project of making us own nothing and eat bugs, they’re painting a picture of us abroad that doesn’t even have a vague, coincidental resemblance to us.
Yes, I do realize that due to our movies and people thinking they depict reality Europeans always thought that we engage in a minimum of a firefight a day, that all our places are as dangerous as the most dangerous areas of Chicago, etc.
Famously etched in my mind is the picture of being in a store with my mom a few years ago — having left a house that since I moved has acquired industrial strength steel shutters on every window, and bars on the lower level one, and taken the wheel, the stereo, etc. out of the car we parked — and hearing the lady said America sounds great but she couldn’t live with the crime and the danger.
At the time I lived in Colorado Springs, downtown, where I not only routinely forgot to lock my car (or my house) sometimes for days at a running, but one particularly crazy week left my purse in the car for a week, with the car unlocked. (Yes, I am aware you couldn’t dot hat now. Even before open borders, the provision of better and more comprehensive services to “homeless” had made the city a vagrant addict paradise and frankly it was getting dicey to walk alone downtown early morning or after dark. HOWEVER even then it was better than the good neighborhood in Portugal my mom lives in.)
So, yeah, it’s been like that for a long time, but now it’s deliberate and fairly insane. From what I gather, they think anyone who tans is at risk, that there are people marching in the streets with swastika armbands, and the country might not be safe for me and mine because of our — fairly unremarkable — Mediterranean appearance.
Also of course, Orange Man Bad hates Europe and loves Putin, and he’s just going to give Europe to Putin, and–
I can’t. I can’t even. I’ve started answering with “I remember when you were smart enough not to buy commie lies.” (Look, dudes, they think MACRON is right wing. They probably think Castreau is a conservative.)
BUT at the bottom of it, at the bottom of their puerile rage at Vance for telling them they have to defend themselves, at the center of their anger that we are telling them we will no longer send American boys to bleed for them, is the attitude about war.
Now, if you look at that bizarre paragraph above, you’ll understand why Europe thinks the way to prevent violence is to forbid the weapons. Because first they build atom bombs, and then a SCIENTIST is mad with power and uses them. Look, dudes, dudettes and dudissimos, this is not how government works in any sane country. I really don’t know about France — see sane — but in the US the only weapons scientists mad with power are allowed to deploy are biological and information control, and that’s because idiots didn’t see it coming.
No scientist in a nuclear lab ever said “Hey, I have a bomb! I’m going to use it to nuke South Nostrillia.” And most people don’t research/create/keep weapons, whether private or public because they twirl their mustaches, cackle evilly and think they will now have the power to kill others.
Even the bad guys don’t get weapons for that reason. They get weapons because some force, either mental or practical, makes them think they need them to defend from something, be it either mental “They’re going to get me, I have to get them first” or practical “I need money, they have money.”
The hierarchy is “Wanting to do something” and then getting the weapon, not the other way around.
Sane nations, yes, develop and stockpile the scariest weapons they can think of (but not biological, because we’re all human and that’s just stupid. Yes, I’m looking at you, China. You might think you’re a completely different and superior type of humanity, but really you’re just like us, and what kills us kills you. What you are in fact is eating rocks dumb for thinking you’d found a cheap shortcut to world supremacy.) And they let other nations know they have them. Because that keeps you relatively safe, and if you’re lucky in relative peace. Until that one nation or group is dumb enough to try sh*t.
Which is why the whole evolved and above it all theory that if you don’t have weapons there will be no war does not work, and makes China’s eating-rocks-stupidity seem like a flash of brilliance in the dark.
What it is ultimately is “If only everyone,” but applied to nations. “If only everyone gave up all their weapons, we wouldn’t’ have war.”
This is bullshit, because war comes from competition for scarce resources, from illusions of cultural supremacy, from dictatorships not being able to feed their own serfs without it, etc. etc. ad nauseum, up to and including the actually righteous “Well, we have to go and exterminate the Northern Anklians because they eat babies alive.” (And the number of times they actually did is shocking. And yes, the only way to destroy a culture that perverse is to exterminate it root and limb, because cultures have a life of their own.)
For all those reasons and some I can’t think of right now, humans will have war. And if they gave up all more advanced weapons, they’d fight with spears and knives. And if they gave up those they’d fight with rocks. And in the bizarre instance they lacked even those, they’d fight with teeth and nails.
The other is a fable for maiden aunts, (as Heinlein put it) and not very smart maiden aunts at that.
(Which is why the instance in the Bible requires a spiritual transformative event. Not confiscation of all books about war.)
The problem is Europeans really, really, really believe that war is always evil, that having weapons and a will to fight CAUSES war, that the military is inherently evil. That even a liking for military history or uniforms will bring about war.
I’m not actually joking that I was taught this in school in the seventies. Patriotism, plus a military mind set causes war.
This utter bullshit must have been very comforting when they didn’t want to face the actual stew of bad ideas, bizarre utupianism and misguided centralization of government, not to mention scientism and worship of “experts” that caused the long war of the twentieth century.
It must have been super comforting to think that now they had evolved past it. And if they didn’t mention the bad things, or own weapons, they would be safe.
Honestly, I suspect America too preferred they dreamed pacifist dreams so we didn’t have to come over and clean up their mess again.
But it was wrong. it was wrong for them, and it was wrong for us. Because it’s based on the “if only everyone” and never, in the history of ever, has everyone done something. If there were a shot invented tomorrow that made us perpetually healthy and young, not everyone would take it. If I tried to give away magic cornucopias that would be perpetually filled with whatever food you wanted to eat, not everyone would take them. If there was a button you could push that would ensure every child in the world was born healthy and beautiful, not everyone would push it.
Because never, in the history of ever, even in small groups has “everyone done x.”
Which means we’ve been protecting them from the bad actors, including those straddling their continent and Asia, while they made us their sin eaters and have lived in an idiot’s dream believing they’ve “evolved” past war and they’re naturally peaceful, not like us, the savages that we are.
Meanwhile their neighborhoods and cities turned into gangland, they were taken over by openly hostile invaders, and in response became more and more restrictive with the law abiding. I expect Great Britain to conduct a great search for nail files, and confiscate them next. (Oy, do you have a license for that nail file? You could put someone’s eye out with that, you could.) I’m only shocked they haven’t started declawing and de-teething their citizens. (Yet.)
However you need to understand they view their helpless state as superior, and look down on us as dangerous savages who live in a land of constant violence.
…. which is why they’re running in circles, trying to demonize Orange Man Bad to bring him down, because how very dare we say we won’t go die for them and protect them, and that it’s time they sharpen those nail files and buy some books about war.
Why do we want to make them savage barbarians like us? Don’t we know what they’re capable of? Think of all the wars they could start. Why, they might have to control themselves. Worse, they might have to face they are normal human beings and not some magical evolved species, beyond aggression, war and patriotism.
Meanwhile, we know very well what they’re capable of. We know what they do to their own citizens and expect announcements tomorrow that they’re serving live baby. We know that they might not embrace extreme nationalism, but their other extreme, non-functional isms, like socialism, are probably worse.
And we’re tired of abetting their dreams of superiority and their false Utopia.
And we found the most hurtful word in our vocabulary is “No.”
I’m a bad person. I want to keep saying it, over and over again.
According To Hoyt 